by Amy Bloom
“Go home, Elizabeth.”
“I am going home, this was my last stop. What is wrong with you?”
Max kept going, bent over like some dark-jacketed horseshoe crab scuttling for retreat, for the absence of contact.
“I’m sorry I didn’t write. I just … I don’t know, I couldn’t. I’m really sorry. Max, I’m really sorry.” She yelled into the cold, garlicky air, startling two women halfway into Bagel Hut, friends of Margaret’s who waved and watched as Max walked faster. Max and Elizabeth stood half a block apart, on either side of the bank parking lot where he’d taught her to drive a stick-shift, and he shouted something the wind took away, and then he stopped.
It was tears. Tears had changed his face, as they were changing it right now, breaking down his flesh with little hammers until there was nothing left but watery mass and two red wells of misery.
“No one told you?”
“Max, I don’t talk to anyone anymore. Rachel’s in Kenya. Is it the boys?”
“Benjamin.”
They sat on the bench across from the parking lot and Max told Elizabeth about Benjamin, about Greta reluctantly, bravely taking him to his Cub Scout meeting, about the wet leaves and the teenage boy driving the van too fast around a narrow corner, one that had already been marked with a DANGEROUS CURVE sign. And the car partially crushed into the trees, leaving Greta enough room not only to move around but to open her door and walk out to greet the ambulance. And it looked like Benjie would recover, not even be scarred by all the glass, and then he got an infection.
“You know he had Addisons? It only seems that no one in my family has an immune system; Benjie really didn’t. The scratches from the accident killed him. I moved back in; I had to, since Greta was hardly leaving the house after that. She’s seeing a shrink now, the guy I used to see. The boys are in therapy, too. I don’t know, I think it helps Danny, but he’s the strong one anyway. Marc is just …” Max turned away. “The world is a terrible place, sweetheart.”
She touched the edge of his jacket for comfort, fingering the little cracks in the old leather.
“I’m here. If you need me, I’m here.”
“No, you’re not. You’re at college, leading a college girl life, and I am here, leading my life. Enough.” He stood up. Elizabeth sat like a lump, arms around her legs. She shook her head, wanting to tell him it looked like she would actually graduate in June, that she’d passed all her courses and turned in all her papers, despite occasional, profound lapses in concentration, two weeklong bouts of self-prescribed bed rest, and several trials of psychotropic medications that left her dry-mouthed and dizzy, something pale green and sticky leaking from her right breast.
She had watched Rachel take college the way she’d taken the road cross-country, carefully aggressive, hardly checking the map, since all the signs seemed so clear to her and fairly helpful. Elizabeth’s college life had been like her driving, too: she did it because she believed she had to (only one application, scribbled in midwinter, while standing in the post office), she never once intuited the right direction, and she understood that her safe arrival, at the end of these four years, owed more to other people’s skill and sensible swerving than to her own efforts.
“I am here for you, just like you were for me. I can help,” Elizabeth said, and cried into the sleeve of her sweater, relieved that she did not, in fact, know what to do, that that had not changed between them.
“Don’t cry,” he said, as kindly as he could. He would have been dimly pleased to hear she was graduating, dimly concerned about the blackouts, but she was alive and Ben was not and her breasts were nothing to him now, unless they could be traded, every moment of them, for him. He hugged her to be rid of her, looking forward to walking back alone, to weeping inside for Ben, to preparing for another evening of emotional heavy lifting and grey, pointless goodness, for Danny’s driving lesson, for Marc’s marathon TV-watching, for the balanced meal he cooked (not that Greta ate), for creating a father for his remaining, less loved boys, now desperately seeking their own lives, if only he will let them go.
And Elizabeth pressed in close, smelling his cigarette smoke and his Scotch and his Barbasol shaving cream, smells so woven into her sense of life that the sight of those striped cans on a supermarket shelf will make her eyes swell with tears for years to come, even after she forgets this conversation.
“Anything you want, Max,” she said, to reach into him without his really hearing, so he’d let her in without knowing he’d done so.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Go home, milacku.”
