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Authors: Andrew Sean Greer

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“Did you get the camera?” I asked her once we were outside.

“What?”

“You were going to buy a camera before I met you. The old man said your fingers were too small.”

She smiled slyly. “I guess they were big enough to hand him the money.”

“You bought it?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What do you take pictures of?”

“Whatever I like. Let’s walk up this way, there’s a hidden stairway to Franklin and I think when the roses are in bloom it’s so mysterious.” She put her arm in mine and, talking now and then about the subjects on her mind, led me to her secret bower.

It would be nice to tell you that she fell in love with me. There, as we took our walk among the mansions and carriages of Van Ness, the hedges that had been planted to keep us from the flower gardens, the vulgar rockwork and cast-iron fountains shaped like children—that she found the sunlight too dazzling to defy and
kissed me under the rare and giant flower of a century plant. But you know better, I think; we were strangers, brought together by an accident, and once we had exhausted all conversation on cars and death and our own shock, we walked for a long time in uncomfortable silence. I tried to think of all I secretly knew of Alice, and led her now and then into topics I knew would get her talking, but mostly I think I bored her.

And I would like to tell you that she was just as perfect as I’d remembered her, but she wasn’t. The tea shop had made me mad with hope, believing that everything true about her could never change for me; she had emerged from the grave of memory as perfectly preserved as love could ever be. But daylight and the lack of disaster made a difference. Alice was still my beautiful girl, even in the bright tailored suit of her “at home” clothes, the odd little toque that seemed almost like a turban; so much about her was exactly the same. But some habits of a girl are not as lovely in a woman. Her private furies, for instance, which had always seemed like a sign of character and independence, had altered a bit, becoming more hilarious from the mouth of a thirty-two-year-old, but also more sour, even petulant. How the mailman mangled her letters. The fog, the rich and stupid neighbors, their dogs. As if every annoyance of the world were meant for her.

As the time passed, I found other changes I had not expected.

“Am I still familiar to you?” I asked her.

She examined my face for a moment. I still could not believe that nothing of old Max could be found there.

“No,” she said.

“Not at all?”

“I was wrong. I was a little emotional on Saturday.”

She pronounced it “Satuhday.” Nothing had ever flattened the vowels of my young Alice, but I suppose a life and marriage in the Northwest will do it. So there was that, and her furies; they were changes so minor that you could ignore them if you liked. After
all, when listening to a symphony, we don’t insist that the composer strike one chord over and over; we enjoy his skill at variation. And I had thought I’d known her so completely that I would love every variation in my Alice, every major and minor scale, because, as in a symphony, the very depths of her would never change. But there was a flaw in that thinking: the Alice I loved would never age, it’s true, but still she might change. She had suffered a burning town and a dying husband and who knows what else; we cannot blame all our scars on time. Perhaps something shifted in Alice, something I hadn’t noticed in the ecstasy of the tea shop.

We reached the house again and stood within the oval curve of the entrance, framed by a glazed tempest of woodwork. I was in an odd sort of panic, like a climber losing his grip on crumbling shale, not only because I had bored her so, and was not even familiar to her, but because the object I had loved so eagerly all these years had changed, ever so slightly, and I could not decide if this change meant nothing or everything to me. No one yet had ever died from not-being-in-love, but I might, if it came to that. I was still examining my heart when she spoke to me very seriously.

“All right, Asgar, tell me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got some kind of secret. It’s all over you, you’re terrified to tell me, it’s all you can think about. I tell you, it’s a bore to be around someone with a secret. Sorry, I know I don’t always put things the right way.”

“I—”

“Please just tell me and get it over with.”

“But there’s nothing to tell.”

She stared at me and called my true name: “Max Tivoli.” This stopped me dead. There was a single oxygenless moment before she continued: “Did I hear you talking about him downstairs? What did my mother say? You couldn’t have known him, he’d be
so old. She probably didn’t tell you this, but she was a little in love with him.”

I found my breath at last, a lucky thief. “I’m sorry, no, I didn’t really know him.”

“He broke her heart. I was a little girl, there was an incident with him and we had to leave. He’s a bit of a villain in our house, and we never talk about him.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry? I just wanted to explain. You asked me once why we left San Francisco, and that’s why. So now you know.” She searched me carefully, as with a scene one is asked to memorize; that is, as if she might never see me again. “Thank you for a pleasant walk, Asgar.”

“It was pleasant.”

“Yes.”

“I’m grateful you could come, Alice.”

“It’s been nice.”

Dull, ordinary words for people who want the moment to die. And perhaps I did. It was too awful to think that I had preserved my heart so long ago and that now, years later, I had stuck it in my chest, smelling of formaldehyde, and found it too sorry and shriveled to work. But it’s a common tale. Isn’t there a statue, in Shakespeare, of a long-dead queen who comes to life before the eyes of her mourning king? The king rejoices and repents, but what does he do the next day? Does he remember how she sang off-key as she brushed her hair, how she screeched at servants? Perhaps it felt easier, in the doorway, to fall sleepily into my old life of memory and sorrow than to face my real, live girl.

We smiled tightly to each other and I saw I’d propped my walking cane beside her. Confused, hardly breathing, I nodded goodbye to her and reached out for my cane.

Alice’s face turned a peculiar color, her hand went out to support herself against a column, and her eyes looked directly into
mine. I had never seen that expression on her before. She stared at me for an instant—a sharp, improbable instant—then turned and saw the cane in my hand. Her face collapsed. I didn’t understand any of it, the stare, the clumsy blush on her cheek. And then I realized: poor woman! She thought I was going to kiss her!

