Love Invents Us

Save Love, Catch Light

In Mars, Alabama, at seven-thirty a.m., Uncle Burf’s pale blue shirt, warm and stiff from Aunt Arlene’s iron, was already showing a long wet triangle down the back. The sleeve creases would stay sharp until lunchtime. Burf looked out from the post office window at the magnolia pyramids, three in a dark-green glossy row, each one starred with one lingering white flower right near the top. The only good things about Alabama, Burf said, were the vegetation, the fishing, and the food. Lately, Arlene packed every lunch as if he were going on a long train ride: three pieces of chicken, a peach, a slice of sweet potato pie. He’d get his own soda. Gus would eat like this too if he was still living here. Gus’s boy ate to live but nothing more.

Arlene was in the kitchen like all three kids were still home, pulling out old cobbler recipes and stewed rhubarb and new things from magazines like spinach lasagna and barbecue turkey. And the boy sat there like who died, which was fair, Burf thought, but hard on Arlene, who was cooking up a storm, out of kindness, and hard on Burf, who was practically eating for two, to show appreciation to Arlene. And especially hard to watch the boy sickening right there at the table, knowing that he, Burf, could expect to find a letter, every single goddamn day another letter from the boy to his girl, and would have to tear it in quarters and throw it in the wastebasket during lunch break.

He read the first one all the way through and breathed in the love, that hot, hurting feeling under your ribs, love that made him sneak out of his barracks and slide past his cracker sergeant, risking court-martial for one of Arlene’s kisses through a chain-link fence, going to sleep with a rust-flecked diamond pressed into his face. Love that made life matter, even when you were just looking back at it.

April 2, 1970

Dear Elizabeth Ann,

I love you. I LOVE YOU. I’m in Mars, Alabama. I don’t know if you can get a letter to me. Maybe if they don’t know it’s from you. Can you mail it from the city? I don’t think they’ll check a letter that’s not from Great Neck.

My aunt and uncle are nice folks, I haven’t seen them since I was little. He’s my father’s brother and there IS a physical family resemblance, which means that Nature has NOT favored him.

Dad put me on the plane so fucking fast you wouldn’t believe it! I guess you would, you know Gus. School here lets out in early June. We’re way ahead of them and I don’t have to do any work. The team’s not bad and I’m forward. They’re all big, bigger than me, as always, but slow. These are some slow-moving country motherfuckers. Because this here is the country, girl. Which is how they all (like y’all) talk. They all think I sound funny so by the time you see me — whenever that is — I’ll probably sound like Uncle Remus.

I want to call but they’ll see it on the phone bill and I can’t call you collect, unless we set up a time. I don’t have any money. If you write a certain time that you’ll call or I should call, like Friday afternoon, between 2 and 4, before they get home, I could be here. You have to know how much I love you. Write to me Call me.

From your forever loving, H.

Burf kissed the letter for Huddie a minute before he tore it up, and he tried not to read the rest of the letters all the way through. He watched for letters from the girl, although there couldn’t possibly be any; he hoped, even as he tore Huddie’s letters into sorrowful, greasy strips, that somehow she would get them and write back. No.

Burf pictured Elizabeth Ann as a pale, pink-lidded blonde, like the little white girl who worked at the post office during holidays, until he remembered that Elizabeth was Jewish. Like Anne Frank, then, sad velvety eyes and dark hair in neat waves. When Burf’s oldest girl brought the book home, he sat down in the upstairs hallway, on his way to the bathroom, and read it through, then cried in the shower and went to work. Burf knew Gus thought the girlfriend’s being Jewish made it worse, but it didn’t seem so; life’s heartbreaks were just that, Jewish or not.

Nadine Taylor’s parents certainly hadn’t wanted her to marry his coal-blue ugly brother. Ugly, mean, poor, no people to speak of, no manners. Nadine’s people were Maryland-based, all kinds of educated freedmen whose every historically significant letter, laundry list, and poem was nicely framed in oak and hung in every one of the Taylors’ thirteen rooms; and Indians, not just high-yellow, high-cheekboned black folks, but real Weapomec Indians from Raleigh, back when black people thought that was an improvement. There had even been a French farmer and an Irish parlormaid, laying the bones for a summer house at Highland Beach where tall, barely tan men and silky-haired, long-nosed women lounged in pristine summer whites.

Augustus and Burford had only their half-mad wandering mother and their Aunt Lessie, whose sense of duty made her gather up the clothes their mother had scattered in the yard, and whose will got their mother settled down in the back room, supper on the table, and their behinds off to school the next morning for the first time in a week. Their father, handsome and sharp in his gold-framed photograph, was in the merchant marine and stayed there. Educated, beaten, washed, and brought up to respect the Lord and people who paid their bills, Gus and Burf were good boys. And still they broke their aunt’s heart and worried her sick. They loved the water. White man’s sport or not, they sailed, canoed, kayaked, and even water-skied. They snuck into the country club at night to swim in the aquamarine Olympic-size pool. They borrowed skiffs and returned them in the early morning; they crewed on big sailboats for reckless white boys with more money than sense. Gus kept three signed photographs of Esther Williams under his mattress and shook over them at night for two full years. Burf dreamed of deep-sea fishing, pulling in marlin with his feet braced against a mile of Philippine mahogany.

He fished religiously still, tying flies for his evening meditation. He showed the boy a few times, but Horace was all thumbs with the flies and bored wild, paddling his amber feet over the side like a little kid, humming radio songs.

“We don’t catch, we don’t eat,” Burf lied. The boy could see for himself that Arlene had stuffed the freezer to the top with pies and stews and foil-wrapped batches of biscuits, just in case. “This here’s dinner.”

“I don’t care. I’m not hungry,” the boy said, his lower lip curling out. Queen Nadine’s boy, all right, from his pink pouty lip to those long skinny feet and round froggy toes flipping through the still water.

Burf sighed. “I know you ain’t hungry. Your Aunt Arlene knows you ain’t hungry. All Mars knows you ain’t hungry, boy. Whyn’t you get your feet out of the water and we’ll catch something and go home. We don’t need to make a good time out of this.”

Arlene cleaned the house, getting ready for the heat and wondering about the girl. Gus was crazy to send his boy away just three months before graduation. Maybe she looked like Nadine. Gus couldn’t look on that face, even in white, with a clear conscience. Nadine Taylor had left behind a nice life for Gus. (Arlene still remembered the hand-embroidered underthings, the tennis clothes Nadine unpacked, blushing, and put in a bottom drawer.) Oh, Queen Nadine. Too good for Gus, too good to leave them all so young. And it wasn’t high hat and airs, either. It was true goodness, the goodness of her soul, and it shone right out at Arlene every day and night now, at breakfast and dinner, sitting directly across her kitchen table and sickening.

The boy went to college in late August. Burf and Arlene watched his games on TV, and Burf thought that maybe the girl would see Horace play and write to him. Write to him, Burf thought, don’t forget. Find her, Arlene thought.

Only Believe

Elizabeth was back for the last three months of school, sooty eyes and lank hair, but back. She wouldn’t look at Max, lurching through the halls like a wounded man. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, crusty and egg-shaped behind his glasses, and she drew in her breath when his hands came too close. He was functionally drunk every weekend and putting vodka in his orange juice at breakfast. He got himself to work, he kissed his children without exhaling, he gave a passing grade to any student whose parents would have come in to complain. He didn’t fall down, he didn’t break things, and he refused to drive with the boys for fear of killing them. Greta would not get in a car with him after four o’clock on Friday. The boys rode their bicycles into town, and Greta had begun to give Dan money for groceries. Max couldn’t do other than what he was doing, so he bought Dan a wire basket for his bike and all the comic books he wanted.

“Hey there, Elizabeth, welcome back. How’ve you been? Have you finished that paper on Edith Wharton?” Manic with despair, he sounded nothing like himself; the voice he’d used with her and hundreds of students and their parents and his own children, the sound of compassionate authority, shriveled in his throat. Rachel stood guard three feet away.

Elizabeth shook her head at Rachel, who edged a little farther down the hall and sat at the bottom of the staircase.

“I’m okay. I lost the baby.”

“I know. I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Was it awful?”

He tried to steer them toward his office, but she clung to the wall like a hostage.

“No, I lost the baby. It died. I didn’t have to have it killed.”

Max reached up, pulling handfuls of air.

“You miscarried?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, so am I. I’m sure the baby’s sorry too.”

And Max kept talking just to talk. Trying to turn what they had into a bold, star-crossed romance, love’s honorable defeat, as if the two of them had wept in each other’s lap on the floor of Mrs. Hill’s kitchen. Elizabeth said nothing. She saw his thoughts and closed her eyes. Max kissed her forehead, kissed her right through her unwashed bangs, and leaned back against the wall beside her.

“Where’s the boy?”

She shrugged, and he thought it would be nothing to break her jaw.

“The boy. The boy who got you pregnant. Where is he?”

“He’s gone. His father sent him away.”

“Well, I’m still here, sweetheart. You call me if you need me. Just call me.”

Elizabeth slid along the cinder-block wall, shouting, “I’m coming. Wait up,” and when she was halfway down the hall and safe by Rachel’s side, she called back to him, “Uh-uh. No thanks, Mr. Stone. Thanks anyway.”

And he saw her speak quickly to Rachel, her arm around her friend’s waist, and they glanced back at him and broke into sharp, disbelieving laughter.

Max had thought of affairs, normal men’s affairs, as a kind of Tabasco for the ego and libido, a little zip for the everyday burgers and scrambled eggs. His own affairs now seemed impossibly lighthearted and kind, the motels pink-and-gold operetta sets, all unhappiness and endings hidden by heavy, friendly thighs around his waist, a good-natured soft throat swallowing wine, a slightly slack belly becoming round and tight under his fingers. This, this girl, was poisoned water in a thousand-mile desert, and he must drink and know he’s dying.

That first terrible summer without her, two years ago, he drank Scotch until the back of his head pressed so tightly on the front and his mouth was such a compost heap that he had to stop for three days, and then he switched to dry white wine, buying it by the case. He felt good whenever he saw one of the pretty labels in a restaurant or at someone else’s house, and he told people it was a great wine for the price. (Not that Max and Greta were invited much anymore. Max had always been the charmer, the half of the couple that people wanted to have over. A sad, charmless drunk and a religious agoraphobic are not much in demand at dinner parties and barbecues.) He felt, as drunks do, that if other people drank the stuff for legitimate reasons, he might, too.

After the formal yielding to Mrs. Hill and his conscience, vanquished in that overstuffed blue parlor, he had stayed away, hoping that such visible goodness would be rewarded, that he would become who he had been. Elizabeth had stayed away for months more, finally walking into his office with a handsome Italian boy, with carefully torn T-shirt, incomprehensible speech, and long black curls. Max thought, He’s not really her boyfriend, she’s just hired him for the afternoon, to torture me for staying away from her, which I had no right to do and which I swear to God I will never do again.

So beautiful, Max thought. Am I supposed to be ashamed for being such a dirty old man, another Humbert, disgusting in my obsession? I try to imagine the man who would not love her, the cold-hearted pervert who could look at her without passion. My deadpan baby doll, as beautiful as the day, and when I compliment her on the arrangement of red roses appliqued across the ass of her jeans, she blushes so deeply the sheer white of her T-shirt pinkens. I know she’s only fifteen, for Christ’s sake. I offend myself, never mind the world. Fifteen. I looked at her the first time and I wanted to pull her to me and make love to her with such tenderness and skill that even God would forgive me. And then I would kill myself, because I know I would never be forgiven, least of all by myself.

Instead of saying that every time he saw her his thoughts were of gentle fucking and violent death, Max shook Tony DiMusio’s small hand and made pleasant, avuncular inquiries. Tony demonstrated interest in Max’s stick-shift Volkswagen, and they argued equably about cheap versus expensive cars (Elizabeth and Tony thought cheap was morally superior; Max had been poor and they had not) and stick-shifts versus automatics (they shared a preference for stick-shifts, even though Elizabeth and Tony didn’t drive).

They didn’t talk about literature; Max assumed that Tony didn’t read. He knew Tony could make out street signs and menus without assistance, but he didn’t read. And he hated Bob Dylan (Elizabeth had made Max listen to Bringing It All Back Home eleven times just last year, and what he did not find sophomoric and obvious amused him, even as he was tempted to point out to Elizabeth all of her Wunderkinds plagiarism), because Dylan was so fuckin’ serious, man, and Tony’s life ambition was to own a cherry-red Porsche with four on the floor, man, and just groove. So Max knew just what they had in common and knew why she’d brought Tony for a visit, and he played dumb through to the end, expressing admiration for Porsches, disdain for Bob Dylan, and best wishes for their future happiness. He believed, furiously, that he had acquitted himself well, even admirably, and that Elizabeth got what she came for.

Tony’s hand was on the doorknob and Elizabeth had dropped her flat-lipped kiss on Max’s cheek when Max surprised them all with a wild cruel lie: Greta and I are thinking about having another baby, I think we really will. Elizabeth lost her color and left, and Max had another year of no Elizabeth at all, in which to repent.

A whole year in which to slide right out of the Little League games, clarinet lessons, food fights, animal-filled movies, and endless doctor appointments that make up family life, into a sea of terror and lust so bright it seemed like the love of penitents for the Lord. Danny played two sports every season. Benjie, who would become Ben by the end of the next year, sat in the corner of whatever room Max was in and watched him. Benjie was Max’s conscience, the repository of his own burnished childhood virtues and the one who got the five-dollar bill Max waved around for assistance before he lay down on the couch. Benjie took the five bucks, untied his father’s shoes, and put a pillow under his head. Benjie had three accidents on his bike, breaking his arm, his collarbone, and two ribs, and each time he winked up at the doctors with Max’s own look of jovial despair. Marc hid candy in his room and drew small-headed superheroes and screaming girls.

Greta didn’t see how sick Max was and he didn’t tell her. Her phobias and her exhausting efforts to overcome them (hours sweating in the living room, just visualizing the airport; near-death experiences on line at the supermarket) distracted her from almost everything. Max believed fatherhood was his drop cloth, that his true, dissolving self was hidden from everyone but Benjie, who saw, but could not, thank God, understand. Since Greta’s official return from Benjie’s room (two minutes of Pyrrhic marital triumph: Greta admitted her presence made the boy nervous; Max’s mouth trembled with mean words and near satisfaction — then, what kind of father gives his boys this mother? and there were no words and no satisfaction at all), they took turns clinging to the bed edges. They had not encountered each other once, not for one minute, during any one night.

