A Friday gift: here is one of my favorite passages from The Feast of Love, a novel by Charles Baxter. I don't think CB would mind me sharing it here. And if it grabs you, please go right out and buy his book. It's in paperback and in pretty much every bookstore. The Feast of Love, a novel, published in 2000 by Vintage Books.

I'm not even going to give you a set-up, just read/listen...

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. That 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 Chloe, Oscar's fiancee, 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 I was thinking: he can have every inch of me. Sweet Jesus, he can pick my bones clean.

I told him I loved him. It escaped me, just like that. And he was cool: he pretended I hadn't said it or that he hadn't been listening, though he had heard me say it plenty of times before.

Just about then I heard an ice cream truck going by on the street, the Good Humor Man. With those distant prerecorded bell chimes. They're supposed to sound cheery, but they sound unearthly and preoccupied, like death's angel.

And then we were making love, calmer than we usually do it, and I'm looking at David, and my soul--I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's what happened--became visible to me. My soul was a large and not particularly attractive waiting room, just like in a Victorian train station with people going in and out. In this waiting room were feelings I hadn't known I had, discarded feelings, feelings with nowhere to go, no ticket to a destination. It turned out that I was larger than I had known myself to be; there were multitudes of feelings in there. This can happen in any sort of way. I don't care if you disapprove of what I'm telling you or the means I used to discover it. I warned you: I'm not an original. But at that point I felt like one. I'm just telling you how it happened with me. I was a different person than I had planned to be. My soul was not particularly attractive, but the surprise was that it was there, that I had one.

I loved him and we fused together. He didn't save me from anything. I was the same person I always was. But as they say: one phase of my life was over, and another one began.