Читать книгу The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter - Страница 10

“DID HE TELL YOU about the dogs?”

“Well, yes. He did.”

“And he said that I was afraid of dogs and that he drove me to the Humane Society?”

“That was the gist of it.”

“Did he make fun of me?”

“Oh no, Kathryn, he didn’t. Certainly not. No—he didn’t do anything like that at all.”

“Well, you wouldn’t tell me if he had. Anything else? Did he tell you anything else about us?”

“He said you two were broke in those days. You worked in a library part-time. He said that you gave names to the dogs, the ones at the Humane Society. You named the dogs one by one, he said. The way he described it, what you did sounded like a blessing.”

“He told you that? I don’t remember naming anybody or anything. I believe that he may have imagined the entire episode. We did go to the Humane Society once. I do remember all those animals. The barking. But I think we just walked in and then walked out without anything like an event, any sort of story, happening there. We had both been at the Botanical Gardens and we heard the dogs making a ruckus nearby, and we went over to investigate. The rest is probably imaginary. I’m certain he made it up.”

“I suppose he might have,” I tell her.

“This is all so weird,” she says. “Your calling me out of the blue and asking me about some encounter that Bradley and I had years ago. Aren’t those matters personal? I think maybe they should be. I realize that nothing stays hidden anymore but I’d still like to keep a few domestic particulars private. Especially when it comes to my love life. Such as it is. I can’t imagine why anybody else would be interested in who I love or how I loved them.”

“Oh, everyone’s interested in that. Besides, I’d change your name. You could retain your privacy.”

“That’s not quite what I’m getting at,” she says. “My marriage with him failed. So it’s not a matter of pride exactly. I switched partners, but doing that is very difficult and taxing in ways you don’t anticipate. Especially when you do it the way I did. It changes your views of yourself and who you are. You said you’re a writer. Have you ever read Schnitzler’s La Ronde?”

“Yes, sure.”

“Then you remember what it’s about. Changing partners. You should reread it. I acted in it once when I was a sophomore.” She waits for a moment, as if imagining it. “I played a housemaid. There was a pantomime lovemaking scene on stage between me and ‘the young gentleman.’ That was fun.”

“Well, maybe you have a story of your own,” I suggest. “About what happened to you.”

“I have lots of stories,” she says. “But they’re not the sort you give away, you know … and I don’t tell them to just anybody. What did you say your name was again?”

I tell her.

“I honestly don’t remember ever meeting you. I’ve never heard of you. Did we ever meet? And this is for a book you’re writing, Charlie?”

“Sort of.”

“You aren’t going to post this whole deal on the Internet, are you?”

“No.”

“Thank God. Who are you anyway? Could you please explain that again, that who-you-are thing?”

I try to spell out to her who I am. It’s not easy, summarizing yourself on the telephone to a stranger. Before I’m finished, she breaks in. “All right. I think I get the idea,” she says. “Okay. That’s enough. You want a story? I’ll give you one. But then you have to promise me not to bother me anymore. Are you writing this down?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. The thing is, you’re appealing to my vanity. I suppose I always wanted to appear in someone’s book, and I guess this is my chance. I can be a literary entity. Up there with Mrs. Danvers and Huck Finn and imaginary people like that. But you’ll just have to understand that I’ll only do this once. Then you can’t call me again. I’m going to check on you before I talk to you again to make sure that you really are who you say you are. A woman in my position has to be careful. To start with, I don’t remember you from my Bradley days. You could be anybody.”

“Of course. That’s right. I could be anybody.”

“But if you check out, this is where I’ll meet you.” And she gives me the name of the coffee shop where Bradley is the manager, Jitters, and she also gives me a time.

When I get there, I am served by a woman whose name tag identifies her as Chloé. Kathryn orders a café latte, sizes me up, then begins to speak.

