The Feast of Love Page 5

  Well, she said, I believe I will put some money in the jukebox. She stood up and sauntered through the cigarette smoke over to the Wurlitzer. Behind her the smoke swirled as it filled the space behind her. As I watched the smoke eddy in those patterns in her wake, I realized that my new friend was just about all that I wanted forever and ever and ever. You can’t dictate to yourself what you want. You either want it or you don’t. I suppose I was drunk by then. She put a dollar bill into the jukebox and started programming. She stood in front of that jukebox with her hip canted to the right. She was profiling for my benefit, I noticed.

  She walked back slowly to the table. Her ponytail bobbed a little as she walked. I’d never seen a woman walking that comfortably before. Oh she was secure in herself, and in despair and exaltation all at once I wanted to be free of Bradley and secure in her, and I shocked myself so much with that thought that I quelled it. She did a promenade thing through the smoke and the noise. The noise quieted in my head when she walked. I had the sudden perception that she was my royalty. I would bow down to her somehow. I would do it without drawing attention to myself or to her. She cleared a path through the room and the smoke swirled in to fill the space behind her as previously. Nobody noticed her all that much except me. Majesty and control in a woman was for me a suddenly disarming sight. That, and the way she looked into my eyes as Bradley never had. She saw my eyes.

  My grandfather was dying. He took showers fully clothed. Our time here is short.

  WE’RE TALKING ABOUT an ordinary summer night in the Midwest now. In a bar. Peanuts fell to the floor. Drunk men roared with laughter. The TV was showing ESPN cars crashing and burning at the Destruction Derby. Inside my head the room grew quite still and warm. She sat down. She put her hand ever so lightly on my knee. I doubt you or anyone else in the known world would have ever noticed, her touch was that deft and soft.

  She leaned toward me grinning wickedly. The co-conspirator grin. The we-are-in-this-together-now grin. I could feel her face close to me. Feel its presence close to me. I couldn’t remember being flirted with by a woman before. Nor did I think that anyone was noticing. Here I was in the New World and no one had noticed I was gone even for a second from the Old World. How did I get here? How did it happen? Someone caught a line drive? Please. But the sequel wasn’t the sequel. It was a prelude. Just then the song she had ordered came on. It was Springsteen’s “Jersey Girl.” Now this song happens to be about a guy who persuades a single mom to leave her baby somewhere with a neighbor so that he can take her — this young mom — out to the docks. They stand out there at the docks and look at the water together and they get gooey.

  “This song is going out to Kathryn from Jenny,” Jenny whispered. She smiled her mischievous smile.

  Now if you’re asking me I would say that at that point I could’ve just taken Bradley’s hand and said Hey I’m tired of this scene, let’s go. I could’ve told him that I had work tomorrow and had to hit the hay. But at that moment I felt I had some power too. In that little bar competence and majesty were the songs she sang over in my direction. Authority radiated from her, plus this pixie impishness that was both sexual and scarily adult. She had some sort of mean blank-check knowledge of neighborhoods I’d never been to but should have seen by now. I felt girlish. I smiled back at her. And then I leaned back into Bradley. He was stroking my arm with one hand and peeling the label off his beer bottle with the other. The kind of absentmindedness I was used to. He continued to stroke my arm. I was his wifely assumption. He was still stroking my arm when I leaned forward in the other direction toward Jenny and put my lips up to her ear and whispered my phone number to her. She smelled of sweat and crushed roses and the future. The lights in the ceiling illuminated the tips of her hair. Then I leaned forward again. Again the sweat and crushed roses. Two women in baseball uniforms, one of them nervous. And told her when to call.

  I wasn’t even drunk. I had sobered up instantly. I was scared.

  At home I stayed awake all night and wondered what in the name of the living God I had just done.

  JENNY SUGGESTED THAT we drive out to an apple orchard. This was a month later. She called me and asked if I wanted to get out for an afternoon. Innocent, innocent. She picked me up in front of our local McDonald’s. I wanted a touch of anonymity and you can’t get much more anonymous than sitting inside a McDonald’s waiting for a woman to pick you up. I got in the car and said hi. I was scared but also not scared. She gave me confidence. She had girled herself up for the day. She was driving her car barefoot. A warm September, this was. Her painted toenails made a strong impression on me as they pressed on the accelerator pedal. I resisted her for a while by thinking that she was bullying me, erotically. Her clothes were carefully disordered with her blue chambray shirt slightly unbuttoned and her hair loose, and the sun drenched her side of the car.

