Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

They — we — had a certain party varnish on. Depending on whether I’ve had enough to drink, I usually don’t like ironic friendliness as much as homely glitter. Because it’s the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it’s more a dull shine, like frequently used silverware. We were all presentable enough, but almost no one was making any kind of statement. Out here in Michigan, real style is too difficult to maintain; the styles are all convenient and secondhand. We’re all hand-me-down personalities. But that’s liberating: it frees you up for other matters of greater importance, the great themes, the sordid passions.

I hadn’t planned to come at all. I knew people were going to take a sort of friendly interest in me and my novelty marriage to Bradley and its quick aftermath. I was prepared to be snarly in a provocative and sexy way, provided I could manage my smiling and witty quarrelsomeness within acceptable limits. I didn’t want sympathy. Well, these people were too hip for sympathy anyway. To be honest, I had this image of myself: I was the tree that a drunk driver slides off the road into. The tree doesn’t move. It doesn’t do anything except stand there. It kills the person just by standing there. That would be me. I’ve got my attitude: lethal neutrality and immobility.

“Hi, Diana.” A voice out of the party air.

“Oh, hi.” My voice back to it. A glassy indifferent smile.

“You look so cute in that.”

“Thanks.” I turned to freshen my drink. I said something about the weather.

I had been back in my house, refurnishing it, preparing one of my cases, and thinking about David now and then, just before this party. Bradley, who was a mistake when conjoined with me, did not occupy my thoughts, but David did, and the other preoccupations I had were the probable duration of our affair and his probable attendance at this back yard social. The statue of the little boy reclined in my back yard.

If you’re recently divorced, and you’re a woman, you don’t know what to wear for a while. You put on the pale blue sundress but you don’t like the boniness of your shoulder blades — people will comment on your eating habits or your level of fitness because they’re terrifically eager to know your mood — so you take off the sundress and you put on the jeans, but that’s physically vain and indulgent unless they’re new and the exact right fit, and so you take them off for the simple skirt, but that’s too simple, that and the blouse: it turns you instantly into one of the clueless off-the-racks, hopelessly unstyled and unaccessorized. So what you do is, you put on one of David’s shirts that he left behind, one time, one summer afternoon in your bedroom, escaping in his undershirt from your presence, bloated and mind-numbed from sex, the undershirt with the bookstore logo on it. Then you put on your jeans. You don’t tuck in the shirt, David’s blue denim, you let it hang down. Then you do tuck it in. You wonder if the wife, the ill-named Katrinka, will recognize it. It has started to seem, in your meaner moments, to be an interesting prospect that she might recognize it. She could make a fuss and stage an outcry. That might even be quite wonderful, that prospect. It would enliven the party.

Before the itch started, I made a social effort. I conversed with one doctor and one accountant, one electrical engineer and two remedial educationists, one professor of economics and one landscape gardener, another person who as far as I could tell was gainfully un employed, very proud about it, too, and one person who had in a former life-phase programmed computers and now, following a personal crisis, contentedly made furniture. I talked to an aging personnel manager who wanted to take up jazz piano. Some of these people were women and some were not.

Then I felt the itch on the sole of my right foot, a poison ivy rash or a mosquito bite. What I wanted to do was to remove my sandal and start clawing. Sometimes my whole body feels that way. When that happens, I can claw at myself anywhere, I turn into a woman-rash, head to foot.

I put down my plate of barbecued ribs and barbecued chicken right there on the green and fuzzy lawn, without somehow noticing that the clouds had formed and rain had begun to fall and then was insistently falling. Soon everyone except for myself had gone inside. There I was. Preoccupied, I took my sandal off to scratch my foot. Intent on my little task, I just dug at it. I love to do that, it’s one of my bad habits when I have an itch. I was sitting behind a tree guarded from public view, near that wasp nest. No one saw me, or so I thought, enthralled with myself as I was, dazed and thoughtless and fugued. That’s why I didn’t notice this lightly damp business from the sky, this airy show of droplets. I wasn’t paying attention. I was under that tree. The party had gone inside, the people and their food and Edgar’s minuets, and I hadn’t noticed, and it had been reciprocal. No one had collared me. I was uncollected.

At that point I was facing away from the house, with my back hunched over, and I had the sensation on my back of a man looking at me. That particular feeling’s like a humming on your skin.

And what I remember next was this guy, David, of course, his arms folded across his chest like a park ranger, bending over me and putting his jacket over my shoulders and saying, “Let’s cover you up. Let’s shelter you.”

“Hi, David.”

“It’s raining, Diana. Didn’t you notice?”

“Apparently not.”

“You don’t pay enough attention to the present conditions.” He looked up at the sky with gentle gloominess. “You never did. You don’t pay attention to the conditions at hand and then you get soaked and someone has to come and clean up the mess you’ve made of yourself. You’re so willful, but in you it isn’t courage, it’s obstinacy. Diana, Diana, Diana.” I noticed that he liked saying my name.

I said, “Ah. I see that I have been explained in full. Where’s your wife, by the way? Where’s Katrinka?”

“Kat? Well, she’s inside, of course, with the other guests.” He looked toward the house. “They sent me out to get you. They said it was raining. And it is, Diana. It is.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” I looked up at the sky and rain fell into my eyes.

“Exactly right. That’s just what I’m saying.” He gave me a sweet look, and my heart crashed in my chest, at least a little. “The weather reports had predicted rain.”

“Well, I was scratching my foot. I think I have poison ivy.”

“Let’s see.” He sat down and lifted my foot. “Ah.” He fingered it. The itchy spot was right under the arch. “Yes, there’s a dermatitis there, all right.” Then he bent over, shielded by the tree trunk, and kissed it, kissed me, right there on the rash. The nerve of him! My lover.

I don’t remember anything else about the party except for a conversation I had twenty minutes later with Katrinka, there in the corner by the upright piano. Having come inside, I had given the jacket back to David, and he had disappeared into the kitchen. Katrinka and I, old acquaintances, were talking about the politics of the local school-board election, and then we were discussing poison ivy (she, too, had it growing at the edge of their yard), and as we held our plates (I had a new plate with new food) and ate, the conversation swerved like a slightly out-of-control automobile toward the proven or unproved benefits of Vitamin E, and all this time, through an act of will so resolute and brave that it can scarcely be imagined, she kept her eyes on my face after having looked, locked on is maybe a better phrase, once, twice, and then a third time, at the denim shirt I was wearing. You could see, from a telltale movement of her eyebrows, that she was struggling to remember the shirt, trying to ascertain if she did remember it, whether she thought or could think that it might be the shirt she suspected it was, her husband’s blue denim shirt, hanging on me two sizes too large. I watched, not without a trace of pity, as a small gauze of sweat broke out on her forehead, tiny spindles of perspiration.