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Authors: Andrew Sean Greer

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BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
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But I could not be stopped. She swam like a mermaid in the swamp-tank of my dreams. I lay in bed with the window open, hoping I would hear the sound of her voice screaming at her mother from the kitchen—“I’m going crazy in this house!”—and it would enter like a sweet poison into my ear. Or I would hear faint footsteps, and I’d picture my girl in her black stockings and white dress dipping her finger into a fresh-baked chocolate cake and then trying to cover her crime. I plotted all sorts of ruses in
those weeks and months as I listened to her below me, singing to herself like a phantom lady, or waking from a nightmare with a shout. I thought perhaps I’d come up with some household repair that needed doing. Normally, of course, we got some local men to help with the house, but maybe I could convince Mother that I was the one to do it. Hughie shrugged his shoulders at this, sniffing to say it just might work. Some minor task, a peek behind the wainscoting for mice, a paint touch-up. Anything so I could be near her.
Not that things went well when I did get close. I charted her movements with the science of an astrologer, and knew she went to Mrs. Grimmel’s Girls’ Academy each morning at exactly eight with a bow in her hair and cake crumbs impastoed on her lips, and returned each afternoon at two; sometimes she did not come until much later, in another family’s yellow surrey in the company of two other girls with wine-dark hair and glasses. It was only on those occasions with her friends that I saw my Alice truly happy, waving her arms to part the waters for her story, because after she yelled goodbye on the dark stones of 90 South Park, she always turned to face the house with the jaded expression of late childhood and the loathing step of a golem. I often tried to put myself in the garden just as she might be coming home, but I could never time it right and Mother was always calling me inside for some chore.
I did place myself correctly once, pretending to fix the iron gate. I had just returned from a job interview at Bancroft’s—a job that would keep me for over twenty years, filing documents for a thirty-volume
History of the West
that Mr. Bancroft was publishing—and I looked down the street to see moody Alice stomping along the two-bit boards of the sidewalk. The light went whitewash for a moment.
“Hello, Mr. Tivoli.”
“Hi, Alice. How was school?”
My eyes had cleared enough to see she wore my favorite hairdo:
barley-sugar curls with a floating lily. She pinched a sly corner of a smile.
“Idiotic, Mr. Tivoli,” she said. “As always.”
“I’m …I’m sorry.”
“But I did decide never to marry.”
“What …never?”
She shook her head, sighing. “Never. We were reading Shakespeare, and I think
The Taming of the Shrew
is a real tragedy. There’s a waste of a good woman.”
“Yep,” I said. I hadn’t read this one.
“Miss Sodov didn’t agree. I had to rewrite my essay. How crazy! Now there’s a shrew.” Suddenly her tone became conspiratorial: “Mr. Tivoli, I wanted to ask you about—”
“Max!” my mother said from the doorway. “What are you doing there? The gate is fine. Hello, Alice, don’t dawdle with Max there. I think your mother especially wants to talk to you.”
Alice rolled her eyes and moaned, then lumbered into my house. Mother stood there, smiling without an idea of what she’d done. For a moment, I plotted matricide.
There is a little lie in here. I have made my heart into a camellia floating in a bowl of clear, pure water when in fact it was a dark and bloated thing. It was absolute pain to watch my Alice pass under my window every morning and never once look up in curiosity or tenderness at the gargoyle perched above her. And it was not with stars set in her hair that I pictured her while I lay in bed each night. No, my thoughts obsessively recalled a single base moment.
It was late in the evening, after supper, and I had slipped out into a corner of the back garden because I couldn’t read my book, or think, and had to go to the rosebushes there and crush a little flower in my fist. I had been weeping for a while when you arrived.
