Love Invents Us (21 page)

Max’s bedroom walls are the elegant Parisian yellow my mother would have chosen, and the ivy stencils from floor to
ceiling are also her kind of thing. It was my last unnecessary effort. We came home to this house and three barely furnished rooms and nine drifting, cocooned, and expensive months together. We lived in baby time, where if you’ve cleaned up the spilled talcum and gotten to and from the grocery store, you’ve had a
day
. I had no other life than Maxie’s, and I could neither remember nor imagine one. A leisurely shower elated me. Tiny red sneakers on sale with matching red and white teddy-bear print socks thrilled me. Burned toast and puddles of zwieback filled the kitchen and I swept it all into the garbage whenever I had the energy. I saw people only as they saw Max, and so I was inclined to love them. My father sent several thoughtful but not excessive checks and a stuffed pink panda, so gaudy and lush I could only assume his new wife had picked it out. He did not send a ticket to Oregon, and I thought, He’s seventy, he’s got a fifty-year-old wife with two college-age kids, her elderly, forgetful mother lives with them, fair enough. Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms. Sol had found the right family, finally, including a stepdaughter who screamed good-naturedly at him in the background, “Sol, Jesus fucking Christ, I’m waiting for a call, you know. Tell her Max is gorgeous, send her a crazy big check, and lemme talk to Kenny before the concert’s sold out.” I thought that when she dropped out of college and got tired of Kenny, I might persuade her to babysit Max. And me.

The apostle spoons went on the shelf over the changing table, and Max had every bath in the company of gospel
greats. Greta found me and sent a painting of crows and snakes, which I put back in its crate and hid in the attic, beneath zipperless luggage and winter clothes. My mother was dead but showed up in dreams so hilarious and realistic I had to believe that her soul had migrated to my subconscious, from which it was now directing late-night cinema. In my dreams, we discussed breast and bottle feeding, the right age for solids, wheat allergies, and the ways in which Max was clearly superior to the little white lumps we’d bubbled next to at the YMCA Tot Swim. We agreed on everything, and when I wavered in my own convictions, my mother, in the pale, pale lilac charmeuse evening dress she wore when I was nine, assembled experts from Anna Freud to Oscar Wilde to reassure me.

Huddie puts his hand out to smooth Max’s hair, spread out on the pillow. He has done this a thousand times, and always with pleasure, but not to hair like this.

“I go to Hebrew School. I’m in Hey. Last year, I was in Daleth. That’s practically babies. We carpool with the Shwartzes and the Manellis. I hate her. She’s really, you know, she stinks.”

Huddie gives the blanket a tug and sits down, moving two black velour gorillas (one with red bow tie, one with peelable banana in paw) to the foot of the bed. In the language of parents and children, Max knows this means his time is almost up; Huddie anticipates the last sleep-defying whoosh of conversation, Max’s long day swirling out in a cloud of words and coded feeling.

“Are you Jewish?”

“No, I’m not. I go to church from time to time.” The ten years he was a deacon are a flat dream, a life built from the outside in: deacon, Chamber of Commerce president, New York Produces Man of the Year, County Youth Basketball coach, good father, good husband, as far as the job went.

“Some people convert.” Max says this into the foot of an eyeless Raggedy Andy doll. “Our snack lady was born Catholic.”

“Uh-uh. There will be no conversion, Mister Max. I think being Jewish is great for you and your mom. But I’m not Jewish.”

“I don’t think it really hurts that much,” Max insists. Huddie winces and wonders if that is really Max’s point, to say “I know you have one. I have one, too. And we are not alike and if I could I’d get the men who are like me to cut yours off.” Max shows what Huddie recognizes as a full-court-press smile: both dimples and the upper lip slightly lifted to reveal the shining white incisors. He is not without weapons, after all. Max raises his arm, and for an insane minute Huddie thinks Max will rest his small hand on Huddie’s groin. The boy takes a headless Ken from under his blanket and tosses it into the garbage.

