The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  Alice lay silent and I worked my nerve up to say something: “They went to balls.”

  She shook her head, still facing the moon. “I mean a long time ago. I mean before kerosene lamps, and I don’t mean special evenings like balls, I mean evenings like this. Ones we like to kill with a parlor game.” Then my young love looked at me at last and my chest went cold with fear: “How could anyone fall in love by gaslight, I ask you?”

  “And yet they do,” came a voice behind us. Her mother was back.

  Alice was still looking at me. “Was it like that, Mr. Tivoli? Candles and long hours in the evening? When you were a boy?”

  “No,” I said softly.

  “Mr. Tivoli isn’t that old, Alice! Really! We had kerosene lamps when I was a girl, you know. And pianos.”

  Alice blinked for a moment and faced the moon again. “Too bad. I’m in the wrong time. I want all my nights to be like this.”

  Mrs. Levy seemed to be smiling. “I do like the moonlight.”

  Alice considered this. “The dark, too, and the cold,” she said. “And the silence.”

  The last word came almost as a command; we were silent. Alice closed her eyes and breathed in the night air, and this action, just the contraction of her shoulders under the oily gleam of sealskin, detached the invisible hair. I was alone again. Mrs. Levy stood before me against a tree. She was looking up at the stars; you could just see her breath forming in the chill air before her face, a ghost mask. We were all breathing, all wearing these masks. It was like a play of some kind, with the bright moon and the furs and hats and the little audience of spoons below us; I did not know what it meant. I saw Mrs. Levy lower her head and smile; I saw Alice breathing openmouthed up to the stars, her cheeks webbed with color; I saw my old hand resting against her sleeve, desperate to tap a code of some kind to her. I saw how the moon had dropped into her cup of coffee. It struggled there like a moth. Then I saw her lean forward, her mouth in a silent kiss, and as she blew on the furrowed surface to cool it, I saw the moon explode.

  Later that night, after I had lit the gaslights, carried in the tête-à-tête, and started a fire in the Levy house, after I had lit the shortburning candles in their rooms, I went upstairs to find Maggie standing like the sewing bird with a sealed note in her grip:

  Max: It’s more than I can bear. Come to the garden at midnight.

  —the girl downstairs

  Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like memory. So I didn’t hesitate. I took the note from Maggie and threw it on the fire. I changed my clothes to finer things and blackened a wet handkerchief by wiping the day’s soot from my face. I remembered the moon in a cup of coffee.

  She was there in the garden. The moon had set; I could only see the glow of white showing from under furs. She was sitting on a bench beneath the trees. The twigs cracked under my feet in the dark garden and she stood, silently watching me approach. Off far away a fire engine sang in steam. A night-blooming cactus in the yard was on full show for no one in particular. I came closer and I could hear her gasp; I could see her holding her hands together and then, when I was close enough for her to see me clearly, she took my arm and whispered something before she kissed me. I was still and quiet and shocked. Seeing my frightened eyes, the widow was unable to hold in her laugh; she leaned back her head and out it came, that string of pearls. Reader, I was seventeen years old.

  Dear Mrs. Levy is dead now, buried south of San Francisco in the Jewish part of Colma. She died in her seventies, after a prolonged illness in Pasadena, where her good daughter tended to her almost daily. Her skin became spotted and pale and she allowed no visitors in her last years; she took to wearing her old widow’s veil when her lawyers would come with documents for her to sign. She died without a penny to her name, and I picture an older Alice weeping by her mother’s bed, holding a hand so thin that the rings no longer fit her fingers. The cold hand of my first lover.

