Love Invents Us (16 page)

“Call me Louisa. Touch me there and call me Louisa.”

Max didn’t say no (he was not as scared as Elizabeth wanted him to be, but he was uncomfortable and he was angry; he’s
dying
, for Christ’s sake). He closed his eyes. Soft, matted hair brushed his nose and lips. He smelled her.

“Is this necessary?”

“It’s hard to say. Was I necessary for you?”

“Oh, sweetheart, why don’t you just leave? You don’t have
to take care of me. Take the hat, take my passbook, and just go.”

“I don’t want to go. I want to stay here and be Louisa, that sweet little thing. Do you think having an alcoholic slut for a mother is what made you chase little girls?”

He wanted to say, You were not little. You were a young woman, and I was wrong, but you were not a little girl. He coughed very hard, bouncing Elizabeth on his chest.

She stood up and handed him a kleenex.

“Never mind,” she said.

She left the cherry-trimmed hat on and dressed in her own clothes.

“I’m sorry, Pops.”

“Forget it. I owe you.”

Elizabeth looked away. “Yeah. Well. Can I keep the hat?”

On Thursday he was better. She found a bright red flannel shirt for him, and in his black overcoat and black beret he looked frail and chic, a French grandfather driving out to inspect the vineyards.

“Let’s go feed the ducks, and we can pick up a couple of bags of apples. I’ll make an apple pie.”

“I never understood ‘feeding the ducks.’ Think about it. We buy stale bread so we can have the pleasure of feeding the ducks, who can’t be hungry, since they’re always being fed. And the store maintains the ducks so it can sell us stale bread. There are no more starving children? We have to come up with this arrangement so we can all play Marie Antoinette by the pond?”

He shut his eyes and Elizabeth kept driving, glad he was
talking. It was always a good sign when he had the energy to talk, no matter what he said. Even if it was about the stupid ducks.

Max thought, Why am I talking about this?

He sat on a bench while Elizabeth fed the ducks, and when she sprinkled breadcrumbs right at his feet, two fat black ducks came up, honking mildly. They were dirtier than she had imagined, something dark caked into the tiny holes on top of their beaks, algae and muck trailing their orange feet.

Max ignored them for a while, pulling his beret down over his eyes, covertly enjoying the sun on his shoulders and legs. The ducks pecked around the bench, and when he shuffled his feet a few times, they retreated and then came back, honking a little louder, pecking more aggressively.

“They must be female,” he said, smiling. She didn’t answer him except to bite down on an apple and chew it loudly. Max could no longer chew apples.

They drove home in silence, and when Max touched her thigh, Elizabeth looked down at the trembling loose skin and patted his hand. There’s no point in being mad, she thought. There’s not enough time. I could yell at him and then he’d keel over and the last thing I would have said would be, Don’t be an asshole, Max.

That’s how you know you’re dying, Max thought. I could burn her clothes, shit in the kitchen, wave my dick at the goddamned ducks, and she’d just smile and pat my hand.

Max’s place was tidier, piles consolidated and concealed, the air filled with motes of lemon furniture polish, ten pink roses as open as bowls, but it was not transformed. Elizabeth was glad she hadn’t mentioned Margaret’s true and apparently
grandiose intentions. Her mother had failed; it still smelled like seeping death.

“Nice roses your mother left. Nice vacuuming. Thank her for me.”

“Maybe you could. When I call. TV?” Elizabeth steadied Max on her hip, pulled off his coat, and held him up with one hand while she reached out to clear the recliner and slide him down into it. She saw that the recliner was empty, in an alien, pristine, showroomlike state.

Max patted the cushions. “All right. I wonder where she put my stuff?” He shut his eyes. “How about those monks?” Yesterday
Family Feud
had monks versus nuns and Max laughed until he cried.

“Okay, you watch. I gotta go out now, just for a little while.”

Elizabeth picked up her keys.

“Where are you going?”

“We need some stuff, Max. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

S
he saw him from the diner window, coming around the corner from the parking lot, his jacket flapping over his high country behind. Suit, white shirt, red tie. Polished black loafers on his big country feet. More waist now, just a little bit of gut pressing against his belt. Big, easy comfort, a long velvet-sofa man. Still those long legs and arms, coming past the rotating dessert tower.

