The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter

want, and dogs that’ll sit at your feet at the dinner table and eat the food you can’t stand to eat. You can just buy a wonderful do-everything dog now.”
    “Bradley does all that.”
    “Listen,” I said. “You just go ahead and stuff that money into your pockets and then hide it and be sure not to let your mom put those trousers into the washing machine until you’ve taken the money out, and don’t tell your mom or anybody else that I’ve been here until she wakes up, and I’ll take Bradley with me, and he’ll make me happy again, and then you and Louie can go down to the Humane Society and pick out a dog of your own with that money I just gave you. No more blue Monday ever again. Okay?”
    “Okay. I guess.” He scooped up all the bills and stashed them in his pockets, as I had instructed him. “Can I kiss Bradley good-bye?”
    “Sure.”
    Bradley sat with me in the front seat all the way down to Ann Arbor. I drove the legal limit. It isn’t every day that a toad can free up a dog. We listened to the jazz station from Detroit, and when he stood on his four legs on the passenger side, he smiled at me with his big dopey face, as friendly and as unsubtle as a billboard. His tail wagged, but not in time to the music. Let’s not get sentimental. That dog never had an ear for jazz.
     
    SHE CALLED ME at dinnertime, as I knew she would.
    “I cannot believe you did what you did!” she shouted. I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. Enraged spittle was teleported over the phone lines and was spattering out of the earpiece. “You stole the dog! Damn you, Bradley. What is the matter with you?”
    “Watch your language. You have children. I didn’t steal him,” I told her. “I bought him back. It was Dog Liberation Day.”
    “You bribed Tommy. Who would do that to a child? You are a monster. I am truly, truly angry at you.”
    “Uh, no. I didn’t bribe your son. He shook me down.”
    “You paid him fifteen dollars for Bradley? That’s a rotten trick. Goddamn you!”
    “Honor is such a guy thing,” I said. “Uh, what did you just say?”
    “I said you paid him fifteen dollars. That’s low. That’s the lowest you’ve ever gone.”
    “Fifteen dollars, eh?” My nephew was a child of deep cunning, I was discovering. “You get what you pay for. What was Harold’s reaction?”
    “You called him at the barbershop! You brainwashed him. He’s changed his tune. He never liked this dog anyway, he says. And now Louie is saying that he never liked the dog either. I think Tommy paid him off to say that. Only me! I was the only loving one! You guys are ganging up against me. You’re all against me!”
    “Now you’re self-dramatizing,” I said coolly. She slammed the phone down.
     
    THE UPSHOT OF IT WAS, I kept Bradley. I fed him and petted him and I built him a doghouse and called his name when I came home, and in return he loved me. My sister and brother-in-law found another dog, as I knew they would. Whom they also named Bradley. Now there are three Bradleys. Their Bradley is smarter than this Bradley, but I don’t care about that at all, not really, because at least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

FIVE
     
     
    OSCAR AND ME, we had such good sex together we thought there ought to be a way to make some money out of it, to live off of our crazy ruinous love forever. Only we hadn’t figured out how. Oscar’s real good-looking once you get his clothes off and his body into its characteristic behavior. As a boyfriend he’s kind of indescribable. Words violate him. And me, Chloé, I’m even more that way. There’s almost no point in me saying anything about myself because the words will all be inhuman and brutally inaccurate. So no matter what I say, there’s no profit in it.
    Still: once upon a time he, Oscar, had been a stoner, sort of upwardly