“Three points. Good night, little man,” Huddie says.

“Good night.”

“You can call me Huddie.”

“Huddie. You can call me Max.”

“Good night, Max.”

“Good night, Huddie. Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, ducky!” This last is yelled like a football cheer.

Huddie turns out the lights, smiling, and wonders who the
father is, who’s been fucking her for the last fifteen years. Apparently, the wish to possess that hit him when he saw the undersides of her white thighs long and harshly flattened out against the oak bleachers has not gone. For the last fifteen years he’s believed he was not a jealous man and it turns out he just didn’t remember.

Max’s sound sleep makes us nervous. We shift around on the couch until we are far enough apart to look directly at one another. Huddie’s stomach presses over his belt in a powerful, endearing slope, and his arms are as big around as small barrels, filling his shirtsleeves. If I cut him, he will open brown, red, pink, down to white bone, small petals of blood rising on his skin. But he puts his arm on the back of the couch, and now I want his fingers to brush against me so much I walk to the foot of the stairs and pretend to listen for Max, who has slept through the night since he was three months old.

“How are your folks?”

“My father’s all right, re-remarried. My mother died nine years ago,” I say. I have considered myself an old orphan, not a heartwarming one, but an orphan nonetheless, ever since.

“I’m sorry. Did it get better between you?”

It got enormously better, as we both saw her death zooming up like the next and necessary exit. We entered her terminal phase like lovers in the shoddiest dime romance: reckless, breathless, selfless, you name it, we threw it out the window. We styled what was left of her blonde hair, and when that was pointless, I spent six hundred dollars I didn’t have on a platinum bob and an ash-blonde pixie cut and found myself defending the Gabor sisters against their bad press. We created
the River Styx Beauty salon (my mother named it) and made up a gruesome menu of services sought by the decomposing but still-fashionable clients of our high camp owner—“That’s M’sieu Styx to you,” she’d snap at the other customers, waiting on our side of the bank.

“It got much better.” And then I got pregnant and had to miss her all over again, just as if she had been the best mother in the world. “And Gus?”

“Oh, baby. They’ll have to drive a stake through his heart.”

“That seems fair, for all the heartache he caused us,” I say, and then see that I shouldn’t have. No matter how old, no matter how bad, we are the only people who can genuinely and expansively bad-mouth our parents. Huddie shakes his head slowly, and I think that I have, with one careless, sincere remark, revealed all my enduring shortcomings.

“You still talk about fair. You’ve been in this world for forty years and talk about fair. I love that,” he says, as if I’ve shown him my childhood bear collection.

“I like the idea of fair. A little rough justice every now and then is appealing. Unlikely, but appealing.”

He tips his head, saluting my idea and me, and I sigh like an old, old woman, because the only choice is kissing or crying over what is behind us and I want to leap ahead without even knowing who he really is or how or if he’s leaving June or whether he will really love Max and do we now have to have real holidays instead of my casual improvisations?

I sigh and feel our first time, catching me in the chest. It is still my old stubbly couch and only that beneath my fingertips, but the dark plum silk of his cock unwrinkles in my hand, his flesh hardens, rising up, blindly seeking me. The
sweet plump point of his nipple bites my palm. We had no words for our genitals then; we said “this” and “that” and “you” and “me,” and when I touched him just the way he wanted, all parts going the right way, his sweat spattering my face, he cried out, “Oh, yes, we’re in the zone now.” And we laughed so hard we had to stop for a few minutes, but that
is
where we were, and I began to say that too, and kept saying it, with other men, even though it was never as true and saying it brought me closer only to the past and never to the man right next to me. And with no vocabulary at all we had done everything we wanted to do, everything I want to do right now, although in my mind I airbrush us, pulling those young bodies out from our folding fleshy shells, even as I want to see him now, kiss the tender, pitiful changes time has left on that beautiful boy, that handsome young man.