“Well, Liz Taube. Bless your heart, good to see you again,” Huddie said, and put out his hand.

Elizabeth stared like it had turned from hand to snake as he spoke. “Bless my heart?”

Huddie slid into the booth and leaned forward.

“Elizabeth? Liz? You still go by Liz? I work in this town, I own a business here now. I have customers in here, Nikos and I are on the same delivery run. You have no goddamned idea. You never did. I am a model minority businessman. I am a family man, I give to the church, hell, I give to the synagogue. You want me to stick my tongue down your throat by way of hello? Bad enough you showed up in my store like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“What are you so pissy about? It’s been seven years and you’re the one that’s married, not me. You’ve got babies, I don’t. Excuse me, I would have written when you were in Buttfuck, Alabama, but you didn’t. And I didn’t know you were back.” Elizabeth looked down. “Running your father’s store. Christ.”

The waiter stood by the table, grinning at Huddie.

“Hey, George, how’s it going?”

“Good, Hud. Going good now.” He licked the tip of his pencil, willing to wait for twenty minutes if that was how long Huddie took. George worked two nights at week at Nassau Produce, Huddie’s store, and Huddie paid for twenty-two English classes, something his cousin Nikos didn’t give a good goddamn about. If Huddie Lester wanted to take his time about ordering coffee, and then take this angry, sort of pretty girl to the motel next door, that was fine with George Pascopolous. Huddie Lester was his man.

“Give us a few minutes, buddy.”

“Okay, Hud, when you want me, you do like so.” George raised one finger discreetly.

She would have kicked Huddie under the table if he hadn’t made her feel that everyone in the diner was watching them, completely fascinated. All that time apart, and now together, and it was not the same, of course, and this conversation would do nothing for them.

His jacket cuff rode up on his sleeve, showing a half-circle of brown skin through the white shirt.

“Are we having a conversation?” Elizabeth ran her palm over the Formica, rolling sugar granules with her fingertips.

“No,” he said. “Lets get out of here. Let’s not run out of here, but let us, by all means, get the hell out of here.”

Elizabeth drove blind to Wadsworth Park, and he followed, watching the oncoming cars for familiar faces, composing a businesslike, everyday expression. She didn’t even look at him getting out of the car, just slammed the door and walked into the woods like an Indian widow. Huddie looked around the empty lot and called to her.

“How about a blanket?”

“I didn’t come that prepared.”

“To sit on. I’m wearing a suit. We could talk in the car.”

“You’re killing me, Huddie. Let’s just go for a walk.”

They went past the rays of gravel tossed up from the parking lot, past the soda cans, candy wrappers, hot dog bun plastic and aluminum foil clumps, bits of old and crumbling forest suspended in the gelling, bug-speckled light. Huddie caught a yellowing condom on the toe of his shiny loafer and kicked it toward the stream.

“I don’t have that little problem anymore.”

“Is that right?”

He loosened his tie with one hand, and she sighed.

“We’re not talking,” he said, and he laced his fingers through hers. They both looked down, caught by what always caught them, what captured them when Huddie put his hand on the bleacher in the high school gym, resting the side of his palm so close to her leg that they both felt the soft prickling of the tiny hairs on her thigh. The absolute aesthetic harmony of their skin flared up and then subsided, outshone by the infinite exploding light of what came next, a beauty living only
in each other, separate from their attractive, everyday faces, from body parts they liked or didn’t like, from the lives they would have. Only their mothers, at the first moment of seeing, had ever read their souls so plain on their faces.

“You saw the store’s bigger now,” he said. “You ought to check it out. That front porch is for coffee and pastry, and we’ve got this big mother dairy case.”

“I’ll come again when your father’s not there. Unless he’s changed.”

“You’ve changed more than he has, and you haven’t changed much.”

“I have.”

“Have not.” He pulled up her hand and kissed it. “Have not, have not, have not. So there. What’re you looking for?”

“A tree suitable for seductive leaning.”

“Don’t bother. Don’t bother looking. There’s no need.”

