The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Where did you get this?”

  She dumped it on the floor, where the chain coiled into an S and the numbers flashed against the wood: 1941.

  I thought of Grandmother in her bonnet. I thought of Father holding me naked from the bath. Dead, buried, gone. I thought of a dinner long ago, Alice touching those numbers one by one, laughing at me.

  “I’ve never seen it before.”

  “It’s yours. I found it in your dresser. Tell me why.”

  I explained that the room was turning and I could not think.

  She showed me a torn envelope with some cursive writing. “And I found this.” She tossed it on the floor and I saw it was from Hughie to a certain Max Tivoli.

  “I can’t think,” I repeated.

  “Asgar, explain.”

  “Didn’t your mother know him? They must be hers.”

  “They’re not.”

  “Perhaps at Bancroft’s, yes now I remember …”

  “Asgar, you’re lying. Explain.”

  We are not ourselves when we are sick. We function at the most basic level, are ugly, miserable, and all our ordinary charms that seem to come so naturally to us fall away, and more than anything else we resemble either ourselves as children, crying for a drink of water, or our parents on their deathbeds, mumbling a prayer. Too weary to keep up the brittle artifice of our self, we shed it, like the locust, and become, in public, the sad and inconsolable adult that we so often are in private, which is to say: our true self. Illness always made me dazzled and weak, and this is the only reason I have for why—rather than concoct a more logical excuse, for though she suspected something, surely Alice never suspected the real reason—I told her. For the third time, I broke the Rule. Softly, carefully, as if she were a cobra that might strike, in a hoarse voice that did not belong to me, but with a relief and regret that did, stopped only now and then by gusts of nausea and black spots, I told her the thing I swore I never would: the truth.

  You sat on the edge of the bed, Alice, and you looked at me in a way you never had before, not in all the years I knew you, as semichildren, as semistrangers, as husband and wife. You looked at me as if I mattered. As if I were a precious vase you had knocked carelessly against, and time had slowed just enough for you to see its hopeless fall towards the stone floor. As if you cared, at last, too late, to save me. “Oh no,” you said. I suppose I began to cry—I was hopeless, and ill, and broken in so many ways—but I only remember you, dressed in white, the kiss of your lips on those words—“Oh no”—and your eyes with a small and tortured Max in each one. Then, with your next words, I was skinned alive.

  “Oh no. You’re simply insane.”

  My mind began to flash with nausea, and I could not stop you from leaving the room because just then I lost what little I had in my stomach and began to heave, like a dog, dryly onto Hughie’s fallen letter. I saw my own name blotched with bile. A nurse came in and took me to the bed, and I could not speak because a pill was thrust between my lips. I saw your pale back moving down the hallway. You carried your face in your hands; they closed the door.

  I awoke, terrified to find myself in the middle of a conversation. It was early evening, still light, and the curtains were open. Alice lay on the other bed, fully clothed in violet plissé crepe, net frill at her neckline, gloves on her stomach as if she had spent the day out. Her coat and hat lay on the foot of the bed. Whiskey on the table, two glasses, both nearly empty; apparently I had been drinking. I came to and she was talking:

  “I don’t want anything that’s here.”

  “No,” I said automatically.

  “Things don’t matter to me, the rugs and china don’t matter. I don’t want them. That will be an old life to me soon, my life’s been in Pasadena for a long time now, Asgar. You’ve known that. Everything is down there now. I’ll take just some books and some little things you gave me.”

  “Yes.”

  “The girl can send everything else to Victor. I’ll give her the address.”

  “Of course. Who’s Victor?”

  She looked at me quite pitilessly. She was not anyone I recognized. I could feel something dark and hard building behind my eyes. She said, “Asgar. Asgar, you have to listen. I know this is hard.”

  “Max, I’m Max.”

  “Stop it. Stop with that.”

  “Alice, I’m Max!”

  Her eyes went to the doorway, where a sea-hag nurse stood with a pill. I nodded and fell back against the pillow and the door closed on her. There was a kind of blur around the edge of my vision, a watery swirl as if we lived at the bottom of something. “Who’s Victor?” I asked again, quietly.

