Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

Stupid stupid stupid she said. To be stung in there. I am so oblivious. Good Lord it hurts. She glanced up at me. It’s just like being stabbed in the ankle with an icepick.

Then she said, I don’t suppose you can do anything.

Oh yes I said. Just wait here a minute.

I ran out of the pressing room and went to the back of the barn, the shady side that faces the fields and the orchard. I checked to see if anyone was there within plain sight. Nobody was. I took the cotton bandanna out of my hair. I looked around again and lowered my jeans and my underwear and I squatted and peed a little into the cotton. Funny about what you learn in Campfire Girls. Then I hitched up and ran around again and found her and dabbed at the spot on her ankle where she’d been stung. Her skin was as red as a little cloud at dawn. After about fifteen seconds she smiled and turned that hothouse smile in my direction.

Ah, she said, girl, it turns out that you are the life of me. What’s that miracle cure you’ve got there?

My secret.

I drove back. I drove her car. I didn’t let her drive. I didn’t drive to our apartment. Not to where Bradley and I lived. No. Not there. I drove to her building. Outside we sat down and talked. That was all we did. I was curious about conversation with her and the atmosphere of calm expectancy that it created. We told each other chapter-and-verse of our lives. What I’m saying is that we waited.

For days after that, I sat on the front stoop, my own, ours. I watched the sun setting while my husband Bradley sat next to me and we shared the small talk of that particular day. And then sometimes he would go inside and I would stay out there looking toward the west as the breezes wafted through the tree (there was only one) in the front yard. I was thinking about her and about the feeling that she gave me.

Two weeks later, after Jenny and I had done some gardening together at one of those communal gardens where you have your own section, collecting a few late-ripening tomatoes in brown paper bags we brought along, we went calmly up to her apartment. We took the tomatoes into her kitchen. I took two of them out and found a small plate and a knife, but my hand was shaking too hard for me to slice them. I put the knife down on the table and looked straight at her.

Then she took my hand and led me to the bedroom. She told me to forget about the tomatoes for a while. In the bedroom we lay down together and we shed our calm exteriors completely and I saw her and when she asked me what I wanted, I said: I want you.

Afterward she sang to me. What she sang was “Hail to the Victors.” She meant it as a joke and as an anthem. I learned how to do that from her. Her cat, Ralph, watched us from the dresser. I was miserable with happiness. Our souls had merged. I lay there and stared up at the string of red pepper lights attached with tiny hooks up near the molding, the ones I had bought for her, and I exchanged jealous glances with Ralph the cat who in agitation had knocked over a hairbrush, and I felt the cool autumn breeze blowing across my body and Jenny’s where our two souls were lodged, and I heard the Good Humor truck go by on the street, little glockenspiel notes.

Then we both went back into the kitchen and, naked, finished slicing and eating the tomatoes. They were delicious, and she had made me ravenous.

My idea was that I could save my marriage. In some respect I suppose I loved him still. Bradley took me to the Humane Society on a Sunday and we walked among the dogs as he held me, and I guess I named them individually even though I don’t remember doing so. I don’t see what importance it would have if I did do that, or if I remembered it.

We made love several times that day and each time I came — and I did, believe me — I thought of Jenny. I thought of the flower-garden smell of her soul and how I could just reach in and find her heart any time I wanted it and of how that would be the end of my loneliness here on earth. When he was on top of me, I would hold out my hands above him in the air and imagine that I was grasping her, her invisible spirit, in the air, terrible hypocrite that I am. No, actually, that I was. I stopped being a hypocrite. It wasn’t the right time to let him know that my soul had flown out of my body and taken up householding in Jenny’s. I sang “Hail to the Victors” to him because I missed her so much. I felt strong with her and weak with him. Empty and absent.

He said that he loved me but I don’t actually think that he did. Or maybe his love just didn’t manage to get into working order with me. By that time I had seen love in its final form. I knew what it looked like. It had freckles on its hands, the southern hemisphere on the left and the northern hemisphere on the right. And it wasn’t him. Or him with me. Or any combination of the two of us. She was flying my flag by that time.

He said he loved me and I stayed quiet and still. He had married me. You have to remember that. He had ringed me.

Several weeks later I told him. I told him about my beloved. His face fell in all its possible directions, my little husband Toadie, but then he composed himself and called me the only word he could think of, a lesbian. A goddamn lesbian. Well, when something hurts you, you can always find some dumb label for your accusation. Not just dumb but dumb. I picked up one of our vinyl kitchen chairs and threw it at him. It missed, by the way.

Anyway, what I’ve just told you was what prompted the chair incident. I had grown big, and he was trying to belittle me.

YOU THINK THAT what I’ve just told you is an anecdote. But really it isn’t. It’s my whole life. It’s the only story I have.

“I FOUND KATHRYN,” I say. “You know, she wasn’t at all hard to track down. She’s listed in the phone directory. She told me all about it. She told me about Jenny and how she left you and how she threw a chair at you. I’m sorry about that chair, I guess, but it’s still a good story.”

“Wonderful,” Bradley says. “That’s just great.” He scratches his hair. “But you should realize our marriage was a long time ago, all that stuff, her leaving me and all.” He hops up and down twice, an odd gesture. “You didn’t have to look her up, you know. You could have taken my word for it. Kind of a small-minded trick, if you ask me, finding people to bear witness to my past.” He grins at me. “Isn’t this an excellent fire?”

Bradley had called and arranged to meet me at a benefit for the Ann Arbor fire department. They’d be burning an abandoned house — two stories, an attic, and an attached garage, he said — out in the township. The firefighters would be showing the locals how they do what they do, and there’d be a suggested donation of four dollars to help the Firemen’s fund. Now we’re standing off to the side, in a ditchlike dogleg of the dirt road bordered by poplars and junipers, watching this old firetrap farmhouse burn, as the accelerants planted in the basement explode and speed the flames along. From this distance, the fire has a festive quality. Just ahead and to my left, one fire truck, a tanker of some sort, is spewing water entertainingly through a second-floor window, while the children in the crowd cheer and run around in circles. A Dalmatian sits on another truck, looking rather smug. On the right of us, the firefighters themselves, in their yellow coveralls, are watching with academic interest as the house burns.

“It’s a great fire,” I say to Bradley, feeling the heat on my face. “But as for looking up Kathryn, well, this whole thing was your idea,” I tell him. “Having everybody give me stories. Besides, the two of us, Kathryn and I, talked in your coffee shop, the one you own. It wasn’t secret or anything.”