The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Oh my God it’s a slaughter.”

  “Hughie …”

  “They’re just killing them one by one.”

  “Maybe just the wild ones,” I said, watching the tall Chinese man ordering the hyena dragged out by its legs, its spotted hide covered now in dust. “Maybe to keep us out of danger.” But another minute proved me wrong; they had brought out Splitnose Jim.

  I did not want my bear to be that slow or old. I did not want to see him roll his feet across the wooden planks as he entered from the grate; I did not want to see him sway with sniffing, senile pleasure at the meal set out before him—enough carrots and soup meat for a den of bears—or see into his mouth as he stared out at us and yawned, showing how his old man’s teeth had worn down almost to the gums. I did not want to see him blinking as the sun came out, licking at the air until he decided to lean back against a fake stone and enjoy the warmth. His keeper had thrown a piece of rope into the pen and Jim kept glancing over at it while he tried to doze, finally deciding it was worth investigating, but I did not want to see the way he swatted at the knotted hemp, curious, until submitting to some long-bred playful urge, sitting on his rump and batting it back and forth as if this were any day of his life. I could not tell what kind of pity to feel for Splitnose Jim; he, at least, did not know if he was young or old. He was merely a paw with a rope. Liver was set out in a silver bowl but he ignored it. The sun arrived again and brightened his fur. Moments later, the German stepped out with the gun.

  The crowd began to scream. Hughie and I were pounding the air with our voices, trying to stop him, but the rest of the men shouted advice: “Get him closer!” “Move the liver!” “Shoot for the head, the head!” “Get his legs!” This did nothing to Jim, who was used to crowds of all kinds, but the German got nervous. He was a butcher from North Beach and planned to sell Jim’s meat to specialty restaurants at a hefty profit. With his beard and chapped hands, he would have looked more at home in a back room with a bloodstained mop than beneath five tiers of half-drunk onlookers. He stood wide-legged in the arena and glared out at us with his gun by his side.

  “Be quiet, you! I know all about it!” he shouted to the mob in a thick accent. “I don’t need no advice! I shim him right in the butt of the seat!”

  And this was what he did, just as Jim dropped. his dainty tongue into the liver bowl. The butcher cocked his gun, shaking nervously, and after a fast exhalation of air, fired off a shot that hit Jim somewhere in his haunches. The old boy gave a long, rough bellow, turning around and around, coughing and grunting. Blood smeared the planks in a flourish. The German watched, startled, while the crowd shouted gaily to the bear the way people do to poor women standing on the ledges of high buildings, urging something to happen, something terrible, anything to happen. Jim noticed the crowd now, and barked at us like a seal; some men laughed. Then, picking up his rope in his jaws, my old friend made off towards the entrance to his cave and slipped inside. Across the stage, he had left a long rubrication in blood.

  Now the crowd went crazy with advice. The bear was gone, hibernating from death; the German stood frozen except for a nervous lip-twitch; the hour of battle was passing and the audience would have none of it. “Scare him out!” they shouted, or “Let him sleep!” or “He’s dead, go get him!” One man yelled out, “Sing ‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers’!” which made the crowd spew laughter, since this was what audiences commonly shouted to dull minstrel performers. But no one moved in the pit below us.

  Years later, when talking over this memory in a tent somewhere in Nebraska, Hughie bald and gray-templed and myself boyishly blond, we agreed that the image that stayed with us was not of Jim roaring out of his cave a minute later, terrifying the poor gunhappy German and staggering blindly around the perimeter of the stage. It was not my bear shitting the floor as a new hail of bullets pelted him, or how he fell in a whining, terrified mound. It was not the ten minutes or so we spent watching his gore trickle across the wood, damming up in a clump of leaves before soaking them and running on towards the wall, that stinking eternity it took for Jim to bleed to death. We best remembered the stage before his reentrance, empty except for a hunter and a shining flourish of blood. A scene from a children’s opera. How the sun spotlighted the very sawdust point where Jim would make his curtain call. How we all shouted for him. The straw, the beer, the hopeful wait for the star. The thrill when his shadow hit the floor where he would die.

