The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [85]
They — we — had a certain party varnish on. Depending on whether I’ve had enough to drink, I usually don’t like ironic friendliness as much as homely glitter. Because it’s the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it’s more a dull shine, like frequently used silverware. We were all presentable enough, but almost no one was making any kind of statement. Out here in Michigan, real style is too difficult to maintain; the styles are all convenient and secondhand. We’re all hand-me-down personalities. But that’s liberating: it frees you up for other matters of greater importance, the great themes, the sordid passions.
I hadn’t planned to come at all. I knew people were going to take a sort of friendly interest in me and my novelty marriage to Bradley and its quick aftermath. I was prepared to be snarly in a provocative and sexy way, provided I could manage my smiling and witty quarrelsomeness within acceptable limits. I didn’t want sympathy. Well, these people were too hip for sympathy anyway. To be honest, I had this image of myself: I was the tree that a drunk driver slides off the road into. The tree doesn’t move. It doesn’t do anything except stand there. It kills the person just by standing there. That would be me. I’ve got my attitude: lethal neutrality and immobility.
“Hi, Diana.” A voice out of the party air.
“Oh, hi.” My voice back to it. A glassy indifferent smile.
“You look so cute in that.”
“Thanks.” I turned to freshen my drink. I said something about the weather.
I had been back in my house, refurnishing it, preparing one of my cases, and thinking about David now and then, just before this party. Bradley, who was a mistake when conjoined with me, did not occupy my thoughts, but David did, and the other preoccupations I had were the probable duration of our affair and his probable attendance at this back yard social. The statue of the little boy reclined in my back yard.
If you’re recently divorced, and you’re a woman, you don’t know what to wear for a while. You put on the pale blue sundress but you don’t like the boniness of your shoulder blades — people will comment on your eating habits or your level of fitness because they’re terrifically eager to know your mood — so you take off the sundress and you put on the jeans, but that’s physically vain and indulgent unless they’re new and the exact right fit, and so you take them off for the simple skirt, but that’s too simple, that and the blouse: it turns you instantly into one of the clueless off-the-racks, hopelessly unstyled and unaccessorized. So what you do is, you put on one of David’s shirts that he left behind, one time, one summer afternoon in your bedroom, escaping in his undershirt from your presence, bloated and mind-numbed from sex, the undershirt with the bookstore logo on it. Then you put on your jeans. You don’t tuck in the shirt, David’s blue denim, you let it hang down. Then you do tuck it in. You wonder if the wife, the ill-named Katrinka, will recognize it. It has started to seem, in your meaner moments, to be an interesting prospect that she might recognize it. She could make a fuss and stage an outcry. That might even be quite wonderful, that prospect. It would enliven the party.
Before the itch started, I made a social effort. I conversed with one doctor and one accountant, one electrical engineer and two remedial educationists, one professor of economics and one landscape gardener, another person who as far as I could tell was gainfully unemployed, very proud about it, too, and one person who had in a former life-phase programmed computers and now, following a personal crisis, contentedly made furniture. I talked to an aging personnel manager who wanted to take up jazz piano. Some of these people were women and some were not.
Then I felt the itch on the sole of my right foot, a poison ivy rash or a mosquito bite. What I wanted to do was to remove my sandal and start clawing. Sometimes my whole body