I know: call it Unchain My Heart. Now there’s a good title. Call it anything you want to. But remember: metaphors mean something,” he says, sitting up. Junior also sits up. “You remember Kathryn, my ex? My first ex? When Kathryn called me a toad, which she did sometimes to punish me, I’m sure she chose that metaphor carefully. She took great care with her language. She was fastidious. She probably searched for that metaphor all day. She went shopping for metaphors, Kathryn did. X marked the spot where she found them. Then she displayed them, all these metaphors, to me. After a while it became her nickname for me, as in ‘Toad, my love, would you pass the potatoes?’ They were always about me, these metaphors, as it turned out. She got that one from The Wind in the Willows, her favorite book. You know: Mr. Toad?”
He says this in his low voice and surveys the gloom of the playground, and now, in the dark, he does sound a bit like a toad.
“It could have been worse,” he informs me. “A toad has dignity.” He looks around. Then he breaks into song.
The Clever Men at Oxford Know all that there is to be knowed But they none of them know one half as much As intelligent Mr. Toad.
“Anyway, I got on her nerves after a while. And of course, she was a lesbian, sort of, a little bit of one, a sexual tourist, but we could have handled the tourism part, given enough time. At least that’s what I thought. The real problem was that she didn’t like how inconsistent I was. She thought I was the man of a thousand faces, nice in the morning, not so nice at night. Men like me exasperated her. She once called me the Lon Chaney of the Midwest, the Lon Chaney with the monster light bulb burning inside his cheekbone. The phantom, she called me, of the opera.” He waits for a moment. “What opera? There’s no opera in this town.”
He stares up into the night sky, then continues. “Well, at least I was a star. You know, women admire physical beauty in men more than they claim they do.” He says this to me conspiratorially, as if imparting a deep secret. He sighs. “Don’t kid yourself on that score.”
“I would never kid myself about that,” I tell him. “This isn’t Diana you’re talking about? This is Kathryn?”
“No,” he sighs angrily, “not Diana. Of course not. No, goddamn it, I told you: this was my first. My starter marriage. You met her, I know that. Kathryn.”
“No,” I say, “I don’t remember her. But you weren’t married to Diana so long either.”
“Maybe not,” he mutters, “but I loved her. Especially after we were divorced. A fate-prank. She loved someone else before I married her and she loved him while I was married to her, and she loves him now. The dog and I sit out here and we think about her, and about the business that I own, the coffee business. I don’t actually know what the dog thinks about.” A little air pocket of silence opens up between us. I hear him breathing, and I look down at his clasped hands. One of the hands reaches into his pants pocket for a dog treat, which he hands to Junior, who gobbles it down.
“You shouldn’t do that. Get lost in nostalgia, I mean. But Diana was beautiful,” I say.
“She still is. And I’m not nostalgic.”
“But she was unfaithful to you,” I tell him. “You can’t love someone who does that.”
“I almost could. She was powerful. She had me in a kind of spell, I’m not kidding.” He looks straight at me. “Nearly a goddess, Diana. I could let her destroy me. In flames. I’d go down in flames watching her.”
Just as he finishes this sentence, some noise—it sounds like a crow cawing—filters down to us from very high in the nearby trees. Odd: I cannot remember ever hearing a crow at night. At the same time that I have this thought, I hear a man laugh twice, distantly, from the houses behind us. A horribly mean laugh, this is. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“Oh, by the way,” I say, “I just came from the football stadium. Guess what I saw.”
“They’re going to put a big fence around that place.” He laughs. “Didn’t you know that? A big fence. With a gigantic new Vegas-style scoreboard. People like you keep trying to get in.”
“There’s no fence around it now,” I tell him.
“I can see where this is going,” Bradley snorts. “Walking around at night, you’re soaking up material for your book, The Feast of Love, and what to your wandering eyes should appear? I know exactly what appeared. You saw some kids who’d snuck into the stadium and were actively naked on the fifty-yard line.”
“Well, yes.” I wait, disappointed. “How did you know? I mean, I thought it was rather sweet. And you know, I was touched.”
“Touched.”
“It’s hard to describe. Their …”
His curiosity gleams at me from his permanently love-struck face.
“Oh, you know,” I say. “The waning moon was shining down on them. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or something of the sort.”
“All right, sure. I know. Love on the field of play. Happens all the time, though,” he says in a calmer and possibly sedated voice. For a moment I wonder if he’s on Prozac. “Didn’t you know that? I grew up around here, so I should know. Kids sneaking in, it’s a big deal for them, they can point to the fifty-yard line and say, ‘Hey, man, guess what I did down there with my girlfriend? That’s where I got laid, Bub, right down there where that big guy is being taken off on a stretcher.’”
“Well,” I say, “I gotta go.”
He grabs my arm in a strong grip. “No you don’t. That’s the most ridiculous claim I ever heard. It’s two in the morning. You don’t have to go anywhere.”
“My wife’s expecting me back.”
He sits up suddenly. “Listen, Charlie,” he says. “I’ve got an idea. It’ll solve all your problems and it’ll solve mine. Why don’t you let me talk? Let everybody talk. I’ll send you people, you know, actual people, for a change, like for instance human beings who genuinely exist, and you listen to them for a while. Everybody’s got a story, and we’ll just start telling you the stories we have.”
“What do you think I am, an anthropologist?” I mull it over. “No, sorry, Bradley, it won’t work. I’d have to fictionalize you. I’d have to fictionalize this dog here.” I pat Junior on the head. Junior smiles again: a very stupid and very friendly dog, but not a character in a novel.
“Well, change your habits. And, believe me, it will work. Listen to this.” He clears his throat. “Okay. Chapter One. Every relationship has at least one really good day …”
EVERY RELATIONSHIP HAS at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there’s always that day. That day is always in your possession. That’s the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don’t. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, “Yeah, that’s the day we had an angel around.”
I DON’T THINK that Kathryn and I had been married more than about two months when this event I’m about to describe occurred. About five years ago, we were living in a little basement apartment, and we both were working two jobs. She had a part-time job at the library during the day and she was waiting tables at night. I was the day manager at a coffee shop—not the place where I am now—and getting headaches from the overhead lighting, and I was also doing some house painting, but it was late autumn and the work came in fits and starts.
Kathryn was strong and spirited, she once even threw a chair at me, but she had one fear. She was profoundly afraid