The Feast of Love (11 page)

Both God and love are best described and addressed by means of poetry. Poetry, however, is also stone dead at the present time, like its first cousin, God. Love will very quickly follow, no? Hmm? Don’t you agree? I asked. After God dies, must love, a smaller god, not follow?

Uh, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it, said Bradley, our new neighbor. Do you want some dessert, Professor? I got some ice cream here in the refrigerator. It’s chocolate.

A very nice change of subject, Esther said, breathless with relief. Harry, she continued, I think you should save Kierkegaard for some other time. For perhaps another party. A party with more Ph.Ds.

She gave me a loving but boldly impatient look, perfected from a lifetime of practice. Esther does not like it when I philosophize about love. She feels implicated.

Okay, I said, I’m sorry. I get going and I can’t help myself. I’m like a man trying to rid himself of an obsession. Actually, I
am
that man. I’m not
like
him at all.

Esther turned toward Bradley Smith. Harry is on the outs in his department, she said. He does all the unfashionable philosophers, he’s a baggage handler of Bigthink. What do you do, again, Mr. Smith? You explained but I forgot.

Well, he said, I’ve just bought into a coffee shop in the mall, I have a partnership, and now I’m managing it.

This interested me because I’ve always wanted to open a restaurant.

Also, he continued, I’m an artist. I paint pictures. There was an appreciable pause in the conversation while Esther and I took this in. Would you like to see my paintings? he asked. They’re all in the basement. Except for that one — he pointed — up there on the living room wall.

Esther appeared discountenanced but recovered herself quickly.

The artwork he had indicated had a great deal of open space in it. The painting itself covered much of the wall. However, three quarters of the canvas appeared to be vacant. It was like undeveloped commercial property. It hadn’t even been compromised with white paint. It was just unfulfilled canvas. Perhaps the open space was a commentary on what
was
there. In the upper right-hand corner of the picture, though, was the appearance of a window, or what might have been a window if you were disposed to think of it representationally. Through this window you could discern, distantly, a patch of green — which I took to be a field — and in the center of this green one could construe a figure. A figure of sorts. Unmistakably a woman.

Who’s that? I asked.

The painting’s called
Synergy #1,
Bradley said.

Okay, but
who’s
that?

Just a person.

What sort of person? Who were you thinking of?

Oh, it’s just an abstract person.

Esther laughed. Bradley, she said, I never heard of an abstract person before. Except for the persons that my husband thinks of professionally. Example-persons, for example.

Well, this one is. Abstract, I mean.

It looks like a woman to me, Esther said. Viewed from a distance. As long as it’s a woman, it’s not abstract.

Well, maybe she’s on the way to becoming abstract.

Oh, you mean, as if she’s all women?
A symbol for women?
There she is, not a woman but all women, wrapped up in one woman, there in the distance?

Maybe.

Well, Esther said, I don’t like
that.
No such thing as Woman. Just women, and
a
woman, such as me, for example, clomping around in my mud boots. But that’s not to say that I don’t like your painting. I do like it.

Thank you. I haven’t sold it yet.

I like the window, Esther continued, and all those scrappy unpainted areas.

It’s not quite unpainted, he informed us. It’s underpainted. I splashed some coffee on the canvas to stain it. Blend-of-the-day coffee from the place where I work. It’s a statement. You just can’t see the stains from here.

Ah, I said, nodding. A statement about capitalism?

Esther glared at me.

You want to see my pictures in the basement? Bradley asked.

Sure, I said, why not?

Only thing is, he said, there’re some yellow jackets nesting in the walls — or wasps — and you’ll have to watch yourself when you get down there. Careful not to get stung.

We’ll do that, I said.

ABOUT THIS BASEMENT
and the paintings residing there, what can I say? I held Esther’s hand as we descended the stairs. I feared that she might stumble. Wasps, likewise, were on my mind. I did not want to have her stung and would protect her if necessary. Bradley had leaned his paintings against the walls, as painters do, on the floor. Each painting leaned into another like a derelict reclining against other derelicts. He had installed a fervent showering of fluorescent light overhead. A quantity of light like that will give you a headache if you’re inclined, as I am, to pain. The basement smelled of turpentine and paint substances, the pleasant sinus-clearing elemental ingredients of art, backed by the more pessimistic odors of subsurface cellar mold and mildew.

