The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “He used to take long walks in just his shirtsleeves,” was her answer to my unasked question.

  “He couldn’t have known.” I pictured poor Professor Calhoun being taken in a carriage down to the stables, taking the common cure for his consumption: hot blood sipped from a tin cup. I pictured the doctors and their illusionist devices, their purges and plasters. I’m sure bedbound Calhoun looked up at his young wife and despised himself for his deadly cold-weather walks, and for dying so quickly and losing so many days lit by the lantern of her face. We waste so much time within ourselves. Alice’s hand must have smoothed the hair on his brow as he breathed through his rough lungs. The second man to die before her eyes.

  “The saddest part is I have no child to remember him by,” she told me. “I was ready to leave Seattle. Mother was ready, too.”

  “Did you miss your old life here?”

  Something odd appeared in her eyes. She stubbed out her cigarette. “It went out a while ago, and I’ve been so boring. Thank you for the tea.” Alice stood up and gathered her A&P bag and parasol. “I must be going.”

  One minute later, she had left my life forever.

  I mean, such were the thoughts in my head as it spun in panicked circles, trying to find some way to stop her. Alice was standing oddly, looking at the shadows of the people passing by. A particular profile now appeared against the curtain; a man in an odd hat. Alice seemed rapt. I was speaking this whole time, excusing my presence in her day, mentioning the coming chill outdoors, or the police scene she might want to avoid, anything to keep her there, but something kept her there already, and it had nothing to do with me. She was not even listening to me. Then, carefully, she slid the curtain back on the rod and daylight dissolved her face.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She smiled at the view before her; it was just a young man in an old-fashioned derby, chatting up a threesome of “hello girls” coming home from the phone exchange. She turned from that ordinary scene of youth.

  “The world’s haunted,” she said, and winked at me mischievously. “Don’t you think?” Laughter, more laughter; I loved her. She produced a glove and spread her fingers to put it on. “You don’t have to sputter. You can see me again if you want to. Except you’ve been rude.”

  “What? Really?”

  Cleverness was on her face. “Well, what’s my name?”

  “Alice.”

  That startled her and I realized my mistake at once, but it was too late. She studied me, saying, “I was going to say you’d never asked, but … now how did you know that?”

  “You said your husband called you Alice.”

  She blinked. I sat in that anxious silence like a man in a waiting room, hoping he will be received into the house. It took only a moment for the answer: “Oh. And what do they call you?”

  We were assaulted at that moment by the very “hello girls” whose shadows had played before my Alice’s eyes so intriguingly a moment before; now, having escaped the masher on the street, they were babbling and laughing and full of the kind of life I don’t remember having at their age. I might have been annoyed by their noise, but they bought me a little time with their loud stories. Some murderer; I had devised no alibi, no alias. Alice seemed irritated and captivated by their dither over ribbons and diets, but they finally settled their identical-shirtwaists-and-skirts into a booth and quieted over the menu. And that supposed stranger, my life’s love, turned her eyes again to mine.

  “I’m Asgar. Asgar Van Daler.”

  She laughed impolitely, then sobered as she slipped a card into my hand: Alice Levy Calhoun. “Goodbye, Asgar,” she said, then turned to leave.

  “Goodbye, Alice.”

  The door caught the sunlight as it opened, blinding me in a flash, and she vanished, leaving the room just as it had been before, scented with sassafras and hair tonic. But everything was different in me, because not only had I found my beautiful, wandering Jewess at last, but now I could see her again and again for as many days as I might wish—my wild heart played this into infinity—and she would never know that I was the same monster who’d loved her so badly before.

  As for that new identity, Asgar Van Daler. Well, I was no stranger to playing a part that did not belong to me. A father, for instance, my young father standing fresh and smiling in the pleasure gardens of his youth, watching the girls and tossing rye bread to the swans, my Danish father in those happy years before he changed his name. Asgar Van Daler. This inheritance was always mine to claim. After all, I do live life as backwards as a saint; like all the beatified, I consider it my duty to restore the world its losses.

  I was at last the luckiest man alive. For who else in the history of time has ever had this opportunity: a second chance at love? It was like something from an Arabian tale; masked by my body, I could approach my old love—who would never accept me if she knew who I was—and I could try again. Unrecognized, better than before, I could use everything I knew to win her. Her card said she was in on Wednesdays and Fridays, and how endless the hours seemed until that Wednesday. This time, it would be different. This time, I would make her love me.

  The address on Widow Alice’s card was easy to find but a bit of a shock. She told me about her family’s Klondike wealth, but I had not expected a two-story mansion on Van Ness, especially one so bedizened with ornament. It was a sort of collection of vertical forms, all white, tied with frippery and bows at every quoin and window, and capped with what architects inaccurately call a “belvedere.” I stood hat in hand on the street for a little while; I thought I had seen every side of my old Alice, and that nothing could surprise me, but something about her house saddened me. Was this really what a rich Alice would buy? I’m not a snob, but I’d believed our home together in South Park would have seemed like a lost dreamland to her, created by my grandfather in that old elegance of early San Francisco that we have never seen again. A house of stone and modest curves. I could not imagine my Alice living like a Jonah in the belly of this whale. I had thought that, like the daughter of an impoverished duchess, she would work to buy back what had been pawned in childhood: the silver, the settings, the art. That, like any of us with a broken life, she would try to resurrect the dead.

