The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [52]
“Yup, I guess so.”
“It’ll be back on, no time flat,” he says, gazing at the ceiling. He has trained himself to be an optimist, a professional optimist, a success maniac, despite conditions. Look at his tie today! It has yachts on it!
“Hope so,” I tell him. “You want anything?”
“Naw,” Windtunnel says, breathing in my direction, his breath so heavy with wintergreen he could stun an ox with it. “Maybe in a little while.” And he saunters back toward his darkened motivation market, all of whose customers have fled. His protective gate lowers until it is halfway down.
Chloé joins me near the counter. “This is freakazoidal,” she says. “Quel rush.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “Come on.”
We walk out toward the mall. You can hear the wind futilely attacking the mall’s exterior, but you would need a full-scale level-five tornado to blow this place apart, and so far we don’t have that. From here we can see into the depths of the mall. These cold emergency lights are giving all the merchandise a shakedown, and when you gaze into Motherhood, all the maternity-ware has turned ghastly. The clerks have their elbows on the cash counter, including Marilyn, a sweet babe, pure honeydew. I should talk to her. The orphaned shoes in the neighboring shoe store are like artifacts or clues to a crime. It’s uniformly gray inside the mall now. What few customers there are seem to be distressed or disheartened. They’re limping along, without purpose. It’s as if, when you turn the power off, the merchandise somehow becomes nothing but a ruin. People lose the desire to buy. Their hearts go out of it.
Why is the light given? you think. Why is the light taken away?
Down at the center of the mall, the fountain has stopped surging into the de-ionized air, and the water sits there, gathering dust. Here and there in the far recesses of the mall, the customers move around, totally unmotivated, confused and abandoned, quite conclusively Monday-morning, and everything we’ve got here for sale loses its allure. Nothing but wallflower commodities, spinster products. Two old people, arm in arm, help each other walk toward the exit.
Across the acres of merchandise a vast silence prevails.
“Wow. This is amazing,” Chloé says, and I nod in agreement. “You know what this makes me think of?” she asks.
“What?”
“Well, uh, your candles going out.” She smiles at me, and one of her blond eyebrows lifts, as she thinks of what to say next. But she doesn’t say anything, eloquently sexy in her silence.
“Hmm,” I say, pretending to think this over. But actually I am thinking it over.
Chloé and I go back into Jitters. She ambles toward the back, taking off her apron, swaying as she goes, her hips alive to their possibilities. She sits down in a sort of wing chair back near the rest room, and seems to doze off. Oscar keeps her busy at night. I’ll wake her up when the customers return. I’m a demanding boss but a fair one.
Then two things happen. I go up to the woman who’s been sitting at a small table near the front, reading the New York Times. I say to her, “How can you read in this light? It’s so dim.”
“I’m used to dim bulbs,” she says, not looking up.
“In that case, you’d be right at home here.”
She seems startled by my witticism, and smiles at me, and in the dim light I can see that her eyes are blue. We introduce ourselves eventually, and I find out that her name is Diana.
Not to get ahead of myself here, but she becomes my second wife.
The other thing that happens is that before the lights go back on in the mall, a strange little man with greasy hair appears outside what I guess you’d call our doorway. He stands there and stands there, shifting from one foot to the other. He’s not large, but he looks strong and wiry, and when I first see him I get the impression that he’s not really looking over the brioche, he’s searching for someone, and then he finds what he’s searching for, which is Chloé. Even though she’s at the back, taking a catnap,