Elizabeth had stretch marks on the crests of both hips, and Max remembered her long torso, saw her ivory peach ass across the classroom ceiling. Delicate raspberry streaks forked through the creamy resilience of closely layered, glossy cells, the inimitable, intimidating bounce of sixteen-year-old skin. Nothing at all like the serious striated rips along Greta’s belly, permanent incursions of painful change, selflessness burrowing deeply into beauty and consuming it. All that was left of poor Greta were those shimmering, heroic coils, nothing like Elizabeth’s ignorant smoothness, nothing like the plain pale marks Max saw along his waist, quietly ugly creases he could barely make out above his buttocks when he stepped out of the shower. Max had a bottle of very cheap Scotch in the bathroom closet, for emergency mornings. It was Scotch because there were emergencies, and it was cheap because he liked to think that he might decline really bad Scotch, and also because, whatever he was unable to do, he was saving seriously for three college educations on a teacher’s salary. When he woke up thinking of Elizabeth, feeling her breasts beneath his fingers, cool, gorgeous piles of loose peony, he took three quick swallows before he stepped into the shower. In the steam, he avoided the sight of his own body, a series of widening, slickly unhealthy rolls, his dick invisible, properly ashamed, appropriately dwarfed by beer bloat, a Scotch pregnancy, his own fat breasts sloping softly under greying chest hair that was losing the battle, like the rest of him, Elizabeth’s breasts offered nothing, not comfort or food or rest, they were just beauty barely set without any purpose at all except their own sweet life. He’d gotten more sustenance from a hamburger, more genuine care from Greta, and more rest from a nap on the bathroom floor. There was a paper cup dispenser in the bathroom, for the kids. Drying off, Max had an emergency Dixie cup of Scotch before he brushed his teeth.

Falling in love for the first time at forty-six was foolish and unnerving and wrong. It was not romantic. Forty-six-year-old emotional virgin. Just that was bad enough; Max had always felt an easy, cynical affection toward his passing desires, relieved admiration for his own unassailable paternal love. He knew, without wanting to know anything, that he was holding on by less than a finger, and when it was too hard to hold on and he found himself laying his cherished Walther P-38 in his mouth, swallowing traces of oil and steel, he decided, as people often do when they have backed themselves into bravery, that he would rather die leaping than clinging and that there was some possibility of safe landing after the leap and none at all on the crumbling ledge. He called her.

“I’m going to be really busy next year,” Elizabeth said.

“Please. I can’t do it without you,” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Elizabeth, don’t make me beg,” Max said.

She walked into his office a full year more beautiful, so lovely he laughed and felt sorry for them both. She smiled tentatively. Max had no idea how she really looked anymore. Her dream face, the pale, sweet, wide-boned face that floated in front of him at three in the morning, slid right over her actual sixteen-year-old features, and if she had acne or ritual scars or a pair of tattoos, he wouldn’t see. He did see the clothes. Green tights, denim miniskirt, stamp-size, undoubtedly snuck past Margaret — her mother would not tolerate that kind of vulgarity, nor would Max, at least not on a daughter of his — and a shapeless green turtleneck, which nevertheless clung to her nipples. His genuine efforts at kindness toward Greta, his late-night examinations of his soul, his frequent forswearing of Scotch, were revealed as transparent, feeble attempts to avoid the truth; the truth stood in his doorway, one foot resting atop the other.

Max didn’t dare stand up to say hello; he waved her in, his face so fiercely distant Elizabeth almost changed her mind.

“I can help out on Wednesdays,” she said. “Can you teach me how to drive a stick-shift?”

You have to, she thought. You love me and I came back.

It was possible she mumbled something perfunctory about having been busy last year, which he ignored, saying only that he was glad they’d be working together and that he could probably teach her, said it with as much reserve as he could manage, even finished grading a paper as she waited, showing her who’s boss while he wondered in what state they might be allowed to marry.

Max thought, If I love her after three hours’ hard riding on my clutch, surely I have proven, even in the eyes of the Lord, that my love is pure. Fairly pure. Her skirt creased up into her emerald-green crotch as they jerked and crunched down side streets, narrowly missing not only a school bus but Benjie’s scout leader doing a double take down Arrandale, trying to see what was happening in Max’s car, this beautiful, straining, perspiring girl beside him, eyes rolling like a stallion’s.

With Max’s two fingers on the wheel, and his calm and constant instructions (self-control learned from years of six small hands “helping” around the yard), Elizabeth parked the car under the chestnut trees, near her bike, and they congratulated each other. He put one hand on her damp bangs, worn as all the girls wore them that year, trailing right into her eyes, and smoothed them back, astonished still that touching her sticky hair should transport him so. She twisted over the stick and kissed him on the lips, and he managed not to weep in gratitude, to remember that she hadn’t ever liked his touch, and to ask her to move the car behind the chestnut trees.

He tried to be clever, but he made mistakes. He could see them now, large and plain as highway signs, but each bad idea was magic until he tried it and saw her soft face shrink to a tight screw, sharpening around the jaw as she listened. Amazing to see a middle-aged woman’s disgust and pity on that lucky, un-lived-in pastry dab of a face. He’d thought he still had a chance until she’d fallen for that boy, whoever he was, doing something so right, being so right in his tight flesh and steel dick, fucking her in a way that Max could not, wouldn’t dare try to with his moidering patchwork body, with middle-aged breath and clinking teeth. Elizabeth was so happy to be rid of him, there was no hiding that the last lunchtime hour was dimming affection and politeness and only middle-class manners had made her kiss him good-bye.

One three-second kiss to play over and over, for Max to hold, recall, taste the mint and salt and that fine, dry pressure on his lips, making him press his hand to his mouth a hundred times a day, for months, although even his palm felt too rough. Nothing came close except the skin on Benjie’s back when he got out of the water, and Max would not let himself touch that and think of this. He reached for her, eyes half closed, hoping for another kiss, one that would turn him, not into the lucky boyfriend, but into part of her, freshly peeled, pink, all uptilted.

Gone for good.

Max watched Elizabeth and Rachel turn the corner. He left before the last bell rang. Briefcase into the backseat, empties into the dumpster. Drive home. Good, it’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Milk, Cheerios, orange juice, cigarettes.

I Sing Because I’m Happy, I Sing Because I’m Free

Sometimes God makes a mistake. Just carelessness. He doesn’t check the calendar. If He had checked, He might have seen that Elizabeth was overbooked for loss. Elizabeth didn’t believe in a real God, but she had a God character in her head, part Mr. Klein, part Santa. In grade school, when Mimi Tedeschi’s little brother died, Mimi had leaned forward from two seats back to whisper that God took him to be one of His angels. Elizabeth almost stood up in the middle of spelling to scream. Who could believe such ugly, cruel nonsense? That God would steal babies from their families because He was lonely, snuff the life out of them because He needed company?

And even if there was a huge Winnie-the-Pooh nursery for all of God’s dead baby angels, where did that leave Mrs. Hill?

Elizabeth lay in her bed every day after school, missing Huddie so badly her body gave out after a few hours. Rachel called, but Elizabeth was too tired to talk. Her mother hovered in the doorway, wishing Elizabeth unconscious until the pain passed.

“Would you like to talk about whatever it is?”

“No.” Elizabeth rolled over.

“Are you quite sure?”

Elizabeth pulled the covers up. The only good thing about a broken heart at a young age is that you don’t yet feel the compulsion to behave well, to consider your effect on others. Margaret brought a plate of square chocolate-dipped cookies and a cup of tea, which is what she would have liked someone to bring her, and Elizabeth wept for the Huddie-colored chocolate and ate all the cookies without gratitude, without appreciation, without any awareness that every day her mother left her office to come home, take her daughter’s emotional pulse, and put a little plateful of appealing cookies on her nightstand. For the rest of her life, when people were in trouble and she cared at all, Elizabeth gave them a box of French cookies, plain on one side, a thick chocolate slab on the other.

The lady who phoned didn’t know who exactly Elizabeth was, and the beginning of the call was a tangle of misunderstanding and misfiring expectations. Elizabeth didn’t know anyone with such a silky, low-pitched, and definitely black voice, and Reverend Shales had not told the A.M.E. Zion Church clerk, who had not told Mrs. Hazlipp, that Elizabeth Taube was a white girl. In the end, Mrs. Hazlipp made it clear that Mrs. Hill’s funeral was on Friday at one, at Doolittle’s Funeral Home, on Little Church Road off Middle Neck, and that Dr. Vivian Hill had indicated that Elizabeth was, of course, “welcome to mourn the passing of Sister Hill.” She was not so welcome that Dr. Hill had called directly, but Mrs. Hazlipp offered that it was a very difficult time for Vivian Hill, what with losing her mother and what with her very busy medical practice in Los Angeles. Elizabeth nodded, unseen, and agreed to everything, not sure that she was allowed to say how much she had loved Mrs. Hill.

Three church Stewardesses went right to Mrs. Hill’s house. They went about their business, tidying up, remarking, wrestling the smell of death out the door, humming melody and harmony for their favorite hymns. No one knew what Mrs. Hill’s favorites were. When Mr. Hill died, all her sociability went with him. No Missionary Society, no Board, not even the Four Seasons Tea or the community potluck could get her back to church. The Stewardesses were not cleaning for Mrs. Hill, they were certainly not cleaning for hincty Vivian Hill, graduated first in her class from North Shore High School, went to medical school in California, left an ailing mother, hardly visited, couldn’t be bothered with the church when she did. They were cleaning for the Stewardesses, for their sense of what was right, for their own peace of mind. No one would say they had not done right by Sister Hill, least of all Miss Vivian in that white Mercedes.

Elizabeth went to the funeral as properly dressed as she could stand, expecting warmth and light and a huge, swaying choir of sweet black voices, Mrs. Hill’s community, her people, throwing their arms around Mrs. Hill to take her in and carry her home, laying her head on a soft dark breast.

The funeral parlor was not large. Dusty olive-green velvet drapes hung down behind two tottering plant stands crowned by massive pink and yellow gladioli. The front rows were empty except for a single woman wearing sunglasses, a chic black silk suit, and black patent leather heels. She was the only woman without a hat, with close-cropped natural hair, and when a large church lady in a grey dress and matching jacket and an ivory grey-feathered turban sat down next to her and put one gloved hand on her dark, ringless hand, Elizabeth could see that Dr. Hill was an outsider too. There were no other white people, and Elizabeth headed toward the back, away from the casket, away from the light bouncing off Reverend Shales as he began to rumble informally beneath the organ wheezing through “God Will Take Care of You.”

Someone put a pamphlet in Elizabeth’s hand, and she looked hard at the tiny xeroxed picture of a middle-aged Mrs. Hill frowning back, even then cocking her head a little. The lady in the grey dress got up, smoothed her white gloves, and stood foursquare in the room. She sang “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and Elizabeth closed her eyes and tried to feel and smell Huddie in this warm, scented room of brown flesh that was all not him. The voice was sweet and full of feeling, but it was not feeling for Mrs. Hill. It was the singer’s love for her Lord, her powerful, in-the-very-core-of-her-being belief in her personal relationship with her Savior, and it was her devotion to Reverend Samuel C. Shales. Mrs. Hill was only an opportunity to celebrate, and the celebration of this whole world that was not Elizabeth’s and not open to her, the slap-obvious truth that this place was not her home, any more than her mother’s house was, that her only home had been Mrs. Hill’s footstool and Huddie’s narrow bed, made Elizabeth crumple up and cry until one of the ladies beside her, kind and curious, passed her a lace hankie that Elizabeth tried to use without actually soiling it or blowing her nose on it.

Reverend Shales said all life was precious, said something soft-voiced and tender about those who lived in the shelter of the Lords something, and then he swung into it.

“Death reminds us that life is given by God, by God Almighty alone, and life is taken away by God. Live righteously and prepare for Judgment Day. As it has come to Sister Hill, it will come to each and every one of us. Live righteously and be judged righteous, for those that are judged righteous shall sit with the Lord in his heavenly mansions, I say they shall sit at the right hand of God in his glorious, heavenly home, and they, the righteous among us, shall feast at the heavenly banquet.”

The women around her began to shift and nod, and Elizabeth could see Mrs. Hill nodding to herself, rooting around in the pork rind bag until she found the really crispy, curlicued ones.

Reverend Shales rose on his tiptoes, thundering now, and the chairs rocked on a tide of Amen and Yes, Lord. Elizabeth saw the straight, lean back of Dr. Hill and hoped that it was rigid with outraged love and the knowledge that Mrs. Hill was not in this place, not even held temporarily in that mauve pearlized casket.

“For those who don’t live right, fornicators, adulterers, liars, thieves, gossips, the impure, the immoral, the amoral, those who refuse to give their hearts to the Lord and those, even worse, who gave their hearts to the Lord and turned their backs on Him — backsliders and disbelievers — they will burn forever in a lake of fire. Because, be not deceived, brothers and sisters, God is not mocked. For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.…”

The organ came in on cue and everyone stood, up as the lady in grey sang again, sang the only hymn Mrs. Hill had ever sung, in her cracked, phlegmy voice. She sang it so often Elizabeth learned the words and hummed along, not wanting to intrude or do the wrong thing, until Mrs. Hill called her into her bedroom one evening and said, “Sing,” and they had sat up together in Mrs. Hill’s bed, their hands in a pile and night falling fast, singing “ ‘Why should I feel discouraged, why do the shadows come, / why should my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home, / when Jesus is my portion, my constant friend is he, / for his eye is on the sparrow and I know he’s watching me, / and I know he’s watching me-e-e-e,’ ” and Mrs. Hill touched Elizabeth’s face with paper-dry fingertips and said, “You’re the sparrow, girl”; and Elizabeth thought that this was family, dirty dishes and unappreciated treasures, the low friendly buzz of TV and two stiff fingers tapping her cheek, a full embrace of all-believing, all-hoping, all-enduring love in the face of deceit and pretense and the unchangeable past and the inevitable end.

Back at the house, the church ladies bustled and clucked and spread cloths over flat surfaces and laid out a ruby-red ham, banquet platters of fried chicken, roasting pans of macaroni and cheese, three-bean salad, warm greens with sliding grey-pink chunks of fatback, two coconut cakes, a chess pie, and one towering, lightly sweating lemon meringue pie. They arranged and rearranged in a serious way, serious about the food and serious about grief (of which there was not much and even Elizabeth could tell that Dr. Hill, refusing to sit down, calmly sipping a cup of tea, was not the kind of mourner the Stewardesses warmed up to), and serious about their role.

Gus Lester uncovered the chicken and sliced the ham in a proprietary way, and when Elizabeth came through to the table, they locked eyes.

Elizabeth said, “Hello, Mr. Lester.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “I was wondering if I could have Huddie’s address,” and saw in his face the open wish to do her harm.

Dr. Hill came out of the bedroom holding a neat paper-bag package.

“Here, Elizabeth, this is for you.” She shoved the package into Elizabeth’s hands, and Elizabeth turned it over a few times, wanting to shake it for a clue about the contents, certain that funeral protocol could not be the same as birthday protocol.

“You can open it now if you want. It’s those spoons of hers.”

How many? Elizabeth wondered, and took out the nine spoons and thought that if Dr. Hill did not cry at her mother’s funeral, Elizabeth certainly had no business weeping over spoons she’d tried to steal and the hundreds of cups of tea they’d had and the way in which even Huddie, banished forever, was closer to Elizabeth now than Mrs. Hill would ever be.

“Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome. You were very good to my mother and I know that having you around—”

The Stewardesses swarmed around Dr. Hill with plates of food she would have to eat and names of people she would have to thank warmly. They carried her across the room to Reverend Shales and put her in the chair next to him, staying close enough to make an exit impossible. Vivian Hill waved to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth took one last walk through Mrs. Hill’s bedroom. The hatboxes were gone.

* * *

Elizabeth’s father — who did not understand children, who had not understood his wife except to see clearly that he was not the man she should have married, who could not understand how his kindnesses were so often misinterpreted, who would not understand anything at all about love until his third wife’s dyed red hair, big Jewish behind, and wide white hands knocked him into the best part of himself — understood loss. He had grown up comfortably in Brownsville; they had no boarders, they had a small parlor and two bedrooms, and he was allowed to finish high school, during the daytime. He had had a much easier life than his closest friend, Myron Flaverman, whose father cut cloth.

His own father, as reliable as a clock, stopped to pick up the Forward one day at Saratoga and Sutter, as he always did, and a blue Franklin from New Jersey jumped the curb and drove right through the newsstand.

Sol wore his father’s clothes, sold fruit for Meyer Shimmelweiss, and slept on the couch for four years to make room for two Slovenian cousins, but he went to college. By subway, at night, dripping sweat into cheap, tight shoes, awash in his late father’s wool trousers. But he did go, graduating from City College three days after his mother’s death, one day before her tiny funeral.

Tucson, June 16, 1970

My dear Elizabeth,

Your mother told me about your friend Mrs. Hill’s death. I wish I knew the right words, not to make you feel better, but to let you know that this — DEATH — is part of life. I recall that you felt very close to her. I remember you were always over there, when your mother and I were divorcing.

I hope she was a good friend to you, and a comfort. I’m sure you took good care of her. You will remember her and keep her alive within you, and I believe that she is also remembering you, something about which your mother and I disagree. As you know, she does not believe in an afterlife.

Your mother told me that you’re not planning to attend your high school graduation. I’ll come if you change your mind.

If you wish to visit me, I will send you a ticket. Please use this for flowers for Mrs. Hill or a donation to her favorite charity.

With love,

Your father

Elizabeth put the check in her jewelry box until she could figure out what to do with it.

May God forgive me.

Max said this every morning, drinking a beer in the bathroom. Clearly, his life would get much better or much worse very soon. He’d been planning a strategy for weeks. He sent her a bouquet of pink and yellow calla lilies with a note of condolence. He sent a funny postcard of a woman scolding a cat, saying “And you call yourself a dog,” and signed it Max Stone. He called when he thought her mother might be gone and said, “I’d like a chance to say good-bye before you go off.”

She said she’d meet him for coffee. He wouldn’t talk about getting back together right away. He wouldn’t say “share.” It sounded too much like what he really wanted, a life forever together. Maybe he’d mention that if she was planning to be around for the summer he was thinking of renting a small place for himself, since Greta and the boys would be away. Maybe she’d like to stay there with him. Maybe he could get two places, across the hall from each other. Maybe he’d just beg her to spend the summer with him, give him two months before she went off to college and found her next romance, her next bareback-riding hero, her future husband. There was something to be said for frank and honest groveling.

Sitting with Elizabeth in a diner twenty miles from Great Neck, his hands circling her wrists, Max could not remember what he had planned to say. Her face was a little thinner. New contact lenses made her eyes brightly pink and round as little lightbulbs. She looked bored.

“I’d love to have you visit me this summer. I might take a little place in the city. Do you think that might be fun? Or maybe a cabin in the Berkshires?”

“I don’t know.” She made a nest of torn sugar packets around her coffee cup.

“Think it over. It’s the end of June now. If you could decide this week, I could start looking. We could start looking, if you felt like it.”

Max and Elizabeth shared, for twenty seconds, exactly the same mental picture: Max and Elizabeth trudging from walk-up to walk-up, meeting a dozen rental agents whose pleasant surprise at this nice father-daughter pair curdles before the plumbing’s been tested.

“No, I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll tell you next week.”

“I’ll take maybe, milacku. Maybe yes? Is that yes for a visit or yes for — for a long visit?”

Elizabeth was done. Between his fat shrimp fingers around her wrist and the last sugar packet. Done. Now everything out of her mouth would be a lie, and she smiled like he was her favorite person.

“Maybe yes. Maybe very likely yes, a long visit. I could stay for a month or six weeks if you want, but I don’t even want to talk about it for another week, okay? There’s been too much going on.”

“Okay, baby girl.” He kissed each of the ten fingers he’d been squeezing. “Of course that’s okay.”

“Don’t call me for a week,” she said.

“Whatever you say. You’re the boss.”

They kissed, and Elizabeth thought, This is it, this is the last time I’m doing this.

Max thought, Yes, Lord, help me turn this around, even now, and I will be your devoted servant. Help me. The boys aren’t babies, they can see this is killing us, it can’t be good for them, seeing us suffer. Greta will be better off without me, she’ll be more independent, she’ll be a better mother, God, she’ll probably recover, she’ll become a counselor for other agoraphobic ladies, write a book about it, she’ll make a lot of money. She’ll remarry some nice Jewish guy, not to be another father, but a nice guy, bald, a podiatrist. And Lizzie and I will be like other happy couples, whoever they are, except she is so beautifully young, and we will be beyond happy, sweet Jesus, and want only each other.

Everything that drove Elizabeth crazy about Rachel turned out to be exactly what was called for in their Great Getaway. Rachel persuaded her father to lend them the station wagon, drove all the way uptown to Columbia University to collect sleeping bags from her brother and his roommate, showed her interested parents and an utterly bored Margaret the AAA trip map, and pointed out all the educational side trips and that no day’s drive was more than a reasonable 250 miles. Rachel, who would become a fine doctor, would also have made an excellent president or a criminal genius. Elizabeth’s only job was to be pleasant to her mother for the remaining eight days and remember her camera and a heavy sweater for the cold nights in the Rockies. Rachel packed two of most items, assuming that Elizabeth would forget almost everything, which she did, knowing that Rachel would pack two. For nine weeks they drove across America, eating apple-butter-and-whole-wheat sandwiches, kissing boys who were handsome only by the firelight of various campgrounds, and becoming expert at putting on eyeliner using their Sierra Club cups as mirrors.

Huddie lies on the gritty floor. He smells the drops of sweat spattered on the shining wood, sees the frayed plastic tip of the ref’s shoelace; his face is near enough to the man’s left sneaker to lay his tongue on it. Water roars through both ears. He hears only a dense, cupping sound. Huddie concentrates on these things to keep from screaming. He has to cry. The ring of fire in his right knee flames dark red up his whole side, and his flesh must be falling off in seared chunks now. Kind faces he recognizes but can’t place hover over him, and he sinks into a grey minty ocean and sees Elizabeth arched back above him, white legs tight around him, their black hairs joined, green trees over them, his fists wrapped in her long hair, his face deep soft between her breasts. His mother’s hand, wide, gardenia-scented, slides up his face, into nothing.

Max’s letters found Elizabeth at college and she read them, the only thick, nicely written letters of her life, of course she read them and cried and returned them all, except the last one.

March 6, 1974

Dearest girl,

I won’t begin with another lament. If you were moved by my misery, I would have heard from you in the last three years. I’m no longer astonished, you’ll be indifferent to hear, that you ran off like that. I am not even astonished that a relationship that I thought made us both happy was obviously a burden to you, one to be shed at the earliest possible moment.

I said to you, in one of our very sweet times together, you were sitting on my lap, that you would break my heart. As I recall, you weren’t in the least upset or guilty, just annoyed with me for bringing it up. And rightly so. Since we both knew what the ending would be, why harp on it?

I regret wasting even one second of those times on anger and shame and self-pity. I am trying my damnedest now to live in the past whenever possible and expect to continue doing so.

You, of course, have moved on and so I won’t be writing again.

I never think of you with anything but love.

Your Max

The Night Is Dark

“Every couple has a life,” Greta said. “Bury me.”

Max stood up, staring at the ocean bleached and mirrored in the late afternoon sun.

“I know you thought ours would be a happy life, and so you are disappointed. Please bury me, I’ve got everything but my arm.”

He put one foot out, pushed a little hill of sand toward her brown arm, and walked closer to the water.

Greta raised her voice. “Come, just a little more, Max. Just my arm. I am not asking for the world, you know, just a little sand.”

He didn’t move.

“I did think it would be a happy life. That is what people think. That’s why they marry and have children. In anticipation of further joy, of multiplying happinesses.”

“Maybe that’s why Americans marry. People like me marry and have children because we are apparently not dead, because we are grateful, because we wish to become like the others. To experience normal despair and disappointment. Garden-variety unhappiness. So, I am not sorry. We have had a normal life together.”

Max was not surprised, not even inclined to argue, when Greta described insomnia and agoraphobia, sex both dismal and frightening, and the death of their oldest child as a normal life, but he was not comforted.

“Do you know what I remember most when I came here? Betty Boop. They showed her all the time, late at night, early in the morning, some channel in New Jersey. They love Betty Boop. And Bimbo and Koko. And Shirley Temple, day and night. Polly wolly doodle. The Littlest Rebel. Did you see that?”

“No. I was selling shoes or still killing Germans. Whatever I was doing, I wasn’t watching cartoons or musicals commemorating the good old days of slavery.” He came back from the water and put two scoops of damp sand on Greta’s arm.

“Do the rest, Max, just cover me up.”

He did, and when she wiggled two long fingers, he covered those, and when they broke free again, to show that it wasn’t enough, he mounded the sand six inches high on top of her hand and crowned it with a sprig of stiff black seaweed.

Greta smiled. “You’re a good man.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I know you don’t. That’s part of your charm, milacku.”

Max smiled too; only his crazy wife could find him charming.

“I know you blame me for the accident,” she said.

“I don’t. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“You do. We do. Dr. Shein said it would help.”

“It doesn’t help me.”

“It helps me.”

“Then by all means, if it helps you,” Max said.

“When I went to see Dr. Berg — you remember him?”

“The first one. Two before Shein.”

“Very good. I told him everything I could remember about the camp. They were all happy memories. Can you imagine? Making daisy wreaths with another little girl, Marya. Where did we find daisies? Her name was Marya. The sun was always shining and it seemed to me that the evenings were quite cozy. We would walk to a grassy field, a group of us and my mother, and we would all hold hands and sing. I remember one of the girls had a harmonica. How could that be? We had no shoes, I know we had no shoes until winter, how could there have been a harmonica? They had taken everything. How could there have been singing in a grass field?”

Max put little shells on the sand over Greta’s body, drew half-circles to indicate her breasts, and fanned out a cluster of brownish, dry kelp for her pubic hair.

“Berg said he understood, that it was a beautiful dream. You see, that I needed it to be—”

“I get it. Really.”

“I was very careful in the car. I told Benjie to wear his seat belt. I told him two times. The first time when he—”

“It’s not your fault, Greta.”

“Of course it is my fault. I am trying to tell you what I feel about it. And you believe it is my fault. As it is.”

And Greta tried to talk about the wet leaves and the square, odd headlights of Vin Malarino’s fathers van and the audible hesitation of sound as the car moved into and under the old maple trees. Greta heard her own voice saying O boyze, and then the harsh cymbaline crash of the vans left side against the front of her car, its hood flying up like one of the boys’ little plastic cars and the glass showering them as the wide green hands of the maple leaves pushed through, right to their faces, Benjie’s white under the red streaming lines across his forehead, spitting out bits of shiny, bloody glass until he fainted and Greta thought, If he is dead, let me die now. And he was not dead, only briefly unconscious, and as he lay on the stretcher, his face wiped with great tenderness by the paramedic, he smiled at his mother. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m okay.” And for one minute, she was grateful as she had never been. Surviving the camps, in the golden arms of a big American, terrible white and red acne around his beautiful smile, she was not so grateful or sure as she was in that minute with Benjie that life was hers, that she was meant to live.

“She’s killing you,” Greta said.

Max pressed his feet into the sand, noting the imprint of his whole right foot and his abbreviated left.

“The girl. I’m not criticizing. I’m not criticizing you or even her, but it’s very cruel of her to leave you like that.”

He didn’t ask who, and he hoped Greta wouldn’t say her name.

“What do you think? I don’t see? I see. I saw. She never answered your letters, she never calls anymore.”

Max put his hands out behind him and leaned forward, listening to the crisp gunshot crack of his vertebrae.

“I know it broke your heart, her going away. You haven’t recovered. The mother’s getting remarried soon, I heard. What is it you always say, the triumph of hope over experience?”

“That’s what I say. More sand?”

“No, I’m fine. Very happy. Perhaps she’s back in town for the wedding. Do you call her?”

Max kept watching the water, hoping for a few boats, but the ocean was on Greta’s side. There was nothing to look at but the relentless bouncing light.

“Max, Maxie. You can tell me. Who else can you tell? You think I’m going to hurt you now? No, dearie, not now that you’re in such pain.”

Max felt like every B-movie prisoner of war offered a cigarette by the suddenly kindly Kommandant. If he talked, he’d get the cigarette and lose his self-respect. Probably, in the end, they’d kill him anyway. If he didn’t talk, he wouldn’t get the cigarette, he’d keep his self-respect, and they’d hang him as an example to the others.

“I’m not in pain.”

Greta laughed, not a common thing, and Max smiled back. When she laughed, she sounded like Edith Piaf, Max’s darling for the last thirty years. He has daydreams of playing Piaf for Elizabeth, and in them she sips red wine and sits without jiggling her feet.

“All right. But you’re not hap-pee.” Greta sang the last word.

“You said it’s a mistake to want happiness.”

“It is. But you do, you can’t help it. And I feel bad for you, dearie. That’s all.”

Greta had learned most of her English from a Dover war bride in Jersey City and had been calling people “dearie” and “ducks” and “love” with Czech softness ever since. It was a thing that Max, even as he prayed for her immediate, painless death, even as he envisioned Elizabeth on Greta’s side of the bed, found completely endearing.

“I think you should build a little shrine,” Greta said.

“I think you’re nuts.”

“So? You have not been spared on account of sanity, have you? A little shrine. Her picture from the yearbook, the one you keep in your sock drawer. Maybe a few votive candles. I have those old pressed glass holders, in the shape of hands. That would be nice, you could have those. And maybe some of the letters that came back to you, the ones in the garage. That would be good.”

Max sat down beside her, poking a hole for her navel and laying shell bits out in a star pattern.

“And then what?”

Greta lifted a hand carefully, balancing the packed sand on her forearm.

“And then, in your own little apartment, you listen to Mahler and drink Scotch, you mourn. You could pray.”

That Greta believed not only in a Greater Force but in an attentive, specific God was another source of astonishment to Max. “How can you, of all people?”

“It’s the least I can do,” she said, and moved from synagogue to synagogue, praying in the back until the night they ask her to join a committee.

“Am I going to be in my own little apartment? Is that what this is? You’re telling me to move out?”

