Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [56]
Fourteen years.
“Ohh, it’s cold, you shit. Horace, you shit. If we weren’t here, drinking motel water, what would you want?”
Huddie picked up his watch, checked, and put it down. “To drink? V8 juice, maybe grapefruit.”
“And to eat?”
“Is this the Glamour Quiz for Lovers?” June loved magazine tests and tore them out to answer right before bed. Tests for love, for budget balancing, for keeping your temper, for managing your in-laws. He answered every question of every test honestly, waiting for the terrible truth to hit June as she sat propped up on three lace pillows, totting up the scores, waiting to be touched.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get to cook for you. Tell me.”
“Right now? A real Caesar salad, lots of egg, homemade croutons, heavy on the garlic. Really green olive oil. I’d cover you with leaves and eat it right off you. You salad bowl, you.” He pushed June out of his mind; this little bit of time with Elizabeth would be lost to him if he waited for June to take off on her own.
He lay down again, setting the watch face toward him, and brought June back, waiting in the kitchen. He put his face deep into Elizabeth and willed his wife always safe and far away.
Elizabeth bit the soft flesh above his narrow hips. Maybe, without either of them noticing, without doing harm to June or Larry, she could mark him.
“Huddie, you’re going to be a fat old man, you know that? You foodaholic. Look at that gleam in your eye, homemade croutons. We’ll end up two big porkers together. ‘Come closer, my darling, closer.’ ‘I’m trying, sweetheart, I’m trying.’ ”
Huddie smiled and was stricken, not wanting to say that he did worry about his weight and every time he looked at his father’s gut pushing wide black diamonds between his shirt buttons, he promised not to sample the triple crème cheeses, not to kick June out of the kitchen anymore, not to let the Belgian-chocolate sales rep leave him a two-pound gift box every six weeks. And as he looked to change the subject, bee stings of pure happiness fired up the back of his neck and shoulders. She saw them together, together in a who-cares, fat and happy middle age. Horace and Elizabeth, rocking, creaking in contentment on the front porch of a house near no one they’ve ever known.
She laid her white hand in the middle of his chest, scarless, dark mahogany, nothing like Max’s, as nothing in the room was like anyplace she’d been lately. No real harm could come to you in a motel room, it seemed. The minute you hit the road, picked up a phone, found out that you’d been found out, all hell might break loose, but right then, between the see-through towels and the stiff green blankets, you were held in the safe, silent wall of the unborn.
“I’m starting to like motels,” Elizabeth said, sliding his watch under her pillow.
Huddie put his hand over hers and the watch back on the nightstand. “I hate them. Except for this.” He sighed and put his head on her back, smoother than the sheet. “I wish I had another life, a whole second life, for us.” He brushed his lips over her ass.
“You’d get tired of me.”
“I wouldn’t mind finding that out for myself.”
“This way we can keep the romance. You know, years longer than other people.”
He lifted his head and pulled the sheet up to his shoulders, unbearably tired, filled with thoughts of June and Larry and everything he would lose and everything he had lost just in this hour, and she slid her fingers down his neck, flicking sweat off his chest. Who had left such