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Authors: Andrew Sean Greer

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BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel

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There was no particular day. It was just somewhere in the dust-storm of snow that mild winter, among the dozen coffee shops with tired waitresses, and cowboys, and desperately poor people staring at Hughie’s watch, while the radio and the sky were equally
static, that I stopped being a man. Hairless as a pup, shriveled below into a sleek little snail. I tried to manipulate it into life, and it still worked for a while, but eventually grew forever soft, rubbery, good only for peeing long distances on the side of the road. I felt a terrible shame. I hid it from Hughie, but as we lived together constantly, it was only a matter of time before he saw me, one morning, getting out of the tub, and realized what a eunuch I had become.

Later, in the car, he grew silent. I knew he’d been shocked by my changed body. At last, he asked if we shouldn’t maybe find a good town, perhaps the one we were approaching, and just settle down until the end of our days. Billboards called to us—the Howdy Hut, Reinhardt Bakery, A and V Photography—and budded apple branches brushed the windows. As good a town as any.

“We’re never going to find them, Max. Not if we lived forever.”

“Settle down?”

Telephone poles passed us one by one, each with a gust of sound. We went through downtown, more stores than expected, a crowd at church, a town that any two monsters could live in and be happy, then we passed through to the other side. The road stretched flat and endless, disappearing in a bluish blur before us, which could have been a mountain, but was only a distant thundercloud, raining on a distant town.

“We’ll never find them. It’s no fun anymore to try. We could turn around,” he said softly. This was his idea, to save the shriveled child he’d seen in the bathroom. “You’ve got money, we could buy a house today. Come on, it’s not a bad idea. We could go back to that town, what’s it called? Back there, buy a house. Probably a mansion in this part of the country. With a porch and a yard and a dog out back. Don’t you want a dog? Aren’t you sick of this car? I mean, really. Really, we can just turn around.”

I went along with it; it was a pleasant thought. After all, we were no closer to my son than before. “You could open a law practice.”

“I could. I’d have to pass the bar, or I could fake it.”

“I could go to grammar school.”

“A sort of family. We could live here. Really, I mean, really. We could turn around.”

I saw the gravity in his eyes. I think, now, that although he had cared, and worried, and laughed with me over the ridiculous state of my body, he had been so close to my life that he had never bothered to imagine it. Just as we do not think of our grandmother as old; she is merely Grandma, forever, until we visit her one day and realize that, despite her smiles and kisses, she is going blind and will die. I had always been merely Max. I noticed him thinking, and glancing over, and what he saw there was not Max anymore—not that old, lumbering bear, the cub of Splitnose Jim—but a fidgeting boy of twelve, picking at a scab, crinkling his sunburned nose in disgust. Hughie had begun to mourn my death.

“Well, Hughie, old friend, perhaps—”

And then a miracle:

“Come and take your Easter photos,”
came a deep voice from the radio
. “Crisp and clear, always on time. Alice and Victor Photography, Eighth and Main.”

Hughie said, “Well, let’s—”

“Hush!”

“Memories forever. I’m Victor Ramsey and I guarantee it.”

The birds all scattered when the Chrysler came to a stop, and they watched warily from the trees as it swerved, too fast, in a rough, squealing semicircle back towards town.

Ramsey’s store wasn’t hard to find. A quaint two-story brick building with black iron numbers near the top: 1871. Flower boxes sat empty under the windows, and a trumpet vine had taken charge of a pot originally meant for roses, of which one white bloom
remained. A brass spittoon, turned into an umbrella stand, signaled a bygone era. A sign said they were closed on Sundays; the floating choir song from the nearby church reminded me of the day.

Hughie wasn’t with me; after much arguing, he had agreed to stay in the car, but he kept a wary eye on me on that newly painted porch; he was not sure what I would do. I wasn’t sure myself. I could see Ramsey’s shape moving deep in the interior, like a beast in dark water, arranging frames or carrying boxes. I could not, however, see
him
.

