by Amy Bloom
“I like the idea of fair. A little rough justice every now and then is appealing. Unlikely, but appealing.”
He tips his head, saluting my idea and me, and I sigh like an old, old woman, because the only choice is kissing or crying over what is behind us and I want to leap ahead without even knowing who he really is or how or if he’s leaving June or whether he will really love Max and do we now have to have real holidays instead of my casual improvisations?
I sigh and feel our first time, catching me in the chest. It is still my old stubbly couch and only that beneath my fingertips, but the dark plum silk of his cock unwrinkles in my hand, his flesh hardens, rising up, blindly seeking me. The sweet plump point of his nipple bites my palm. We had no words for our genitals then; we said “this” and “that” and “you” and “me,” and when I touched him just the way he wanted, all parts going the right way, his sweat spattering my face, he cried out, “Oh, yes, we’re in the zone now.” And we laughed so hard we had to stop for a few minutes, but that is where we were, and I began to say that too, and kept saying it, with other men, even though it was never as true and saying it brought me closer only to the past and never to the man right next to me. And with no vocabulary at all we had done everything we wanted to do, everything I want to do right now, although in my mind I airbrush us, pulling those young bodies out from our folding fleshy shells, even as I want to see him now, kiss the tender, pitiful changes time has left on that beautiful boy, that handsome young man.
“You could have us both.” I think I can say that. “Don’t give up what you have.” Life will be tolerable (it would have been even better than that if you’d never showed up with those ridiculous flowers and that gigantic car), and once a month it will be all-white gardens drenched in silver moonlight, sweet whole mouthfuls of revelation, a feeling of rightness in the passing essential bits of everyday. And the rest of the time, I will still have the pleasure of being a good mother, even the unmentionable pleasure of being the only parent, the court of first and last resort, the highway, the dead end, and the only gas station for forty miles. And I count on that and Max counts on me, and you are the joker in the deck, my man.
“What are you thinking, Horace?”
“Nothing.”
“You lying jellybean.”
“You’re right. I won’t tell you what I’m thinking.” And he can’t. Pictures of June, tenderly and efficiently pressing her weight on his unbendable leg two hundred times a day until he regained use of his knee; in labor with Larry, her wet face, stunned and determined; Larry as a small boy, tearing through spangled wrapping at Christmas, glitter sticking to his curls; June’s appendectomy and most of the choir crowding into her room afterwards, Rosa Grant’s flowered straw hat perched on the IV, pink silk ribbons fluttering in front of the vent; six thousand fans, standing for that last basket; June walking the floor with colicky Larry, milk plastering her red chiffon don’t-forget-your-husband nightgown to her breasts; flashes of white and black women’s bare behinds bouncing in front of him in various motel rooms, their cheeks knotting and opening, the tiny soft arrowhead of hair beneath them; women flipping over in his hands like fresh fish, their breasts swinging and sliding in silky blue-white sacks up to their shoulders, or three shades of brown in sweet handfuls coming to rest on either side of a narrow chest, cocoa pools around purple nipples and stretch marks like the veins of fall leaves, every shape beautiful, calling for his mouth, all of them gone forever.
He smiles. “I’m here. Right here.”
“No matter what?”
“Well. That’s a lot of ground. Yes, no matter what. No one’s going to die from this. And I won’t have to shuffle off this mortal coil knowing I lived the wrong life.”
He takes my hand. “And what’re you thinking? Elizabeth?”
“Nothing.”
“You lying hound.”
“Yup. And I won’t tell you.” And I cant: pictures of him trembling over me a million years ago; of Max’s face—the first Max—peevish and remorseful in the face of death; the faint, nameless image of my Max’s father, blond and tall, foolish but not unkind and not unattractive in his uniform, in bed for twenty-four hours straight until he shipped out, as I hoped he would, and now I watch my son for signs of stupidity and wanderlust; Margaret and Sol reading silently after I’d gone to bed and come out again to see what grown-ups did—“Nothing,” my mother said, “we do nothing”; my easy cloistered evenings, doing laundry, making lunch, cutting coupons, playing with Maxie and his Claudette Colbert paper dolls, of which Huddie will surely disapprove, and they will fight and Max will weep and Huddie will turn to dark unreadable stone, and long for the sensible ease of June and the pleasant routine of childless, healthy middle age. And I surely cannot tell him that I’m no more good for me or for him than I ever was, that I will disappoint and confuse him, that I’ve been alone my whole life, and that it may really be too hard and too late, not even desirable, after such long, familiar cold, to be known, and heard, and seen.
“It’s late,” I say.
“It’s a long drive,” he says.
If this were really the end, if this were only my story, I would tell you everything.
Acknowledgments
I have had the assistance and wisdom of my friends the Reverend Robert Thompson and Nadine Abraham-Thompson, the linguistic help of Josie Zelinka, and the medical insight of Dr. Ron Nudel.
I am grateful to my friend and agent, Phyllis Wender, who knows good from bad and right from wrong and helps me navigate the minefields and mousetraps of the literary world.
I have been lucky in my Random House editor, Kate Medina, a class act, a good captain, and such a mixture of will and savvy that if the act of Creation had been left: to her, our world would have been finished in only four days, and with elegance.
My friends and family have provided kind criticism, ungrudging and generous support, and tolerance of all kinds. I am especially grateful to Joy Johannessen, whose supernatural ability to read, see, and understand what is on the page and off has made all the difference.
READING GROUP GUIDE: LOVE INVENTS US
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The questions, discussion topics, author biography, and suggested reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Amy Bloom’s Love Invents Us. We hope they will give you a number of interesting angles from which to view this rich novel of passion, desire, and the universal search for belonging.
