The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  MOST HUMAN BEINGS have never been to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It retains its somewhat mysterious origins. Cartographers have mapped it, all right, but there are places up there where visitors have been maybe once or twice but never returned, because they didn’t want to return, and never would want to. I’m not talking about Marquette, where they filmed Anatomy of a Murder, but places like Matchwood, where there’s a busted American Motors dealer sign standing near an abandoned farmhouse, and not another habitation for miles, and large fields where they gave up farming years ago, and dense forests filled with trees — I do not exaggerate — of a kind you never saw before, probably hybrid trees resulting from the mating, it could be, of white pines and willow trees, grafted together out of sheer loneliness. I mean, these are odd-looking trees, barbaric and sad, and there are entire forests of them growing unobserved and unlabeled up there.

  For the tourists, there are little tiny zoos scattered just off the main highways, with animals tucked away inside cages the size of carry-on suitcases, and other visitor attractions, like mystery spots and restaurants where they make pasties that the locals eat. You drive across this expanse of peculiarity as all the radio stations fade, all of them, Brahms and the Ronettes and Toad the Wet Sprocket and Hank Williams, and you start to wonder what got into you, that you brought your brand-new wife up here, the goddess whose scary wondrous beauty put you on trial. The broad open vistas fill you with second thoughts bordering on consternation. When you get to the waterfalls, you have to pay to see them; you have to pay a guy chewing a toothpick who somehow managed to buy the whole goddamn waterfall and is now going to sell you the view.

  As we crossed the Upper Peninsula, Diana and I tried to be cheerful — we were both wearing jaunty hats and sending postcards to our friends every seventy miles or so — but by the time we reached Lake Gogebic, the distant aroma of a mistake was in the air, and it was my mistake, and it seemed to be going in several different directions at once. But after we unpacked at the B&B and tried out the bed, my spirits improved. We had an upstairs room filled with interior decoration antique bric-a-brac, and a bed close by a window just to the left of the headboard, and some cut flowers there on the bedside table, next to a simpering porcelain tabby cat. The window’s glass was flawed and antique, so that the lake outside asserted itself in several visual dimensions, several different geometrical planes.

  “Look,” I said, pointing outside. Early evening, and the sun had given the lake a golden tint, the kind you see in bad paintings and bad movies, though this, I should quickly add, had been a good day and not a cheap imitation of a good day. She raised herself in the bed and lay across me, so that her breasts brushed against me. I was sitting there, propped up against the pillows and the headboard, reading a local tourist guidebook. It was so friendly and so erotic at the same time, Diana draped in that manner over me. And I thought: this is what marriage should be, this intimacy, eros and friendship, Diana and me, exciting and calm.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Very beautiful.” She just rested there, stretched across me, gazing languidly out through the window, elbows on the bed next to my legs, and I looked down at her back and felt like touching each one of the bumps of her spine consecutively. I traced designs on her back. I drew, with my finger, a dragon rising out of the valley above her waist and flaring upward with powerful wings toward her shoulders. “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m drawing a dragon.”

  “Hmmm. Tell me when you’re finished.”

  I drew some scales on its sides, and some fire from its mouth. She was giving me pleasure as I drew it, so I slowed down my draftsmanship. “I’m done,” I said, after a minute or two.

  She turned over. I cradled her head in my right hand. I put my left hand placidly on her rib cage and then on her breast. She gazed up at me. We were loving and familiar. “You’re so sweet,” she said. “Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you, Diana,” I said. “I love you very much.” The truth was easy for me to say.

  She smiled. “Yes, that was nice,” she said. “You know, I love you, too. What do you love about me, Bradley? Really?”

  “How beautiful and smart you are,” I said. With my thumb I twirled her hair. “I love that. I don’t know,” I said. “It’s like love doesn’t have any reason. I can’t stop looking at you.” My voice had dropped to a hoarse murmur. “I go to sleep with your image in my head, and when I wake up, it’s still there. I think you’re a goddess,” I said, meaning it. My cock had stayed up, and the way we were positioned, she could probably feel it beneath her, tickling her back, right where I had drawn that dragon. “Why do you love me?” I asked, still in a whisper, a little frightened by the way she might answer. We’d never had this discussion before.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “You’re a better person than I am.”