Alice, you were in your chemise and pantaloons. I think you were worried you had dropped something earlier in the day, a valuable pin or brooch your mother would scold you for, and so you slid through the back door, closing it carefully, and hurried into the darkness of the grass, whispering, searching every blade, heedless of how you looked. I stood unbreathing in my dark corner. On your knees, cat-stretching your arms into the yard, I could see through the neck of your loose cotton chemise a pink landscape of skin. You turned and writhed in your cloud and I turned and writhed in mine. I saw your legs stretching and tensing as you hunted and jerked your body in hope; women’s pantaloons were devious things in those days, split down the crotch with overlapping fabric, and once you shifted just carelessly enough to allow the veil to part and I glimpsed the vulnerable blue veins of your thighs. A cat leaped in the yard; you froze, the chemise settling off one shoulder. Then, abandoning yourself to fate, surely imagining a lie that might save you, you ran to the back door, opening it to make a bright square and then, closing it behind you, a dark one. I spent all night looking for your jewel, darling, but found only a hairpin, a bird’s egg, and two battered coils of grass where your knees had been.
The agony that one night caused me! The blueness of those veins colored everything in sight, and every night I had to rid the world of you just to sleep, just to survive another day. Sammy, close your ears. I did this in the most obvious, the most boyish of ways. I’m sure you think no one was ever like you in the world, and that young men in my day, adrown in love, secured their wrists in wolfman-chains until the dawn. No, we succumbed like all young men. Forgive my crudeness, Alice, but I was crude, and I hope you’ll find it flattering, now that you are old as well, to think of me in bed, staring at my memory like a French postcard, watching the starlight trickle into the darkness of your clothes.
I did not climb down the trellis to peek into her window; I did
not hang a mirror discreetly from a tree so I could see every holy one of the nightly hundred brushes of her sweet hair as she stared bored into the looking glass; I did not sneak into the carriage house to touch the seat from which she had just descended, feeling the startling warmth my fidgeting girl had made there. I imagined all these things but did none of them. No, I was left standing on the carpet and trying to feel her soul’s vibration (damn those Brussels rugs) and holding the memory of what I considered to be the closest I would ever get to love.
“Don’t go on so much,” Hughie told me when we went out on our bone-shaking bicycles. “You’ll get love. You’ll get better love than she has to offer, I can tell you. I’ve got some books you can read, but don’t keep them too long. I think my father knows I took them.”
I read the books. They had nothing to do with love, but they kept me up very late night after night. One, perhaps acquired for the collection by Mr. Dempsey to convince himself this was a form of study, turned out to be a tract on spermatorrhea and terrified me for almost a week, but the others were a source of great knowledge and fascination. I especially enjoyed the pictures. I returned them all to Hughie and we did not speak of them, just exchanged an understanding flick of the eyes. I had been distracted, at least, but I still was no nearer to love.
The opportunity I was looking for came through Mrs. Levy herself. Desperate, heartaching, red and ugly from lack of sleep, I decided I had to take a chance; I had to have another photograph to fondle in my bedroom. I rashly decided on the house-repair idea and went downstairs in shirtsleeves, a badly tied cravat, and with a yetunformed idea about needing to examine a leak in her daughter’s room.
“Mr. Tivoli!”
Mrs. Levy stood at the open door, smiling only faintly and touching her hair, which was middle-parted and done up with surprising sloppiness in puffs on either side of her head. A few presses of her experienced hand put things in place, and she stood slightly away from the door, embarrassed or signaling me that I was welcome. The sun pinkened her face. She was in unwidowlike green and wore an old-style bustle high at the back of her skirt. Mrs. Levy seemed conscious of her artificiality and straightened herself slightly. She made these small but profound adjustments in the first moments I saw her in the doorway, distracting me from her maneuvers by light, intelligent conversation:
“ …something about the evening positively Shakespearean, don’t you think? Something about being in a grove of trees, like Arden? I wonder if that feeling will ever change. I wonder if a hundred years from now people will be standing at their doorways looking at the trees with that comical sensation of being in love.”
She had transformed herself into the old Mrs. Levy again and gave a light rendition of her laugh—that descending string of pearls. “I’m being stupid. Please come in, Mr. Tivoli. I’m sure Alice would love to see you, too.”
“I’ve come to check the paint,” I began, but found I was already inside the house, inside my own old hallways repainted in dimmer colors and sectioned by various wallpapers, dadoes, and friezes so that it was like coming upon an old friend done up for some event—a state dinner or a chowder party—looking so unlike themselves that you blink awkwardly and turn away, kindly refusing to recognize this strange person attached to a beloved face. I found no scent of my childhood here. This was not like walking through a pyramid tomb of the past, knocking against my old relics; this felt very new; someone else had cracked and repaired that porcelain figure; it was a museum of Alice. For there she was.
“Alice, Mr. Tivoli is here to check … the paint you said? Say hello, dear girl, and maybe wipe your hands, thank you.”
Alice’s deep brown hair was up; she looked like a woman. She stood up from the settee and set down her book
(From the Earth to the Moon,
the distance between us in that room, my dear).
“Well, gee, hi there, Mr. Tivoli,” she said mockingly as she smiled and shook my hand. These were the most ordinary gestures, given to me as she gave them to all others. I searched desperately for some sign that something dear was hidden for me in this routine, but very quickly she was sitting back on the couch, lifting her book. She wore the strangest dress of gossamer satin, which had a sheen of age about it that had probably gone unnoticed in candlelight. Some hairs clung to the fabric, burnished gold hanging on a sleeve. The light was ribboned throughout her hair, which was parted and coiled elaborately around her head as it might be for a dinner party. These were not the costumes Mother and I had seen them wearing that morning on their way to temple. They had been playing in the closet, and they had done each other’s hair. So this was what lonely women did the whole Sabbath day long.
“You both look nice,” I said, and grimaced, trying to shake the burlap from my tongue.
Mrs. Levy smiled conspiratorially at Alice, who finally turned human in my presence: she blushed. She touched her hair, sighing and looking everywhere but at me and her mother, as if searching for some escape from the room in which she had been caught playing dress-up with her old mother. I had done this; I had made a little flame under her skin. I took the moment—snip—and coiled it in the enamel locket of my heart.
Mrs. Levy sat, motioning for me to sit as well. She turned to her burning daughter. “You know, Alice, a cup of tea would really hit the spot right now, wouldn’t it?”
Alice said, “Ugh,” then stared angrily at her book.
Mrs. Levy looked warmly at me. She sat perfectly motionless and lovely, knees to the side so that her dress could fit in the chair, and I saw she had already loosened her bustle so that it lay more naturally. It must have been an old dress, something from her courtship with Mr. Levy long ago in Philadelphia, a shimmering vestige of girlhood and vanity.
And she continued to look at me, signaling something from deep inside her eyes. I looked back to Alice, who sulked in the settee, then to her mother and that mysterious smile.
“Where’s Tillie?” I asked, referring to their maid.
Mrs. Levy shook her head. “A family emergency. Somebody’s died, I think, or is going to die. In Sonoma, so we’re all alone.”
A tilt of her head, a blink of the eyes. What was she trying to tell me?
“Shall I make tea?” I ventured.
The room released its breath. Mrs. Levy laughed again and Alice let out a little snort of amusement, shaking the ebony wreaths of her hair, twisting the ribbons of light all over.
“Wouldn’t that be wonderful, Alice?”
“Oh, absolutely wonderful, Mother. Stunning.”
Her mother shot her a mean look. “I appreciate it, Mr. Tivoli.”
I went into the kitchen, utterly perplexed. There, the tea things were already set out on a silver platter. I lit the gas of the stove in that old kitchen where I used to sit beside John Chinaman as he haggled with the bread and fish vendors who came to this back door. I boiled the water and made the tea while Mrs. Levy stood there in the room with me, humming something under her breath. And then, with no help from her at all, nothing but the encouragement of her pearl-drop eyes, I arranged the tea things in the parlor directly in front of Alice, who gave me a little breath of gratitude before setting at the cherry cake. I sat back. I realized they had been sitting in the parlor all afternoon, distracting themselves with hair and costumes, weary, thirsty, and half starved.
BOOK: The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
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