The Feast of Love (17 page)

WE HAD ONCE TRIED
to do what married people do: we went together to a department store to buy a pair of driving gloves. The whole event felt uncomfortably like a charade. At the counter, the salesgirl allowed me to try on several different pairs, and David smiled and frowned and exercised his discriminations and helped me choose the ones I bought, a very soft leather, light tan.

“Is that pair the one you really want, Diana?”

“Yes.” I smiled.

“Sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

He wasn’t the least bit businesslike when he was strolling the aisles with me; he was pleasant when he admired the sweaters and the watches and the diamond pins, and me, but the whole episode was like an amateur theatrical: Two Lovers Pretend They’re Not Clandestine. But we were, even there, under the lights and surveillance cameras. Our eyes kept roving, on the lookout for anyone known to the two of us, including the wife.

She, the wife, hadn’t managed to stay interested in him, he said, though they did make love somehow for the sake of appearances, and she put the radio on to a twenty-four-hour news station so that she wouldn’t have to hear the sounds they made together, the creaks and the groans. He liked going to bed in my bed because he didn’t have to listen to the news when I was on top and was riding him to kingdom come. Well, I mean: the poor man.

Despite all this, he said he loved his wife, et cetera. And of course there were the children, two of them, a boy and a boy. I’d say: You don’t have to explain or apologize, honey; I
don’t
want to marry you. I don’t love you. But, oh, sweet guy, you’re my friend, my buddy, and you’re agreeable and adept in bed. He seemed wounded when I complimented him for these secondary virtues. And I said, No, no. A sane man who can be a friend and a lover to a woman is a
find.
You, David, are a find, I would say as we lay facing each other in my bathtub’s hot soapy water and he slipped soap-rings over my fingers and then massaged my feet. You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I’m a malcontent and you can’t change that.

SO THERE I WAS,
in Jitters at the Briardale Mall, drinking my morning coffee and reading the paper during a power failure. Housed in my gray suit, nicely and distinctly accessorized with a small gold pin David had bought for me, I was sipping a Tip of the Andes specialty blend and checking the
New York Times
arts-and-leisure section, a feature on the choreographer Mark Morris whose work I happened to admire for its ritualized symmetries. In college I had aspirations to be a dancer, now done for. But I felt relaxed and very expensive, concentrating my forces. I had a large complicated case in the works and I was Zen-ing the whole thing, coolly distant but already imagining through strategy each step and each minute detail how I’d win. I was pre-victoring it. I had a couple of aces up my sleeve, and the anticipation of my winning — my future winnings — made me not happy, exactly, but contented with myself. The client was almost irrelevant by that time.

When the power went off in the mall,
I
was the power, so I didn’t care. I thought about my four colleagues in their darkened law offices half a mile away. I imagined those contentious characters — nominally friends of mine — stuck in elevators or in conference rooms with no ventilation, trying to figure out who to blame for the loss of electricity.

If God appeared on this earth again, lawyers would sue Him.

I always have coffee before going to work. I tend to get to the office a bit late. I am quite successful — I do litigation — and can pretty much set my own hours except when I go to court. I have to be reckoned with. No one tells me when to arrive at the office. No can do. You don’t dictate
anything
to me.

My days are segmented, very clearly divided and defined, and that is how I work it. I have a compartment for everything, including getting ready for the working day, down to the coffee and the paper and the arts-and-leisure section. And I have always orchestrated my romances with, well, an icy methodical self-interest. That’s how I managed my affair with David.

As regulated by law, as soon as the power went off, the safety floodlights went on. Certainly enough illumination to catch up on the news. Sounds of meteorological strife resounded above me. From the sound of it, hail was falling out of the sky. I didn’t care. I went on reading.

The manager of the shop appeared next to me.

“How can you read in this light? It’s so dim.”

I didn’t bother looking up. “I’m used to dim bulbs,” I said.

“In that case, you’d be right at home here.”