Greta clicked her tongue, as she did when the boys were being particularly difficult.

“You can stay. You can go. We could keep each other company. You, me, grief. But why, Maxie? The boys are almost grown. Danny could live with you, even. I’m not abandoning you, I just think it would be better.” Greta turned her face toward the empty lifeguard chair. “I do get tired of watching you.”

“You get tired of watching me? After all these years, watching you cry at every goddamned intersection, watching you scare the shit out of the boys, watching you break a sweat just thinking about grocery shopping?” Max stopped, he didn’t even know why he wanted to go on. She was setting him free. He hated living with her; just two days ago, he’d written in his journal that he was serving a life sentence, with time added for good behavior.

Greta shrugged, and chunks of sand slid down.

“I’m getting up,” she said.

Max gave her a hand and dusted her off, wiping down the backs of her calves and thighs, trying to keep the sand from going into her suit bottom.

“I’m giving you the candle holders,” Greta said.

I Surrender All

Not long after Max’s last letter, Elizabeth came home for one final weekend before the end of spring, shortly before she would have to find herself a real home. Standing on line at the Bagel Hut, squashed between two suede jackets, she stood patiently, even penitently, the edges of a pink sequinned turban brushing her eyelids. At each jingle of the door chime, everyone turned to scrutinize the next wave of customers: a pushy newcomer, sneaking in at the head of the line to make off with the really fresh bagels and the last of the whitefish chubs, or someone fondly, vaguely remembered from the old neighborhood, before everybody had become middle-aged and found themselves with expensive, youthful clothing and spoiled children. In Great Neck a woman’s face or hair color meant nothing; only the backs of the hands and the little hump at the base of the neck told you the truth.

Elizabeth turned at the jingle, with everyone else, and saw Max. She pushed through the crowd surging into the small space she’d left and held on to his sleeve, making herself talk.

“Hi. I can’t believe you’re in here. Margaret’s getting married tonight. That’s why I’m back.”

“That’s why you’re back?”

Something had changed his face. Whatever it was had torn up his cheeks, leaving them so soft and pulpy that if she’d had the nerve to touch him, skin would have stuck to her finger.

“Max, are you all right?”

He backed out of the store, brushing against the thick coats, his hands feeling for the doorpull behind him.

Elizabeth followed him onto the street, forgetting the whitefish salad and bagels and three kinds of cream cheese she’d offered to pick up for the get-acquainted lunch with her mother’s groom and his sister. She stood a few steps behind Max, thinking, He is not walking away from me, he loves me.

“Go home, Elizabeth.”

“I am going home, this was my last stop. What is wrong with you?”

Max kept going, bent over like some dark-jacketed horseshoe crab scuttling for retreat, for the absence of contact.

“I’m sorry I didn’t write. I just … I don’t know, I couldn’t. I’m really sorry. Max, I’m really sorry.” She yelled into the cold, garlicky air, startling two women halfway into Bagel Hut, friends of Margaret’s who waved and watched as Max walked faster. Max and Elizabeth stood half a block apart, on either side of the bank parking lot where he’d taught her to drive a stick-shift, and he shouted something the wind took away, and then he stopped.

It was tears. Tears had changed his face, as they were changing it right now, breaking down his flesh with little hammers until there was nothing left but watery mass and two red wells of misery.

“No one told you?”

“Max, I don’t talk to anyone anymore. Rachel’s in Kenya. Is it the boys?”

“Benjamin.”

They sat on the bench across from the parking lot and Max told Elizabeth about Benjamin, about Greta reluctantly, bravely taking him to his Cub Scout meeting, about the wet leaves and the teenage boy driving the van too fast around a narrow corner, one that had already been marked with a DANGEROUS CURVE sign. And the car partially crushed into the trees, leaving Greta enough room not only to move around but to open her door and walk out to greet the ambulance. And it looked like Benjie would recover, not even be scarred by all the glass, and then he got an infection.

“You know he had Addisons? It only seems that no one in my family has an immune system; Benjie really didn’t. The scratches from the accident killed him. I moved back in; I had to, since Greta was hardly leaving the house after that. She’s seeing a shrink now, the guy I used to see. The boys are in therapy, too. I don’t know, I think it helps Danny, but he’s the strong one anyway. Marc is just …” Max turned away. “The world is a terrible place, sweetheart.”

She touched the edge of his jacket for comfort, fingering the little cracks in the old leather.

“I’m here. If you need me, I’m here.”

“No, you’re not. You’re at college, leading a college girl life, and I am here, leading my life. Enough.” He stood up. Elizabeth sat like a lump, arms around her legs. She shook her head, wanting to tell him it looked like she would actually graduate in June, that she’d passed all her courses and turned in all her papers, despite occasional, profound lapses in concentration, two weeklong bouts of self-prescribed bed rest, and several trials of psychotropic medications that left her dry-mouthed and dizzy, something pale green and sticky leaking from her right breast.

She had watched Rachel take college the way she’d taken the road cross-country, carefully aggressive, hardly checking the map, since all the signs seemed so clear to her and fairly helpful. Elizabeth’s college life had been like her driving, too: she did it because she believed she had to (only one application, scribbled in midwinter, while standing in the post office), she never once intuited the right direction, and she understood that her safe arrival, at the end of these four years, owed more to other people’s skill and sensible swerving than to her own efforts.

“I am here for you, just like you were for me. I can help,” Elizabeth said, and cried into the sleeve of her sweater, relieved that she did not, in fact, know what to do, that that had not changed between them.

“Don’t cry,” he said, as kindly as he could. He would have been dimly pleased to hear she was graduating, dimly concerned about the blackouts, but she was alive and Ben was not and her breasts were nothing to him now, unless they could be traded, every moment of them, for him. He hugged her to be rid of her, looking forward to walking back alone, to weeping inside for Ben, to preparing for another evening of emotional heavy lifting and grey, pointless goodness, for Danny’s driving lesson, for Marc’s marathon TV-watching, for the balanced meal he cooked (not that Greta ate), for creating a father for his remaining, less loved boys, now desperately seeking their own lives, if only he will let them go.

And Elizabeth pressed in close, smelling his cigarette smoke and his Scotch and his Barbasol shaving cream, smells so woven into her sense of life that the sight of those striped cans on a supermarket shelf will make her eyes swell with tears for years to come, even after she forgets this conversation.

“Anything you want, Max,” she said, to reach into him without his really hearing, so he’d let her in without knowing he’d done so.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Go home, milacku.”

Margaret laid out daughter-of-the-bride clothes, layering them from the peach silk skirt to the white lace blouse, an ivory nylon slip and pale peach pantyhose on top of the pile. Peach peau de soie shoes faced the bed. Idiot-proof dressing. Elizabeth drank champagne while she showered, drank stingers while she dried her hair, put on socially appropriate makeup, although not the peach-toned stuff her mother had piled suggestively in front of the bathroom mirror. She simulated eye contact by looking at people’s foreheads and she fought back nausea when her mother promised to spend her life with Aaron Price, the psychiatrist she’d had in mind for Elizabeth in the bad old days. Elizabeth spent the rest of the afternoon and some part of the night in the ferocious blank haze that gives alcohol its good name.

Still drunk at dawn, she left her mother the nicest note she could and drove back to college. Instead of showing up for the graduation ceremony, she put on the peach skirt and the white lace blouse and got a job in a safe place.

What Else Can I Do?

Elizabeth had been sitting on her knees in the cookbook section, reading recipes for things like syllabub and poor mans tarts. She had been the assistant manager at Spivey’s Bookstore for the last three years, mostly because she would not become the manager. She didn’t become the manager, she didn’t become a teacher or a lawyer. No one ever suggested interior decorating or medicine or government, and Elizabeth did wonder, after each encouraging remark, what it was that made people think she should teach or litigate. It was probably not her interpersonal skills or her fine analytic mind. It was probably some sort of prematurely shriveled self-righteous obstinacy that people associated with their third-grade teacher or with a particularly vicious district attorney.

Elizabeth knew that the bad things that had happened to her were no worse than other people’s bad things; they were pretty small potatoes, in fact, compared to terminal cancer, death by famine, incest, quadriplegic paralysis. Nevertheless, whatever effort life required, whatever responsibility for joy was necessary to make it appear, Elizabeth didn’t have it. She was not drippingly miserable, she was not an affront to society. She paid her bills. She didn’t smell or piss on other people’s lawns. She suffered from the opposite of “phantom limb” syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not.

She thought about Max, but she didn’t write. She thought about Huddie when sweat trickled down her neck, when she heard the slap of sneakers on blacktop, when she woke up and when she couldn’t sleep. She stopped speaking to her mother, but not so her mother noticed. She didn’t look for ways to improve herself. She didn’t arrange to have her mail forwarded when she moved. She had been in her latest apartment for six months and hadn’t cleaned it. She couldn’t, really; she didn’t own a broom or a mop or even a bottle of Windex anymore, and she knew what Margaret would say about that. It’s a bad sign.

Every Friday, Elizabeth put out two cartons of juice and a bag of half-price bagels for the two crazy men who came through Spivey’s back alley every afternoon, and Peter, her boss, who loved her, watched and thought, Feed me. They will always be hungry.

Cupid and Psyche were Elizabeth’s favorite people. Socially mismatched, badly dressed, unprepared for the climate and the place in the way that marks the truly poor and the truly crazy, the two men spent most of their days by the concrete city fountain, a grey grim wedding cake of previous municipal good times, now barely trickling even in July and August, not even damp in spring and fall. The younger man, blond and slim, looked normal at a distance. Elizabeth had once come closer, pretending to catch a bus, and saw that he had a twenty-foot normal zone. Closer than that, you saw the heels run down to nothing on laceless wingtips, the pink plastic belt on the designer jeans, and the missing splotch of material on the right shoulder of his light blue button-down shirt. You saw his face, the features misaligned because no linked thoughts or feelings molded them. The older man was an obvious social problem, barely welcome at Dunkin’ Donuts and only briefly, and only when the afternoon-shift manager felt good. He bought a dozen doughnuts at a time, never squeezing or sniffing for freshness, just struggling with the coins and crumpled bills stuffed in the back pocket of his organically spattered black pants, as wide and swaying as a Victorian skirt, barely hanging on beneath the huge doughy belly and no visible underwear. His skin was so white and his hair so black and wiry that everyone could study each individual curl around his navel. No one looked too long; eye contact could lead to conversation, and although he smiled gamely, hoping to make friends, he had too few teeth and too many things snapping and shifting in his head to have the kind of conversation people wanted to have as they shuffled through the doughnut shop, getting on with their day. But he loved the young man.

They sat on the lowest tier of the fountain, and when the sun began to drop, the fat man made a pillow of some clothes from his bag and the young man stretched out. In the damp heat, he fanned the young man for hours at a time, using a folded newspaper. Occasionally he changed hands, and sometimes he’d break rhythm to swat a fly or chase some early-evening mosquitoes. He fanned him graciously and steadily, with no unsettling changes of pace or sighs of fatigue, fanned him until it was dark, until Elizabeth saw fireflies and the black outline of the fat man’s back. Then he woke his friend, very slowly and gently, a delicate, indulgent touch, and they went back through the alley.

Peter stepped over her knees ostentatiously. “Phone.”

Peter had waited almost a year before asking Elizabeth out the first time. He asked again, after another year, in such a careful, casually delicate way that Elizabeth only said “No, thank you,” fearing that any further remarks would show that she understood exactly what it had cost him to ask. For the past few months they’d eaten lunch together, standing up in the stockroom, putting their coffees near books they preferred not to sell, and avoiding all personal remarks (Peter lost most of his hair, suddenly, without the adjustment period of a receding hairline or widening bald spot; Elizabeth’s clothes, clean but unironed, were alternately too big or too small; she didn’t seem to know what size she was). They never made the kind of affectionate, scolding remarks that other people made to them all the time. All they offered was respect for each other’s stunning haplessness. Out of consideration, they continued to act as if the other person had not destroyed the friendship.

“It’s me,” said Rachel.

“Are you all right?” Elizabeth would have driven all night for Rachel, offered her a kidney, shot her captors and coached her through labor, but she’d only called twice since Rachel came back from Kenya three years ago; Rachel didn’t have time for a bad friend, and Elizabeth couldn’t do any better.

“I’m fine.” Rachel was always fine. “I thought you’d want to know Max is in the hospital. My hospital. Triple bypass. In his condition, that’s not so good. Cabbage.”

Rachel was in pediatric oncology now. She knew what was good and not so good, medically speaking.

“Oh my God. He’s a cabbage?”

“No, listen to me. Coronary artery bypass graft surgery. That’s just what they call it. What’s new with you?”

Rachel’s private name for Elizabeth, the name she uttered only in her head, was Slug. And when Rachel’s heart was being trampled by the steel-capped boots of her latest snake-hipped, mean-hearted girlfriend, she thought it might not be so bad to be Slug, not terrific to be a burnout at twenty-four, but not so bad to be comfortably buried in a life of books and platonic affection.

“But he’s okay? Is Greta with him? Who told you?”

“Sam Lieb had him in ninth grade, too. He saw his name on the patient list, sweetie. So I checked. Listen, I gotta go. He’s not good but he’s not dead. I heard they split up.” There were loudspeaker voices in the background. “Have to go now. Bye, sweetie.”

Elizabeth left Spivey’s and drove the four hours to Great Neck. She had an extra-large, sturdy paper cup of coffee, two Heath bars, and forty bucks, which blocked the onset of really bad feelings. She parked behind what used to be Squire’s Movie Theater, looking for Bee’s Corseterie, and saw it was now a North Shore version of the Empress Josephine’s silk-paneled dressing rooms. The new owners, who would not have hired the original Bee, served tea in china cups and concealed their cash register behind a large folding screen laminated with scenes from the Rape of the Sabine Women. Elizabeth crept along the edges of the store, avoiding the four lion-maned salesgirls manning their stations in sheer silk blouses and long slit suede skirts, bits of fancy bra and flower-trimmed garter aggressively displayed above and below.

Did women really wear this stuff? Maybe he would have loved it, Elizabeth thought, fingering the chiffon-and-satin tap pants. I could have given him six years of leopard-skin bustiers and push-up bras and black silk stockings held up with black satin rosettes. I could have pleased him, I wasn’t busy. And if I had, I could just let him die now, I wouldn’t even have to send flowers.

The salesgirls were not unused to gloomy young women picking up silky items in despair, putting them aside, and picking them up again, eyeing red satin panties and hand-embroidered nightgowns with reluctant, embarrassed hope. Even the stupidest salesgirl knew that underwear, even underwear dotted with seed pearls and edged with slender pink ribbons through the inch-wide lace trim, didn’t really make a difference. Still, they watched Elizabeth, and the youngest, newest salesgirl was determined to sell her something. She showed Elizabeth things young women wear to please young men, virginal gowns in transparent white cotton, strips of pink satin cut for small breasts and long, hard thighs.

