by Amy Bloom
“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.”
“What happened to the pigs’ feet?”
“We still got ’em. In the soul section. And shrimp paste and rice noodles and biscotti and tapenade. We upscale now.”
And she thought that if he could be sure of not being mocked, he would be pleased and only a little sorry that the dusty Coca-Cola cases and cakey cans of Ajax were gone.
They walked to the parking lot, unable to resist bumping into each other, closing their eyes in the pleasure of his hip against hers, as though there were not four layers of fabric between them and not even five seconds before he reached his car.
“Can I start shopping at your place?”
“Does old Max have gourmet tastes?”
“I do.” She was not going to talk about Max now.
“You come anytime. I don’t go in on Sundays.”
“Sundays you go to church in the morning, and then it’s family dinner with your father, who is probably just crazy about your wife, and then you shoot a little hoop with your boys.”
“Don’t make fun of my life.”
“That was longing, not mockery. Or longing concealed by mockery.”
“My son is only four years old, and my knees are too fucked up for me to play. My father is no nicer to June than he is to anybody else. Otherwise you’re right on the money. And you’re going to mess up those Sunday mornings now.”
“How?”
“Because in church, when they hit those high notes, I will not only remember us in that little yellow bed and in these woods back then, I’m going to think of you right here and I am not going to be thinking like a churchgoing man.”
“Good. Me neither.”
“You neither. Still funny.”
“I am. Was the bed yellow? I thought the walls were yellow. Little yellow flowers.”
“I don’t think so. I think the bed was yellow, the walls were no color.” He could still see the rickety bed, could see the wall as it looked to him, before and after he banged his head against it, leaving oily spots he would touch later, touching himself, thinking of her beneath him, his own amazing country.
“All right. I’ll think of you too, Huddie. Horace. I guess this means we’re not going to be getting together.”
“For what?”
“For coffee, for lunch, for a walk.”
“You know if I see you in private I’m going to make love to you, and if I see you in public this is not going to be our little secret for very long. A blind man could see how much I love you. I gotta go, sweet.” His voice rough on that last word, and inside Elizabeth bright red streamers snap open and billow out in six-foot-long celebration. Inside Huddie, there is a quiet pinging, the warning sound of a failed alarm.
“Okay. I’ll see you. Let’s just get into our cars and go. I love you too. What’s your son’s name?”
He shook his head painfully, walking away. “Larry. I know you do.”
T
hey started their cars simultaneously. Elizabeth left first, nosing past his nicer, newer car and shooting gravel onto his windshield.
Huddie’s wires cross every which way now. Sight, smell, taste, and touch enfold one another. Wet is like sweet is like heat is the aching pulse, is salt caking. Her smell is the smell of the unwrapped ready-to-rot figs, and for a lost half hour he scrunches thin lilac tissue paper around their small purple asses, tilting their stems so each seamed bottom is turned to its most seductive side. Carrot fronds are her hair; the slick celadon crack of a broken honeydew is hers and tastes cool, then warm. He puts his lips flat against tomatoes, plums, peaches, and nectarines before stacking them, and they ripen too fast, with hard-to-sell dark spots where his saliva has gathered and seeped in. Marshmallows, not even of interest since early Boy Scouts, roll out of their bags, pull his fingers into their sweet dusty white middles, pull themselves up around his fingertips. Half a bag. Twenty-three marshmallows. His fingers are stiff, powdered white, and his throat is glued shut, but the sugar thickly coating his lips and the drying tug from the roof of his mouth to the root of his tongue is so like a past moment between them he has to sit down behind the un-shelved goods, head resting on the giant cans of juice, sticky hands hard over sticky mouth, and cry without making a sound.
* * *
Three weeks later, after two embarrassing and badly choreographed visits to Nassau Produce, half hiding to watch Huddie sell happy women olive oils they never thought they wanted and milk that was twenty cents more than the supermarket’s, Elizabeth was finally naked, sitting up to admire the way Huddie undressed, laying his red tie on the seat of the armchair, unbuttoning his white shirt, hanging it over the chair back to avoid wrinkling, and then tugging hard on his belt, stomach sucked in and released, in that way that men don’t mind and women feel terrible about, and pulling off pants, briefs, and socks in one piece.
“When did you get so polished?”
He turned his head, reminding her that when he blushed the tips of his ears burned red as if the sun set through them, and like that she fell in love again. For the red-brown tips of his ears.
“I can’t stand standing around in my shorts and socks. Like an idiot.”
“No. You look beautiful.”
“Well. Now, you give me some room here, Elizabeth.”
Huddie splashed water over his face, drinking some from his hands, and looking in the little mirror, he saw his skinny, lovesick young self. He wondered if God was more likely to forgive him if he told June she could go ahead with another baby and then he could leave her when the youngest, not even conceived, was finally off to college, or if he could save himself some time and tell June now that Larry was enough, which would allow him to leave, not dishonorably, in only fourteen years. He sprinkled Elizabeth’s chest with cold water and watched the white-blue skin of her breasts crowd up into tight pink waves around her nipples.
Fourteen years.
“Ohh, it’s cold, you shit. Horace, you shit. If we weren’t here, drinking motel water, what would you want?”
Huddie picked up his watch, checked, and put it down. “To drink? V8 juice, maybe grapefruit.”
“And to eat?”
“Is this the Glamour Quiz for Lovers?” June loved magazine tests and tore them out to answer right before bed. Tests for love, for budget balancing, for keeping your temper, for managing your in-laws. He answered every question of every test honestly, waiting for the terrible truth to hit June as she sat propped up on three lace pillows, totting up the scores, waiting to be touched.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get to cook for you. Tell me.”