Margaret laid out daughter-of-the-bride clothes, layering them from the peach silk skirt to the white lace blouse, an ivory nylon slip and pale peach pantyhose on top of the pile. Peach peau de soie shoes faced the bed. Idiot-proof dressing. Elizabeth drank champagne while she showered, drank stingers while she dried her hair, put on socially appropriate makeup, although not the peach-toned stuff her mother had piled suggestively in front of the bathroom mirror. She simulated eye contact by looking at people’s foreheads and she fought back nausea when her mother promised to spend her life with Aaron Price, the psychiatrist she’d had in mind for Elizabeth in the bad old days. Elizabeth spent the rest of the afternoon and some part of the night in the ferocious blank haze that gives alcohol its good name.
Still drunk at dawn, she left her mother the nicest note she could and drove back to college. Instead of showing up for the graduation ceremony, she put on the peach skirt and the white lace blouse and got a job in a safe place.
What Else Can I Do?
Elizabeth had been sitting on her knees in the cookbook section, reading recipes for things like syllabub and poor mans tarts. She had been the assistant manager at Spivey’s Bookstore for the last three years, mostly because she would not become the manager. She didn’t become the manager, she didn’t become a teacher or a lawyer. No one ever suggested interior decorating or medicine or government, and Elizabeth did wonder, after each encouraging remark, what it was that made people think she should teach or litigate. It was probably not her interpersonal skills or her fine analytic mind. It was probably some sort of prematurely shriveled self-righteous obstinacy that people associated with their third-grade teacher or with a particularly vicious district attorney.
Elizabeth knew that the bad things that had happened to her were no worse than other people’s bad things; they were pretty small potatoes, in fact, compared to terminal cancer, death by famine, incest, quadriplegic paralysis. Nevertheless, whatever effort life required, whatever responsibility for joy was necessary to make it appear, Elizabeth didn’t have it. She was not drippingly miserable, she was not an affront to society. She paid her bills. She didn’t smell or piss on other people’s lawns. She suffered from the opposite of “phantom limb” syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not.
She thought about Max, but she didn’t write. She thought about Huddie when sweat trickled down her neck, when she heard the slap of sneakers on blacktop, when she woke up and when she couldn’t sleep. She stopped speaking to her mother, but not so her mother noticed. She didn’t look for ways to improve herself. She didn’t arrange to have her mail forwarded when she moved. She had been in her latest apartment for six months and hadn’t cleaned it. She couldn’t, really; she didn’t own a broom or a mop or even a bottle of Windex anymore, and she knew what Margaret would say about that. It’s a bad sign.
Every Friday, Elizabeth put out two cartons of juice and a bag of half-price bagels for the two crazy men who came through Spivey’s back alley every afternoon, and Peter, her boss, who loved her, watched and thought, Feed me. They will always be hungry.
Cupid and Psyche were Elizabeth’s favorite people. Socially mismatched, badly dressed, unprepared for the climate and the place in the way that marks the truly poor and the truly crazy, the two men spent most of their days by the concrete city fountain, a grey grim wedding cake of previous municipal good times, now barely trickling even in
July and August, not even damp in spring and fall. The younger man, blond and slim, looked normal at a distance. Elizabeth had once come closer, pretending to catch a bus, and saw that he had a twenty-foot normal zone. Closer than that, you saw the heels run down to nothing on laceless wingtips, the pink plastic belt on the designer jeans, and the missing splotch of material on the right shoulder of his light blue button-down shirt. You saw his face, the features misaligned because no linked thoughts or feelings molded them. The older man was an obvious social problem, barely welcome at Dunkin’ Donuts and only briefly, and only when the afternoon-shift manager felt good. He bought a dozen doughnuts at a time, never squeezing or sniffing for freshness, just struggling with the coins and crumpled bills stuffed in the back pocket of his organically spattered black pants, as wide and swaying as a Victorian skirt, barely hanging on beneath the huge doughy belly and no visible underwear. His skin was so white and his hair so black and wiry that everyone could study each individual curl around his navel. No one looked too long; eye contact could lead to conversation, and although he smiled gamely, hoping to make friends, he had too few teeth and too many things snapping and shifting in his head to have the kind of conversation people wanted to have as they shuffled through the doughnut shop, getting on with their day. But he loved the young man.
They sat on the lowest tier of the fountain, and when the sun began to drop, the fat man made a pillow of some clothes from his bag and the young man stretched out. In the damp heat, he fanned the young man for hours at a time, using a folded newspaper. Occasionally he changed hands, and sometimes he’d break rhythm to swat a fly or chase some early-evening mosquitoes. He fanned him graciously and steadily, with no unsettling changes of pace or sighs of fatigue, fanned him until it was dark, until Elizabeth saw fireflies and the black outline of the fat man’s back. Then he woke his friend, very slowly and gently, a delicate, indulgent touch, and they went back through the alley.
