Love Invents Us (15 page)

“Conservative. Like a father.” Like a father, if you wanted a life on talk shows.

“Your boyfriend is like my dad?” The salesgirl took a step back, clutching at the edge of a bleached pine cabinet filled with soft pastel undershirts, apparently taken off the backs of rich little girls.

“Sorry, I don’t even know your father,” Elizabeth said, very sorry that she was wasting Max’s last hours on this blonde moron. “I just know—I just know this guy. Something outrageous, okay? Let’s find something completely outrageous. Something to bring the dead back to life.” The salesgirl was not happy, but she worked on commission. She helped Elizabeth find everything she wanted.

Elizabeth buttoned up her old raincoat in the hospital parking lot and went through reception. She passed two Candy Stripe girls, dark as cherrywood, with organza bows clustered high and bright atop their small sleek heads, like tribal headdresses from Woolworth’s. The nurse at the station stepped in front of her, but Elizabeth said she was Max’s niece and kept going. Pat O’Donnell was the daughter of Elizabeth’s eighth-grade English teacher; she had her father’s pre-ulcerous stomach and twenty years of nursing, and she knew that wasn’t a niece, not with those heartsick eyes, but she didn’t care. Might be interesting when the wife showed up.

Max lay in bed, his head propped up by two slippery hospital pillows, his hair a greasy spray of grey spikes. They had taken the tubes out of his nose but left two still winding down into his chest and another one connecting his left arm to a bulging, transparent drip bag. He looked like the Tin Woodsman, poorly patched and strapped together, wandering the cold world over for a heart. Elizabeth’s own heart beat between her ears, blood pooling in her veins.

“You’re here,” Max whispered.

Tears floated on the inside-out red edges of his eyes, and the visit Elizabeth had imagined dissolved. She would not do a quick and funny strip for him, dropping one shoulder of her trenchcoat to reveal her black lace bra. The sight of her white skin and tight black garters would not raise him off the bed. Scented talc gleaming between her breasts and thighs would not steady his breathing. He was going to die because she had been selfish and stupid and childish. He was going to die because she hadn’t answered his letters. I have to go right now, she thought.

Max’s hands lay folded on his chest.
“Je ne regrette, je ne regrette, non, je ne regrette rien
,” he sang out hoarsely in cartoon French.

“Peter, this is Elizabeth. I need some sick leave or vacation, whatever. Time off.”

“All right. Why?”

“My father’s very sick. I think he’s dying.”

“Jesus. Your father? I’m sorry. Are you going to stay with him until … I mean, for a few weeks?”

“I don’t know. I have to take care of him. I have to nurse him.”

“Of course. You know, my mother died of cancer five years ago. Do what you have to do. I can hold the job for at least three months.”

“Fine. Okay. I’ll call you soon. Thanks.” I should have gone out with you. I should be buying animal-shaped mugs and a butcher-block kitchen table, and I should be going in some
other direction. I am not old enough for rubber sheets and bedsores and that smell which is as recognizable as reveille.

The backseat was layered with jeans and cotton underpants and all of Spivey’s healthy-heart cookbooks and a shopping bag spilling new shampoo, new soap, two kinds of mouthwash and a sponge still in its natural loofah shape. Elizabeth had shopped like she was sending herself to camp. Camp Max, the special endless summer for wayward girls. She would be with him, in some small airless place, until he died or recovered or she killed him. She had a full tank of gas, she had her coffee, her candy, and enough cash. The radio was on and the windows were cracked open.

“Play ‘Woolly Bully,’ ” said the tired Jersey voice. A housewife/mother voice, a three glasses of canned juice, three bowls of leftover Cheerios floating in thin, sweet milk by 7:25 a.m. voice. Screaming at the kids to remember their books, remember their notes, remember not to let the cat out. Kisses to remind them that she screams only because she loves them, wants them to succeed, wants them to be somebody. And then there is nobody home until three. A no-power, no-money voice.

“Okay,” said the flat smirky deejay. “And do
you
have a woolly bully, ma’am?” Like he’s behind her in the supermarket, laughing at her fat ass and curlers and the bent-in backs of her loafers.

“Oh yeah, honey. I did used to have one … but I divorced him.”

She’d fooled them both, and the deejay laughed with Elizabeth, in the pleasure of acknowledging grace and steel where
they hadn’t seen it. Maybe he, like Elizabeth, imagined the caller as a mother, imagined the watery orange juice coming with the kind of mothering you never stop trying to get, or get away from.

“Lady, you can call me anytime.”

“Likewise,” the woman said. “So, put on my man, Sam the Sham,” she said.

Elizabeth sang along. She began a list with her right hand.

In his hospital room, newspapers beginning to pile up by the bed, roses wilting on rubbery stems, Max made his offer.

“If you come stay with me for a little, you might get to watch me die. Or kill me at your leisure. Could you stick around?”

Elizabeth wheeled him to the car, sliding him into the backseat. Two orderlies stood by as if to help, but Elizabeth managed to bang Max’s head against the car door and they didn’t move.

“I want you to live, Max.” She buckled his seat belt.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he said, “I always try to give you what you want.”

“No. You gave me what you wanted me to have. I’m not arguing with you. I want you to live.”

“I don’t think so, baby.”

Elizabeth put her face an inch from Max’s ear and spoke very softly and clearly.

“You better fucking live. If you don’t make up your mind to live, I’m going to camp in your goddamned room and make sure you get intravenous nourishment and no painkiller. Okay? You better fucking live.”

“E
lizabeth, if you could get Max out of the place for a few hours, I could fix it up a bit.”

“Mother, he hates to go out. Why can’t you do what you’re going to do while he’s here?”

“I’m sorry, old thing. I simply can’t.”

Elizabeth understood that it wasn’t a problem of logistics. Margaret could not make beauty in the presence of death. Elizabeth was only getting through the year by keeping her eyes closed. She hadn’t looked in a mirror or even directly into Max’s face for weeks. Why should Margaret step up to unnecessary pain?

“All right,” Elizabeth said, “we’ll go out to Mad Nan’s Orchards and get some apples and feed the ducks. You know, I can’t have him out for more than two and a half, three hours. Is that enough?”

“Fine. Call me when you’re about to get your car.”

“Mother, we don’t need split-second timing for this. It’s not a military maneuver, for Christ’s sake.”

“I am coming with three assistants and a van. I am going to do everything but paint, and I promise not to rearrange his
books or records. I don’t think Max would like to feel that I’m doing him a large favor, do you? I do think he can tolerate the idea that your mother is coming in to tidy things up a little, and to make her daughter’s life more pleasant. All right?”

“All right. Jesus, Margaret, what a business. But thank you. What day?”

“Go for a spin on Thursday. That gives me four days to set things up and get these blighters moving.”

“You do that, you get those blighters moving. Thank you.” Elizabeth put down the phone. Was God obliged to close one big window in order to crack open this ridiculously tiny door?

Elizabeth used to stand in the kitchen of her parents’ house, before Margaret had her downtown office, listening to her mother do business in that same happy, crisp, pugnacious voice. Four months ago, standing in Max’s small, dirty kitchen, helping bag chicken breasts and turkeyburgers, her mother tried again.

She asked Elizabeth to talk to her husband’s partner.

Elizabeth said, “Rachel”—now that Rachel was a doctor, Margaret no longer flinched when she was mentioned—“says Zoltow’s very friendly with his female patients, friendly to the point of lawsuit.” She slid two skinless chicken breasts onto a plate of Mrs. Dash and flipped them over.

“I’m sure Aaron could suggest someone else, then. A woman.”

“Why would I go?”

“This is no way to live.” Margaret waved her small hand around the three crowded rooms, the couch covered with blankets and Elizabeth’s underwear, the dying plants, the cornucopia of medications spilled across the kitchen table.
“You’re twenty-four. Why are you doing this? Do tell me. I would like to know.”

“He’s going to die, and he was there for me when I needed him. It’s all right. It won’t take that long.”

Margaret nodded. Considering they’d never discussed Elizabeth’s relationship with Max and that Margaret never allowed herself to think anything untoward about his constant and fatherly affection for her daughter, grateful that some paternal figure had kept his hand in, it was amazing how quickly she understood. “Nothing I can say, then? Trip to Europe, that sort of thing?”

Elizabeth shook her head and put her hand out to wipe crumbs off the counter. If she had known that her mother would never again have money to spare, she might have said yes and seen Paris.

Margaret caught her by the wrist. She blinked hard and did not cry and did not say, Is your life so terrible that you prefer this? She pulled Elizabeth’s hand so close Elizabeth could feel her mother’s warm breath on her palm. Margaret said, “You need a manicure,” and pulled out a fresh bottle of Cherries in the Snow and an orange stick.

“Max, on Thursday my mother’s coming to do a little housecleaning for us and hang a few pictures.”

Max opened his eyes, his hair sticking up all over his head, like a great grey baby.

“Pictures? I can’t wait. The entire history of the Empire, in jewel tones, right here in my boudoir. Tell her thanks.”

“I did.”

He closed his eyes again, tugging the comforter up over his
shoulders. When he was a little boy, he loved and imitated his stepfathers Irish tenor, the only sweet sound in a house of Mississippi ululation and breaking glass. “’Twas on the Isle of Capri that I met her, something something a thin golden ring on her finger, ’twas good-bye on the Isle of Capri.” The edge of the comforter poked his leaking right eye. He pulled it beneath his chin, pretended to sleep, and slept.

He woke up to find Elizabeth in his mother’s pale blue velvet cloche and the pale blue wool peplum jacket she’d worn to demonstrate sobriety, and a withered white garter belt, with its rusty metal clasps swinging back and forth over Elizabeth’s cotton panties. She wore her own basketball sneakers and white socks.

“Nice, huh?”

“Very. Interesting. Who are you?”

“Your mother? I couldn’t get into the skirt. She must have been tiny.”

“She was small. You’re quite a bit taller. Bigger-boned, I’d say.” He might be old, he might be dying, he might be every kind of fool, as his history demonstrated, but he had never told a woman she was fatter than another woman.

“I didn’t know you had all these women’s clothes. Fetish?” Elizabeth perched on the end of the couch.

“I guess. I never wanted to throw out all my mother’s stuff, so I just threw it into my footlocker and took it with me. I don’t think I’ve opened it in twenty years.”

“How’d she die?”

“Cirrhosis. A very ugly way to die, I hear. I wasn’t there.”

Elizabeth put the back of her hand to her forehead, staggered around the couch, and collapsed in front of Max.

“I think I would have made a great Camille.”

“Probably. Except for your robust good health. And your sneakers.”

“I do love you. Was your mother kind of a party girl?”

“She liked a good time. She drank quite a bit, she had a lot of boyfriends between husbands. Or so it seemed to me, when I was a boy. Was there anything you wanted in there?”

Elizabeth pulled out a crumbling straw hat with chipped flocked velvet cherries on the brim.

“Hey, a come-fuck-me hat. There have to be shoes to match.”

Max closed his eyes.

“Did I offend you? I’m sorry.”

“You meant to offend me. This isn’t much of a sport, sweetheart. Getting at me is shooting fish in a barrel.”

“But if you really want the fish shot, what better arrangement?” She took off the cloche and the jacket and put on the hat. She took off her sneakers and socks. She put a wide elastic belt, a cluster of plastic cherries concealing the clasp, around her waist and kicked off her underpants.

“What do you want from me?” he said.

“I don’t know. You don’t have any money, what with Greta’s house and Greta’s shrink and Danny’s darkroom and Marc’s whatever. Why do we send Marc money?”

“Because he is getting a small design business off the ground in Lyons and he needs some start-up capital.”

Elizabeth lay down on the floor beside the couch, her breasts brushing Max’s fingertips. He pulled his hand up to his chest.

“Yeah. And because you feel guilty.”

“And because I feel guilty.”

“Don’t you feel guilty toward me?”

“You know I do.”

“This is a pretty funny apology, right? Come nurse me through this illness and let me try to make it up to you.”

“I am sorry, Elizabeth. You were very kind to come take care of me. I know I loved you too much and too soon.”

“The fuck you did.” Elizabeth took his hand and pressed his palm over her breast. She sat up over him, her knees on either side of his chest.

“Touch me. Touch me now.”

Max put his hands down, resting them on her cold heels.

“Now you don’t want to?”

“I’m tired.”

“You’re scared.”

“I’m scared because I don’t know what you want. You can’t want me.”

“Why not? And if I don’t really want you—I mean, you’re right, I don’t—maybe I want something from you.”

“I’m really tired.”

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Louisa.”