Love Invents Us (19 page)

In some alternate universe, Huddie and Elizabeth would make love every day, without fear or hurry, and if he had to, he would lie about it to June until kingdom come, lie willingly and shamelessly, lie and feel lucky to have the opportunity. But in this precarious world, he will not leave June and he will not become a man who sees his son every other Saturday and sends a check. Will not. Will not be another successful black man leaving his fine, kind, bronze-skinned wife for a white woman. A crazy white woman, with no common sense, no prospects, less of a foothold in the world than he had. A woman who doesn’t even see the thousand things he has taught himself to ignore, the thousand things June knows, without discussion. Elizabeth has split herself open for him without knowing who enters her, the hundreds he carries with him, right to the bed, how much he owes to people she cannot even imagine. Marry this educated white girl whose people have money and still move down. Unbelievable.

The early morning crowd came and went. In ten minutes Michelle and John would drive up, put on their aprons, and go about their business. And Michelle would look at them as a black woman does, and John would look at them as a black man does, and much as they liked him, much as they owed him for various kindnesses of the past two years, the air at work would shift and June would hear. Huddie put a note on
the cash register—“Back by 8:15. John, Basket Hill produce in the back. Michelle, bag yesterday’s bread for St. Vincent de Paul. Horace”—and drove Elizabeth to Wadsworth Park.

“We need to step back, sweetheart. Not step away, but step back. I think so.”

Elizabeth picked up handfuls of wet leaves and let them drop.

“We could just go on like this.”

“I can’t. I can’t go from this to my real life. I can’t have this not be my real life.”

“You love me so much we have to break up.”

“Shit. Yes.”

Elizabeth shook her head.

“How about you love me so much you leave June?”

Huddie shook his head.

“Well, I must be the dumbest woman in North America. I did not see this coming.”

“Sweet. Elizabeth. You don’t see things coming. You never did.”

“I will. Someday I will see things coming and I will jump out of the way. And if I see you, I’ll run in the opposite direction. And if you see me first, you should do the same, you gutless son of a bitch. Drive me to Max’s.”

They drove in silence, wet-faced, two shrinking loose piles in the corners of the front seat, Huddie steering with two shaking fingers, Elizabeth’s head on her chest. She shut the car door carefully. Surely, at the edge of the curb, at the corner, at the blurred traffic light, at the crumbling stucco arch over the entrance to Max’s building, surely at some stopping point one of them would see that it could go another way, that it must,
but Elizabeth finds her key and Huddie speeds through the changing yellow light.

He worked longer hours and claimed insomnia. He fixed up his fathers house and built a sandbox for Larry. He ate all day long, stashing macadamia nuts in the glove compartment, dried figs in his pocket, a box of shortbread beneath his desk. Elizabeth fell back on old habits, her own and Max’s, to get through a time so bad it made her long for elementary school. She made her way, at a numbing, workaday pace, through Max’s stockpile of hard liquor. Max had anticipated a long, slow, tedious dying, and he had not expected to stop drinking until he was at death’s very door. There was a bedroom closet full of Scotch and cheap white wine and three bottles of bourbon, which Elizabeth was able to drink if she mixed it with coffee. She shoplifted cans of crabmeat and lobster bisque and paid for bread and bananas and paper plates. Every day she stole something useful, a box of paper clips, a dustpan, a six-pack of sponges, so she could put Max’s things in order. Margaret called to read her the obituary, which mentioned Greta and the two boys and his long teaching career. It did not mention Elizabeth or Benjamin, and she was not invited to the funeral. No one called her about it, which seemed small of them, but she had no wish to go.

She packed and cleaned and hung outside the windows to wash them. At night she flipped through Max’s journals with less interest than she expected and drank until her eyes closed. When she touched her face, it felt like oil over dust.

When Dan finally called, all Elizabeth had to do was shower and put on the set of clean clothes she’d left folded on
top of Max’s dresser for the last eight days. The sheets were washed and dried and put away, the drawers were empty, she’d never been there. She took Louisa’s paste diamond earrings and cherry hat and left the stock certificates and passbooks in a daisy shape on Max’s desk.

“What did my father tell you about me? Did he tell you what a strange boy I was? What a strange boy I am?”

“No. He loved you very much, he was very proud of you.”

“He didn’t know fuck-all about me.”

