The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  By the time I married Alice, Mina had refused to see me. We had told her, back in 1900, the true nature of her Uncle Beebee. She was twelve at the time and had stared at me, fiddling with her bows, not comprehending. “Is he going to die?” she asked, to which Mother replied, “Well, as much as any of us,” and then my sweet sister looked at me with tense black eyes and said, “We can’t tell anyone, don’t tell, please Beebee, don’t tell.” I knew what she meant. She made me swear it many times over the years. Mina meant that this kind of deformity would reflect badly on the family, especially on her. She cried for her old Beebee. But the creature had to stay in the attic.

  What happened, though, was not her fault. Whispering to love-struck admirers, dancing the daring polka at balls in town, no, Mina was not to blame. Nor Mother, staying in her house across the bay, speaking to her spirits. The fault was entirely mine. For I did more than hide my marriage from them. Over a few years, I ceased to return their letters or calls; I made excuses for why I could not join them for holidays or birthdays; I tapered off my visits to brief lunches or walks and then, by the end, to nothing at all. Because I did not want them to break my secret, to destroy the love I had worked so hard to win, I hid my life. I hid myself. I am not the first to do this. Like my father before me, I simply vanished in the snow.

  So I was all alone on my wedding day. I came with just my hat, my suit, my heart full of honey. Friendless, orphaned, her Asgar offered himself completely when he slid that ring onto her finger and whispered those little words.

  “Well I do too,” said Alice. Our witness wept.

  The judge pronounced us wed. Birds, sleeping in the spirals of the ruined stairs, flowed out into the sky above us. Alice’s hand was cold as February.

  “Asgar, are you crying?”

  “No, no.”

  “Oh you are ridiculous. Kiss me.”

  I was. I did. For there was nobody left in my life but you, dear Alice. I had sent them all away.

  What do we abandon to claim our heart’s desire? What do we become?

  As for the wedding night, well. Prurient reader. My son may be reading this, and he will blush, so I must open a peacock screen across the page. Behind it, imagine what you will: fog air beading a body. Phlox-perfumed memory, a teenage prayer answered at twice that age, the whisper of a beloved name, a false one. An exaltation of swallows. And so on.

  Much later, in our older years traveling together in an automobile, Hughie asked me why I never asked him to the wedding.

  “Are you insane?” I said. “You would have blown the whole thing.”

  “Max, I would’ve come in disguise. A false beard and a cape. A parasol. Come on, I would have hidden behind a tree.”

  “There were no trees left.”

  “Behind a stout woman. I would have watched over you as a witness.”

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We weren’t close then, were we? There were all sorts of things we didn’t tell.”

  “True.”

  And he drove on past a lake of aquamarine, shadowed by one solitary cloud, the air through the open window making its syllable sound. I pointed out three boys, loud as crows, jumping from a dock; he smiled. Ah, old Hughie.

  But back to married life.

  It is a wolfish world, but she relieved it. Somehow, on our meager funds, Alice made a rich and lovely life. In those expensive postearthquake days, she produced feasts of rice in aromatic spices, talked wealthy friends out of their opera tickets, redid our bedcovers from old dress material, and all so effortlessly—as if it were perfectly natural to melt used candles into multicolored tapers. Did you know you can reuse broken earthquake china to tile your kitchen walls? My wife somehow did. She hired a neighbor boy and had my shoddy kitchen all redone in priceless cracked porcelain some friends were throwing out. She even had a broken teacup set in there with all the fine Limoges—imagine that, a teacup sticking out of the wall, handle and everything—and in it she always kept the fresh blossoms that I gave her.

  What my wife and I ate for breakfast: Weetabix from the box. What we learned together, laughing in the privacy of our parlor, but never performed: the turkey trot. What she smelled of in the evening when she stepped smiling into the parlor where I waited: Rediviva.

  Tell me: What is the proper wine for rapture? What is the proper fork?

  Curse me if you want to, Alice, but say I was no miser. In fact, I gave you everything I could—gowns that I had seen you admire, far beyond our means, that I would buy and hang in the closet for you to discover; and of course the books that you would never have bought, all shipped from New York so you did not have to leave the house to find them—all these I gave you, and more. I even slipped a few dollars into your shoes for you to spend as you wished. I wanted more than anything to make you happy, to see that hard-won shock of joy when you pulled a leather book out of an unexpected parcel. My one luxury was the purchase of that smile, that quick laugh. Gothic villains keep their maidens in sewers, or high in foreign castles, sipping their blood like cordials. Jealous husbands are different, but still, we know that it is not enough to have them love us. We have to make a life they cannot leave. Too good to leave. Oh Alice, I did it so you would stay.

  And isn’t that what Sammy has heard me shouting in my sleep? When the summer lightning slits the sky’s throat and Buster shivers in the sheets? Oh stay, Alice, please stay, please stay, oh stay, stay.