  We left while Jim lay on the floor in the pile of his own blood and shit; I could not bear to watch. I only heard the German shouting and shouting, and the crowd applauding, and I imagine they must have dragged my old Jim out of the bear pit where the creature had performed for twenty years. I’m sure he died in confusion; I’m sure he could remember nothing of his youth in Yellowstone or wherever he was born, or his life on the streets with a ring in his nose. I’m sure he did not know he had grown old or that nobody loved him anymore. He died in plain confusion, perhaps thinking that all this would go away if he performed his old tricks for the audience, balancing a peanut on his nose or roaring to the sky, but he was surely tired; or perhaps he thought that when he opened his weary eyes, he might be in a forest full of trees and creeks of salmon, buzzing bees, and roaming bears. For I am sure he had not seen another bear for thirty years or more.

  Hughie was married in January of 1898 and went to war three months later. It was a sweet and informal ceremony at the bride’s parents’ home in the Fillmore; the time was half past three. Hughie and I wore frock coats, striped cashmere trousers, patent leather boots, and tan kid gloves—as well as top hats, of course; I can hear you snickering, Sammy—and in his buttonhole he wore an enormous sprig of stephanotis in the accidental shape of Prussia, which, like that dead nation, threatened to invade the rest of his coat. The bride was a plump-cheeked beauty with the strained eyes of a devoted reader; the daughter of a newspaper editor, the young woman, like those strange creatures who exist only at the salt point where freshwater meets the ocean, dressed and walked like a society girl but nudged and guffawed like a seamstress. She wore a white dress and a bonnet, not a veil, because soon after the ceremony the couple departed in a coach bound for a destination known only to me. I went ahead to handle the luggage and pay the porters, and when Hughie and his new wife arrived, they seemed in awe of themselves as if they had done something never before accomplished. The coachman said that the wedding guests had thrown slippers and one had landed inside: good luck. A left shoe, the bride informed me, was even better. The coachman produced the item: left indeed. There were kisses, solemn promises, and with an exhalation of steam, my youth departed.

  Why did he marry? I don’t know; for love, I suppose, or something like it. Young men do marry, after all. But there was something hard won about Hughie’s marriage, almost as if he were closing his eyes and diving backwards from his life. Something sad, you see? I can’t describe it. All I can give you is a small moment I remember, one of many from the blizzard of days, a night of no importance at the time.

  I was drunk and angry. It had begun earlier in the evening, when I came home from a miserable day at Bancroft’s—walked home, in fact, to save on money—to find a piano recital in full flower within my parlor, all ladies in taffeta and stiff aigretted hats and a corps of girls in lace berthas. Some confident child was at her instrument, tearing Mozart all to shreds, and I watched her whitegold curls wriggling in the electric light before I realized this was my Mina. Happy, beloved, ignorant of life: my Mina. I felt a presence beside me; it was an ugly woman in heavy brocade. She looked over my thin clerk’s clothes, then said, “Here, man, get some more cake for the girls,” and stepped away. I did not know her at all, but I knew the tone: it was that of a woman used to talking to servants such as me. I was twenty-five.

  I fled to Hughie’s. He was a lawyer by then and owned a building so ridiculously small and fairy-tale that I referred to it as “the Pumpkin.” The streets were dark, as was his house, so I rapped lightly on the door. No
answer. As his best friend, I had a copy of the key, so I let myself in. I thought maybe I’d help myself to his sherry and a snack. “Hughie?” I called, and there was no response.

  Then I saw light glimmering from the library—the light of a fireplace, wavering like water in the hallway—and I wondered if he was simply asleep. And so I stormed down the hall and into the room. I was so selfish a young man it never occurred to me that Hughie might not be alone.

