The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [51]
For example, when I’m conversing with people, checking out the young women coming in and out, these women, even while I’m doing these day-to-day things, I’m in a reverie. I’ll be standing there, behind the counter, and first I’ll think about women, possible women who might be my girlfriends or wives or something, you know, the usual fantasies, candlelit dinners, for example, and then, when I get bored with that, I’ll think about my own funeral, which always cheers me up. I mean, I’ll imagine the church, full of distraught supermodels listening to the eulogy and sobbing. All these supermodels boohooing over my death. And there in front of the church would be someone like what’s-his-name, Robert Schiller, the televangelist, the one with the silver hair and the electronic smile, and he’d be going on and on about me, shockingly eloquent.
“Bradley W. Smith,” he’d say, and he’d shake his distinguished head. “No one really understood Bradley W. Smith, except maybe his dog. And, yet, unbeknownst to many, he was a great person —”
“ — Could I have a double decaf cap, please?”
“Sure,” I say, pulling myself out of my imaginings. It’s probably not healthy to maunder through a fantasy about your own funeral. Morbid, as Chloé says. But, as the song says, it’s a hard habit to break. And it’s harmless.
Around eleven o’clock my next-door neighbor, Professor Harry Ginsberg, comes in, mostly soaked, his remaining hair plastered to the sides of his face. He shakes out his umbrella, the one with the duck’s head on it. He then waves at me — not to me, but at me — in greeting, before he says, “Have you seen it outside, Bradley? Really, this is something you should see.” He smiles and shakes his head, and raindrops drizzle downward off his face onto the floor.
“What?” I say.
“Skies so dark, my boy, that you can’t read under them, and this in the daytime! Go look.”
“Harry, I can’t leave the business.”
He checks out Jitters and spies some of my art. “I see you’ve hung The Feast of Love there in the back. Your very best effort. Is it for sale?”
“No, Harry, it’s hors de commerce. And it’s —”
All at once there’s a crack, like someone snapping a whip, and a low roaring, and a strange singeing smell, coming from I don’t know where, and Chloé, who’s been bussing the tables with the collection tray, looks up.
“Didn’t you hear?” Harry asks me. “They’ve been predicting tornadoes.”
“There’s no weather in malls, Harry,” I tell him. “Not even tornadoes. We’re impervious — is that the word? — we’re impervious to conditions.”
“I should have such optimism,” Harry says, opening his mouth and laughing silently, a gesture I do not care for. “ ‘Impervious to conditions,’ an interesting phrase. I should have —”
Another roaring, longer this time, seems to be approaching us, silencing Harry’s meditation on my wording, and when the storm sound starts to reverberate throughout the mall, like the echo in a bowling alley, my customers hear it, and they all look up, and at this point the lights blink, and the Oscar Peterson CD falls silent inside Jitters, and Mozart leaves the podium in the mall, and that’s when I hear the shard-crack sound of shattering glass.
“My God,” Harry Ginsberg says. He takes his espresso-to-go and walks out into the atrium.
At that point the power fails in Briardale. The emergency lighting flickers on, battery-operated evacuation spots, and all but one of my customers get up and leave. Why should they leave? They’re safe here. One woman near the entrance is drinking her cup of espresso and reading the New York Times, and she doesn’t so much as budge while everyone else scurries out. The light inside Jitters becomes emergency light: frosty and cold and glaring. But she just goes on reading, her head down, deep in concentration.
You can hear the wind shaking the Masonic emblem skylight, then hail assaulting it, and you can hear the gusts shaking the exterior doors, but otherwise it