  We talked about books, how boring they were to read but how you loved them anyway.

  A few miles out of town, geese patrolled the riverbank. I sat on the passenger side with my legs tucked under me. A couple in a canoe floated down the river. We passed a little Lutheran cemetery on the other side of the road where the headstones were all in German. Hier ruhet in Gott. A necklace of brilliant glass beads swung from Jenny’s rearview mirror: red and purple and blue. She said she used the beads for navigation. She didn’t explain how. One rose lay across the dashboard facing me. Freshly cut. Its stem was wet. She said it was mine. She said it was my rose. That I could have it. This gift was ordained.

  She told me that she was the youngest of three daughters. I asked her if she had ever loved a woman before. Loved? Loved? she asked. She smiled and laughed. Is that what we’re talking about? I thought we were talking about being a daughter.

  I got scared again. Being teased that way. But then she grinned squarely at the passenger side of the car, where I was.

  JUST OUT OF TOWN is an orchard and a cider press. We parked the car and made our way out to the orchard. There’re paths between the rows of trees for the people who come to pick the apples themselves and on one of these paths you can tramp up a hill where you are able briefly to see in all directions. The humble soft modest landscape of Michigan surrounded us with indistinct vegetation: the farmlands laid out in their green rectangular symmetries until they faded into haze, then the ever-distant water towers and sky-poking radio transmission antennas. Down below us in the orchard the trees were being mechanically shaken one by one by a motorized device that clamped the tree around the trunk and then vibrated so that the apples fell into a spread piece of rough brown burlap cloth. We watched the apples raining down in a circle and then being gathered and loaded.

  Jenny held my hand for a moment. Then she walked backward and leaned against the trunk of the tree that happened to stand there. She reached up and picked an apple and pulled it off the branch. She bit into the apple and smiled. Then she simply handed it to me. I held the apple in my hand and gazed down at the marks her teeth had made. I raised the apple to my mouth and put first my lips and then my tongue on the spot where her teeth had been. It had a familiar taste. The apple’s bright sweetness worried its way into me.

  I hardly knew her. We hadn’t talked all that much.

  Guess what, she said. I happen to know that this very tree is the very tree of life. What an amazing deal! Then she laughed and said, Come on. And then she said, You know that you and I are going to be the two best friends ever. We’ll share everything. The two of us?

  Doing what? I asked.

  Oh just being together. Having adventures, Kathryn. Kathryn and Jenny.

  STILL BAREFOOT SHE WALKED into the barn where the cider press commanded the central room. They lowered the press over a layer or two of apples enclosed in burlap and held inside a wooden frame. They crushed the apples into mash and the cider flowed out through the slats into an immense wire-mesh drain beneath the press. The guy there operating it, his body looked like a sackful of gravel. The cider poured down into a containment tank. In
the mass of details I lost my concentration because at that moment a dog happened into the room. A cocker spaniel. Jovial and harmless of course. That’s what they say. Just sniffing around the edges of the room for some doughnut crumbs. I turned quickly away from this dog. I can’t bear to be in the same room with a dog. I was on my way out.

  Until then I hadn’t noticed that the room was filled with yellow jackets and bees. They flew onto the press and made their way onto the Dixie Cups on the corner card table and to the doorway where the late afternoon sun was shining in. I thought: Oh they’re just yellow jackets. But just then Jenny cried out. She bent down. She shouldn’t have been in there barefoot anyway. We agreed on that later, when we were less dazed. She walked out onto the driveway and sat down. She put her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were squinting at nothing. They squinted as she wept.

  Stupid stupid stupid she said. To be stung in there. I am so oblivious. Good Lord it hurts. She glanced up at me. It’s just like being stabbed in the ankle with an icepick.

  Then she said, I don’t suppose you can do anything.

