The Feast of Love (6 page)

Jenny and I did a conversational dance, something very formal. She didn’t say anything about her leaping catch. She was talking about her cat instead. She had a calico cat named Ralph with urinary tract problems. She went on about this cat. Women often do. It’s polite to listen. I don’t like cats much but I listened to her talk about this cat Ralph and I hung on every word. She got the cat at the Humane Society, by the way. You might be interested in that literary coincidence. By listening to the stories of the cat I learned that she lived by herself in a sort of spare apartment on the north side. One of those apartments decorated with line-strings of plastic hot peppers up near the molding to provide cheer. I was imagining it. She kept her radio tuned to the jazz station. Too much traffic noise in her neighborhood made it hard to sleep.
Hard to sleep.
She said she tossed and turned. Uh-huh. I see. It would be sad to be alone in that bed with the ionizer buzzing in the corner.

And I was thinking: Oh, this is a wonderful moment. I have a new woman friend and I can talk to her about anything, by which I mean all the subjects that Bradley never managed to pay any attention to.

In the bar she was still lanky. Big feet. Long legs. And they all moved in a pleasing languid dramatic graceful performance. As if her body also were busy having a conversation. First it talked to itself and then it talked politely to me. Beneath that politeness glided schools of fish.

I told her that Bradley and I had just been married and that we lived in a basement apartment just as spare as hers, except for his paintings. She appeared to be quite interested in Bradley and so I told her about his work and his art and the jobs we did. She yelled across me to say hi to him, and they shook hands over my lap. Then I explained again about our apartment. Ours was just as spare and empty as hers, I repeated without thinking why. For some reason we got on the subject of female medicine and I gave her the name of my gynecologist, Dr. Moosbrugger. I said I worked a couple of dumb jobs. She listened to me as if every time I made a commonplace observation it was the most noteworthy event of the day. We talked about cloning, hair dye, and personal web sites. As if we were two musicians, we kept striking chords. I don’t know how else to say it. She leaned forward toward me. She laughed and nodded. For the first time in my life I felt myself hanging on to somebody’s words, hanging on for dear life. By her expression, you could tell that she hung likewise on mine. Tightrope hanging, as we reached for each other’s hearts.

You don’t know that you’ve crossed a border until you’re over on the other side. At that point you see where you’ve got yourself to and whether you’re done for or not. Plenty of friendships have a latent erotic component. But before I had even quite realized that I was attracted to her — well, I knew I was because I wanted to be more like her than I was like myself — the old terrible magic coalesced into the air, and I realized with a sort of shock what I wanted to do. Dear God, I wanted to put my hands on her as a trial, just as a test. I wanted to put a hand on her face or on her arm because I thought that if I did that, I would be so happy. I just wanted to feel her skin but of course I wanted to feel the muscle beneath her skin and I wanted to get at the soul underneath that muscle because I could smell it. I had never gotten a whiff of Bradley’s soul and at that moment at the table in the King’s Armor I had a flash that I never would. The menu of sensations in this post-softball evening was mostly new to me. But at that table I could smell her soul and I wanted it. She being a woman, et cetera, it was scary. But it was uplifting too. That’s what you have to know.

When she laughed she opened her mouth and I saw her teeth. Well, now, and hello. I had a new thought:
I love those teeth.
Never in my life have I felt so private to myself with those feelings banging around in my skull. They were white and straight, those teeth, and I thought of a line of French poetry I had learned in junior high:
God, how good it is to look upon her.
I can’t remember the original, only the translation. I shuddered with the excitement and fear of it. I was inventing each moment as it arrived as if I were in a car shooting down the side of a mountain without brakes.

I also felt as if I had been shot. That’s how strong it was. Or maybe punched. Poor Bradley, he had no idea what was happening to me. Poor me also.

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.