The Feast of Love

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, nothing was visible at this party. I took this to mean that at the ceremony itself, her father had not given her away. She had given herself away, courageous girl.

FOLLOWING MY SON Aaron’s last call, I had decided not to interfere again with the misconstrued ironies of his life. I would not bother him with my fatherly intentions. I would not call to ask for his news. What news he had always tended toward the apocalyptic. Let him call me. This was my plan.

I failed to carry it through. Afternoons, I worked in the garden, planting snapdragons and petunias, or weeding, and while I did so, I thought about my son. These thoughts were tormenting, buzzing gnatlike around my head, because they had no content except by way of the images they presented. I added fertilizer to the soil. Aaron on a swing set, Aaron playing touch football, Aaron slouched in a chair reading Churchill’s ghostwritten history of World War Two. I remembered his shy tokens of affection toward his mother and me, pen-and-pencil sets he had bought us, homemade birthday cards, school projects from the elementary grades we had never had the heart to throw out.

I remembered how he got the scar on his forehead and the scar on his knee. I remembered his face as a Bar Mitzvah boy.

I tried to think of my new project, the book about Kierkegaard and his admirer Wittgenstein, but my attention continued to turn in the direction of my son.

At last, giving in to my own myopic affections one Thursday around dinnertime, I called his apartment in Los Angeles. From the phone came the mechanical message that that particular number had been disconnected and was no longer in service. I dialed information and asked for Aaron Ginsberg on Ambrose Street. There was no longer such a person at that address. I obtained the numbers of all the Aaron Ginsbergs without street addresses, the new listings, but none of them were him.

I called the florist in Los Angeles where he had worked intermittently as a delivery person. He had quit, they said. He had moved. To where? He hadn’t told them. He had been soaked into the ethers, and there he was dispersed.

That evening at dinner I broke the news to Esther.

Aaron has disappeared, I said. I tried calling him but his number’s dismembered. Disconnected, I mean.

Oh, honey. No one disappears. What do you mean?

I explained. Maybe no one disappears. But he has, not to the world of course, but to us. I told you: his phone’s disconnected. He’s not working at the florist anymore.

Esther put down her fork. He’s just moved, Harry. He’ll tell us where he has moved to as soon as he can. We have to be patient with Aaron. His maturing is taking its time.

Maturing! He is one of these never-never land Americans who will never grow up. Intellectually he is still in diapers. I feel like calling Los Angeles missing persons. I feel like calling the Martian embassy.

Don’t do that yet, she said. He’s not missing.

I could hardly look at her face.

He’s not missing, she repeated, to succor me. He is somewhere. He is always somewhere.

But he was missing. The police could find no trace of him. They recommended a private detective who at great expense to us found a few sniffs and scents of him in the Pacific Northwest but not the person himself, not Aaron, our son.

America, as everyone knows, is large enough to lose a child in. The tendency of the country to absorb its inhabitants and to render them anonymous and invisible had gone to work. He was now a runaway, a runaway from us, and was effectively erased.

My vice is the comfort of abstractions. Concrete events as a rule disable me. When my son disappeared from the face of this earth, I was willing to try out sociology, I was willing to commit a social science the better to know the patterns of mislaid children in a post-industrial economy. I was willing to try out religion: Judaism, Christianity if need be. An exceptionally developed capacity for abstract thought does not preclude a consideration of the soul, a word I do not surround with fussy quotation marks. But I did not know how to look for him, and I no longer knew how to think about him, either. Concerning Aaron, I could find refuge in no known set of ideas. Aaron had gone to work on his own invisibility with zest and imagination, as if he had finally discovered a calling, which was the eradication of himself.

We have, Esther and I, two successful children, Sarah and Ephraim. We love them and think about them. But we do not think about them half as much as we do Aaron, who is unsuccessful and invisible besides. As the tongue goes to the missing tooth, so do we poke and pry at his absence. He is our null.

He is not a boy, but a young man. We must — we had to — give him over to the mischievous criminal attentions of the world. And now he had taken his heartfelt leave of the public realm. He did it to hurt us.

When Esther and I are alone together in the evening, we avoid looking at each other’s faces. Aaron’s disappearance is much too visible in our eyes for us to bear the mutual sighting of it in ourselves. Esther and I know each other so thoroughly, we don’t even have to confirm our thoughts back and forth anymore. I know her moods; she knows mine. Aaron has achieved his purpose. I mean this: When you break the heart of a philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.

Thus encumbered, I taught Chloé to waltz on her wedding day, humming to her tunes from Die Fledermaus.

TWENTY-THREE

IT DOESN’T SEEM FAIR that I’ve spent all this time telling you about Kathryn and Diana, who made me unhappy, but not about Margaret, who did the opposite and filled me with joy, a word I don’t trust and have never used in my life until this moment. When I met Margaret, I wasn’t inclined to tell anyone what was going on between us. People don’t go to psychiatrists and pay good money to talk at length about how happy they are. Talking can spoil it. As a rule you don’t settle down at the end of the day with a beer and tell your friend the particulars of how you lucked out and how well the day and the week and the year went, unless you’re the gloating type. You just don’t do that. It’s provocation. You find some other neutral ground. If you’re smart, you keep happiness to yourself.

THE FIRST TIME I called Margaret to invite her out, she asked me why I had called, and I told her that I had admired the color of her yes. I meant eyes but said yes. I think she was touched by my dazed friendliness. She wasn’t inclined to go out with me — she had an on-again, off-again boyfriend — but at last she decided to take a chance on me, just for coffee at first, at Jitters.

I gradually learned that she’s so used to emergencies that she’s relaxed and urbane about the rest of life. Almost nothing fazes her. She has a calming effect, as a human being, as a person. As a doctor, she’s used to the sight of blood, gunshot wounds, broken bones, and the other norms of calamity. A daily diet of emergencies puts existence itself into a steady and calm perspective. She told me a few weeks after our first date that I looked like someone who had offered love to a lot of people but that I hadn’t had any takers so far. Then she said that I was an unusual man, and when I asked her why, she said I was “openhearted,” which made me look down at the ground, not knowing what to think. Women use such words at the oddest moments. No, that’s wrong. Only Margaret ever used that word, maybe because she’s a doctor. Then I was gazing at her face with such concentration that I could hardly hear what she was saying. When I realized what she had said, I kissed her, and she kissed me back. Bradley stood nearby watching us and wagging his tail. She never called me a Toad. Perhaps she had never seen one.

We were standing in the kitchen. It was raining out. She leaned back against the kitchen counter. She said, “I’ve heard about men like you, but I never actually met one until now.”

I went to her dripping blood, my heart in tatters over Diana, and she cured me of that in a week.

She was born in this country. Margaret’s parents were African diplomats who sent her to schools in the United States, where she decided to remain after she’d finished her internship. She didn’t dislike white people. She liked emergency medicine and wanted to practice it in a large training hospital. That’s all I’ll say about that.

HERE’S A PROFUNDITY, the best I can do: sometimes you just know. Chloé and Oscar knew. You just know when two people belong together. I had never really experienced that odd happenstance before, but this time, with Margaret, I did. Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn’t have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us. Whatever I was, well, that was what Margaret apparently wanted. I wasn’t sure that she’d want a white guy like me, a service person afflicted with modesty, but she said she didn’t care about my color or my temperament one way or another because they were fine just as they were. She hadn’t thought she could love a man of my race, but once I showed up in her life, I turned out to be the man she loved, what is the word, regardless. To this day I don’t know exactly what she loved about me and that’s because I don’t have to know. She just does. It was the entire menu of myself. She ordered all of it.

We do what you do in tandem when you belong together. We go to movies, we go dancing (she’s a better dancer than I am), we go to the grocery store and hold hands in the aisles (scandalizing the racists), we decide about furniture, we cook, we make love, we talk about the future, we play with the dog and take him for walks, we talk about our plans to get married, where and how and when. We fit together. (I avoid saying these things in public; people hate to hear it, as if I’d forced them to eat raw sugar.) There’s nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I want to say to her. Life has turned into what I once imagined it was supposed to be, as complacent and awful as that sounds. In fact, I don’t really want to talk about this anymore. As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it’s the unhappy ones who create the stories.

I’m no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

THE ART. First I sketched her in charcoal and then I did a portrait of her. I hadn’t done human figures in years. I drew and painted her nude and clothed, asleep and awake, wearing her amused expression or the thoughtful one, frowning. I did each portrait, each study, quickly. Inspiration made me confident and efficient. Besides, she doesn’t like to sit very much for these portraits. She’s too nonvain. So I do most of them from memory. Her skin tone was very hard at first for me to get, the way light hits it. But through trial and error I learned the tricks of shading flesh the color of hers, first in charcoal and then in oils. You should see what I accomplished, but I won’t let you, because I will not show any of these pictures in public, ever. They’re not for sale.

I’M TALKING ABOUT gains and losses here.

When Oscar died, it was a Saturday in mid-November, and he was out playing touch football with his friends and with Chloé. Just before that, during the afternoon, they’d been watching the televised University of Michigan Wolverines as they defeated the Ohio State Buckeyes on the gridiron, and the sight of it inspired them and brought their blood up to a boil. I was working at Jitters with another assistant I’d hired, Stusnick, and had given those kids, Oscar and Chloé, the day off. Harry and Esther Ginsberg were strolling around the edge of the park with Bradley the dog (I’d given them a set of keys to my house), worrying about their missing son, Aaron.

They’d gone to the park, this group of people, and they’d found others from our neighborhood there, out for a stroll, out for a physical release after the tension of that game, and these neighbors, these keyed-up fans, who happened to include Diana, my ex, and her new love, David, who was athletic and who — I believe I’ve said this already — liked to hang out near the park for pickup basketball and touch football games, they were there too. They were invited to join Oscar’s game. Oscar and David knew each other from previous basketball. The more the merrier. For all I know, Kathryn was out there, with her partner, Jenny. Pregnant as she was, Chloé was on the sidelines watching and cheerleading. This is a small city. All these spokes of the wheel came into place that afternoon, all these gears meshed, everyone drew together at that moment.

It’s February now. I’ve taken my dog out to that field, out into the snow. Bradley and I walk over the field, crusted with winter. In February the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to your psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely. I stand in the middle of the field, right about where I imagine Oscar ran out for that pass, and then, I mean now, with Bradley running after a winter squirrel, I imagine Oscar leaping up, out of the range of everyone else, and I can see him, even at this moment, in the middle of winter, catching the football the way he did in November, and then falling, still holding it, to the ground, and lying still.

I can see them all bending over him. Even Bradley the dog has come over to examine him. Oscar’s friends are talking to him, or what’s left of him. I can see Chloé running out to the field. Someone — it’s his friend Scooter — nudges him. They say someone must have hit him and knocked him out cold.

What hit him?

I dunno. He got the wind knocked out of him. That’s all. Or, hey, maybe not. Maybe it’s something else. Oscar? Hey, man, Oscaaaaaar. Jeez.

Maybe we gotta get him down to the hospital.

Naw. He’s okay. I’m pretty sure he’s okay.

Somebody take his pulse? He doesn’t look like he’s breathing.

They bend down. They listen. Diana takes his pulse. Chloé pushes her aside and starts shouting that they have to get him to the emergency medical thing. Come on, come on, come on, come on, she says. Pick him up, you guys. Pick him up!

So they load him into the nearest car, which happens to be David’s, and David and Diana and Chloé prepare to take Oscar — Oscar’s body — to the University Hospital, where Margaret has just, as it happens, finished work and is headed in the opposite direction, back to me.

But they have all forgotten about the football traffic after the game. Every street in Ann Arbor is snarled with cars. This is a small city, and it takes a long time to empty of traffic. The stadium holds over one hundred thousand human souls. When David honks and waves his arms frantically, the drivers ahead of him and to the side honk happily in return and wave their arms and make the V-for-victory sign, or, using the same gestures that David has used, hold their fists in the air, unless they’re Ohio State fans, in which case they sit and glance around sullenly, hands clutching the wheel. No matter how much he honks, no one moves aside, no one lets him proceed with the body of Oscar to the hospital. There is no space to move. In both directions the traffic has halted, like blood in a blocked artery. He cannot shout. What good would shouting do, in this crowd of happy shouters? They’re all shouting. He’s one of many. He can’t get out of the car because that would accomplish nothing: the cars in front of him are stuck as well. His sedan with its occupants moves by slow increments toward the hospital.

