Amy Bloom: Love Invents Us

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.”