“No,” she said. “It’s not what I’m looking for. My boyfriend’s not this type.” Elizabeth smiled, thinking of what type Max had been, and the salesgirl decided she’d been mistaken, that this was not another girl in love with the wrong guy.

“Okay, what type is he?”

“Conservative. Like a father.” Like a father, if you wanted a life on talk shows.

“Your boyfriend is like my dad?” The salesgirl took a step back, clutching at the edge of a bleached pine cabinet filled with soft pastel undershirts, apparently taken off the backs of rich little girls.

“Sorry, I don’t even know your father,” Elizabeth said, very sorry that she was wasting Max’s last hours on this blonde moron. “I just know — I just know this guy. Something outrageous, okay? Let’s find something completely outrageous. Something to bring the dead back to life.” The salesgirl was not happy, but she worked on commission. She helped Elizabeth find everything she wanted.

Elizabeth buttoned up her old raincoat in the hospital parking lot and went through reception. She passed two Candy Stripe girls, dark as cherrywood, with organza bows clustered high and bright atop their small sleek heads, like tribal headdresses from Woolworth’s. The nurse at the station stepped in front of her, but Elizabeth said she was Max’s niece and kept going. Pat O’Donnell was the daughter of Elizabeth’s eighth-grade English teacher; she had her father’s pre-ulcerous stomach and twenty years of nursing, and she knew that wasn’t a niece, not with those heartsick eyes, but she didn’t care. Might be interesting when the wife showed up.

Max lay in bed, his head propped up by two slippery hospital pillows, his hair a greasy spray of grey spikes. They had taken the tubes out of his nose but left two still winding down into his chest and another one connecting his left arm to a bulging, transparent drip bag. He looked like the Tin Woodsman, poorly patched and strapped together, wandering the cold world over for a heart. Elizabeth’s own heart beat between her ears, blood pooling in her veins.

“You’re here,” Max whispered.

Tears floated on the inside-out red edges of his eyes, and the visit Elizabeth had imagined dissolved. She would not do a quick and funny strip for him, dropping one shoulder of her trenchcoat to reveal her black lace bra. The sight of her white skin and tight black garters would not raise him off the bed. Scented talc gleaming between her breasts and thighs would not steady his breathing. He was going to die because she had been selfish and stupid and childish. He was going to die because she hadn’t answered his letters. I have to go right now, she thought.

Max’s hands lay folded on his chest. “Je ne regrette, je ne regrette, non, je ne regrette rien,” he sang out hoarsely in cartoon French.

“Peter, this is Elizabeth. I need some sick leave or vacation, whatever. Time off.”

“All right. Why?”

“My father’s very sick. I think he’s dying.”

“Jesus. Your father? I’m sorry. Are you going to stay with him until … I mean, for a few weeks?”

“I don’t know. I have to take care of him. I have to nurse him.”

“Of course. You know, my mother died of cancer five years ago. Do what you have to do. I can hold the job for at least three months.”

“Fine. Okay. I’ll call you soon. Thanks.” I should have gone out with you. I should be buying animal-shaped mugs and a butcher-block kitchen table, and I should be going in some other direction. I am not old enough for rubber sheets and bedsores and that smell which is as recognizable as reveille.

The backseat was layered with jeans and cotton underpants and all of Spivey’s healthy-heart cookbooks and a shopping bag spilling new shampoo, new soap, two kinds of mouthwash and a sponge still in its natural loofah shape. Elizabeth had shopped like she was sending herself to camp. Camp Max, the special endless summer for wayward girls. She would be with him, in some small airless place, until he died or recovered or she killed him. She had a full tank of gas, she had her coffee, her candy, and enough cash. The radio was on and the windows were cracked open.

“Play ‘Woolly Bully,’ ” said the tired Jersey voice. A housewife/mother voice, a three glasses of canned juice, three bowls of leftover Cheerios floating in thin, sweet milk by 7:25 a.m. voice. Screaming at the kids to remember their books, remember their notes, remember not to let the cat out. Kisses to remind them that she screams only because she loves them, wants them to succeed, wants them to be somebody. And then there is nobody home until three. A no-power, no-money voice.

“Okay,” said the flat smirky deejay. “And do you have a woolly bully, ma’am?” Like he’s behind her in the supermarket, laughing at her fat ass and curlers and the bent-in backs of her loafers.

“Oh yeah, honey. I did used to have one … but I divorced him.”

She’d fooled them both, and the deejay laughed with Elizabeth, in the pleasure of acknowledging grace and steel where they hadn’t seen it. Maybe he, like Elizabeth, imagined the caller as a mother, imagined the watery orange juice coming with the kind of mothering you never stop trying to get, or get away from.

“Lady, you can call me anytime.”

“Likewise,” the woman said. “So, put on my man, Sam the Sham,” she said.

Elizabeth sang along. She began a list with her right hand.

In his hospital room, newspapers beginning to pile up by the bed, roses wilting on rubbery stems, Max made his offer.

“If you come stay with me for a little, you might get to watch me die. Or kill me at your leisure. Could you stick around?”

Elizabeth wheeled him to the car, sliding him into the backseat. Two orderlies stood by as if to help, but Elizabeth managed to bang Max’s head against the car door and they didn’t move.

“I want you to live, Max.” She buckled his seat belt.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he said, “I always try to give you what you want.”

“No. You gave me what you wanted me to have. I’m not arguing with you. I want you to live.”

“I don’t think so, baby.”

Elizabeth put her face an inch from Max’s ear and spoke very softly and clearly.

“You better fucking live. If you don’t make up your mind to live, I’m going to camp in your goddamned room and make sure you get intravenous nourishment and no painkiller. Okay? You better fucking live.”

Oh, Do Not Let the World Depart

“Elizabeth, if you could get Max out of the place for a few hours, I could fix it up a bit.”

“Mother, he hates to go out. Why can’t you do what you’re going to do while he’s here?”

“I’m sorry, old thing. I simply can’t.”

Elizabeth understood that it wasn’t a problem of logistics. Margaret could not make beauty in the presence of death. Elizabeth was only getting through the year by keeping her eyes closed. She hadn’t looked in a mirror or even directly into Max’s face for weeks. Why should Margaret step up to unnecessary pain?

“All right,” Elizabeth said, “we’ll go out to Mad Nan’s Orchards and get some apples and feed the ducks. You know, I can’t have him out for more than two and a half, three hours. Is that enough?”

“Fine. Call me when you’re about to get your car.”

“Mother, we don’t need split-second timing for this. It’s not a military maneuver, for Christ’s sake.”

“I am coming with three assistants and a van. I am going to do everything but paint, and I promise not to rearrange his books or records. I don’t think Max would like to feel that I’m doing him a large favor, do you? I do think he can tolerate the idea that your mother is coming in to tidy things up a little, and to make her daughter’s life more pleasant. All right?”

“All right. Jesus, Margaret, what a business. But thank you. What day?”

“Go for a spin on Thursday. That gives me four days to set things up and get these blighters moving.”

“You do that, you get those blighters moving. Thank you.” Elizabeth put down the phone. Was God obliged to close one big window in order to crack open this ridiculously tiny door?

Elizabeth used to stand in the kitchen of her parents’ house, before Margaret had her downtown office, listening to her mother do business in that same happy, crisp, pugnacious voice. Four months ago, standing in Max’s small, dirty kitchen, helping bag chicken breasts and turkeyburgers, her mother tried again.

She asked Elizabeth to talk to her husband’s partner.

Elizabeth said, “Rachel”—now that Rachel was a doctor, Margaret no longer flinched when she was mentioned—“says Zoltow’s very friendly with his female patients, friendly to the point of lawsuit.” She slid two skinless chicken breasts onto a plate of Mrs. Dash and flipped them over.

“I’m sure Aaron could suggest someone else, then. A woman.”

“Why would I go?”

“This is no way to live.” Margaret waved her small hand around the three crowded rooms, the couch covered with blankets and Elizabeth’s underwear, the dying plants, the cornucopia of medications spilled across the kitchen table. “You’re twenty-four. Why are you doing this? Do tell me. I would like to know.”

“He’s going to die, and he was there for me when I needed him. It’s all right. It won’t take that long.”

Margaret nodded. Considering they’d never discussed Elizabeth’s relationship with Max and that Margaret never allowed herself to think anything untoward about his constant and fatherly affection for her daughter, grateful that some paternal figure had kept his hand in, it was amazing how quickly she understood. “Nothing I can say, then? Trip to Europe, that sort of thing?”

Elizabeth shook her head and put her hand out to wipe crumbs off the counter. If she had known that her mother would never again have money to spare, she might have said yes and seen Paris.

Margaret caught her by the wrist. She blinked hard and did not cry and did not say, Is your life so terrible that you prefer this? She pulled Elizabeth’s hand so close Elizabeth could feel her mother’s warm breath on her palm. Margaret said, “You need a manicure,” and pulled out a fresh bottle of Cherries in the Snow and an orange stick.

“Max, on Thursday my mother’s coming to do a little housecleaning for us and hang a few pictures.”

Max opened his eyes, his hair sticking up all over his head, like a great grey baby.

“Pictures? I can’t wait. The entire history of the Empire, in jewel tones, right here in my boudoir. Tell her thanks.”

“I did.”

He closed his eyes again, tugging the comforter up over his shoulders. When he was a little boy, he loved and imitated his stepfathers Irish tenor, the only sweet sound in a house of Mississippi ululation and breaking glass. “’Twas on the Isle of Capri that I met her, something something a thin golden ring on her finger, ’twas good-bye on the Isle of Capri.” The edge of the comforter poked his leaking right eye. He pulled it beneath his chin, pretended to sleep, and slept.

He woke up to find Elizabeth in his mother’s pale blue velvet cloche and the pale blue wool peplum jacket she’d worn to demonstrate sobriety, and a withered white garter belt, with its rusty metal clasps swinging back and forth over Elizabeth’s cotton panties. She wore her own basketball sneakers and white socks.

“Nice, huh?”

“Very. Interesting. Who are you?”

“Your mother? I couldn’t get into the skirt. She must have been tiny.”

“She was small. You’re quite a bit taller. Bigger-boned, I’d say.” He might be old, he might be dying, he might be every kind of fool, as his history demonstrated, but he had never told a woman she was fatter than another woman.

“I didn’t know you had all these women’s clothes. Fetish?” Elizabeth perched on the end of the couch.

“I guess. I never wanted to throw out all my mother’s stuff, so I just threw it into my footlocker and took it with me. I don’t think I’ve opened it in twenty years.”

“How’d she die?”

“Cirrhosis. A very ugly way to die, I hear. I wasn’t there.”

Elizabeth put the back of her hand to her forehead, staggered around the couch, and collapsed in front of Max.

“I think I would have made a great Camille.”

“Probably. Except for your robust good health. And your sneakers.”

“I do love you. Was your mother kind of a party girl?”

“She liked a good time. She drank quite a bit, she had a lot of boyfriends between husbands. Or so it seemed to me, when I was a boy. Was there anything you wanted in there?”

Elizabeth pulled out a crumbling straw hat with chipped flocked velvet cherries on the brim.

“Hey, a come-fuck-me hat. There have to be shoes to match.”

Max closed his eyes.

“Did I offend you? I’m sorry.”

“You meant to offend me. This isn’t much of a sport, sweetheart. Getting at me is shooting fish in a barrel.”

“But if you really want the fish shot, what better arrangement?” She took off the cloche and the jacket and put on the hat. She took off her sneakers and socks. She put a wide elastic belt, a cluster of plastic cherries concealing the clasp, around her waist and kicked off her underpants.

“What do you want from me?” he said.

“I don’t know. You don’t have any money, what with Greta’s house and Greta’s shrink and Danny’s darkroom and Marc’s whatever. Why do we send Marc money?”

“Because he is getting a small design business off the ground in Lyons and he needs some start-up capital.”

Elizabeth lay down on the floor beside the couch, her breasts brushing Max’s fingertips. He pulled his hand up to his chest.

“Yeah. And because you feel guilty.”

“And because I feel guilty.”

“Don’t you feel guilty toward me?”

“You know I do.”

“This is a pretty funny apology, right? Come nurse me through this illness and let me try to make it up to you.”

“I am sorry, Elizabeth. You were very kind to come take care of me. I know I loved you too much and too soon.”

“The fuck you did.” Elizabeth took his hand and pressed his palm over her breast. She sat up over him, her knees on either side of his chest.

“Touch me. Touch me now.”

Max put his hands down, resting them on her cold heels.

“Now you don’t want to?”

“I’m tired.”

“You’re scared.”

“I’m scared because I don’t know what you want. You can’t want me.”

“Why not? And if I don’t really want you — I mean, you’re right, I don’t — maybe I want something from you.”

“I’m really tired.”

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Louisa.”

“Call me Louisa. Touch me there and call me Louisa.”

Max didn’t say no (he was not as scared as Elizabeth wanted him to be, but he was uncomfortable and he was angry; he’s dying, for Christ’s sake). He closed his eyes. Soft, matted hair brushed his nose and lips. He smelled her.

“Is this necessary?”

“It’s hard to say. Was I necessary for you?”

“Oh, sweetheart, why don’t you just leave? You don’t have to take care of me. Take the hat, take my passbook, and just go.”

“I don’t want to go. I want to stay here and be Louisa, that sweet little thing. Do you think having an alcoholic slut for a mother is what made you chase little girls?”

He wanted to say, You were not little. You were a young woman, and I was wrong, but you were not a little girl. He coughed very hard, bouncing Elizabeth on his chest.

She stood up and handed him a kleenex.

“Never mind,” she said.

She left the cherry-trimmed hat on and dressed in her own clothes.

“I’m sorry, Pops.”

“Forget it. I owe you.”

Elizabeth looked away. “Yeah. Well. Can I keep the hat?”

On Thursday he was better. She found a bright red flannel shirt for him, and in his black overcoat and black beret he looked frail and chic, a French grandfather driving out to inspect the vineyards.

“Let’s go feed the ducks, and we can pick up a couple of bags of apples. I’ll make an apple pie.”

“I never understood ‘feeding the ducks.’ Think about it. We buy stale bread so we can have the pleasure of feeding the ducks, who can’t be hungry, since they’re always being fed. And the store maintains the ducks so it can sell us stale bread. There are no more starving children? We have to come up with this arrangement so we can all play Marie Antoinette by the pond?”

He shut his eyes and Elizabeth kept driving, glad he was talking. It was always a good sign when he had the energy to talk, no matter what he said. Even if it was about the stupid ducks.

Max thought, Why am I talking about this?

He sat on a bench while Elizabeth fed the ducks, and when she sprinkled breadcrumbs right at his feet, two fat black ducks came up, honking mildly. They were dirtier than she had imagined, something dark caked into the tiny holes on top of their beaks, algae and muck trailing their orange feet.

Max ignored them for a while, pulling his beret down over his eyes, covertly enjoying the sun on his shoulders and legs. The ducks pecked around the bench, and when he shuffled his feet a few times, they retreated and then came back, honking a little louder, pecking more aggressively.

