Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [35]
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