The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [89]
After ten minutes, it was too dark, and they stopped playing. And this guy, David, came over to where she was, and Diana stood up, and he put his arm around her shoulders, and she put her arm around his waist, and they started walking toward his car, that way, his arm around her shoulder, her arm around his waist. It couldn’t have taken more than fifteen seconds for them to get to that car. But I’ll remember how they looked all my life.
I’d never seen Diana with that settled contentedness before. It’s funny how you can tell when people are in love.
They passed under one of those streetlights they have near the parking area. Bradley tugged at the leash, but I was not to be moved. And I saw Diana clearly, leaning into this fellow, her head bent to the left so that it was resting on his shoulder, and this insane eventuality happened. I felt this punch in my stomach. Standing there, across the street, in the shadows where it was possibly my fate to live, forever after, I felt this punch in my stomach.
I could see instantly what I was missing. That she was beautiful in a way I hadn’t noticed before. Suddenly I missed her lazy manner of reading the editorial pages aloud on Sunday morning and I missed the way she said good night by whispering it in my direction and I missed everything about her, including how mean she could sometimes be. I remembered the way she blew the bangs away from her forehead by jutting her lower lip outward and blowing a stream of air, perfected by her years of playing the oboe in high school, upward. Sick with memory, I was in love with Diana, genuinely, still, or maybe for the first time, at least this way.
They got in the car and now she put her hand on his chest and started kissing him. They kissed for a while. I should have turned away. I tried.
A fire truck went by a few blocks away, howling. Chloé came and collected Oscar and they went home together in Oscar’s beat-up Matador.
I staggered home and couldn’t sleep. It occurred to me for the first time that I had smashed my life with a hammer.
THE JOB AT JITTERS became a different job.
Couples, plain-style Americans, would come in, hand in hand, arm in arm, treating each other as delicacies. They’d order a pound of coffee or they’d order decaf cappuccino, and they’d sit down at a table and talk, leaning toward each other, their secretive knees slowly but ever-so-surely touching. Every day this familiar tableau that I myself had painted in The Feast of Love was presented to me as a done deal, an actuality. In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.
The mere sight of happiness made me groan inwardly. Now, when I walked in the parks, all I saw were couples, Chloé and Oscar types of every description. At intersections I would find myself behind couples necking in the backseat, or some woman next to a guy in the front. I would watch. I would see her toying with the back of his neck. Twirling her fingers there. Playing with the little curls. Sometimes I’d see people smiling for no reason. Just smiling, happy with life. This enraged me. I suffered from the happiness of others.
It helps that in Michigan everyone goes inside from November through April. But from May until October they are outside, on display, and all of a sudden if you are single, you have a window to heaven and no way at all to get in.
My attitude toward my art changed. Now I didn’t paint my canvases; instead I vandalized them. Harry Ginsberg came over one evening and said, “I have heard of action painting, but this is new. Bradley, you are at last a pioneer in the visual realm. You are post-action and post-Pop. This, what you are doing, is devastation painting. You are the first painter of the new millennium.”
I was pleased by his comment.
ONE EVENING I LEFT Bradley behind in the house, and I drove to Jackson, Michigan, which is about thirty miles west of Ann