The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [74]
“I heard something,” she said. “Also, I think we’re lost.”
I told her that we weren’t lost, that my map said that a road existed on the other side of the ridge ahead of us. She shrugged — God, I loved that! — and agreed to follow me.
As we were walking on the path I saw a small bronze engraved plaque that someone had affixed to a tree.
On this spot in 1983
E. L. Orlan discovered that the meaning of his life
lay in learning, friendship and love,
and service to others.
I pointed it out to Diana, but she just laughed. She was personally way beyond the meaning of life. She was making, I thought, heroic efforts to love the outdoors, but she had her limits. I took her hand.
Behind us and then to our right came a two-note call, neither bird nor animal. More like the rubbing of an agitated branch against a tree trunk.
Nobody was around. “You wanna make love here?” I asked. “You wanna mess around in the woods?” She just looked at me. We walked down a slope toward a patchwork clearing. She was not about to get herself laid in the woods. What had I been thinking?
A road became visible ahead, opposite the clearing. A white farm house, with a wide front yard dotted with objects too small to be seen from a distance, stood sagging and in need of paint on the other side of the dirt road.
We crossed the road and looked down at the objects for sale in the front yard: several bright blue Virgin Mary shrines, wooden deer and rabbits, and a nondescript collection of other creatures made out of ceramic God-knows-what, all of them with big eyes, all of them smiling without sincerity. They had the mean cuteness of painted souvenirs. The phrase blunt instruments came into my head. I imagined a disgruntled wife pitching one of these skunks at her husband after a long weekend. I almost tripped over a sign.
EVERYTHING HERE
FOR SALE
RING THE DOORBELL
“Of course it’s awful,” Diana said. “But that’s why we’re here.” She held up a possum, aimed it at me, and made terrible kissing noises.
Sometimes she enjoyed slumming around in junk stores. Castoffs and ripped, dented things flashed a spark in her. She fever-grinned at me. So I shrugged. “This makes good taste seem easy,” I said. “Dull, too.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She put the possum back down on the ground. “You know, we could make love right here, right on the ground, now, and it wouldn’t help at all. This stuff is more complicated than you realize.”
I was thinking about what she could possibly have meant by that when the screen door slammed and a blind woman came toward us down the porch steps. I knew she was blind because her blue eyes were milky and she looked in no particular direction. Like the animals, she too was smiling. And like them, her eyes were slightly too large for her face. Her brown hair sagged, if that’s the word, under a hair net.
She wore a brown cardigan sweater, and as I watched she fished a cigarette out of the left pocket and a Zippo lighter out of the right. She illuminated the cigarette and took a long stagy puff. She had the pleasant formal manners of a troll under whose bridge you have just wandered. “Can I be of any help for you?” she asked. “Is there any assistance I may be of?”
“Oh, no,” Diana said, and she glanced in her perturbed stylish way toward the horizon. “We were hiking. Now we’re here.”
“Now you’re here,” the troll-lady said in an echo-chamber voice. I gazed at her with great uneasiness. I have never liked men or women who live on dirt roads. It’s a matter of temperament, mine or theirs. I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway. “You’re both so young,” she said. “Well, certainly take a look around. Take your time.”
“We were just married,” Diana said