Alice closed her eyes, whispered a goodbye, and made her way awkwardly into the house. I just stood there. The network of veins vibrated through my body, harp-thrummed by the impossible. Could I be wrong? That I’d seen in her eyes the same carnality I’d always hidden in mine? Alice, you will forgive my crudity, but I knew then that my luck had doubled over the years: I had become a man too handsome to resist, and you, a widow longing to be merry, had walked all those long blocks just hoping to be touched. Admit it, now that I am dead: you wanted me to kiss you. And you still did, inside the house, leaning breathless against the shut door, your heart pulsing as fast as the glands of a snake emptying itself of venom; you still saw my face inside your lids.

No braceleted ankle or can-can leg was ever as erotic as the shame you showed me in that doorway, darling. And with a great relief, everything was just as it had been before, or greater, because all at once it came rushing back—the ice in the heart, the bell in the brain—the terror of wanting you.

Now the astute reader will be wondering how I ever thought I would get away with this. It’s one thing to disguise oneself for an afternoon tea or carriage ride; it’s quite another to keep a lie for the length of an affair or, more improbably, for the lifetime that I hoped to be with Alice. I might change my looks and words to suit her, but how could she really love me when my truest self was buried under the floorboards? And yet, I’ve heard of long and happy marriages where the wife never knew of his second family,
or the husband never learned that her blond hair that he so valued could be bought at any druggist’s. Maybe lies are necessary for love, a little; certainly, I wouldn’t be the first to create a false persona just to seduce a woman. Of course, none of this crossed my mind in the following weeks of my courtship—the visits to the House of Widows, the at homes with Alice and her mother, smiling in their ignorance—never did I consider that I might wear this false mustache for life. The heart plans nothing, does it? No, the only obstacle I ever considered was Hughie.

He was not sad in marriage; he was stable. I have to assume this made him happy, in a way; perhaps marriage was a weight, a paperweight, keeping the heart from flying across the room at every breeze. Of course we never went out to the Barbary Coast—he was married, and the place was nearing its final days—but we never went out together at all. Instead, I was invited to dinner parties hosted by Hughie and his wife. They had bought a new house on O’Farrell, something more appropriate than the Pumpkin, and I would find myself at a table of handsome, rich, and clever people who intimidated me with their clothes and their wit until I discovered they had no imaginations, that their opinions and fashions were copied from magazines they all had read. Hughie seemed perfectly at home in this crowd, but I was always nervous and drank too much. I couldn’t play their games, but what saddened me the most was seeing these glittering bores lean across the wineglasses to whisper into Hughie’s ear, hearing their private laughter, knowing they had supplanted me in his confidence. At least it took a crowd of them to do it.

It was only right, though, that his wife would take over all the parts I was used to playing, and she was a kind young woman, bright and pretty and never pretending to be more clever or fashionable than she really was. She was good to me, and yet we were rarely together; she always found reasons to leave the room or tend to someone else. It wasn’t, as she said, because Hughie and I should
be alone; I think, somehow, I scared her. In any case, by the time Alice came back into my life, I was seeing little of either Hughie or his wife; their lives were taken over by their family. Yes, shortly after the turn of the century, little Hughie Dempsey had a son.

At the time, I could not understand how the soft look on my old friend’s face, which used to come only after several belts of whiskey and buttermilk, appeared so easily as he stroked his young boy’s face. I couldn’t see how this clever man could listen to his wife speaking of her “angel from heaven” and keep his willing smile; I couldn’t fathom Hughie’s belief that his son would accomplish wonders in the world, as if other worthy children, equally full of promise, were not born every minute, and failed, and turned into men just like us, who would lay onto the next generation the same hopes, infinitely deferred.

But I was not a father then. I did not know, Sammy, what happens to us in the presence of our sons. Today, for instance, when you and I built a fort among the honeysuckle and the blackberry, using an old refrigerator crate with
Coldspot
branded on the side. We shared no secrets in our little house. Instead, we lay side by side, barely fitting, our heads on the long cool grass of the forest. I felt the prick of the grass on my face and, beneath it, the moist earth coming through, smelling of blood. A strong breeze blew over a leaf, revealing the tiny husk of an insect. A drab butterfly, headed the wrong way, was being blown ceaselessly away from his goal. “Jeez, it’s boring,” you said, then smiled and did not speak for half an hour. Sound of desperate birds. Why would this make a father weep?

We have no right to keep our friends from being happy, and if it seemed to me that Hughie, like a man searching for a religion, had found a life that had been led before, I never took him aside and scolded him for it. He was an extraordinary man, I’d always thought, and deserved an extraordinary life. But perhaps it’s the average men who need the extraordinary lives; the rest of us need
the comfort of the common. He’d had fun with me, but I saw now that he’d always been unhappy, and terribly alone, even in my company. So I did not trouble his new world. I suppose in some way I envied it.

The problem of Hughie, therefore, was not his life. I could not change that. The problem was merely that Alice might come across us together, realize we were friends, and discover my true identity.

I did tell him about Alice, and my old friend was stunned and happy. I gave him all the details of our meeting, her unfading beauty, and how I had worked my way into becoming a regular at the House of Widows despite the terrifying presence of Mrs. Levy. He laughed at the foolishness of my life, and had a plain and happy expression on his face, perhaps remembering how in our youth the least important things were filled with an intensity he had forgotten.

“My God, Max, really? Alice?”

“Yes, Alice.”

“Well, she can’t be the same. I mean, I guess what I mean is you can’t feel the same.”

“I do, that’s what I’m telling you. It’s so strange, but I never forgot. And now here she is, thirty-two and a widow, but it’s like I’m seventeen.”

BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel

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