Amy Bloom - Love Invents Us

“Where’s the boy?”

She shrugged, and he thought it would be nothing to break her jaw.

“The boy. The boy who got you pregnant. Where is he?”

“He’s gone. His father sent him away.”

“Well, I’m still here, sweetheart. You call me if you need me. Just call me.”

Elizabeth slid along the cinder-block wall, shouting, “I’m coming. Wait up,” and when she was halfway down the hall and safe by Rachel’s side, she called back to him, “Uh-uh. No thanks, Mr. Stone. Thanks anyway.”

And he saw her speak quickly to Rachel, her arm around her friend’s waist, and they glanced back at him and broke into sharp, disbelieving laughter.

Max had thought of affairs, normal men’s affairs, as a kind of Tabasco for the ego and libido, a little zip for the everyday burgers and scrambled eggs. His own affairs now seemed impossibly lighthearted and kind, the motels pink-and-gold operetta sets, all unhappiness and endings hidden by heavy, friendly thighs around his waist, a good-natured soft throat swallowing wine, a slightly slack belly becoming round and tight under his fingers. This, this girl, was poisoned water in a thousand-mile desert, and he must drink and know he’s dying.

That first terrible summer without her, two years ago, he drank Scotch until the back of his head pressed so tightly on the front and his mouth was such a compost heap that he had to stop for three days, and then he switched to dry white wine, buying it by the case. He felt good whenever he saw one of the pretty labels in a restaurant or at someone else’s house, and he told people it was a great wine for the price. (Not that Max and Greta were invited much anymore. Max had always been the charmer, the half of the couple that people wanted to have over. A sad, charmless drunk and a religious agoraphobic are not much in demand at dinner parties and barbecues.) He felt, as drunks do, that if other people drank the stuff for legitimate reasons, he might, too.

After the formal yielding to Mrs. Hill and his conscience, vanquished in that overstuffed blue parlor, he had stayed away, hoping that such visible goodness would be rewarded, that he would become who he had been. Elizabeth had stayed away for months more, finally walking into his office with a handsome Italian boy, with carefully torn T-shirt, incomprehensible speech, and long black curls. Max thought, He’s not really her boyfriend, she’s just hired him for the afternoon, to torture me for staying away from her, which I had no right to do and which I swear to God I will never do again.

So beautiful, Max thought. Am I supposed to be ashamed for being such a dirty old man, another Humbert, disgusting in my obsession? I try to imagine the man who would not love her, the cold-hearted pervert who could look at her without passion. My deadpan baby doll, as beautiful as the day, and when I compliment her on the arrangement of red roses appliqued across the ass of her jeans, she blushes so deeply the sheer white of her T-shirt pinkens. I know she’s only fifteen, for Christ’s sake. I offend myself, never mind the world. Fifteen. I looked at her the first time and I wanted to pull her to me and make love to her with such tenderness and skill that even God would forgive me. And then I would kill myself, because I know I would never be forgiven, least of all by myself.

Instead of saying that every time he saw her his thoughts were of gentle fucking and violent death, Max shook Tony DiMusio’s small hand and made pleasant, avuncular inquiries. Tony demonstrated interest in Max’s stick-shift Volkswagen, and they argued equably about cheap versus expensive cars (Elizabeth and Tony thought cheap was morally superior; Max had been poor and they had not) and stick-shifts versus automatics (they shared a preference for stick-shifts, even though Elizabeth and Tony didn’t drive).

They didn’t talk about literature; Max assumed that Tony didn’t read. He knew Tony could make out street signs and menus without assistance, but he didn’t read . And he hated Bob Dylan (Elizabeth had made Max listen to Bringing It All Back Home eleven times just last year, and what he did not find sophomoric and obvious amused him, even as he was tempted to point out to Elizabeth all of her Wunderkinds plagiarism), because Dylan was so fuckin’ serious, man, and Tony’s life ambition was to own a cherry-red Porsche with four on the floor, man, and just groove. So Max knew just what they had in common and knew why she’d brought Tony for a visit, and he played dumb through to the end, expressing admiration for Porsches, disdain for Bob Dylan, and best wishes for their future happiness. He believed, furiously, that he had acquitted himself well, even admirably, and that Elizabeth got what she came for.

