Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [48]
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.