Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [71]
“How are your folks?”
“My father’s all right, re-remarried. My mother died nine years ago,” I say. I have considered myself an old orphan, not a heartwarming one, but an orphan nonetheless, ever since.
“I’m sorry. Did it get better between you?”
It got enormously better, as we both saw her death zooming up like the next and necessary exit. We entered her terminal phase like lovers in the shoddiest dime romance: reckless, breathless, selfless, you name it, we threw it out the window. We styled what was left of her blonde hair, and when that was pointless, I spent six hundred dollars I didn’t have on a platinum bob and an ash-blonde pixie cut and found myself defending the Gabor sisters against their bad press. We created the River Styx Beauty salon (my mother named it) and made up a gruesome menu of services sought by the decomposing but still-fashionable clients of our high camp owner—“That’s M’sieu Styx to you,” she’d snap at the other customers, waiting on our side of the bank.
“It got much better.” And then I got pregnant and had to miss her all over again, just as if she had been the best mother in the world. “And Gus?”
“Oh, baby. They’ll have to drive a stake through his heart.”
“That seems fair, for all the heartache he caused us,” I say, and then see that I shouldn’t have. No matter how old, no matter how bad, we are the only people who can genuinely and expansively bad-mouth our parents. Huddie shakes his head slowly, and I think that I have, with one careless, sincere remark, revealed all my enduring shortcomings.
“You still talk about fair. You’ve been in this world for forty years and talk about fair. I love that,” he says, as if I’ve shown him my childhood bear collection.
“I like the idea of fair. A little rough justice every now and then is appealing. Unlikely, but appealing.”
He tips his head, saluting my idea and me, and I sigh like an old, old woman, because the only choice is kissing or crying over what is behind us and I want to leap ahead without even knowing who he really is or how or if he’s leaving June or whether he will really love Max and do we now have to have real holidays instead of my casual improvisations?
I sigh and feel our first time, catching me in the chest. It is still my old stubbly couch and only that beneath my fingertips, but the dark plum silk of his cock unwrinkles in my hand, his flesh hardens, rising up, blindly seeking me. The sweet plump point of his nipple bites my palm. We had no words for our genitals then; we said “this” and “that” and “you” and “me,” and when I touched him just the way he wanted, all parts going the right way, his sweat spattering my face, he cried out, “Oh, yes, we’re in the zone now.” And we laughed so hard we had to stop for a few minutes, but that is where we were, and I began to say that too, and kept saying it, with other men, even though it was never as true and saying it brought me closer only to the past and never to the man right next to me. And with no vocabulary at all we had done everything we wanted to do, everything I want to do right now, although in my mind I airbrush us, pulling those young bodies out from our folding fleshy shells, even as I want to see him now, kiss the tender, pitiful changes time has left on that beautiful boy, that handsome young man.
“You could have us both.” I think I can say that. “Don’t give up what you have.” Life will be tolerable (it would have been even better than that if you’d never showed up with those ridiculous flowers and that gigantic car), and once a month it will be all-white gardens drenched in silver moonlight, sweet whole mouthfuls of revelation, a feeling of rightness in the passing essential