  “Oh you …we’ve gone through this. Victor Ramsey. I told you. Now I’m going to head downstairs in a minute, I don’t want you to come down. You’re sick, you’ll make a scene. Promise me.”

  “Okay. Is he a doctor?”

  “Asgar, are you even listening? I’m leaving for the train. I’m going down to Pasadena for good now. For good.” Victor Ramsey, VR, yes, the clouds were parting from my brain and I recognized that old friend of her mother’s, the photographer, her business partner. Him? How impossible. But she was talking: “Asgar, please listen. Please listen. You and I are saying goodbye.” Then, more kindly, she added: “No, don’t cry.”

  I could not stop it. You’ll think I am so simple a creature that I wept because I was denied a thing I wanted, especially this, my life’s goal. A child, a madman, wailing. But it isn’t true. I wept because I loved her and because, no matter how she had faded to a visitor in our marriage, a cameo performer with few scenes, still I loved every one. To hear that sigh, Alice, from your dressing room as you tried to fit into an old dress. To find another of your favorite books, ruined by a careless drop into the bathtub, pressed under the dictionary to save it from swelling. To discover, coiled behind a chair, one of your snake-shed stockings, a sign that you were still in my world. Your kitchen singing voice. Your laugh. That foolish sound. Oh Alice, I had to save it.

  “Alice,” I said. “I’m not myself today. There’s something I could say right now that would make all the difference, isn’t there? You would stay if I said it, Alice. But I’m not thinking well, I’m in a kind of cloud, so you have to think of it. Help me, Alice, what could I say? Let’s think. I know it’s about ten words, and not big ones. What are they?”

  Your hand was on your hat. “We are strangers, Asgar. There’s nothing to say.”

  “There is, there is, Alice. I have to try. Life is very short.” I left my bed, almost sweet with sickness, and sat beside you. Did you flinch? I think you were listening for the first time. “Alice, when I’m well, I will take you away from this house and this city and old Max. You’re right, I’m not Max, I was in a fever, forgive me, Alice. Or don’t forgive me. Or love me, either, forget all that. We’ll travel around the world. You are the whole point of my life. Do you hear that? Not quite the words I want, but close. Alice, you will never meet anyone like me, and you know it. Don’t you?”

  She said it sadly: “Yes, Asgar, I do.”

  “You see? Alice, you have to stay.”

  “No. Here’s the truth. I don’t …I don’t know who you are anymore.”

  “Of course you do! It’s me, Alice.”

  She shook her head and I saw little tears forming there.

  The darkness was pressing on my eyes. I leaned forward, talking softly now. “You have to stay, I’ll die, you have no idea, do you?”

  “Asgar, move away …”

  Something awful was happening, but I was too much in a fever to stop it. I can hear myself whispering, “Stay, Alice, please stay, oh stay, stay.” Throb of blackness, bubble of tar—more lost seconds—then I was kissing her. I remember thinking I felt a little love for me there still, some last desire for her young husband, and my fevered brain realized there is no final form to the universe, that we might change it if we cared enough, and I ravished her, in our bed, my face inches from hers, panting Stay, stay, stay until m
y hot tears splashed into her open eyes.

  I warned you. I am a monster.

  She said nothing afterwards, when she sat on the bed and buttoned her dress, nor when she put on her coat and looked into the mirror. One pinkie fixed her lips. One hand drove a deadly pin through her hat.

  I said, “Alice.”

  She said, “Don’t ever try to find me. Don’t ever try to see me again.”

  “Alice.”

  She simply stood there facing the door. In my nightmares, I work endlessly on a statue of my wife in just that pose, her back to me. I will never get to carve her face. Then, without turning, she walked out the door to meet her new life, and I had lost her forever this time.

  Not quite forever, of course. I have twisted fate, for here she is: lying in the sun beside me in her white skirted bathing suit and sighing to a radio. She has just turned over in the lounge chair and there are welts all along the untanned regions of her womanly thighs, the heart-shaped cutout of her back, and I want to touch them all with my hand and take away the pinkness, wipe them from my lovely Alice. She is sweating slightly in the heat. She is thinner in her fifties than she ever was at forty.

