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Authors: Andrew Sean Greer
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BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
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“I’ll talk to him, I’ll tell him … I’ll mention you …”
“You will?”
“I’ll tell him how beautiful you are.”
“Does he think I’m beautiful?”
“He does. He thinks you’re the most lovely girl.”
“Oh my.”
“Yes, the most lovely girl he’s ever seen.”
“The most lovely girl …” she repeated.
Alice left my parlor happier than when she entered it; she left with all these stupid promises of mine, done just to keep her in the room, just to force one more occasion for us to talk and to make a secret between us, for this was to be kept from her mother at all costs. I nodded, pursing my lips. When she left, she kissed my forehead, and as I smelled the soft cotton at her throat, I thought of how I was more than a confidant to her, more than the sharer of a secret; I was her only route to love. As she had once depended on me to light a Sabbath fire, so now she depended on me to bring some word to warm her heart. And though I knew the smile faintly forming on her face as she left was not for me,
and the sleepless night she would spend was not over my bearded face, still I was there in it somewhere. I was a houseboy of her heart. When we are very young, we try to live on what can never be enough.
and the sleepless night she would spend was not over my bearded face, still I was there in it somewhere. I was a houseboy of her heart. When we are very young, we try to live on what can never be enough.
Alice, what are you thinking, reading this, now that you are old? You know where this is leading and I’m sure you have a different story. One, perhaps, in which you are more lost and innocent, a little piece of Alice-glass chiming in the window, or one full of details I can never know: how Hughie laughed at your cleverness; the thick, erotic pads of the Victoria Regina; the angry way you missed your father; the weird sensation of that old man undoing the ribbon in your hair. While in my version Hughie is just the man who happened to block the light, in your memory I’m sure you loved him for specific reasons, as we think we do; you still warm your hands over the ember of that early love; you could never be convinced, in your old age, that it was only chance.
I told your mother—did you know? Of course I did. I told her, as a secret between us, that you were in love with Hughie and that he did not deserve you. This was not a lie, but it was cruel; it was meant to make her huff and sigh if you ever mentioned Hughie. Looking back, this could only have made you love him more.
One night, you were different. You will remember this. One night, Maggie let you in and you were a stone daughter striding into the room. You didn’t sit on the rug and blush; there was no blood in you that night. You chose my father’s old chair, arranged your braid, then stared at me and said, with no accusation in your voice: “He doesn’t love me.” You waved away every one of my words, wincing just a little, and kept repeating what you were now too smart not to see. He didn’t love you; no, of course he didn’t. It had been clear from the beginning. You wore a gaudy
young girl’s necklace and cheap shoes that fell from your heels. You produced a cigarette from a reticule and it was as if you said:
I am now a woman who does these things.
At fourteen, a woman who does these things. I stopped talking and let you build this other woman from smoke, breathe her into being there in the room. There was silence while she turned, all hair and tendons, in the slant of moonlight. When she was gone, I was the one who fell to the floor at your knees and wept; I can’t say why. You were the one who touched my hair and said soft things that gave, as always, little comfort.
young girl’s necklace and cheap shoes that fell from your heels. You produced a cigarette from a reticule and it was as if you said:
I am now a woman who does these things.
At fourteen, a woman who does these things. I stopped talking and let you build this other woman from smoke, breathe her into being there in the room. There was silence while she turned, all hair and tendons, in the slant of moonlight. When she was gone, I was the one who fell to the floor at your knees and wept; I can’t say why. You were the one who touched my hair and said soft things that gave, as always, little comfort.
Then I heard you murmur something I cannot forget. You said, “I feel so old.”
I lifted my face. “What?”
You shook your head, latching the thought back in.
“You can’t feel old,” I said.
You just rocked a little in your chair, your hand on my head as you lit another cigarette. The room held you in the curve of some shadow. You looked as old as you would ever be. You said, “Like I’m floating above my body. And I watch myself and my little stupid movements, how I put the kettle on for tea or brush the dust from the braid on my dress, complaining how it gets so filthy, sitting with Mother and reading the visiting cards. It takes so little to be myself, and I’ve done it for so long, being so little, doing such little things. But most of me is floating above, watching. As if it weren’t my body. Part of me knows something that it can’t bear to tell the rest.”
I sat, stunned, feeling the burn of your words. A woman whose body wasn’t hers, floating outside her life; you would understand, I thought. You would know what life was like for the sick, timetwisted boy who was in love with you. I watched you smoking, as if the smoke could keep the coldness in your face.
