Love Invents Us (7 page)

“Could you come a little closer? My eyesight’s not so good.” Mrs. Hill’s sweet-little-old-lady voice.

I heard him drag the ottoman over, which meant he was sitting a good six inches below her, putting them face-to-face. Ear to face, since Mrs. Hill was probably trying to get him in her sights.

“You’re not even a
young-looking
man,” she said, and I heard Mr. Stone laugh.

“No, ma’am.” He sounded different, Southern, not his classroom voice, not his smoking-in-the-car voice.

“Come a little closer,” Mrs. Hill said. “South Carolina?”

“Yes, ma’am. Kershaw. And you?”

“Mars, Alabama.”

The tip of his nose had to be denting her puddingy cheek for them to be talking so quietly.

“All the way from Kershaw. My.” For a minute, I didn’t hear anything. “And what do you want with my girl? You like girls in particular? Children?”

Mr. Stone breathed in fast. I wanted to rush in and hit her, and as she lay on the floor we would drive off to someplace pastel and foreign in our dark-red convertible.

“No, ma’am. I’m not like that. I don’t prefer girls to women. I’ve got a wife at home. And three boys.”

“Well, then,” she said, and I thought, So there, and wondered how close they were now. I could just see a sliver of his shoe tips pointed toward the recliner.

“Well, then,” he echoed. “I know it doesn’t seem right. I could lie to you, that’s what a reasonable man would do. A reasonable man, oh Jesus. I beg your pardon, ma’am.”

I heard Mrs. Hill’s wheezing and Mr. Stone’s deep cough and the clock on the mantel.

“I don’t do anything I shouldn’t,” he said.

“Except what you’re thinking, and you won’t stop that, will you?”

“Can’t, not won’t. How can I? I’m not leaving town, if that’s what you mean. And that’s what it would take, about three thousand miles. Could we throw in an ocean?”

Very softly, Mrs. Hill said, “We could throw in two oceans for all the good it’ll do you, and you know we should, because there is no glory coming from this and this is not a conversation about forgiveness. I don’t care how you end, that’s your concern, or your poor wife’s. You put one hand on that child, who thinks you love her fine mind, one hand, even when she’s more grown, and I’ll see you turning in Hell, listen to you pray for death. And don’t think I won’t know. That child tells me everything. So maybe you can keep your hands to yourself, and I won’t have to think so badly of you. Mis-tuh Stone.”

“Yes, ma’am. I don’t want you to think badly of me, and I don’t want to think badly of myself. I have no intention of harming her. You must see that whatever it looks like, it is love. And I have to say it is, in part, for her fine mind. I give you my word. Well, I don’t have much else, under the circumstances. I would cut off my hand first.”

It didn’t sound like it was so hard for him to give me up and just admire my mind for the rest of his life. He didn’t sound so madly in love with me that it was scaring him and Mrs. Hill. He just sounded happy to be talking Southern, the two of them purring along, word endings gone to nothing, their voices loopier and wider and sweeter than when they talked to me.

I brought in the teacups, went back for the spoons, and had to go back a third time for milk; Mr. Stone poured. Mrs. Hill
told a couple of funny stories about the kids in her Sunday school class, all of them now at least Mr. Stone’s age, and Mr. Stone slapped his leg and laughed.

I walked him to the door, and he said my name and straightened my shirt collar. I lifted my shoulders to meet his fingers, and he dropped the little bit of shirt he’d been holding. Mrs. Hill said of course he should come by again, and he said of course he would hope to come again, without imposing on her hospitality, it would be a pleasure.

I closed the door behind him. She was already sighing and sucking her teeth, getting warmed up for something.

“That’s your Mr. Stone.”

“Yeah. Do you want some dinner? Turkey tetrazzini? You’ve got that three-bean salad from the weekend.”

“All right. In a minute. Come in here, Elizabeth. Are you going to make me shout all night?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, sighing at least as loudly as she had.

The ottoman was still warm, even damp, from when Mr. Stone sat on it and told her he loved me.

“He sure does like you. And you like him.”

“He’s okay. He’s a good teacher. He’s interested in poetry.”