What’s worse is that the cars to the right and left of him have stopped in the same traffic jam he’s in, and their happy inebriated passengers witness Chloé bending over on the seat and breathing into Oscar’s mouth. They misunderstand what they are observing. They think it’s passion. They think it’s the feast of love in the back seat. Apparently they don’t see her clamping his nostrils shut, as she breathes her breath into his lungs, because they give her smirks and grins and smiles, honking in great amorous collaboration at what they take to be Chloé’s celebrational mouth-to-mouth. Go for it, girl! Go Blue! And they don’t stop giving her the high sign until she turns her face away from Oscar’s. Then she fixes her eyes on them, and she screams, but the scream is swallowed up in the tumult. She then brings her mouth back to his, to keep him alive.

It all takes a long time.

AND STILL HE ISN’T ALIVE when they arrive at the hospital, and nothing that is done to him there can bring him back. He has had (we learn these helpful terms later) hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the medical slang for which is “hocum.” Goddamn these doctors anyway, with their jargon, their jauntiness, damn them all except for Margaret, who is my beloved exception. Ventricular fibrillation dropped him down. Eventually he was declared dead, Oscar was. An autopsy showed an abnormally enlarged murmured heart, from the track and the basketball and the genetic code, though I refuse to give up the metaphor and think it enlarged itself from his love of Chloé. Margaret explained all this to me in her calm, horizon-greeting African Zen style, using terms like commotio cordis. Against the terrors and sorrows of death, only the multisyllabic Latinate adjectives and nouns for protection, the know-how, and then the prayers, for those who have them.

TWENTY-FOUR

THERE I WAS, CAGED. I sat in the front seat next to David, with Chloé bending over Oscar in the back, trying to breathe her life into him. All around us people, these fans, these monkeys, hollered. They whooped. They celebrated. On their faces were all the manifestations of glee. Being of a difficult and combative nature, I wanted to kill them early in their lives.

I sat in the car, containing myself but wild with sanctioned fury, and then I thought of whom I would sue.

Oscar and Chloé, these two kids, who had served me coffee day after day out at the mall — I had taken a liking to them. I enjoyed the spectacle of how they felt about each other. I thought it was rather inspiring, actually, those two orphans, with nothing, really, to their names. They weren’t middle class in any of the tiresome customary ways, and they didn’t have two nickels to rub together. You could tell from the fatigue lines under their eyes that they’d been around a few blocks. Sometimes, seeing them working together at Jitters, I thought: David should marry me. We could have that. Except, possessing money, we would have it easier, we would do it with a little more style and a little less emotion.

And now, in the backseat, Oscar looked, to all appearances, no longer living, no longer even dying. His dying had been successfully accomplished. Watching Chloé trying to keep him alive, putting her lips to his, I started to cry. I never do that.

I’m a lawyer. I reached for the car phone. I called the emergency number. I explained the situation. The dispatcher told me that no ambulance would be able to move faster in this traffic than we were able to do. No helicopter would be able to land where we were located, the congestion being what it was. Such a maneuver, I was informed, would be unsafe. It would be faster if we just continued to drive.

So we stayed in the car.

I’m a lawyer. I think about responsibility. And in my ire, I thought: I’ll sue the university, for staging the game; I’ll sue the city of Ann Arbor, for having clearly inadequate plans for controlling and siphoning off the traffic. Within Ann Arbor, I’ll sue the police department and individuals within that department, standing at intersections and misdirecting the cars, buses, trucks, and vans; and then I will organize a suit against the city manager, for permitting the congested and overfilled parking lots to block proper egress from the city; and the zoning board, for the proximity of the buildings. I’ll sue the architects, for the design of those buildings. I’ll institute proceedings against the automobile manufacturers, for the size and shape of these vehicles. I’ll sue the athletic department, no, I’ve already done that; I’ll sue the advertisers who have supported these games; and I’ll sue the Wolverine Fan Club; I’ll sue each and every one of the businesses lining this street, for being located there and for blocking our way. I’ll sue the driver of the car in front of us and I’ll sue his drunken girlfriend — I already have their license plate number committed to memory — and the two passengers in the back, waving at us while David gives them the finger and then leans on the horn, they’ll all be penniless by the time I’m finished with them and sorry that they were ever within living proximity to me. In my wrath I’ll sue the drivers and passengers in front of them. I’ll sue the manufacturer of the football that Oscar caught, that proximate cause, I’ll drag the officers of that company into court and pull their names through the mud, so that even their children will refuse ever to speak to them. I’ll sue the makers of the clothes Oscar wore, including his shoes (he may have slipped! he may have lost traction! he may have fallen because of the shoes!); I’ll find out what he ate while he watched the game, and I’ll sue the brewers of the dangerous beer he drank and the makers of the arteriosclerotic snack food he consumed; I’ll sue the tattoo artist who tattooed the skull and crossbones onto Oscar’s back (Chloé told me about it) with the word “Die” underneath it, goddamn it, I’ll sue them for prophecy; I’ll sue Oscar’s father, the Bat, for not taking care of him, for not preventing this eventuality, and for generally endangering Oscar and Chloé’s welfare; I’ll sue the doctors, I will take their fat-cat medical school asses to court and nail those asses to the wall, for whatever they give him, for whatever they do, in their wisdom and knowledge, oh, let them try anything, fuck them all, for I shall see to it that their efforts could be construed as unprofessional, mistaken, foolish, and wrong. I’ll sue the doctors and the drug manufacturers for not bringing him back to life; I’ll sue Jesus, who is acquainted with Chloé and who once met her at a party, for not being here, when we needed Him; and I’ll sue God, who passes out misfortune with equanimity.

Such were my thoughts as we motored, inch by inch, toward the university hospitals.

Oscar had been a young man, physically beautiful, and in wonderful condition except for his now-defunct heart. After they were done with the electrical defibrillation, the intubation, the epinephrine, the lidocaine and the procainamide, and the chest compressions, they harvested him. They sold him off for parts, down to the skin and bones. He helped save the lives of others, et cetera, et cetera.

CHLOÉ NEEDED SOMEONE SMART, mean-tempered, and bad-natured to accompany her to the funeral home and to take care of things. I was that person. We had womanly solidarity, Chloé and I. First off, I called Oscar’s father, the Bat. Ah, now there was a charmer. He had a German name, Metzger, though he said his friends called him Mac. I doubted it. Such a name wasn’t plausible. He wouldn’t have had friends. Co-conspirators maybe, but friends, no. I would not call him Mac, as per his request. I asked if he wished to have a hand in the funeral arrangements, and he said he would not. He appeared to be lacking in grief; I couldn’t hear a trace of it in his voice, and his lack of grief managed to enrage me. He, this dreadful example, explained that Chloé had killed his son, at which point I pulled out some of my verbal knives and went to work on him. Some of my meanings went over his dull-normal head, but he was stunned by my vicious eloquence into hostile silence. Then he tried a retort, but, unused to the arts of argumentation, he tripped over himself, and I threatened him again. Things, how shall I put this, had quickly become acrimonious, and I will admit that I finally hung up on the man, who was, judging from his slurred speech, as drunk as a church sexton.

We had better luck with the funeral director. A pleasant enough person, a Mr. Kleinschmidt, broad-shouldered and athletic and a go-getter as most funeral directors are, he took us through the possibilities, and Chloé decided on a closed-casket viewing and a cremation. Then we were ushered into the cavernous casket showroom downstairs. Some of the caskets, particularly the ones with brushed aluminum exteriors, looked like huge kitchen appliances dedicated to obscure purposes. They didn’t appear to be caskets at all. Though I had offered her money for the funeral costs, Chloé didn’t want my money. She was prideful. She made arrangements for installment payments, but I examined every charge that Kleinschmidt put on the bill, down to the dime.

For the closed-casket viewing, Kleinschmidt had something in mind. He walked over to a cherrywood casket and pointed to it. “I can give you something of a bargain on this one,” he said. “But I’ll have to explain something about it.”

“It looks nice,” Chloé said, a bit uncertainly. “What’s the deal?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s used.”

“Used? You mean they buried somebody in it?”

“Oh no,” he said. “We would never do that. No, this is the casket we used last time we had a viewing, prior to the cremation. The body is laid out in it, and then removed and cremated. All the inside cloth and padding is removed — okay? — and replaced. It’s just the wood that’s the same. So it’s not really used, not the way you might think. It’s never been buried.” He waited. “In the ground.”

“I dunno,” Chloe said. “A used casket.” She turned to me. “Diana, whattya think?”

“I think it’s all right,” I said. “I don’t think Oscar would’ve minded.”

“I guess not.”

“Good,” Mr. Kleinschmidt said, “that’s settled. Now we need something for the cremains.”

“The cremains?”

“Well, that’s the word we use. You know. The… ashes. The urn.” We followed him to the back of the room, where there was a display of these commodities in an alcove. It looked like a sculpture collection of Bakelite canisters and wooden boxes. One of them was green ceramic of some sort, with a bronze dolphin frolicking on the side.

“Not that one,” Chloé said. “I don’t think Oscar liked dolphins.” She waited. “Well, he never met one.” She pointed. “That one. That’s the one I want.” She had indicated a polished and gleaming mahogany box about a foot and a half in each direction like a knickknack box that happened to be a bit too large for the dresser. “He’d like that one,” she said.

Just about then Chloé’s forehead began to get damp, and she put her hand on my shoulder. Her eyes, which are unusually bright, had gone stoned-or-bored-gauzy. I was about to ask her how she was feeling when her eyes rolled up, and she fainted. I grabbed her around the shoulders in time before she hit the floor.

Kleinschmidt and I managed to haul her upstairs, he carrying her by the shoulders, while I took her legs. It wouldn’t do for Kleinschmidt to carry her alone. We laid Chloé out on the sofa. He pulled out some smelling salts from his desk. “Happens all the time,” he said. “Men and women. You’d be surprised.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said.

After she came to, she rubbed at her scalp and said, “Hey.” She tried a smile. “Hello, again. Diana, I was just wondering where Oscar was. I guess I was wondering that when I passed out.”

“He’s dead,” I told her. “Oscar died, Chloé.”

“Oh, yeah, I know that. I meant his body. You know: what’s left of him.”

“Downstairs,” Kleinschmidt said. “In the rear of the building.”

“Can I see it?”

“Why don’t you come back after lunch?” Kleinschmidt suggested. “We’d need some time to get it ready.”

“Okay,” Chloe said. “I could eat about a month of cheeseburgers anyway. Gotta keep my strength up, right?”

I took her to a restaurant where, I’m glad to say, she ate like a horse, shoveling it all down, cheeseburgers, fries, salad, and a chocolate malt. She didn’t even stop to talk. “I’m nauseous in the morning but by lunchtime I’m starving,” she said, munching on a ketchup-covered french fry. I liked almost everything about her, including the way she chewed with her mouth open and how she disapproved of the meager dieter’s salad I had ordered. “You could just go outside and eat grass,” she said, pointing at it. “It’d be cheaper. Maybe more nutritious, too, except for the herbicides.” When we returned to the funeral home, she was ushered toward a viewing room. “Want to come along?” she asked me. I said no.

About twenty minutes later, she came back out and said, “Well, that’s done.”

“How’d he look?” I asked her.

“He didn’t look like himself anymore,” she said, working up to a concentrated scowl. “So what I gotta do is, I gotta remember him, instead.”

AFTER THE VIEWING and the cremation, Chloé and Oscar’s friends had a party-wake for the two of them. There was a controlled tumult of drinking and dancing and stories about Oscar. She took the wooden box containing his ashes along, and put it on a shelf near the stereo system. I asked her about drugs. She told me — I was being the starchy big sister — that, pregnant as she was, she wasn’t drinking or smoking anything at the party. She had made a resolution about that. After all, it was Oscar’s baby too she was carrying, and she didn’t want to fuck it up with anything toxic, she wanted it to come out big and strong. Those were her words. Big and strong.

