The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [69]
FOURTEEN
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