Love Invents Us (17 page)

“You know if I see you in private I’m going to make love to you, and if I see you in public this is not going to be our little secret for very long. A blind man could see how much I love you. I gotta go, sweet.” His voice rough on that last word, and inside Elizabeth bright red streamers snap open and billow out in six-foot-long celebration. Inside Huddie, there is a quiet pinging, the warning sound of a failed alarm.

“Okay. I’ll see you. Let’s just get into our cars and go. I love you too. What’s your son’s name?”

He shook his head painfully, walking away. “Larry. I know you do.”

They started their cars simultaneously. Elizabeth left first, nosing past his nicer, newer car and shooting gravel onto his windshield.

Huddie’s wires cross every which way now. Sight, smell, taste, and touch enfold one another. Wet is like sweet is like heat is the aching pulse, is salt caking. Her smell is the smell of the unwrapped ready-to-rot figs, and for a lost half hour he scrunches thin lilac tissue paper around their small purple asses, tilting their stems so each seamed bottom is turned to its most seductive side. Carrot fronds are her hair; the slick celadon crack of a broken honeydew is hers and tastes cool, then warm. He puts his lips flat against tomatoes, plums, peaches, and nectarines before stacking them, and they ripen too fast, with hard-to-sell dark spots where his saliva has gathered and seeped in. Marshmallows, not even of interest since early Boy Scouts, roll out of their bags, pull his fingers into their sweet dusty white middles, pull themselves up around his fingertips. Half a bag. Twenty-three marshmallows. His fingers are stiff, powdered white, and his throat is glued shut, but the sugar thickly coating his lips and the drying tug from the roof of his mouth to the root of his tongue is so like a past moment between them he has to sit down behind the un-shelved goods, head resting on the giant cans of juice, sticky hands hard over sticky mouth, and cry without making a sound.

*  *  *

Three weeks later, after two embarrassing and badly choreographed visits to Nassau Produce, half hiding to watch Huddie sell happy women olive oils they never thought they wanted and milk that was twenty cents more than the supermarket’s, Elizabeth was finally naked, sitting up to admire the way Huddie undressed, laying his red tie on the seat of the armchair, unbuttoning his white shirt, hanging it over the chair back to avoid wrinkling, and then tugging hard on his belt, stomach sucked in and released, in that way that men don’t mind and women feel terrible about, and pulling off pants, briefs, and socks in one piece.

“When did you get so polished?”

He turned his head, reminding her that when he blushed the tips of his ears burned red as if the sun set through them, and like that she fell in love again. For the red-brown tips of his ears.

“I can’t stand standing around in my shorts and socks. Like an idiot.”

“No. You look beautiful.”

“Well. Now, you give me some room here, Elizabeth.”

Huddie splashed water over his face, drinking some from his hands, and looking in the little mirror, he saw his skinny, lovesick young self. He wondered if God was more likely to forgive him if he told June she could go ahead with another baby and then he could leave her when the youngest, not even conceived, was finally off to college, or if he could save himself some time and tell June now that Larry was enough, which would allow him to leave, not dishonorably, in only fourteen years. He sprinkled Elizabeth’s chest with cold water
and watched the white-blue skin of her breasts crowd up into tight pink waves around her nipples.

Fourteen years.

“Ohh, it’s cold, you shit. Horace, you shit. If we weren’t here, drinking motel water, what would you want?”

Huddie picked up his watch, checked, and put it down. “To drink? V8 juice, maybe grapefruit.”

“And to eat?”

“Is this the
Glamour Quiz
for Lovers?” June loved magazine tests and tore them out to answer right before bed. Tests for love, for budget balancing, for keeping your temper, for managing your in-laws. He answered every question of every test honestly, waiting for the terrible truth to hit June as she sat propped up on three lace pillows, totting up the scores, waiting to be touched.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get to cook for you. Tell me.”

“Right now? A real Caesar salad, lots of egg, homemade croutons, heavy on the garlic. Really green olive oil. I’d cover you with leaves and eat it right off you. You salad bowl, you.” He pushed June out of his mind; this little bit of time with Elizabeth would be lost to him if he waited for June to take off on her own.

He lay down again, setting the watch face toward him, and brought June back, waiting in the kitchen. He put his face deep into Elizabeth and willed his wife always safe and far away.

