The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [72]
“Look,” I said, pointing outside. Early evening, and the sun had given the lake a golden tint, the kind you see in bad paintings and bad movies, though this, I should quickly add, had been a good day and not a cheap imitation of a good day. She raised herself in the bed and lay across me, so that her breasts brushed against me. I was sitting there, propped up against the pillows and the headboard, reading a local tourist guidebook. It was so friendly and so erotic at the same time, Diana draped in that manner over me. And I thought: this is what marriage should be, this intimacy, eros and friendship, Diana and me, exciting and calm.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Very beautiful.” She just rested there, stretched across me, gazing languidly out through the window, elbows on the bed next to my legs, and I looked down at her back and felt like touching each one of the bumps of her spine consecutively. I traced designs on her back. I drew, with my finger, a dragon rising out of the valley above her waist and flaring upward with powerful wings toward her shoulders. “What’re you doing?” she asked.
“I’m drawing a dragon.”
“Hmmm. Tell me when you’re finished.”
I drew some scales on its sides, and some fire from its mouth. She was giving me pleasure as I drew it, so I slowed down my draftsmanship. “I’m done,” I said, after a minute or two.
She turned over. I cradled her head in my right hand. I put my left hand placidly on her rib cage and then on her breast. She gazed up at me. We were loving and familiar. “You’re so sweet,” she said. “Tell me you love me.”
“I love you, Diana,” I said. “I love you very much.” The truth was easy for me to say.
She smiled. “Yes, that was nice,” she said. “You know, I love you, too. What do you love about me, Bradley? Really?”
“How beautiful and smart you are,” I said. With my thumb I twirled her hair. “I love that. I don’t know,” I said. “It’s like love doesn’t have any reason. I can’t stop looking at you.” My voice had dropped to a hoarse murmur. “I go to sleep with your image in my head, and when I wake up, it’s still there. I think you’re a goddess,” I said, meaning it. My cock had stayed up, and the way we were positioned, she could probably feel it beneath her, tickling her back, right where I had drawn that dragon. “Why do you love me?” I asked, still in a whisper, a little frightened by the way she might answer. We’d never had this discussion before.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know?”
“You’re a better person than I am.”
“You love me for that?”
“Bradley, I don’t think people should talk about these things.”
“Why not?”
“Some matters you shouldn’t verbalize. I mean really, Bradley” — and here she raised her hand and caressed my cheek — “all this love business is just nature’s way of getting more babies into the world. The rest of it is just all this romance nonsense.” She struggled for the word. “The rest of it is just superstructure.”
“Well, maybe. But what if,” I said, still gazing at her, with her sly sexy smile like a little dawn on her face, “what if the love we feel, what if it’s central, what if it’s what makes the world’s soul possible, what if it’s what made the world and keeps it running, and the babies, the babies are also a product of that, our soul-making, not the only product, but . . .”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “You’re so weird and metaphysical. For a coffee guy.”
“About what?”
“That you would say that. That you would say that love isn’t just a necessity for . . . biology.” I had my hand cupped around her breast, and she had her hand on my cheek, and we were having an argument, though it was still sounding like love talk. “Bradley, what are we going to do here?