The next time I went back to Jitters for my morning cup of coffee, the box with Oscar’s ashes in it was sitting on the shelf on the back wall, near the signboard listing the varieties of coffees and drinks. That box looked as if it belonged exactly in that spot. There he was, Oscar, a bit more anonymous now, back at Jitters, following his death leave.

Bradley and I had gone back to being wary friends. Whatever had gotten into us, to think that we would be successful partners? It was an embarrassing interlude, our marriage, of which we were both slightly ashamed. Still, we greeted each other with pleasure, those mornings when I came into his shop for coffee, and he was there, the Toad, behind the counter.

Chloé managed her grieving in an absentminded way, but she managed it all the same. She told me that she knew Oscar was dead, but she didn’t believe it. I didn’t ask her what she meant by that, but I should have.

I DON’T KNOW if David and I will stay together. Our lovemaking is so stormy and theatrical that we keep tearing into each other, and when we do, we tear holes. Sometimes what we do is more like fighting than love. We slam each other around. I think we’re trying to find each other’s souls, knowing they must be in there somewhere, close to our undernourished hearts. You shouldn’t envy us, sexy as we might appear to be. It’s not sustainable. No one could endure it. This intensity can’t continue forever. But it’s the way we are, hard-assed and mean and a bit selfish, and yet the main point to make here is that we’re obsessed with each other and are willing to admit it now, for all the good it does two people like us to be in love, if that’s what it is, which is very little good at all. We probably shouldn’t be in love. Dragons shouldn’t be characters in love stories. We should turn our attention to something else. The orgasms I have with him go up to my shoulders and down my arms and leave me beleaguered for hours afterward. The thing that we create when we’re together is wondrous but certainly not wonderful. I hate the idea of marriage. I hate seeing couples in cars going the other way on the highway. It makes me cringe. I go into rages.

On some days I’d like to be more like Chloé, who has star quality, but I’m not like her, and I won’t be. I’m bad, because I lack usable tenderness and I don’t have a shred of kindness, but I’m not a villain and never have been. That’s what you should remember about me.

TWENTY-FIVE

BEFORE I MET OSCAR, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn’t go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn’t the same person anymore. He mutated me.

First off, I had to do some serious crying. It got me nowhere, but I did it anyway. It felt like work, like building a fence or doing hard labor. I was okay during the day, most days, but I’d wake up crying and go to sleep crying, first in chairs, then in bed. I’d wake up and the pillow was still wet. In the morning I’d cry into my cereal, my tears dropping into the milk. I’d cry in the shower, and then I’d cry at work during my breaks. At home I watched TV and wept all the way through an infomercial for exercise equipment. So I guess I wasn’t okay during the day after all.

It didn’t help that Oscar showed up in my dreams constantly. Talking and jiving, his cap on backward, wearing his wedding ring, he’d go on and on about bands he liked and games he wanted to see, curious about my news just as if nothing special had happened. I kept telling him to get actual, that he’d died, and he’d say, No no, honey, you got it all wrong. Oh, man, look at my hand. And I’d look at his hand that he held out, and I’d grab it, reaching out in dreamtime, doubting him, and it was there all right, but the touch of it, the tight tough skin exactly Oscar’s, would startle me with terror and love, and I’d wake up by myself in my apartment in the dark like a flashlight you’ve just switched on, with the traffic moving on the street outside the window and the headlights lighting the ceiling, and this big broken hole in me that Oscar had left behind, by dying.

Sometimes I’d get mad at him for leaving me behind here in this life on Earth, but that didn’t work either. It was counterkarmic. Okay, I admit it: I only pretend to know about karma. I read in this magazine about it and I made up the rest. I don’t even know what language it comes from. So there I was. All day I was baffled, and all night I was sweating and shivering. Only I wasn’t sick, unless you count being pregnant and abandoned as sick.

It’s funny what being pregnant does for you socially, though. People such as your parents, who couldn’t be bothered calling you up or saying that you were an interesting person, who were alienated from you, suddenly do start calling and showing up as if you were interesting all of a sudden. They found out my whereabouts from my sister and drove forty miles from their home downriver to see me. They brought cooked chicken on a tray.

On this Sunday, my mom came in dressed to the nines, wearing her church dress and plum-colored lipstick and some sort of hair thing tottering on her head, and carrying, like I said, the chicken, which she deposited on the kitchen counter. She shrieked when she saw me as if I was the surprise of the month. “You’re so grown up!” she said. Yes, I was. She planted a kiss on my face and put her hand on my tummy, which you could tell she was dying to do. Then she looked around at our apartment, Oscar’s and mine, and said it was cute, and she took my hand to look at my wedding ring, doing an ooh and an aaah five months late, long long long past the deadline when I could’ve used it, that admiration. She asked me where he had bought it, and I told her truthfully, at the jewelry counter. She nodded wisely.

My dad, Chester, was behind her. I don’t know if I love my mom, but I have loved my dad even when he was angry at me and was a misogynist when he said I was no good. I go back and forth about him.

He’s confused all the time about life and doesn’t pretend to know anything except his job — he works on the line at Ford — and how to fix household appliances and moving-parts things, and he knows sports. With my sister and me, and how to raise us, I think he took his orders from Geraldine, my mom. He would’ve been okay with sons, but with two daughters he was clueless and sweet and so generous it was a compulsion with him. Anyway he was standing there in the doorway as if I hadn’t invited him in, wearing his hat and cleaning his glasses with his shirt flap, very shy and embarrassed about his previous anger toward me. So I said, “Come on inside, Dad,” and he walked in, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him, wearing his sheepish look. A sheepish look on a dad can bring you into a state of startled puzzlement. You could tell he was ashamed. Ashamed that he had once hypercursed me, but mostly ashamed that he had never met Oscar and had taken no interest in my life for the last year or two, because his wife had told him not to. He didn’t even look around at our little apartment. I guess he thought he didn’t have the right to look around. But I’m not squalid. Neither was our apartment. I couldn’t stand it, so I ran over to him and gave him a hug.

My dad smelled of grease and dime-store aftershave. Hugging him, you kind of collide with his stomach before you get to his face, but that was okay. My dad’s stomach is like the foyer to the rest of him.

That Sunday afternoon proceeded in a normal fashion until my mom asked if I had a picture of Oscar. I went to a drawer and pulled out his high school graduation photo, where he’s smiling in a smug way I never saw him smile, and his hair is watered down, and he’s basically pre-me, pre-Chloé, so he doesn’t look like himself, he doesn’t look transformed, except by the drugs he was using right about then. He was a little gaunt in those days, at least in the off-season, away from the track team, feeding his body with drugs. Later, Oscar in love went out of two dimensions into three or four. We made love in the fourth dimension, for example. But anyway this graduation portrait’s the only picture of him I have, except for one of him that Scooter took at our wedding, in which me and Oscar are kissing and Oscar’s got his hand planted on my tits, which I wasn’t going to show to my parents, the picture I mean, for safety’s sake.

“He looks very nice,” my mom said.

“Kinda thin,” my dad said.

No point in telling them about the drugs, so I said, “He’d just had flu.”

They nodded.

They spent the rest of the afternoon with me, making mature efforts to reconcile. We talked about boring stuff like my dad’s job, my mom’s job (she’s sort of a cashier-receptionist at a car dealership), and how the house was empty these days and if I wanted to move back, just before or after the baby was born, I could do that, and I could use the crib for my baby that they used for me. I almost said, “Thanks very much, that’s very sweet, but, you know, it’s too late for that,” but I didn’t, because they were trying to be solid and correct with me, turning over a new parental leaf, now that I was my own woman and not their little girl anymore. Besides, I wanted to show them how mature I’d gotten by not saying fuck all the time, a habit that’s hard to give up. That’s scary for parents. You have to be careful with parents once you’re grown up into mature adulthood. They get sensitive. Almost anything you say, you hurt their feelings. Their aging hearts get broken. They just crumple up. Besides, I was about to become one of them.

THERE WAS ONE OTHER CALL I was expecting, and sure enough, eventually it came. I was expecting it to come at about two in the morning, but the phone rang at seven at night, and I just knew it was him, I had known all day at work that it was going to be him, it was a little gift that Mrs. Maggaroulian had given me, knowing when my father-in-law the Bat would call me before he actually did. Maybe I knew these things because I was carrying his grandchild, but I don’t think that’s it. I think I picked it up from Mrs. Maggaroulian, what Weekly World News calls “precognition.”

After I was a full-fledged married woman, the Bat had stopped stalking me, and Oscar and me, we sort of forgot about him, just figured that he had retreated into his bat cave for a while until he decided to be decent. Oscar didn’t need anything from the house — he’d taken all his stuff out of there a long time ago — so we were what you would call out of touch with the Bat.

Anyway, the phone rang and I answered it.

“This is Mac Metzger,” the Bat said. “I thought I had better talk to you.”

“Oh, hi,” I said.

I waited for him to say something. Then he said, “Lot of water’s over the dam, ain’t it?”

“I guess so.” Then I asked, “Uh, water?”

He ignored the question. “I hear tell you’re in the family way.”

“Yes,” I said. “How’d you know?”

“Word gets around. Well, besides,” he said, “I guess I got some apologizing to do.”

“Apologizing? For stalking me?”

“No. On account of I was drinking so much, last time I saw you. Well, finally I quit it, praise God.”

“You did?” It seemed we were both doing New Year’s resolutions, without the New Year to help us out.

“Swore it off. Had to. The long arm of the law caught me falling down, you might say, and they were going to confiscate my truck and my license, so I had to go into this treatment group. I did it. I swore it off and I’m making amends. Hardest thing I ever managed to do.”

“You sound different.”

“Well, I am different. Ashamed of the way I acted. I don’t know what-all got into me. And besides I forgave you for all the stealing, you loaded down with my stuff. I didn’t care about that worldly goods anyway. It was castoffs. You could have had it, you being Oscar’s wife, if you’d asked.”

“I never stole anything. Really.”

“Okay.” He waited. “I know that was what you said. Well, you got your story and I got mine. Difference of opinion. I guess everybody’s got a story, right?” He waited for me to agree with him, and when I didn’t, he said, “Anyhow Oscar’s gone. Poor kid. I guess I was angry at him way too much.”

“That’s right.”

“I was so surprised and done in by events that I pretty much got dead drunk when you asked me for help on the funeral arrangements. I don’t know what got into me, what I done or said. The devils, I guess. I got a problem with the devils, I can tell you right now. Sorry I couldn’t do more. A kid his age, he was too young to have a heart attack. You told me where you put his ashes, but you’ll have to tell me again. I blacked out on everything after he died.”

“In Saginaw Forest,” I said, lying to him.

“That’s a pretty place, I been there. Well, now he’s dead, Oscar might do the trees some good, the way he did you. He was a handful. And sometimes he sure acted too smart with me. That boy was constant trouble.”

“He did me some good,” I said. “He was the best person I ever knew.” I could have hung up, but I didn’t. “Yes,” I said. “He was.”

“Well, is that a fact? I’m sure glad. You know, Oscar was so often a terror, and when he wasn’t a terror, he couldn’t be moved off the sofa. The drugs did that to him. They made him lazy, and then he had a mouth on him when I’d get on him. We had quite a household. Between us, it was like a war, so I’d make myself scarce, and when I was around, he could be as mean as my own daddy had been. ‘Course I miss him. You always miss your children.”

“Yes,” I said.

“It must be there was a side to him I almost never saw. I was mostly proud of him when he was running. That boy could run the relay as fast as anything, and that was when I was happy to claim him as my own. But so much of the rest of the time, I just had to put up with him and his drugs and troublemaking and his smart mouth, but like I say, maybe there’s another side to matters and I’d like to hear your side. You probably saw things I never saw. You got a side?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have a side.”

“Well, see, that’s just what I’m saying. You got a side. You’ve got a story. You probably got a story about Oscar. You probably know something about him that even I never got me no idea of.”