Elizabeth bit the soft flesh above his narrow hips. Maybe, without either of them noticing, without doing harm to June or Larry, she could mark him.

“Huddie, you’re going to be a fat old man, you know that?
You foodaholic. Look at that gleam in your eye, homemade croutons. We’ll end up two big porkers together. ‘Come closer, my darling, closer.’ ‘I’m trying, sweetheart, I’m trying.’ ”

Huddie smiled and was stricken, not wanting to say that he did worry about his weight and every time he looked at his father’s gut pushing wide black diamonds between his shirt buttons, he promised not to sample the triple crème cheeses, not to kick June out of the kitchen anymore, not to let the Belgian-chocolate sales rep leave him a two-pound gift box every six weeks. And as he looked to change the subject, bee stings of pure happiness fired up the back of his neck and shoulders. She saw them together, together in a who-cares, fat and happy middle age. Horace and Elizabeth, rocking, creaking in contentment on the front porch of a house near no one they’ve ever known.

She laid her white hand in the middle of his chest, scarless, dark mahogany, nothing like Max’s, as nothing in the room was like anyplace she’d been lately. No real harm could come to you in a motel room, it seemed. The minute you hit the road, picked up a phone, found out that you’d been found out, all hell might break loose, but right then, between the see-through towels and the stiff green blankets, you were held in the safe, silent wall of the unborn.

“I’m starting to like motels,” Elizabeth said, sliding his watch under her pillow.

Huddie put his hand over hers and the watch back on the nightstand. “I hate them. Except for this.” He sighed and put his head on her back, smoother than the sheet. “I wish I had
another life, a whole second life, for us.” He brushed his lips over her ass.

“You’d get tired of me.”

“I wouldn’t mind finding that out for myself.”

“This way we can keep the romance. You know, years longer than other people.”

He lifted his head and pulled the sheet up to his shoulders, unbearably tired, filled with thoughts of June and Larry and everything he would lose and everything he had lost just in this hour, and she slid her fingers down his neck, flicking sweat off his chest. Who had left such wide, milky pools on the bed?

“All right,” Huddie said, patting the hand on his shoulder, keeping his face turned away, to not see her tears, to not have her see his.

When he rose to leave, after three false starts, there was no afternoon light left, just the chill blue-grey of winter dusk and the white Hollywood-style bathroom lights buzzing through it.

“You’re leaving,” she said.

“Leaving you?” One of her hairs would not come loose from his tongue, her earrings had left twin, intimate gouges on his cheeks, and these awkward things gave him as much pleasure as all the official great moments of his life put together.

“No. It only looks that way. I am right here.” He put his hand between her breasts, and felt his palm sink by quarter inches, lodging far beneath the surface of her skin. “Here.”

H
uddie knew it would be a disaster.

“Max will be at physical therapy. I know his schedule, I’m taking him there and picking him up. Don’t worry, just meet me on your break.”

They were both tired of the motel. At first, when he couldn’t have even five minutes of his hand on Elizabeth’s naked stomach, an hour on a bed, any private bed, was all he would ever ask for in life. He knew that it would be no time at all before even two hours on the bed wasn’t enough; it made his chest hurt, it made the motel impossibly sterile, a disgusting black hole that took in conversation and sentiment and memory and left sex between two people in a hurry, trying to act as though an afternoon was a life. He liked comfort, a glass of juice, a bathrobe, real pillows. He liked decency. Huddie didn’t want to raise the issue of the motel’s shortcomings. He couldn’t afford an apartment, and when he talked about leaving June, he and Elizabeth both burst into tears.

“All right. You sure?”

“Huddie, of course I’m sure. I’m the one who drives him.
I’ll drop him off at around one, run a few errands, and meet you at two. I’ll go pick him up at three-thirty. Okay?”

Huddie listened closely at the door and heard nothing from inside. Elizabeth wasn’t back yet. The apartment was as he imagined, like his dad’s place, more or less. Old-man smell, bathroom nastiness, a little lingering cigarette smoke and Old Grand-Dad, which made it very much like his father’s house. Huddie was standing next to a musty, overloaded coat tree, one of Max’s hats falling toward him, when he heard a gluey, rumbling cough that was not Elizabeth’s.