Oh, a contender. Someone for whom some notice was required. It’s always a key moment when you have to drop what you’re doing to look up at a man who has initiated this sort of conversation. So, noting the paragraph where I had stopped reading in the Mark Morris article, I trained my blue eyes on him and took his measure. Before me, leaning against a chair, stood a tallish man of somewhat uncertain appearance. He gave me a guarded smile. He didn’t flinch when I gazed at him. He radiated a sort of old-fashioned semisexy kindliness planted in the midst of a serviceable face. He had meditative, haunted eyes, a painter’s eyes, as it turned out, widely set apart in his vaguely half-handsome head. I couldn’t yet tell if he was being friendly in order to flirt, or to increase customer satisfaction. Or whether the flirting was specific to me or generic to women. I kept thinking: he’s halfway there, wherever “there” is. Probably the kids in grade school had called him Froggy.

He stood, as if planted, in the cold trashy evacuation floodlight and smiled persistently. He didn’t seem dim in the least. It was all a pretense. He was imagining us as comrades in a weather crisis, elbow to elbow as we faced a green sky. Meteorological solidarity. I heard the hail pounding atop the skylight. Weather is so nineteenth-century in its effects, I thought. “I’ve seen you here before,” he said.

“This place is close to work,” I said.

“I thought maybe the appeal lay in our atmosphere.” He leaned against the wall. “Our way of making our customers feel at home. Not customers
— guests.”

“It’s close to work.”

“Or that maybe you were attracted by the paintings, the ambiance, all this comfortable furniture you see, or perhaps even the quality of the coffee.”

“It’s close to work.”

“Okay,” he said, “it’s the staff, the friendly unassuming service people you tend to encounter periodically around here, like Chloé, snoozing there in the back.” He gestured in the direction of a punkette half-asleep in a rear booth. I was about to get up and flee from his defective overtures when he said, “I’m sorry. You’re exasperated by me, I can tell. You know, I don’t mean to be exasperating. I’ll let you finish your coffee. Sorry to bother you.” He waited. “By the way, where
is
work, for you?”

“A mile or so away.” I pointed a finger westward. “You’re not
particularly
exasperating, you know. Not specifically. I’ve known worse.”

“Thank you. What do you do? For a living?”

I told him.

“Ah.” Sudden thunder crashed outside. We both moved, though I think I must have shuddered and surprised myself, because he told me a month later that I had shuddered and he had noticed and recorded it. That little movement, that tremor of mine, struck a flame. Bradley is interested in fears and phobias. He gestured toward the center of the mall, where there was nothing at all to see. “Violent weather,” he said.

“Right.”

“Well, you know . . . an improvement.”

“Ah.” I decided to nod, but not emphatically. An improvement to what? I would not inquire. A nod without enthusiasm, a nod that withheld final agreement, was what I gave him. I realize that my irony and my distance can become fatiguing, tiresome. But evasiveness is deeply erotic, at least to me. I can fight my own chilliness when the situation demands, when I rouse myself to charm and warmth. He smiled at me as if facing a strong headwind, which I had created and which collaborated with the storm outside. “You like it?”

“What?”

“The . . . the violent weather.”

“Oh,” he said, “sure.” He was very agreeable.

“So do I, I suppose.” I was trying to make a bit of a social effort. “When I was a little girl, I was afraid of thunder.” I glanced down at my newspaper. Something by Paul Hindemith was being revived at Lincoln Center. And something else by what’s-his-name, the boy genius, Korngold. What had happened to the Mark Morris article? “I was quite a cliché in those days,” I said, remembering the conversation.

“But you’re not a cliché anymore, probably. What are you afraid of now?” he asked.

“Now?” I thought for a moment. “You’re very direct. Why do you ask?”

“Because you don’t look like you’re afraid of much. You don’t look like the afraid type.”

“The afraid type? Exactly right. I’m not. Well, since you ask, I
am
opposed, emotionally I guess, to open spaces,” I said. “They get to me sometimes. Fields. They make me slightly loopy. Any place without a boundary. I have mild agoraphobia. Also I’m terrified of being bored. I get bored, and then I get scared of the way I’m bored. Nothing I can’t handle, though.”

“My ex,” he said, “was afraid of dogs.”

