The Feast of Love (15 page)

Above us in the mall’s atrium, close to our entrance, is a skylight in a mystical geometrical shape like one of those Masonic emblems. Don’t get me wrong: I believe in business and profit. Only . . . anyway, across from us is a clothes store, Snooker, specializing in clothes that have a slick polyester thug appeal, and next to it on one side is Video Village, and on the other side is All Outdoors, where they sell what they call wilderness products — though there’s no wilderness within a thousand miles of here — hiking clothes and such, along with alpha-wave sound-effect tapes of breakers crashing on the beach and nearly extinct birds singing their farewell songs. The place smells of cedar and burlap. Nearer to us, down a sort of mall alleyway heading out to the north entrance, there’s a cinnamon roll concession and a one-hour photo lab, and a Fun Factory and a maternity store called Motherhood, next to a nutrition store for bodybuilders. They sell megavitamins, protein powders, and motivation magazines and tapes in there. The last store in that alley is eXcess-ories (“Everything eXtreme you want”).

Out on the courtyard is a salad-and-snack store, The Marquis de Salade. Next to our business is Heppelworth’s, which sells weekly, monthly, and yearly planners, and motivation posters and motivation books. They sell
motivation
in there, preachers of aggression, hard-sell cures for Monday morning blues. Motivation! Almost everyone at our end of the mall sells motivation except us. Everything around here is a cure for Monday morning. Well, I guess we do that, too, with our coffee. The biggest-selling items in Heppelworth’s are the framed posters with pictures of seagulls flying over misty Pacific coastlines thick with lyric beauty and printed wisdom underneath. There is an enormous markup for these items. Here’s a sample of what they print on the posters.

SUCCESS:
Every effort no matter how large or small contains the kernel of its own reward. In every inventory your greatest asset is you.

Then there’s another one of a raging river cutting through a swath of pine woods. Underneath that you would read the following thought.

THE FUTURE:
I can go no higher than my hopes can take me. Therefore I must be defined by my hopes and the awe-inspiring practicality of my dreams.

Sometimes I go into Heppelworth’s on my break. I speak to the manager, Windtunnel — not his real name, I don’t want him to sue me — about customer traffic and about business. Windtunnel occasionally visits us when he comes into Jitters on his break, though he always drinks the cheapest coffee we have. He has the murderous blank open-eyed look of a screech owl, and his breath smells of floor cleanser. Anyway, in Heppelworth’s, I look at these posters Windtunnel has put on display, and of course I feel the onset of mall hallucination. I am so far beyond being motivated that I want to punch the nearest clerk. But I don’t!
That’s
discipline. I start to think up my own motivation posters. I’d put them just below photographs of automobile junkyards and clear-cut forests and gray skies sick with cloudy indifference. The Gospel According to Bradley.
The Book of Job,
pronounced “job.”

DISCIPLINE:
I am a peaceful man. Peace is my mission: I will not smite any customers today. That is sound business practice and a sure path to profits.

Then I go back to Jitters.

Following Kathryn’s departure from my life, I’d go to work after giving Bradley the dog his early morning walk. I have to admit it: the business gave me a boost. I liked having a place to go in the morning. I liked having a purpose. I liked arriving there before the mall had opened. It’s what you might call a dawn feeling. No doubt there is a word for this in German. Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history. I’d look out through the steel-mesh security curtain at the dim interior spaces of the Briardale Mall. You know, stores have a peculiar bitter vacancy when there’s nobody in them, nobody wanting anything. They succumb to pointlessness.

I’d sit down and inspect our books and spreadsheets, then make sure the cups and saucers and equipment were all in place. I’d make the brews for the day and load the dispenser-thermoses with them. I’d open the cash register and do a count. I’d page through
Specialty Coffee Retailer.
I’d look out through those cell bars at the empty mall. Shiny surfaces. Every surface washed and polished. After an hour or so, the bakery would deliver our breads and pastries for the day. I’d chat with the delivery guy, Hans.

