The Feast of Love

by Charles Baxter

  She writes and illustrates children’s books, all of them about a family of goats who are given distinctive individual features like reading glasses, distinctive smirks, uncombed forelocks, and scowls that Lydia has picked up from her two ex-husbands and her own children. I have often wondered what her children thought about finding their own features located in these goats, but I never found the right moment to ask.

  The guests were all from Burns Park, a rumpled academic-professional neighborhood, mostly made up of professionally paid know-it-alls, people with opinions and the leisure to express them.

  They — we — had a certain party varnish on. Depending on whether I’ve had enough to drink, I usually don’t like ironic friendliness as much as homely glitter. Because it’s the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it’s more a dull shine, like frequently used silverware. We were all presentable enough, but almost no one was making any kind of statement. Out here in Michigan, real style is too difficult to maintain; the styles are all convenient and secondhand. We’re all hand-me-down personalities. But that’s liberating: it frees you up for other matters of greater importance, the great themes, the sordid passions.

  I hadn’t planned to come at all. I knew people were going to take a sort of friendly interest in me and my novelty marriage to Bradley and its quick aftermath. I was prepared to be snarly in a provocative and sexy way, provided I could manage my smiling and witty quarrelsomeness within acceptable limits. I didn’t want sympathy. Well, these people were too hip for sympathy anyway. To be honest, I had this image of myself: I was the tree that a drunk driver slides off the road into. The tree doesn’t move. It doesn’t do anything except stand there. It kills the person just by standing there. That would be me. I’ve got my attitude: lethal neutrality and immobility.

  “Hi, Diana.” A voice out of the party air.

  “Oh, hi.” My voice back to it. A glassy indifferent smile.

  “You look so cute in that.”

  “Thanks.” I turned to freshen my drink. I said something about the weather.

  I had been back in my house, refurnishing it, preparing one of my cases, and thinking about David now and then, just before this party. Bradley, who was a mistake when conjoined with me, did not occupy my thoughts, but David did, and the other preoccupations I had were the probable duration of our affair and his probable attendance at this back yard social. The statue of the little boy reclined in my back yard.

  If you’re recently divorced, and you’re a woman, you don’t know what to wear for a while. You put on the pale blue sundress but you don’t like the boniness of your shoulder blades — people will comment on your eating habits or your level of fitness because they’re terrifically eager to know your mood — so you take off the sundress and you put on the jeans, but that’s physically vain and indulgent unless they’re new and the exact right fit, and so you take them off for the simple skirt, but that’s too simple, that and the blouse: it turns you instantly into one of the clueless off-the-racks, hopelessly unstyled and unaccessorized. So what you do is, you put on one of David’s shirts that he left behind, one time, one summer afternoon in your bedroom, escaping in his undershirt from your presence, bloated and mind-numbed from sex, the undershirt with the bookstore logo on it. Then you put on your jeans. You don’t tuck in the shirt, David’s blue denim, you let it hang down. Then you do tuck it in. You wonder if the wife, the ill-named Katrinka, will recognize it. It has started to seem, in your meaner moments, to be an interesting prospect that she might recognize it. She could make a fuss and stage an outcry. That might even be quite wonderful, that prospect. It would enliven the party.

  Before the itch started, I made a social effort. I conversed with one doctor and one accountant, one electrical engineer and two remedial educationists, one professor of economics and one landscape gardener, another person who as far as I could tell was gainfully unemployed, very proud about it, too, and one person who had in a former life-phase programmed computers and now, following a personal crisis, contentedly made furniture. I talked to an aging personnel manager who wanted to take up jazz piano. Some of these people were women and some were not.

  Then I felt the itch on the sole of my right foot, a poison ivy rash or a mosquito bite. What I wanted to do was to remove my sandal and start clawing. Sometimes my whole body feels that way. When that happens, I can claw at myself anywhere, I turn into a woman-rash, head to foot.