  He was not; there was a letter. He held it before the fire with two hands as if it were the tiny dead body of a lover, and he stared at it as if some new breath might bring it back to life. A simple letter; a page. Hughie was dressed in just his suit pants, shirtsleeves, and an undone cravat, leaning into the sphinx-headed arm of his ridiculously Egyptian chair with the posture of something firming up against collapse. The fire sent its apprehensive light over the room, polishing and tarnishing the objects around us. A noise came from the chair as if my friend were gently choking. I admit I see these details only in retrospect; at the time, I had nothing on my mind but the sherry in his cabinet.

  “Ah, Hughie, got a drink for your pal?”

  He shook, startled, and I was such a fool that I laughed. But he was not facing me; he was facing the fire now, and just as he might drop it into a mail slot, the letter went neatly into the flames. He jerked back when he had done it and almost immediately his hand went out again to catch it. But the letter was buffeted by the waterfall of fire, and except for one small fragment, it burned into a kind of fragile film that floated up the chimney in one piece.

  “Hey, what was that? Ain’t got a log?”

  I heard him laughing now. “Get us a drink, old man,” he said.

  “Who’s the host here?”

  “You are for once. I’m dead tired. Hey, I’ll find us some H and we’ll have a little party. I feel like a little party.”

  We had one. By the time I was back with the whiskey (I had changed my mind, as always) Hughie was up and dressed again, bearing in his hand a vial of his wicked hashish and two pipes which lay bedded together in their velvet like the beginning of a grand quotation. He was all aglow from the fire. He found us some cold beef and potatoes, then entertained me late with his liquor and his pipe. At first, the smoke was pleasant enough to send us both into a calm stupor. I looked up into my skull and it was as plain as the interior of a parasol, as full of indistinct shadows. We both lay there in solitude, together, as friends will, but soon we were restless. We set up a game, but as the hours filled with whiskey, as the cards were dealt and foolishly laid down, I fell once more into my own worries.

  “I’m unhappy, Hughie.”

  “So am I,” he said without looking up.

  I fiddled with the pipe lying there on the table. “No you’re not. You’ve got a lucky life. I want your life.”

  He spoke in bitter tones: “You may have it.”

  I did not notice his voice. I never thought of Hughie as unhappy for a moment, and it would have annoyed me, I think, for him to take on such a new role so late in our friendship. Melancholy was my birthright, not his. I lifted my hands into the darkness above the globe of lamplight. I said, “I want this stupid house, and your stupid girls.” I waved towards him, saying, “I want your young looks. I want nice clothes that people my age wear instead of … my God, look at me, I’m still wearing my dad’s pantaloons!”

  He smoked without expression. “I don’t want to talk about your clothes.”

  “You get along so fine. Most of us mope around about some woman or another our whole lives, nothing can make us happy.” I fell into a momentary pause as I considered what I meant by this. I looked back at him and said, “But you’re happy even if nobody loves you.”

  Oh, he looked up now.

  “Shut up, Max,” he said.

  I laughed. “I mean who would love you? Your Pumpkin House. Imagine some woman in here yelling at you to get rid of your smokes. Get your feet off that ottoman! Where’s your good coat? Not here. You don’t need it,” I said, coming out of my dark haze and smiling. “Who could love you? You’re inhuman.”

  He said nothing but just looked away from me, down to where the one unburnt scrap of letter lay on the hearth as white as youth.

  “I’m wrecked. Can I sleep here tonight? I won’t vomit this time.”

  “No,” he said, standing up and going to the scrap of paper. I could have read what was on it if I’d wanted, but I didn’t care back then. I was too concerned with myself. The scrap went into the flames, unnoticed, and Hughie stood with his back to me, staring at the fire. He said, “The maid comes in the morning and she gossips with the neighbors. She already thinks I’m a lowlife. I don’t need drunks on my sofa.” I heard him laughing now. “And you will vomit. I’ll call you a cab.”

  “It’s Alice I miss.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s Alice.”