“You could have us both.” I think I can say that. “Don’t give up what you have.” Life will be tolerable (it would have been even better than that if you’d never showed up with those ridiculous flowers and that gigantic car), and once a month it will be all-white gardens drenched in silver moonlight, sweet whole mouthfuls of revelation, a feeling of rightness in the passing essential bits of everyday. And the rest of the time, I will still have the pleasure of being a good mother, even the unmentionable pleasure of being the only parent, the court of first and last resort, the highway, the dead end, and the only gas station for forty miles. And I count on that and Max counts on me, and you are the joker in the deck, my man.

“What are you thinking, Horace?”

“Nothing.”

“You lying jellybean.”

“You’re right. I won’t tell you what I’m thinking.” And he can’t. Pictures of June, tenderly and efficiently pressing her weight on his unbendable leg two hundred times a day until he regained use of his knee; in labor with Larry, her wet face, stunned and determined; Larry as a small boy, tearing through spangled wrapping at Christmas, glitter sticking to his curls; June’s appendectomy and most of the choir crowding into her room afterwards, Rosa Grant’s flowered straw hat perched on the IV, pink silk ribbons fluttering in front of the vent; six thousand fans, standing for that last basket; June walking the floor with colicky Larry, milk plastering her red chiffon don’t-forget-your-husband nightgown to her breasts; flashes of white and black women’s bare behinds bouncing in front of him in various motel rooms, their cheeks knotting and opening, the tiny soft arrowhead of hair beneath them; women flipping over in his hands like fresh fish, their breasts swinging and sliding in silky blue-white sacks up to their shoulders, or three shades of brown in sweet handfuls coming to rest on either side of a narrow chest, cocoa pools around purple nipples and stretch marks like the veins of fall leaves, every shape beautiful, calling for his mouth, all of them gone forever.

He smiles. “I’m here. Right here.”

“No matter what?”

“Well. That’s a lot of ground. Yes, no matter what. No one’s going to die from this. And I won’t have to shuffle off this mortal coil knowing I lived the wrong life.”

He takes my hand. “And what’re you thinking? Elizabeth?”

“Nothing.”

“You lying hound.”

“Yup. And I won’t tell you.” And I cant: pictures of him trembling over me a million years ago; of Max’s face—the first Max—peevish and remorseful in the face of death; the faint, nameless image of my Max’s father, blond and tall, foolish but not unkind and not unattractive in his uniform, in bed for twenty-four hours straight until he shipped out, as I hoped he would, and now I watch my son for signs of stupidity and wanderlust; Margaret and Sol reading silently after I’d gone to bed and come out again to see what grown-ups did—“Nothing,” my mother said, “we do nothing”; my easy cloistered evenings, doing laundry, making lunch, cutting coupons, playing with Maxie and his Claudette Colbert paper dolls, of which Huddie will surely disapprove, and they will fight and Max will weep and Huddie will turn to dark unreadable stone, and long for the sensible ease of June and the pleasant routine of childless, healthy middle age. And I surely cannot tell him that I’m no more good for me or for him than I ever was, that I will disappoint and confuse him, that I’ve been alone my whole life, and that it may really be too hard and too late, not even desirable, after such long, familiar cold, to be known, and heard, and seen.

“It’s late,” I say.

“It’s a long drive,” he says.

If this were really the end, if this were only my story, I would tell you everything.

I have had the assistance and wisdom of my friends the Reverend Robert Thompson and Nadine Abraham-Thompson, the linguistic help of Josie Zelinka, and the medical insight of Dr. Ron Nudel.

I am grateful to my friend and agent, Phyllis Wender, who knows good from bad and right from wrong and helps me navigate the minefields and mousetraps of the literary world.

I have been lucky in my Random House editor, Kate Medina, a class act, a good captain, and such a mixture of will and savvy that if the act of Creation had been left: to her, our world would have been finished in only four days, and with elegance.

My friends and family have provided kind criticism, ungrudging and generous support, and tolerance of all kinds. I am especially grateful to Joy Johannessen, whose supernatural ability to read, see, and understand what is on the page and off has made all the difference.