Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [65]
“I wished he would die, sometimes. He caused my mother such pain.” Dan laughed. “It was a two-way street, I guess. Is this okay?” he asked, one hand skimming over the places Max wrote about.
“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Yes.”
Like tired babies, like collapsing balloons, they lay flip-flopped over each other, ignoring belt buckles digging into soft parts, ignoring the impulse toward sex that death brings out in people even more ill-suited than Dan and Elizabeth.
“Good night, you banana,” Elizabeth said, folding up the rug corner with his shirt to make a pillow for him.
“Good night, Lizzie. Dobrounuts. Thank you.” He threw both arms over the shirt and the rug and closed his eyes.
Elizabeth kissed his forehead and took her bag out to the car. She came back for her jacket and put the apartment keys on the table and kissed him again, as if he were the Max she’d never met.
PART THREE
The Greatest of These Is Love
I know he’s on the road. I feel him coming. I don’t know when or why or what he’ll expect my house to be. Funny enough to me that it’s my house. That I own a house. Safely in the middle of the middle block, and the only thing that stands out is the wild army of tulip trees in the front yard. I never even thought about making this place interesting. It is comfortable, it is normal; it lies on the lower end of the neighborhood spectrum, true, but in a way that arouses tolerance, not disgust. I am not like the Gilroys, who don’t water, and I am not like the Boenches, who have built a three-car garage and subtly but definitely offend in the other direction.
When he gets here, he’ll try to figure out which house is mine (the letters have fallen off the mailbox), and as he is driving slowly by, he’ll see Max on the lawn, turning cartwheels.
Huddie sits in his car, wondering where to park, and sees a young white boy on the lawn turning cartwheels, and he knows—the hair, something in the face—the boy is Elizabeth’s. And queer. He can see the boy’s queerness from two houses down. Jesus, he thinks, just get him a tutu. Huddie reaches for the bouquet, studying him. Once he’s with Elizabeth, been invited into her house, he’ll have to pretend not to see the narrow, puffed chest and the thin shivery shoulders. Boy life will be a horror for this child, and some man will have to take up for him. A mother will not be enough. You’d have to make him a faggot to reckon with, a queer you’d think twice about bothering, even on a hot, dull evening.
Huddie climbs out of the car slowly, flowers first, wishing he weighed fifty pounds less, feeling like a beached black whale in the eyes of this very white, very thin kid. The boy averts his eyes from Huddie and goes right to the flowers, apparently approving. Huddie would throw them away if the boy hadn’t seen them already; how could he have brought something so obvious, so desperate? He knows enough about wine to have chosen something impressive. One red, one white, maybe two big-bowled glasses. He could have brought her interesting cheeses from local farms, seven different kinds of crackers nestled on damask in one of the big willow baskets he now charges fifty dollars for. These flowers are bleeding away their purple foolishness, wetting the pretty tissue, the bottom of it limp, falling away in his hand.
The huge bouquet of lilac and purple irises is visible all the way from my living room window. There must be four dozen flowers in all that pink tissue. It’s the Kilimanjaro of bouquets. He’s studying my child. Max bangs on the window for my attention, and when our eyes meet, he stretches up his skinny arms and puffs out his chest. Even as he goes into his backward walkover, he has the sweet obsessive look of a leaping cat, and a cat’s light slant eyes. His legs spring out supple and wide as a wishbone beneath baggy grey shorts that slide up his smooth thighs, revealing his underwear. He wears inconspicuous boy clothes—a dirty T-shirt, ratty sneakers on bare dirty legs—but they’re useless as disguise when he’s shrugging his shoulders