The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [62]
“You’re not dressed.”
“I have my shorts on. Besides, do you think I give a flying fuck about the neighbors?”
He crossed the kitchen, past the vase where his cut flowers — gladioli this time — were arranged on the breakfast table, there in the alcove, and then he stomped out toward the back entryway. As quickly as I could, I put on a bathrobe and ran out to see where he’d gone. I couldn’t see him. In the living room, the CD player, rotating its carousel selections, had gotten around to the Miles Davis we had carefully timed for background to postcoital murmuring, Sketches of Spain. But no David in sight.
I put my face to the window and tried to see him. Oddly, for a moment Bradley’s word desolation returned to me as I raised my hand to the side of my face and stared out into the darkness. Night birds and crickets chirped away madly.
The house I own is a large one, and I have an ample front yard with azaleas planted on the north side, and when I put my hands to the sides of my head to blank out the light, I could see him squatting in the back under a tree, in his underwear, pulling out random clumps of grass with his right hand as he swigged at a beer, which he must have found somewhere in the refrigerator. He was talking to himself, a novelty David-thing, absolutely new and unseen before by me, though I couldn’t be absolutely sure what he was doing in that dim light aside from being actively upset with me. The face, though, was the classic male crying face even if there happened to be no tears on it. The son of a bitch loved me, and he had never told me about it. He was so rigorous.
He dropped the beer can and the grass he had pulled out and started to walk toward the garage. When he came around to the front again, he was buck naked. In his grief he had taken off his boxer shorts. God knows what he did with them. Thrown them up into a tree, maybe. He was in a state of erotic semicomic despair. At last he had well and truly surprised me. I was dumbstruck, and I was thinking of the nearest phone, but all David did was to come inside and return to the bedroom and slowly and almost shyly put on his beautifully tailored clothes, item by item, carefully, though of course without the boxer shorts. I wondered what he would tell his wife about their absence, but maybe she would be asleep when he came in, oblivious in her dreams. Maybe she never noticed what he wore. He attached his cuff links: David. If he lost his composure quickly and violently, he recovered it just as quickly. There’s that particular man for you.
I had followed him into the room. My face stung. “David,” I said. “This doesn’t mean —”
“ — You shouldn’t marry someone you don’t love,” he said, his back to me. “Oh sweetie, it’s a soul-error.” He waited. He stared at the dragon drawing on my dresser mirror. “Yeah, and see if I’m right. Hey, where’s that famous coffee of yours? The cup I asked for? Again and again and again? You never made it, did you? You couldn’t bring yourself to do that, could you, for my sake? That little thing. Well, too late now.”
And those were the last words I heard from him until after Bradley and I were married, when David and I started up our relationship once more. I was the one who called him. I was the initiator. Then he called me. Before too long, we were back to where