READER’S GUIDE
1. Can you explain why Amy Bloom has given her novel the title Love Invents Us? How are the various characters in the book invented or defined by love rather than, for instance, by family or social identity? Does Mr. Klein take advantage of an innocent child, or is his relationship with Elizabeth a positive one? Does Bloom portray Mr. Klein with affection, or does she imply that his feelings for Elizabeth are not really benign?
2. Why do you think Elizabeth’s mother has developed into the kind of person she has? “Guilt and love were as foreign to her as butter and sugar” [p. 9], Elizabeth says. Do you think that is true, or do you see evidence of love in the mother’s feelings for her daughter?
3. Is it safe to say that Elizabeth seeks parental figures in the older men in her life–Mr. Klein, Mr. Canetti, and Max Stone–or is this formulation too simplistic? Is her interest in older men due to some essential lack in her own family?
4. Why does Elizabeth steal?
5. How would you characterize the relationship between Elizabeth and Mrs. Hill? What does Mrs. Hill provide that Elizabeth’s mother has never given her, and what does Elizabeth give Mrs. Hill that is not provided by her daughter, Vivian?
6. How much affection does Elizabeth feel for her father, and how much scorn? To which of her parents does she feel closer?
7. Why does Elizabeth arrange for Max and Mrs. Hill to meet [p. 55]? What does she hope the visit between them will bring about, and does she get what she wants from that visit?
8. If Elizabeth do
esn’t like Max’s touch, why does she keep the “affair” going for so long? What is it about him that fulfills an essential need in her? Do you find that Elizabeth is cruel to Max, a “tease”?
9. Can you explain Elizabeth’s emotions and reactions after Max uses the vibrator to have surrogate sex with her? Why does she refuse to communicate with Max, then call him again after a couple of months have gone by [p. 69]?
10. What effect does Elizabeth’s miscarriage have on her thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and priorities? In what ways does it change her life forever? Afterward, she says, “I wanted not to abandon anyone ever again. I wanted to be good” [p. 84]. What does she mean?
11. Why does the author have Elizabeth narrate Part One, switch to third-person narration in Part Two, and then back to Elizabeth in Part Three? What effect do these changes have upon the experience of reading the story?
12. Why don’t Burf and Arlene relent and let Huddie’s letters be sent to Elizabeth? To whom are they being loyal, and are they right to do as they do?
13. How have Huddie’s parents, Gus and Nadine, affected his life and helped to make him what he is? Do you have any respect for Gus’s point of view, or do you think he is unnecessarily harsh with Huddie? To what extent does the issue of race enter into his decision to send Huddie away from home?
14. At Mrs. Hill’s funeral, Elizabeth comes up against “the slap-obvious truth that this place was not her home, any more than her mother’s house was, that her only home had been Mrs. Hill’s footstool and Huddie’s narrow bed” [p. 110]. What concept of “home” does the novel finally endorse?
15. Why does Elizabeth decide to care for Max when he becomes ill? Does her decision spring from guilt or from love?
16. When she fears that Max may be dying, Elizabeth reflects that “He was a good father” [p. 170]. What does she mean by this? Is it really as a father that she sees Max?
17. Why did Huddie choose to marry June, of all the women he could have married, and what makes their marriage work? When Huddie refuses to leave June for Elizabeth, she calls him a “gutless son-of-a bitch” [p. 178]. Do you agree with her opinion that Hud-die shows gutlessness at this point, or is his decision a brave one? Why does he finally decide, fifteen years later, to come back to Elizabeth?
AMY BLOOM
Amy Bloom is the author of the bestselling and acclaimed novel Away; Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Love Invents Us; and Normal. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and many other anthologies here and abroad. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Granta, and Slate, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Bloom is the Kim-Frank Family University Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University.
Books by Amy Bloom
Fiction
Come to Me: Stories
Love Invents Us
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories
Away
Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Nonfiction
Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross-dressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude
BOOKS BY AMY BLOOM
A BLIND MAN CAN SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU
In Amy Bloom’s brilliant short story collection, lives are illuminated in the midst of darkness, of thwarted and unexpected love, of families made and found. These are people we know and are, people we long to be and fear we may become: a mother grieves for her beloved daughter and the handsome young man surgery will make her; a woman with breast cancer, a frightened husband, and a best friend all discover that their lifelong triangle is not what any of them imagined; a couple survives the death of their newborn to find themselves in mortal combat with the world. Sensuous, heartbreaking, spare, and laugh-out-loud funny, these tales take us straight to the unpredictable heart of real life, with rare generosity and wit.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-375-70557-1
LOVE INVENTS US
National Book Award finalist Amy Bloom has written a tale of growing up that is sharp and funny, rueful and uncompromisingly real. A 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. In this exquisitely rendered novel, Elizabeth, Horace, and Max know each other, leave each other, and find each other again over the course of thirty years. The need to be loved and the unreasonable demands of the heart take Bloom’s characters through lives they could not have even imagined. With her finely honed style and her generous, unflinching sensibility, Bloom shows how profoundly the forces of love and desire can shape a life.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-75022-9
NORMAL
Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence. The same qualities distinguish Normal, a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of “people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic”—female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, “Melanie,” who devote themselves to the cause of “ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension.” And we meet Hale Hawbecker, “a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy” with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender. Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender, and identity, Bloom reveals new facets to the ideas of happiness, personality, and character, even as she brilliantly illuminates the very concept of “normal.”
Gender Studies/978-1-4000-3244-0
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
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