Tony’s hand was on the doorknob and Elizabeth had dropped her flat-lipped kiss on Max’s cheek when Max surprised them all with a wild cruel lie: Greta and I are thinking about having another baby, I think we really will. Elizabeth lost her color and left, and Max had another year of no Elizabeth at all, in which to repent.

A whole year in which to slide right out of the Little League games, clarinet lessons, food fights, animal-filled movies, and endless doctor appointments that make up family life, into a sea of terror and lust so bright it seemed like the love of penitents for the Lord. Danny played two sports every season. Benjie, who would become Ben by the end of the next year, sat in the corner of whatever room Max was in and watched him. Benjie was Max’s conscience, the repository of his own burnished childhood virtues and the one who got the five-dollar bill Max waved around for assistance before he lay down on the couch. Benjie took the five bucks, untied his father’s shoes, and put a pillow under his head. Benjie had three accidents on his bike, breaking his arm, his collarbone, and two ribs, and each time he winked up at the doctors with Max’s own look of jovial despair. Marc hid candy in his room and drew small-headed superheroes and screaming girls.

Greta didn’t see how sick Max was and he didn’t tell her. Her phobias and her exhausting efforts to overcome them (hours sweating in the living room, just visualizing the airport; near-death experiences on line at the supermarket) distracted her from almost everything. Max believed fatherhood was his drop cloth, that his true, dissolving self was hidden from everyone but Benjie, who saw, but could not, thank God, understand. Since Greta’s official return from Benjie’s room (two minutes of Pyrrhic marital triumph: Greta admitted her presence made the boy nervous; Max’s mouth trembled with mean words and near satisfaction — then, what kind of father gives his boys this mother? and there were no words and no satisfaction at all), they took turns clinging to the bed edges. They had not encountered each other once, not for one minute, during any one night.

Elizabeth had stretch marks on the crests of both hips, and Max remembered her long torso, saw her ivory peach ass across the classroom ceiling. Delicate raspberry streaks forked through the creamy resilience of closely layered, glossy cells, the inimitable, intimidating bounce of sixteen-year-old skin. Nothing at all like the serious striated rips along Greta’s belly, permanent incursions of painful change, selflessness burrowing deeply into beauty and consuming it. All that was left of poor Greta were those shimmering, heroic coils, nothing like Elizabeth’s ignorant smoothness, nothing like the plain pale marks Max saw along his waist, quietly ugly creases he could barely make out above his buttocks when he stepped out of the shower. Max had a bottle of very cheap Scotch in the bathroom closet, for emergency mornings. It was Scotch because there were emergencies, and it was cheap because he liked to think that he might decline really bad Scotch, and also because, whatever he was unable to do, he was saving seriously for three college educations on a teacher’s salary. When he woke up thinking of Elizabeth, feeling her breasts beneath his fingers, cool, gorgeous piles of loose peony, he took three quick swallows before he stepped into the shower. In the steam, he avoided the sight of his own body, a series of widening, slickly unhealthy rolls, his dick invisible, properly ashamed, appropriately dwarfed by beer bloat, a Scotch pregnancy, his own fat breasts sloping softly under greying chest hair that was losing the battle, like the rest of him, Elizabeth’s breasts offered nothing, not comfort or food or rest, they were just beauty barely set without any purpose at all except their own sweet life. He’d gotten more sustenance from a hamburger, more genuine care from Greta, and more rest from a nap on the bathroom floor. There was a paper cup dispenser in the bathroom, for the kids. Drying off, Max had an emergency Dixie cup of Scotch before he brushed his teeth.