  Oh yes I said. Just wait here a minute.

  I ran out of the pressing room and went to the back of the barn, the shady side that faces the fields and the orchard. I checked to see if anyone was there within plain sight. Nobody was. I took the cotton bandanna out of my hair. I looked around again and lowered my jeans and my underwear and I squatted and peed a little into the cotton. Funny about what you learn in Campfire Girls. Then I hitched up and ran around again and found her and dabbed at the spot on her ankle where she’d been stung. Her skin was as red as a little cloud at dawn. After about fifteen seconds she smiled and turned that hothouse smile in my direction.

  Ah, she said, girl, it turns out that you are the life of me. What’s that miracle cure you’ve got there?

  My secret.

  I drove back. I drove her car. I didn’t let her drive. I didn’t drive to our apartment. Not to where Bradley and I lived. No. Not there. I drove to her building. Outside we sat down and talked. That was all we did. I was curious about conversation with her and the atmosphere of calm expectancy that it created. We told each other chapter-and-verse of our lives. What I’m saying is that we waited.

  For days after that, I sat on the front stoop, my own, ours. I watched the sun setting while my husband Bradley sat next to me and we shared the small talk of that particular day. And then sometimes he would go inside and I would stay out there looking toward the west as the breezes wafted through the tree (there was only one) in the front yard. I was thinking about her and about the feeling that she gave me.

  Two weeks later, after Jenny and I had done some gardening together at one of those communal gardens where you have your own section, collecting a few late-ripening tomatoes in brown paper bags we brought along, we went calmly up to her apartment. We took the tomatoes into her kitchen. I took two of them out and found a small plate and a knife, but my hand was shaking too hard for me to slice them. I put the knife down on the table and looked straight at her.

  Then she took my hand and led me to the bedroom. She told me to forget about the tomatoes for a while. In the bedroom we lay down together and we shed our calm exteriors completely and I saw her and when she asked me what I wanted, I said: I want you.

  Afterward she sang to me. What she sang was “Hail to the Victors.” She meant it as a joke and as an anthem. I learned how to do that from her. Her cat, Ralph, watched us from the dresser. I was miserable with happiness. Our souls had merged. I lay there and stared up at the string of red pepper lights attached with tiny hooks up near the molding, the ones I had bought for her, and I exchanged jealous glances with Ralph the cat who in agitation had knocked over a hairbrush, and I felt the cool autumn breeze blowing across my body and Jenny’s where our two souls were lodged, and I heard the Good Humor truck go by on the street, little glockenspiel notes.

  Then we both went back into the kitchen and, naked, finished slicing and eating the tomatoes. They were delicious, and she had made me ravenous.

  My idea was that I could save my marriage. In some respect I suppose I loved him still. Bradley took me to the Humane Society on a Sunday and we walked among the dogs as he held me, and I guess I named them individually even though I don’t remember doing so. I don’t see what importance it would have if I did do that, or if I remembered it.

  We made love several times that day and each time I came — and I did, believe me — I thought of Jenny. I thought of the flower-garden smell of her soul and how I could just reach in and find her heart any time I wanted it and of how that would be the end of my loneliness here on earth. When he was on top of me, I would hold out my hands above him in the air and imagine that I was grasping her, her invisible spirit, in the air, terrible hypocrite that I am. No, actually, that I was. I stopped being a hypocrite. It wasn’t the right time to let him know that my soul had flown out of my body and taken up householding in Jenny’s. I sang “Hail to the Victors” to him because I missed her so much. I felt strong with her and weak with him. Empty and absent.

  He said that he loved me but I don’t actually think that he did. Or maybe his love just didn’t manage to get into working order with me. By that time I had seen love in its final form. I knew what it looked like. It had freckles on its hands, the southern hemisphere on the left and the northern hemisphere on the right. And it wasn’t him. Or him with me. Or any combination of the two of us. She was flying my flag by that time.

  He said he loved me and I stayed quiet and still. He had married me. You have to remember that. He had ringed me.