“Probably.”

“So what I was thinking was, you should tell me your side, since I want to hear it so much, with my son dead and gone and his ashes in Saginaw Forest.” The Bat waited, and all at once I thought I had caught his drift. “We oughta you and me meet face to face, so you can tell me your side,” he said, as if thinking it over. “I want to hear about Oscar from you.”

There was a long pause in there, while I waited. “What’re you suggesting, Mr. Metzger?”

“You mean I’m not being clear? I sure thought I was. Goddamn if I’m confusing you. I was kinda hoping you’d invite me over that apartment of yours.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe a restaurant’d be better.”

“You want to come over here?” he asked. “It’s kinda dusty. I’d have to clean up and mostly I’m too tired at the end of the day to do that.” He sighed. “I could, I guess. Okay, you’re invited.”

“No. I’d rather not come over there.”

“Well we got ourselves an impasse, then,” he said. “I don’t want to go to a restaurant, myself. I don’t ever do that. So we’ve got a failure of the meeting of minds.”

“I know what we’ll do,” I said. “I just had an idea. Why don’t you come over here and meet my parents? I’ll invite them, too. You know, like how the in-laws meet when their kids get married? The grandparents, now. Just ’cause Oscar’s dead doesn’t change that. What d’you think?”

I had outfoxed him and he knew it. “It’s your side I want to hear, not theirs,” he said, all of a sudden somber.

“You’ll get mine and theirs.”

“I was never much for relatives,” the Bat said, “of the conversational variety.”

“But that’s what I am.”

“Oh all right,” he said angrily, like I’d been beating him at a game. “Invite your parents if you want to. Sure, I’d be happy to meet them.”

I had sudden shooting pains in my stomach, which the Bat was causing just by talking to me.

“So,” he said. “When should I come? How about tonight?”

“I have to work,” I said. “It’s too soon.”

“You don’t think much of me, do you?” he asked me suddenly, a question I wasn’t about to answer.

“You’re fine,” I said. “I don’t think of you one way or another.”

He cleared his throat, an awful sound. “Sorry,” he said. “I got this thing caught in my throat. So, how about Saturday night?”

“Well, I’ll call my parents and then call you back.”

“You do that. I will wait right here by the telephone for that callback from you.”

I called my parents, reached my mom, who was overjoyed that I was inviting her and delighted to be meeting Oscar’s father, and I called the Bat again. So as a plan it was accomplished.

I bought bags of potato chips, and pop, and beer, and some potato salad, and hamburgers, and the hamburger buns, and the ketchup and relish and pickles. Good-time food. It wasn’t a picnic but I figured picnic food would put everybody into a better disposition and help them get along with one another.

I guess I should have been afraid, but it didn’t occur to me to be, with my parents there.

That night it snowed, this being December, and I’d invited my parents early, but they didn’t come when they were supposed to. I kept checking my watch as I buttered the buns. It was one of those best-laid-plans deals. When the phone rang, sure enough, it was my dad saying they had slid off the road and had to call a tow truck, and they’d be there eventually, but they were going to be late. “Delayed” was the word he used. And had I seen the snow, my dad asked, how it was coming down?

That was about when I heard the Bat’s knock on the door. With this building, there’s a front door that’s supposed to be locked, but no one ever keeps it locked, they’ve always got bricks propped against it. Anyone can get in. Anyone did. And he was knocking at my door right now.

No point in looking through the peephole. You didn’t need Mrs. Maggaroulian to tell you what was on the other side. The only thing was, when I opened the door, he didn’t look bad or mean, but more like a loser standing in line at the unemployment office, humbled, ready to ask the passers-by for a quarter.

He had a layer of snow on his head. Snow was on his shoes. And he was, all over again, small. I kept expecting Oscar’s father to look like Oscar, but instead he was a miniature, shorter than me, and the only feature Oscar’d got from him was a sort of cheekbone thing, which, for a second, made me homesick for my late husband. The Bat was holding a tallboy, and he didn’t look sure of himself. Carrying a beer? What had happened to his promise to swear off the alcohol? He was half-smiling, almost panting with the effort of it, wearing a jacket, a wrinkled necktie, and snowy shoes.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi there, daughter.” His voice rasped and rattled. He moved from foot to foot. “You gonna invite me in?”

“Sure,” I said. I helped him out of his jacket and hung it in the closet. He kept his cap on. I turned around and walked back toward where the three chairs were and the hideabed. I heard him following me. He let out this cough that went on and on and sounded like the end of the world. I sat down in one of the chairs and waited for the coughing event to cease. Finally it did.

“I got phlegm,” the Bat informed me. He looked around my apartment. Then he sat on a chair and gave me a look in which cheerfulness and meanness were mixed equally. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Snows get into my lung cavities and I can’t get ’em out.” The coughing started up one more time. When he stopped, he said, “It’s bad. Don’t really know what it is. Don’t want to know.”

“You should see a doctor,” I said.

“You think so? All they have is bad news and bills you can’t pay. No, I’d rather see myself in hell first,” he told me. He tried to lean back, and when that didn’t work, he leaned forward. He smiled at me. “Here, you want this beer for your party?” He handed me the tallboy and reached into his shirt for a cigarette, which he proceeded to light. “You want to know what I do? For the lungs?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I go to a healer. We got this healer in our church. He lays his hands on me.”

“Does it help?”

“Wish I knew. I couldn’t say. I’m neither dead nor alive. You got an ashtray?”

I brought over a dish I kept under the sink and handed it to him. “There.”

“Thank you,” he said, fingering the ashtray and then peering at me. “I reckonized it. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to get to know you. A little, anyways. You don’t know me. For like an example, you don’ know I’m a Christian man. Go to a church, go to a healer.” He crossed his arms, holding the cigarette, and touched his forehead. I was watching the snow on his cap and his shoes. I was waiting for it to melt.

“No, I knew that. The church part.”

“How come?” He looked at me, squinting his eyes.

“Oscar told me.”

He shook his head, and water dripped down from his hair, but the snow remained on his shoes. He laughed. “I was born in Kentucky where we had a healer living on the same street. Old woman named Gladys — there was a scary and amazing power she had, so I’ve always believed in it more than medicine. She happened to be a great-aunt of mine. She called me Little Mac.”

“Like the hamburger.”

“Hunh?”

“You know. The Big Mac.”

“Oh, right.” He turned his eyes upon my apartment. He looked long and hard at the window. “Did you ever happen to come to Jesus yourself?”

“No, actually, he came to me. At a party. He asked me for directions.”

He stared at me for several moments. He stood up, went to the window, then sat down again. “That’s blasphemy. Well, I forgive it. Where’s your parents that you said was coming?” He scratched at a scar above his left eye. I couldn’t help it: I was watching him closely.

“They’re late.”

“I can see that. It must be they had trouble on the road. Weather reports give, I dunno, five-six-seven inches of snow.”

He threw me a look, the very same one I saw him give me when I walked past him out of Oscar’s bedroom into the hallway. I couldn’t say for sure, but I thought he was calculating his chances.

“Now you tell me about yourself,” the Bat said. “Let me hear your story. I’d like to hear that, where you come from and everything.”

I talked for ten minutes, yakking away, hoping my parents would arrive to get me out of this mess. But they didn’t come and didn’t come, and meanwhile, in the middle of my life story, the Bat went to the refrigerator and found himself a beer, not the tallboy he had bought but another one, which he opened and drank in about five seconds. I remembered that he wasn’t supposed to drink, that he had sworn it off and was supposed to be clean. Then he opened another beer and brought it over to his personal chair. He was, like, proportionating me all over again, his eyes like lizards crawling up and down my arms and legs. The phone rang once more and I ran to answer it. It was my dad, calling from his car phone, saying the axle was bent and they couldn’t drive it, seeing as how the car had gone into the ditch and the front end was broken open. I didn’t want to sound desperate so I just went uh-huh, uh-huh. My dad said if he could figure out a way to get over here in the next half-hour, they’d come by cab, if the cabs were running.

I went over to the boom box and put some music on softly, radio-type tunes.

“Who was that?” the Bat inquired, from his chair.

“My dad.”

“Still late, those two. Am I right? Well well. Just us, you and me, Missy and Mac. I kinda like the sound of that. ‘Missy and Mac.’ Do you believe in Jesus, Missy?”

“Back to that topic? Sure,” I said.

“Me too. You know why?”

“No.”

“’Cause he’s interested in me the way he’s interested in everybody. Being the way I am, big trouble in a small shape. Hey, I got a riddle for you. What’d the elephant say to the naked man?”

“I don’t know.”

“ ‘How do you eat with that thing?’ ” He smiled fiercely. “Get it? ‘How do you eat with that thing?’ I think that’s funny. You know, Oscar always said you were pretty, and I guess you are, but it’s more like country-cute.” He studied me for a moment. “With that toothy smile you got.”

“Thank you.”

“I can see why Oscar’d want to sleep with you and even marry you. All that marriageable cuteness in one package and such.”

“What was Oscar’s mother like? He’s told me —”

“ — Do you mind me saying what I just said, a dirty word or two? Sometimes I cain’t help it.”

“Well, no.”

“You should of. You should of said, ‘Mac, don’t talk that way, it’s nasty.’ Like that time I called you a dirty word. I shouldn’t remember doing that, but I do.”

“Well, it is nasty, I guess, but —”

“ — Not as nasty as the act, y’know. Which you did in my house, can you remember it? Walkin’ past me on display? That got me started.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

The Bat reached down and took a swig of his beer. He appeared to think for a moment. “So you can apologize after all. I liked it though.” He stared at me. “Seeing the features of yours. You sure are pretty.” He appeared to think for another moment. “Your parents ain’t comin’, right?”

“No, they’ll be here any minute.”

“I don’t think so. I think you’re puttin’ me on. You’re just actin’. That’s all you ever done with me, was pretend. I had high hopes, drivin’ over here in my four-wheel. Missy and Mac, I thought, maybe we can be friends.” He stood up and walked toward the kitchen area. He scratched his scalp with the beer bottle. “You think I’m a bad person? Honestly? Tell me now.”

“I don’t know what you are,” I said.

“That’s the ticket.” Now he scratched his ear with his index finger, then examined the finger. I wanted him to stop all the scratching. “That’s the ticket right there. I don’t know either. I just don’t know what I do from minute to minute. Goddamn, I am confused.” He stared up at the ceiling. “Lord, I am confused and tired. I am forever gettin’ tired. You think, Missy, we could, y’know, somehow, well, be friends, and I could someday, when your baby comes, help you out? I’d like to do that. Babysitting. I might help.”

“I think so.”

“I think so too. We could start all over. Like nothin’d ever happened between us. ’Cause I’ll be a granddaddy. We could give it a baptism. Wash it in the blood of the lamb. What you gonna name it?”

I told him I didn’t know.

For a moment this thing happened on his face. I had never seen it there before and I couldn’t be sure I was seeing it now. His face calmed down for a few seconds, settled into itself. He was peaceful and quiet. I saw at that moment that all my worries about the Bat were mistaken. He was just a harmless little middle-aged guy who drank way too much and who had once followed me around and who had trouble with demons.

“You wanna give me a hug?” the Bat asked. “A hug for the father-in-law?”

“Well, not quite yet,” I said, softening. “Maybe later. Soon. In a little while.”

“Okay,” the Bat said, scratching himself higher, on his chest. His face was getting dazed again, maybe from the beer. “If you’ll excuse me, I gotta go for a pee.”

“Be my guest,” I said. The Bat disappeared into the bathroom and I reached under the hideabed for Oscar’s knife box, and I took a knife out and hid it under a magazine. I reached over to the bowl where the potato chips were, and I grabbed some and ate them.

The door to the bathroom opened an inch or two. “Hi,” he said, from behind the door. Here things get a little hazy, a little unclear.

After another minute or so, the Bat walked out, with his pants off, and his underwear off, and his shoes and socks removed. His dick swung back and forth like an inspection tool, as he made his way in slow motion toward me. I remember looking at the window quickly. Maybe someone would see this. He stood there for a moment, naked from the waist down, as if he couldn’t decide on his next move. Then he said, “How ’bout that hug now?”