Jitters is meant to be inviting. We have wood floors and semiwood ceilings. We have tables and chairs, and large sofas and furniture — Pottery Barn knockoffs — scattered every which way.
Soft
surfaces. We have — well, we have my paintings on the wall.
The Feast of Love
is up there, in the back. A portrait of Bradley, my dog, is also up near the entryway, but it’s very abstract. You can’t tell whether it’s a dog or a contraption or what, though it looks friendly in its abstract way, like
Nude Descending a Staircase
except with a dog. You can see Bradley in there if you know where to look. He’s eating dog chow, the food suggested by drips and dribbles. It was cubism plus charm.

If I had everything ready for the day and a few moments free, I’d start to draw. I’d draw the Dragon with the Rubber Nose, the dragon that Harry Ginsberg had told me about. I got started with this art thing by being a cartoonist. I’d draw this dragon on little sheets of motivation paper I’d filched from Heppelworth’s, the dragon rubbing out all the wording in Heppelworth’s, all that motivation. Then I’d draw little pictures of him browsing and shopping and setting fire to JCPenney’s and Nordstrom’s and eating all of the cinnamon buns just down the mall from us and then eating the Mortal Kombat machine at Fun Factory. And then, resting. My dragon: like God, on the seventh day. Some of these drawings were technically quite difficult.

When the exterior doors of the mall open, the senior citizens arrive and start their mall walking. Smelling of antique cologne, they hold their elbows up and appear to be quite complacent as they grind by.

Chloé comes in right about then, Chloé who works at Jitters because she says there’s a harmonic convergence right in this very spot in the mall. She says it’s a sacred place, like Sedona, Arizona. Sweet girl that she is, Chloé gives my nerves a good shaking every day. Sometimes she comes in so yeasty with sex she’s just had with her boyfriend that I feel like applauding. She gives off sexual odors like a flower out in the front yard trying to make a statement about gardens, which of course flowers don’t need to do. Her shirt says RAGING HORMONES across the front. She’s in love with Oscar now, it’s gone beyond sex, and Oscar has told her (after consulting me: should he tell her?) that he’s in love with her. They look so punk and disreputable, those two, but they’re just a couple of kids, dressed and costumed to affect a menacing appearance.

On this particular day, she comes in and says, “So how’s it going, Mr. S?”

“Oh, okay,” I tell her. “The usual. Monday, you know. I kept noticing those little crosses on the curves on the way here.”

“Monday!” she exclaims. “Right. And those crosses. Did I ever tell you I went to school with one of the guys who, uh,
got
one of those crosses? He was a
total
asshole. He wasn’t even a fun asshole, which, you know, some of them are. Even dead, he’s lucky to get a cross. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t give that guy a shave.”

“What was his name?” I ask.

“Bumford,” she says. “Bumford McGonahy. A
loser.
With a loser name. Those crosses. Cry my eyes out. He was a mean guy. Guess I should have more sympathy, huh?”

She puts on her apron and starts arranging the pastries, like an art project.

“How’s Oscar?” I ask. “What time’s he coming in?”

“You should know that,” she says. “I’m just labor. You’re management.” She smiles, and then she stops to think. “Around one.” She stands up straight. “No. One-thirty.”

We have overhead track lighting, five lights over the service area, and Chloé has a habit of moving back and forth behind the counter so that she appears sequentially under the lights like an actress on a stage. She’s careful not to plant herself in the small shadowy vacant gaps between the lights. She’s star-practicing. She flicks her head to highlight her hair. She’d be breaking my heart if she weren’t my employee and a kid and Oscar’s lover, besides.

“Do you think,” she asks, rubbing her cheekbone, “that it’s bad to do a bad thing if a good thing is going to come out of it eventually?”

“Beats me,” I tell her. I’m staunchly stacking franchise coffee cups near the entryway. “What sort of bad things?”

“Well, not way bad, just bad.”

Now she’s positioned herself behind the display case so that she can see her reflection on it. The glass is at an angle, but when she’s under the lights, she can see her face reflected there, although she doesn’t know that I know she can. When she stands in exactly the correct spot, she looks down at herself and kisses the air as if her reflection is kissing her, she’s that pleased with the stringy unkempt unofficial beauty of herself. No doubt each time she undresses she unwraps herself like a Christmas present. I have a feeling she blesses her body for her various wild gifts every half-hour or so, now that she knows what they are and she can use them.

