The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [96]
Funny stuff happens to me when I get stoned. Two years ago, before I met Oscar, in my wild-girl days, I went to a summer party. Here’s how high I got. At that party I saw Jesus, the real one, also in attendance at the party. Not all that many people have that honor. He was glistening. Glistening! I mean, he looked like an average Joe, but you could tell he wasn’t. This guy, just standing there, waiting around for I don’t know what, was the Son of Man, so-called, and you could tune in on that without asking anybody, it was so obvious. He was dressed in white and was wearing sandals, and He was so beautiful you just wanted to, like, eat him. He had a million watts of candlepower. He didn’t have to introduce himself because his divinity was so blatant. He didn’t stay. He had business to do. He drank some lemonade and then asked for directions. Jesus nodded while I told him where he wanted to go. It wasn’t the Celestial City, just a street address on the west side. He thanked me. And then he left. Jesus was on an errand, if you can believe it. I wished he’d stayed. He’s probably busy all the time. Everyone in the world wants to talk to him constantly, not just the prison population — everybody.
My point is, I saw Jesus once, and I’m still alive, I’m still here. Talk about luck!
I WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL woman there at the wedding party that afternoon. No one could take their eyes off me. I drank and danced and smoked Ranger’s weed and kissed Oscar, and if a man or a woman wanted to dance with me and get high by being near me for a moment or two, okay, but then I’d go back to Oscar. Bradley’s next-door neighbors, Harry and Esther Ginsberg, they dropped by. Harry and I have a lot in common. We’re both interested in philosophy. We compare notes. He asked me to dance, and I did. He’s a gentleman, and sweet, and he’s so smart you can tell thinking bothers him and takes up a great deal of his time. He gave me a little speech while we danced, ordering me to be happy, which I explained I was anyway, and he said, no, I had to be aware that I was happy. I asked him about evil, and he explained. He wanted to waltz, so I waltzed with him. He showed me how, and I picked the moves up right away.
At one point I looked at the street and saw the Bat just standing and watching, but then he vanished. I should have been concerned, but I wasn’t.
Bradley danced with this black doctor, Dr. Ntegyereize, and she was a much better dancer than he was, but she didn’t seem to care. They looked nice together. You got the feeling that all his life, Bradley had been looking around for an emergency-room physician, and at last he found one, and she was beautiful, besides. People who said that Bradley was unmarketable as a boyfriend and husband would just have to eat their words with a fork and spoon from now on.
He had drawn a picture of Oscar and me riding a dragon, and he put this picture up on the back door into his house, so you’d see it in passing when you went in to the bathroom to do your business.
Late in the afternoon a lot of the guests — our relatives and friends — were getting pretty drunk and/or stoned, but that was okay and totally acceptable behavior at a wedding party. I came out of the house from the bathroom, and I looked at this table, the one Bradley had set for us. The light was shining on it in a certain celestial way, blazing blazing, and for a second the table turned into a bonfire, and so did the food and the wine. The party became, like, incandescent, right in front of my eyes, and I heard voices saying my name, Chloé, like the air was saying it, or God saying it, celebrating me. This table in front of me, the party, was so bright you could be blinded by it. It was just like one of Bradley’s