  I had to search among the medieval carvings of the door to find the electric bell—there it was, posing as a saint’s head. After a bit of waiting, a stout Negress appeared with a face as wide open as someone who has just been slapped.

  “Yes?”

  “Is the widow in?”

  “The who?”

  “The widow.”

  She told me to wait and then left me alone in the hall. I sat on the bench, quickly going through the card receiver to see who had been there before me—some names of Jewish women, nothing more. So at least I would not sit on a chair recently warmed by some other gentlemen, handsomer, richer, and more easily loved. I at least had this advantage. Then I had the luxury of looking around the place; it was calmer on the inside, although strangely at war with itself; old, ratty books had been crammed behind glass-fronted cabinets, and though the chandelier above me was clearly electric, the hall was lighted (extraordinary, now that I look back on it) by rose-colored kerosene lamps. The maid came back through a different door and stared at me, motioning for me to enter. I smiled and nodded.

  With the quick little motions of the body that we all learn in order to make ourselves as handsome as we can, I went over my posture, my cuffs, my coat and shoes, and entered the parlor to find the second shock of the day. There, sitting in a chair with a bit of lace pinned to her head, was my first lover, Widow Levy.

  “Have you come from the club?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I told them I’d only pay half the dues. I don’t play tennis, for heaven’s sake, or swim. Can you imagine? Old ladies bobbing about like pickles in a barrel. I only go to monthly dinners and I only eat the soup and fish.”

  “I’m not from the club.”

  Mrs. Levy smiled slyly and touc
hed a finger to her cheek. “It’s too bad. They need more handsome young men like you.”

  She was old. Her hair was quite white and done up high on her head in rich curls, some of which were whiter than others and surely false, and over this was pinned the piece of antique lace that ladies wore to signal they had retired from the trials of beauty. She wore no corset, either, and her bodice flounced generously to cover a frame much altered from the one I’d held in the garden so many moonlit nights ago. She clearly enjoyed the privileges of age and now ate what she desired without a worry. A high pearled collar covered her neck, and over it fell two fleshy lappets; her earlobes, as well, drooped with heavy jewelry like an African queen’s. Her face was broader than I’d remembered, colored an artificial pink, perhaps merely from habit, her eyes hard and dark, her lips so thin I could scarcely find in there a memory of those whispers she had given so tenderly to my young ear. I admit I was repulsed; there was no beauty in her. Mrs. Levy had dressed perfectly for her age in South Park, but now she seemed to have tired of prudent fashion, to have become almost a parody—part haggard courtesan, part countess. I realized that this queer house was her choosing, her taste. Perhaps all of us reach an age when we come to the end of our imagination.

  “Are you Alice’s mother?”

  She said, “Ah, you got the wrong widow, didn’t you? We’re all widows in this house, even Bitsy, bless her soul, is a widow five years now, she lost her husband to a mining accident in Georgia. An astounding woman.”

  “This is a lovely house you have.”

  “No it is not, but I love the rooms, I barely leave it, so I never have to see the outside. Don’t worry, young man, you won’t have to chat up the old lady for long, Alice will be here any moment. I sent her up to change for gentlemen visitors.”

  “I’m delighted to talk to you.”

  “The gorgeous boy is delighted! My heart is fluttering. Positively Shakespearean.” I could hardly breathe, watching her flirt with me like this, her lashes flicking their paint hopefully against her cheeks. But no, I was safe; she didn’t recognize me at all. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Asgar Van Daler,” I told her.

  “Vander …”

  “Van Daler.”

  “Vadollar.”

  “Van Daler.”

  “My dear man, I don’t care a fig for families. Do I recognize you? Anyways, I will speak frankly before Alice comes.”

  “Of course.”

  “First of all, Alice is Jewish on both sides. I don’t want you to get involved and then drop things for some blood reason.”

  “It’s of no importance to me.”

  “Also, all of my money is going to the Jewish Educational Alliance. This is Alice’s wish. She believes very strongly in the settlement houses, and I have to say I do too. I am being very honest with you, Mr. Dollar. Alice will only get the jewelry I am wearing on my person.”

  “It’s very lovely.”

  “My person? Why, thank you,” she cooed. “But if you are searching for wealth, you’re on the wrong trail.”

  Then I made a terrible error. I was feeling the airy heart of a shoplifter and, careless, I said, “I should tell you, I’m not wealthy, either, Mrs. Levy. I’m merely a clerk at Bancroft’s.”

  Her mood of jovial flirtation was over. Instead, she wore the old face of a brokenhearted widow writing a poisoned letter to her lover twenty years before. “Bancroft’s?” she repeated. Sorrow pooled in every wrinkle of her face, but there was something alive within her eyes as well, either a buried rage or a kind of hope, one that I of all people knew too well. I was shocked to see how little dies in us. She chose her words carefully: “I knew a man who worked there. It would have been before your time.”

