Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [42]
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