The Feast of Love (21 page)

“I will.” I stopped at the door. “Mrs. Maggaroulian,” I said, “are you really a girl?”

She didn’t even look up. “No, dear,” she said, sniffing. “I am a lady.”

WHEN I CAME INTO
the apartment, Oscar was all over the bed, half-asleep after his exertions and his shower and his beers. He had the TV on to baseball, and his eyes were closed, and I figured, worst-case scenario, that he was dead. So I took my shoes off and I put the two cheeseburgers and the big thing of French fries on the kitchen table, and I went running over to where he was, and I gave him a good shake. And, just like that — presto — his eyes open.

“Hey, Chloé,” he says, “whassup?”

I’m straddling him, and shaking him, and he smiles at me. “How was basketball?” I ask.

“Great,” he says. “Man, I was so hot, I was like an action figure. Hey, I see you took the car. Wheredja go?”

“Ypsi,” I said. “I went to a psychic. Mrs. Maggaroulian. I wanted to find some things out.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Cool. What’d she say?”

And that’s when I took a deep breath, and I looked down at Oscar, and I said, “Oscar, I’ve got this idea. Don’t get mad at me, okay?”

“Naw,” Oscar says, “I wouldn’t get mad. What’s your idea?”

“Well,” I say, “I know it’s early and all, and maybe we should go slow and everything, and I know that girls aren’t supposed to say this, but after talking to Mrs. Maggaroulian I’ve been thinking that maybe I should. I mean, this is going to sound real weird, ’cause here it is Saturday afternoon . . . anyway, what I was wondering was, Oscar, maybe we should get married. Oscar, would you marry me?”

And Oscar, who’s said that he loves me about a thousand times in the last week alone, he doesn’t even stop to think about it, he just sits up a little in bed, and he says, “Oh,
yeah.”
Just that, “Oh,
yeah.”
Like it’s a great idea that he hadn’t thought of recently, but should have. Then he says, “That’s a real cool idea, Chloé. You and me married. Like I’d be your husband, and you’d be my wife, right? Wow. I’d
like
to do that.”

Some things you think can’t ever happen, and then they do.

I gave him the hugest kiss he’d ever had, and then I went over and got the bag, and we did a four-alarm fuck, and afterward I fed him the cheeseburgers, both of them, his and mine too, from my hand to his mouth, bite after bite after bite after bite after bite.

YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE?
I hate it when someone turns to me and says, “What’re you thinking, Bradley? Tell me. What’re you
thinking?”
Well, no. If it’s a-penny-for-your-thought time, here’s your penny back. Because, first of all, it’s private, whatever my thoughts are — and don’t think I’ll tell
you
all my thoughts, either — but secondly, most of the time I don’t, in the way of things,
have
any thoughts. There aren’t any
thoughts,
per se, is what I’m saying. Day after day it’s a long hallway up there, just a yard sale, interrupted with random images of my paintings, or my dog, or the coffee store, or memories, or a woman, her face or her body or something she said, all of it in free fall through the synapses.

And I don’t care if I’m mixing my metaphors. This is my second marriage I’m talking about now. I can damn well mix my metaphors on that marriage if I want to. I’ve got my rights.

The reason I say all this is that I couldn’t stop asking Diana what
she
was thinking. We’d be somewhere, like a restaurant, before or during our engagement, and she’d drop into these states, staring off into space or down at the breadsticks in the glass container. Then she’d look at the butter plate or the hors d’oeuvres instead of at me. And I just knew she was carrying on a serious conversation with herself. You could all but see her lips moving.

So I’d say, “Hey, Diana. What’re you thinking?”

She’d smile, suddenly. She’d sort of pick at her engagement ring. “Nothing.” As if she had been recalled to Earth from some asteroid belt or other. “Nothing. Why do you ask, Bradley?”

When they — women — are serious about you, they’ll use your full name.
Bradley.
“You just looked deep in thought, that’s all.”

“I’m thinking about us,” she’d say, and reach for my hand. Another big smile, like a smile you’d do for a flashbulb, a smile like arriving in France after seven cramped hours on the plane, that’s what she’d give me. But those smiles of hers didn’t even have a half-life. They were on her face, optically illusional, and then they’d be gone so quickly you couldn’t be sure you’d seen them at all.