“Mac,” I said, trying to hold my breathing steady, “you left your underwear and your pants off.” I couldn’t run; he was closer to the door than I was.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” he said, clearing his throat. “Maybe I oughtta put ’em back on.”

“That’s a good idea.” I stood up. My knees were shaking. My face had gone ice cold. “Why don’t you do that? Just turn around and go back in there.”

“I forgot,” he said. “Thought I was home. Thought it was Missy and Mac, quiet evening at home.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t that.” I was measuring the distance to the door. He started to walk toward me, his dick swinging again a little.

“I’d like that hug now,” he said. “Then I’ll put the pants back on.”

I couldn’t think. I didn’t have a single good idea to help me out.

“The shades aren’t down,” I said, feeling my tongue rattling. “People will see.” The Bat turned around to lower the shades, and when he did, I reached for the knife under the magazine and held it behind me. I took a deep breath. I’d never been so scared in my life, but I was also not scared, which is harder to explain. But I am going to explain it, because I’ve thought about it ever since. I mean, I knew he could kill me, or rape me and kill me, but I also knew that I could probably kill him, if I wanted to, and that maybe at any moment any of us could do any of that to anybody. He hadn’t decided what he would do, not yet. But the more amazing thing is, I felt Oscar’s spirit pass through me right at that same exact instant, and I almost cried out, Oscar! ’cause there he was, my boy and my man and my husband, he had just walked inside of me out of nowhere, out of death, and I could think like Oscar and move like Oscar and be strong like him, strong and fearless. Maybe all I was doing was thinking of Oscar. That’s probably it. Thinking of being fearless. Which I wasn’t, scared to death as I was, but I was also this other person, right at that moment, like that person was on one side and the scared person was on the other. I was going to give room to the fearless side. Oh Oscar, I thought, be in me.

The Bat walked over to me, calm as a cucumber, but drunk all the same. Concentrating on his every move, calculating the odds. “Shades’re down now.”

“Get away,” I said. “Don’t come any nearer to me.”

“You sure are pretty,” he said, getting closer. “Prettiest little thing. Always were. I can be pretty, too. I can be a kindly man.”

“Put your clothes on, Mac,” I said. “Besides, I’m pregnant.”

“I get so confused,” he said. “Help me. There isn’t anybody I can talk to. I get so tired. Help me out, little one.” His arms reached out as he got next to me. “I’m not askin’ for much. Please. I’m askin’ please. From politeness. Just a little hug. And a kiss? The tiniest bit of love.”

Then the air unfroze itself.

The Bat put his arms around me and he pressed himself against me, and my hand came down once, stabbing him through his shirt into the upper arm with Oscar’s knife.

He looked hard at his arm for a second, then howled in surprise and dropped to his knees. Some blood appeared on my blouse, as the knife sort of worried its way out of his arm, and with its blade shiny with blood fell to the floor, spattering the linoleum. I got to the doorway and grabbed my jacket and ran outside. I turned the lights off as I went. I thought: I’ll get the neighbors. No no no: he’ll be here in a minute, he’ll accuse me of something. Assaulting him. I should’ve gotten the neighbors, but I wasn’t thinking so clearly. I just wanted to get out of that building. I raced down to the Matador and started it. I had a few minutes on him, but no particular place to go.

If you’re in your right mind, you drive straight to the police, but I wasn’t in my right mind, and besides, the roads were terrible. I was thinking: I did the wrong thing, and now they’ll arrest me, Chloé, for what I did. I saw myself, arrested, ruined, panhandling on the street. I thought of Rhonda, my sister, too far away; my friends, too unhelpful and stoned; and then I thought of Bradley, my boss and my friend, and his girlfriend, Margaret, because maybe I was still thinking of Oscar, I could still feel him, and I was thinking of our wedding day, and the party that Bradley had thrown for us, the feast of love he’d laid out on his table. I thought of that, too.

THE ROADS HADN’T been plowed yet, and this thick snow lay over everything, and the Matador had rear-wheel drive, plus it was old and rusty, and the first thing I knew I was going down my street sideways, and then I wasn’t going anywhere at all, just spinning and spinning at an intersection. I thought of the Bat and his four-wheel truck gaining on me, and that was when a face appeared on my driver’s side window, and I screamed.

But it was only a passing pedestrian walking his dog, and, like, offering to push me. It’s amazing he stayed when I screamed like that. But he did, and he pushed my car, and I was off again.

I made my way around the city trying to get to Bradley’s street, over by Allmendinger Park, and at one point the engine died and I had to start it again, and at another point I found myself on a dark street with the snow falling and I had to stop the car because I was crying and shaking and shivering. But then I faced up to things and got strong, and I made another New Year’s resolution two months early that I wouldn’t give in to cheesy panic or anything, even though it made sense to panic, and was the easy, logical thing to do, lame though it was.

The street lights passed over me, and I felt myself getting faint and helpless, and I had the sudden recognition that I didn’t know where I was, but then I passed the football stadium where Oscar had once given me a Slurpee, and I made a right turn, and another left, and another right, and I started skidding down Bradley’s street, and suddenly I felt my baby kick, although it was way too early, it couldn’t have been the baby kicking, so I guess it was my heart thumping, which is how I knew Oscar was leaving me, because I was having this little tiny heart attack, just like the one Oscar’d had, except very small, so it was time for Oscar to go. And then he was gone, out of me entirely, having helped me in my time of trouble. He re-died.

I parked in front of Bradley’s house, which was, like, totally dark. I opened the Matador door with its formerly satisfying squeak. I ran up to his door, and when I did, the snow got into my running shoes, and I rang the bell, rang it and rang it and rang it, and Bradley the dog started barking inside, but there was no Bradley the human there, or Margaret either, and I thought, oh please, someone save me now before the Bat gets here.

So I ran over next door, where Harry and Esther Ginsberg were, and there was more snow in my shoes, and I thought I would faint, but I pounded on their door knocker, and I said, “Help! Please, help! Somebody, please!”

And I heard Harry coming toward the door, and as he opened it, he said, like he didn’t know it was me, like my voice wasn’t my own but a man’s voice, like he thought it was someone else, “Aaron? Is that you? Aaron?”

TWENTY-SIX

I KNOW ONE UNASSAILABLE TRUTH: Help your friends and those whom you love; hurt your enemies. The very banality of this formulation ensures that most academics — who enjoy hurting their friends — will ignore it.

For days, in any case, I lay awake, thinking of Aaron and of how I might have done him indeliberate harm. I awoke, nocturnally fevered, my forehead sweating, perspiration soaked into my pajamas, in my unforgiving mind’s eye the spectacle of Aaron being ill served by my negligence. On my son’s behalf, I had performed no heroic measures, the ones that, bright with prudence, you wisely do not perform in the daytime but whose nonperformance terrorizes your conscience following the arrival of dusk. Disquieted, assailed, I would rise out of bed and aimlessly walk down the hallway to the bathroom. I would switch on the light. All bathrooms, whatever their minute variations, are overilluminated at night, just as, at night, all telephones when they ring are too loud. The existential nocturnal glare of bathrooms has a certain ghastliness built into the shadowless illumination. Under such lights one discovers the first signs of cancer.

Moody and forlorn with middle age, baffled by the enigmatic Christian knight of faith, Kierkegaard, who nevertheless came to grips with spiritual psychologies as few thinkers ever have, battered with visual memories of Aaron, I would walk back to the bed, comically abandoned by sleep. It occurred to me that my lifelong tramps through the landscapes of philosophy had set Aaron off in the direction of counterphilosophy, of Scientology and Theosophy and Anthroposophy and the other occult sciences he favored. Who knows, who knew, what set him off? Perhaps he loved men and not women. But who would care one way or another about such a choice, in this era, except the unenlightened? We would have accepted him gladly, accepted his homosexuality, if that’s what it was. We would have welcomed him back to the house. He knew that. He could have come back, our own beloved prodigal, bedecked with strange clothes and jewels, dressed like a gypsy, and we would have swung wide the door and hugged him and kissed him. But no, he preferred to hate and to be hated.

This is the only cure for insomnia I know. Lying on my back, I would imagine myself in a cosmopolitan but still rather lethargic city, a city that had long ago given up worldly ambition, a city in genteel decline, Lisbon, for example (which I have never visited), where I am sitting at an outdoor café during a mild summer afternoon, drinking bitter coffee and reading the paper in Portuguese. Esther sits there with me, commenting on the architecture of the square — shabby Baroque — and on the passersby. Some are solitary. Others, the lovers, walk arm in arm. They all have an inaptitude for work. The women wear bright scarves tangled around their necks, the young men wear peacock-colored shirts. Occasionally we witness a group of three or four, laughing quietly as they pass in front of us. Then I revise the city so that the square faces the estuary. Boats sail in and out past the anchorage, near a breakwater at whose end is a harbor light. I am also on some of these boats (I am subdivided), and I wave to myself affably. No one has to go anywhere, no one has to accomplish anything. One has, it seems, an entire lifetime to sort through the major questions and to develop a coherent set of opinions and judgments on these matters. The meaning of everything will arrive in due course.

Gulls land and then take flight from the quay at Alcântara. The waiter brings another cup of coffee, a boat toots in the distance over the lapping waves, there is a hint of rain beyond the wharf, a bank of clouds developing over the horizon suggests but does not threaten the relief of a storm. At the next table over a man feeds olives to a gray pet parrot perched on his finger. Esther murmurs something to me, a consoling phrase, I don’t quite attend to it, though I may register the words later. I look around again at the harbor and now at the buildings behind me. Nearby, children are playing hopscotch. Two scholars of the Talmud stroll by, arguing in Portuguese flavored with Yiddish. A small band of musicians is tuning up, a trio of vagabond string players enjoying the outdoors, intending to perform Rossini. I am not particularly hungry, but when the solicitous waiter comes by I order a plate of the local delicacy, a rolled pastry with honey tucked inside.

I take another sip of coffee.

Usually this little nighttime fantasy is enough to send me off to sleep. But on certain nights, following fierce committee meetings at the Amalgamated Education Corporation, I must calm down by closing my eyes and reading the imaginary paper in imaginary Portuguese at length. I don’t read Portuguese, but in my insomnia cure I do. I scan the paper at my sidewalk café near the harbor. The paper I imagine has trivial matters reported in a lively and almost comically beautiful prose. This is paradise, to read a newspaper containing matters of no consequence written by vainglorious prose stylists. A woman has her purse stolen in a leather shop, all this reported in a fashion that would have done honor to Gibbon, if the great man had written in Portuguese. A man falls off a balcony, breaking a bone or two, and the account has the melancholy wit of Saint-Simon. In another section of the paper, a cat is reported missing, but the story has been written by G.W.F. Hegel, and one can barely discern the cat. Well, no one admires Hegel’s prose style, but it is pleasing and relaxing to imagine Hegel, humbled at last, having to write for a newspaper. Hegel also reports on the doings at the racetrack. Elsewhere, a soccer match is narrated by Proust, an apartment is offered for sale by Heine, a quarrel between two neighbors is accounted for by Colette. Virginia Woolf has control of the financial columns, which, in this newspaper of mine, detail how money should be spent, and on what items, not how it should be invested. In this city of my making, my imaginings, there are no major investments. Savings are minimal. The bankers are as poor as mice. They must go begging, organize bake sales.

But then, or now (I am still awake), I lower the paper and look into the harbor, and there, in a rowboat without oars or motor, is Aaron, drifting away from shore, and shouting. Behind me the great clock tower in the central square sounds its lugubrious and melancholy bells. These are large bells, with a complex layering of overtones, and their announcements dictate the timing of the social life of the city. It is four in the afternoon. Aaron is shouting or screaming. The bells clang repetitively, going past the hours into tollings of sorrow. I cannot make out any of his words. My son is shouting at me. He is drifting out to sea. He is gesturing. My G-d, I must help him. I am sweating, I have a fever.

Somebody save him.