  “You love me for that?”

  “Bradley, I don’t think people should talk about these things.”

  “Why not?”

  “Some matters you shouldn’t verbalize. I mean really, Bradley” — and here she raised her hand and caressed my cheek — “all this love business is just nature’s way of getting more babies into the world. The rest of it is just all this romance nonsense.” She struggled for the word. “The rest of it is just superstructure.”

  “Well, maybe. But what if,” I said, still gazing at her, with her sly sexy smile like a little dawn on her face, “what if the love we feel, what if it’s central, what if it’s what makes the world’s soul possible, what if it’s what made the world and keeps it running, and the babies, the babies are also a product of that, our soul-making, not the only product, but . . .”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. “You’re so weird and metaphysical. For a coffee guy.”

  “About what?”

  “That you would say that. That you would say that love isn’t just a necessity for . . . biology.” I had my hand cupped around her breast, and she had her hand on my cheek, and we were having an argument, though it was still sounding like love talk. “Bradley, what are we going to do here? At Lake Gogebic?”

  “We’re on a honeymoon,” I said, noting the obvious, which I had hoped at that moment I wouldn’t have to do. “We’ll have meals and make love. That’s about all.” She turned, so that now her back was to me again. “And we could go outside. We could explore. We could take hikes.”

  “You know I don’t like hikes.”

  “You’re in shape, Diana. You run in the gym.”

  “You know what I mean.” She gazed outside. “This doesn’t have anything to do with fitness. The outdoors gives me the creeps.”

  “But look,” I said. “Look what I’ve brought.” I pulled myself out from under her and went over to my suitcase, from which I pulled two whistles, the kind that football coaches use, with the little balls in them. They really make a racket. “Hey, hey,” I said hopelessly.

  “What’re those for?”

  “You get lost in the woods, you just blow.”

  “ ‘I get lost in the woods, I just blow,’ ” she repeated. “What is it about my agoraphobia, Bradley — does it make you feel better that I have it? An advantage? You brought those along? I mean, why now, of all times, do you want to worry it?”

  “I don’t want to worry it,” I said. “It wasn’t that. The thing is, I saw the two of us, walking outdoors, and I thought: What can I do for Diana? I can help her get outside, I can help her with the wide open spaces.” I handed the whistle to her.

  She took it and tossed it in her hand. Then, sweetly, she raised her other hand and put her index finger on my lower lip. She played her finger back and forth on my lip. “We’re not compatible, you know,” she said. Her eyes hardened and for an instant looked through me a little. I thought that was such an odd thing for her to say that I refused, almost, to hear it. I just felt her finger on my lip.

  “It’s not compatibility,” I said. “It
’s how you manage it. How loving you are.”

  “I’m loving with my friends,” Diana said, “and I’m mean to my lovers.” She caressed my mouth. “ ‘Just put your lips together and blow,’ ” she said, quoting from somewhere. “Oh, screw it,” she said. “Put that whistle down and make love to me again, since you want to.” She pointed to me and what was obvious, my well-meaning and innocent erection. So I did, I made love to her, because she asked me to, and because I wanted to, even though — and it’s hard to explain this — my feelings were hurt and I was angry, so I was meaner to her in bed than I usually am, rougher, more abrupt, and slowly it dawned on me, as I watched her respond, that she liked me that way, almost as if she was used to it, and I thought, Uh-oh, and kept it to myself.

  You can have good sex on your honeymoon and still suspect that there’s something fishy going on.

  THE NEXT DAY we went over to the Porcupine Mountains. They’re worn down in that region and the state forests and parkland have been crisscrossed with paths, but it’s a moody landscape given to early morning fogs and indescribable forest sounds. They tear through the silences every now and then. Out of nowhere, a half-mile behind you, a baby cries once, then quiets. Tree branches snap and fall in front of you. These seemingly harmless nature scenes fill you with premonitions of bucolic doom.

