Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

When they — women — are serious about you, they’ll use your full name. Bradley. “You just looked deep in thought, that’s all.”

“I’m thinking about us,” she’d say, and reach for my hand. Another big smile, like a smile you’d do for a flashbulb, a smile like arriving in France after seven cramped hours on the plane, that’s what she’d give me. But those smiles of hers didn’t even have a half-life. They were on her face, optically illusional, and then they’d be gone so quickly you couldn’t be sure you’d seen them at all.

She’d go absent without leave at meals, she’d go absent in the car, and she’d go absent after our lovemaking. She looked like a woman gazing out from the railing of a cruise ship toward an island of some sort, and her bangs would fall over her eyebrows while her feet twitched in time to an interior melody. She was a great one for examining the ceiling. The molding fascinated her. Lying beside me, she could carry off her fleshly existence away from me, but, after a moment, she couldn’t. I mean, my God, I was so in love with her that I almost didn’t notice. I thought I was made of plutonium, I was that powerful. Radioactive Man. I would imagine Diana walking toward me, looking at me with recognition — I am your woman, you are my man, we are mated — and I’d think: How did I get this lucky? Not that I’m selling myself short.

Other men envied me, I was sure. I longed for her. I looked forward to her, not to her sweetness, because she didn’t have any of that, but to her acids and spices, the way she made me feel more alive. To hear Diana talking or to kiss her, to wake up beside her, you’d just know, I mean any man in his right mind would know, that she was a goddess, and not one of those New Age goddesses either, but one of the old ones, the genuine kind of goddess, the sort they don’t make anymore, with lightning coming out of her eyes. She filled my eyes with her beauty; her eyes put me on trial.

I mean, Diana was a handful, but after one of our largish moments she would lie in a still, solemn posture while her feet beat in time to her inaudible music and her fingers touched my ribs like a fretboard, and she would stare off ceilingward, as if… well, it was then that I’d ask her what she was thinking, and she’d turn to me and give me a flashbulb smile, and she’d say, “I’m thinking about you, honey.”

And I didn’t know whether that was good news or bad, given the fact that she was almost frowning, and her lower lip beginning to stick out, pouty, as if she were reading poetry or something like that that’s more trouble to figure out than it’s worth. I didn’t really want to know what she was thinking after such moments. I just kept that door shut. Bluebeard kept one of his castle doors shut too. Well, I said to myself: she’s a lawyer, and she’s contemplating her next case.

At our wedding, which was not at a church, because she and I didn’t believe in anything that large, but which occurred in the expansive back yard of a reception hall near the Saline River, she had said, “I do,” with considerable force. We were under a large white canopy and there would be dancing afterward. But she had seemed almost surprised when at the conclusion of the ceremony I leaned down to kiss her, the way you do when the ritual is finished. She was made light-headed by my kiss, the fact of it. You could tell from the way she looked at me. Her eyes grew wide and she seemed frightened for a split second as my lips attached themselves to hers. She said later that she had been studying the pattern of the woodwork in the bandstand and had been distracted. Distracted? At our wedding? For the kiss? I used to think that technically the wedding doesn’t happen unless you kiss each other.

After the kiss, though, she remembered to smile. She could be polite. And following the reception, we had a horse-drawn carriage take us to the motel. The carriage was antique-elegant, with inlaid wood though it had a wet bar inside, and a TV, and as we got into it, we were pelted with rice and flowers by her lawyer friends and my artist-and-coffee friends, and by our parents and relatives and hangers-on. Chloé and Oscar were there in thrift-shop formal attire, and they threw flowers at us, too. My sister Agatha was there, and Harold, and my nephews, my friends, and my father and mother, and some of Diana’s friends including an old boyfriend of hers named David, whom I didn’t exactly get to meet, not then.

The sun was out, not a cloud in the sky. The driver wore a top hat. This was unlike my first wedding to Kathryn, which took place in city hall, where people do not typically wear costumes. We clip-clopped away from the reception hall, and I kissed Diana again, and she didn’t seem so surprised this time. The horse smelled of straw and oats, I remember.

My best man had said, long before this, You may end up like the happiest man on Earth, old Buddy, or you may end up like someone on daytime television.

During the first night, after we had made love as man and wife, as wedded partners, instead of just lovers, Diana said, “Bradley, you’re such a nice guy,” as she drifted off to sleep. I thought: Well, I’ll take my compliments where I can get them, but “nice” is not what a man wants to hear under these particular circumstances. I mean, she had nothing to complain about. I had satisfied her. She looked satisfied. We had groaned together during our lovemaking. But “nice”? When you make love to a goddess, you want a fierce compliment. Or speechlessness. Speechlessness will do just fine.

DIANA’S AGORAPHOBIA PRESENTED a bit of a problem as regards the honeymoon.

Her idea had been that we should remain in Ann Arbor and perhaps, as a kind of respite from ordinary life, stay in different motels and hotels around town for a week or two. We could laze in lounge chairs near the indoor pools and order vast crazy meals complete with champagne from room service, if there happened to be room service. We would make love a lot and metaphorically cement ourselves together. We would go to movies if we felt like it. Despite its attractions, however, I found this entire prospect unappealing. It lacked, I don’t know, the charisma of the exotic.

She didn’t like open spaces at all, and she didn’t care for locales she’d never been to before. She did not like to travel and did not care for airplanes, except when her legal business required rapid transit. Nevertheless, I suggested that we drive to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and spend our honeymoon at a bed-and-breakfast on Lake Gogebic, near the Porcupine Mountains. Eventually I wore her down. I asserted myself, and she shrugged — Jesus, she had a beautiful shrug — and agreed. I’d been to this B&B, the Porcupine Inn, before, alone, and thought she’d like the vistas. We held hands as we talked about what we’d do there.

We boarded Bradley at a kennel. Chloé and Oscar would mind the store. Harry Ginsberg said he’d keep an eye on the house. Diana hadn’t sold her house. She had rented it out.

I suspected that we were in for trouble when we began to cross the Mackinac Bridge. Diana began to breathe hard, and she put her hand to her face and smoothed her eyebrows. I shouldn’t say this about my ex-wife, but she farted, I’m not kidding, out of sheer fright. The sky and the bridge and the water far below her were oddly and intensely incorrect to her at that moment, or so she reported. You can’t see much from up on that bridge except the infinity of fresh water and some uncommonly distant islands. Spatial malevolence. She felt this wrongness surrounding her and ganging up against her. The empty air was unpleasantly interested in her. Funny to find this phobia in a woman so strong in other ways. I turned the radio on, thinking it would help, but the radio was tuned to an oldies station, and the first line out of the speakers was, “Well, I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day…” and of course Diana reached down and snapped off that song.