Love Invents Us

by Amy Bloom

  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.

  Fare Thee Well

  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.

  Max circled the little ball up and down my legs on the inside of my thighs, making electric tracks on my skin. He turned me over again onto my back and pulled the blanket around his face like a babushka, to be funny, and threw it back to the end of the bed. He rubbed my arms to get rid of the goose bumps and tucked my h
ands under his sweater. The hair on his chest was wet.

  “You’ll warm up in a minute, sweetheart. Do you want to shut your eyes and just concentrate on what you feel?”

  He straightened out my legs and tried to pull them apart. I pressed them together and smiled to show I was sorry. I tried to relax.

  “You don’t have to do anything, baby girl. You don’t have to move, or kiss me, nothing. If you don’t like it, you let me know.”

  He put the little ball right between my legs, and I almost jumped out of the bed.

  “Jesus. What is that?”

  “Is that too much?” He put it down and waited.

  “Sort of. Like a shock, but it didn’t hurt. It felt weird.” I opened my eyes. I could see how excited he was, sweat rolling down his temples and his neck onto me.

  “All right,” he said.

  I lay back down, and this time he got his arm around my hips, holding me steady. He put it between my legs, without touching me; it just hovered above me, moving the air. A little breeze buzzed my pubic hair.

  “Very easy now,” he said, and he lowered it to my skin, tightening his hand on my hip. It started making muffled overdrive noises as Max circled it around like a tiny metal detector. Hard waves rolled through my legs, from the soles of my feet, burning through my shins, and then right into my center, knocking my head back. I heard Tony’s voice, before he hurt me: Oh, yeah, ba-de-boom. Let me do you like that.

  “Oh, yes,” Max whispered, a hundred times. Nothing was left of me but smoking skin, liquefying bone. My hips lifted high under Max’s hand until I slammed down on the bed, released. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my legs shook so hard I knew I couldn’t walk out. I curled up deep in the covers and wouldn’t let him touch me.

  “All right?” He put it back under the bed. I certainly didn’t want to see it.

  I wouldn’t talk, and when he put his hand on my breast, I pushed it away. After a while he got up to change his wet shirt, and I went into the bathroom and saw my wide, blurred face sliding around like Jell-O on a plate.

  “Cow face,” I said to the mirror, and came out dressed, my hands fists. Max backed away. I know he wasn’t afraid I’d hurt him. He was worried I’d hate him. He was worried I wouldn’t do it again.

  “You are a fucking pervert,” I told him, and even when it took me ten minutes to undo the lock on my bike, he stayed in the house and watched me from the bedroom window. I gave him the finger, which felt like a stupid cow thing to do, but I couldn’t think of anything else that meant I hate you.

  It was him calling my house all weekend, but I didn’t pick up the phone and he hung up when my mother answered. On Saturday afternoon my mother called the telephone company to complain. Even when the repairman ran all over the house like a crazed hamster with his ringing belt, my mother following him from phone to phone, I sat quietly in the rec room, opening and closing the dollhouse doors until he left. My mother bought two new phones. Max mailed a letter to me the last week of school, which was stupid. He could have been arrested.

  Dearest girl,

  Your absence and distress is killing me. Please forgive me. I didn’t play fair. All I really wanted was to have something special with you. I’m sorry that I frightened you, angered you, whatever I did, I’m sorry. I am sorry and I never saw anything so beautiful in my life. You took my breath away. Please at least have breakfast with me before school ends.

  All my love, for as long as you’ll have me,

  M.

  I was bored by August. Mrs. Hills house was about a hundred degrees during the day. We had so many fans on we couldn’t hear each other, which was fine with me. She gave me two more cups, and every once in a while she’d point out some handsome white guy on the soaps and say, “Now, that’s a nice young man,” as if the next step was for me to call CBS. Rachel and I were sort of talking again, but she had a new boyfriend, a sophomore who followed her everywhere and smiled when she made fun of his devotion. After teaching retarded children how to swim and learning how to French-inhale, I had nothing to do. Finally I called Max. I put the receiver down when he answered.

  He knew who it was and called me back, crying that nothing mattered but me, and I heard my mother making a cup of tea, and I could barely picture him in my mind while he talked and cried. He was a speck.

  For a long time I wouldn’t take a ride home, even in bad weather. I did good deeds and played solitaire. I read Baudelaire and I read Georgette Heyer. I spent my mother’s money on the movies and gas and began to watch boys again and smile at them. My body was humming, a cheerful, wild tune just behind everything else. And then I wanted to talk about the books and the boys with Max, and I smelled coffee and Barbasol in my dreams, and we started again.