  “Sammy, hand me my drink,” she says, but Sammy is too high in a tree to help her. “Mom,” he yells, “look!” His little father looks and smiles; his mother adjusts her sun hat, squinting. The radio sings: Button up your overcoat! When the wind blows free!

  Alice, you sing: “Take good care of yourself!”

  I join in, boy soprano: “You belong to me!”

  Do you know what I did after you left me, Alice? Do you know why it is such a miracle that I sit here beside you with my comic books and gum? Because I wanted to die and, seeking my death, I pretended to be a boy of twenty-two and joined the army. I did, Alice, me, a man in his mid-forties, not knowing his son was growing secretly in his vanished wife. I drilled until my mind was dull. Then, one month later, I got my wish and tasted death. I went to war.

  Alice, your glass is here beside me, hoar-frosted gin. “I’ll get it,” I say, and hand you the cold thing, jingling with ice.

  “Thanks, hon.”

  You take it and leave my fingers wet. A sip and you sigh, wink at me, return to your sun-sleep. Later, I imagine, when the sun has fallen, you will remove the bathing suit before the mirror and admire your new tan line—that salt point of your kissable skin.

  “Cold,” you say, and hand the glass to me again. I open my chest and place it where my heart should be.

  IV

  SEPTEMBER 1, 1930

  Sammy, I write this by moonlight and firefly-light, far from our home and its eccentric, modern noises, far from Buster (who must be howling), far from the housebound boredom of summer. I write this on the banks of a gurgling river. White witch of a moon. My family is nearby, asleep; my wife and son, mother and brother, and another. Now, my boy-face is weeping and I have to wait for it to stop. There. We have gone camping.

  When Alice mentioned the idea a few weeks ago, I was overjoyed. It seemed like another opportunity—perhaps my last—to huddle in the cave-comforts of my family. I imagined building a fire together, singing songs and roasting sausages on long whittled sticks, squinting when the smoke blew towards us, laughing, whispering when we thought—we city slickers—we heard the rustle of a bear (extinct in this safe state). I thought of a dark night in a tent, giggling as we tried to fall asleep, the three of us. And in the dark, I thought I could almost pretend I was a man again, a father, lying there beside my wife and son, owls hunting silently overhead, toads yodeling, moon lying like a stain upon the tent roof. In the dark, we can almost have the life we long for.

  It did not happen this way.

  “Rodney’s coming,” Sammy told me the night before, as we were packing for our trip. Our little-boy underwear bore our names in pen, by Alice’s hand. I stroked those six black bleeding letters with my thumb.

  “Who?”

  He glared with the annoyance he often shows with me. “Rodney. Your doctor, duckbrain.”

  “He’s not!”

  “He is. He’s driving. This is his whole duck-brained idea and I think it stinks like heck.”

  I should have noticed a certain affection growing between you, Alice, and my Dr. Harper—you remember the harmless quack who read my bones—but I’d been too distracted with these pages, and with finding as much time as I could with my restless son, to see it. There have been, of course, times when you left the house for hours and we were left in the charge of a neighbor. I now look back and realize you spent these evenings out with Dr. Harper. It was for him you worried over your outfits, dyed your sky-gray hair, practiced a winning smile.

  The biggest clue, of course, was that cocktail party you had. I had the luck to help you with that zipper of yours (my hands quaking religiously), and then I watched as you applied those toodark shadows and lipsticks and became too modern a woman for my tastes. Sammy and I were sent to bed, so the rest I saw only through the bars of the stairway: neighbors arriving in a bouquet of gay noise, then some muttering retired teachers, and then Dr. Harper with his cigar-store-Indian face, who brought a bouquet of roses and a small stuffed bear and kissed you on my favorite cheek. You had forgotten to start the Victrola, and a neighborly man was put to work. Dance music, not to my taste. But I saw him whispering to you beneath the stairs, my Dr. Harper. I saw how you laughed, blinked, touched his tie. Once, long ago, you wanted me like that.