“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning / fair as the moon / clear as the sun / and terrible as an army with banners?
Like that?” Mrs. Hill said.

I didn’t answer, just walked into the kitchen while she was reciting.

“You’re in the room, you’re out of the room, I know what I know. Were you eavesdropping?”

“I don’t care what you know and I don’t care what you said. I’m starting dinner.”

“Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”

I gave her the water and cooked and washed up while she ate, which took forever. I wiped up the bean salad goop and the turkey shreds and wiped down the counters.

“I’m going.”

“Be good. Be careful. You are going to thank me someday.”

I slammed the door.

Mr. Stone stopped waiting for me in the parking lot. When I went to his office, there were always other kids in it, kids who could hardly read, kids waiting to show him their papers or ask for advice or just sit around with him. I ate lunch behind the field house until school ended, and watched the little kids at recess, and saw which girls sat by themselves near the monkey bars or the back steps. Mrs. Hill gave me the rosebud cup and saucer to cheer me up.

My mother established accounts with our four favorite food places and never made another meal. I didn’t tell her I’d learned to cook. She offered to send me anywhere for the summer—to sail in the Caribbean, to slop pigs and make jewelry in Vermont, to study architecture in Venice. I got a job at the Great Neck Public Library and boxed old magazines and stole old books. Mr. Stone didn’t call me.

In the fall I was in high school. In the middle of October I walked over to the junior high to visit Mr. Stone. I brought Tony DiMusio, who went with me everywhere for two months, until we exhausted ourselves dry-humping and made the mistake of having a conversation. I wanted to bump into Danny or Benjie in town and remind them of what a great babysitter I was, but I never saw them, although I looked in
the comic book store and near the parks. Rachel got skinny again and we fell out over Eddie Sachs, who was supposed to be her boyfriend but asked me over to his basement when she was in Bermuda with her parents. I said yes and he told her what we did and she told me she would never forgive me even though it was only one time. When they passed me in the halls, they put their arms around each other and their hands in each other’s pockets and looked through me.

I studied a little, went on hamburger, cottage cheese, and hot water diets so my ribs would show under my leotards, and stole money from my mother. I bought pot from Eddie Sachs’ brother and smoked it under the football bleachers. It made me sleepy and compliant, and I stopped when I woke up in the dusk with my head on a rock and someone’s hand under my shirt. My father moved to Ohio for six months and came back. He said Cleveland was not the West and he was still working on getting out to the wide open spaces. I told him I might not go to college.

He said, “You do what you want to do. If you start school before you’re twenty, I promise you I’ll have enough money. Not after that.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “I got to have a life, too, Lizzie.”

“I know,” I said.

I made some cross-hatching at the top of my thigh, and it hurt like hell and looked terrible. I didn’t do it again. I drank vodka and Hawaiian Punch with Eddie Sachs’ brother in their basement. I think that’s all I did the first year of high school.

Mr. Stone wrote to me in June, inviting me to make tapes of
Treasure Island
for his junior high literacy project. I threw out the letter.

“I’m going to be really busy next year,” I said when he called.

“Please. I can’t do it without you.”

“I don’t know.”

“Elizabeth, don’t make me beg,” he said.

I
lay on my back in the dark, Max’s head resting on my bare stomach.

He said he was sorry, he meant to wait until I finished high school, but he couldn’t. We always did it that way, me naked, him fully dressed, after the first time, Columbus Day my junior year. Greta and the boys were at a conference for gifted children. Max made me dinner at his house when my mother thought I was with Rachel, and he kissed me on the mouth when I went to put away the salad. The refrigerator door curved out cold behind me, and Max curved in, smelling just like he did when I was in ninth grade. I saw it coming, the hairy, fishlike opening, and I closed my eyes. The feel of his mouth wasn’t terrible—a soft bathing of Scotch from his tongue, his lips two slick bars of pressure.

“If you need to say no, say no,” he said. He was nervous.

I didn’t say anything. What would no get me?

He put his hand on my zipper and waited.

“No?” he said.

All right. “No.”

“Your no is very sexy. You know that.”