A pause. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. The thunder and wind outside made a theatrical sound-effects din, but externally, distantly, an irrelevance to people in a shopping mall, except those who wanted electric light and couldn’t have it. “You know,” he said, pressing his luck, “sometimes, when I’m working here, I look out into the
. . . recesses
of this place, and I see all these people walking by, and I think about what they like and what they’re afraid of, and what makes them feel desolate.”
Desolate.
I’d never heard anyone use that word in conversation. What would be next?
Disheartened? Forlorn?
What a strange counterproductive and counterintuitive way to flirt! The style beyond a style. He kept on smiling, despite the turn in the conversation and despite his ineptitude at this sort of talk.

I still didn’t know his name. Shopping specters slid past us on their way somewhere. Winds belted the mall, whipped it.

It felt and looked weirdly sweet, that smile of his, and then I took the time and the initiative to glance at his hands. He had nice hands. There was a physical intelligence there. He didn’t have — he would never have — the visible attractiveness that David had, the sexual power to make you painfully aware of his body’s presence in the room with yours without your even having to look at him, and he would never have David’s shoulders and his way with words, but David was beautiful and wrongful and already spoken for. He was as assuming as this guy was unassuming.

“And then I think” — he was still talking while I considered what he, this guy, might be like in bed, long-term, or on the sofa on Sunday morning, married, as it were, as the sun poured in the windows, how he would be behind the wheel or raking the leaves — “about how even that — what people are afraid of — can make them attractive. And after I’ve been through their . . . fears, I start to imagine, not that I have all
that
much time, how I’d get along with them, if we were ever a couple, you know, where we’d travel to and so forth, Bali or Fuji maybe or the Orkney Isles, and how —”

“You mean Fiji.”

“What?”

“You said ‘Fuji’ and you meant ‘Fiji.’ One’s a film. The other’s an island in . . . well, you know where it is.”

“Oh,” he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasn’t a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down.

“ — Here,” I said, interrupting his silence. I took a business card out of my purse.

“What?”

“I’m writing down my home phone number. My name is Diana.”

He took the card and stared a bit dumbly at the number on it. “Thank you,” he said at last, as if he’d found an eyedropper of eloquence and was determined to use it.

“And now,” I said, “as decreed by custom,
you
tell me
your
name.”

“Well I’m Bradley,” he said in a rush, as if the kids in elementary school had always made fun of that name, and it was a wound for him. “Bradley Smith. Could I ask you to do something?”

“What’s that?”

“Could you stand up, so that I could give you a hug?”

Well, that was cute. But I’d rather have a tracheotomy than hug a man the first time through. “No,” I said, “no, indeed, I certainly won’t do that. Not yet. Nope. Too soon for hugs between strangers. Actually, I
will
stand up, but if there are going to be hugs, Bradley, they’ll have to come a bit later. That’s one of the things you’ll learn about me. You’ll excuse me, but I have to get to the office now, power failure or not. Time’s a-wasting.”

I shouldn’t have said that, that minute condescension in tone, but I’m not sure he noticed. So I rose to my feet, and he watched me do it. He appraised me. Oh, the poor guy: I bet he knew he was overmatched already. I think he knew I would always be quicker, and not just verbally, my edges would be sharper than his, more acute angles, I was the superior animal and he was in for the time of his life. I’m good-looking, but I
will
come at you. I’m one of those women who can’t see the beauty in any kind of weakness or pathos. Most men won’t trade up from themselves, they’ll walk away from a matchup like this, even if the woman is scarily beautiful, which I’m not, though almost, if you like intelligent eyes and gestures that correct themselves halfway through. But I saw him pocket my phone number and keep his fingers on the card, that little brand-new fetish curled up safely in its nest. He must have been a brave soul, in his way.

Then he went behind the counter and came back and gave me a slip of paper. It was an expertly drawn sketch of a dragon erasing, with his nose, the sign in front of Jitters. I was sitting inside the door, in his drawing, reading. Just a few strokes of the pencil, and you could tell it was me, just from my posture. I put it in my pocket. It had been signed by Bradley. An original.