The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [95]
For the next couple of days we didn’t see the Bat. He went back to his cave, I guess. And then it was the day of our wedding.
IT WAS A SUNNY DAY in August, the thirteenth. We dressed casual. Bradley Smith was going to meet us at city hall to be our witness. We wanted him there because he’s like an official adult, and he’d always been ultra-nice to us. Also he was going to have a reception for us that afternoon in his back yard, and we wanted to let him have the honor of being at the ceremony, the authorized witness.
On the way to city hall, I went down on Oscar, right in the Matador, that’s how much I loved him. I started at a red light near that new tellerless bank and finished about a mile and a half later, near a minimart and a dry cleaner. I don’t know if anyone saw me. I don’t think so. Oscar said, “Honey, I’m just amazed.” I believe he was. He just let out a little mew when he came, and then he accelerated accidentally. It was straight from the heart, him and me, whatever we did. I kind of hoped you’d be able to smell his splurge on my breath an hour or so later after I said “I do,” but I don’t know if you can detect that smell conversationally. I didn’t leave any stains on him; I swallowed it all down, neat as a pin as I am, though there wasn’t much to swallow, since for good luck for our marriage we had made copious desperate love about two hours earlier on the floor, before we got dressed. Oscar’s cum tastes like wheat beer with a dash of Clorox, by the way. We were a couple of wild childs, that’s for sure. Everything we did was holy instead of scandalous. You have to trust me on that.
Bradley was there, grinning, at city hall, when we arrived. His left hand was all bandaged up. We went in, and when we came out an hour later — there was another couple waiting, and that slowed us down — with Bradley as our witness, the mayor officiating, Oscar and me were man and wife. Once we were married we kissed, even though it was redundant, the two of us being who we were.
I was Oscar’s wife. In the olden days I would have been Mrs. Oscar Metzger, but since we were living in contemporary times, I was still Chloé Barlow. Anyhow, it was time to celebrate.
WE SET UP THIS BOOM BOX in the boss’s back yard, and a collection of CDs, and he’d taken some tables out there and covered them with food, and over to the side were coolers filled with beer, and jugs and jugs of wine. We would never run out no matter how much we drank or who we invited. I didn’t know why Bradley wanted to do this for us except that we had started as his employees and stuck by him or something. We were Bradley Smith loyalists, Oscar and me, despite our almost minimal wages and the oppression we experienced by having to work hard.
The sun did what it’s done for decades: it shone. First thing I did when I got there was toss my shoes off so I could dance. I wanted to dance on the grass and feel it on my bare feet like an African woman approaching her new husband. I wanted to be that fierce. I took Oscar’s shoes off myself by hand and I started to feed him food by hand from the table including the cake that Bradley had remembered to buy. I would breathe oxygen into him if I had to.
My sister Rhonda was there, and the Vulture, and Janey, taking her videos, and a bunch of my big-haired friends from high school, and a couple of the Spice Girls I used to live with, plus some of Oscar’s friends like Ranger and Spinner and Fats, and a guy whose name was unimaginatively just plain Don. Bradley’s dog, Bradley, was racing around, barking conversationally