“They must be female,” he said, smiling. She didn’t answer him except to bite down on an apple and chew it loudly. Max could no longer chew apples.

They drove home in silence, and when Max touched her thigh, Elizabeth looked down at the trembling loose skin and patted his hand. There’s no point in being mad, she thought. There’s not enough time. I could yell at him and then he’d keel over and the last thing I would have said would be, Don’t be an asshole, Max.

That’s how you know you’re dying, Max thought. I could burn her clothes, shit in the kitchen, wave my dick at the goddamned ducks, and she’d just smile and pat my hand.

Max’s place was tidier, piles consolidated and concealed, the air filled with motes of lemon furniture polish, ten pink roses as open as bowls, but it was not transformed. Elizabeth was glad she hadn’t mentioned Margaret’s true and apparently grandiose intentions. Her mother had failed; it still smelled like seeping death.

“Nice roses your mother left. Nice vacuuming. Thank her for me.”

“Maybe you could. When I call. TV?” Elizabeth steadied Max on her hip, pulled off his coat, and held him up with one hand while she reached out to clear the recliner and slide him down into it. She saw that the recliner was empty, in an alien, pristine, showroomlike state.

Max patted the cushions. “All right. I wonder where she put my stuff?” He shut his eyes. “How about those monks?” Yesterday Family Feud had monks versus nuns and Max laughed until he cried.

“Okay, you watch. I gotta go out now, just for a little while.”

Elizabeth picked up her keys.

“Where are you going?”

“We need some stuff, Max. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Can’t Turn You Loose

She saw him from the diner window, coming around the corner from the parking lot, his jacket flapping over his high country behind. Suit, white shirt, red tie. Polished black loafers on his big country feet. More waist now, just a little bit of gut pressing against his belt. Big, easy comfort, a long velvet-sofa man. Still those long legs and arms, coming past the rotating dessert tower.

“Well, Liz Taube. Bless your heart, good to see you again,” Huddie said, and put out his hand.

Elizabeth stared like it had turned from hand to snake as he spoke. “Bless my heart?”

Huddie slid into the booth and leaned forward.

“Elizabeth? Liz? You still go by Liz? I work in this town, I own a business here now. I have customers in here, Nikos and I are on the same delivery run. You have no goddamned idea. You never did. I am a model minority businessman. I am a family man, I give to the church, hell, I give to the synagogue. You want me to stick my tongue down your throat by way of hello? Bad enough you showed up in my store like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“What are you so pissy about? It’s been seven years and you’re the one that’s married, not me. You’ve got babies, I don’t. Excuse me, I would have written when you were in Buttfuck, Alabama, but you didn’t. And I didn’t know you were back.” Elizabeth looked down. “Running your father’s store. Christ.”

The waiter stood by the table, grinning at Huddie.

“Hey, George, how’s it going?”

“Good, Hud. Going good now.” He licked the tip of his pencil, willing to wait for twenty minutes if that was how long Huddie took. George worked two nights at week at Nassau Produce, Huddie’s store, and Huddie paid for twenty-two English classes, something his cousin Nikos didn’t give a good goddamn about. If Huddie Lester wanted to take his time about ordering coffee, and then take this angry, sort of pretty girl to the motel next door, that was fine with George Pascopolous. Huddie Lester was his man.

“Give us a few minutes, buddy.”

“Okay, Hud, when you want me, you do like so.” George raised one finger discreetly.

She would have kicked Huddie under the table if he hadn’t made her feel that everyone in the diner was watching them, completely fascinated. All that time apart, and now together, and it was not the same, of course, and this conversation would do nothing for them.

His jacket cuff rode up on his sleeve, showing a half-circle of brown skin through the white shirt.

“Are we having a conversation?” Elizabeth ran her palm over the Formica, rolling sugar granules with her fingertips.

“No,” he said. “Lets get out of here. Let’s not run out of here, but let us, by all means, get the hell out of here.”

Elizabeth drove blind to Wadsworth Park, and he followed, watching the oncoming cars for familiar faces, composing a businesslike, everyday expression. She didn’t even look at him getting out of the car, just slammed the door and walked into the woods like an Indian widow. Huddie looked around the empty lot and called to her.

“How about a blanket?”

“I didn’t come that prepared.”

“To sit on. I’m wearing a suit. We could talk in the car.”

“You’re killing me, Huddie. Let’s just go for a walk.”

They went past the rays of gravel tossed up from the parking lot, past the soda cans, candy wrappers, hot dog bun plastic and aluminum foil clumps, bits of old and crumbling forest suspended in the gelling, bug-speckled light. Huddie caught a yellowing condom on the toe of his shiny loafer and kicked it toward the stream.

“I don’t have that little problem anymore.”

“Is that right?”

He loosened his tie with one hand, and she sighed.

“We’re not talking,” he said, and he laced his fingers through hers. They both looked down, caught by what always caught them, what captured them when Huddie put his hand on the bleacher in the high school gym, resting the side of his palm so close to her leg that they both felt the soft prickling of the tiny hairs on her thigh. The absolute aesthetic harmony of their skin flared up and then subsided, outshone by the infinite exploding light of what came next, a beauty living only in each other, separate from their attractive, everyday faces, from body parts they liked or didn’t like, from the lives they would have. Only their mothers, at the first moment of seeing, had ever read their souls so plain on their faces.

“You saw the store’s bigger now,” he said. “You ought to check it out. That front porch is for coffee and pastry, and we’ve got this big mother dairy case.”

“I’ll come again when your father’s not there. Unless he’s changed.”

“You’ve changed more than he has, and you haven’t changed much.”

“I have.”

“Have not.” He pulled up her hand and kissed it. “Have not, have not, have not. So there. What’re you looking for?”

“A tree suitable for seductive leaning.”

“Don’t bother. Don’t bother looking. There’s no need.”

The tiny black pits of his shaved beard, the leaf fragments in his black hair, his slightly chapped lips, with a dry whitish spot smack in the middle of the lower one, were all she saw. Huddie licked the dry spot and kissed her. He put his wet forehead to her collarbone, his nose pressed into her neck so that he could only breathe by opening his mouth and pulling back slightly. They heard the damp suck of his kiss and he felt Elizabeth’s silent laugh, and pulled away entirely. Anything but her sweet, lovestruck voice saying his name would push him back to his right mind, where he did not want to be.

“Huddie. Hudd-eee,” Elizabeth whispered.

“I did write to you. I wrote almost every day, for weeks. I never heard back. My aunt and uncle said — well, you know what kind of things they’d say. I wrote one time to Mrs. Hill. I called your mother one time, but I don’t guess you got the message.”

“Never. And I didn’t get those letters, Hud. She died right after you were sent away. Oh, boy. Broken hearts all around. I never heard from you, about you, at all. A few times I skulked around the store, thinking your father might have softened up, that he’d give me your address or just drop a hint.”

“I don’t guess he did.”

“No, not even close. He did say that you’d be going to Howard. But I wrote to Howard that fall and they’d never heard of you.”

“Howard? Shit, I ended up at Michigan. You obviously did not watch college basketball.”

“Not much. A few times. It made me cry and I didn’t see you. Ridiculous,” Elizabeth said, hooking her hands inside his belt, feeling him big and wide against her, exactly as she thought he’d be. “Closer.”

Huddie felt her breasts through her T-shirt, pouring through his suit and shirt, dense liquid hearts at rest on his middle ribs. He wouldn’t say a word now, wouldn’t exhale, stared hard at his watch the way a person who’s not where he’s supposed to be does. He wanted to cross himself, like the boys from Fordham, all of whom, even the Jews, understood that the cross was to placate Fate, to demonstrate humility and helplessness when all your talent and practice were not enough to swing the odds in your favor. He unhooked her thumbs, turning her palms down when she brought them up to his mouth, smooth, round palms, curved like her thighs, spread wide for the kisses he very carefully, gathering his wits, doesn’t give. He fished for his car keys and left his hands in his pockets.

“Maybe we didn’t really want to. Maybe we wanted to keep it the way it was.” He sighed. “Who knows. I’m sorry about Mrs. Hill. Let’s go, lady. I gotta get back to the store. It’s the end of delivery day. There’ll be six feet of charcuterie and eggplant terrine all over the floor.”

“What happened to the pigs’ feet?”

“We still got ’em. In the soul section. And shrimp paste and rice noodles and biscotti and tapenade. We upscale now.”

And she thought that if he could be sure of not being mocked, he would be pleased and only a little sorry that the dusty Coca-Cola cases and cakey cans of Ajax were gone.

They walked to the parking lot, unable to resist bumping into each other, closing their eyes in the pleasure of his hip against hers, as though there were not four layers of fabric between them and not even five seconds before he reached his car.

“Can I start shopping at your place?”

“Does old Max have gourmet tastes?”

“I do.” She was not going to talk about Max now.

“You come anytime. I don’t go in on Sundays.”

“Sundays you go to church in the morning, and then it’s family dinner with your father, who is probably just crazy about your wife, and then you shoot a little hoop with your boys.”

“Don’t make fun of my life.”

“That was longing, not mockery. Or longing concealed by mockery.”

“My son is only four years old, and my knees are too fucked up for me to play. My father is no nicer to June than he is to anybody else. Otherwise you’re right on the money. And you’re going to mess up those Sunday mornings now.”

“How?”

“Because in church, when they hit those high notes, I will not only remember us in that little yellow bed and in these woods back then, I’m going to think of you right here and I am not going to be thinking like a churchgoing man.”

“Good. Me neither.”

“You neither. Still funny.”

“I am. Was the bed yellow? I thought the walls were yellow. Little yellow flowers.”

“I don’t think so. I think the bed was yellow, the walls were no color.” He could still see the rickety bed, could see the wall as it looked to him, before and after he banged his head against it, leaving oily spots he would touch later, touching himself, thinking of her beneath him, his own amazing country.

“All right. I’ll think of you too, Huddie. Horace. I guess this means we’re not going to be getting together.”

“For what?”

“For coffee, for lunch, for a walk.”

“You know if I see you in private I’m going to make love to you, and if I see you in public this is not going to be our little secret for very long. A blind man could see how much I love you. I gotta go, sweet.” His voice rough on that last word, and inside Elizabeth bright red streamers snap open and billow out in six-foot-long celebration. Inside Huddie, there is a quiet pinging, the warning sound of a failed alarm.

“Okay. I’ll see you. Let’s just get into our cars and go. I love you too. What’s your son’s name?”

He shook his head painfully, walking away. “Larry. I know you do.”

They started their cars simultaneously. Elizabeth left first, nosing past his nicer, newer car and shooting gravel onto his windshield.

Huddie’s wires cross every which way now. Sight, smell, taste, and touch enfold one another. Wet is like sweet is like heat is the aching pulse, is salt caking. Her smell is the smell of the unwrapped ready-to-rot figs, and for a lost half hour he scrunches thin lilac tissue paper around their small purple asses, tilting their stems so each seamed bottom is turned to its most seductive side. Carrot fronds are her hair; the slick celadon crack of a broken honeydew is hers and tastes cool, then warm. He puts his lips flat against tomatoes, plums, peaches, and nectarines before stacking them, and they ripen too fast, with hard-to-sell dark spots where his saliva has gathered and seeped in. Marshmallows, not even of interest since early Boy Scouts, roll out of their bags, pull his fingers into their sweet dusty white middles, pull themselves up around his fingertips. Half a bag. Twenty-three marshmallows. His fingers are stiff, powdered white, and his throat is glued shut, but the sugar thickly coating his lips and the drying tug from the roof of his mouth to the root of his tongue is so like a past moment between them he has to sit down behind the un-shelved goods, head resting on the giant cans of juice, sticky hands hard over sticky mouth, and cry without making a sound.

* * *

Three weeks later, after two embarrassing and badly choreographed visits to Nassau Produce, half hiding to watch Huddie sell happy women olive oils they never thought they wanted and milk that was twenty cents more than the supermarket’s, Elizabeth was finally naked, sitting up to admire the way Huddie undressed, laying his red tie on the seat of the armchair, unbuttoning his white shirt, hanging it over the chair back to avoid wrinkling, and then tugging hard on his belt, stomach sucked in and released, in that way that men don’t mind and women feel terrible about, and pulling off pants, briefs, and socks in one piece.

“When did you get so polished?”

He turned his head, reminding her that when he blushed the tips of his ears burned red as if the sun set through them, and like that she fell in love again. For the red-brown tips of his ears.

“I can’t stand standing around in my shorts and socks. Like an idiot.”

“No. You look beautiful.”

“Well. Now, you give me some room here, Elizabeth.”

Huddie splashed water over his face, drinking some from his hands, and looking in the little mirror, he saw his skinny, lovesick young self. He wondered if God was more likely to forgive him if he told June she could go ahead with another baby and then he could leave her when the youngest, not even conceived, was finally off to college, or if he could save himself some time and tell June now that Larry was enough, which would allow him to leave, not dishonorably, in only fourteen years. He sprinkled Elizabeth’s chest with cold water and watched the white-blue skin of her breasts crowd up into tight pink waves around her nipples.

Fourteen years.

“Ohh, it’s cold, you shit. Horace, you shit. If we weren’t here, drinking motel water, what would you want?”

Huddie picked up his watch, checked, and put it down. “To drink? V8 juice, maybe grapefruit.”

“And to eat?”

“Is this the Glamour Quiz for Lovers?” June loved magazine tests and tore them out to answer right before bed. Tests for love, for budget balancing, for keeping your temper, for managing your in-laws. He answered every question of every test honestly, waiting for the terrible truth to hit June as she sat propped up on three lace pillows, totting up the scores, waiting to be touched.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get to cook for you. Tell me.”

“Right now? A real Caesar salad, lots of egg, homemade croutons, heavy on the garlic. Really green olive oil. I’d cover you with leaves and eat it right off you. You salad bowl, you.” He pushed June out of his mind; this little bit of time with Elizabeth would be lost to him if he waited for June to take off on her own.

He lay down again, setting the watch face toward him, and brought June back, waiting in the kitchen. He put his face deep into Elizabeth and willed his wife always safe and far away.

Elizabeth bit the soft flesh above his narrow hips. Maybe, without either of them noticing, without doing harm to June or Larry, she could mark him.

“Huddie, you’re going to be a fat old man, you know that? You foodaholic. Look at that gleam in your eye, homemade croutons. We’ll end up two big porkers together. ‘Come closer, my darling, closer.’ ‘I’m trying, sweetheart, I’m trying.’ ”

Huddie smiled and was stricken, not wanting to say that he did worry about his weight and every time he looked at his father’s gut pushing wide black diamonds between his shirt buttons, he promised not to sample the triple crème cheeses, not to kick June out of the kitchen anymore, not to let the Belgian-chocolate sales rep leave him a two-pound gift box every six weeks. And as he looked to change the subject, bee stings of pure happiness fired up the back of his neck and shoulders. She saw them together, together in a who-cares, fat and happy middle age. Horace and Elizabeth, rocking, creaking in contentment on the front porch of a house near no one they’ve ever known.

