Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

In other words, he was husband material. Simple as that.

I didn’t need a husband, I’ve said that. But I hadn’t had one, not yet, though there had been half-hearted offers, and I was ready to have the experience, retro as it may have been, of being married, to say nothing of the fact that it seemed about time for one of them, one of these unattached default-mode fellows to wander into my life and choose me. God, I sound awful. Also, I wanted a baby sooner or later, and I didn’t want to do the baby thing without having a husband. I didn’t want the weird political progressivism and the faint pathos of the single mom label hanging over me. Myself, I wanted to do the whole scene in the old-fashioned way.

As my mother once said to me, They’re quite crazy, dear — men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.

I WATCHED HIM PAINT his canvases in his basement. We went canoeing on the Huron River. I played with his companion, Bradley the dog (a special-needs dog, I am sorry to say, cognitively challenged, and a slobberer). We took some weekend trips to Chicago and listened to jazz. He drew a picture of the Dragon with the Rubber Nose giving me a ride on its back. That picture actually made my heart do a back flip. How could he possibly know that I had wanted to ride dragons from the time I was a girl? We had candlelit dinners at his house. We had sex, successful sex, good-enough sex, though when I compared him to David in that category, which I could not help doing, he lost. It seems a shame to say so, but one orgasm is not as good as another. So what, I thought. We sat around on Sunday morning, funky and grungy, and traded opinions. We went to galleries, where he expounded his views on the art we saw (he rarely liked it and denounced and demeaned it in whispers to me). He showed me his copies of ARTnews. I met his neighbors, the Ginsbergs. We went up to Five Oaks and met his sister and brother-in-law, the barber. We worked in the yard, we went to my health club. There was a peacefulness to it. I would talk about the law, and he would zone out a bit as he pretended to listen. I scared him and, humbly, he tried to cover it up. I gradually settled down into him the way you settle down into an easy chair. I accepted, conditionally, the kindheartedness he offered me, though I thought it a bit dull, the way a comfortable familiar thing is dull, and its dullness is totally beside the point.

I found myself, at odd moments, leaning over him and kissing his bald spot, the one toward the back of his head. I met his parents. He met mine. He was always nervous around me, afraid that he would say something that would unmask him as a fool or a dolt. Poor guy, he was unmasked right from the start. If I loved anything about him, it was his plainness, his lack of mask, his failure of costume. This is the sort of man he was: he made balloon sculpture every two weeks or so to amuse the neighborhood kids who lived up the block and sometimes wandered into his yard. He criticized himself for not being better at it. What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight. He was uninteresting and genuine, sweet-tempered and dependable, the sort of man who will stabilize your pulse rather than make it race.

He proposed. And I accepted.

THE NEXT TIME DAVID came over — because peacefulness is insufficient — he brought wild rice chicken soup, along with a perfectly chilled wine he liked, a sauvignon blanc. No leather jacket this time — he’d come from the office.

Somehow he’d gotten a streak of ink from a ballpoint pen on his face, the right side. (He’s clean-shaven.) Once he was inside the door, but just barely inside, I curled my leg around his and licked my finger with spit and slowly and pleasurably wiped the ink off.

As I did that, we talked about our usual news, but somehow I didn’t get around, at least not right away, to telling him about Bradley’s proposal and my acceptance of it. After the soup and the wine, we went into my bedroom where he kissed me and undressed me, unsnapping my skirt smartly and kneeling before me, slowly lowering my underwear. He liked to get on his knees before me while I was still standing, doing homage to me. He would put his arms around me, kissing me, and then he would hold his face against my abdomen, and I would feel the nubs of his beard, and I would sigh with pleasure. He made me, I have to admit it, weak in the knees. After that, I took off his clothes. I noticed his body a bit more this time, caring for it, appreciating its musculature. I saw his reflection in the dresser’s mirror, on whose side I had lodged Bradley’s drawing of me riding the dragon.

David and I made love at some length. While we were engaged in this activity, I continued to study him, between gasps, the way you’d study a habit you’re about to give up. This man, this particular one: all his adult physical features, all of them manfully occupied, not one of them boyish. Boyishness was not his style. We bucked and buckled and fought and ground ourselves into each other. First we made love — the quiet tenderness of it — and then we fucked brutally and mindlessly and then we went back to making love and then that lapsed into fucking again. He brought out a thing, a beast in me I hadn’t known I had, and it always surprised me to see it, to see her as me. For the first time in my life it occurred to me that a guy who is really, really good at making love to a woman, the same woman, and who is inventively and exceptionally good at it time after time, who is carefully brutal at some moments and solicitous at others, who knows her sweet spots and concentrates on them and seems to be worshipping her body and is keen on driving her to a sweet distraction every time, is not someone to be ignored or otherwise taken for granted or dismissed on minor charges, even as a lover, a recreational human.

When we were done, I inhaled and smelled the rank and honeyed odor of our brute sexual heat, which, that evening, made me feel nostalgic for us, for the two of us. I cut it off, that nostalgia, but it kept seeping back.

After a rest, I was kissing him on his flat gorgeous stomach, seasoned with small hairs, letting my own hair tickle him, and moving downward toward where the smell was strongest. It was then that I looked up at him and said, “You know what, David? Bradley proposed.”

He nodded. He knew all about Bradley. Apparently he had never taken him seriously. He had his fingers in my hair, my aggressive attitudinizing hair. He frowned. “Your artist? What did you say to him, Diana?” He waited as if he were actually curious. “What did you say in response? To his question?”

“I said yes.”

There was a long silence after that, during which he kept his fingers in my hair, stroking my scalp. I was still kissing him, more as a delay to the next stage of whatever we would do or say to each other.

“You did, eh? Well.” He leaned his head back. He was quiet. Sounds of the crickets came into the room, and the music from the CD player, Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” and the occasional car passing by on the street. “That’s interesting. So you said yes.” Then he said, a bit more querulously now, his face disagreeably restive, “Well, Diana. You agreed to marry him?” He was alert. He was quickening. “You actually did that?”

“Yup. That’s right,” I said.

“You are going to marry him. No kidding. Jesus, you’re mean. You’re doing this as a little prank. This is the joker side of you. But you know, you’re going to wither him right away. Honey, you are going to eat him alive. You do that to the nice ones, and I know that because you have a past and you have me, and I’ve seen you in action. I know you. Don’t say I don’t, kiddo, I know every square inch of you. He won’t stand up to you for longer than a year, you and your sharp edges. He’s not your match. You’ve described him to me, here in this very bed. You’re such a bruiser, Diana, what the hell are you thinking?”