  Several weeks later I told him. I told him about my beloved. His face fell in all its possible directions, my little husband Toadie, but then he composed himself and called me the only word he could think of, a lesbian. A goddamn lesbian. Well, when something hurts you, you can always find some dumb label for your accusation. Not just dumb but dumb. I picked up one of our vinyl kitchen chairs and threw it at him. It missed, by the way.

  Anyway, what I’ve just told you was what prompted the chair incident. I had grown big, and he was trying to belittle me.

  YOU THINK THAT what I’ve just told you is an anecdote. But really it isn’t. It’s my whole life. It’s the only story I have.

  FOUR

  “I FOUND KATHRYN,” I say. “You know, she wasn’t at all hard to track down. She’s listed in the phone directory. She told me all about it. She told me about Jenny and how she left you and how she threw a chair at you. I’m sorry about that chair, I guess, but it’s still a good story.”

  “Wonderful,” Bradley says. “That’s just great.” He scratches his hair. “But you should realize our marriage was a long time ago, all that stuff, her leaving me and all.” He hops up and down twice, an odd gesture. “You didn’t have to look her up, you know. You could have taken my word for it. Kind of a small-minded trick, if you ask me, finding people to bear witness to my past.” He grins at me. “Isn’t this an excellent fire?”

  Bradley had called and arranged to meet me at a benefit for the Ann Arbor fire department. They’d be burning an abandoned house — two stories, an attic, and an attached garage, he said — out in the township. The firefighters would be showing the locals how they do what they do, and there’d be a suggested donation of four dollars to help the Firemen’s fund. Now we’re standing off to the side, in a ditchlike dogleg of the dirt road bordered by poplars and junipers, watching this old firetrap farmhouse burn, as the accelerants planted in the basement explode and speed the flames along. From this distance, the fire has a festive quality. Just ahead and to my left, one fire truck, a tanker of some sort, is spewing water entertainingly through a second-floor window, while the children in the crowd cheer and run around in circles. A Dalmatian sits on another truck, looking rather smug. On the right of us, the firefighters themselves, in their yellow coveralls, are watching with academic interest as the house burns.

  “It’s a great fire,” I say to Bradley, feeling the heat on my face. �
�But as for looking up Kathryn, well, this whole thing was your idea,” I tell him. “Having everybody give me stories. Besides, the two of us, Kathryn and I, talked in your coffee shop, the one you own. It wasn’t secret or anything.”

  “Kathryn. She’s still with Jenny?”

  I nod. “She says men are really hard to love. Hard for her to love. We’re not very lovable, she says. Do I look lovable to you?”

  “I’m not answering that. You’re going to have trouble with continuity, Charlie. By the way, you know what you should do? You should talk to my employees in Jitters. They’re just kids. There’s a cross section for you. Start with this girl Chloé. She pronounces it Chloé, not Clow-ee but Clow-ay — I don’t have any idea where she gets that from. Quite a girl. Excuse me. ‘Woman,’ I suppose I should have said. She’s got a boyfriend named Oscar. Chloé and Oscar. They’re sweet kids, but I don’t think they represent anything. You won’t get them to stand as symbols of today’s youth, too bad for you.”

  I give him a look. He ignores me and keeps on talking. “They met at that fast-food place, Dr. Enchilada’s. She quit that job. She said she went home smelling of guacamole and that the karma was bad. The karma was bad! Really, you should talk to her. Incidentally, while we’re on the subject, you should stop talking to me. This is getting much too personal. But as long as you’re collecting stories, did I ever explain to you how I got the dog back?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to think this is funny. I know you. It’ll make you chuckle. But it wasn’t funny at all. It’s a comic story, just not comic to me.”

  MY SISTER AGATHA lives north of here, in Five Oaks. You’ve been there, I believe. She’s married to a guy named Harold, who happens to be a barber. A really incompetent barber, by the way, just as a barber, though he’s a nice guy in other respects, nice enough, anyhow, for what his daily life requires. “Nice” isn’t much of a virtue, though; kindness and mildness aren’t on the map anymore, not these days. They’re trivial. As it happens, Harold learned how to cut hair when he was in the Army. Certainly that could explain it. His father was a security guard, worked for Brinks. You let Harold cut your hair and you’ll emerge smelling of Clubman and looking like Boris Karloff out for a night on the town.