She laid her white hand in the middle of his chest, scarless, dark mahogany, nothing like Max’s, as nothing in the room was like anyplace she’d been lately. No real harm could come to you in a motel room, it seemed. The minute you hit the road, picked up a phone, found out that you’d been found out, all hell might break loose, but right then, between the see-through towels and the stiff green blankets, you were held in the safe, silent wall of the unborn.

“I’m starting to like motels,” Elizabeth said, sliding his watch under her pillow.

Huddie put his hand over hers and the watch back on the nightstand. “I hate them. Except for this.” He sighed and put his head on her back, smoother than the sheet. “I wish I had another life, a whole second life, for us.” He brushed his lips over her ass.

“You’d get tired of me.”

“I wouldn’t mind finding that out for myself.”

“This way we can keep the romance. You know, years longer than other people.”

He lifted his head and pulled the sheet up to his shoulders, unbearably tired, filled with thoughts of June and Larry and everything he would lose and everything he had lost just in this hour, and she slid her fingers down his neck, flicking sweat off his chest. Who had left such wide, milky pools on the bed?

“All right,” Huddie said, patting the hand on his shoulder, keeping his face turned away, to not see her tears, to not have her see his.

When he rose to leave, after three false starts, there was no afternoon light left, just the chill blue-grey of winter dusk and the white Hollywood-style bathroom lights buzzing through it.

“You’re leaving,” she said.

“Leaving you?” One of her hairs would not come loose from his tongue, her earrings had left twin, intimate gouges on his cheeks, and these awkward things gave him as much pleasure as all the official great moments of his life put together.

“No. It only looks that way. I am right here.” He put his hand between her breasts, and felt his palm sink by quarter inches, lodging far beneath the surface of her skin. “Here.”

Beneath Wings of Love Abide

Huddie knew it would be a disaster.

“Max will be at physical therapy. I know his schedule, I’m taking him there and picking him up. Don’t worry, just meet me on your break.”

They were both tired of the motel. At first, when he couldn’t have even five minutes of his hand on Elizabeth’s naked stomach, an hour on a bed, any private bed, was all he would ever ask for in life. He knew that it would be no time at all before even two hours on the bed wasn’t enough; it made his chest hurt, it made the motel impossibly sterile, a disgusting black hole that took in conversation and sentiment and memory and left sex between two people in a hurry, trying to act as though an afternoon was a life. He liked comfort, a glass of juice, a bathrobe, real pillows. He liked decency. Huddie didn’t want to raise the issue of the motel’s shortcomings. He couldn’t afford an apartment, and when he talked about leaving June, he and Elizabeth both burst into tears.

“All right. You sure?”

“Huddie, of course I’m sure. I’m the one who drives him. I’ll drop him off at around one, run a few errands, and meet you at two. I’ll go pick him up at three-thirty. Okay?”

Huddie listened closely at the door and heard nothing from inside. Elizabeth wasn’t back yet. The apartment was as he imagined, like his dad’s place, more or less. Old-man smell, bathroom nastiness, a little lingering cigarette smoke and Old Grand-Dad, which made it very much like his father’s house. Huddie was standing next to a musty, overloaded coat tree, one of Max’s hats falling toward him, when he heard a gluey, rumbling cough that was not Elizabeth’s.

“Sweetheart? Could you come here?”

Between his impulse to laugh aloud at the farce his life was turning into and his jacket’s entanglement with the coat tree, Huddie froze in the middle of the front hall.

“Liz? I don’t—”

Max leaned through the bedroom doorway, losing his grip on his unzipped pants. Huddie remembered a stronger and bearded face from junior high school and looked away from the shining white ball of Mr. Stone’s belly.

“Mr. Stone? Max? I’m a friend of Elizabeth’s. She invited me over for a cup of coffee …”

“And gave you the key?”

“She thought she might be a little late, from taking you to the uh.” Huddie couldn’t remember, for the life of him, where Elizabeth had been taking Max.

Max slid down to the floor.

“Could you get me the blue pillbox, from my nightstand? And the water?”

Huddie brought Max his nitroglycerine and pressed Max’s hand to the glass.

“Okay now. Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure. I had this pain before.” Max put his fist to the middle of his chest, a gesture that would ensure him immediate examination in the emergency room. “And I took a nitro and it was better. And now it’s back. And a few minutes ago my jaw and my elbows ached. But they’re not hurting now, so that’s good.”

“That is good. Did you eat something spicy? You know, heartburn?”

“Chinese food.” Max was embarrassed to talk about eating with his belly resting on his thighs, in front of this well-built boy.

“Golden Chopsticks?” It was the place nearest Max’s apartment, the place Huddie would go for Empress Chicken, given his choice.

“Yeah. Ahh. It’s not better.”

“Let me call your doctor.”

“If it’s an infarction, he’ll want me to go to the ER.”

“I’ll take you.”

“You?”

“Horace Lester. Let’s go.”

Huddie left Elizabeth a note and put an overcoat on Max, who insisted on slowly buttoning his shirt and zipping his pants to hide his nearly tearful longing for his blue sweatpants and his soft, mothering sweatshirt.

Everything in the emergency room happened quickly and efficiently. Huddie decided to say he was Stone’s son-in-law, which could be, and that way they’d let him take care of him, or sit with him, until they did whatever they did. He apologized mentally to June and her father.

There wasn’t five minutes of sitting, and the triage nurse didn’t give a fuck who Huddie was. Max slapped down an insurance card, put his fist to his chest again, and in ten minutes Huddie was cooling his heels in the waiting room, Max had an IV dripping into his veins, and they’d hooked two monitors to his chest. Two white doctors bumped into each other behind a pale green curtain, and after the EKG one of them stuck his head out and nodded to Huddie.

Finally, the fat doctor said, “Let’s play it safe. It’s not an emergency, you’re okay.” He raised his voice to reach the nurse back at the desk. “Let’s just say a soft romey and follow up tomorrow.”

The nurse nodded, typing slowly onto pink paper.

A tear ran from Max’s eye into his ear.

“What’s a soft romey?” Huddie asked, as any good son-in-law would.

“Sorry. It’s just ‘Rule out myocardial infarction.’ I notified his doctor. We’ll get him to his room in a little bit, as soon as we get things calmed down again.”

A white, limp girl was carried in, blood streaming down her forearms, and Max and Huddie watched, slightly ashamed of their relieved curiosity, like people with a flat observing the eighteen-wheeler flipping over in front of them.

They leafed through magazines until the nurse, whose white uniform was now lightly red-speckled, came over with a pair of orderlies.

Huddie rose as they put Max on the stretcher.

“Subacute c.c.u. Room 146,” the nurse said.

In the elevator, the black orderly and the white orderly checked out Huddie and Max. Their relationship is not obvious. They might be old white employer, young black employee. Possibly, the black man’s the boss and the old white guy’s been working for him for years, but the old man doesn’t look like he’s been able to work for years. They don’t look like friends, like poker buddies. It does not occur to the orderlies that the men might be lovers, or family. Neither of them would like those possibilities.

Max saw the grey elevator walls, the distorted reflections in the dented steel ceiling, the green sheet, Horace’s hand, his fingernails smooth honey-colored ovals, longer than Max’s, and Max wondered if all black men wore their nails long; he’d never looked at any man’s nails before. He put his hand on Huddie’s wrist and squeezed it. The orderlies took this in too, looking at each other sideways and then straight ahead.

The nurse hung a long grey rectangle around Max’s neck on a cheap cloth band and stuck two new wires into the tabs on his chest. She smiled at the doctor walking in, and he gave back a small smile beneath his big moustache, showing that it was a serious business — don’t even hope otherwise — but they were in good, even excellent, hands. He was visibly intelligent, arrogant, not unkind, taller than average. Max and Huddie thought only one thing: black. Max thought, Good. It will make Horace Lester feel good, and furthermore, he’s not a young man, he probably had to be smarter than everyone else to go to medical school and become a cardiologist back then.

Huddie knew it was stupid to be pleased, but he was, and inside he’s six and the Alabama kitchenware Aunt Les brought with her flies past him as she calls out, after each pot, lid, and saucepan hits the back door, “Lift up the race, child! Lift up the race.” She lived with them for only three years, his Great-aunt Lessie, and moved back home, saying Gus was doing fine, Huddie was doing fine, and the cold was killing her. She prayed conversationally and constantly: instructing, cajoling, informing, and flirting with the Lord. She prayed for Huddie to learn to wipe his feet, she prayed for justice for her people, she prayed for Gus’s loan to come through, she prayed for Gus to find a wife to mother the boy, she prayed that God would see fit to change Gus’s ways so that the woman’s life would not be Hell on earth. She smoked a corncob pipe at night and made Huddie hold up her big silver-backed mirror on Sundays so she could pluck two grey hairs from her chin, dress her long hair, and take him to church. On the occasional Sunday, he’s found himself sitting behind an old woman smelling of woodsmoke and Dixie Peach and felt time collapse like a paper tunnel.

The doctor finished examining Max and making notes. He nodded to Huddie, patted Max on the shoulder. He walked out with a small, stiff-wristed wave, like the Queen of England.

The nurse stayed behind for cleanup. “Any pain, any complaints, call. Otherwise, sweet dreams, Mr. Stone. And—”

“Jack Robinson. Son-in-law.”

Max smiled. “We’re just waiting for my daughter to get here. Are two visitors okay?”

“Until eight o’clock, two is fine. Take it easy.”

* * *

“The lights on the mirror,” Max said, “it’s like one of Liberace’s capes.”

“I never saw him.”

“He’s on TV all the time. Campy crap. You never saw him? The rhinestones? The candelabra?” Why was he talking about this? “Like Little Richard without the falsetto. And Polish.”

“What’s the goddamned point of that?”

“All right. You don’t have to stay. Is Elizabeth here?”

“Max, if she were here, you’d be seeing her. She’ll be here soon.”

“All right.”

Huddie took Max’s hand and Max let him, then pushed his hand further into Huddie’s. If he’s dying, he will die holding a hand that loves.

When Elizabeth came, Max was asleep, still holding Huddie’s hand.

“My Christ, Huddie. I’m so sorry. You had to bring him here? Oh my fucking Christ, that must have been something. Go back to the store, go home.” She was practically pushing him out the door, knowing what this could cost him. If he’s late at the store, his assistant, a well-meaning girl who thinks Huddie walks on water, will begin calling around. Eventually, someone will call June and Huddie will have to say something credible that in no way contradicts anything that anyone might have already said. He kissed her. “Take care of him, baby.”

“Don’t worry. Get out of here.”

Huddie waved to her and was gone. Elizabeth didn’t want Huddie showing concern and affection for Max. They weren’t even supposed to exist in the same universe. She looked at Max, drawing slow, bubbling breaths through his various tubes. He didn’t look that much worse than usual. All right, God, whatever you want. I don’t give a shit if Max lives, actually. You want him, take him. I am not trying to keep him here. It’s enough. He’s not getting better, he’s a self-absorbed pain in the ass. That smell, old socks, and lesions. He takes his meds whenever, he lies to me about it. Whatever this is, it’s enough. He was a good father, God, he taught me to drive a stick-shift, he taught me whole chunks of Auden, he made me listen to every kind of music. If you could give us a little more time, we could get all this straightened out. What’s it to you? You didn’t take him then, when it might have seemed like a good idea, for my sake, you certainly don’t need to take him now. Ignore us.

Max coughed in his sleep and Elizabeth leaned over him, holding the plastic cup and the bending straw.

“You’re here,” Max said.

“Don’t worry, I’m here.”

“I met the guy you’re fucking. Very nice guy.”

“Yeah.”

“Too bad he’s married.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you could break up his marriage, too.”

“Get some rest, Max.” She smoothed the sheet around his shoulders.

“Okay, Elizabeth.” It is funny, the way he says it. They rarely call each other by name. Sweetheart, honey, darling, baby girl, milacku is what he calls her. She calls him Pops or Grumpy or Buster.

She sat by his bed, flipping through a magazine left behind by the previous occupant.

“Baby girl. Go home.”

“I’ll stay, it’s okay.”

“Go home. I’d rather be alone. Go, go.”

“If I go now, I’ll come back in the morning. We can have breakfast together.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll bring you the Times. Love you, Mr. Stone.”

“I know you do. Love you, Miss Taube.”

It was terrible to be sent home by Max, although Elizabeth had no wish to spend more time in the hospital. Max looked sick but not frighteningly so. But he’d rather be alone than be with her, and although she didn’t like to think about it, she’d rather be with Max than be alone, and that was why she was back in Great Neck in the first place.

The charge nurse called at four a.m., and Elizabeth went back to the hospital. A young nurse stopped her in the hall before she got to Max. They wanted her to sign a dozen forms, including permission to perform an autopsy and to make use of his organs. She began to sign, and another nurse, the one who called the apartment — her Queens accent identified her — said, “You’re the daughter, right?”

“Not legally, no.”

“Awright. Is there a legal daughter? A legal anybody?”

“He has a wife, I mean, I don’t know if they’re divorced. And he has three — two sons. They’re grown. One of them lives here. One of them’s in France.”

“So then, really, Miss Taube”—the nurse had been skimming the notes while Elizabeth stumbled over who she was not—“really, we need to call the wife. If they’re divorced, we can call the son, or whoever. It’s nothing against you, it’s a next-of-kin thing.”

And so it was. Greta came down with Danny, and in the early morning, in the tiny green waiting room, where they’d been sent like squabbling children to sort out their differences, Greta hugged her silently. Danny, for whose weekly father-son dinner Elizabeth vacated the apartment every Wednesday night, said, “Call me Dan,” and stared at the floor. Elizabeth assumed he was thinking, He ruined his life for you? She smoothed down her bangs.

“I’m glad he didn’t die alone. Oh, dearie, we both thank you,” Greta said. Dan grunted.

“What do you want me to do?” Elizabeth asked. She preferred not to have to move her stuff to a motel at five a.m., but the request would not surprise her, would not even strike her as unfair.

“Perhaps you can put his things in order, in the apartment. Marc is flying in tomorrow. He’s doing very well in Lyons now. Max must have told you. Well, Danny or I will call you about the, about the …” Greta waved her hands.

“All right. I’m so sorry. If I had realized you were still married, I would have told them to call you first.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, dearie.”

The nurse came for Greta, who made the smallest wave, a tilt of one open hand, as if they had never embraced, as if they’d barely traded names and hospital facts in front of the coffee machine and had not much cared for each other’s tone or outfit. Elizabeth put her hand over her mouth and walked slowly to the parking lot. The big list in her head was who she cannot call. She cannot call her mother, who will not be sorry anyway, she cannot call Huddie, she can call Rachel in London, but it hardly seems worth it to track her down through the maze of the London Hospital for Children, reaching out for Rachel over the bald heads of little cancer patients to tell her that someone she felt littered the planet was now dead. The easy list was clothing, books, records, kitchen stuff, furniture, plants, stereo system. She was determined to do a spectacular clean-up job.