  You’re thinking that, having carved her name like a whaler into my very bones so that even my skin bore a faint trace of those five letters, having sailed around the world in my mind in search of her, and having found her, captured her, held her, old Max would soon tire of her. We are restless beasts, after all, and even paradise becomes too plain a prison. It did annoy me, now and then, that her housekeeping was not of the best quality. Shoes somehow propagated under settees. The bathroom, still resounding from her tub-singing, was always as wet as a marsh. And her whims were shortsighted; a harmless prank such as wearing the chandelier-drops as earrings was amusing, but somehow they never found their way back to their proper home, and I always had to set things aright in the end. I recall, as well, how trying it was when Alice would become entranced by some idea—for instance that we would have a mountain picnic—and become so firmly set that when these schemes dissolved, from rain or cost or whatever, it would take her hours to recover from her childlike disappointment. But none of this mattered. Not for more than a minute, two minutes, and I forgave her. With kisses that she accepted along her shoulder. With fingers spread beneath her scented hair, touching the landscape of her scalp like something beneath the sea. With words in her ear that made her whisper, “You’re a fool.” I forgave and forgave her. Of course I never grew tired. You see, I loved her.

  You’re wondering: Did she notice? That particular quirk of my body, did she sense it in the early mornings? When she accepted all those kisses of mine, through the years, the lips that grew slightly smoother? The hair that brightened just a little, the lines that faded from my eyes? While she gave up bread to take the voluptuous weight from her thighs (little realizing how I loved each dimple), did she notice that my pants had been taken in to fit a shrinking waist? By our sixth year, when she was forty, could she tell that the man who begged for an embrace before she left—the man who could not seem to get enough of her—did it with the desperation of a youth of twenty-seven?

  I did my best to hide it. As I once had worked to cover my age with careful dyes at the barber’s, now I came up with other tricks, countercurses. I bought a pair of uncorrected glasses, for instance, in old-fashioned ovals that made me just a little middle-aged. No longer interested in fashion as I once had been when nothing fit me, I chose to dress as old men do, in drab or antique styles, as if I had lost touch with a passing world. I even had my trusted barber put a little gray into my temples—yet when I looked in the mirror, it had come out even blonder, and I saw before me a blinking sun-touched boy
whom Alice could never love. We took the color down a few shades, approaching the dull and dusty brown of books. Every day of my life, time was tricking me, embellishing my body with new leanness, long muscles, a rose in each cheek, and each day I did my best to burn the evidence. A telltale heart was beating beneath the floorboards of my skin, the heart of the man I’d buried, and I tried to forget—for love teaches us to forget—that one morning I would find her staring at me, a young stranger, the spell worn off at last.

  But I was lucky. What she noticed were her own body’s changes, and I often heard low sighs from the bedroom. She joked about her wrinkles and her chin, her new gray hairs (which disappeared at the salon), the bruises that took too long to heal, the aches of her back, her feet. She said these things lightly, as if she didn’t care, and I told her over and over that she was lovely. You see, I wanted to see her old. Perhaps it was a product of deformity, but it excited me to think of her body moving through time, her breasts full and low, her neck ringed with folds. By our final years, when she could no longer hide the lines around her mouth, I desired her more than ever. Not the girl I’d met at stung-fourteen, but every variation of that girl. How luscious to see my Alice grow broad and then thin again, frail and gray, pleating her face with laughter! This is what my sacrifice was for: to have her ripen until her death within my arms.

  One cool morning, just after we had finished the dreamlike act of love—something I had pictured so often as a youth, and which in those early years was given to me eagerly, daily—my new wife turned to me and said, “You’re not enough for me, Asgar. I need another man.” She arranged the bedclothes happily around her and then looked back at me, smiling impishly. “Why do you look like that? Did you bruise something? A son, sweet man. I think we need a son.”

  You, Sammy, it was you she needed. Alice spoke of you so merrily that morning, full of hopeful plans, almost as if you were a treasure buried long ago within her life and here she was, returned to find you. She knew you in every detail—your clever laugh, your school pranks, your underwater face in the morning, your stunned rapture in the midst of a Jules Verne novel, how you can stand on your head, sing, and whistle through your nose, swim farther on the river than any of your friends—and how is it mothers know these things? Are their dreams built into you, cell by cell, even before you are born? Or do they have some mystic clue to you, a pirate map folded in their heads?

  In that first year of our marriage, she talked about you brightly, always when we’d just finished our conjugal embrace and I lay back on the bedsheets, dazed and happy. It was still so fresh and pure, the impossibility that my little Alice, whom I had loved since she was in barley-sugar curls and princess hats, could kiss me so hotly, tear at me with her nails as if she might rip me to shreds. Like a druidess, every morning she burned me to ashes. Our house was ever in fog, but I picture the window stuffed with sun, and a long diamond of light across our bodies. As I lay in my private bliss, your mother curled my hair around her finger and told me how soon you would be coming now, how she could feel you impearling in the nacre of her womb.

  The second year, it became an occupation: the thought of you, the implication of you, there between us in the bed. “Don’t be so shy, Asgar,” she used to whisper, crawling towards me with dark cat-eyes. “Just do exactly as I tell you.” I did, dutifully; no teacher was ever better. But those jewel-bright impossible mornings of the first year were gone; instead, we had a job before us, like a crew searching for an uncharted island, and she sometimes batted away my tickling fingers, my whispering kisses, intent only on the necessary parts of love.