  We veered off the main highway onto a county road and continued driving until the pavement turned to dirt, and then parked when we found a stand of woods with a marker for a path. I myself had grown interested in the mushrooms. I’d brought a sketchbook and sketched a few. They caught my attention with their red caps and their structural mockery of flowers and umbrellas and sexual organs. Diana wouldn’t touch them and seemed puzzled, or even saddened, by my interest in them.

  Diana’s hair was swept back and held under that cap, and she was wearing a light yellow tee-shirt. She’d brought along a jacket in case it started to rain, and after we’d been out there for an hour or two, it began to drizzle. The drizzle was so fine that the water couldn’t even be glimpsed as it fell. You could see its presence as a graying factor in the air.

  I’d also brought a small field guide — my jacket was full of pockets — and was checking the identifying marks of what I thought was a destroying angel when I heard Diana blowing her whistle. I tripped my way over several dead logs and through some underbrush that I couldn’t identify until I found her standing near a stump. She was shaking, but it didn’t quite make sense, because she was smiling that tough smile of hers. Her breasts heaved under her tee-shirt.

  “I heard something,” she said. “Also, I think we’re lost.”

  I told her that we weren’t lost, that my map said that a road existed on the other side of the ridge ahead of us. She shrugged — God, I loved that! — and agreed to follow me.

  As we were walking on the path I saw a small bronze engraved plaque that someone had affixed to a tree.

  On this spot in 1983

  E. L. Orlan discovered that the meaning of his life

  lay in learning, friendship and love,

  and service to others.

  I pointed it out to Diana, but she just laughed. She was personally way beyond the meaning of life. She was making, I thought, heroic efforts to love the outdoors, but she had her limits. I took her hand.

  Behind us and then to our right came a two-note call, neither bird nor animal. More like the rubbing of an agitated branch against a tree trunk.

  Nobody was around. “You wanna make love here?” I asked. “You wanna mess around in the woods?” She just looked at me. We walked down a slope toward a patchwork clearing. She was not about to get herself laid in the woods. What had I been thinking?

  A road became visible ahead, opposite the clearing. A white farm house, with a wide front yard dotted with objects too small to be seen from a distance, stood sagging and in need of paint on the other side of the dirt road.

  We crossed the road and looked down at the objects for sale in the front yard: several bright blue Virgin Mary shrines, wooden deer and rabbits, and a nondescript collection of other creatures made out of ceramic God-knows-what, all of them with big eyes, all of them smiling without sincerity. They had the mean cuteness of painted souvenirs. The phrase blunt instruments came into my head. I imagined a disgruntled wife pitching one of these skunks at her husband after a long weekend. I almost tripped over a sign.

  EVERYTHING HERE

  FOR SALE

  RING THE DOORBELL

  “Of course it’s awful,” Diana said. “But that’s why we’re here.” She held up a possum, aimed it at me, and made terrible kissing noises.

  Sometimes she enjoyed slumming around in junk stores. Castoffs and ripped, dented things flashed a spark in her. She fever-grinned at me. So I shrugged. “This makes good taste seem easy,” I said. “Dull, too.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She put the possum back down on the ground. “You know, we could make love right here, right on the ground, now, and it wouldn’t help at all. This stuff is more complicated than you realize.”

  I was thinking about what she could possibly have meant by that when the screen door slammed and a blind woman came toward us down the porch steps. I knew she was blind because her blue eyes were milky and she looked in no particular direction. Like the animals, she too was smiling. And like them, her eyes were slightly too large for her face. Her brown hair sagged, if that’s the word, under a hair net.

  She wore a brown cardigan sweater, and as I watched she fished a cigarette out of the left pocket and a Zippo lighter out of the right. She illuminated the cigarette and took a long stagy puff. She had the pleasant formal manners of a troll under whose bridge you have just wandered. “Can I be of any help for you?” she asked. “Is there any assistance I may be of?”