One by one he brought out his visions.

This, he said, is
Composition in Gray and Black.
He held up for our inspection images of syphilis and gonorrhea.

And this, he said, is called
Free Weights.

Very interesting, Esther said, scratching her nose with a pencil she had found somewhere, as she contemplated our neighbor’s abstract dumbbells and barbells, seemingly hanging, like acorns, from badly imagined and executed surrealist trees, growing in a forest of fog and painterly confusion that no revision could hope to clarify.

And here, he said, lugging out a larger canvas from behind the others, is a different sort of picture. In my former style. He placed it before us.

Until that moment I had thought the boy, our neighbor, a dim bulb. This painting was breath-snatching. What’s this called? I asked him.

I call it
The Feast of Love,
Bradley said.

In contrast to his other paintings, which appeared to have been slopped over with mud and coffee grounds, this one, this feast of love, consisted of color. A sunlit table — on which had been set dishes and cups and glasses — appeared to be overflowing with light. The table and the feast had been placed in the foreground, and on all sides the background fell backward into a sort of visible darkness. The eye returned to the table. In the glasses was not wine but light, on the plates were dishes of brightest hues, as if the appetite the guest brought to this feast was an appetite not for food but for the entire spectrum as lit by celestial arc lamps. The food had no shape. It had only color, burning pastels, of the pale but intense variety. Visionary magic flowed from one end of the table to the other, all the suggestions of food having been abstracted into too-bright shapes, as if one had stepped out of a movie theater into a bright afternoon summer downtown where all the objects were so overcrowded with light that the eye couldn’t process any of it. The painting was like a flashbulb, a blinding, cataract art. This food laid out before us was like that. Then I noticed that the front of the table seemed to be tipped toward the viewer, as if all this light, and all this food, and all this love, was about to slide into our laps. The feast of love was the feast of light, and it was about to become ours.

Esther sighed: Oh oh oh. It’s beautiful. And then she said, Where are the people?

There aren’t any, Bradley told her.

Why not?

Because, he said, no one’s ever allowed to go there. You can see it but you can’t reach it.

Now it was my turn to scratch my balding head. Bradley, I barked at him, this is not like your other paintings, this is magnificent, why do you hide such things?

Because it’s not true, he said.

What do you mean, it’s not true? Of course it’s true if you can paint it.

No, he said, still looking fixedly at his creation. If you can’t get there, then it’s not true. He looked up at me and Esther, two old people holding hands in our neighbor’s basement. I’m not a fool, he said. I don’t spend my time painting foolish dreams and fantasies. Once was enough.

I could have argued with him but chose not to.

And with that, he picked up the painting and hid it behind the silly ugly dumbbells growing like acorns on psychotic trees.

WHAT A STRANGE YOUNG MAN,
Esther said, tucked in next to me several hours later, sleepy but sleepless in the dark. Her nightgown swished as she tossed and turned. He seems so nondescript and midwestern, harmless, and then he produces from the back of his basement a picture that anyone would remember for the rest of their lives.

Oh, I said, you could say it’s imitation Matisse or imitation Hockney. Besides, I said, light as a subject for contemporary paintings is passé.

You
could
say that, Esther whispered, but you
wouldn’t,
and if you
did,
you’d be
wrong.

She gave me a little playful slap.

I only said that you could say that, not that you would.

You didn’t actually say it.

No. Not actually.

Good, Esther said. I realized that she was agitated. I turned to her and rubbed her back and her neck, and she put her hands on my face. I could feel her smiling in the darkness. I could feel her wrinkles rising.

Harry, she said, it was a recognition for me, a moment of beauty. How strange that a wonderful painting should be created by such a seemingly mediocre man. Our neighbor, living in the Dybbuk House. How strange, how strange. Then she sighed. How strange, she said again.

