The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter Page B

inescapable and inevitable. She’s never wrong about things like that, the Vulture isn’t.
     
    HE GOT MY PHONE NUMBER, in that house where I was living with about sixteen other people. They were all from high school, and we were existing generically and domestically together before we found serious jobs and apartments and lives that we could claim as our own. Some of them were working at this coffee franchise, Jitters. For this guy Bradley. I ended up working there. I guess you know him, obviously.
    At home there was this constant desperate party going on day and night, which can be depressing and effortful. You get tired of the burns in the furniture and how the bathroom is always locked, or, when you get in, there are potato chips floating in the toilet. Anyway, Oscar’d call and say, I want Chloé. Not, Can I speak to Chloé? Or: Is Chloé there? But every time: I want Chloé. I liked that, especially the “want” part. My roommates taught him to say Please. They’d imitate him, these girls. Give me Chloé I want Chloé, was their envious little whine. The Spice Girls I lived with — Dopey and Sneezy and Slutty and Bookish — they were so urbane that they pretended not to eat or to cook or anything — they subsisted on air and bulimia. So Oscar took me to some movies and we ate popcorn out of the same bag. As a gift, he gave me his syringe and his spoon and his rubber tubing thing. He put them in a box with a sort of rubber band around it. He told me never to give them back, that I was the new event in his life, the new car in his driveway. The old events were passé. Things developed between us. I’m summarizing here.
    He told me that he was burning for me, and he meant it. When he was around me, he gave off a smell of young man musk, mixed of salt and leather and grass. He’d stare at me desperately, smoldering his life away.
    To be more romantic than we were, you’d have to kill yourself in the middle of the street and then write about it. Shakespeare did that.
    He took me out to dinner at the Happy Chef, for example. The Happy Chef himself is outside the restaurant on a concrete pedestal. He’s ten feet tall and made out of plastic and wood and glue. He’s the symbol of everything that happens inside. Oscar let me press the button at the side of the Chef that makes the Chef talk, from a recording. “Hello. While you’re at the Happy Chef, you may notice that some of the water glasses have no ice in them. This is not because we forgot to put ice in the glasses — all of our water comes with ice in it — but because the water got hungry, and ate the ice.” Like that. We laughed sadly at the lame-o humor, then went inside for hamburgers. Oscar put his foot between my legs, and he touched the inside of my wrist with his fingers. I loved it, how high he carried a torch for me. It was romantic, at least as romantic as my life ever gets.
    But! He still lived with his father in Ypsilanti. He took me over there and showed me his knife collection stashed under the bed in this velvet-lined box. He wouldn’t let me touch his knives. Because I would hurt their aura. He said. As if I could blunt a knife! Also I got shown his stamps, that he had collected in fourth grade. Those I could touch. He still had his track team medals up, and his track shoes on his windowsill, all this boy-holy shit. He had run the relays. That was the last thing he did before he tried out syringes filled with mind-soak for a little while. But what really got to me? Was that he still slept with his Bert. Or maybe it was Ernie. It was the one that looked like President Bush, with the pinhead, whichever. Oscar gave it to me when I asked for it because it smelled like him, grass and vinegar and musk. It had Oscar-aroma.
    His father dynamited tree stumps for a living, then hauled them away. That’s what Oscar said he did, though even Oscar wasn’t sure about his dad’s total occupation. Early on, I saw Oscar’s dad a few times, through