The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [78]
I was frightened out of my wits, saying these terrible condemning words. But the sentences came out of me as if I meant them.
You’ve done it this time, he said. You’ve done it this time, there’s no going back . . . Gently, my broken heart thumping, I hung up the phone, laying the receiver in its cradle.
I entrusted his life and his soul to God at that moment, placing my son in His hands, this God in whom I do not believe.
AND KIERKEGAARD? Kierkegaard himself says that the gods created humankind and its troubles simply because they were bored.
SIXTEEN
WITHIN A MONTH after our return to Ann Arbor, we were talking about a divorce. Diana lived with me for a while, a few desultory months, and then, once she had the renters removed from her house, she moved out of here and back in there. She took the stone child she bought in the Upper Peninsula and put it in her back yard. Snow fell on that child all winter long; drifts blew up against it, and gradually it disappeared into the snow. She also salvaged the pictures I had drawn of herself on the back of the dragon. Those she saved. That dragon erased the two of us.
That’s all I’m going to say about the subject for now. As Chloé says, some things don’t bear much looking into. If you want something to read, then read the white space on the rest of this page. That’s me, down there in the white.
SEVENTEEN
I COULDN’T GET Mrs. Maggaroulian out of my head. I’d be sleeping, and there she’d be in my dreams, pulling up a chair for an intimate girl-to-girl chat. Her wig’d be edging down toward her forehead and her nail polish would sort of be flaking off. I mean, she looked like a human pawn shop, Mrs. Maggaroulian did, but she never was one for appearances anyway. The whole point of Mrs. M as a person was inner truth. The outer Mrs. Maggaroulian was a horse that somebody should have let out to pasture years ago; you could see she didn’t even have a game plan for contemporary life. She was post-makeover and just about post-human. You could have, like, set her on fire, and I don’t think she’d even have noticed or minded.
But in my head and my dreams, she made sense. She talked to me about Oscar and myself, us as a couple, and she told me to get my marriage license signed immediately, because time was running out on the two of us. She said we had to get married right away on account of our personal eternity was contracting rapidly into a space the size of a dime. We had just about no eternity left, Mrs. Maggaroulian told me. If we weren’t careful, we would be forcibly tossed out of a time window. She couldn’t elaborate. She went on about how you can’t name names in dreams. She had all these disclaimers, how she knew everything there was to know but only had an operator’s permit from the universe to tell me a tiny percentage of it before I woke up.
I told Oscar some of this. I trusted him.
She was a soul-antique, Mrs. Maggaroulian. You could see that she believed in marriage by the way she talked about it. A sacrament, she quoted from somewhere, rubbing her big hands together. Mrs. Maggaroulian talking about marriage was weird. It was kind of like a dog talking about being the mayor of Cleveland. But if the dog does it long enough, talking on and on about the difficulties and the responsibilities of being mayor and how he has to keep track of everything and not slip up, you start to believe him. Well, she could have called it — what Oscar and I had — anything she wanted to, because, as you know, we were getting married. Mrs. Maggaroulian was telling me what I already knew. I mean, I knew we were holy and would only become more so. She was just saying to get holier in a hurry, to put it on the