  I put down my plate of barbecued ribs and barbecued chicken right there on the green and fuzzy lawn, without somehow noticing that the clouds had formed and rain had begun to fall and then was insistently falling. Soon everyone except for myself had gone inside. There I was. Preoccupied, I took my sandal off to scratch my foot. Intent on my little task, I just dug at it. I love to do that, it’s one of my bad habits when I have an itch. I was sitting behind a tree guarded from public view, near that wasp nest. No one saw me, or so I thought, enthralled with myself as I was, dazed and thoughtless and fugued. That’s why I didn’t notice this lightly damp business from the sky, this airy show of droplets. I wasn’t paying attention. I was under that tree. The party had gone inside, the people and their food and Edgar’s minuets, and I hadn’t noticed, and it had been reciprocal. No one had collared me. I was uncollected.

  At that point I was facing away from the house, with my back hunched over, and I had the sensation on my back of a man looking at me. That particular feeling’s like a humming on your skin.

  And what I remember next was this guy, David, of course, his arms folded across his chest like a park ranger, bending over me and putting his jacket over my shoulders and saying, “Let’s cover you up. Let’s shelter you.”

  “Hi, David.”

  “It’s raining, Diana. Didn’t you notice?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “You don’t pay enough attention to the present conditions.” He looked up at the sky with gentle gloominess. “You never did. You don’t pay attention to the conditions at hand and then you get soaked and someone has to come and clean up the mess you’ve made of yourself. You’re so willful, but in you it isn’t courage, it’s obstinacy. Diana, Diana, Diana.” I noticed that he liked saying my name.

  I said, “Ah. I see that I have been explained in full. Where’s your wife, by the way? Where’s Katrinka?”

  “Kat? Well, she’s inside, of course, with the other guests.” He looked toward the house. “They sent me out to get you. They said it was raining. And it is, Diana. It is.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.” I looked up at the sky and rain fell into my eyes.

  “Exactly right. That’s just what I’m saying.” He gave me a sweet look, and my heart crashed in my chest, at least a little. “The weather reports had predicted rain.”

  “Well, I was scratching my foot. I think I have poison ivy.”

  “Let’s see.” He sat down and lifted my foot. “Ah.” He fingered it. The itchy spot was right under the arch. “Yes, there’s a dermatitis there, all right.” Then he bent over, shielded by the tree trunk, and kissed it, kissed me, right there on the rash. The nerve of him! My lover.

  I don’t remember anything else about the party except for a conversation I had twenty minutes later with Katrinka, there in the corner by the upright piano. Having come inside, I had given the jacket back to David, and he had disappeared into the kitchen. Katrinka and I, old acquaintances, were talking about the politics of the local school-board election, and then we were discussing poison ivy (she, too, had it growing at the edge of their yard), and as we held our plates (I had a new plate with new food) and ate, the conversation swerved like a slightly out-of-control automobile toward the proven or unproved benefits of Vitamin E, and all this time, through an act of will so resolute and brave that it can scarcely be imagined, she kept her eyes on my face after having looked, locked on is maybe a better phrase, once, twice, and then a third time, at the denim shirt I was wearing. You could see, from a telltale movement of her eyebrows, that she was struggling t
o remember the shirt, trying to ascertain if she did remember it, whether she thought or could think that it might be the shirt she suspected it was, her husband’s blue denim shirt, hanging on me two sizes too large. I watched, not without a trace of pity, as a small gauze of sweat broke out on her forehead, tiny spindles of perspiration.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, as in a farce, a comic opera, a nighttime TV half-hour comedy written by a committee, David developed poison ivy rashes on the backs of his hands and on his face, near his mouth.