  I will be discreet. We must be gentle with the dead; the dead can say nothing for themselves. I will only tell you she was kind and generous with me over the weeks we spent together in the darkness of the garden and, more than once, in the midnight dangers of our South Park. She was confused and touched by the innocence of old Mr. Tivoli, and I think she took my trembling and moodiness for love, because after we were done and I lay shivering and gasping on the ground, Mrs. Levy would stare at me and, just for a little while, her eyes would star over in tears. She was a woman, not a girl, and though she had often been lonely, our nights were not desperate ones for her. They were simply “a little honey for my heart,” as she always whispered in my ear. Mrs. Levy, you never said it but you probably loved me. You were kind to me and I treated you badly and in some hell you are all smiles today, measuring my private seat of fire.

  Why did I do it? Why, when my poor eyes squinted into the garden and saw not my sweet Alice’s face among the fuchsia but her mother’s, did I not step back into the house? No one would have been hurt; it could easily have been construed as nerves or, better still, propriety calling for nothing further to be said of women in dark gardens. And nothing magic happened; the strands of starlight did not bind me to the spot; I could have left at any moment. But I was young. She thought I was an old businessman with a butterfly heart, but I was an ordinary boy of seventeen who had never known what it was to smell a woman’s hair that close, or feel a hand brushing his skin, or see a face unlatched with longing. It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window and not your own heart. Brave or carefree people will not understand. You, Sammy. But for some of us, the young or old or lonely, it might seem a palatable substitute and better than we have. We are not in love, but we are with someone in love, and the spare dreams of their days are all for us.

  Think of it: I had never been kissed. And I had no sense, from my life as an old man, that I would ever be touched or loved by a woman. I was unprepared for my own body; Hughie’s books had taught me what was what, but not what I might feel, and it all happened quicker than my dull mind could handle. From the moment Mrs. Levy took my arm under those trees, she moved without doubt—my very presence there meant I was willing—and I, heavy with doubt, could not keep up with her hands and kisses and her little whispers like folded birds placed in my ears. I could not keep up with the heat under my skin, or the scrape of her nails as she undid my shirt buttons and I was bare to the night. The body, that pale spider, stuns the mind; it wraps it up in silk and hangs it from a corner so that the body is free to go about its business. I awoke to find myself lying in the phlox, hardly able to breathe, while Mrs. Levy sat above me, glad-eyed; lunarly barebosomed, stroking my hair and whispering: You’re a good man, Max, don’t worry, you haven’t touched a woman in a while, have you? Max, you good, good man.

  I was Mr. Tivoli on the steps and in the mail, but I was Max in her arms, dear Max, handsome Max, strong and eager Max. I had never heard my name said so many times, in so many ways, all of them tender and good, as if that name—which always tasted of hard tack in my mouth—were so rich it could only be indulged in quietly, carefully, within the secret antechamber of my ear. It was the first and one of the last times I heard my name said like that, because though women have gasped a name into my ear, it has seldom been Max. Sammy, have you heard it yet? You have had so many Sammys said to you—the “Get in here” Sammy, the “Aren’t you a laugh?” Sammy, the “Come out and play” Sammy, the “Don’t bother me” Sammy—but are you old enough, reading this, to have heard the very different and surprising Sammy that comes from a girl in love? For once, someone is not calling you or informing you or addressing you at all; it is not talk. She is saying it for her own pleasure, because though
you are there before her, saying your name calls forth not the past Sammys she has held, but a future Sammy she imagines still kissing her like this. So Mrs. Levy conjured up a future Max, a strong man always lying in the phlox and breathing hard, and I was so unused to the feeling that I accepted him; I became him for a while, for I still answered her notes and, after a time, recognized the signal of shades in her window: one up, one down. A wink in the night; for young men in old bodies, my God, isn’t that reason enough?

