Charles Baxter: The Feast of Love

They sulk, men, so many of them. They bear grudges and they get violent almost as a hobby, the ones I’ve known. Didn’t you realize this? Ask around. As a gender they’re — you’re — always scheming or at least they seem to be scheming because they never ever tell you what’s on their minds. The sample I’ve had. They just sit there day after day and they brood. After the brooding, then the firepower. Well, I know these are generalizations, but I don’t care, because they’re my generalizations, so I don’t have to prove them, which is exciting.

I will say that the one feature I like about men is that they can usually figure out how small appliances work. They’re good at fixing this and that. But that competence doesn’t lead to passion, just to gainful employment. Of course I’m only using the case studies here of the men I have happened to know in my brief lifetime. But a sample is a sample and what I’m describing to you is what I have observed.

They get to you in the small ways. They have their little bag of tricks. You take Bradley. In high school he sat behind me or next to me in English and biology. He was above average whenever he studied, which wasn’t that often because Bradley wasn’t and isn’t particularly studious. While everybody else was taking notes or being rowdy, Bradley was drawing sketches in his notebooks. Of me. Day in and day out he did pencil drawings of me in detail on paper. Even if his eyes were too large or too direct, he was a good-looking boy in those days when he remembered to comb his hair and to shave, and you should have seen the sketches he did of me. A few of them were confiscated by the teachers. Whenever they managed to steal a peek at what he was doing, the other girls were agog that he loved me so much. Everyone thought we were terrible sweethearts. Jesus. I never knew what I had done to attract his attention. In his hands a picture of a woman could often be more beautiful or arresting than the woman herself. It was hurtful, how beautiful he made me. I thought: that’s me? I was just Kathryn before but in his sketches of me I was a miracle. I was extraordinary. I just couldn’t get over what he did to me.

Do you understand what I’m saying? He confused me in the way that a lot of women get confused. He had a system going with these sketches so that if he happened to be distorting my beauty by making me more attractive than I actually was, I never had the brains or the wit to notice it. These pictures pretended to be mere records of my looks, standing or sitting or gazing downward in thought, but they undermined me. If somebody makes you beautiful or says you’re pretty and then repeats it insistently, you become his victim. He wasn’t always detailed about my eyes but I didn’t notice that at the time. That was my mistake. I should have noticed. Remember Picasso’s trouble with Gertrude Stein’s eyes in that portrait he did of her? Rembrandt’s portrait of himself in old age — I saw it in London — is as terrific as it is because of what he knew about his own eyes. Go look. Bradley didn’t know anything about my eyes and therefore avoided them. They’re not really in the pictures.

But because these Bradley-drawn pictures were celebrating me I fell in love with the pictures and then in a standard move I fell in love with the guy himself as the creator of the images in which a beautified version of me appeared. He drew one very elaborate sketch of me riding a horse that just about took the breath out of me. I was both beautiful and muscled, like the horse. A naked woman on a horse, two animals. I thought: if he can see me this way, then what else would I ever need?

Well, much else is necessary, believe me. He only loved his love for me and the pictures he was drawing. He loved those two. He loved the feeling he was having. I was a mere accessory to the feeling.

Loving him was extremely tricky because he was inaccessible in a sort of wacky way. Like so many of these twenty-something guys he was a perpetual traveler in outer space. What are you guys looking for out there? Trysts with aliens? I don’t get it. Never have. He was one of those men who could talk articulately about anything — food or movies or music or current events — but you could discern in the middle of his conversation that he had commenced to brood about something else that was not making its way into the mix. Right at the table he’d disappear on you and you couldn’t get him back. When he made love to me, he had this absentminded sex mannerism going on that eventually drove me crazy. And I don’t mean how, with sex, personality has to give way to your desire. That’s why it’s so hard to talk when you’re engaged physically.

Silent physical passion would have been just fine. But I felt insulted after a while: he made love the way you would drive a car to work. Autopilot stuff. Short-little-span-of-attention stuff. What I mean is that he was hardly in the same room with me when we were in bed together. He didn’t notice enough how I was reacting. It was boorish. He hummed while he was doing it, as if he were changing a light bulb. If he could concentrate on me in the pictures, then why couldn’t he concentrate on me in person when I was naked for him between the sheets? It made no sense. I assumed that this elemental problem with his absentminded love would improve, would go away, would dissolve.

I kept reaching for his heart and finding nothing there to hold on to.

Gradually I lost my confidence. That was about when he proposed to me and I said yes. Some mistakes are both simple and huge. The worst mistakes I’ve made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

After we were married I realized that I had no particular idea who he was. I once called him the Lon Chaney of Ann Arbor, and instead of being hurt, he was pleased. At least I’m a star, he said. Days would go by without an endearment. He was too young to be a sleepwalker, so I’d try to wake him up. We’d have a nice dinner and we’d rent a movie and then we’d go to bed. We’d kick back the sheets and frolic like a good modern couple, and he would gradually fade on me, he’d look like he was thinking about the stock market. His distance took the wind out of me. And then I got this idea that the trouble I was having wasn’t just with Bradley but was a generic trouble. It was with men. He wouldn’t share his heart with me. He was preoccupied with the unspoken and would be all his life.

Believe me, most women know what I’m talking about.

AND THEN SOMEONE walks into your life and takes control of the situation.

This was a few weeks before he took me to the dog pound, this episode I’m about to describe. About at the end of the summer, the last week of August. He was correct about the two jobs I had and that he and I were married by then.

Oh, I should tell you one other story about that period. My grandfather was dying. He was getting Alzheimer’s and living in an assisted-care facility. I’d go over there to visit him. And one summer afternoon I drove over to see him and went up to his apartment and knocked and went in, because the door wasn’t locked. I heard the water turned on in the shower.

“Grandpa?” I asked. He wasn’t in the living room.

“I’m in here,” he said, calling from the bathroom.

“Okay,” I said.

So I waited for him. But he stayed in there. Stayed and stayed. So eventually I stood up, because I was worried and anxious about him, and I went into the bathroom where he had said he was. I looked in through the translucent glass of the shower stall and saw my grandfather in there, and I could also see that he had all his clothes on. Naturally, I was alarmed. I reached over and pulled aside the glass divider.

There — inside the shower — was my grandfather wearing his three-piece suit. He was standing under the spray of water, his wet hair hanging like seaweed down the sides of his head. Even his shoes were on. “Grandpa,” I said, “what are you doing in there?”