The Feast of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

howling again, crying out to heaven as we unlocked the car and backed out of the parking lot and pulled out onto the road. We were gone, we were erased from the Humane Society. Meanwhile, the sky had mottled over with clouds.
    We lived in a cheap place in one of those student neighborhoods, an old building, really antiquated, one cigarette would have set it afire instantly. I was driving, rushing back to our old building and that apartment, feeling gleeful, and at first Kathryn was annoyed that I had taken her there to see the dogs, you know, paternalistic or patriarchal or something equally criminal, but then she changed her mind, and in her excitement was actually bouncing on the seat, her legs tucked under her, and she said, “I’m still scared of them, but, Jesus, Brad, I was inspired. Those were really their names! I gave them the right names. I knew exactly what to call them.”
    “There’s no such thing as the right name for a dog,” I said. “It’s all arbitrary. A name is arbitrary.”
    “No, it isn’t,” she insisted. “There are okay names, approximate names, but there’s one correct one, and I hit it every time.”
    And I thought: Well, I dunno, who cares, maybe she’s right, why argue. We got home, and we sat down on the sofa together, and she looked so beautiful in the blue sweatshirt and the blue jeans she was wearing, no socks, just her sneakers, these rags, these gorgeous rags that she had made beautiful by wearing them, and the cap she had on, her gray eyes, the delicate way she moved, and in a sudden heedless rush I said, “Kathryn, I love you,” and she nodded, she acknowledged it, she didn’t say she loved me but I didn’t care and didn’t even notice that she hadn’t said anything in return until about four weeks later when she moved out. But on that day, she leaned into me. We held on to each other. Clutching. We must have stayed together in one posture just holding each other, there on the sofa, for maybe an hour. When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.
    Then eventually she said, “Look. It’s snowing.”
    We disentangled ourselves and got up together and walked over to the window. The air had been abruptly filled, every square inch, with snowflakes, and I thought of how peaceful it was, even though the snow was just this humble artifact. “This is our first snow,” I said aloud, thinking that we would have many more years of seeing it together, that we would stand in front of windows year after year, watching the first snow, the two of us, watching the wind swirl it, then watching the spring storms, watching the snow melting and the water rushing down into the storm drains. From now and then onward into forever, this would happen. We would watch our children playing in the melting snow, splashing in the puddles. After we died, we would still be seeing everything together, Kathryn and me. Into eternity, I thought. Death would be a trivial event as long as I loved her.
    She must have thought she loved me, too, because she wanted to cook a dinner for me, which she did, a quick Stroganoff, and then afterward, while I was doing the dishes, she was still sitting at the table, and she started to sing.
    I had never heard her sing before. I didn’t know she could sing. I don’t think she knew that she could sing. She had a small, a very small, but a sweet voice, and in this small sweet voice she sang two songs, I guess the only ones she could think of at that moment, very slow and sultry, “You Are My Sunshine” and “Stairway to Heaven.”
    Then in bed, later, she sang the Michigan fight song, “Hail to the Victors.” Softly and slowed down, in my ear. As a love song. You know: the way you’d sing to a winner. Because after all, I had won her, somehow.
    Outside, the snow went on falling.
    For days afterward I went back secretly to the Humane Society. I went back there and