Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

“I don’t want to worry it,” I said. “It wasn’t that. The thing is, I saw the two of us, walking outdoors, and I thought: What can I do for Diana? I can help her get outside, I can help her with the wide open spaces.” I handed the whistle to her.

She took it and tossed it in her hand. Then, sweetly, she raised her other hand and put her index finger on my lower lip. She played her finger back and forth on my lip. “We’re not compatible, you know,” she said. Her eyes hardened and for an instant looked through me a little. I thought that was such an odd thing for her to say that I refused, almost, to hear it. I just felt her finger on my lip.

“It’s not compatibility,” I said. “It’s how you manage it. How loving you are.”

“I’m loving with my friends,” Diana said, “and I’m mean to my lovers.” She caressed my mouth. “ ‘Just put your lips together and blow,’ ” she said, quoting from somewhere. “Oh, screw it,” she said. “Put that whistle down and make love to me again, since you want to.” She pointed to me and what was obvious, my well-meaning and innocent erection. So I did, I made love to her, because she asked me to, and because I wanted to, even though — and it’s hard to explain this — my feelings were hurt and I was angry, so I was meaner to her in bed than I usually am, rougher, more abrupt, and slowly it dawned on me, as I watched her respond, that she liked me that way, almost as if she was used to it, and I thought, Uh-oh, and kept it to myself.

You can have good sex on your honeymoon and still suspect that there’s something fishy going on.

THE NEXT DAY we went over to the Porcupine Mountains. They’re worn down in that region and the state forests and parkland have been crisscrossed with paths, but it’s a moody landscape given to early morning fogs and indescribable forest sounds. They tear through the silences every now and then. Out of nowhere, a half-mile behind you, a baby cries once, then quiets. Tree branches snap and fall in front of you. These seemingly harmless nature scenes fill you with premonitions of bucolic doom.

We veered off the main highway onto a county road and continued driving until the pavement turned to dirt, and then parked when we found a stand of woods with a marker for a path. I myself had grown interested in the mushrooms. I’d brought a sketchbook and sketched a few. They caught my attention with their red caps and their structural mockery of flowers and umbrellas and sexual organs. Diana wouldn’t touch them and seemed puzzled, or even saddened, by my interest in them.

Diana’s hair was swept back and held under that cap, and she was wearing a light yellow tee-shirt. She’d brought along a jacket in case it started to rain, and after we’d been out there for an hour or two, it began to drizzle. The drizzle was so fine that the water couldn’t even be glimpsed as it fell. You could see its presence as a graying factor in the air.

I’d also brought a small field guide — my jacket was full of pockets — and was checking the identifying marks of what I thought was a destroying angel when I heard Diana blowing her whistle. I tripped my way over several dead logs and through some underbrush that I couldn’t identify until I found her standing near a stump. She was shaking, but it didn’t quite make sense, because she was smiling that tough smile of hers. Her breasts heaved under her tee-shirt.

“I heard something,” she said. “Also, I think we’re lost.”

I told her that we weren’t lost, that my map said that a road existed on the other side of the ridge ahead of us. She shrugged — God, I loved that! — and agreed to follow me.

As we were walking on the path I saw a small bronze engraved plaque that someone had affixed to a tree.

On this spot in 1983

E. L. Orlan discovered that the meaning of his life

lay in learning, friendship and love,

and service to others.

I pointed it out to Diana, but she just laughed. She was personally way beyond the meaning of life. She was making, I thought, heroic efforts to love the outdoors, but she had her limits. I took her hand.

Behind us and then to our right came a two-note call, neither bird nor animal. More like the rubbing of an agitated branch against a tree trunk.

Nobody was around. “You wanna make love here?” I asked. “You wanna mess around in the woods?” She just looked at me. We walked down a slope toward a patchwork clearing. She was not about to get herself laid in the woods. What had I been thinking?

A road became visible ahead, opposite the clearing. A white farm house, with a wide front yard dotted with objects too small to be seen from a distance, stood sagging and in need of paint on the other side of the dirt road.

We crossed the road and looked down at the objects for sale in the front yard: several bright blue Virgin Mary shrines, wooden deer and rabbits, and a nondescript collection of other creatures made out of ceramic God-knows-what, all of them with big eyes, all of them smiling without sincerity. They had the mean cuteness of painted souvenirs. The phrase blunt instruments came into my head. I imagined a disgruntled wife pitching one of these skunks at her husband after a long weekend. I almost tripped over a sign.

EVERYTHING HERE

FOR SALE

RING THE DOORBELL

“Of course it’s awful,” Diana said. “But that’s why we’re here.” She held up a possum, aimed it at me, and made terrible kissing noises.

Sometimes she enjoyed slumming around in junk stores. Castoffs and ripped, dented things flashed a spark in her. She fever-grinned at me. So I shrugged. “This makes good taste seem easy,” I said. “Dull, too.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She put the possum back down on the ground. “You know, we could make love right here, right on the ground, now, and it wouldn’t help at all. This stuff is more complicated than you realize.”

I was thinking about what she could possibly have meant by that when the screen door slammed and a blind woman came toward us down the porch steps. I knew she was blind because her blue eyes were milky and she looked in no particular direction. Like the animals, she too was smiling. And like them, her eyes were slightly too large for her face. Her brown hair sagged, if that’s the word, under a hair net.

She wore a brown cardigan sweater, and as I watched she fished a cigarette out of the left pocket and a Zippo lighter out of the right. She illuminated the cigarette and took a long stagy puff. She had the pleasant formal manners of a troll under whose bridge you have just wandered. “Can I be of any help for you?” she asked. “Is there any assistance I may be of?”

“Oh, no,” Diana said, and she glanced in her perturbed stylish way toward the horizon. “We were hiking. Now we’re here.”

“Now you’re here,” the troll-lady said in an echo-chamber voice. I gazed at her with great uneasiness. I have never liked men or women who live on dirt roads. It’s a matter of temperament, mine or theirs. I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway. “You’re both so young,” she said. “Well, certainly take a look around. Take your time.”

“We were just married,” Diana said quickly. The proprietor of this lawn exhaled some smoke straight up. I wondered if it might be a signal to someone we couldn’t see, some message or other. Emotional health is a relative matter once you’re away from the cities. I thought it was time for us to go.

“My name is Mrs. Watkins,” the old woman said. She held out her hand, and I shook it for the god of politeness. Then Diana did. “Yes, that’s a good woman’s grip,” Mrs. Watkins muttered, taking another puff from her cigarette. “I’m so pleased you’ve visited me. But you must come into the back yard. You must see the children. These,” she swept her hand in the direction of the animals, “are just for show.”