The tiny black pits of his shaved beard, the leaf fragments in his black hair, his slightly chapped lips, with a dry whitish spot smack in the middle of the lower one, were all she saw. Huddie licked the dry spot and kissed her. He put his wet forehead to her collarbone, his nose pressed into her neck so that he could only breathe by opening his mouth and pulling back slightly. They heard the damp suck of his kiss and he felt Elizabeth’s silent laugh, and pulled away entirely. Anything but her sweet, lovestruck voice saying his name would push him back to his right mind, where he did not want to be.

“Huddie. Hudd-eee,” Elizabeth whispered.

“I did write to you. I wrote almost every day, for weeks. I never heard back. My aunt and uncle said—well, you know
what kind of things they’d say. I wrote one time to Mrs. Hill. I called your mother one time, but I don’t guess you got the message.”

“Never. And I didn’t get those letters, Hud. She died right after you were sent away. Oh, boy. Broken hearts all around. I never heard from you, about you, at all. A few times I skulked around the store, thinking your father might have softened up, that he’d give me your address or just drop a hint.”

“I don’t guess he did.”

“No, not even close. He did say that you’d be going to Howard. But I wrote to Howard that fall and they’d never heard of you.”

“Howard? Shit, I ended up at Michigan. You obviously did not watch college basketball.”

“Not much. A few times. It made me cry and I didn’t see you. Ridiculous,” Elizabeth said, hooking her hands inside his belt, feeling him big and wide against her, exactly as she thought he’d be. “Closer.”

Huddie felt her breasts through her T-shirt, pouring through his suit and shirt, dense liquid hearts at rest on his middle ribs. He wouldn’t say a word now, wouldn’t exhale, stared hard at his watch the way a person who’s not where he’s supposed to be does. He wanted to cross himself, like the boys from Fordham, all of whom, even the Jews, understood that the cross was to placate Fate, to demonstrate humility and helplessness when all your talent and practice were not enough to swing the odds in your favor. He unhooked her thumbs, turning her palms down when she brought them up to his mouth, smooth, round palms, curved like her thighs,
spread wide for the kisses he very carefully, gathering his wits, doesn’t give. He fished for his car keys and left his hands in his pockets.

“Maybe we didn’t really want to. Maybe we wanted to keep it the way it was.” He sighed. “Who knows. I’m sorry about Mrs. Hill. Let’s go, lady. I gotta get back to the store. It’s the end of delivery day. There’ll be six feet of charcuterie and eggplant terrine all over the floor.”

“What happened to the pigs’ feet?”

“We still got ’em. In the soul section. And shrimp paste and rice noodles and biscotti and tapenade. We upscale now.”

And she thought that if he could be sure of not being mocked, he would be pleased and only a little sorry that the dusty Coca-Cola cases and cakey cans of Ajax were gone.

They walked to the parking lot, unable to resist bumping into each other, closing their eyes in the pleasure of his hip against hers, as though there were not four layers of fabric between them and not even five seconds before he reached his car.

“Can I start shopping at your place?”

“Does old Max have gourmet tastes?”

“I do.” She was not going to talk about Max now.

“You come anytime. I don’t go in on Sundays.”

“Sundays you go to church in the morning, and then it’s family dinner with your father, who is probably just crazy about your wife, and then you shoot a little hoop with your boys.”

“Don’t make fun of my life.”

“That was longing, not mockery. Or longing concealed by mockery.”

“My son is only four years old, and my knees are too fucked up for me to play. My father is no nicer to June than he is to anybody else. Otherwise you’re right on the money. And you’re going to mess up those Sunday mornings now.”

“How?”

“Because in church, when they hit those high notes, I will not only remember us in that little yellow bed and in these woods back then, I’m going to think of you right here and I am not going to be thinking like a churchgoing man.”

“Good. Me neither.”

“You neither. Still funny.”

“I am. Was the bed yellow? I thought the walls were yellow. Little yellow flowers.”

“I don’t think so. I think the bed was yellow, the walls were no color.” He could still see the rickety bed, could see the wall as it looked to him, before and after he banged his head against it, leaving oily spots he would touch later, touching himself, thinking of her beneath him, his own amazing country.

“All right. I’ll think of you too, Huddie. Horace. I guess this means we’re not going to be getting together.”

“For what?”

“For coffee, for lunch, for a walk.”