Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [55]
“How?”
“Because in church, when they hit those high notes, I will not only remember us in that little yellow bed and in these woods back then, I’m going to think of you right here and I am not going to be thinking like a churchgoing man.”
“Good. Me neither.”
“You neither. Still funny.”
“I am. Was the bed yellow? I thought the walls were yellow. Little yellow flowers.”
“I don’t think so. I think the bed was yellow, the walls were no color.” He could still see the rickety bed, could see the wall as it looked to him, before and after he banged his head against it, leaving oily spots he would touch later, touching himself, thinking of her beneath him, his own amazing country.
“All right. I’ll think of you too, Huddie. Horace. I guess this means we’re not going to be getting together.”
“For what?”
“For coffee, for lunch, for a walk.”
“You know if I see you in private I’m going to make love to you, and if I see you in public this is not going to be our little secret for very long. A blind man could see how much I love you. I gotta go, sweet.” His voice rough on that last word, and inside Elizabeth bright red streamers snap open and billow out in six-foot-long celebration. Inside Huddie, there is a quiet pinging, the warning sound of a failed alarm.
“Okay. I’ll see you. Let’s just get into our cars and go. I love you too. What’s your son’s name?”
He shook his head painfully, walking away. “Larry. I know you do.”
They started their cars simultaneously. Elizabeth left first, nosing past his nicer, newer car and shooting gravel onto his windshield.
Huddie’s wires cross every which way now. Sight, smell, taste, and touch enfold one another. Wet is like sweet is like heat is the aching pulse, is salt caking. Her smell is the smell of the unwrapped ready-to-rot figs, and for a lost half hour he scrunches thin lilac tissue paper around their small purple asses, tilting their stems so each seamed bottom is turned to its most seductive side. Carrot fronds are her hair; the slick celadon crack of a broken honeydew is hers and tastes cool, then warm. He puts his lips flat against tomatoes, plums, peaches, and nectarines before stacking them, and they ripen too fast, with hard-to-sell dark spots where his saliva has gathered and seeped in. Marshmallows, not even of interest since early Boy Scouts, roll out of their bags, pull his fingers into their sweet dusty white middles, pull themselves up around his fingertips. Half a bag. Twenty-three marshmallows. His fingers are stiff, powdered white, and his throat is glued shut, but the sugar thickly coating his lips and the drying tug from the roof of his mouth to the root of his tongue is so like a past moment between them he has to sit down behind the un-shelved goods, head resting on the giant cans of juice, sticky hands hard over sticky mouth, and cry without making a sound.
* * *
Three weeks later, after two embarrassing and badly choreographed visits to Nassau Produce, half hiding to watch Huddie sell happy women olive oils they never thought they wanted and milk that was twenty cents more than the supermarket’s, Elizabeth was finally naked, sitting up to admire the way Huddie undressed, laying his red tie on the seat of the armchair, unbuttoning his white shirt, hanging it over the chair back to avoid wrinkling, and then tugging hard on his belt, stomach sucked in and released, in that way that men don’t mind and women feel terrible about, and pulling off pants, briefs, and socks in one piece.
“When did you get so polished?”
He turned his head, reminding her that when he blushed the tips of his ears burned red as if the sun set through them, and like that she fell in love again. For the red-brown tips of his ears.
“I can’t stand standing around in my shorts and socks. Like an idiot.”
“No. You look beautiful.”
“Well. Now, you give me some room here, Elizabeth.”
Huddie splashed water over his face,