She’d go absent without leave at meals, she’d go absent in the car, and she’d go absent after our lovemaking. She looked like a woman gazing out from the railing of a cruise ship toward an island of some sort, and her bangs would fall over her eyebrows while her feet twitched in time to an interior melody. She was a great one for examining the ceiling. The molding fascinated her. Lying beside me, she could carry off her fleshly existence away from me, but, after a moment, she couldn’t. I mean, my God, I was so in love with her that I almost didn’t notice. I thought I was made of plutonium, I was that powerful. Radioactive Man. I would imagine Diana walking toward me, looking at me with
recognition —
I am your woman, you are my man, we are mated — and I’d think: How did I get this lucky? Not that I’m selling myself short.

Other men envied me, I was sure. I longed for her. I looked forward to her, not to her sweetness, because she didn’t have any of that, but to her acids and spices, the way she made me feel more alive. To hear Diana talking or to kiss her, to wake up beside her, you’d just know, I mean any man in his right mind would know, that she was a goddess, and not one of those New Age goddesses either, but one of the old ones, the genuine kind of goddess, the sort they don’t make anymore, with lightning coming out of her eyes. She filled my eyes with her beauty; her eyes put me on trial.

I mean, Diana was a handful, but after one of our largish moments she would lie in a still, solemn posture while her feet beat in time to her inaudible music and her fingers touched my ribs like a fretboard, and she would stare off ceilingward, as if . . . well, it was then that I’d ask her what she was thinking, and she’d turn to me and give me a flashbulb smile, and she’d say, “I’m thinking about you, honey.”

And I didn’t know whether that was good news or bad, given the fact that she was almost frowning, and her lower lip beginning to stick out, pouty, as if she were reading poetry or something like that that’s more trouble to figure out than it’s worth. I didn’t really want to know what she was thinking after such moments. I just kept that door shut. Bluebeard kept one of his castle doors shut too. Well, I said to myself: she’s a lawyer, and she’s contemplating her next case.

At our wedding, which was not at a church, because she and I didn’t believe in anything that large, but which occurred in the expansive back yard of a reception hall near the Saline River, she had said, “I do,” with considerable force. We were under a large white canopy and there would be dancing afterward. But she had seemed almost surprised when at the conclusion of the ceremony I leaned down to kiss her, the way you do when the ritual is finished. She was made light-headed by my kiss, the fact of it. You could tell from the way she looked at me. Her eyes grew wide and she seemed frightened for a split second as my lips attached themselves to hers. She said later that she had been studying the pattern of the woodwork in the bandstand and had been distracted. Distracted? At our wedding? For the kiss? I used to think that technically the wedding doesn’t happen unless you kiss each other.

After the kiss, though, she remembered to smile. She could be polite. And following the reception, we had a horse-drawn carriage take us to the motel. The carriage was antique-elegant, with inlaid wood though it had a wet bar inside, and a TV, and as we got into it, we were pelted with rice and flowers by her lawyer friends and my artist-and-coffee friends, and by our parents and relatives and hangers-on. Chloé and Oscar were there in thrift-shop formal attire, and they threw flowers at us, too. My sister Agatha was there, and Harold, and my nephews, my friends, and my father and mother, and some of Diana’s friends including an old boyfriend of hers named David, whom I didn’t exactly get to meet, not then.

The sun was out, not a cloud in the sky. The driver wore a top hat. This was unlike my first wedding to Kathryn, which took place in city hall, where people do not typically wear costumes. We clip-clopped away from the reception hall, and I kissed Diana again, and she didn’t seem so surprised this time. The horse smelled of straw and oats, I remember.

My best man had said, long before this,
You may end up like the happiest man on Earth, old Buddy, or you may end up like someone on daytime television.

During the first night, after we had made love as man and wife, as wedded partners, instead of just lovers, Diana said, “Bradley, you’re such a nice guy,” as she drifted off to sleep. I thought: Well, I’ll take my compliments where I can get them, but “nice” is not what a man wants to hear under these particular circumstances. I mean, she had nothing to complain about. I had satisfied her. She
looked
satisfied. We had groaned together during our lovemaking. But “nice”? When you make love to a goddess, you want a fierce compliment. Or speechlessness. Speechlessness will do just fine.

DIANA’S AGORAPHOBIA PRESENTED
a bit of a problem as regards the honeymoon.