CHARLIE, I’LL START with a generalization here that maybe only applies to me. Maybe. Please don’t be too offended. I always found it a challenge to love men. At first I just thought I had to, that I had no choice. I thought that men in general—I’d really rather not say this—were unlovable. But I mean, look at them. If you’re a man you probably may not realize how they are. Amazing when any woman can stay married to one of them. Most of the ones I’ve known are bossy, or passive and obsessive, the men I mean, and after the age of twenty-five or so they are by most standards not beautiful. If one of them happens to be easy on the eyes, he gets hired by the photogenic industry. Beauty is not part of the show they do, most of the ones I’ve known. So you have to cross that off the list of accountables right away. And you’re left with their behavior.

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?”

He looked at me. “The stars,” he said. “The stars are so beautiful.”

“The stars at night?” I asked.

“What other stars are there?”

I took his hand and led him out of the shower and took his clothes off and toweled him dry and into his pajamas. Then I went downstairs and told the attendants that they would have to take better care of my grandfather, that they would have to watch him more closely.

BUT BACK TO BRADLEY. In those days he had an idea that he was a painter. Of course he was a painter. That’s not what I mean. He labored as a house painter but his real love consisted of a variety of sly and very odd expressionism on canvas. He became proficient at it. He understood the ironies of his existence, painting houses during the day and making eerie images at night. When you’re as young as we were you have a strong sense of the pranks of fate. He had to prove that he could be a real painter and not a pretender, just the way that a lot of men feel they have to prove they’re real men. I’ve never known what that was about. I don’t think that most women have to prove that they’re real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

Bradley comes on as a know-nothing but he really admired artists like Diebenkorn and Jennifer Bartlett and Hockney and all the other painters who knew how to use a light luminescent blue. He loved representational art that was full of problems you couldn’t solve just by looking. He loved stylization and stasis and pale pastel color, color that appeared to be temporary or about to fade, colors that might be in danger of becoming obsolete any minute now, blues that were endangered and inadequate. Did he mention that? Probably not. Because he had sold so few of his own works, he grew killingly modest. The more representational his art was, the more abstract he became. You couldn’t find him anywhere. He turned himself into the greatest abstraction.

As for his paintings, they filled up all the space we had. It was really tricky for me to adjust my attitude toward his accomplishments because I really wasn’t sure whether his work’s self-consciousness was intelligent or just gawky and shy. He had given up hyperrealism and had gone in for social commentary in faded hues. I remember that he splashed Tip of the Andes coffee on one of his canvases as a judgment against the proliferation of big coffeehouses like Starbucks, but how would you ever know that unless he told you, since the painting was of a window? All his canvases required an explanation or a commentary. They accumulated in the house. They even occupied the bathroom. And his art took up most of his free time. So when he was painting I found other diversions.

I had squeezed in some soffball as my one evening sport. I’m a bit of a jock. As a girl I swam constantly and played basketball when I could. I used to love to watch gymnastics. I would rather watch the women gymnasts than the men. I would rather watch women playing basketball than guys. When sports are played by women it speaks directly to my condition. I like to watch their fierceness and the animal pride of female physical movement.

Our softball team was doing pretty well that particular summer. We were blowing everybody else into the ash can. That week—the one I’m telling you about—we had this night game with the Brackner Buick Devils. They were another women’s team and supposedly our rivals. What I liked was simply getting out on the field under the lights during those summer evenings, playing the game, watching the evening come down to earth, the moths flittering in front of the floodlights. I was psyched for it. I had let Bradley know how much the game meant to me.

So on this occasion it was the bottom of the eighth inning. We were ahead, five to four. Bradley sat in the stands watching. He cast his husbandly gaze on me and maybe paid more attention to me as a Softball player than as his wife and lover. He had a curious budget of attention, Bradley did, maybe it was the painter in him, maybe he thought of Softball diamonds as geometrical abstractions. I was up to bat. Their pitcher was throwing some skillful stuff and they were concentrating hard in the infield and I could hear Bradley from the stands clapping and encouraging me. That was sweet. Give him credit. I had my patient husband the Toad in my corner. So I thought I’d show them, and on her next pitch I connected with what I thought was a line drive.

