The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [59]
As I did that, we talked about our usual news, but somehow I didn’t get around, at least not right away, to telling him about Bradley’s proposal and my acceptance of it. After the soup and the wine, we went into my bedroom where he kissed me and undressed me, unsnapping my skirt smartly and kneeling before me, slowly lowering my underwear. He liked to get on his knees before me while I was still standing, doing homage to me. He would put his arms around me, kissing me, and then he would hold his face against my abdomen, and I would feel the nubs of his beard, and I would sigh with pleasure. He made me, I have to admit it, weak in the knees. After that, I took off his clothes. I noticed his body a bit more this time, caring for it, appreciating its musculature. I saw his reflection in the dresser’s mirror, on whose side I had lodged Bradley’s drawing of me riding the dragon.
David and I made love at some length. While we were engaged in this activity, I continued to study him, between gasps, the way you’d study a habit you’re about to give up. This man, this particular one: all his adult physical features, all of them manfully occupied, not one of them boyish. Boyishness was not his style. We bucked and buckled and fought and ground ourselves into each other. First we made love — the quiet tenderness of it — and then we fucked brutally and mindlessly and then we went back to making love and then that lapsed into fucking again. He brought out a thing, a beast in me I hadn’t known I had, and it always surprised me to see it, to see her as me. For the first time in my life it occurred to me that a guy who is really, really good at making love to a woman, the same woman, and who is inventively and exceptionally good at it time after time, who is carefully brutal at some moments and solicitous at others, who knows her sweet spots and concentrates on them and seems to be worshipping her body and is keen on driving her to a sweet distraction every time, is not someone to be ignored or otherwise taken for granted or dismissed on minor charges, even as a lover, a recreational human.
When we were done, I inhaled and smelled the rank and honeyed odor of our brute sexual heat, which, that evening, made me feel nostalgic for us, for the two of us. I cut it off, that nostalgia, but it kept seeping back.
After a rest, I was kissing him on his flat gorgeous stomach, seasoned with small hairs, letting my own hair tickle him, and moving downward toward where the smell was strongest. It was then that I looked up at him and said, “You know what, David? Bradley proposed.”
He nodded. He knew all about Bradley. Apparently he had never taken him seriously. He had his fingers in my hair, my aggressive attitudinizing hair. He frowned. “Your artist? What did you say to him, Diana?” He waited as if he were actually curious. “What did you say in response? To his question?”
“I said yes.”
There was a long silence after that, during which he kept his fingers in my hair, stroking my scalp. I was still kissing him, more as a delay to the next stage of whatever we would do or say to each other.
“You did, eh? Well.” He leaned his head back. He was quiet. Sounds of the crickets came into the room, and the music from the CD player, Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” and the occasional car passing by on the street. “That’s interesting. So you said yes.” Then he said, a bit more querulously now, his face disagreeably restive, “Well, Diana. You agreed to marry him?” He was alert. He was quickening. “You actually did that?”
“Yup. That’s right,” I said.
“You are going to marry him. No kidding. Jesus, you’re mean. You’re doing this as a little prank. This is the joker side of you. But you know, you’re going to wither him right away. Honey, you are going to eat him alive. You do that to the nice ones, and I know that because you have