Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

It’s not unusual for people to go phobic on that bridge. Sometimes they just stop the car at one end and have to be escorted, or driven, to the other side. We made it intact to St. Ignace, the first town you meet up with in the Upper Peninsula, but her episode of horizon panic had established a bad precedent.

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?”