The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [87]
FOUR DAYS LATER, as in a farce, a comic opera, a nighttime TV half-hour comedy written by a committee, David developed poison ivy rashes on the backs of his hands and on his face, near his mouth.
I don’t remember the last time poison ivy was considered a sexually transmitted disease. Actually, it can’t be transmitted from foot to mouth or even from hand to hand. But it was certainly what you might call a catalyst, accidental though its appearance was on him. Anyway, Katrinka had been thinking about my shirt for days and at last deduced that it was David’s — a wife does not forget her husband’s shirts, not a suburban-four-bedroom-home wife like Katrinka. And when she put one and one together, the two they added up to was us, David and Diana, and that was the night when David moved out, and where he moved was over here, his little boys desperately crying and clutching as he walked out the front door. It doesn’t matter the least little bit that you can’t really pass poison ivy back and forth. She thought you could. So they had an opportunistic fight, which resolved matters. Remember the song? It became our song.
You’re gonna need an ocean
Of calamine lotion
Which we daubed on each other with little tender gestures, our first night as an official couple, unclandestine, David miserable and relieved and miserable again and somehow relieved again, not knowing at all what he felt when I kissed him wildly. He stayed awake all night in his joy and misery.
HE HAD ALWAYS LOVED ME and kept that love a secret from me. Every man likes to pretend that he’s in the CIA, a holder of vast dangerous secrets. This is why they suffer so in telling you that they love you. But once he was here, in my bedroom, the truth having come out, he talked about it — the love — openly, wretched as he was after leaving the boys. As I said, he was rigorous about that. I was the person you had to pry open with a crowbar.
By late summer, a month later, this particular evening I’d been out watching him play basketball with this kid Oscar and some other guys at a city park. The men were vocalizing, I have no idea what they were grunting to each other, this guy-yelping, and their shoes were squeaking on the asphalt. Actually I loved that sound. I was lounging on a park bench off to the side, sitting there, studying him. He was just in shorts and shoes. Earlier in the day we’d been doing yard work. I thought he was kind of beautiful. I liked thinking about him. My tastes had changed. My concept of male beauty had altered: he was now the definition of it. He’d lunge for the ball, he’d use his elbows, he’d do his layups. I sat there, just watching. I’d thought of playing and decided not to, for now. I had shorts on, too. I thought my legs might distract him from time to time. My legs were prettier than they’d been a month or so before. Smoother and nicer-looking. I don’t know why. They just were. Oh, actually I do know why: he loved them.
Behind me, the dogs barked at passing fire trucks, and in another section of the park, two softball teams were shouting some sort of encouragement to their batters and pitchers. The sun sank under the horizon.
When it was finally too dark to play, he joined me. I stood up, and Chloé, Oscar’s fiancée, who was sitting on the other bench after jogging around in her Joy Division tee-shirt and whom I had sort of befriended, well, she stood up, too. David came over. David’s skin was so sweaty that his hand slipped out of mine at first. Then he reached for me again. He laced his fingers between mine. I could smell his sweat. It was rank. I wanted to have him immediately. He put his arm around my shoulders. I hitched myself to his waist.
We got into his car and drove back to my place, which was gradually also becoming his. We went into the bedroom and lay down together. He was still wet and as his sweat dried he had a sweet heavy smell, like overripe blueberries. God, I loved that.
When we were naked, finally, we were standing up, and then he had his hands on my breasts and he was kissing me. I felt star-spattered. And