The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  It’s time to go. Dr. Harper’s prescription pad has gotten me an encouraging supply of pills, all blues and mauves, and while it’s still my birthday, and before I sink too badly into the mire of my particular curse, I think I should end things in indigo. Probably tonight, if I finish this. I plan to hide these pages in the attic, in a box that’s labeled “Max.” I plan to sneak out to the local creek and slip into a tin canoe. There, I’ll take my dose of gin and violets. It is my birthday wish to do this.

  I can see my wife and son, wandering among the graves of the Civil War dead. How my mother would have loved to lead her grandson there! Grasshoppers are jumping in the tombstone weeds, maple seeds are twittering towards the river, and, most surprising of all, in the bright sky I can see the faint dandelion of the moon. From somewhere I can hear a birdlike sound that I have decided is a group of children, somewhere in the neighborhood, playing a blindfolded game, their crazed voices brought to me only in bits and pieces, softly, on the wind. They will shout and yell like this, carried on the breeze, until they are too old for it, but by then there will be more children, glad and ignorant and wild, and so on, but among them there will never be another one like me.

  Sammy is waving to me. He’s shouting something I can’t hear. I think he’s found an old soldier. Bye, Sammy. And Alice, there you are, looking at me in the shade of your hand. Remember this always: there was no moment in my life I didn’t love you.

  Tomorrow, you will probably be awakened by a phone call. It will be too early in the morning to understand, and you’ll grope for your glasses as if they could help you hear, but what the man will say is that they have found a body. Your newest son, lying dead in a boat among the reeds. It will just be light, and you will be frozen for a while as you dress in your haphazard clothes, pull on a sweater, and stumble out to the car. The police will give you coffee at the station, and they will talk softly. It will not make any more sense than it did in the bleary light of morning. You will be given a bag of my belongings. Then you will be shown a body under a sheet. They will remove the sheet. There I will be, as naked as on our wedding night, bloated with water, my skin bruised with blue flowers. Don’t be sad. Life is short, and full of sorrows, and I loved it. Who can say why? Don’t look at me too long; I will make you think of Hughie, and it will start all over again, the old grief along with this new one. Turn away from me, Alice. Look in the little bag they gave you; there should be a necklace there. 1941. You will understand then. Don’t be sad.

  One day, you will find these pages. I suspect you will not be cleaning out the attic; I think you’ll just be searching for something from your early life to show your new husband. You will move aside the photo albums and there it will be, the box labeled “Max” in my boyish hand. You will pull out the yellow pages, stuck with sand and grass, and some rush will overcome you—sudden hatred, or tenderness, or something for the old man. I expect, someday, you will show them to Sammy and a little mystery will be blotted from his childhood: that odd boy, his brief brother, whom you buried so quickly and never spoke of again. Just as you never spoke of his father. If they fall into the hands of Dr. Harper, as I suspect they will, I’m sure he will dismiss me as a madman, claiming these are not the writings of a little boy but a forgery, certainly by your ex-husband but not by any magical being. Impossible. Perhaps he will publish them in collaboration with Goldforest House, my old asylum, as a study of that delusion: everlasting love.

  It’s time to go.

  Grow old and wise, my love. Raise our son to be a good Cub Scout, and a faithful lover; teach him to use his new wealth wisely, start a foundation, and do not let him go to war. Let your hair turn white, and let your hips broaden across the chair, and let your breasts fall on your chest, and let this husband, who loves you, be your last. Do not be alone. It does no good to be alone.

  They may not find my body, after all. Water is unpredictable that way. I may drink my poison, kick off from the dock, and never come back to shore. I will lie back on a pillow so I can see the stars. I plan on there being stars; the sky must comply, this once. I expect it to take a full half hour for the drugs to take effect, and if I have measured out my death correctly, and don’t simply vomit into the black water, the constellations will brighten and slide above me, and I won’t weep, not for all the dead, or because I miss the world. If I am lucky, I will be like the Lady of Shalott in that poem. I will float down the current until it meets the river, slowly, over weeks, for I will just be sleeping, still alive, growing younger every hour, as the river takes me along its swelling center, a boy, a child, ever younger until I am at last a little baby floating under the stars, a shivering baby, dreaming of no particular thing—borne into the dark womb of the sea.

  Max Tivoli

  1930

  Praise for The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov … . Max writes, ‘Life is short, and full of sorrows, and I loved it.’ His poignantly awry existence, set out with such a wealth of verbal flourishes and gilded touches, serves as a heightened version of the strangeness, the muted disharmony, of being human.”

  —John Updike, The New Yorker

  “Max may be a monster, but he is a profoundly human one, a creature whose unusual disorder, far from making him a freak to be wondered at, simply magnifies his normal and recognizable emotions, sharpening their poignancy.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “There’s something wonderfully clean and old-fashioned in the way Greer’s elegant and graceful style meshes perfectly with the period. He is an agile, inventive storyteller who intelligently examines deep and unsettled feelings about so-called monsters: do they deserve happiness? And aren’t we all in some way monsters in matters of the heart?”