“I want to tell you something, Alice.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
But it was too late; I had begun to say the thing my mother taught me never to say. It felt like the first words of a spell, though, the kinds of words that try to lift a curse. “I have to tell you. Listen to me. You don’t have to talk. Just listen.”
You took your eyes down from the gaslight and they were alive again, for a moment, and I think you hoped I was going to say something about Hughie; I think that even after this last
no,
still it was not beyond belief that there would be a
yes.
no,
still it was not beyond belief that there would be a
yes.
“I’m not … what you think I am, it’s not what I am. I know what I look like.” I was speaking roughly, between hard breaths. My throat was gagging on this foolish thing, but I went on: “Alice, I’m … I’m seventeen. Do you see? Alice. I’m just a boy.”
I felt a little rapture when your looks broke open. I think you had never considered me to be another person in the room; here I was, listening all this time, the messenger of renounced love; here I was, kneeling before you on the carpet; and all this time I had been as wretched as you.
“I’m just a boy.”
I saw a sadness beating at the back of your eyes, an insect dying behind a screen.
“Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
You will remember: you held my face with both hands and, thumbs out, wiped the tears from my cheeks. There was blood in your face again; your eyes were moist like my own; you were my old Alice thinking,
Let’s one of us be happy.
There in the parlor you saw through me and knew how young I was, younger than you; you gripped my face and were the soothsayer for both of us, pursing your lips over something bitter, then nodding your head in slow degrees before you kissed me. You will remember: it was you who kissed me that evening in the parlor. I tasted that last coil of smoke held in your mouth; it tasted like a word, like a
yes
. From some other room we heard a baby’s undulating
oh.
You kissed
me and did not pull away or change your mind; you drank from me like a thirsty girl. I was the first to say he loved you. You will remember.
Let’s one of us be happy.
There in the parlor you saw through me and knew how young I was, younger than you; you gripped my face and were the soothsayer for both of us, pursing your lips over something bitter, then nodding your head in slow degrees before you kissed me. You will remember: it was you who kissed me that evening in the parlor. I tasted that last coil of smoke held in your mouth; it tasted like a word, like a
yes
. From some other room we heard a baby’s undulating
oh.
You kissed
me and did not pull away or change your mind; you drank from me like a thirsty girl. I was the first to say he loved you. You will remember.
I wanted to see her first thing in the morning; I could not wait. It’s true I had not slept since she whispered,
Mr. Tivoli, Mr. Tivoli,
and stood to rearrange her hair and calm her swarming breath (I did cause something there, at least) before leaving me. I sat in my chair as my sister wailed into the night, and of course in my imagination I continued that evening with Alice as far as a moral man could, and then I set the cylinder back in its cradle and replayed each moment in the music box of my mind.
Mr. Tivoli, Mr. Tivoli,
and stood to rearrange her hair and calm her swarming breath (I did cause something there, at least) before leaving me. I sat in my chair as my sister wailed into the night, and of course in my imagination I continued that evening with Alice as far as a moral man could, and then I set the cylinder back in its cradle and replayed each moment in the music box of my mind.
As I lay in bed, I went over the scene I had been rehearsing since dawn: what I would say to Alice. I had an addict’s rage against himself, the rage of a reformed man waking to the evidence of his night—a scorched pipe of opium, a cold and beaded vial of ether—but feeling inside him, gnawing past his first reproach, the love of those long-desired objects; his arm is already reaching across the bed. I had to see her. Why had I told her I loved her? It might have cost me everything. But no, I rationalized, no, she needed to hear about love; everyone does. Don’t they? Didn’t she? Oh God, and I had said I was just a boy; she had believed me. Had she? Perhaps it was sweet, or perhaps for her it was just as it seemed: an old man wetting her face with his gross kisses. But as much as I tried to search the details of her face in the gaslight of the evening, I lost her more and more. The past had its back already turned; there was no speaking with it.
I plotted as well as I could. I would smile and laugh and pretend the night was nothing in particular; that I, like her, was baffled by tangled human moments like ours. I would apologize; no, that would give me away. I would pretend it was a private joke of
ours. The old man, the old neighbor, a private joke. Unless, of course, unless I could make out on the surface of her face some ripple of hope. I got out of bed, eager to see her as soon as possible, if only to know of my fate.
ours. The old man, the old neighbor, a private joke. Unless, of course, unless I could make out on the surface of her face some ripple of hope. I got out of bed, eager to see her as soon as possible, if only to know of my fate.
“Mr. Tivoli?” Maggie’s voice came from the door.