Their shortstop was a sort of lanky woman. She had that specific appearance of physical confidence as if she never thought twice about making a move before making it. All her moves were ones she did purposefully. First thought, best thought. She did them quickly. Body and mind together. It was certainly beautiful to watch. As an athlete she had no hesitation of the kind that sometimes hobbled me. After my hit, I was two steps off for first base when she ran backward and leaped to her left for the ball. She extended herself and went airborne and caught the ball smack in her glove. Thmp. My line drive.

I was out. I was absolutely out and out. What she had done was there and then the most amazing physical move I had seen for I don’t know how long, in its concentration and certainty and grace. Most people would have been crushed that they were put out in a game that close. Not me. Not that time. I am telling you it was heart-stopping. To watch that goddess in her ponytail doing that one leap caused me to halt in my tracks. I was almost irrelevant to what she did. I did the hit. She did the move on it. She had conviction. God, I loved that. So I stood there like a waxwork. I stayed right on that spot halfway between home and first base. They could have put me into Madame Tussaud’s, I was so unmoving. She got up from the ground and dusted herself off. She rubbed her forehead with her forearm. She held the glove up and then threw the ball to the pitcher. She smiled at her teammates and girl-whooped the way you do when you’re the champ of one particular action that you can do in front of other people. Then she smiled at me.

If a guy did that smile to another guy it might be a challenge to him and an insult. But not hers. Not her spun-steel-and-stardust smile. She was displaying what she could do for me. A very pleasing and smiling woman. And I thought: this certainly ain’t your regular sort of day. Or your regular sort of game either. Because that night with the moths clustering in front of the lights, when she smiled at me I felt that smile go down through me and out the other side. Some sort of competitive drive in me gave way to something else. As if I was transparent. A burning. Permeable to her smile.

We ended up losing that game. Six to five. Even while it was happening the game was already a quickly fading memory. Losing. Winning. Who cared? Because by that time I was watching her stealthily. I was trying to recover that moment by sheer willpower.

AFTERWARD THEIR TEAM and our team went out for beers at the King’s Armor Bar. As it turned out her name was Jenny. I’d seen her before. She worked as a meter maid. Almost like a song: Lovely Jenny, meter maid. Pitchers of beer circulated all around the table. I was the pretty woman in a baseball uniform sitting with her husband and surrounded by other girl-jocks. We were smoking and laughing and consuming the beer. I was being cool. My husband—Bradley—was scrunched up against my left side where I could lean into him and he was talking to the other husbands and boyfriends and girlfriends who happened to be stringing along. Jenny the meter maid had taken a seat on my right. I had not the slightest clue what I was going to do next. Except for my involuntary stomach flips it might have been any night at all. I was ignoring the stomach flips.

Peanut shells all over the floor. Smoke everywhere. Hubcaps decorating the walls. The cap-gun clang and bonk of pinball machines. People saying “Fuck” every five seconds and then laughing haw haw haw after they pour beer down themselves.

After all, I was just married. Some women never even get that far. The wedding ring felt new on my finger. That little diamond? I could still feel it planted against my skin all the time. When you’ve got it there for the first few months it feels a little bit like a gender award that you can carry around and display. It has clout. My ring—outside the mitt—broadcast its glitter as if I had just won it in a small-town raffle, the only prize most women get. He had gazed at me fixedly for hours on end and then he had just made me princess of some personal half-secret kingdom. Look, I could say. I am very young but singularly acclaimed. This absentminded man, he’s mortgaged his life to me. On me Bradley’s pale light has fallen. I’m subject voluntarily to his gaze from here on. It’s happy-ever-after time.

She sat on my other side. She had freckles in star-field patterns on the back of her hands, different patterns for each hand. On her right cheek was an odd dimple that appeared whenever she frowned, a dimple to break your heart. Her hair was mostly brownish but with a streak of something blond running through it to punctuate it. Up close I could see her eyes more closely, brown with a tiny flaw of blue in the right one. She was small-breasted like so many athletic girls and she held her shoulders together as if she were cold. She leaned forward and encouraged me to talk about anything. It was odd: she felt like the sun to me. I glanced down and saw Cassiopeia’s chair in the freckles on her left hand.

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.

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.