The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [97]
Oscar started dancing with me, whispering love-and-sex stuff in my ear, wrapping himself around me (for a sometimes inarticulate boy, he could sure be eloquent, at least about me, when he whispered to me), and I was afraid I’d take my clothes off there and then, in front of everybody, shameless and crazy with love as I was, giving myself to him body and soul on the lawn, so we excused ourselves from the party and got rice thrown on us and we thanked everyone and we remaindered our sweaty selves into the car (I forgot my shoes in Bradley’s yard), but instead of going to the School of Velocity concert and staying at a motel in East Lansing, we went barefoot back to our little apartment, where we did our lovemaking all night long, my legs wrapped around him oh sweet sweet sweet fucking, like happy birds, which is sort of what you should do anyhow, given the circumstances, newlyweds and everything. We were legal now. We fell asleep at sunrise, birds chirping outside, all our limbs intertwined and confused.
“Sweet dreams, girl,” he said to me.
“Sweet dreams,” I said.
I’D HAD MORE HAPPINESS than most people do in a lifetime, so when Oscar died four months later, I wasn’t ready for it, but I tried to be. I was pregnant by then, and I had memorized every inch of Oscar so I’d never forget any particle of him, inside or out. I didn’t think Mrs. Maggaroulian could be wrong about something that big, and she wasn’t.
ENDS
The Soviets made me change Romeo and Juliet so that it would have a happy ending, a barbarism, because living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.
— SERGEY PROKOFIEV
TWENTY-TWO
THIS BAREFOOT YOUNGSTER, Chloé, wearing her bridal blue jeans, approached me to make a few inquiries at her wedding party, which happened to be next door at Bradley’s. Why, she asked, did love — by which she appeared to mean sexual love — attract so much, her phrase, weird badness to it? She said that as a philosopher I would know and that she needed to have the answer in a hurry. (I am not a philosopher; I teach philosophy of the antique and outmoded variety, and there is after all a difference between making philosophy and teaching it, a difference of stature and modesty.) Her question was not entirely clear. She stood there beautifully young in the hot sunlight. She referred to “scumbags,” but I grasped her intention. She was holding a beer and grinning quizzically. Her lips were so chapped it must have hurt her to smile.
When I asked about the scumbags, she referred to pornography in a general way and then pointed to a strange little man staring at us from a distance near the street. Who was he? She didn’t say. But he, the strange man, appeared to be the scumbag problem to which she referred.
Oh, I said — I had had some wine myself by that time, my syntax was not of the best — the force of eros, which is godlike and has been known to be such since ancient times and therefore does not have to include morality, being outside of it — think of the Bacchae, the unleashing of this force, the goatish caperings, well, any force as powerful as that is premoral. Eros, I told Chloe, is a devil as well as an angel; the faces are the same but the expressions are dissimilar. Every positive attracts a negative and must contend with it. I mentioned The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Freud and de Sade, the mingling of the angelic and the demonic, the control of these forces by means of ritual, of which her official marriage was one. I was prepared to speak of Spinoza and Plato, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, but she asked me to dance just as I was about to pontificate.
I taught her to waltz, this young woman in bare feet. Esther danced with the handsome groom, who was similarly unshod, if otherwise decorated with earrings and a necklace of animal teeth. The music was not waltz music, but I hummed it into existence. Her delicate bones under my hand unleashed in me an unexpected surge of protectiveness. She was someone’s daughter. Of her parents,