Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

Then she turned around and walked toward the back of the house. She seemed to know where everything was. We followed her. I wanted to take the whistle out of my pocket and blow it. Diana reached for my hand. She appeared to be having a perfectly good time. The huge air and the horizon weren’t getting on her back and weighing her down in the conventional ways.

I decided to be tactless. “You manage so well,” I said to Mrs. Watkins. “Considering.” Then we saw the back yard.

“You think I’m blind, but I’m not,” Mrs. Watkins said. “I have cataracts and things, but I’m not blind.” As she said this, she stared at my right elbow. “I can see all the colors, and I can see you have many pockets in your jacket. It looks like you’ve been picking mushrooms.”

I wasn’t exactly listening to her at that moment, because I had fixed my attention on her back yard. The children were in front of me, stone children and plaster children, in various postures of disarray.

One boy stood with his hands in the air, appearing to hold a kite string. Another lay on the ground with his head propped in his right hand, gazing blankly off into the distance, but in my direction. Those children had been there forever. Mrs. Watkins walked toward the kite-flying boy and put her hand on his head. “My husband made these,” she said. “He made all these children on weekends.”

I noticed the past tense. Close by me was a girl on her knees with her hands together in prayer and her head tilted upward. She had been outdoors for as long as these mountains had been here. Part of her face was wearing away, probably from rain or from the blind woman’s caresses. Although it’s probably a shame for me to admit it, I’ll say here and now that I don’t think statuary is any form of art. You can put it in a museum, and I’ll walk right past it. I don’t want to look at or touch those things. Rodin, Michelangelo, Degas: just clutter to me.

On the other side of the praying girl was another girl — very white and also plaster, my guess was — bending down and looking for a worm. There was a price tag on one of her fingers. It had smeared in the rain, and I couldn’t tell what her asking price was.

“They’re all of them very sweet,” Mrs. Watkins said. “My husband loved making these children. It was a constant love and occupied his daytime leisure hours, such as they were.” She looked up at me but her gaze missed my face and focused on the gray Michigan sky. Quite possibly she was kind. I had no way of knowing. She reached behind her and put her hand on a boy with an open mouth. He appeared to be singing rather than shouting. “Anything interest you here?”

“It all interests me,” Diana said. And then she put her hand underneath my shirt and reached for me around the waist. I could tell she wanted to kiss me in front of Mrs. Watkins, and I wasn’t going to let it happen. Diana’s hand went up my back and I felt the shivers coming on. Being among all these cement children bothered me. It was too much like being with Kathryn at the Humane Society.

Mrs. Watkins stubbed out her cigarette in an open space between two children and deftly reached in her left pocket for another one. I admired her Zippo. Those things could really light cigarettes, and they closed with a satisfactory metallic smack. “We get all kinds of people here,” she said, exhaling more smoke from her freshly lit cigarette. “Most of the children have been sold, though, as you can see.”

“Do you have names for them?” Diana asked.

“Oh no,” the old woman said, leaning back. “That would be sentimental.”

“I think we have to go now,” I announced. All this was more than enough for one day. “Our car is parked on the other side of the ridge, and we need time to get back before it gets too dark to see. We’re on our honeymoon,” I added, without thinking. It was still midday. No one paid any attention to me. I was noticing that most of the children’s faces had worn away a bit too much, and the loss of detail was unnerving. No doubt there would be a clearance sale fairly soon.

“I want that one,” Diana said, pointing toward the reclining boy whose head was propped up by his arm. “How much is it? No, I mean, how much is he?”

“I could let you have him for thirty-six dollars,” the old woman said.

“Bradley, you’ll have to bring the car around here to pick this up,” Diana said, smiling curiously at me and scratching her scalp as if in thought. “We can’t lug it back.”

“You didn’t ask me if I wanted it.”

“Oh, this is for me,” Diana told me. “I’ll just put it somewhere.” She was counting out dollar bills into Mrs. Watkins’s hand.

“What mushrooms you got there?” Mrs. Watkins asked me, pointing toward my jacket pockets.