  Of course I didn’t forget my Alice. It took everything I had not to let the ah-hiss of her name escape into Mrs. Levy’s ear, and I considered it a kind of tribute that Alice’s face often played fairy-lamp-style in my mind while I trembled in her mother’s embrace. Also, my situation allowed me greater access to the household below, and Hughie and I (complicitous Dempsey always came) spent many an evening carving at a fat, hard roast and surviving the older Levy’s version of “Listen to the Mockingbird” in order to delight in the pleasures of the younger Levy’s piano renditions of Civil War marching songs. Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! we would sing. Alice stuck her tongue into the air as she pounded the piano, Hughie would bellow along and punch the air to break his boredom, Mrs. Levy blew every word like a kiss to me, and dear old page-turning Mr. Tivoli harmonized with a smile. I had one hand on the music and one pressed decorously against Alice’s lacy back, where I felt the buttons of her spine beneath the buttons of her dress and, on every blessed Pea!, the sweet convulsion of her frame.

  Mother did not come to these events; she was laid up the last weeks of her pregnancy and took daily doses of whiskey to keep her from the dangers of hysteria. Before my evenings at the Levys I would bring her dinner up to her and tell her, as always, about my day at work in the belly of Bancroft’s brick whale, how the funny white-haired hatless man sold me the Call and I read about the three Haymarket Square anarchists still waiting to be hanged. Together, as always, we went through the cards from the receiver. She told my tarot. I read to her from a Cosmopolitan magazine that she was perfectly capable of reading herself, but she always closed her eyes and listened. Later, after the parlor entertainment and before the tumble in the phlox, I came upstairs to kiss her lips and snuff out the smoking candle beside her.

  I was sent out of the house when she began to go into labor, and Hughie and I found ourselves in an old banker’s bar drinking growler after growler of ale. From the ceiling sprang a Hindu serpent of paper, endlessly writhing down into a basket, and men picked it up from time to time to read the latest world events. Hughie wore a new mustache and was all in black; it was his uniform at the Conservatory of Flowers, the park’s greenhouse where he worked.

  “Have you seen the Victoria Regina?” was his new line with girls, referring to the popular name for the gargantuan water lily he tended, and they always blushed. You see, Sammy, in those days this was a racy thing to say.

  “How’s the Leviathan?” Hughie asked that evening, as always using his filthy term for my good neighbor.

  “Oh come now …”

  “The boys at the conservatory want to know if it’s true about Jewesses.”

  “You told the boys?”

  “Oh not the details. But are they the hottest?”

  “Hughie, I don’t know any other girls. In fact, I don’t know girls at all. Mrs. Levy is a woman.”

  “You don’t still call her Mrs. Levy.”

  “I wish I called her Alice.”

  “Not that now. Think of nice things. Tell me about your Mrs. Levy …”

  I was wracked with guilt. I might pretend that this was all a way to bring myself closer to Alice, but every time I saw her on the lawn pulling weeds from her wilted helianthus, every time she turned that worry-pleated face to me, I went hollow. I was betraying the very thing I meant to save. I was unraveling from one end everything I wove from another. “How Greek,” Hughie would say. I suppose it was an oft-told tale; I suppose I was not the first to make a mess of love, but it never matters, does it?

  I told Hughie all the things I cannot tell you, not from bragging, not from adolescent pride, but because I dared not keep a diary in my mother’s house; I had to scrawl my memories in him. For instance how Mrs. Levy prepared for our evenings by wearing a kind of sponge with a long thread for removal, how she eventually produced a pig-gut device for my own use. Hughie was fascinated. He was my great companion, after all, as mystified by everything as I. All we knew of sex was in his father’s books, and I now realized they were mostly aberrations. Of course, what was I? Would my Mrs. Levy ever have loosened her corset for a boy of seventeen? It was my deformity that drew her, my mild monsterhood. Yes, Hughie always knew the whole of my life. Well, almost the whole.

  The men at the ticker tape muttered and growled over news of a dam break back east, covering a town in thirty feet of water, killing thousands. The bartender asked if I wanted another for my son and myself.

  I began: “He’s not my—”

  “Dad needs another,” Hughie broke in, grinning, then said to me: “Drink it down, Dad. I have to tell you something.”