“I didn’t say he understood you or your photographs. I said he loved you and he was proud of you. He supported you all those years, in every way, and he gave you everything he could. He paid for college, he gave you money to go to Mexico. Did he have to
understand
too? I used to let you stay up until midnight, remember? I’m the person who sat with you when you had those nightmares, when you were little, remember? I don’t think you have to swear at me.”

“You sat up with Benjie. You put Marc and me to bed early. Marc thought you were a bitch. He did a whole comic strip about you. ‘Betty Bitch.’ I loved you so much then. I never even fucking saw you again. You left me, you left him, and that was it. When you lay down on the bed next to me—my nightmares weren’t that bad, by the way, I just wanted you beside me—I used to look down your shirt. You finally started wearing a bra, I see. I wasn’t so little. I just didn’t hit puberty until I was fifteen. You were gone by then. Did you babysit us just so you and my father could be together?”

“That’s actually a very funny question. No. Max thought I was crazy. I wanted to be just the babysitter, a normal girl. So
I wouldn’t let him touch me, kiss me good night, nothing. Not so much as a squeeze on the knee. More happened on my other babysitting jobs.”

“But he could fuck you all the other times, go down on you all night long while my mother was in Europe, visiting what was left of her family.”

She sat down in Max’s recliner. “Yes. You want to hear ‘yes’? Yes.”

He unbuttoned his shirt. His skin was just like it was when he was little, white-gold over big blue veins snaking down his smooth shoulders and chest. The skin of martyred boy saints, luminous and sheer. His hands were just like Max’s used to be, long and square, with thick fingers. No stiffening grey tape over hands like old fruit, no bloody skin puddling around the entry point of the IV drip. Elizabeth had watched him sleep a dozen times, flat on his back in his nightshirt and his little white underpants, his briefs sliding down below his smooth stomach. His little penis and his pointy little hipbones made a triangle in his underpants, and she would watch for a few minutes as the little tent got bigger and then shifted away, until it was no different from looking at a girl.

“ ‘Going down on her is like licking honey off the back of the tiniest, rose-enameled demitasse spoon. Not a spoon, no spoon has that softness, that thick, soft, bite-me quality.’ ”

Elizabeth got up. “You read his journals.”

“Of course, whenever I could. I wanted to know, just like you did. I wanted to know what he thought of me, what happened between the two of you, what happened with my mother. You two had a very weird relationship.”

She stood so close to him she could feel his breath on her
forehead. He backed up. “Yeah, we did,” Elizabeth said. “We had a very weird relationship for a very long time. He sort of ruined my life and I loved him very much and now he’s dead, and frankly, that’s okay. He’s not in pain anymore, and I am, so there you go. I took pretty good care of him, I think, and I would not have been able to go on doing that for another year or another ten years or even another month. And we were lucky enough to have an ending that worked out much better than the rest of our relationship, and that’s all I want to tell you. That’s it.”

“I’m sorry. You don’t have to go tonight if you don’t want to.” He put his hand to her wet face. Elizabeth turned away.

“Well, I do, actually. But not for a few minutes, Snurfel.”

“You remember that game.”

“You also had pretty weird relationships. Do you remember the time you hid all of your mother’s paints?”

He had hidden Greta’s paints to make her stop creating surreal canvases of ghostly Nazi uniforms and slaughtered animals, severed heads scattered in the wheat fields, torn grey uniforms flung into wormy apple trees. Greta asked him if he’d seen her paints, and when he shook his head, afraid to say the lie, she walked three miles into town with him and bought fifteen fat new tubes for herself and a leather-handled cherrywood box of twelve oil paints for him, with three soft brushes, its own smooth wood palette, and its own pretty little metal cup for turpentine. It was not what he wanted or needed, and he left it in the yard underneath a madder blue hydrangea, wet and warping through the whole of fall and winter.

Elizabeth made tea for them both and found Christmas cookies in an unopened tin. They remembered the make-believe
game: Congo Banana and Little Chimp and Farfel, Furfel, and Snurfel, a family in which the father roared at the mother, the mother bit the babies, and the babies burned down the hut. Elizabeth was only allowed to be They, the force that moved the dolls (a Gumby, three small bears, and a G.I. Joe, which served as Congo Banana, the father) and rearranged furniture during scene changes.

They unpacked Max’s records of Gregorian chants and Yemenite rock and roll and plugged in the stereo. They poured a little rum into their cups and then poured some more into the teapot.