“I don’t know their names,” I said.

“Hand them to me,” she said. “I know mushrooms.”

“No, no, I don’t think so,” I said.

Diana put her hands into my own pockets and pulled all the mushrooms out. She turned them over to the old woman, who dropped them on the ground. Then Mrs. Watkins picked up one with a red cap in her left hand — her right hand still held the cigarette — and sniffed it several times. “This is called a pungent russula,” she said. “It’s not poisonous but it’ll make you vomit. Emetica, they call it. Very delicate structure though.” She passed her fingers around the mushroom’s gills before handing it to Diana. Then she reached down for another one. I wanted to get out of there but Diana was watching all this with considerable attention. Something was happening, and I didn’t know what it was.

More sniffing from Mrs. Watkins. “This is a club foot. It’s no good for eating. The woods are full of those.” She threw it on the ground near one of the boys and reached down again. “Ah,” she said. She stubbed out her second cigarette. “Now this one is something. This one’s a parasol. This is one of the best.”

Then, and I can’t say I was prepared for this, Mrs. Watkins — with her cataracts — bit off a tiny piece of the mushroom and chewed it. “Yes,” she said, smiling, like the ebullient hobgoblin she was, “that’s indeed what it is. Here.” She held it toward Diana.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. Don’t you do that.”

“Shut up, Bradley,” Diana said. “Just shut up.”

“No no no,” I said and forced it out of her hand.

“Give it back here,” she said. “Or this will become very serious.”

“This is serious right now,” I said.

Mrs. Watkins looked at us with her inaccurate smile. Perhaps she meant well.

“You don’t know what that is,” I said. “You don’t know what this is all about. Stop all of this, please, Diana.”

“Oh yes, I do,” she said. She pulled the mushroom out of my hand. “This is about us.” She bit into the mushroom. I watched her chew and swallow. Then she leaned toward me. She whispered. “It’s a feeling. This is about this exact moment and where we are exactly right now.” She was biting off more mushroom, and chewing and swallowing. “This is about a favor that is being done to me. This is a spell. This is a charm. From one woman to another.”

“Oh, dear,” the crone said. “A quarrel.” She turned around and went back into her house. She stumbled on the stairs going up.

ON THE WAY HOME, with the reclining boy stashed in the trunk, Diana said to me, “When we get back, I’m going to make such love to you, it’ll take your roof right off.”

When we arrived back at the Porcupine Inn, the bedroom smelled of lilacs, even though it was the wrong season for lilacs. We left the statue, or whatever it was, in the car. I wasn’t about to carry it up to the bedroom. It might have been a joke, that boy, but I couldn’t stop thinking of him, all thirty or forty pounds of him, ensconced in the trunk gazing through the darkness at the spare tire. Up in the bedroom, between us, Diana brought more fever to our lovemaking than she ever had before, but it was the wrong fever, as if she were trying to get rid of an internal pressure through physical means. She would ride me and close her eyes, and she would bend down to kiss my eyelids, and there wouldn’t be a sprig of affection in it, not a single solitary sign of love. It was just something she needed. She churned away and when she’d whip her head back and forth, the sweat from her forehead fell on my face. She slapped me several times as a sex thing, and as often as she came, it wasn’t enough, she wanted to come more often, and harder. She knocked the porcelain tabby cat off the bedside table, and the flowers too. They lay insensate on the floor in a puddle of water. She told me we were going to skip dinner. The mushroom didn’t make her sick, but I guess it gave her some sort of permission. It went further and profoundly into night, all this mushroom sex, and then on and on toward morning. I’d fall asleep and wake up to feel her working on me. She wouldn’t let me sleep. We had bruises. I never imagined this happening, but no matter how naive you sometimes think I am, I knew that whole night, by then, watching her, that she was in love with someone else, intensely, and had always been, and been tormented by it, and now she was taking it out on me, and making it obvious and those were her thoughts, the ones she couldn’t tell me, not for a penny, not for a pound.