A second miracle: the door was open.

The place smelled of vinegar and smoke. Large, striking photographs of ocean waves filled one entire wall, and the other was all billowing wheat, but otherwise the pictures on little stands were of weddings, family groups, babies. A broom leaned exhausted against a wall, a counter and cash register filled the far corner, and two doors were open beyond: one to darkness, the other to wavering light. The waver was the movement of a shadow.

All of a sudden, there he was, standing in the room with me. A tall man, and old, a puff of white hair with bulging eyes and an intellectual’s tapering nose. How could she have loved him? Tall, with rolled-up shirtsleeves and large, bony hands. Ordinary, utterly ordinary, but can you tell a villain when you meet him? He stared at me. It began to rain once more against the windows, tear-streaked. He seemed more stunned than I expected.

“Sammy?” he stammered.

It took me a moment to realize I looked exactly like my son.

“No, no I’m Tim.”

“Well, Tim, I don’t give to the Scouts,” he said. British accent, unexpected. He smiled and gave a comical salute. “Military training, it’s horrible.”

“You’re Victor Ramsey?”

“Yes.”

“Alice and Victor Photography. Your wife?”

“She was. Still has a share in the shop.”

“But she no longer lives here. Where did she go?”

He stared at me curiously. “Tim, let me make some guesses about you. I’ve been reading detective fiction. Let’s see, you came from California.”

“She had a son.”

“I’ll tell you, I knew from the license plate. Not very sophisticated, I know.”

“Alice and Sammy.”

He waved that aside. “Yes yes, Alice and Sammy, but that’s not very current stuff, Tim. Are you writing a report for school? I hate to tell you I’m not a very famous man. Not in this town, not since before you were born, those pictures on the wall are all I’m remembered for, but only in New York, not here. Look at them, take your time. You’ve done your research, though. Well done, it’s swell to meet you, is that what teenagers say? I try to be modern. Just swell. Come again, Tim. Goodbye.” And before I knew it he had vanished into the other room. I followed him.

“I have a question.”

“Could you hand me my little brush?” he asked. I had emerged into a sun-dappled glen—one of his photography sets—a gorgeous illusion of falling leaves, a summer haze in the distant sky, an unmended fence. My enemy stood on a ladder, painting a leaf on a tree. What did I want from Victor Ramsey? To kill him? There was Teddy’s gun in the car; no one would have heard the shot—the nearby choir was bellowing “Rock of Ages,” heavy on the soprano. Nor, if I had pushed the old ladder and sent Victor Ramsey flailing into his painted glen, would anyone have found his knotted bones for days. I could have murdered Victor Ramsey in a thousand awful ways, but you see the thought never occurred to
me. In that room, an old man and a little boy among the autumn leaves, we were not rivals. We were both lost husbands, jilted lovers; we were both members of the same religion, that Sunday. No, I found I wanted more even than an address: I wanted words from someone who had also lost his muse.

“Victor Ramsey, did you love her?”

“Who?”

“Alice. Did you love her?”

“No.” He worked at the leaf, effortlessly creating it, moving on to the next. He did not seem to think anything of a boy asking about love; I was discovering that he was unlike any other old man I’d known. An artist, I guess, also as if he, too, were a child. “Not the way men seem to love their wives in this town, now I don’t know your mom and dad, but not like that.” Closer, I could see the ugly wings of his nose. “I worshipped her, Tim. She was like no one you will ever meet. Strong, independent. I never took her for granted for a moment, or pretended I understood her, and when she wanted to go I let her go, because she was art and she was music.” He made another leaf, another, each turning precisely in the breeze that he imagined. “You won’t understand. I can’t express things. Look behind the door, there’s a photograph.”

