Amy Bloom - Love Invents Us

She saw him from the diner window, coming around the corner from the parking lot, his jacket flapping over his high country behind. Suit, white shirt, red tie. Polished black loafers on his big country feet. More waist now, just a little bit of gut pressing against his belt. Big, easy comfort, a long velvet-sofa man. Still those long legs and arms, coming past the rotating dessert tower.

“Well, Liz Taube. Bless your heart, good to see you again,” Huddie said, and put out his hand.

Elizabeth stared like it had turned from hand to snake as he spoke. “Bless my heart?”

Huddie slid into the booth and leaned forward.

“Elizabeth? Liz? You still go by Liz? I work in this town, I own a business here now. I have customers in here, Nikos and I are on the same delivery run. You have no goddamned idea. You never did. I am a model minority businessman. I am a family man, I give to the church, hell, I give to the synagogue. You want me to stick my tongue down your throat by way of hello? Bad enough you showed up in my store like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“What are you so pissy about? It’s been seven years and you’re the one that’s married, not me. You’ve got babies, I don’t. Excuse me, I would have written when you were in Buttfuck, Alabama, but you didn’t. And I didn’t know you were back.” Elizabeth looked down. “Running your father’s store. Christ.”

The waiter stood by the table, grinning at Huddie.

“Hey, George, how’s it going?”

“Good, Hud. Going good now.” He licked the tip of his pencil, willing to wait for twenty minutes if that was how long Huddie took. George worked two nights at week at Nassau Produce, Huddie’s store, and Huddie paid for twenty-two English classes, something his cousin Nikos didn’t give a good goddamn about. If Huddie Lester wanted to take his time about ordering coffee, and then take this angry, sort of pretty girl to the motel next door, that was fine with George Pascopolous. Huddie Lester was his man.

“Give us a few minutes, buddy.”

“Okay, Hud, when you want me, you do like so.” George raised one finger discreetly.

She would have kicked Huddie under the table if he hadn’t made her feel that everyone in the diner was watching them, completely fascinated. All that time apart, and now together, and it was not the same, of course, and this conversation would do nothing for them.

His jacket cuff rode up on his sleeve, showing a half-circle of brown skin through the white shirt.

“Are we having a conversation?” Elizabeth ran her palm over the Formica, rolling sugar granules with her fingertips.

“No,” he said. “Lets get out of here. Let’s not run out of here, but let us, by all means, get the hell out of here.”

Elizabeth drove blind to Wadsworth Park, and he followed, watching the oncoming cars for familiar faces, composing a businesslike, everyday expression. She didn’t even look at him getting out of the car, just slammed the door and walked into the woods like an Indian widow. Huddie looked around the empty lot and called to her.

“How about a blanket?”

“I didn’t come that prepared.”

“To sit on. I’m wearing a suit. We could talk in the car.”

“You’re killing me, Huddie. Let’s just go for a walk.”

They went past the rays of gravel tossed up from the parking lot, past the soda cans, candy wrappers, hot dog bun plastic and aluminum foil clumps, bits of old and crumbling forest suspended in the gelling, bug-speckled light. Huddie caught a yellowing condom on the toe of his shiny loafer and kicked it toward the stream.

“I don’t have that little problem anymore.”

“Is that right?”

He loosened his tie with one hand, and she sighed.

“We’re not talking,” he said, and he laced his fingers through hers. They both looked down, caught by what always caught them, what captured them when Huddie put his hand on the bleacher in the high school gym, resting the side of his palm so close to her leg that they both felt the soft prickling of the tiny hairs on her thigh. The absolute aesthetic harmony of their skin flared up and then subsided, outshone by the infinite exploding light of what came next, a beauty living only in each other, separate from their attractive, everyday faces, from body parts they liked or didn’t like, from the lives they would have. Only their mothers, at the first moment of seeing, had ever read their souls so plain on their faces.

“You saw the store’s bigger now,” he said. “You ought to check it out. That front porch is for coffee and pastry, and we’ve got this big mother dairy case.”

“I’ll come again when your father’s not there. Unless he’s changed.”

“You’ve changed more than he has, and you haven’t changed much.”

“I have.”

“Have not.” He pulled up her hand and kissed it. “Have not, have not, have not. So there. What’re you looking for?”

“A tree suitable for seductive leaning.”

“Don’t bother. Don’t bother looking. There’s no need.”

The tiny black pits of his shaved beard, the leaf fragments in his black hair, his slightly chapped lips, with a dry whitish spot smack in the middle of the lower one, were all she saw. Huddie licked the dry spot and kissed her. He put his wet forehead to her collarbone, his nose pressed into her neck so that he could only breathe by opening his mouth and pulling back slightly. They heard the damp suck of his kiss and he felt Elizabeth’s silent laugh, and pulled away entirely. Anything but her sweet, lovestruck voice saying his name would push him back to his right mind, where he did not want to be.

“Huddie. Hudd-eee,” Elizabeth whispered.

“I did write to you. I wrote almost every day, for weeks. I never heard back. My aunt and uncle said — well, you know what kind of things they’d say. I wrote one time to Mrs. Hill. I called your mother one time, but I don’t guess you got the message.”

“Never. And I didn’t get those letters, Hud. She died right after you were sent away. Oh, boy. Broken hearts all around. I never heard from you, about you, at all. A few times I skulked around the store, thinking your father might have softened up, that he’d give me your address or just drop a hint.”

“I don’t guess he did.”

“No, not even close. He did say that you’d be going to Howard. But I wrote to Howard that fall and they’d never heard of you.”

“Howard? Shit, I ended up at Michigan. You obviously did not watch college basketball.”

“Not much. A few times. It made me cry and I didn’t see you. Ridiculous,” Elizabeth said, hooking her hands inside his belt, feeling him big and wide against her, exactly as she thought he’d be. “Closer.”

Huddie felt her breasts through her T-shirt, pouring through his suit and shirt, dense liquid hearts at rest on his middle ribs. He wouldn’t say a word now, wouldn’t exhale, stared hard at his watch the way a person who’s not where he’s supposed to be does. He wanted to cross himself, like the boys from Fordham, all of whom, even the Jews, understood that the cross was to placate Fate, to demonstrate humility and helplessness when all your talent and practice were not enough to swing the odds in your favor. He unhooked her thumbs, turning her palms down when she brought them up to his mouth, smooth, round palms, curved like her thighs, spread wide for the kisses he very carefully, gathering his wits, doesn’t give. He fished for his car keys and left his hands in his pockets.

“Maybe we didn’t really want to. Maybe we wanted to keep it the way it was.” He sighed. “Who knows. I’m sorry about Mrs. Hill. Let’s go, lady. I gotta get back to the store. It’s the end of delivery day. There’ll be six feet of charcuterie and eggplant terrine all over the floor.”