  “Okay, Max.”

  “Thanks, Hughie, I love you.”

  I could see his whole body outlined by the lightning flashes of the fire. He did not move for a while and neither did I, intent to sleep there in my chair where I was happy. The fire spoke, chattering like a madman, and then quieted again in a helix of sparks. My friend, so still and copper-outlined in the dark, said something so softly that I cannot, even more than thirty years later, hear what it was.

  It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another’s heart.

  In the morning, I would remember very little of that night, and Hughie never mentioned it to me; I’m sure he had heard many stupid rants from drugged and drunken friends in his days, and forgave me, of course.

  And that first afternoon of his husbandhood, he waved to me gaily from the window of the train. I suppose he married for love, a little, but largely he married for fear, as most men do. But it is not for me to describe Hughie’s heart. He met his bride within months of our chat, took her out in streetcars and carriages all over town, ate Chicken in Cockleshells at that old great San Francisco restaurant, the Poodle Dog, and asked her to marry him within a year. I was not consulted on any of this except the color of his gloves (tan, as I told you). But how funny it is with men: they will beg you loudly not to leave them at the pub, but they will go off and marry without a word, as if it did not concern you in the least.

  Hughie took his commission right after the wedding and headed to the Philippines, where his captain took Guam from the Spanish in a single afternoon. Meanwhile, Mother’s business did well, mostly because she had the brilliant idea (or vision, as she put it) to become a specialist in Civil War dead. Women in old lace caps came by the hundreds, sitting in our darkened parlor while Mother summoned up the horrors of Cold Harbor: “There’s dead men a-lyin’ in over five acres here, and I’m among them, Mama …I ain’t got no legs.” She gave it in such detail that the stunned women often forgot to pay and had to be reminded by post the next day.

  By the time I was twenty-five, I seemed to be in my mid-forties: plump and elegant with waxed mustaches. I looked like my mother’s generation. In 1895, in fact, we appeared to meet each other’s age and, nodding as we passed, continued in our opposite directions towards age and youth, respectively.

  What I did not realize was that, as Mother and Mina were growing older—the former with her graying chignon and the latter with her flirtatious laugh—I was getting closer and closer to my real age. While at twenty I had been far off the map of youth, now that I was nearly thirty I looked nearly right. Perhaps not quite in the bloom of youth, but approaching it in my ogreish way, and I began to get more than my usual share of glances from ladies who peered like fascinated children out of carriages, streetcars, and shopwindows. Because I saw the world only as a bored audience eager to hear the joke of my life, I thought these girls were just eyeing my odd clothes, and that their pink-orchid smiles were just amusement at my ug
liness. I did not understand these women were speaking to me in silence. I did not understand that my glands, like those fine tubules that twine down a silkworm’s back, were spinning from my ugliness a face both young and fine. The century turned, the seasons changed, but little changed for me until a lucky and terrible disaster.

  What a hidden blessing to be grounded, Mrs. Ramsey, for now I have the time to put this down just as it happened:

  It was in March of 1906, on the three-penny planks of Fillmore Street. The morning was a surprise to me; so warm and fogless for March, so lovely that people floated almost in a daze through Golden Gate Park, carriage tops down, and one could see women on the promenade in the palest of summer dresses, never worn before or since, women grinning in the glory of light fabric but stilt—cautious girls—carrying a fur wrap in case this miracle should turn on them. A bright, hot sunny morning in San Francisco! Imagine! The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.

  A street scene like any other, though, of course, from a time that now seems forever lost. There were dray horses hauling goods to the rich folks up the hill; there were Chinese lugging vegetables across their shoulders, traveling the back alleys and shouting to the cooks in the kitchens; there were men and women by the score out on that gorgeous day. Another great change in me that year: I had shaved my beard at last. I walked along dressed in a plaid bow tie and a porkpie hat, looking every bit a man in his mid-thirties and glad of it because, for this brief moment of my life, I was the age I seemed.