ALMOST EVERY RELIGION obsesses over the sacrifice of a son by a father. For the Jews, it is Abraham and Isaac, an example appropriated by Kierkegaard for the purposes of irrational faith. For the Christians, of course, the son, Jesus, is sacrificed, is donated as an offering for the first and last time by the father-god; Gentiles cannot get over this. There is Absalom. Elsewhere, we find Prometheus, understood as a young god, who must be killed time and again. These myths I find more compelling than the tales of the father’s death, organized by the primal horde, an idea whose commonplace vulgarity was so aptly taken up by Freud, a vulgarian of the clinical variety.

When I was in college, my father, a gruff undemonstrative man, died of a stroke on a ladder one Saturday afternoon while painting the house. When he tumbled down to the ground, the can of white paint went tumbling with him, splashing over his face and torso. My father died stretched out on the green lawn, the nearby grass and my father’s face painted white, clownishly, as if by an action painter. I believe it gives me no pleasure to tell this story, but Esther says that it does, I have told it so often and so compulsively to anyone who would listen. He, my father, thought me bookish and unworldly. He sold copper pipe in Chicago and wanted me to go into the business, which I refused to do from the age of seven onward. My father was given to rages, as is Aaron. He suffered from a metaphysical anguish without any apparent cause. I see my father in my son. Both have a talent for withering cryptic conclusive remarks. I never said Kaddish over him. I am not that sort of Jew. It complicates things.

THIS SATURDAY NIGHT, I was pacing through the house while Esther did her sewing. I was trying not to think of Aaron but could not help myself. To block my worries, I had taken up Kierkegaard and was deliberating over the Wittgensteinian pronouncement in Repetition (Wittgenstein, who admired Kierkegaard enormously, was the Knight of Rules) that “He who knows how to keep silent discovers an alphabet that has just as many letters as the ordinary one.” What does it mean, knowing how to keep silent? What kind of silence would this be? How do such silences differ from one another? How does this particular silence contrast with being morosely mute? What is a knowledgeable silence? How would we know or for that matter recognize this knowledge? And what, if I may ask, is the nature of this silent alphabet?

Wittgenstein regarded metaphysics as the lint on a suit. However, after he picked off the lint, the suit itself vanished.

Perhaps these musings would find a chapter in my new book, a refutation of the tendentious and mannered arguments concerning Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in Herbert Quain’s The Labyrinth of the God.

Outside it was snowing, a dreadful December snow, wet and clumped and cumulative. Sitting in my study, mulling over K’s notice that all life is a repetition — these silent alphabets must have existed before us — but actually visualizing Aaron’s wanderings over the face of the earth, I peered through the window.

I imagined my son pursued by barking dogs.

Helpless in my imaginings (where was Lisbon? my city had faded with the pitiless evanescence of all fantasy), I imagined Aaron, hapless and lonely, an orphan of this midwestern storm, pelted by wet snow, one of the wretched. I would like very much to say that I did not think of Aaron at all and that my thoughts were free, but my son, having disappeared, commanded my thoughts entirely in his absence and silence. At that moment it occurred to me that Aaron had discovered Kierkegaard’s secret alphabet and was writing letters to me, employing it.

A car rumbled out on the street. It was not Bradley’s car, which I recognized, but one of an unknown pitch and timbre. The driver stopped the car, opened the door — it squeaked — and slammed it.

I am not inclined to magical thinking. Nevertheless my breath quickened, I must tell you, at that moment. My heartbeat increased. I stood up and approached the front hallway. Aaron had at last come home, was my intuition. He had given up his rebellion and had returned, remorseful, quite possibly drug-free, and grateful for our forgiveness. Perhaps he would bring someone with him. There would be wildfires of contrition on all sides. Fine, fine. I made my way toward the foyer.

A fist knocked against the door. A hoarse boyish voice called out for help. I opened the door a crack and sniffed the winter air. Aaron, I said. Is that you? Aaron?

Pulling the door open, Esther standing behind me, I saw not Aaron but Chloé, the coffee waitress and recent widow, her face pale and airless and stricken and terrified.

CHLOÉ, I SAID. What is it? Come in. Please come in.

He tried to rape me, she cried out. And I stabbed him and now they’ll arrest me and take me off to jail. I’m done for.

Esther brushed me out of the way. She reached for Chloé’s ungloved chapped hand. Come in, dear, she said, come in right this minute. Esther pulled Chloé inside and shut the door behind her, turning the lock. She did not let loose for a moment her grip on Chloé’s palm and fingers. Esther unzipped Chloé’s jacket — the girl did not at that moment seem capable of this simple action — and took it off. Then she unlaced and removed Chloé’s big shoes and led her into the kitchen, where she sat her down at the dinette table. Shoeless, the girl scattered snow from her jeans down the hall, past the ticking clock. Don’t say anything, Esther instructed her. Just warm up for a moment, and I’ll make you some coffee. No, not coffee. Tea.

He tried —

— Just a moment, please, Chloé. Just wait, Esther said. Then she turned to me. Harry, you must leave us.

Nonsense, I said.

It’s okay, Chloé said. He can stay.

No, Esther insisted. Harry, go back to your study. Please, open a book.

Open a book?

She took pity on me. Do as I tell you, Harry. Open one of your books. Ten minutes. Give us ten minutes here.

Who tried to rape you? I asked. We must call the police.

Harry! Esther said. She rose and with a will of iron pushed me with both hands out of the kitchen. She pushed me into the living room and then down the hallway to the stairs. She would have pushed me up the stairs to my study, but I had agreed in my mind to go up there anyway.

Nevertheless, at the landing I turned around and waited. I could not help but be curious. What rape? And who the perpetrator? The door to the kitchen closed behind Esther, and I heard from in there female murmurings. Chloé said something, Esther said something in return. Women have this way of excluding men from discussions of domestic importance. Around the house we are befuddled by their private plans and strategies. I trudged upstairs.

THEY WENT TO THE POLICE, leaving me behind in the house. But Chloé, having not been penetrated or otherwise assaulted by her father-in-law, declined to press charges for criminal sexual assault or to testify against him, although she was encouraged to do so. They calmed her fears of being arrested, Metzger having all the bad unsavory cards in this particular deck. Late that night, she returned to our house and called her parents, who had made their way home by tow truck and taxi. Esther would not let her drive herself home. She gave Chloé a spare nightgown — they were the same height, Esther and Chloé — and put her to bed in Aaron’s room. Much of the night Esther sat there on the edge of the mattress, until Chloé slept.

The next morning Esther rose, I won’t say “joyfully,” but with serious intent. She called in to her job and to her boss, informing everybody that she would not appear. In the kitchen she prepared orange juice, scrambled eggs, toast, and bagels. Chloé came in wearing Aaron’s too-large green bathrobe, and I must say it was a shock, seeing her dressed that way, barefoot in our kitchen as she had been at her wedding reception, dressed in our son’s robe, then a priestess of Eros, now brought low.

She managed a smile for the two of us, one of the more heartbreaking gestures of politeness I have ever witnessed.

Good morning, she said, and she started to cry. Esther rose up faster than I did and took the girl in her arms. I can’t eat scrambled eggs, Chloé said, huddled inside Esther’s arms. Because I’m pregnant, they make me sick or something.

You don’t have to eat anything.

Hard-boiled eggs’re okay, she said. Still she continued to weep.

Please sit down, Chloé, I requested of her.

I’ll try.

She sat successfully at the table and dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. What are you going to do now? I asked.

I can’t go back there, she said. That little shithead — pardon my French — is gonna be followin’ me around. I can’t… She shook her head. I can’t think, for starters.

Well, you’ll live here, then, Esther said. Until you think of something to do. For the interim, you’re right here. You can move into one of the bedrooms upstairs, or we can make up an apartment for you in the basement. You could have privacy down there. You could come and go as you please.

Esther looked at me, an expression on her face not of inquiry — Was this plan acceptable to me? — but of unarguable confirmation — We are going to do this. Why would I argue? I just nodded.

Here, Esther said, and she pulled a green bracelet off her arm and put it on Chloé’s.

What is it? the girl asked.

Malachite, Esther told her. It gives courage.

Later that day, I drove with Chloé over to her apartment and helped her collect some of her household gods: her clothes, her radio and CDs, her little TV, her late husband’s track shoes and baton, pathetic odds and ends. In two carloads we brought them over. The chairs and table we left behind for a later trip.

Eventually she broke her lease. She is now our tenant.

She decided that she wanted to live in the basement. I don’t want to have windows, she said, even though the basement did have glass-block windows up near the ceiling, through which the light strained into the room. Chloé’s living in our house was Esther’s idea; before anyone had thought the matter over, it was done and completed. Consequently: there she resides in what was once our rec room. Where Ephraim and Sarah and Aaron once played Ping-Pong, Chloé now lives. She reads Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, watches television, goes to work, listens to music, sleeps, and prepares for her delivery. From time to time she comes up the stairs to the kitchen. Now and then she joins us for dinner or breakfast. Mostly she keeps her own hours, does whatever youngsters of her generation do. (I don’t inquire.) Sometimes, from down there, I hear singing, Chloé’s intermittent solitary warbling.

She has swelled up. She radiates the preemptive procreative heat of pregnancy. Esther accompanies her to the Lamaze classes. They come back laughing and whispering. My wife appears to be regressing to presumptive girlhood and to be enjoying it. She often has on her face a pumpkin grin. Myself, I have agreed to be godfather to the baby. This is all inappropriate — a Jew as a godfather? — but I have decided to indulge what Kierkegaard calls “the blissful security of the moment.” Even baptisms hold no terror for me. It is simply what the Gentiles do.

Bradley’s new girlfriend, Margaret Ntegyereize, has promised, if she’s available, to deliver the baby. As Jimmy Durante used to say, Everybody wants to get into the act.

Bradley Smith and Margaret Ntegyereize — how will it end? This coupling is no more preposterous than the others, and perhaps less than most of them. It is possible that Bradley will fall in love with a new woman every two years and marry her, like, what’s-his-name, Tommy Manville. I see them together, Bradley and Margaret, walking hand in hand, trailed by the dog. The days of my pestering Bradley with conversation appear to be over. If I am going to be lucid, I must talk to myself.

But the father-in-law, Metzger, what of him? Do I remember my German? A Metzger equals a butcher. This Metzger, of dubious humanity, he is a more difficult case. Chloé calls him the Bat, but I prefer his name without metaphoric trappings. We have not, I think, seen the last of Metzger. As long as there is Cupid, as long as there is Venus and for that matter Adonis, there is Metzger, the broken wheel, the nail rusty with infection.

Feeling that she should not do it herself, I returned alone to Chloé’s apartment, intending to pick up the remaining furniture. There was not much to take, very little substance. The hideabed I left there. She didn’t want it.

Oscar and me fucked our brains out on it, she said crudely but straightforwardly. I don’t wanna see it again. Its career is over.

But I recovered a lamp, a chair or two, a table. I brought back her books — Edgar Cayce and the prophecies of Nostradamus — and one or two small items she’d missed, including, to my surprise, a tea strainer and an egg coddler. I resisted the pathos of this small collection of kitchen fixtures. Girls leave home every day, set up house, and buy dish drainers, colanders, and garlic presses, thus bringing a version of themselves into existence. It is their rendition of a late afternoon in Lisbon reading the paper near the quay, except for the reality of it.

On one of my trips out to the car I encountered a man I took to be Metzger, there on the sidewalk. He had an inescapably trashy look. Pallor was mixed with incipient disease on his remarkably ignoble features. He was both pre- and post-venereal. Apparently the knife wound had not slowed him down. He nodded at me and grabbed at my elbow. I believe in the great courage and perseverance of the working classes, but this Metzger was an exception, a step down from the lumpen proletariat into the ash can.

That chair yours? he asked me.

I put it down on the sidewalk. I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of meeting, I said.

I don’t believe we have, he said.

Harry Ginsberg, I said, holding out my hand.

Howdy do, he said, shaking it.

And you are…?

Friend of the family, he offered. That chair yours?

Yes, I said.

Lookit, he said. I think it got stole from me. I got my truck over there for it. You’ll wanna take it for me?

Sorry, no, I told him.

