The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [82]
“My parents hate me,” I said. I tried to find what she was looking at on the ceiling but couldn’t. “My dad threw me out, you remember that, back in my party-animal days. They think I’m a loser. Plus my dad is taking orders from my mom about ignoring me. So I’m pretty harsh on them, too, now that the ball’s in my court. What I do is, I exclude them from stuff, such as my wedding.”
“Yeah. You gotta be radical,” she said.
“So anyway, I’ll tell them after the wedding. But they’re not invited. Rhonda, my sister, you remember her? She’s coming. She’ll be at the reception.”
“What about Oscar’s parents?”
“He’s only got one parent. The Bat. Very scary individual. Don’t know if he’s going to show up or not.”
“Am I invited?”
“Well, yeah.” I gave her the time and the address, but you could see she was pissed about not getting a written invitation, of which there weren’t any.
She tried to recover herself by getting girlish. “You guys goin’ on a honeymoon?”
“Yeah. We’re going to a School of Velocity concert the next day and we’ll spend the night in a motel in East Lansing.”
“Chloé, you are so hot. You’re going to be the happening married couple. So what about this guy who wants to watch you two lovebirds fuck?” She was going back to street language, back to business. She smiled at me like she had indigestion and was trying to cover it. “Like all that money?” She named the figure again. “Now there’s a fortune. What about him?”
“It’s way creepy. But, like I say, I’ll ask Oscar.”
THE THING WAS, I wanted to buy Oscar some medical insurance, because Bradley couldn’t afford to give us any benefits at Jitters. And I thought that if we had it, and something happened to Oscar, we’d be covered. But! I knew, alas, that you can’t get an insurance policy for five hundred dollars, but you almost can. What I was worried about also was the pre-existing condition thing, how they never cover that. Well, maybe we could put a deposit on a better apartment.
As for us, I didn’t want anyone watching us ever, exactly. But I also thought: Hey, this customer wants to watch Oscar and me, it’s his problem, right? It’s not our problem. We’re not watching. We’re just doing it the way we always do, being in love and physically endorsing it. Some poor loveless unloved excuse for an American human wants to watch from the bottom of his particular barrel so we can pay for Oscar’s health insurance or a down payment on an apartment, well, hey, there’s a possibility for positive gain here. I guess everybody wants to watch, sort of. Except: you don’t feel like doing it quite so much, maybe you don’t feel like it at all, the air goes out of that particular tire, any of the things you usually do, when somebody’s got their gloating eyes on you.
And then I thought about what sort of man would want to do this. I mean, he had to be pretty desperate, calling up some service somewhere, just because he wanted to watch. I took a walk in Allmendinger Park to think about it. I watched the dogs and the parents and the kids. I imagined him coming home from work, another lonely guy doing the dishes, standing under a lightbulb and listening to the radio, trying not to be a creep but being one anyway, and one night he realizes, bingo, that he’s in hell, he just lives there permanently, hellllooooo, he’s never getting out. The fix is so in, you can’t get more in than that. So what he wants is, he wants to look at what it’s like in heaven, where we are, he wants to see two representatives of the youth culture, which is us, Oscar and me, just lying around and making love, and maybe he could get clarified that way, you know, sitting there, looking at us yelping with happiness the way we do.
It’d be sort of like bringing a dog to a person in an old-age home. Therapeutic. Except you can pat the dog. Us, he wouldn’t be able to touch. I’d insist on that.
Seeing is believing. Seeing is different from telling. I mean, it’s different from me telling you about it, right? Right?
Well, I think so.
But suppose Oscar starts to give me a kiss. When nobody’s watching,