The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [91]
I sat down. My head was full of wild ambitious urges to hurt myself. I tasted the ambrosia of maddened impulse. I wanted my interior pain out in my body somehow. I wanted this vague pain to be specific. That’s how I explain it.
I took out my sharpest knife and cut off the very tip of my little finger. On my left hand.
I sat there and bled while my dog whined and barked at me. Then I called my neighbor, Harry Ginsberg, and he drove me in my car down to the hospital. He did not comment or ask questions. He’s a good man. Philosophy has taught him how to keep his mouth shut when necessary. I insisted on taking my car because I knew I would leave bloodstains soaked into the leatherette, and indeed I did: great expressive blotch-stains. At the emergency entrance, Harry dropped me off to park the car. Eventually they put me into a room with this black woman, this doctor, who introduced herself as Dr. Margaret Ntegyereize, and she was the one who bandaged me up. She asked me how I had done such a thing. I explained. She had beautiful eyes, Margaret did, and no wedding ring, and I fell in love with her on the spot. I couldn’t tactfully get her phone number right there but resolved to obtain it by stealth.
Driving me home, Harry told me — how could I not know it? — that Jackson Pollock had cut off the tip of his little finger at the age of seven. Seven! Jesus Christ. Not even my pain is original.
TWENTY
IN THOSE DAYS, before I fell in love with Diana and married her (which was after Bradley had met her, married her, and she left him for me) — before all that, I used to hunt in the forests and marshes up north. Deer, in particular, but ducks also, and pheasants. Now that I’ve lost that passion, I remember my prey with an odd clarity. I see all the individual animals I killed and cleaned and prepared for meals, crossing my line of sight one by one like mechanical birds in a shooting gallery flipping up from one side and sinking down on the other. I see their eyes, small glintings there. Sympathy for these animals? Why should I feel sympathy? That’s for others. They were one form of life, I was another. I was never one of them.
It could be that I didn’t think at all. The cells of my body collectively strained to be outside with a weapon in my hand, in pursuit of them.
Every part of this pursuit made me edgy and alert. I didn’t say to myself: I like to hunt. Liking had nothing to do with it. It was much more simple: I was a hunter, and that simplified my identity. I didn’t really have to consider the matter at all. I hunted the way an apple tree produces apples, as if it was purely second nature. My father had taught me how. I felt his presence there in those woods and fields, the weight of his flesh and bones on my shoulders, the sound of his gruff voice in my ear.
I counted the days until hunting season opened just as other men counted the days on the calendar until baseball or football season began. My hunting clothes were stored in a basement closet, the bright orange for deer hunting, the camouflage for the ducks. I’d go to that particular corner, open the door, yank at the pull chain for the light, and just look at the clothes, hanging there, swaying sometimes in the draft I had brought in, or from the furnace vents, swaying like ghosts dangling on the clothes rack. I’d have a beer in my hand and I would drink the beer as I gazed at the contents of the basement corner, an expression of suspended animation on my face.
I had a succession of girlfriends who tolerated this behavior. Then I had Katrinka. I married her.
I gave it all up when I left her and moved in with Diana, when I left