The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [88]
I told him I loved him. It escaped me, just like that. And he was cool: he pretended I hadn’t said it or that he hadn’t been listening, though he had heard me say it plenty of times before.
Just about then I heard an ice cream truck going by on the street, the Good Humor Man. With those distant prerecorded bell chimes. They’re supposed to sound cheery, but they sound unearthly and preoccupied, like death’s angel.
And then we were making love, calmer than we usually do it, and I’m looking at David, and my soul — I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s what happened — became visible to me. My soul was a large and not particularly attractive waiting room, just like in a Victorian train station with people going in and out. In this waiting room were feelings I hadn’t known I had, discarded feelings, feelings with nowhere to go, no ticket to a destination. It turned out that I was larger than I had known myself to be; there were multitudes of feelings in there. This can happen any sort of way. I don’t care if you disapprove of what I’m telling you or the means I used to discover it. I warned you: I’m not an original. But at that point I felt like one. I’m just telling you how it happened with me. I was a different person than I had planned to be. My soul was not particularly attractive, but the surprise was that it was there, that I had one.
I loved him and we fused together. He didn’t save me from anything. I was the same person I always was. But as they say: one phase of my life was over, and another one began.
NINETEEN
FOLLOWING THE DIANA marriage incident, Bradley the dog took over my affairs. He urged me onward to take walks with him, eat regularly, and make noises at strangers. This did not include Harry and Esther Ginsberg, who came by from time to time with baked foods of various sorts, and who informed me that the cause of my divorce was not actually myself, or my happenstantial faults, but the house I lived in. At first I thought they meant this metaphorically, but no: the reference was to the physical enclosure, the walls and windows and ceilings. They claimed there was a dybbuk living in it. I had never heard of such a thing, and they refused to explain, claiming that to speak of the thing itself was, like the uttering of the unutterable name of the divinity, bad luck. I checked it in the American Heritage Dictionary and couldn’t believe what I found there. He was a philosopher and she was a scientist, and they were both alleging that Diana and I had been done in by some sort of Jewish phantom.
Well, they’re my neighbors, and I suppose they mean well. I listened to them talk about their son Aaron, and they listened to me talk about Diana. Let them have their dybbuk. Or, excuse me, my dybbuk. After all, I had heard Chloé and Oscar yelping with love cries in my house long after they had been there, house-sitting. I had felt the breath of themselves, the memory of their bodies crisscrossing down the hallways. Who was I to scoff at a dybbuk?
LATE IN THE SUMMER I was walking around town with Bradley. I wasn’t feeling too bad. This song, “My Funny Valentine,” as sung by Ella Fitzgerald, was going through my head as I walked. I always liked her; I liked it that she sang jazz while wearing glasses. I came to the park. There was just enough light to see by, Magritte light. These guys were playing basketball, as usual, including Oscar. Chloé was jogging around the park, wearing her Joy Division tee-shirt and keeping a distant eye on her beloved. And there next to the basketball hoops was a bench, and on this bench sat of all people my ex-wife, Diana. Of course I knew she hadn’t moved out of town. She still occasionally showed up at Jitters, just to say hello and to have coffee. She had changed her hair color. It looked as if it had been dipped in blond ink or something. She looked nice. She was resting on the bench with her arms crossed just under her breasts. I watched her — I was some distance back, on the other side