“Yes?”
“I have your coffee and a note.”
On custard stationery on the silver tray, beside the toast. One edge of it was dark with spilled coffee; I glared at Maggie and she left. A note from Alice, I thought, and felt relieved. What a coward I was. Now I would not have to confront her; I could know, in a few lines, what that first kiss had meant for both of us. Here is how it began:
Max,
You are a monster of the lowest kind. You are a false, betraying criminal. You are a sick, blackened, evil old man and I cannot believe I ever cared for you. To have betrayed me is nothing. To have seduced the mother is nothing, used me up, is nothing. You may toss aside my old broken heart, it doesn’t matter. But Max. You have touched my girl, my Alice. And if this mother ever sees you again, I am sure to tear your eyes out.
It was only much later, of course, that I pieced together what must have happened. Alice, late at night, arriving home in a teary whirlwind of confessions. And Mrs. Levy, sitting in a black nightgown, listening, feeling her heart fall to pieces inside her. She saw only an old man, her lover, pawing her daughter with reechy kisses. She could not have understood it was a boy of seventeen, like in a song, stealing a kiss.
But I was thinking of none of that. I was reading quickly, trying to figure out what I’d do now. Maybe a full confession, disease and all, with Mother as a witness. Maybe have Hughie
talk to Alice once again. And Mrs. Levy; well, perhaps she was still in my thrall. A few perfect words and I might be saved. So I read on.
talk to Alice once again. And Mrs. Levy; well, perhaps she was still in my thrall. A few perfect words and I might be saved. So I read on.
More hateful, overwritten stuff, pulled from the deepest well of a mother’s rage. Some upsetting parts about the police, immediately retracted. And then a final bit that chilled me:
Enclosed is a check for our last rent. Our furniture is all taken care of, but there is nothing to reveal where we are going. Oh, Max, this much I will ensure: you will never see Alice again. Nor me, my moonlight love.
Overwritten, yes, but I could tell at last what I had done. To have peeled her clothes off in the garden, night after night, and listened to her giggling in my ear. Her moonlight love. I had never thought about her, in all my worrying over Alice; she was an adult, of a different world, and I’d never considered she might be just as fragile as her daughter. And yet it seems quite clear that I shattered poor Mrs. Levy. That I took perhaps the last love in her old heart.
I heard horses breathing and battling their reins out front. A panic seized me, and I ran in my nightclothes to the window. That childhood sound of hooves and springs and leather, that old carriage noise, and below me I watched a hired two-in-hand clattering away. Black and dull, it rattled slowly across the light, the isinglass unrolled so I could see two faces in the window. There she was. My love, my sweet girl, shaking in the cage of the carriage, in traveling clothes, a bag on her lap, eyes closed against the dust cloud of her future. That was the end of the first time I loved Alice.
Sammy: this is a letter from the front lines; I write this with you in the room. With you asleep beside me in this bed, muttering through some shallow dream just as Buster twitches through his own there on the floor. My writing may be shaky, for it turns out Dr. Harper’s right, after all:
At nearly sixty, I have caught the mumps. And you, poor Sammy, have caught them as well.
At first Mrs. Ramsey, feeling my improbably swollen gills, sent me alone to the “sewing room,” as she calls it, to suffer in solitude among the scraps of her unfinished dresses—I can see fabrics of cherries and corals and reclining geishas; or are these perhaps my fever’s inventions? I have been so sad in my sickroom, writing in my journal, burning in and out of my fever like a lighthouse. But today I awoke to find a brightly opened door and another little boy being shoved inside.
“Better get it over with,” your mother said as she dragged you to the bed, poor Sammy.
“Jeez, not with the duckbrain!” you shouted.
“With the duckbrain. In you go,” she said, and folded you, still complaining, into these sheets warm from my sickness. That old folk wisdom, that it’s better to catch it as a child than as a man—well, everything’s reversed in me, I guess. I remember fifty years ago when my mother took me for a carriage ride and I was thrown into a goose-down bed with hot, irritable Hughie. Mumps again, but that time I was no child; I did not catch it. I remember Hughie’s moans and mutterings made it impossible for me to read my
Boys’ Life
in peace, and I lay for a week beside my best friend until he reached a level of sanity to throw me, perfectly healthy, from his bed. You, Sammy, burn brighter.
Boys’ Life
in peace, and I lay for a week beside my best friend until he reached a level of sanity to throw me, perfectly healthy, from his bed. You, Sammy, burn brighter.
BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
2.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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