That helped. I leaned back to make him come closer, and then I leaned forward to leave. I made him nuts. Pathetic. My body said jump, his said how high. If I said no, the conversation would be over, I’d just be a scared girl. When I looked straight into his blue eyes, with the long lashes, I didn’t see the crumpled skin around them or the way his brow sloped over them or the deep dirty holes in his cheeks.

I lay facedown on his bed, their bed, pretending I was asleep, while he lay on top of me, touching me under my clothes. I pressed my body hard to the mattress, trying to drive my spine to it and keep some space between us. He slid his hand right under me, his fingers wrestling against me, his belly pressing on my back. My eyes kept opening onto one of Greta’s paintings, and I tightened my body until it felt like wood, and finally he said, “All right, go to sleep.” He was so old to me, dark freckles and grey hair on his shoulders and the back of his neck, not tons of it like those gross guys at the pool, but still. Little scoops of flesh pulling down under his arms, and lines creasing his back. And he saw how I looked at him; when I cracked my eyes open, he had his shirt and his pants back on. After that, I kept my eyes closed.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked a week later, thinking that he must know.

He laughed and lifted his head. “What’s going to happen? I’m going to love you as long as you’ll let me, and I’ll teach you a little about literature and about real music, and then you’ll break my heart. That’s the classic denouement.” He sounded cheerful. I thought he was teasing me.

“How am I going to break your heart?”

He kissed my stomach and pulled me up, deep into his lap.

“Like this, baby.” He kissed my cheek lightly. “Like this.” Again. “Very gently, I’m sure.”

“Maybe you’ll break my heart.” Half the time, I felt he
had
broken my heart, turning what was simple and safe as milk into a pool of black ice, everything familiar sliding sideways and slipping under.

“Ha. You’re seventeen. Never mind the rest. All seventeen-year-olds break the hearts of their elderly lovers. Even the ones who are not half so delicious as you. Honey, I am just the first stop for you.”

I was almost sixteen, and this was my favorite part; I could listen to him talk about my irresistibility all night. “What’s the rest?”

“You’re fishing. That’s not a nice girl thing to do. The rest is your wit and your beauty and your limpid green eyes. And so on. Now behave, I can’t spend all day cataloging your charms.” He kissed his hand and laid it on my cheek, and I put my hand over his. His hands were the part of him I liked to touch.

“Why not?” I loved showing him my worst self because there were no consequences. He couldn’t help how much he loved me. In my real life I had become remarkably trustworthy. People gave me their keys when they went away for the weekend, and returned to find everything as they’d left it, their personal correspondence undisturbed. I babysat for newborns and folded clothes while they napped; I negotiated with the principal to get permission for students in good standing to go off school grounds for lunch. I had become a student in good standing. I still had too much to hide to behave badly in public.

“I have to read these exams, and Danny will be home soon, at which time you’re supposed to take him downtown to the movies. Is it okay, babysitting for us again?”

“It’s fine. Danny’s a nice kid.” I stretched out over his papers.

“Please get dressed. I can’t begin reading with your sweet little breasts staring me in the face. As it were.”

I put on my T-shirt, content. I wondered what it would be like when I was grown. Two years ago he had swept me and my glasses and my pimples and my bumping, changing body into the sheer gold-trimmed gown of Aphrodite and kept me there. Everything that followed, even between us, was bound to be a disappointment.

Every Monday and Wednesday lunchtime, Greta was at her hypnotherapist’s, the boys were in school, and I was under Max’s black and red sheets, slightly sick from the smell and feel of Greta. Even the invisible grit in the sheets was hers, put there to annoy me and make me hate Max.

He took something out from under the bed. It was electric, I could see the cord running to the wall. He turned it on and I laughed. It looked so stupid, an egg beater with nothing to mix, just buzzing in the air and jiggling his hand.

“What’s that?”

“You’ve never seen one?”

I pretended to shut my eyes, looking down so that I could see what happened when he got closer.

“It’s pretty noisy.”

“It is,” he said, “it’s a noisy little thing. But nice. Nice for you. I’m just going to hold it on your skin, it doesn’t hurt.
None of this hurts. It’s just fun, just something nice for my sweet girl.”

Max put the blobby white ball against my arm. It tickled. He moved it up and down my legs, and then he turned me over and ran it down my spine.