  —Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald

  “Heartrending … beautifully written … this is a rich and mesmerizing fable. Time will not reverse its impact.”

  —Joe Heim, People (four stars, critic’s choice)

  “[Greer] has an eerie maturity not often found in young novelists. His prose, incantatory but not overheated, idles along with a tophatted, almost courtly elegance … . A fable of surpassing gravity and beauty, The Confessions of Max Tivoli returns Andrew Sean Greer to the central concerns of his first novel: how time ravages love, and how love takes its revenge.”

  —David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

  “The Confessions of Max Tivoli leaves its readers in much the same state as its narrator: bewildered by the sheer unlikely strangeness of life and feeling somehow both younger and wiser on that account.”

  —The Washington Post

  “[Max] refers to himself as a ‘monster,’ and indeed he inspires the same strange pity elicited by Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster. Racked by their own insatiable desires, these earthly creatures remind us of our own pitiable yearnings. That startling sense of sympathy for Max’s bizarre situation is perhaps the novel’s greatest accomplishment. It’s just the shock we need to fracture old attitudes about age and love.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Heartbreakingly beautiful … It is a pleasure simply to follow Mr. Greer’s sentences and to explore the turn-of-the-century San Francisco that he conjures.”

  —The New York Sun

  “Greer’s prose gleams with a persistent inner light … . One of the sheer joys of Max Tivoli is its meticulous re-creation of a bygone San Francisco … . There is a visceral, old-fashioned charm to Greer’s rendering of the park, as there is to the novel, which purports to be a memoir.”

  —East Bay Express

  “Tender and tragic … This book can be summed up with one of its own lines, ‘all of a sudden, life was gorgeous broken glass.’ A+”

  —On the Town

  “The most distinctive book you can read this year … . The writing is beautiful in its Victorian tone, and it has a classical feel to it … . Even if h
e stopped writing now, the story of Max Tivoli would guarantee his reputation as a great writer.”

  —Deseret News

  “The best authors of such work, from Shakespeare to Katka, leave the reader with a greater perspective of his own world after having ventured into that of the writer’s. The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer’s remarkable second novel, is very much a part of the tradition of exceptional supernatural works that function dually as serious literature … . Extraordinarily well written.”

  —Stop Smiling

  “Greer (The Path of Minor Planets) writes marvelously nuanced prose; with its turn-of-the-century lilt and poetic flashes, it is the perfect medium for this weird, mesmerizing, and heartbreaking tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred)

  “The Confessions of Max Tivoli is that rare delight—a second novel that doesn’t just exceed your expectations, it quietly explodes them. Andrew Sean Greer is a delicate and merciless chronicler of the heart, of the painful and hilarious ways in which we blunder through love. His narrative skills are on a par with Ford Maddox Ford, and his limitless imagination seems genuinely his own … . The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a thing of beauty.” —Neil LaBute, director and screenwriter, In the Company of

  Men and Your Friends and Neighbors

  “A hugely ambitious and extraordinarily beautiful book … The book is ostensibly about love, but really Greer tackles an array of weighty topics with a skill that is always a joy to behold … . There will be few, if any, better novels published this year.”

  —The List (five stars)

  “The Confessions of Max Tivoli unfolds as a mythic, Proustian romance. Greer’s achievement is to show how extraordinary creatures like Max may touch us in the most ordinary and moving ways. Despite time warps and cellular impossibilities, The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a brilliant story about the simplest of brief encounters, the encounter with life.”

  —The Times (U.K.)

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  This work is reprinted almost exactly as it was found in an attic in 1947. Some errors, such as spelling and punctuation, have been corrected, some illegible words (such as in the thunderstorm passage) have been deduced from context, but errors of history, geography, and medicine have been allowed to remain. Printed by permission of the Samuel Harper Foundation.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, for the memoirs, diaries, and letters I was allowed to search through, as well as to the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library. This book would not have been possible without the generosity of the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies and their benefactors. Thanks also to Jonathan Galassi, Carla Cohen, Susan Mitchell, Spenser Lee, and Jessica Craig and to my friends and family and everyone at FSG, Picador, and Burnes & Clegg. Of course to Bill Clegg himself, to whom this is dedicated. Best thanks of all to Frances Coady, who tended Max and transfused him with her very blood. And to David Ross, who never had any doubts.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the story collection How It Was for Me and the novel The Path of Minor Planets. He lives in San Francisco.

  THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI. Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Sean Greer.

  All rights reserved.

  For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.picadorusa.com

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.

  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department as St. Martin’s Press.

  Phone: 1-800-221-7945 extension 763

  Fax: 212-677-7456

  E-mail: trademarketing@stmartins.com

  Designed by Debbie Glasserman

  eISBN 9780374706302

  First eBook Edition : February 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greer, Andrew Sean.

  The confessions of Max Tivoli / Andrew Sean Greer.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-42381-0

  EAN 978-0312-42381-0

  1. Triangles (Interpersonal rotations)—Fiction. 2. Immortalism—Fiction. 3. Aging—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.R3987C66 2004

  n—

  813’.54—dc21

  2003054737

  First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux