Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [72]
“What are you thinking, Horace?”
“Nothing.”
“You lying jellybean.”
“You’re right. I won’t tell you what I’m thinking.” And he can’t. Pictures of June, tenderly and efficiently pressing her weight on his unbendable leg two hundred times a day until he regained use of his knee; in labor with Larry, her wet face, stunned and determined; Larry as a small boy, tearing through spangled wrapping at Christmas, glitter sticking to his curls; June’s appendectomy and most of the choir crowding into her room afterwards, Rosa Grant’s flowered straw hat perched on the IV, pink silk ribbons fluttering in front of the vent; six thousand fans, standing for that last basket; June walking the floor with colicky Larry, milk plastering her red chiffon don’t-forget-your-husband nightgown to her breasts; flashes of white and black women’s bare behinds bouncing in front of him in various motel rooms, their cheeks knotting and opening, the tiny soft arrowhead of hair beneath them; women flipping over in his hands like fresh fish, their breasts swinging and sliding in silky blue-white sacks up to their shoulders, or three shades of brown in sweet handfuls coming to rest on either side of a narrow chest, cocoa pools around purple nipples and stretch marks like the veins of fall leaves, every shape beautiful, calling for his mouth, all of them gone forever.
He smiles. “I’m here. Right here.”
“No matter what?”
“Well. That’s a lot of ground. Yes, no matter what. No one’s going to die from this. And I won’t have to shuffle off this mortal coil knowing I lived the wrong life.”
He takes my hand. “And what’re you thinking? Elizabeth?”
“Nothing.”
“You lying hound.”
“Yup. And I won’t tell you.” And I cant: pictures of him trembling over me a million years ago; of Max’s face—the first Max—peevish and remorseful in the face of death; the faint, nameless image of my Max’s father, blond and tall, foolish but not unkind and not unattractive in his uniform, in bed for twenty-four hours straight until he shipped out, as I hoped he would, and now I watch my son for signs of stupidity and wanderlust; Margaret and Sol reading silently after I’d gone to bed and come out again to see what grown-ups did—“Nothing,” my mother said, “we do nothing”; my easy cloistered evenings, doing laundry, making lunch, cutting coupons, playing with Maxie and his Claudette Colbert paper dolls, of which Huddie will surely disapprove, and they will fight and Max will weep and Huddie will turn to dark unreadable stone, and long for the sensible ease of June and the pleasant routine of childless, healthy middle age. And I surely cannot tell him that I’m no more good for me or for him than I ever was, that I will disappoint and confuse him, that I’ve been alone my whole life, and that it may really be too hard and too late, not even desirable, after such long, familiar cold, to be known, and heard, and seen.
“It’s late,” I say.
“It’s a long drive,” he says.
If this were really the end, if this were only my story, I would tell you everything.
Acknowledgments
I have had the assistance and wisdom of my friends the Reverend Robert Thompson and Nadine Abraham-Thompson, the linguistic help of Josie Zelinka, and the medical insight of Dr. Ron Nudel.
I am grateful to my friend and agent, Phyllis Wender, who knows good from bad and right from wrong and helps me navigate the minefields and mousetraps of the literary world.
I have been lucky in my Random House editor, Kate Medina, a class act, a good captain, and such a mixture of will and savvy that if the act of Creation had been left: to her, our world would have been finished in only four days, and with elegance.
My friends and family have provided kind criticism, ungrudging and