“You take off your shirt,” he said.

Elizabeth sighed and unbuttoned her shirt, thinking, This cannot be what he really wants, my hair’s sticking up all over the place, this bra is unraveling, I smell like Lysol.

“ ‘I love to kiss her breasts. They have the same faint, gold down that you see on those gorgeous Seattle peaches. I hope I die with that velvet feel on my lips.’ ”

Elizabeth lay down on the floor, and Dan lay down beside her, the two of them closing their eyes.

“I wished he would die, sometimes. He caused my mother such pain.” Dan laughed. “It was a two-way street, I guess. Is this okay?” he asked, one hand skimming over the places Max wrote about.

“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Yes.”

Like tired babies, like collapsing balloons, they lay flip-flopped over each other, ignoring belt buckles digging into soft parts, ignoring the impulse toward sex that death brings out in people even more ill-suited than Dan and Elizabeth.

“Good night, you banana,” Elizabeth said, folding up the
rug corner with his shirt to make a pillow for him.

“Good night, Lizzie.
Dobrounuts
. Thank you.” He threw both arms over the shirt and the rug and closed his eyes.

Elizabeth kissed his forehead and took her bag out to the car. She came back for her jacket and put the apartment keys on the table and kissed him again, as if he were the Max she’d never met.

I
know he’s on the road. I feel him coming. I don’t know when or why or what he’ll expect my house to be. Funny enough to me that it’s my house. That I own a house. Safely in the middle of the middle block, and the only thing that stands out is the wild army of tulip trees in the front yard. I never even thought about making this place interesting. It is comfortable, it is normal; it lies on the lower end of the neighborhood spectrum, true, but in a way that arouses tolerance, not disgust. I am not like the Gilroys, who don’t water, and I am not like the Boenches, who have built a three-car garage and subtly but definitely offend in the other direction.

When he gets here, he’ll try to figure out which house is mine (the letters have fallen off the mailbox), and as he is driving slowly by, he’ll see Max on the lawn, turning cartwheels.

Huddie sits in his car, wondering where to park, and sees a young white boy on the lawn turning cartwheels, and he knows—the hair, something in the face—the boy is Elizabeth’s. And queer. He can see the boy’s queerness from two houses down. Jesus, he thinks, just get him a tutu. Huddie
reaches for the bouquet, studying him. Once he’s with Elizabeth, been invited into her house, he’ll have to pretend not to see the narrow, puffed chest and the thin shivery shoulders. Boy life will be a horror for this child, and some man will have to take up for him. A mother will not be enough. You’d have to make him a faggot to reckon with, a queer you’d think twice about bothering, even on a hot, dull evening.

Huddie climbs out of the car slowly, flowers first, wishing he weighed fifty pounds less, feeling like a beached black whale in the eyes of this very white, very thin kid. The boy averts his eyes from Huddie and goes right to the flowers, apparently approving. Huddie would throw them away if the boy hadn’t seen them already; how could he have brought something so obvious, so desperate? He knows enough about wine to have chosen something impressive. One red, one white, maybe two big-bowled glasses. He could have brought her interesting cheeses from local farms, seven different kinds of crackers nestled on damask in one of the big willow baskets he now charges fifty dollars for. These flowers are bleeding away their purple foolishness, wetting the pretty tissue, the bottom of it limp, falling away in his hand.

The huge bouquet of lilac and purple irises is visible all the way from my living room window. There must be four dozen flowers in all that pink tissue. It’s the Kilimanjaro of bouquets. He’s studying my child. Max bangs on the window for my attention, and when our eyes meet, he stretches up his skinny arms and puffs out his chest. Even as he goes into his backward walkover, he has the sweet obsessive look of a leaping cat, and a cat’s light slant eyes. His legs spring out supple and
wide as a wishbone beneath baggy grey shorts that slide up his smooth thighs, revealing his underwear. He wears inconspicuous boy clothes—a dirty T-shirt, ratty sneakers on bare dirty legs—but they’re useless as disguise when he’s shrugging his shoulders or tossing his straight blond hair back like a starlet. He is the perfect thing in my life, and I would like to get him some adequate protection. I wouldn’t flash gold jewelry in the bad part of town and I wouldn’t send this child into the world without a man. I am not only not enough, I think I am trouble.