Perhaps I have not mentioned: I grew up on the streets of Chicago, and despite my abstracted and somewhat airy ways, am not a physical coward, quite the contrary, in fact. In my youth I fought the boys and men who wished to fight me, some of Chicago’s best, mostly Irish bullies affronted by Jews. Many of these Americans went home Ginsberg-bruised and bloodied. It had been years since I had found myself in a brawl, but the prospect of one with this man of doubtful probity filled me with cheer beyond measure. I had not practiced my pugilism for years, but I was ready. I felt happy and truculent.

I had taken hold of two of the chair’s legs, for carrying. The little greasy-haired man now grasped the other two legs. We began a grotesque dance on the front sidewalk, a shoving match. He muttered, while I kept silent. My blood, somewhat dormant at the Amalgamated, began to boil.

Greedy fucking kike, said the smelly diminutive shegetz. I put the chair down and popped him one. He stood for a moment, as if surveying the sky for blimps. Then his knees gave way under him and he appeared to sit down, dazed, on the sidewalk. How easy it had been! And how pleasurable! I had expected to expend more effort in subduing him. He stood up. Again I slugged him, an easy uppercut this time. Fistfighting is like riding a bicycle: you don’t forget how. Down he went again. But there he sat, fingering what would soon be his shiner. I carried the chair to my car, returned to the building, messaging my knuckles, locked up Chloé’s mostly empty — except for the hideabed — apartment, and returned to the front sidewalk.

He was standing up by now, but not steadily.

You’ll hear from me, he said.

By phone or telegram? I asked. I reached the car, lowered myself inside, and drove away.

ONE DAY, I THINK, Metzger will find us. Chloé’s enemy is now mine, however, and my feeling is: Let the lamebrain Metzger do as he pleases. I am ready for him. I am pleased to have an enemy who is not symbolic.

We must collect our thoughts, for the unexpected is always upon us. Who said that? Beckett? Kierkegaard? I am no longer sure of my quotations.

Every night I take up my watch by the front window. I have my lamp and my book. I listen to Schubert on the phonograph. Next to my family, Schubert is the love of my life; if he were to return to Earth, he could come to my house and take any of the objects here he wanted. Nearby, Esther reads or knits. Certain nights of the week, we play honeymoon bridge or canasta or Scrabble. On other nights, when Esther is Lamazing with Chloe, I am alone here, guarding the house. Aaron continues not to call. Our son has vanished into the maw of this vast continent. But I continue to think that one night, for it will surely be an evening (all reunions occur in the evening), probably one in the spring or summer when the cool breezes are blowing through the maple and linden trees in our front yard and the birds are uttering their consolations, a car door will close softly, and within moments the tread of a man will become audible as he makes his way toward the front door. The air will be clear and crisp. He will step tentatively up to the front entryway. He will make his hand into a fist, to knock. Or perhaps he will extend his index finger to ring the doorbell. Dad? he will say. Daddy? It’s me. It’s Aaron.

But perhaps the person at the door will be Metzger, the butcher, having found us out, having discovered our place in the world, our location and locale, our modest lives. From the street he will hear Schubert. The music will enter his ear and have no effect. It will fall like a seed upon stone. He knows as much about music as a pig about oranges. Perhaps he will bring along his thuggish and nitwit friends. Perhaps they will bring firearms. Fine. Let them come. I will be here. I will be ready.

I think of a poem I had to memorize in college: “Love makes those young whom age doth chill,/And whom he finds young, keeps young still.” Something like that.

The unexpected is always upon us. Of all the gifts arrayed before me, this one thought, at this moment of my life, is the most precious.

TWENTY-SEVEN

LOOKS LIKE I GET the curtain speech.

Some nights I walk around town, protected by my malachite machine-made bracelet that Esther gave me and by Oscar’s track team relay baton, which I could use as a weapon. The obstetrician said I should exercise for the baby’s sake, and when I do that, I sort of accidentally see into people’s living room windows even though I don’t always want to. But because it’s spring, the windows’re open and the curtains are pulled aside, flufftering in the breezes, and it’s that movie, Rear Window, by Hitchcock, except in my case everything’s out front, Front Window, by Chloé. Generally people are just practicing their slumping vegetable life by watching TV, or they’re mowing down the lawn or grubbing in the grub garden, but what’s amazing is how often you see people sitting on the front stoop staring off into space. I guess you’re not supposed to do that, stare into space, because it’s not-for-profit, but believe me, that’s what people do with their unapplied leisure time. They look like human-sized possums. And when they see a pregnant woman walking by unaccompanied, pregnantly huge like me, carrying a track team relay baton, they usually give me a smile or a wan wave, like I’m contributing to the Gross National Census or the enlarging welfare of humanity. People go by, things go by, such as me. When people are staring off into their neighborhood infinity, before they see me, what are they thinking about? That’s what I’m trying to grasp. I think they’re stupefied, thinking about love, mostly, how they once had it, how they got it, how they lost it, and all the people they loved or didn’t love, how they ended up royally hating somebody, like, the weirdness and wetness of it. Bradley says they’re thinking about money, but I know they’re not. Love comes first. They’re humming their love songs, for example as sung by Frank Sinatra or the Beatles or Madonna — did she ever sing one? a love song, I mean, and not just sex and money? I guess so — and they imagine about how they’d like to be with somebody else, or truly the person they’re actually with, sitting there on the stoop, accompanying them on life’s journey by talking, talking about nothing special, just talking. Or sitting in the kitchen, making turkey club sandwiches for each other. Or watching TV together. Or dancing. Or in the bedroom, having sex merrily or maybe not so merrily as the case may be. One thing I never mentioned so far was that once Oscar and I made love so hard that I got out of bed with a sunburn. It’s true! If he hadn’t died, he could vouch for me. We had tried something we hadn’t done before, I won’t go into harmful detail, and when he was doing me he asked if I was happy and I said I was. We did it for as long as we wanted to and then when we were finished I went to the bathroom and I had acquired a sunburn. And I thought, this is totally inexplicable. But I had it. Making love with Oscar gave it to me. I wish I still had it. Now I’m as pale as a sheet. Maybe I’ll get it again when my baby is born. I’ll give birth to the baby and get a sunburn in the delivery room in the process. Positive ions will darken my skin and I’ll look like a native. So, as I said, I walk past these houses and I see all these domestic arrangements, I guess you’d call them. Women living with women. Women living with men. Men living with men. Women living alone. Men living alone. Sane people and crazy people, people who have lost what once remained of their minds. The crazy ones are mostly crazy because love made them that way. I believe that. Dan Cupid’s arrow can make you one bubble off-level, is what I’m saying. Love has some ingredient for flat-out lunacy in it. Everybody knows that. Look at the Bat if you need proof. I mean, you can say that love is obsolete and retro, okay, but everybody comes home at night wanting somebody there, even villains come in the door and say hopefully, “Honey, I’m home?” and either somebody is there to kiss you, or somebody isn’t. And if somebody isn’t, if there are no kisses, you’ve got to deal with it. Maybe you get a dog so that the dog kisses you, like Bradley did once. Maybe the cat dances around your feet, meowing with happiness. That happens. It’s no disgrace to kiss a dog in the evening. Dogs don’t mind. I’m not saying you can’t manage one way or another, I’m just saying you have to cope, such as the dog solution. So anyway, I come home to my basement that I rent from the Ginsbergs and of course Oscar isn’t there. Oscar isn’t there because he’s dead. I mean, I know that he’s dead because I saw his dead body, close up, but even though I know he’s dead, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he’s dead. He’s around here somewhere. I just know that, don’t ask me to explain. I sleep with his Bert or Ernie doll, and I can smell him on it. And so that’s part of the reason I’m out there walking. I’m gonna find Oscar. It’s partly because of what I did to him, how I changed him. That boy befriended me. I suppose that I made a man out of him, but I don’t think that’s really much of an accomplishment. Oscar could’ve made it to manhood on his own, without my help. I keep talking about all the sex we had, but what I forget to mention is what else we did together. We danced and listened to music and played cards (I taught him gin rummy) and went to movies and we talked all the time, complete with our opinions about things. Oscar had a lot of opinions. Some of his opinions were unique and experimental. He said that the universe was expanding, it had to expand, to make room for all the souls, human and animal, that had died in it. Each soul took up considerable space. The universe had to accommodate that. He thought that the rich had invented poverty in order to get poor people to do terrible and stupid jobs no one would consider doing unless they needed the money. Money, he said, was God’s worst invention, the only way he could think of to get people to work. Get out! I said, but no, he meant it. He thought that when the world came to an end, everybody would sort of forget about Australia, and it’d survive the end of the world through sheer negligence. He didn’t believe in cars, Oscar didn’t; he thought cars would contribute to the end of the world as we know it. He thought that there were time zones on the moon, but only two. If it was midnight on the dark side of the moon it’d always been noon on the other side. Two time zones on the moon, two times of day or night. You wouldn’t need daylight savings time on the moon because you couldn’t save the lunar daylight just by adjusting your watch. He wasn’t zany. He used common sense. He could be old-fashioned despite his tongue stud and his outward appearances. Like, he once brought me flowers in a vase. He once brought home a lobster for us to eat, but we couldn’t put it in the boiling water to cook it — we didn’t have the heart — and so we put it in the bathtub with some water for the night and returned it, alive, to the grocery store the next day for a refund. As for sex, except for when he got excitable, Oscar believed in extensive foreplay, he was a real traditionalist in that respect; the drugs had helped him to see there was no point in ever rushing anything. He didn’t ever beat me up. I can’t remember him ever hitting me once. Oscar the Gent. When I think about him now — and I think about him way more than I ever think about myself — I think of him like he’s standing on a hill somewhere, this cow pasture, looking into the future, and telling me what he sees. I have my hand on his dick and I can feel his heart murmur through it, his blood bounding joyfully. I’m sorry he didn’t make it to the year 2000 because he thought for sure there would be major changes in the cosmos, everything, down to physics, would be revamped. All the same, despite his radical-traditional belief system, I think I’m more of a visionary than he was. After all, I once saw Jesus at a party. There was another thing I saw there, which I’ll tell you about eventually, once I get up my nerve to describe it. This thing I saw, it was probably the whole point of the party and of Jesus being in attendance and alerting me to it. But back to my walking around town. My point is, Oscar is here somewhere and that’s why I’m strolling hereabouts looking for him. You can’t have a body and a soul like that and just die and disappear. It’s much too wasteful, psychically. God won’t permit that. God’s no hambone: God believes in soul ecology. Something has to happen to you after you die, something mysterious and so far unexplained to us humans, and I’m determined to find out what it might be. I’m the woman to do it, I’m the woman for the job. I think maybe Oscar has taken up residence in some other guy, or he’s going to, and I have to find him there, though the search will be hard, because the guy will deny that he’s Oscar, of course. He’ll claim to be himself. I won’t know if it’s Oscar at first, because it’ll look like someone else, but it will be Oscar, the guy will have Oscar-essence. That can happen. I’ll strip him of whatever girlfriends he has and get him into my arms, as long as he isn’t dismayed by my having a baby. He won’t know what hit him once I go to work on him. I have enough goddess stuff in me to manage. Because he’ll be Oscar without knowing it. That’s why I go in search of him. Sometimes, when I don’t want to walk, I get into the Matador on evenings when the car agrees to start, and first I head down toward Ypsilanti. I drive past where Mrs. Maggaroulian once worked. She isn’t there anymore. She isn’t anywhere. Mrs. Maggaroulian has disappeared from our planet. She can’t tell me where Oscar is. I have to do the search by myself. Wait a minute. I have to take a breath. Just a minute. I need to breathe in.