  I don’t remember the last time poison ivy was considered a sexually transmitted disease. Actually, it can’t be transmitted from foot to mouth or even from hand to hand. But it was certainly what you might call a catalyst, accidental though its appearance was on him. Anyway, Katrinka had been thinking about my shirt for days and at last deduced that it was David’s — a wife does not forget her husband’s shirts, not a suburban-four-bedroom-home wife like Katrinka. And when she put one and one together, the two they added up to was us, David and Diana, and that was the night when David moved out, and where he moved was over here, his little boys desperately crying and clutching as he walked out the front door. It doesn’t matter the least little bit that you can’t really pass poison ivy back and forth. She thought you could. So they had an opportunistic fight, which resolved matters. Remember the song? It became our song.

  You’re gonna need an ocean

  Of calamine lotion

  Which we daubed on each other with little tender gestures, our first night as an official couple, unclandestine, David miserable and relieved and miserable again and somehow relieved again, not knowing at all what he felt when I kissed him wildly. He stayed awake all night in his joy and misery.

  HE HAD ALWAYS LOVED ME and kept that love a secret from me. Every man likes to pretend that he’s in the CIA, a holder of vast dangerous secrets. This is why they suffer so in telling you that they love you. But once he was here, in my bedroom, the truth having come out, he talked about it — the love — openly, wretched as he was after leaving the boys. As I said, he was rigorous about that. I was the person you had to pry open with a crowbar.

  By late summer, a month later, this particular evening I’d been out watching him play basketball with this kid Oscar and some other guys at a city park. The men were vocalizing, I have no idea what they were grunting to each other, this guy-yelping, and their shoes were squeaking on the asphalt. Actually I loved that sound. I was lounging on a park bench off to the side, sitting there, studying him. He was just in shorts and shoes. Earlier in the day we’d been doing yard work. I thought he was kind of beautiful. I liked thinking about him. My tastes had changed. My concept of male beauty had altered: he was now the definition of it. He’d lunge for the ball, he’d use his elbows, he’d do his layups. I sat there, just watching. I’d thought of playing and decided not to, for now. I had shorts on, too. I thought my legs might distract him from time to time. My legs were prettier than they’d been a month or so before. Smoother and nicer-looking. I don’t know why. They just were. Oh, actually I do know why: he loved them.

  Behind me, the dogs barked at passing fire trucks, and in another section of the park, two softball teams were shouting some sort of encouragement to their batters and pitchers. The sun sank under the horizon.

  When it was finally too dark to play, he joined me. I stood up, and Chloé, Oscar’s fiancée, who was sitting on the other bench after jogging around in her Joy Division tee-shirt and whom I had sort of befriended, well, she stood up, too. David came over. David’s skin was so sweaty that his hand slipped out of mine at first. Then he reached for me again. He laced his fingers between mine. I could smell his sweat. It was rank. I wanted to have him immediately. He put his arm around my shoulders. I hitched myself to his waist.

  We got into his car and drove back to my place, which was gradually also becoming his. We went into the bedroom and lay down together. He was still wet and as his sweat dried he had a sweet heavy smell, like overripe blueberries. God, I loved that.

  When we were naked, finally, we were standing up, and then he had his hands on my breasts and he was kissing me. I felt star-spattered. And I was thinking: he can have every inch of me. Sweet Jesus, he can pick my bones clean.

  I told him I loved him. It escaped me, just like that. And he was cool: he pretended I hadn’t said it or that he hadn’t been listening, though he had heard me say it plenty of times before.

  Just about then I heard an ice cream truck going by on the street, the Good Humor Man. With those distant prerecorded bell chimes. They’re supposed to sound cheery, but they sound unearthly and preoccupied, like death’s angel.

  And then we were making love, calmer than we usually do it, and I’m looking at David, and my soul — I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s what happened — became visible to me. My soul was a large and not particularly attractive waiting room, just like in a Victorian train station with people going in and out. In this waiting room were feelings I hadn’t known I had, discarded feelings, feelings with nowhere to go, no ticket to a destination. It turned out that I was larger than I had known myself to be; there were multitudes of feelings in there. This can happen any sort of way. I don’t care if you disapprove of what I’m telling you or the means I used to discover it. I warned you: I’m not an original. But at that point I felt like one. I’m just telling you how it happened with me. I was a different person than I had planned to be. My soul was not particularly attractive, but the surprise was that it was there, that I had one.