“Well,” she says, “like putting yourself on display.”

“I don’t follow you,” I tell her, having lost my concentration. I’ve been setting the copies of the
New York Times
and the
Detroit Free Press
on the reading rack. “Putting yourself on display how?”

“Skip it,” she says quickly. She’s regrouping. “You hear the weather report this morning, Mr. S?”

I tell her I didn’t.

“Mucho thunderstorms and mucho kaboom. Sky evil. ‘Course, who’d know in a mall?”

“Who’d know?” I agree.

“What’s the worst thing ever happened to you?” she asks, frowning downward at her purple fingernails. She’s arranging the foods for our sandwiches.

“The worst thing?” I wait. “How come?” I come back behind the counter and adjust my manager’s smock.

“Just curious. Yeah. Just curious.” She gives me an odd square smile.

“Hmm,” I say. “Hard to decide. I can’t think of it. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, it isn’t the worst, it’s just that I remember something, at this very moment. Here it is.” I straighten up to scratch my eyebrow. “One time, in college, a bunch of us somehow got cheap airplane tickets to Paris for a few days. We were hitchhiking once we got there. Anyhow, when you’re in Paris, you go to the cathedral, Notre Dame. Big tourist attraction.”

She nods.

“So the four of us go into Notre Dame. And Notre Dame, you know, is actually a working cathedral. People, supplicants, I guess you’d call them, go in there and pray. They have Mass every morning, despite all these tourists milling around.” She’s stopped arranging the food and looks up at me. “Well, we went in there. We started at the back. In the back of the cathedral you can buy votive candles from some nun or other and light them for a loved one who needs help, and even if you’re not a Catholic, you can still do this. And because someone I knew was sick, I bought a votive candle and lit it. I mean, a votive candle looks like a soul, doesn’t it? And then I went over to put it on the stand.”

“It’s almost nine o’clock, Mr. S.”

“I know. We’re almost ready. I got here early. Let me finish this story.” I could see some customers outside our chain security gate waiting for their morning coffee fix. “Well, we’d been traveling, so I was tired, so my hand was shaking. And these stands they have, they’re thin and spindly, like thin wrought iron, and delicate, because this is Europe. That’s where we are. And because my hand was shaking, I reached down to the holder, this freestanding holder or candelabra or whatever of votive candles, and somehow, I don’t know how this happened, my hand caused this holder of candles, all these small flames, all these souls, to fall over, and when it fell over, all the candles, lit for the sake of a soul somewhere, there must have been a hundred of them, all of them fell to the floor, because of me, and all of them went out. And you know what the nun did, Chloé, the nun who was standing there?”

“She spoke French?”

“No. She could have, but she didn’t. No, what she did was, she screamed.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, the nun screamed in my face. I felt like . . .”

“You felt like pretty bad, Mr. S. I can believe it. But you know, Mr. S, those were just
candles.
They weren’t
really
souls. That’s all superstition, that soul stuff.”

“Oh, I know.”

“No kidding, Mr. S, you shouldn’t be so totally morbid. I thought when you were telling me about the worst thing you ever did, it’d be, like, beating up a blind guy and stealing his car.”

“No. I never did that.”

“Oscar did, once. You should get him to tell you about it.”

“Okay.”

“He was drunk, though.” She prettily touches her perfect hair. “And the guy wasn’t really blind. He just said he was, to take advantage of people. It was, like, a scam. Oscar saw through all that. It’s nine o’clock now, Boss. We should open up.”

“Right.” And I unlock the curtain, and touch a switch, and slowly the curtain rises on the working day. The candles are nothing to Chloé; they’re just candles. I feel instantly better. Bless her.

The processional begins, and we have employees from nearby businesses coming in to get a cup of coffee and maybe something else, a brioche. We turn on the music: cool piano jazz to counteract the Mozart the mall is always playing on their PA system to keep the mall rats out. I look at them all, all our customers, and I smile. I chat them up. Many of them I know by name. But really, Chloé’s right. I’m too morbid. I need to work on it.