There. I took a breath. Sometimes I get light-headed and I think I’m going to faint. Anyway, you can’t figure out love without figuring out death, too, but the effort it takes can knock the wind out of you. Love is the first cousin of death, they’re acquainted with each other, they go to the same family reunions. Mrs. Maggaroulian’s office is empty, her sign’s been removed, and another sign, THIS SPACE FOR LEASE, is up there instead. I wish she were still there, with her Laurel and Hardy clocks. I could use some help and advice from her. I could use a few e-mails from the future, a few pennies-per-serving tidbits from the prophet of Ypsilanti, where the three Christs once lived. We’re constantly getting bulletins from the future, in case you haven’t noticed, but mostly we ignore them because of the unsightly messengers, the slobby crackpots who get the information and have to pass it on with their bad breath and missing teeth. Harry Ginsberg, the professor who lives upstairs, is always going around saying, “Chloé, the unexpected is always upon us,” but what he really means is that the future wants us to know what is about to happen and it, the future, sends us people like Mrs. Maggaroulian to help us out. I suppose he really means that I am the unexpected and that I am always upon him, but maybe he wants to say that he expected his son Aaron to show up one day and what he got was me, instead. He lost a son but he gained a sort of daughter, which was myself. You can’t always get what you want but sometimes you get what you need — truer words than that have been spoken, but not much truer, and for sure not in my lifetime. Here’s what I think: every once or so often, the Mrs. Maggaroulians appear in your life to help manage your most exciting and troubled times and to help you get through them. Ever notice how drag queens and street people and madmen typically show up at your doorstep just when you’re about to take a new job or go on a long journey? They’re there, as a rule, to tell you how it’s all going to turn out. You’ve got to cock an ear in their direction, despite the bad oniony smells they give off. If you ignore them, good luck, you’re on your own, that’s all I can say. Here’s another example of what I mean. Oscar had a cassette player installed in the Matador, so he could listen to music dimensionally when he drove to his various destinations. After he died, and I got the car, being his widow, I started to motor around town listening to the audition tape Oscar made at the Arbogast School of Broadcasting, where he was, like, practicing to be a DJ. On this tape, Oscar tries out different names for himself during his broadcast. Sometimes he’s Sam Loomis. Sometimes he’s Mister Van Damm or Bone Barrel. Oscar didn’t think “Oscar” was a good name for a radio personality, it had something dreadful about it. It’s funny. He plays music and does the weather and reads commercials that he wrote himself for clubs and used-car lots and window shade companies. God, I love hearing his voice. He’s mellifluous. I found that word in a dictionary, where it belonged until I used it just now. He announces songs but he doesn’t play them, not on this tape, except for one. In the middle of the tape he says that the next song is going out for Chloé. He doesn’t say who’s singing it. It’s not rock or Goth or heavy metal or anything like that. What happens instead is, this old bluesy guy comes on and sings it. It’s an old blues song, I guess. “Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down.” I guess Oscar liked it because of the title or the tune. Anyhow, on this tape he plays it, and it’s for me, and the reason it’s for me is that Oscar knew he was going to die, but that he would come back some way or other and find me. No grave would hold his body down. It’s also a sexual boast. I have to take another breath here, I’m feeling a little faint.

Okay. I know it’s audacious for Oscar to say he was going to be resurrected. But why shouldn’t he be? Resurrection is a form of recycling. There’s an efficiency to the cosmos. Souls don’t get thrown out in the garbage dump. They get reused. The universe does not believe in waste, as you have no doubt noticed from observing the stars and the way they’re always right back in the same places night after night, on the job for stellar occasions. One Sunday morning I was driving around on the other side of town and noticed this little church, the African Baptist Hope of Resurrection Church, and I figured, okay, sure, it’s true that I’m white, but, hey, it’s a church and that happens to be the place where people think about souls being recycled. It was, like, February, when you really need a resurrection or two. So I parked the car and quietly crept in, trying not to track in the snow. Inside they had an organ and a choir singing, they were so beautiful in their robes, and near me there in the back was Dr. Ntegyereize and the only other white person, her boyfriend, my boss, Bradley the human. Bradley the human, being white, couldn’t dance around and hold his hands joyfully in the air the way the black people could, but, and this is the important thing, he was doing these little steps, like he was concentrating on them. He was concentrating on joy for once. He was doing it in a white-guy way. It was because he loved Dr. Margaret and had resurrected himself for her sake. You could hear the shoes of the celebrators tapping on the wood floor. He and Margaret noticed me, but somehow they also didn’t notice me, they were so into the spirit world, so I turned around and got back into my car and drove to Harry and Esther’s, with the singing still in my ears and the sight of Bradley the human doing his little dance inside my mental framework. Hey, sometimes I’ve wanted to throw off my clothes and dance in the street out of pure happiness at the holy spirit moving inside of me. I understand dancing. Harry was reading the New York Times when I got back, which I guess is his form of Sunday morning joy. It reminded me of something Oscar and I had done after we were married. It was Halloween. Oscar and I didn’t have to work that night. We decided that you’re never too old to go trick-or-treating, and besides we both liked candy, the same brands. Oscar decided to dress up as a big powerful dragon, the one with the eraser for a nose, and I decided to dress up as Venus. In day-to-day life Venus the goddess wears tight sweaters and skirts but, and this is the most important feature, you can recognize her because there’s usually an invisible star in the middle of her forehead, a silver one, that she hypnotizes you with. I wore that. Oscar had a big eraser attached to his nose, held there by a rubber band around his head, and a green cape, for scales. We went to a few homes of friends we knew, and we collected treats. It turned into a party. I kept thinking about the Dragon with the Rubber Nose, in Bradley the human’s drawing, because actually the poem is about things about to disappear and not just signs and billboards being erased, it’s about death. The Dragon with the Rubber Nose is found in most mythologies. We were Venus and the Dragon, and it wasn’t until November or December that I realized that Oscar’s costume was another form of prophecy, because the Dragon with the Rubber Nose self-erased Oscar. In another month he was gone.

But no dragon ever dies, either. That’s how I know I’ll find Oscar somewhere. I don’t want to tire you out, so I’ll finish this as soon as I can. Diana says I should sue the Bat in a civil action, but I won’t. Suing the Bat would be like trying to collect damages from a cold virus. The Bat is just there, in whatever form he takes, such as Oscar’s dad, and because I haven’t seen him lately, I think he’s gone in retreat back to his cave. Soon he may appear in another shape. That’s Oscar’s plan as well, of course. I know you’re wondering why I dressed up as Venus and why I think the Bat will appear in another shape. It’s because the shapes we have are, like, fragile. I once was Venus. I didn’t look like her. I was her. These friends I had, these dropouts, they lived out in this rental farmhouse west of here, and a summer or two ago they decided to throw this summer solstice party, and as the night went on, it got pretty wild. We were all drunk or stoned, which helped. People were getting naked and running through the woods and the fields, and the girls had braided garlands for themselves and the boys had God knows what, and there was dancing and gallons of wine and beer and outdoor fucking and singing most of the night. That happened in my party days. Around midnight I went out into the woods and someone naked ran past me in pursuit of someone else who was also naked, and I thought: This sure is old-fashioned.

And I could point to a boy and then point to a girl, and they’d look at each other and it’d happen, they’d be locked, helplessly locked, and I had the power to point to a boy and maybe another boy, and even if they had been straight they’d decide, that very night, to try it, to try love on each other just once, flesh against flesh. To see two guys kissing is sometimes a big relief, for a girl. It takes the burden off womanhood. Or it might be girl on girl, because it was the summer solstice, and that’s what Venus requires, though Venus prefers boy on girl because Venus is into procreation. I ruled that party. I had a star in my forehead. People saw that it was me, that I was making it happen, and they were in awe. Look out, I’m coming, it’s Chloé, and I’ll make you come, too, and I’ll point at you and you, and you can just try to ignore it, but you’ll be helpless. Ha. Slowly and then more quickly you will approach each other, you’ll make these efforts at conversation, and your mouth will be dry because you’re so scared and excited. You’ll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won’t have a chance against me until you’re very old, if then.

The dawn arrived and we all dressed and went home and took showers and then went off to minimum-wage work, dressed in our clothes of the day, our workers’ uniforms, like the worker bees we were. Mostly we all had crummy jobs and mostly in our day-to-day lives we’re irritable and humble and bummed. We just sit around and watch television and argue about who’s going to go to the store to get potato chips and ketchup. I’m on, like, the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, as they call it. I can’t do the money thing. That’s not where my power resides. But that night, that summer solstice, we traded in those costumes of nothingness we usually wear for our nakedness, and that’s how we became gods and goddesses for a few hours, and of all the goddesses, I was the supreme one and everybody knew it. They bowed down to me. You would too. Okay, give me a chance to get my breath, one more time.

There. I think I’m all right. I was going to tell you about this other party, this one other party, where I saw Jesus and then saw this other thing. I won’t say that I was clean and sober that day, because that would be, like, false. Jesus had already come and gone. I was sitting outside, almost passed out, in my chair, smoking a cigarette and eating a chunklet of cheese. I don’t believe I ever bragged about my virtue or my party manners. Anyway, I was sitting there with, I don’t know, a beer to wash down the cheese, and a cigarette there somewhere, and because it was a Sunday afternoon, I thought I would check out the sky. Which was blue, with clouds. I’d just said something really dumb and nonsensible when I looked up. There was something up there. It was scary. I looked and looked. This thing was made of cloud matter, but the longer you looked at it, if you were as high as I was, the more it became circular. I know you’ll say, Get real, Chloé, you saw a cloud. Hey, that’s all you saw. Okay, okay. Maybe. I said, “Hey, look at that cloud,” but no one looked up, they were all too out of it to bother. So like I said, it was circular, white and burning, like a fiery merry-go-round, with, if you looked closely enough, people attached. And cogs. You could see them, these people, getting on and off the inflamed cloud wheel in the sky, and they’d be strapped in facing out, and they’d be turning slowly because it turned slowly. It turned slowly like a huge grinding thing, and there were other wheels and gears in the sky, and they were all meshing together. And these people, they were all naked, walled up in the sky, attached to the wheel. I wished I hadn’t seen it, the wheel turning in the sky, because even if you’re stoned as I was, it fills you with majesty and terror, but that was the day I knew I had a goddess in me, because I had seen that. Oceans and rivers and fires of light, and I swam in that river from then on.

I asked Harry Ginsberg: Who saw the burning wheel? Because I knew someone else had. Harry is very educated, he would know. He was reading something else, a book, and for a moment he looked up. And he said, Ezekiel, Chloé. Like two people had seen it, Ezekiel and me. I know he was speaking to me, addressing me, but I took it another way, that it was a list of two people, very exclusionary, a tiny club in which I was one member, Ezekiel being the other.

So now I work at the coffee shop where Oscar’s ashes are in a pretty wooden urn on a shelf up near the listings of coffees we offer, and nobody except Bradley and me know that he’s there, my husband Bone Barrel. Down here in my basement — I’m doing Harry and Esther a huge favor by staying here, by the way, because they’re lonely and they need contact with the youth culture — I’ve set up a crib and a changing table and I have baby toys ready. My breasts, they’re huge, they’re ready for lactating and nursing. I smell of milk. I’m careful about what I eat and drink: lots of milk and Caesar salads and steak and fruits and vegetables. I quit smoking. It wasn’t needful. I wait for the baby and I wait for the return of Oscar. Oscar wasn’t unsung. I sang him, so he’ll be back. In whatever form he takes this time, I’ll welcome him. Sometimes I think of what Harry likes to say, The unexpected is always upon us, and I think, Yeah sure it is, but maybe he’s right, and one evening I’ll be down here, and, who knows, Charlie, I’ll be gazing toward the ceiling, just thinking about nothing, feeling my baby’s kicks as she or he gets ready to be born, this baby that’s half Oscar and half me, and I’ll be thinking about the baby’s name, and I’ll hear somebody outside, somebody who’s, like, approaching the front door, and maybe it’ll look like Harry and Esther’s son Aaron, who they’ve been waiting for all this time, who had previously invisibled himself but now has reappeared. He’ll come to the door, he’ll come in, they’ll welcome him back, but it’ll be me who’ll know who he really is. Once someone has bound your heart, he’s the only person who can let it loose again. I’m waiting, Charlie. I’m patient. I don’t ever want my heart unchained, except by him.

The song was right, sweet Jesus. Here’s your lemonade.

Ain’t no grave will hold his body down.

Our life is no dream, but ought to be and perhaps will become so.

— NOVALIS