Her idea had been that we should remain in Ann Arbor and perhaps, as a kind of respite from ordinary life, stay in different motels and hotels around town for a week or two. We could laze in lounge chairs near the indoor pools and order vast crazy meals complete with champagne from room service, if there happened to be room service. We would make love a lot and metaphorically cement ourselves together. We would go to movies if we felt like it. Despite its attractions, however, I found this entire prospect unappealing. It lacked, I don’t know, the charisma of the exotic.

She didn’t like open spaces at all, and she didn’t care for locales she’d never been to before. She did not like to travel and did not care for airplanes, except when her legal business required rapid transit. Nevertheless, I suggested that we drive to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and spend our honeymoon at a bed-and-breakfast on Lake Gogebic, near the Porcupine Mountains. Eventually I wore her down. I asserted myself, and she shrugged — Jesus, she had a beautiful shrug — and agreed. I’d been to this B&B, the Porcupine Inn, before, alone, and thought she’d like the vistas. We held hands as we talked about what we’d do there.

We boarded Bradley at a kennel. Chloé and Oscar would mind the store. Harry Ginsberg said he’d keep an eye on the house. Diana hadn’t sold her house. She had rented it out.

I suspected that we were in for trouble when we began to cross the Mackinac Bridge. Diana began to breathe hard, and she put her hand to her face and smoothed her eyebrows. I shouldn’t say this about my ex-wife, but she farted, I’m not kidding, out of sheer fright. The sky and the bridge and the water far below her were oddly and intensely
incorrect
to her at that moment, or so she reported. You can’t see much from up on that bridge except the infinity of fresh water and some uncommonly distant islands. Spatial malevolence. She felt this wrongness surrounding her and ganging up against her. The empty air was unpleasantly interested in her. Funny to find this phobia in a woman so strong in other ways. I turned the radio on, thinking it would help, but the radio was tuned to an oldies station, and the first line out of the speakers was, “Well, I would not give you false hope, on this strange and mournful day . . .” and of course Diana reached down and snapped off
that
song.

It’s not unusual for people to go phobic on that bridge. Sometimes they just stop the car at one end and have to be escorted, or driven, to the other side. We made it intact to St. Ignace, the first town you meet up with in the Upper Peninsula, but her episode of horizon panic had established a bad precedent.

MOST HUMAN BEINGS
have never been to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It retains its somewhat mysterious origins. Cartographers have mapped it, all right, but there are places up there where visitors have been maybe once or twice but never returned, because they didn’t want to return, and never would want to. I’m not talking about Marquette, where they filmed
Anatomy of a Murder,
but places like Matchwood, where there’s a busted American Motors dealer sign standing near an abandoned farmhouse, and not another habitation for miles, and large fields where they gave up farming years ago, and dense forests filled with trees — I do not exaggerate — of a kind you never saw before, probably hybrid trees resulting from the mating, it could be, of white pines and willow trees, grafted together out of sheer loneliness. I mean, these are odd-looking trees, barbaric and sad, and there are entire forests of them growing unobserved and unlabeled up there.

For the tourists, there are little tiny zoos scattered just off the main highways, with animals tucked away inside cages the size of carry-on suitcases, and other visitor attractions, like mystery spots and restaurants where they make pasties that the locals eat. You drive across this expanse of peculiarity as all the radio stations fade, all of them, Brahms and the Ronettes and Toad the Wet Sprocket and Hank Williams, and you start to wonder what got into you, that you brought your brand-new wife up here, the goddess whose scary wondrous beauty put you on trial. The broad open vistas fill you with second thoughts bordering on consternation. When you get to the waterfalls, you have to pay to see them; you have to pay a guy chewing a toothpick who somehow managed to buy the whole goddamn waterfall and is now going to sell you the view.

As we crossed the Upper Peninsula, Diana and I tried to be cheerful — we were both wearing jaunty hats and sending postcards to our friends every seventy miles or so — but by the time we reached Lake Gogebic, the distant aroma of a mistake was in the air, and it was my mistake, and it seemed to be going in several different directions at once. But after we unpacked at the B&B and tried out the bed, my spirits improved. We had an upstairs room filled with interior decoration antique bric-a-brac, and a bed close by a window just to the left of the headboard, and some cut flowers there on the bedside table, next to a simpering porcelain tabby cat. The window’s glass was flawed and antique, so that the lake outside asserted itself in several visual dimensions, several different geometrical planes.