  Off in her high room, that instant, my sister was being born. I am glad to report that no one screamed except the newborn girl and nothing was smothered except a mother’s worry; red gleaming Mina was lifted into the world gulping like a lungfish, coughing, and then as the cord was severed and she was made as lonely as any of us, she sang out and Mother could see through the green mist of the chloroform pills that here was her baby. Here was a thing that would grow old; here was a thing that would turn beautiful and lose that beauty, that would inherit the grace but also the bad ear and flawed figure of her mother, that would smile too much and squint too often and spend the last decades of her life creaming away the wrinkles made in youth until she finally gave up and wore a collar of pearls to hide a wattle; here was the ordinary sadness of the world.

  And I myself was growing a little older as I listened to Hughie’s story. What he told me loosed a loneliness I had not expected. Hughie sat all in black, a grave man telling a grave thing, pausing only to accept his steam ale and to blow the foam from the top, turning back to me with the soft eyes of a temple cat. “Don’t be angry,” he kept insisting, tapping his nail on the bar just below a carved insanity of hearts and thorned initials. “It’s nothing to me, I swear, it’s nothing.” From above, the smoke-trail of paper floated down into the basket, as if returning to its burning source, as if something other than myself were running backwards in the world. But nothing else does; the world falls forward when it falls apart.

  They were a few brief words. A cluster of glass. You see, while I was romping with Mrs. Levy in the corner garden, my Alice had fallen in love. Simply, brutally, in love. With whom? With Hughie, of course. Who else?

  Doctors, an update:

  I have survived an examination just this afternoon. I avoid physicians as much as I can, and especially since I have become a little boy, but the thunderstorm of the other night has given me a sore throat. I tried to hide it with lozenges and smiles, but swallowing Mrs. Ramsey’s cooking has gone from a small torture to an impossibility. All I can do is moan and grimace. The dog is terrified of me. And you, Sammy, have been teasing me mercilessly. So I have been taken to a little bungalow in the nice part of town, a windowless place with movie posters and a spool of gauze to play with. Mrs. Ramsey, that kind woman, bathed me in her concern, gave me a dry kiss, and said she would be back. So for almost an hour it was just me and the gauze and the movie-poster nurse. I have memorized the snowy battlements of her cap.

  Dr. Harper turned out to be a jokey fellow with the stainedwood look of a Hollywood leading man. He stared into my throat and squinted for a while before he spoke to me.

  “You don’t feel well?”

  “I’m fine. It’s a sore throat.”

  He shook his head and took some notes. “It isn’t. It’s something very different. I’ve never seen anything like it.” A little laugh.

  Was it possible? That half a century of doct
ors, who had bled me, blistered me, purged, sweated, and electrocuted me, could not discover what this man caught in an instant? I have withstood Rushians and Thomsonians, Grahamites and Fletcherizers and Freudians—so had I become an old lake bass that, lazy with slipping so many barbed nooses, gets landed by a schoolboy? I am an old man; I do not understand the world as it is, and it seems entirely possible that the new century has found an X, Y, or Z ray to sound out a man like me. Still, in this small hamlet on the plains? I calmed my impulse to confess; I sat still as a child.

  “I need some measurements, old man,” he said, smiling mysteriously.

  I shivered, then he took my height, my weight, the length of various bones, peered into my ears and eyes and listened thoughtfully to the off-key radio of my heart. I noted the numbers myself, but knew he could not tell that I had shrunk two inches in the past year, lost a proportional amount of weight, and now owned only a tight snail-wad of genitals. I lied about my medical history, giving myself an infant hernia operation, chronic bronchitis, and a handful of allergies, just to handicap his game. Throughout, he tried to interest me in little jokes, but I was elsewhere, floating above, terrified that my choking swallow was that clue, in boys’ detective stories, that always reveals our young hero to his foe.

  “It’s all very clear, old man. Let’s find your mom and dad.”

  “She isn’t my mother. And my dad’s dead.”

  “Oh,” he said, startled for the first time.

  “What are you going to tell her?”