Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [36]
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