Then the phone rang.

Don’t answer it, Esther quickly said. You mustn’t. Don’t, dear, don’t, don’t, don’t.

No, I must, I told her. I must.

I PICKED UP THE TELEPHONE RECEIVER
and said, Hello? From across the continent, on the West Coast, my son Aaron began speaking to me. In a voice tireless with rage he cursed me and his mother who lay beside me. Once again I was invited to hear the story of how I had ruined his life, destroyed his soul, sacrificed him to the devils and angels of lost ambition. In numbing fashion he found words to batter my heart. Indictment: I had expected more of him than he could achieve. Indictment: I had had hopes for him that drove him, he said, insane. Indictment: I was who I was. Crazy, sick, and inspired with malice, he described his craziness and his sickness in detail, his terrible impulses to hurt others and to hurt himself, as if I had not heard this story many times before, several times, innumerable times. Razors, wire, gas. He called me, his father, a motherfucker. He told me that he did not want me to be his father anymore. Then he broke down in tears and asked for money.
Demanded
money. From the nothingness and everlasting night of his life, he demanded cash. I, too, was weeping with sorrow and rage, holding the earpiece tightly to my head so that not a word would escape to Esther. Cupping my hand around the mouthpiece, I asked him if he had hurt anyone, if he had hurt himself, and he said no, but he was thinking about it, he planned every single minute in advance, he planned monstrous personal calamities, he needed help, he would ask for help, but first he had to have money
now,
this very minute,
my
money, superhuman quantities of it. Don’t make me your sacrificial lamp, he said, then corrected himself, sacrificial lamb, don’t you do that now, not again. I said, against my better judgment, that I would see what I could do, I would send him what I had. He seemed briefly calm. He breathed in and out. He pleasantly wished me good night, as if at the conclusion of an effective performance.

To have a son or daughter like this is to have a portion of the spirit shrivel and die, never to recover. You witness the lost soul of your child floating out into the ethers of eternity. Ethics is a dream, and tenderness a daytime phantasm, lost when night comes. Esther and I, eyes open, held each other until dawn broke. My darling wept in my arms, our hearts in ruin. We live in a large city, populated only by ourselves.

Kafka:
A false alarm on the night bell once answered — it cannot be made good, not ever.

ONCE I HAD BRADLEY THE DOG
returned to his rightful owner (myself), I saved a bit of money for a down payment-actually, I was doing pretty well, financially — and moved out of my basement apartment into a white clapboard house next door to Harry and Esther Ginsberg, who became my friends and neighbors. Everything I owned fit into one small moving van. I brought the dog, and my easels, my paint tubes, my paintings, and every other worldly possession that I thought was fit to survive, and I found places for them where they seemed comfortable. I was the only entity in that house that didn’t have a place to be. Bradley had his back room and his dog bed, the paintings had the basement, the clothes had their closet, the clock had its wall, the audio system had its shelves. I roamed around the house trying to figure out my proper location. But I couldn’t get comfortable anywhere, including the bedroom, and finally I decided not to worry and just to go on being relaxed and uncomfortable and myself. After all, I was a single, recently divorced man. I was both a problem and a solution.

A MAN LIVING ALONE
is a king of sorts, but unfortunately only one minute at a time, and his kingdom is remote and typically unvisited and small, with few comforts. Moodiness and solitude are the order of the day. It’s easy to control moods and the king’s solitude as long as there is a royal project, a scheme, or narcotic drugs left over from root canal, but the drugs eventually run out.

Those first few weeks, I was making business arrangements (I went from being a salaried employee to being an entrepreneur), but once I had organized the business in the mall and saw that it was up and running, I went back to my painting during my free time at home. I’d paint canvases and take the dog for endless walks around town, and we would watch sports on TV, Bradley the dog and I, though I was very often indifferent to the outcomes. Why should I cheer these steroid-stupefied guys? I’d watch seven innings, or two quarters, and then I’d turn the whole thing off, too confused about my allegiances to care.