  I loved him and we fused together. He didn’t save me from anything. I was the same person I always was. But as they say: one phase of my life was over, and another one began.

  NINETEEN

  FOLLOWING THE DIANA marriage incident, Bradley the dog took over my affairs. He urged me onward to take walks with him, eat regularly, and make noises at strangers. This did not include Harry and Esther Ginsberg, who came by from time to time with baked foods of various sorts, and who informed me that the cause of my divorce was not actually myself, or my happenstantial faults, but the house I lived in. At first I thought they meant this metaphorically, but no: the reference was to the physical enclosure, the walls and windows and ceilings. They claimed there was a dybbuk living in it. I had never heard of such a thing, and they refused to explain, claiming that to speak of the thing itself was, like the uttering of the unutterable name of the divinity, bad luck. I checked it in the American Heritage Dictionary and couldn’t believe what I found there. He was a philosopher and she was a scientist, and they were both alleging that Diana and I had been done in by some sort of Jewish phantom.

  Well, they’re my neighbors, and I suppose they mean well. I listened to them talk about their son Aaron, and they listened to me talk about Diana. Let them have their dybbuk. Or, excuse me, my dybbuk. After all, I had heard Chloé and Oscar yelping with love cries in my house long after they had been there, house-sitting. I had felt the breath of themselves, the memory of their bodies crisscrossing down the hallways. Who was I to scoff at a dybbuk?

  LATE IN THE SUMMER I was walking around town with Bradley. I wasn’t feeling too bad. This song, “My Funny Valentine,” as sung by Ella Fitzgerald, was going through my head as I walked. I always liked her; I liked it that she sang jazz while wearing glasses. I came to the park. There was just enough light to see by, Magritte light. These guys were playing basketball, as usual, including Oscar. Chloé was jogging around the park, wearing her Joy Division tee-shirt and keeping a distant eye on her beloved. And there next to the basketball hoops was a bench, and on this bench sat of all people my ex-wife, Diana. Of course I knew she hadn’t moved out of town. She still occasionally showed up at Jitters, just to say hello and to have coffee. She had changed her hair color. It looked as if it had been dipped in blond ink or something. She looked nice. She was resting on the bench with her arms crossed just under her breasts. I watched her — I was some distance back, on the other side of the street, in the shadows — as she slapped
at a mosquito. Her legs looked prettier than I remembered.

  After ten minutes, it was too dark, and they stopped playing. And this guy, David, came over to where she was, and Diana stood up, and he put his arm around her shoulders, and she put her arm around his waist, and they started walking toward his car, that way, his arm around her shoulder, her arm around his waist. It couldn’t have taken more than fifteen seconds for them to get to that car. But I’ll remember how they looked all my life.

  I’d never seen Diana with that settled contentedness before. It’s funny how you can tell when people are in love.

  They passed under one of those streetlights they have near the parking area. Bradley tugged at the leash, but I was not to be moved. And I saw Diana clearly, leaning into this fellow, her head bent to the left so that it was resting on his shoulder, and this insane eventuality happened. I felt this punch in my stomach. Standing there, across the street, in the shadows where it was possibly my fate to live, forever after, I felt this punch in my stomach.

  I could see instantly what I was missing. That she was beautiful in a way I hadn’t noticed before. Suddenly I missed her lazy manner of reading the editorial pages aloud on Sunday morning and I missed the way she said good night by whispering it in my direction and I missed everything about her, including how mean she could sometimes be. I remembered the way she blew the bangs away from her forehead by jutting her lower lip outward and blowing a stream of air, perfected by her years of playing the oboe in high school, upward. Sick with memory, I was in love with Diana, genuinely, still, or maybe for the first time, at least this way.