  The third year was a ghost story. She would put down her book sometimes and stare into a corner, as if she could see you there, barely visible, padding through the hallway. She was not sleeping well and would get up at night, go to the kitchen, where I could swear I heard the faint sound of singing. Alice tried to lift her spirits with her photography and went on long outings during the day. She returned from these outings with images of our city in its rebuilding, of the new Chinatown with its broader streets to keep out rats, its pagoda buildings, its lines of children holding on to each other’s pigtails. Boys in the park, mothers gathered in white ruffles on a park bench. She developed these in our bathroom, and many of the pictures she tore to pieces. Was she looking for an image of you? And sometimes I came home to find her in a satin dress and paste diamonds; my Alice, dressed to cheer herself up, just as she had in the old days of South Park. I would find her sitting by the window, glittering, laughing, saying, “I’m feeling grand, darling!” But my heart would drop. What longing was hidden there? What secret? I would laugh and pour a drink, hoping tomorrow would be different. For we hate what is half seen.

  Our tangle in the bedroom became less frequent, but more intense again: a seance, calling forth the one spirit who would not come. “I think I felt something that time,” she’d whisper, worried, “Or no, no maybe not,” and she would lie in silence, sheets wrapped up to her chin, nose red from the cold air. I fell into a quiet despair. You see, as with any lover, I was never sure that she was mine entirely. I knew she could vanish in an instant. But with a son, my son, if she somehow (God forbid) ever stopped loving me, she would love you forever, and it would still be enough. You could have saved my life. And yet—I admit I was also a little anxious. For what kind of creature would come from my incubus loins? Half human, half gorgon, with snaky hair and cockatrice eyes? Or, like myth, immortal?

  But you are beautiful, Sammy, you are. I sit here writing on our little shared desk, and you are sprawled out like a dead soldier on your bunk, napping, your mouth agape with wonder at your dreams, the sun lighting your right ear so it glows coral-pink. One cheek is raw from rubbing on the sheet. Your left hand hangs at a crazy angle, soft and hopeless, and your lids pulse with the frenzy of your sleeping eyes. My son, you are beautiful, although you came too late.

  A brief intrusion; forgive the dust. These scribblings are from the attic. I’ve finally found the little doorway leading here—Wonderland-sized—and it is indeed a dreamlike kingdom of broken chairs and dead insects and boxed-up memory. I have to pause here to write about the view from this smudgy window; it is sublime. It is of you, Alice, far below me.

  You are stooped in yellow in the rows, your skirt tied in two calfknots as Roman women used to do, your arms half reddened by the sun and air of summer as you pluck and prune with such decision. You move as unhesitatingly as a card dealer, either absolutely sure of what’s a weed and what isn’t or, perhaps, immune to regret in this one place. You don’t sing or talk or clench your face in worry. You are tender with each dahlia and approach it as if it were the loveliest, the only flower in the world, but once you move on it is forgotten. Ah, there’s a bee following your every move.

  It’s hot up here, Alice. It’s full of motherly rubbish and lover’s loot. I’m thrilled and exhausted from going through all of Sammy’s artwork from his early scribblings—mostly cave drawings that look like spidery heads speared on thin stakes—to recent portraiture of our little family that emphasizes his hands, your hairdo, and my chin. I think I love most the race car drawings he has made for me, and the scribbled inventions that he hopes will make him a fortune. These are what a father hoards—secrets his son shared only with him.

  But that is not what I have come to find. Like any great museum, you keep your greatest, most controversial treasures stored away forever, but here they are, all leaning in a row like skeletons in a catacomb: your photographs. All the things you made in the years you spent without me, the years before I found you this last time. Yes, here it is: a self-portrait of you floating in a pond. I love it; I am thrilled by its passion; it intimates a private world of storm clouds, floodwaters, scattered petals, and broken glass. What do our lovers see when they close their eyes? What comes to them in daydreams? Only those who love artists will ever know, though it breaks our hearts to find it’s never us.

  I must keep an eye on you, Alice Ramsey, if I am to look
through your things. But now that I’ve begun spying on you, I hardly know how to stop. I can’t sit in this stuffy room and search for some bit of the past because here you are! What I’ve searched for so long is below me in the garden. You kneel, and your calves spread out between the hairy curled fists of the poppies, your skin bruised just faintly from when I tagged you in a game the other day; I have made my mark. Those legs, falling out of the skirt. And I picture a little girl like this, searching in the dark grass for a pin, her bloomers rising up her thighs like this. The bee is in the air above you, dipping towards your hair, but you don’t notice. You lean back and wipe the sweat from your face with the edge of your elbow, a peasant gesture. The bee, the sun, the air circle around you. So lovely in the garden. Old men and little boys will always love you, Alice Ramsey. Beware.

  It was in December of 1912, and I had been happily married to Alice for more than four years, when our lives endured a slight alteration. Her mother, the Widow Levy, who had been living in Pasadena since our marriage, took ill. The doctors never learned the true cause, but as I recall she broke out in a rash of telegrams, delivered weekly to our doorstep until Alice took me aside one night and said it was really very serious.

  “How serious, darling?”

  “Well, I’m going to have to help.”