Elizabeth parked in front of Nassau Produce, waiting for Huddie. He saw her sleeping in the front seat and was glad to see her, because this particular face, this being, with the long boy legs and the mole on her right shoulder blade, is his lifeblood. It’s not a source of pleasure right at this moment, that is just how it is. He’s fed up with her bad judgment, first the meeting in the apartment, causing him six kinds of grief since yesterday afternoon, and now, lying here in front of his store, not giving a damn that June might have dropped him off or that he might have brought Larry in for a croissant or that his early morning people, the walkers who came in for coffee and the widows who began their day buying breakfast fruit and stopped in before closing for a fancy frozen dinner, would see her sprawled across her front seat, obviously not giving a good goddamn that someone from his life, which she didn’t seem even to take into consideration, might see her and wonder.

He banged on the hood of her car, making more noise than he intended.

Elizabeth jumped up, her hair wild, her glasses still on but not quite resting on her nose. Huddie wanted to calm her down and he wanted to slap some sense into her.

“Max died,” she said, holding on to the steering wheel.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Why don’t you get out of the car? Come on in and wash up and I’ll make us coffee.” It was the kind thing to do, it was also the most convenient and the least likely to destroy his life, which seemed highly perishable and sweet and in need of immediate care. Elizabeth wasn’t a weeper; it would probably be okay to set her up at the table near the back, even if other people came in.

Huddie filled two mugs with fresh coffee and put a pile of rugalach on a plate, although his impulse was to hand her a to-go cup and a muffin in a bag. He showed her the bathroom and hugged her before she closed the door. He said he was sorry about Max, and he was sorry about the old man, seemed like a sad end to a sad life, but the real issue was that Elizabeth was now free to leave and might require a reason to stay.

Sunday night, on the way home from the movies, Huddie’s arm began to tremble under Larry’s sleep-heavy head. June had lifted Larry’s head with one hand and folded up her sweater to make a pillow for him. Elizabeth doesn’t know how to do that. He can’t see her lifting Larry’s head so smoothly it seems to grow out of her fingers, can’t see her traveling with a comfortable sweater, extra kleenex, Life Savers, and a Frog and Toad book scrunched into a big vinyl purse.

June has four capacious, indestructible tote bags, in black, brown, navy, and bone. She is embarrassed and proud, too, defiant about her bags, all just like her mamas pocketbooks, and when they window-shop, she looks sideways at tiny evening bags with thin, pointless straps, jewel-studded bouquets, playful minaudières, and she shakes her head. “Not for the mother of Larry.” She doesn’t say anything about what the wife of Horace should wear. He won’t tell her, and she makes herself believe, whistling in the dark of love’s signless neighborhood, that he does like her, must love her, as Larry’s mother, and will then come upon her, and love her, as June.

She fell in love as he spun through Michigan, a hundred times handsomer than the other handsome boys, kinder than the other sports stars. Even girls he slept with only once had nothing bad to say about him. A big hello for everyone, putting his arm around every girl, including the plain and dull, as if it were a privilege and a pleasure, always making it clear that his singleness was not due to any shortcoming on their part, but entirely and only because he hadn’t been ready. And each woman knew that if he’d been ready, it would have happened with her. He attended eighteen weddings in four states the summer after his senior year.

June’s small circle barely overlapped his; her friends were Christian, future nurses and social workers and mothers, and they held themselves apart from the radical girls with wide Afros and new names and hoop earrings to their shoulders, and apart from the Black Power boys in tight jeans and berets, sexy and scary and wrong, and they held themselves apart from the white girls who were everywhere, Jewish girls with auburn Afros and little blue glasses on their long noses, Protestant girls with Breck-shampoo blonde hair, flat as silk to their skinny behinds, managing to apologize for that hair and still toss it around a room like Stardust. If June had not moved to Boston, by chance and because her mother’s best friend was director of a nursing program, she might have lost Huddie sooner. But she saw him play two games for the Celtics (her mother’s best friend was a fan, had touched the smooth hands of JoJo White and wept during John Havlicek’s last game), jumping to the very rim of the basket, above the heads of bigger men, and she saw him fall to the hardwood floor like wet laundry. She heard the snap before she saw him curl up, grey with pain, and although it broke her heart, she was reasonably sure he wouldn’t play again.

She had a girlfriend hand-deliver a sympathetic and encouraging card to his hospital room. She wrote Huddie about her old boyfriend who broke his knee and went on to play three more seasons (in high school and badly, she did not write) and sent a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies. After two weeks, she sent another batch of cookies to his apartment with a friendly, dignified note on her own stationery suggesting the name of a good physical therapist. Finally he had to thank her, and as sweetly as she could, she kept him on the phone until a visit seemed in order. She was maid, secretary, cheerleader, and rehab assistant. She did not presume to call herself girlfriend, and when the model types were around she faded, and when they stopped coming, when his contract was not renewed and the Phoenix Suns went back on their offer and the Italians sent only a case of Barbaresco and their condolences, she made spaghetti with Italian sausage and listened while Huddie talked about red wine and the kind of restaurant he’d like to run. She finished nursing school and they were still together. And he had not found his feet in real estate or insurance or franchises and he didn’t sleep well or long. He never blamed anyone. June was happy to be pregnant, happy to be a pediatric nurse, happy to leave the terrible cold and terrible white people of Boston, happy to be handsome, kind Huddie Lester’s wife. She willed him to be happy with her.

In some alternate universe, Huddie and Elizabeth would make love every day, without fear or hurry, and if he had to, he would lie about it to June until kingdom come, lie willingly and shamelessly, lie and feel lucky to have the opportunity. But in this precarious world, he will not leave June and he will not become a man who sees his son every other Saturday and sends a check. Will not. Will not be another successful black man leaving his fine, kind, bronze-skinned wife for a white woman. A crazy white woman, with no common sense, no prospects, less of a foothold in the world than he had. A woman who doesn’t even see the thousand things he has taught himself to ignore, the thousand things June knows, without discussion. Elizabeth has split herself open for him without knowing who enters her, the hundreds he carries with him, right to the bed, how much he owes to people she cannot even imagine. Marry this educated white girl whose people have money and still move down. Unbelievable.

The early morning crowd came and went. In ten minutes Michelle and John would drive up, put on their aprons, and go about their business. And Michelle would look at them as a black woman does, and John would look at them as a black man does, and much as they liked him, much as they owed him for various kindnesses of the past two years, the air at work would shift and June would hear. Huddie put a note on the cash register—“Back by 8:15. John, Basket Hill produce in the back. Michelle, bag yesterday’s bread for St. Vincent de Paul. Horace”—and drove Elizabeth to Wadsworth Park.

“We need to step back, sweetheart. Not step away, but step back. I think so.”

Elizabeth picked up handfuls of wet leaves and let them drop.

“We could just go on like this.”

“I can’t. I can’t go from this to my real life. I can’t have this not be my real life.”

“You love me so much we have to break up.”

“Shit. Yes.”

Elizabeth shook her head.

“How about you love me so much you leave June?”

Huddie shook his head.

“Well, I must be the dumbest woman in North America. I did not see this coming.”

“Sweet. Elizabeth. You don’t see things coming. You never did.”

“I will. Someday I will see things coming and I will jump out of the way. And if I see you, I’ll run in the opposite direction. And if you see me first, you should do the same, you gutless son of a bitch. Drive me to Max’s.”

They drove in silence, wet-faced, two shrinking loose piles in the corners of the front seat, Huddie steering with two shaking fingers, Elizabeth’s head on her chest. She shut the car door carefully. Surely, at the edge of the curb, at the corner, at the blurred traffic light, at the crumbling stucco arch over the entrance to Max’s building, surely at some stopping point one of them would see that it could go another way, that it must, but Elizabeth finds her key and Huddie speeds through the changing yellow light.

He worked longer hours and claimed insomnia. He fixed up his fathers house and built a sandbox for Larry. He ate all day long, stashing macadamia nuts in the glove compartment, dried figs in his pocket, a box of shortbread beneath his desk. Elizabeth fell back on old habits, her own and Max’s, to get through a time so bad it made her long for elementary school. She made her way, at a numbing, workaday pace, through Max’s stockpile of hard liquor. Max had anticipated a long, slow, tedious dying, and he had not expected to stop drinking until he was at death’s very door. There was a bedroom closet full of Scotch and cheap white wine and three bottles of bourbon, which Elizabeth was able to drink if she mixed it with coffee. She shoplifted cans of crabmeat and lobster bisque and paid for bread and bananas and paper plates. Every day she stole something useful, a box of paper clips, a dustpan, a six-pack of sponges, so she could put Max’s things in order. Margaret called to read her the obituary, which mentioned Greta and the two boys and his long teaching career. It did not mention Elizabeth or Benjamin, and she was not invited to the funeral. No one called her about it, which seemed small of them, but she had no wish to go.

She packed and cleaned and hung outside the windows to wash them. At night she flipped through Max’s journals with less interest than she expected and drank until her eyes closed. When she touched her face, it felt like oil over dust.

When Dan finally called, all Elizabeth had to do was shower and put on the set of clean clothes she’d left folded on top of Max’s dresser for the last eight days. The sheets were washed and dried and put away, the drawers were empty, she’d never been there. She took Louisa’s paste diamond earrings and cherry hat and left the stock certificates and passbooks in a daisy shape on Max’s desk.

“What did my father tell you about me? Did he tell you what a strange boy I was? What a strange boy I am?”

“No. He loved you very much, he was very proud of you.”

“He didn’t know fuck-all about me.”

“I didn’t say he understood you or your photographs. I said he loved you and he was proud of you. He supported you all those years, in every way, and he gave you everything he could. He paid for college, he gave you money to go to Mexico. Did he have to understand too? I used to let you stay up until midnight, remember? I’m the person who sat with you when you had those nightmares, when you were little, remember? I don’t think you have to swear at me.”

“You sat up with Benjie. You put Marc and me to bed early. Marc thought you were a bitch. He did a whole comic strip about you. ‘Betty Bitch.’ I loved you so much then. I never even fucking saw you again. You left me, you left him, and that was it. When you lay down on the bed next to me — my nightmares weren’t that bad, by the way, I just wanted you beside me — I used to look down your shirt. You finally started wearing a bra, I see. I wasn’t so little. I just didn’t hit puberty until I was fifteen. You were gone by then. Did you babysit us just so you and my father could be together?”

“That’s actually a very funny question. No. Max thought I was crazy. I wanted to be just the babysitter, a normal girl. So I wouldn’t let him touch me, kiss me good night, nothing. Not so much as a squeeze on the knee. More happened on my other babysitting jobs.”

“But he could fuck you all the other times, go down on you all night long while my mother was in Europe, visiting what was left of her family.”

She sat down in Max’s recliner. “Yes. You want to hear ‘yes’? Yes.”

He unbuttoned his shirt. His skin was just like it was when he was little, white-gold over big blue veins snaking down his smooth shoulders and chest. The skin of martyred boy saints, luminous and sheer. His hands were just like Max’s used to be, long and square, with thick fingers. No stiffening grey tape over hands like old fruit, no bloody skin puddling around the entry point of the IV drip. Elizabeth had watched him sleep a dozen times, flat on his back in his nightshirt and his little white underpants, his briefs sliding down below his smooth stomach. His little penis and his pointy little hipbones made a triangle in his underpants, and she would watch for a few minutes as the little tent got bigger and then shifted away, until it was no different from looking at a girl.

“ ‘Going down on her is like licking honey off the back of the tiniest, rose-enameled demitasse spoon. Not a spoon, no spoon has that softness, that thick, soft, bite-me quality.’ ”

Elizabeth got up. “You read his journals.”

“Of course, whenever I could. I wanted to know, just like you did. I wanted to know what he thought of me, what happened between the two of you, what happened with my mother. You two had a very weird relationship.”

She stood so close to him she could feel his breath on her forehead. He backed up. “Yeah, we did,” Elizabeth said. “We had a very weird relationship for a very long time. He sort of ruined my life and I loved him very much and now he’s dead, and frankly, that’s okay. He’s not in pain anymore, and I am, so there you go. I took pretty good care of him, I think, and I would not have been able to go on doing that for another year or another ten years or even another month. And we were lucky enough to have an ending that worked out much better than the rest of our relationship, and that’s all I want to tell you. That’s it.”

“I’m sorry. You don’t have to go tonight if you don’t want to.” He put his hand to her wet face. Elizabeth turned away.

“Well, I do, actually. But not for a few minutes, Snurfel.”

“You remember that game.”

“You also had pretty weird relationships. Do you remember the time you hid all of your mother’s paints?”

He had hidden Greta’s paints to make her stop creating surreal canvases of ghostly Nazi uniforms and slaughtered animals, severed heads scattered in the wheat fields, torn grey uniforms flung into wormy apple trees. Greta asked him if he’d seen her paints, and when he shook his head, afraid to say the lie, she walked three miles into town with him and bought fifteen fat new tubes for herself and a leather-handled cherrywood box of twelve oil paints for him, with three soft brushes, its own smooth wood palette, and its own pretty little metal cup for turpentine. It was not what he wanted or needed, and he left it in the yard underneath a madder blue hydrangea, wet and warping through the whole of fall and winter.

Elizabeth made tea for them both and found Christmas cookies in an unopened tin. They remembered the make-believe game: Congo Banana and Little Chimp and Farfel, Furfel, and Snurfel, a family in which the father roared at the mother, the mother bit the babies, and the babies burned down the hut. Elizabeth was only allowed to be They, the force that moved the dolls (a Gumby, three small bears, and a G.I. Joe, which served as Congo Banana, the father) and rearranged furniture during scene changes.

They unpacked Max’s records of Gregorian chants and Yemenite rock and roll and plugged in the stereo. They poured a little rum into their cups and then poured some more into the teapot.

“You take off your shirt,” he said.

Elizabeth sighed and unbuttoned her shirt, thinking, This cannot be what he really wants, my hair’s sticking up all over the place, this bra is unraveling, I smell like Lysol.

“ ‘I love to kiss her breasts. They have the same faint, gold down that you see on those gorgeous Seattle peaches. I hope I die with that velvet feel on my lips.’ ”

Elizabeth lay down on the floor, and Dan lay down beside her, the two of them closing their eyes.

“I wished he would die, sometimes. He caused my mother such pain.” Dan laughed. “It was a two-way street, I guess. Is this okay?” he asked, one hand skimming over the places Max wrote about.

“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Yes.”

Like tired babies, like collapsing balloons, they lay flip-flopped over each other, ignoring belt buckles digging into soft parts, ignoring the impulse toward sex that death brings out in people even more ill-suited than Dan and Elizabeth.

“Good night, you banana,” Elizabeth said, folding up the rug corner with his shirt to make a pillow for him.

“Good night, Lizzie. Dobrounuts. Thank you.” He threw both arms over the shirt and the rug and closed his eyes.

Elizabeth kissed his forehead and took her bag out to the car. She came back for her jacket and put the apartment keys on the table and kissed him again, as if he were the Max she’d never met.