Amy Bloom - Love Invents Us

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Love Invents Us: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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National Book Award finalist Amy Bloom has written a tale of growing up that is sharp and funny, rueful and uncompromisingly real. A chubby girl with smudged pink harlequin glasses and a habit of stealing Heath Bars from the local five-and-dime, Elizabeth Taube is the only child of parents whose indifference to her is the one sure thing in her life. When her search for love and attention leads her into the arms of her junior-high-school English teacher, things begin to get complicated.
And even her friend Mrs. Hill, a nearly blind, elderly black woman, can't protect her when real love-exhilarating, passionate, heartbreaking-enters her life in the gorgeous shape of Huddie Lester.
With her finely honed style and her unflinching sensibility, Bloom shows us how profoundly the forces of love and desire can shape a life.

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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.

PART THREE

The Greatest of These Is Love

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.

I see Max watching Huddie as he gets out of the car. He still moves easily, but he needs more room. Much more room, he’s a big man after fifteen years, almost as wide as his father and taller than I remember. Huddie puts his legs out of the car carefully, scanning the street. I have half fallen for a dozen black men over the years for no other reason than that they exit their cars the way he does, the slow, self-possessed unfolding of a big man to his full size, making clear that he will not be threatened, that there is nothing to fear. And if there is, if you insist, he will reluctantly give you the trouble you’re looking for, kick your sorry ass, and go on about his business. It says Don’t. Fuck. With. Me. and it is the required daily grace under pressure of a black man in a white place, and although it must exhaust him, it moves me, and although I would think that understanding its ugly root would make excitement impossible, it excites me.

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