Peter stepped over her knees ostentatiously. “Phone.”
Peter had waited almost a year before asking Elizabeth out the first time. He asked again, after another year, in such a careful, casually delicate way that Elizabeth only said “No, thank you,” fearing that any further remarks would show that she understood exactly what it had cost him to ask. For the past few months they’d eaten lunch together, standing up in the stockroom, putting their coffees near books they preferred not to sell, and avoiding all personal remarks (Peter lost most of his hair, suddenly, without the adjustment period of a receding hairline or widening bald spot; Elizabeth’s clothes, clean but unironed, were alternately too big or too small; she didn’t seem to know what size she was). They never made the kind of affectionate, scolding remarks that other people made to them all the time. All they offered was respect for each other’s stunning haplessness. Out of consideration, they continued to act as if the other person had not destroyed the friendship.
“It’s me,” said Rachel.
“Are you all right?” Elizabeth would have driven all night for Rachel, offered her a kidney, shot her captors and coached her through labor, but she’d only called twice since Rachel came back from Kenya three years ago; Rachel didn’t have time for a bad friend, and Elizabeth couldn’t do any better.
“I’m fine.” Rachel was always fine. “I thought you’d want to know Max is in the hospital. My hospital. Triple bypass. In his condition, that’s not so good. Cabbage.”
Rachel was in pediatric oncology now. She knew what was good and not so good, medically speaking.
“Oh my God. He’s a cabbage?”
“No, listen to me. Coronary artery bypass graft surgery. That’s just what they call it. What’s new with you?”
Rachel’s private name for Elizabeth, the name she uttered only in her head, was Slug. And when Rachel’s heart was being trampled by the steel-capped boots of her latest snake-hipped, mean-hearted girlfriend, she thought it might not be so bad to be Slug, not terrific to be a burnout at twenty-four, but not so bad to be comfortably buried in a life of books and platonic affection.
“But he’s okay? Is Greta with him? Who told you?”
“Sam Lieb had him in ninth grade, too. He saw his name on the patient list, sweetie. So I checked. Listen, I gotta go. He’s not good but he’s not dead. I heard they split up.” There were loudspeaker voices in the background. “Have to go now. Bye, sweetie.”
Elizabeth left Spivey’s and drove the four hours to Great Neck. She had an extra-large, sturdy paper cup of coffee, two Heath bars, and forty bucks, which blocked the onset of really bad feelings. She parked behind what used to be Squire’s Movie Theater, looking for Bee’s Corseterie, and saw it was now a North Shore version of the Empress Josephine’s silk-paneled dressing rooms. The new owners, who would not have hired the original Bee, served tea in china cups and concealed their cash register behind a large folding screen laminated with scenes from the Rape of the Sabine Women. Elizabeth crept along the edges of the store, avoiding the four lion-maned salesgirls manning their stations in sheer silk blouses and long slit suede skirts, bits of fancy bra and flower-trimmed garter aggressively displayed above and below.
Did women really wear this stuff? Maybe he would have loved it, Elizabeth thought, fingering the chiffon-and-satin tap pants. I could have given him six years of leopard-skin bustiers and push-up bras and black silk stockings held up with black satin rosettes. I could have pleased him, I wasn’t busy. And if I had, I could just let him die now, I wouldn’t even have to send flowers.
The salesgirls were not unused to gloomy young women picking up silky items in despair, putting them aside, and picking them up again, eyeing red satin panties and hand-embroidered nightgowns with reluctant, embarrassed hope. Even the stupidest salesgirl knew that underwear, even underwear dotted with seed pearls and edged with slender pink ribbons through the inch-wide lace trim, didn’t really make a difference. Still, they watched Elizabeth, and the youngest, newest salesgirl was determined to sell her something. She showed Elizabeth things young women wear to please young men, virginal gowns in transparent white cotton, strips of pink satin cut for small breasts and long, hard thighs.
“No,” she said. “It’s not what I’m looking for. My boyfriend’s not this type.” Elizabeth smiled, thinking of what type Max had been, and the salesgirl decided she’d been mistaken, that this was not another girl in love with the wrong guy.
“Okay, what type is he?”
“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 patc
hed 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.