  So Dr. Harper arrived early in the morning in an Oldsmobile packed with outdoor equipment—I gather he’s a fan of this sort of thing—and an old-fashioned horn that went bawowzah, bawow zah. I was put in the back with my son, and the adults sat up front, talking about books and art in voices too soft for me to hear, and I pouted all the sunny miles until we arrived at the camp. Then I announced that I wanted Mother to sleep with Sammy and me.

  “Oh Jeez!” said Sammy.

  Harper: “I think she might want her own tent, don’t you, Alice?”

  Alice, you smiled and tugged at your diamond bracelet—were you unconsciously remembering who gave it to you, one hopeful anniversary? “I’d like that,” you said.

  Harper: “You boys will have fun together, don’t you think?”

  Sammy: “Not if duckbrain wets the bed.”

  Oh, be kind to old men.

  Harper: “Fellas, let’s get your tent up. See those stakes? I need you to count them out for me there, buster, that’s right. And Sammy, pull out those rocks.”

  The day that followed was atrocious. First there was a picnic lunch—withheld until the two “boys” gathered enough dry firewood for a wintering homesteader—and then about four hours of fishing. I suppose this was well meant, and peaceful and summergreen, but there was something positively sick about sitting on a riverbank and listening to my pediatrician give fishing advice to my own son. What made it worse, of course, was that Harper was an excellent fisher and I, a city boy and a freak, was as helpless as if I’d really been a boy of twelve. After half an hour, Harper came over to help me.

  “How’s it going there?”

  “The fish and I have made peace.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Now here, try this. You’ve got it in the shallowest—how about over there? That’s good. You’re doing great. There’s no trick to it. It’s only patience, patience.”

  I looked up at his great kind and rocky face and thought, I know more about patience than you will ever know.

  He put his large hand on my head and I felt its weight, its warmth. There was a comfort in this that I tried to ignore.

  “Why you’re a natural,” he said quietly. “Your father ever take you fishing?”

  “No, Doctor.”

  “Alice says he was a good man.”

  “He was.”

  “I wanted to tell you I’m so sorry about what happened.”

  I nodded and stared at the river, silver, rolling like a cylinder in its music box.

  “I wanted to
tell you that Alice, she’s very fond of you,” he said. Something in his tone reminded me of old Hughie; I wondered if Alice ever noticed this. “She thinks of you as a son, you know. A son just like Sammy.”

  “She does?” I could not hide the grain of hope in my voice, so like the boyish character I was portraying.

  “Alice loves you very much.”

  My line in the water was making endless loops of light. Alice loves you. Something I have waited half my life to hear, given to me by her next lover.

  Later, after charred meatballs cooked in foil and potatoes that were still hard at the center, Harper told us antique ghost stories that raised the downy hair on Sammy’s arms, and Alice had us sing some favorite songs of hers—good old Goober Peas! at the top of my tiny voice, to show you I knew all the words—and then we stared into the flame-palaces of the fire, and it was time for sleep.

  “Good night, sweet boys,” Alice said to us, smiling, as she looked into our tent. The glow of the fire was still behind her, and in the crevices of her eyes. She kissed our foreheads with her feathery lips—my eyes fluttered in a fever—then left, zipping the door into a glowing triangle. There was a little silence as we listened to Alice and the doctor laughing around the flames, uncorking something, whispering. The fire barked and growled and grew still.

  “What do you think of Harper?” I whispered, desperate.

  Sammy, you lay there a little while in the darkness, the light from the moon and fire coming through the trees in long coils of blurry light. I could hear the funny boy-noise of your breathing and the sick, sick as you scratched a finger against the canvas of the tent.

  “I don’t know,” you said.

  “Think he’s a duckbrain?”

  “Naw. I don’t know. I don’t like doctors much.”

  Sharp taste of hope. I said, “Pshaw, I don’t like them at all.”

  You laughed. “Pshaw! Pshaw!” you said, in high-pitched imitation of me. “Just like an old man. You’re the duckbrain.”