Amy Bloom - Love Invents Us

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.

Max said my back was my erogenous zone. It was also the only place I could bear to let him touch me. When we lay next to each other, his fingers felt slick and oysterish. They didn’t hurt me, and with his arm around me, sitting on his couch, I loved his hands. They were as wide as they were long, and his fingers were thick and smooth and strong. Romantic hands, but I hated how they felt on my skin, and when I saw them moving down my body, I closed my eyes.

In tenth grade, Tony DiMusio and I got drunk at a party and I let him touch me down there, and he snagged a piece of my skin with his nail, and I was bleeding, saying like a moron, “Oh, it’s okay, it’s just a little cut.” Like a cut in the middle of your vagina wasn’t a big deal. He called me for six months to go out, I must have seemed like such a good sport, but when we saw each other at school, I would narrow my eyes and he’d look away.