“Sweetheart? Could you come here?”

Between his impulse to laugh aloud at the farce his life was turning into and his jacket’s entanglement with the coat tree, Huddie froze in the middle of the front hall.

“Liz? I don’t—”

Max leaned through the bedroom doorway, losing his grip on his unzipped pants. Huddie remembered a stronger and bearded face from junior high school and looked away from the shining white ball of Mr. Stone’s belly.

“Mr. Stone? Max? I’m a friend of Elizabeth’s. She invited me over for a cup of coffee …”

“And gave you the key?”

“She thought she might be a little late, from taking you to the uh.” Huddie couldn’t remember, for the life of him, where Elizabeth had been taking Max.

Max slid down to the floor.

“Could you get me the blue pillbox, from my nightstand? And the water?”

Huddie brought Max his nitroglycerine and pressed Max’s hand to the glass.

“Okay now. Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure. I had this pain before.” Max put his fist to the middle of his chest, a gesture that would ensure him immediate examination in the emergency room. “And I took a nitro and it was better. And now it’s back. And a few minutes ago my jaw and my elbows ached. But they’re not hurting now, so that’s good.”

“That is good. Did you eat something spicy? You know, heartburn?”

“Chinese food.” Max was embarrassed to talk about eating with his belly resting on his thighs, in front of this well-built boy.

“Golden Chopsticks?” It was the place nearest Max’s apartment, the place Huddie would go for Empress Chicken, given his choice.

“Yeah. Ahh. It’s not better.”

“Let me call your doctor.”

“If it’s an infarction, he’ll want me to go to the ER.”

“I’ll take you.”

“You?”

“Horace Lester. Let’s go.”

Huddie left Elizabeth a note and put an overcoat on Max, who insisted on slowly buttoning his shirt and zipping his pants to hide his nearly tearful longing for his blue sweatpants and his soft, mothering sweatshirt.

Everything in the emergency room happened quickly and efficiently. Huddie decided to say he was Stone’s son-in-law,
which could be, and that way they’d let him take care of him, or sit with him, until they did whatever they did. He apologized mentally to June and her father.

There wasn’t five minutes of sitting, and the triage nurse didn’t give a fuck who Huddie was. Max slapped down an insurance card, put his fist to his chest again, and in ten minutes Huddie was cooling his heels in the waiting room, Max had an IV dripping into his veins, and they’d hooked two monitors to his chest. Two white doctors bumped into each other behind a pale green curtain, and after the EKG one of them stuck his head out and nodded to Huddie.

Finally, the fat doctor said, “Let’s play it safe. It’s not an emergency, you’re okay.” He raised his voice to reach the nurse back at the desk. “Let’s just say a soft romey and follow up tomorrow.”

The nurse nodded, typing slowly onto pink paper.

A tear ran from Max’s eye into his ear.

“What’s a soft romey?” Huddie asked, as any good son-in-law would.

“Sorry. It’s just ‘Rule out myocardial infarction.’ I notified his doctor. We’ll get him to his room in a little bit, as soon as we get things calmed down again.”

A white, limp girl was carried in, blood streaming down her forearms, and Max and Huddie watched, slightly ashamed of their relieved curiosity, like people with a flat observing the eighteen-wheeler flipping over in front of them.

They leafed through magazines until the nurse, whose white uniform was now lightly red-speckled, came over with a pair of orderlies.

Huddie rose as they put Max on the stretcher.

“Subacute c.c.u. Room 146,” the nurse said.

In the elevator, the black orderly and the white orderly checked out Huddie and Max. Their relationship is not obvious. They might be old white employer, young black employee. Possibly, the black man’s the boss and the old white guy’s been working for him for years, but the old man doesn’t look like he’s been able to work for years. They don’t look like friends, like poker buddies. It does not occur to the orderlies that the men might be lovers, or family. Neither of them would like those possibilities.

Max saw the grey elevator walls, the distorted reflections in the dented steel ceiling, the green sheet, Horace’s hand, his fingernails smooth honey-colored ovals, longer than Max’s, and Max wondered if all black men wore their nails long; he’d never looked at any man’s nails before. He put his hand on Huddie’s wrist and squeezed it. The orderlies took this in too, looking at each other sideways and then straight ahead.