  Speak to My Heart

  I was not a cheerleader, I never played team sports, and I never watched them; I never showed school spirit, but I did like the basketball players. I even watched the NBA on TV once, but they were too much for me: huge, big-veined men, hard as trees, plunging across the floor on their big bandaged legs. The basketball players at my high school were all damp skin and calcium deposits, a few good-sized, broadening young men, the rest just tall, lanky boys with cornsilk hair flopping in their eyes until it got ridged and wet in the second half, or brown mushroom Afros wobbling slightly as they ran up and down the court. The white boys got dark half-circles under their arms and big blotches in the middle of their chests and backs, but the black boys ran water. And Huddie Lester soaked and shone like rain on a moonlit night. I was tutoring a ninth-grade girl more interested in not being left back than in actually learning how to read, and we took breaks every ten minutes. During the breaks, Yolanda ran wild in the halls, jimmying lockers and xeroxing her ass in the teachers’ lounge; I watched Huddie shoot hoop.

  I watched them practice three Fridays in a row and finally Huddie dribbled over as they broke up into groups of four, shooting endlessly, a dozen balls swishing through nets, bouncing against the hard white backboard and the hard shining floor.

  “You like basketball?”

  “It’s okay. At least you have to think when you play. Or at least you look like you’re thinking.” Inside, I was smashing my head against the wall.

  “Yeah, we think. You tutor Yolanda McKee?”

  It turned out Yolanda was good friends with Huddie’s cousin Abigail. We could hear her singing in the hall, loud and sweet, behind the noise of the boys. He rested his hand on the bleacher and bounced the ball lightly, looking somewhere between me and the gym door.

  “You go out with Allen Schreiber?”

  “No. He’s just a friend.”

  “Jon Schwartz?”

  “No. Is this a quiz?”

  “Yeah. One more.”

  “Okay. Could you stop that?” If he was going to ask me out, if he liked me that way, he’d stop dribbling.

  He spun the ball up on one skinny brown finger and we watched it turn, orange, black, orange. He popped it down his arm.

  “How about pizza after practice? We finish at five, I don’t have to get to the store right away today.”

  I don’t know how I said anything. My ears rang yes and my blood jangled and we sat there grinning and breathless until we heard the janitor hollering at Yolanda.

  “Meet you at the bike rack at five.”

  We were very private and very proud. We met at the furthest bike racks, the ones shunned by the jocks and the hippies; we nodded to each other in the halls, and on the weekends we walked down Bleecker Street, kissing at every street corner and looking into the eyes of people who looked at us. I expanded Yolandas tutoring sessions, which was a good thing anyway, and I watched Huddie’s practices like someone with a little time to kill, sitting down so my legs wouldn’t shake. In all our months together, we saw one local movie and ate pizza by the slice at the revolting train station pizza joint, run by an Indian family who seemed not to notice that all successful Long Island pizza joints were run by Greeks, and the diners by Italians,
and that the only exotic food anyone wanted was eaten on Thursday nights at Bruce Ho’s and included canned litchis and large blue tropical drinks. The Patels served watery ham, green pepper, and pineapple specials and flat Coca-Cola, and the drunks and tired women waiting for the Flushing and Bayside trains were the only people we ever saw. The pizza was so bad we started ordering the curry, mentioned only in apologetic small print at the bottom of the menu; astonished and happy, the Patels phased out the worst of the pizzas. We liked rogan josh and chicken vindaloo and the yogurt shakes, which separated us once more from everyone we knew. We made ourselves invisible. We never said why.

  We used every private place a small, affluent town has, every well-kept wood, every wintering swimming pool, every empty boathouse, and even the seven-foot-wide granite boulders that some people in Saddle Rock Estates put in to make their quarter-acre backyards more interesting. Huddie brought us sodas and Twinkies from his father’s store. One night we painted all the little black jockeys in Kennilworth white and made out until dawn, watching for the first homeowner to discover the new ornament on his Ivory Rose-spattered lawn as he picked up The New York Times. We lay in the shadows of the boulders and boats and in the big blue bathtubs of empty pools and talked. Big things were happening around us, the Revolution was under way, even here, and when the older kids and decent adults finished changing the country, we would step in and carry on their work. We assumed we knew what we thought about politics, and we assumed we agreed. Brushing and braiding each others hair, unbuttoning shirts, idly running a toe along a bare leg, we talked about our families, about our school and idiot teachers, of our great luck, of his future with the Celtics and mine with The Village Voice.

  I forgot Max. Every day with Huddie erased him further, until the only truth was that I had had a student crush on him years ago, that I used to babysit for his kids, that he had been kind enough to teach me how to drive a stick-shift, and that I guessed (and I could even smile at this part, flattered but sort of embarrassed) he seemed to find me attractive now that I was grown up. Did anything happen? Huddie asked. No, are you kidding? I said, and put my hand on the jumping muscle in his arm. Every time Max appeared in the parking lot across from the high school to lead me toward his car for our lunchtimes, I was completely surprised. And then I said that Mondays were no good, and then Wednesdays were no good, and I would only do it once in a great while, to cheer him up, and when I couldn’t anymore, I just gave him a little kiss and Rachel stood on the school steps for a whole week, her arms folded, daring him to ask where I was. He didn’t belong near my body now that it was Huddie’s.