There was. Alice at the age of fifty or so, lying in a pool of floating duckweed like a bathing girl; she was naked. Her arms were soft and dimpled, her breasts lopsided under the water, the nipples large and pale, and she gazed grinning up at a sky that had, through some trick of exposure I will never understand, become a lake-surface pitted with rain. She was not beautiful. Not the way I had preserved her in my memory, all symmetry and wet lips, fast asleep. Silt rose around her in tiny particles, and that smile rose above the water. How mystifying: my Alice, old, but lovely in some new way, floating happy and free.

Students of art, you may recognize this portrait from its brief
and minor fame, or so I’m told. If you do, keep quiet. Let my love live out her life in peace.

“She did that one,” Ramsey said. It did not seem to cross his mind that old men should not be showing nude portraits to little boys. “I taught her the basics, but she was really something, she became a new person behind the camera. Most of these are hers.”

I looked around and realized there were portraits of her everywhere, leaning against the walls: Alice eating figs with an amused expression, Alice nearly nude behind a clothesline with the sun in her squinting eyes, Alice asleep the way she always looked, Alice older and older in every frame. All the photographs that you grew up with, Sammy. A catalog of the years without me. I kept staring at this woman whom I guess I never really knew.

From behind me, the quiet voice of my fellow man: “She made me younger, year by year.”

“Where did she go?” I asked at last.

He mentioned the name of a village, two days’ drive from here. I didn’t dare ask for an address.

“You met her in California?”

He nodded, closing his eyes as he contemplated the next color he would choose. “In Pasadena. I knew her mother, and invited her to work with me. It was such a gift that she arrived.”

“Why?”

“Hmm?”

My voice came out too harsh: “
Why did she go?
”

I meant me, why did she leave me? But Victor didn’t hear it that way. He looked at me with no pity for himself or for anyone. “Well, my boy, she didn’t love me.”

“I see.”

“Could you hold the ladder?”

“Sure.”

He grinned again, so impossibly innocent. Instantly I was able to picture him with his bride: Alice fussing clumsily with baby
Sammy, old Victor mumbling and smiling as she filled the room with laughter. Tulip tree in the window, macaroni pie in the oven, Rediviva floating in the air. What a lovely life he’d lost. He said, “I have a theory about my wife. Since you seem interested, though I can’t think why. Like all women before her, she couldn’t change except by marrying. She wanted to change all the time, be a new woman, so she kept marrying, first Calhoun, he let her be brilliant, and then Van Daler, he let her be beautiful, and gave her a child. I … well. I taught her the skills with which she could leave me. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s married again, who knows what she’ll be next? She didn’t love me, but I understand. I do. Sentimental girl. There was only one, I think, she ever really loved.” And I knew from his expression that it wasn’t him or me.

Forgive this last interruption, Sammy, but I have heard bad news. Just yesterday, my wife and son and I visited a friend of Dr. Harper’s who lives by a lake. A fat man, happy and generous; also a psychoanalyst, which terrified me. But he gave me no more than one probing glance—that of a botanist identifying a pleasant, common flower—before making us all play a baffling new kind of board game. Both Alice and I lost instantly and she announced we were going for a walk. Lucky me you’ve always been such a bad sport, Alice. Outside, night birds sang in the moist air, and it was after we walked and listened that she told me.

We stopped by the lake (no moon, but a bright phosphorescence in the clouds) and sat in the shimmering darkness, the lampless darkness she’d said she loved as a girl, the darkness of olden times. There was a distant splash; she said maybe some monster lived in the water. I said I was cold, but luckily she had a sweater with her (good mother), so she had me lift my arms in surrender
while she lowered the pullover onto my body. It smelled of my son. We threw some rocks—I was a terrible throw with these shrinking hands—and she laughed, and I tried to laugh, but I was a nervous child in love with an older woman he could never have. At last she told me that Harper had asked her to marry him and she had accepted and that you, Sammy, already knew.

I stared at her like a rabbit in a garden.

“What do you think?”

I said, “Marry Harper?”

BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel

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