  “And who was that?”

  “Mr. Tivoli. Mr. Max Tivoli.”

  “Max Tivoli,” I repeated.

  “Have you heard of him?”

  I almost told her, I swear it. I almost revealed myself so that I could be forgiven, and perhaps if I had done that, I might have been kept from all the other misdeeds that followed. Instead, I was generous in another way. I gave her the lie she wanted to hear: “He died before I came.”

  “Ah.”

  “There’s a rumor it was murder.”

  I saw the tremor of a smile on her lips: “Pity.”

  Then her old cheerful expression sprang back like a rubber band. “I must shut up now, my daughter’s here. Keep our confidence.” She turned away from me, the woman who took such pleasure at my death, to shout:

  “Alice, what on earth are you wearing now?”

  I wish I could remember all the details of that morning. I know we all sat in the parlor for a little while talking politics, which got Alice very worked up, and that her mother turned to her at last and said, “Widow Calhoun, get out of this house, you don’t need a chaperone.” Alice smiled and said, “Widow Levy, you’ll be all alone.” The old woman shook her head, saying, “I’m happiest alone, Widow Calhoun.” They spoke to each other in this odd way, joking almost morbidly about their widowhood, and it reminded me of the nights when I came to light the fires for them and found them trying on dress-up clothes, or in the midst of charades, or painting the other’s portrait. I felt intensely jealous for a moment, realizing that there was a part of Alice I might never get to know, the part devoted to her mother, and that while they had indeed left San Francisco out of love, it was only love for each other, and never for me.

  “Did you get the camera?” I asked her once we were outside.

  “What?”

  “You were going to buy a camera before I met you. The old man said your fingers were too small.”

  She smiled slyly. “I guess they were big enough to hand him the money.”

  “You bought it?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What do you take pictures of?”

  “Whatever I like. Let’s walk up this way, there’s a hidden stairway to Franklin and I think when the roses are in bloom it’s so mysterious.” She put her arm in mine and, talking now and then about the subjects on her mind, led me to her secret bower.

  It would be nice to tell you that she fell in love with me. There, as we took our walk among the mansions and carriages of Van Ness, the hedges that had been planted to keep us from the flower gardens, the vulgar rockwork and cast-iron fountains shaped like children—that she found the sunlight too dazzling to defy and kissed me under the rare and giant flower of a century plant. But you know better, I think; we were strangers, brought together by an accident, and once we had exhausted all conversation on cars and death and our own shock, we walked for a long time in uncomfortable silence. I tried to think of all I secretly knew of Alice, and led her now and then into topics I knew would get her talking, but mostly I think I bored her.

  And I would like to tell you that she was just as perfect as I’d remembered her, but she wasn’t. The tea shop had made me mad with hope, believing that everything true about her could never change for me; she had emerged from the grave of memory as perfectly preserved as love could ever be. But daylight and the lack of disaster made a difference. Alice was still my beautiful girl, even in the bright tailored suit of her “at home” clothes, the odd little toque that seemed almost like a turban; so much about her was exactly the same. But some habits of a girl are not as lovely in a woman. Her private furies, for instance, which had always seemed like a sign of character and independence, had altered a bit, becoming more hilarious from the mouth of a thirty-two-year-old, but also more sour, even petulant. How the mailman mangled her letters. The fog, the rich and stupid neighbors, their dogs. As if every annoyance of the world were meant for her.

  As the time passed, I found other changes I had not expected.

  “Am I still familiar to you?” I asked her.

  She examined my face for a moment. I still could not believe that nothing of old Max could be found there.

  “No,” she said.

  “Not at all?”

  �
�I was wrong. I was a little emotional on Saturday.”

  She pronounced it “Satuhday.” Nothing had ever flattened the vowels of my young Alice, but I suppose a life and marriage in the Northwest will do it. So there was that, and her furies; they were changes so minor that you could ignore them if you liked. After all, when listening to a symphony, we don’t insist that the composer strike one chord over and over; we enjoy his skill at variation. And I had thought I’d known her so completely that I would love every variation in my Alice, every major and minor scale, because, as in a symphony, the very depths of her would never change. But there was a flaw in that thinking: the Alice I loved would never age, it’s true, but still she might change. She had suffered a burning town and a dying husband and who knows what else; we cannot blame all our scars on time. Perhaps something shifted in Alice, something I hadn’t noticed in the ecstasy of the tea shop.

  We reached the house again and stood within the oval curve of the entrance, framed by a glazed tempest of woodwork. I was in an odd sort of panic, like a climber losing his grip on crumbling shale, not only because I had bored her so, and was not even familiar to her, but because the object I had loved so eagerly all these years had changed, ever so slightly, and I could not decide if this change meant nothing or everything to me. No one yet had ever died from not-being-in-love, but I might, if it came to that. I was still examining my heart when she spoke to me very seriously.

  “All right, Asgar, tell me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got some kind of secret. It’s all over you, you’re terrified to tell me, it’s all you can think about. I tell you, it’s a bore to be around someone with a secret. Sorry, I know I don’t always put things the right way.”