“Right now? A real Caesar salad, lots of egg, homemade croutons, heavy on the garlic. Really green olive oil. I’d cover you with leaves and eat it right off you. You salad bowl, you.” He pushed June out of his mind; this little bit of time with Elizabeth would be lost to him if he waited for June to take off on her own.
He lay down again, setting the watch face toward him, and brought June back, waiting in the kitchen. He put his face deep into Elizabeth and willed his wife always safe and far away.
Elizabeth bit the soft flesh above his narrow hips. Maybe, without either of them noticing, without doing harm to June or Larry, she could mark him.
“Huddie, you’re going to be a fat old man, you know that? You foodaholic. Look at that gleam in your eye, homemade croutons. We’ll end up two big porkers together. ‘Come closer, my darling, closer.’ ‘I’m trying, sweetheart, I’m trying.’ ”
Huddie smiled and was stricken, not wanting to say that he did worry about his weight and every time he looked at his father’s gut pushing wide black diamonds between his shirt buttons, he promised not to sample the triple crème cheeses, not to kick June out of the kitchen anymore, not to let the Belgian-chocolate sales rep leave him a two-pound gift box every six weeks. And as he looked to change the subject, bee stings of pure happiness fired up the back of his neck and shoulders. She saw them together, together in a who-cares, fat and happy middle age. Horace and Elizabeth, rocking, creaking in contentment on the front porch of a house near no one they’ve ever known.
She laid her white hand in the middle of his chest, scarless, dark mahogany, nothing like Max’s, as nothing in the room was like anyplace she’d been lately. No real harm could come to you in a motel room, it seemed. The minute you hit the road, picked up a phone, found out that you’d been found out, all hell might break loose, but right then, between the see-through towels and the stiff green blankets, you were held in the safe, silent wall of the unborn.
“I’m starting to like motels,” Elizabeth said, sliding his watch under her pillow.
Huddie put his hand over hers and the watch back on the nightstand. “I hate them. Except for this.” He sighed and put his head on her back, smoother than the sheet. “I wish I had another life, a whole second life, for us.” He brushed his lips over her ass.
“You’d get tired of me.”
“I wouldn’t mind finding that out for myself.”
“This way we can keep the romance. You know, years longer than other people.”
He lifted his head and pulled the sheet up to his shoulders, unbearably tired, filled with thoughts of June and Larry and everything he would lose and everything he had lost just in this hour, and she slid her fingers down his neck, flicking sweat off his chest. Who had left such wide, milky pools on the bed?
“All right,” Huddie said, patting the hand on his shoulder, keeping his face turned away, to not see her tears, to not have her see his.
When he rose to leave, after three false starts, there was no afternoon light left, just the chill blue-grey of winter dusk and the white Hollywood-style bathroom lights buzzing through it.
“You’re leaving,” she said.
“Leaving you?” One of her hairs would not come loose from his tongue, her earrings had left twin, intimate gouges on his cheeks, and these awkward things gave him as much pleasure as all the official great moments of his life put together.
“No. It only looks that way. I am right here.” He put his hand between her breasts, and felt his palm sink by quarter inches, lodging far beneath the surface of her skin. “Here.”
Beneath Wings of Love Abide
Huddie knew it would be a disaster.
“Max will be at physical therapy. I know his schedule, I’m taking him there and picking him up. Don’t worry, just meet me on your break.”
They were both tired of the motel. At first, when he couldn’t have even five minutes of his hand on Elizabeth’s naked stomach, an hour on a bed, any private bed, was all he would ever ask for in life. He knew that it would be no time at all before even two hours on the bed wasn’t enough; it made his chest hurt, it made the motel impossibly sterile, a disgusting black hole that took in conversation and sentiment and memory and left sex between two people in a hurry, trying to act as though an afternoon was a life. He liked comfort, a glass of juice, a bathrobe, real pillows. He liked decency. Huddi
e didn’t want to raise the issue of the motel’s shortcomings. He couldn’t afford an apartment, and when he talked about leaving June, he and Elizabeth both burst into tears.
“All right. You sure?”
“Huddie, of course I’m sure. I’m the one who drives him. I’ll drop him off at around one, run a few errands, and meet you at two. I’ll go pick him up at three-thirty. Okay?”
Huddie listened closely at the door and heard nothing from inside. Elizabeth wasn’t back yet. The apartment was as he imagined, like his dad’s place, more or less. Old-man smell, bathroom nastiness, a little lingering cigarette smoke and Old Grand-Dad, which made it very much like his father’s house. Huddie was standing next to a musty, overloaded coat tree, one of Max’s hats falling toward him, when he heard a gluey, rumbling cough that was not Elizabeth’s.
“Sweetheart? Could you come here?”
Between his impulse to laugh aloud at the farce his life was turning into and his jacket’s entanglement with the coat tree, Huddie froze in the middle of the front hall.
“Liz? I don’t—”
Max leaned through the bedroom doorway, losing his grip on his unzipped pants. Huddie remembered a stronger and bearded face from junior high school and looked away from the shining white ball of Mr. Stone’s belly.
“Mr. Stone? Max? I’m a friend of Elizabeth’s. She invited me over for a cup of coffee …”
“And gave you the key?”
“She thought she might be a little late, from taking you to the uh.” Huddie couldn’t remember, for the life of him, where Elizabeth had been taking Max.
Max slid down to the floor.
“Could you get me the blue pillbox, from my nightstand? And the water?”
Huddie brought Max his nitroglycerine and pressed Max’s hand to the glass.
“Okay now. Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure. I had this pain before.” Max put his fist to the middle of his chest, a gesture that would ensure him immediate examination in the emergency room. “And I took a nitro and it was better. And now it’s back. And a few minutes ago my jaw and my elbows ached. But they’re not hurting now, so that’s good.”