  “Oh, no,” Diana said, and she glanced in her perturbed stylish way toward the horizon. “We were hiking. Now we’re here.”

  “Now you’re here,” the troll-lady said in an echo-chamber voice. I gazed at her with great uneasiness. I have never liked men or women who live on dirt roads. It’s a matter of temperament, mine or theirs. I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway. “You’re both so young,” she said. “Well, certainly take a look around. Take your time.”

  “We were just married,” Diana said quickly. The proprietor of this lawn exhaled some smoke straight up. I wondered if it might be a signal to someone we couldn’t see, some message or other. Emotional health is a relative matter once you’re away from the cities. I thought it was time for us to go.

  “My name is Mrs. Watkins,” the old woman said. She held out her hand, and I shook it for the god of politeness. Then Diana did. “Yes, that’s a good woman’s grip,” Mrs. Watkins muttered, taking another puff from her cigarette. “I’m so pleased you’ve visited me. But you must come into the back yard. You must see the children. These,” she swept her hand in the direction of the animals, “are just for show.”

  Then she turned around and walked toward the back of the house. She seemed to know where everything was. We followed her. I wanted to take the whistle out of my pocket and blow it. Diana reached for my hand. She appeared to be having a perfectly good time. The huge air and the horizon weren’t getting on her back and weighing her down in the conventional ways.

  I decided to be tactless. “You manage so well,” I said to Mrs. Watkins. “Considering.” Then we saw the back yard.

  “You think I’m blind, but I’m not,” Mrs. Watkins said. “I have cataracts and things, but I’m not blind.” As she said this, she stared at my right elbow. “I can see all the colors, and I can see you have many pockets in your jacket. It looks like you’ve been picking mushrooms.”

  I wasn’t exactly listening to her at that moment, because I had fixed my attention on her back yard. The children were in front of me, stone children and plaster children, in various postures of disarray.

  One boy stood with his hands in the air, appearing to hold a kite string. Another lay o
n the ground with his head propped in his right hand, gazing blankly off into the distance, but in my direction. Those children had been there forever. Mrs. Watkins walked toward the kite-flying boy and put her hand on his head. “My husband made these,” she said. “He made all these children on weekends.”

  I noticed the past tense. Close by me was a girl on her knees with her hands together in prayer and her head tilted upward. She had been outdoors for as long as these mountains had been here. Part of her face was wearing away, probably from rain or from the blind woman’s caresses. Although it’s probably a shame for me to admit it, I’ll say here and now that I don’t think statuary is any form of art. You can put it in a museum, and I’ll walk right past it. I don’t want to look at or touch those things. Rodin, Michelangelo, Degas: just clutter to me.

  On the other side of the praying girl was another girl — very white and also plaster, my guess was — bending down and looking for a worm. There was a price tag on one of her fingers. It had smeared in the rain, and I couldn’t tell what her asking price was.

  “They’re all of them very sweet,” Mrs. Watkins said. “My husband loved making these children. It was a constant love and occupied his daytime leisure hours, such as they were.” She looked up at me but her gaze missed my face and focused on the gray Michigan sky. Quite possibly she was kind. I had no way of knowing. She reached behind her and put her hand on a boy with an open mouth. He appeared to be singing rather than shouting. “Anything interest you here?”

  “It all interests me,” Diana said. And then she put her hand underneath my shirt and reached for me around the waist. I could tell she wanted to kiss me in front of Mrs. Watkins, and I wasn’t going to let it happen. Diana’s hand went up my back and I felt the shivers coming on. Being among all these cement children bothered me. It was too much like being with Kathryn at the Humane Society.

  Mrs. Watkins stubbed out her cigarette in an open space between two children and deftly reached in her left pocket for another one. I admired her Zippo. Those things could really light cigarettes, and they closed with a satisfactory metallic smack. “We get all kinds of people here,” she said, exhaling more smoke from her freshly lit cigarette. “Most of the children have been sold, though, as you can see.”