Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [47]
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