Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [64]
She sat down in Max’s recliner. “Yes. You want to hear ‘yes’? Yes.”
He unbuttoned his shirt. His skin was just like it was when he was little, white-gold over big blue veins snaking down his smooth shoulders and chest. The skin of martyred boy saints, luminous and sheer. His hands were just like Max’s used to be, long and square, with thick fingers. No stiffening grey tape over hands like old fruit, no bloody skin puddling around the entry point of the IV drip. Elizabeth had watched him sleep a dozen times, flat on his back in his nightshirt and his little white underpants, his briefs sliding down below his smooth stomach. His little penis and his pointy little hipbones made a triangle in his underpants, and she would watch for a few minutes as the little tent got bigger and then shifted away, until it was no different from looking at a girl.
“ ‘Going down on her is like licking honey off the back of the tiniest, rose-enameled demitasse spoon. Not a spoon, no spoon has that softness, that thick, soft, bite-me quality.’ ”
Elizabeth got up. “You read his journals.”
“Of course, whenever I could. I wanted to know, just like you did. I wanted to know what he thought of me, what happened between the two of you, what happened with my mother. You two had a very weird relationship.”
She stood so close to him she could feel his breath on her forehead. He backed up. “Yeah, we did,” Elizabeth said. “We had a very weird relationship for a very long time. He sort of ruined my life and I loved him very much and now he’s dead, and frankly, that’s okay. He’s not in pain anymore, and I am, so there you go. I took pretty good care of him, I think, and I would not have been able to go on doing that for another year or another ten years or even another month. And we were lucky enough to have an ending that worked out much better than the rest of our relationship, and that’s all I want to tell you. That’s it.”
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to go tonight if you don’t want to.” He put his hand to her wet face. Elizabeth turned away.
“Well, I do, actually. But not for a few minutes, Snurfel.”
“You remember that game.”
“You also had pretty weird relationships. Do you remember the time you hid all of your mother’s paints?”
He had hidden Greta’s paints to make her stop creating surreal canvases of ghostly Nazi uniforms and slaughtered animals, severed heads scattered in the wheat fields, torn grey uniforms flung into wormy apple trees. Greta asked him if he’d seen her paints, and when he shook his head, afraid to say the lie, she walked three miles into town with him and bought fifteen fat new tubes for herself and a leather-handled cherrywood box of twelve oil paints for him, with three soft brushes, its own smooth wood palette, and its own pretty little metal cup for turpentine. It was not what he wanted or needed, and he left it in the yard underneath a madder blue hydrangea, wet and warping through the whole of fall and winter.
Elizabeth made tea for them both and found Christmas cookies in an unopened tin. They remembered the make-believe game: Congo Banana and Little Chimp and Farfel, Furfel, and Snurfel, a family in which the father roared at the mother, the mother bit the babies, and the babies burned down the hut. Elizabeth was only allowed to be They, the force that moved the dolls (a Gumby, three small bears, and a G.I. Joe, which served as Congo Banana, the father) and rearranged furniture during scene changes.
They unpacked Max’s records of Gregorian chants and Yemenite rock and roll and plugged in the stereo. They poured a little rum into their cups and then poured some more into the teapot.
“You take off your shirt,” he said.
Elizabeth sighed and unbuttoned her shirt, thinking, This cannot be what he really wants, my hair’s sticking up all over the place, this bra is unraveling, I smell like Lysol.
“ ‘I love to kiss her breasts. They have the same faint, gold down that you see on those gorgeous Seattle peaches. I hope I die with that velvet feel on my lips.’ ”
Elizabeth lay down on the floor, and Dan lay down beside