The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “I—”

  “Please just tell me and get it over with.”

  “But there’s nothing to tell.”

  She stared at me and called my true name: “Max Tivoli.” This stopped me dead. There was a single oxygenless moment before she continued: “Did I hear you talking about him downstairs? What did my mother say? You couldn’t have known him, he’d be so old. She probably didn’t tell you this, but she was a little in love with him.”

  I found my breath at last, a lucky thief. “I’m sorry, no, I didn’t really know him.”

  “He broke her heart. I was a little girl, there was an incident with him and we had to leave. He’s a bit of a villain in our house, and we never talk about him.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry? I just wanted to explain. You asked me once why we left San Francisco, and that’s why. So now you know.” She searched me carefully, as with a scene one is asked to memorize; that is, as if she might never see me again. “Thank you for a pleasant walk, Asgar.”

  “It was pleasant.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m grateful you could come, Alice.”

  “It’s been nice.”

  Dull, ordinary words for people who want the moment to die. And perhaps I did. It was too awful to think that I had preserved my heart so long ago and that now, years later, I had stuck it in my chest, smelling of formaldehyde, and found it too sorry and shriveled to work. But it’s a common tale. Isn’t there a statue, in Shakespeare, of a long-dead queen who comes to life before the eyes of her mourning king? The king rejoices and repents, but what does he do the next day? Does he remember how she sang off-key as she brushed her hair, how she screeched at servants? Perhaps it felt easier, in the doorway, to fall sleepily into my old life of memory and sorrow than to face my real, live girl.

  We smiled tightly to each other and I saw I’d propped my walking cane beside her. Confused, hardly breathing, I nodded goodbye to her and reached out for my cane.

  Alice’s face turned a peculiar color, her hand went out to support herself against a column, and her eyes looked directly into mine. I had never seen that expression on her before. She stared at me for an instant—a sharp, improbable instant—then turned and saw the cane in my hand. Her face collapsed. I didn’t understand any of it, the stare, the clumsy blush on her cheek. And then I realized: poor woman! She thought I was going to kiss her!

  Alice closed her eyes, whispered a goodbye, and made her way awkwardly into the house. I just stood there. The network of veins vibrated through my body, harp-thrummed by the impossible. Could I be wrong? That I’d seen in her eyes the same carnality I’d always hidden in mine? Alice, you will forgive my crudity, but I knew then that my luck had doubled over the years: I had become a man too handsome to resist, and you, a widow longing to be merry, had walked all those long blocks just hoping to be touched. Admit it, now that I am dead: you wanted me to kiss you. And you still did, inside the house, leaning breathless against the shut door, your heart pulsing as fast as the glands of a snake emptying itself of venom; you still saw my face inside your lids.

  No braceleted ankle or can-can leg was ever as erotic as the shame you showed me in that doorway, darling. And with a great relief, everything was just as it had been before, or greater, because all at once it came rushing back—the ice in the heart, the bell in the brain—the terror of wanting you.

  Now the astute reader will be wondering how I ever thought I would get away with this. It’s one thing to disguise oneself for an afternoon tea or carriage ride; it’s quite another to keep a lie for the length of an affair or, more improbably, for the lifetime that I hoped to be with Alice. I might change my looks and words to suit her, but how could she really love me when my truest self was buried under the floorboards? And yet, I’ve heard of long and happy marriages where the wife never knew of his second family, or the husband never learned that her blond hair that he so valued could be bought at any druggist’s. Maybe lies are necessary for love, a little; certainly, I wouldn’t be the first to create a false persona just to seduce a woman. Of course, none of this crossed my mind in the following weeks of my courtship—the visits to the House of Widows, the at homes with Alice and her mother, smiling in their ignorance—never did I consider that I might wear this false mustache for life. The heart plans nothing, does it? No, the only obstacle I ever considered was Hughie.

  He was not sad in marriage; he was stable. I have to assume this made him happy, in a way; perhaps marriage was a weight, a paperweight, keeping the heart from flying across the room at every breeze. Of course we never went out to the Barbary Coast—he was married, and the place was nearing its final days—but we never went out together at all. Instead, I was invited to dinner parties hosted by Hughie and his wife. They had bought a new house on O’Farrell, something more appropriate than the Pumpkin, and I would find myself at a table of handsome, rich, and clever people who intimidated me with their clothes and their wit until I discovered they had no imaginations, that their opinions and fashions were copied from magazines they all had read. Hughie seemed perfectly at home in this crowd, but I was always nervous and drank too much. I couldn’t play their games, but what saddened me the most was seeing these glittering bores lean across the wineglasses to whisper into Hughie’s ear, hearing their private laughter, knowing they had supplanted me in his confidence. At least it took a crowd of them to do it.

  It was only right, though, that his wife would take over all the parts I was used to playing, and she was a kind young woman, bright and pretty and never pretending to be more clever or fashionable than she really was. She was good to me, and yet we were rarely together; she always found reasons to leave the room or tend to someone else. It wasn’t, as she said, because Hughie and I should be alone; I think, somehow, I scared her. In any case, by the time Alice came back into my life, I was seeing little of either Hughie or his wife; their lives were taken over by their family. Yes, shortly after the turn of the century, little Hughie Dempsey had a son.

  At the time, I could not understand how the soft look on my old friend’s face, which used to come only after several belts of whiskey and buttermilk, appeared so easily as he stroked his young boy’s face. I couldn’t see how this clever man could listen to his wife speaking of her “angel from heaven” and keep his willing smile; I couldn’t fathom Hughie’s belief that his son would accomplish wonders in the world, as if other worthy children, equally full of promise, were not born every minute, and failed, and turned into men just like us, who would lay onto the next generation the same hopes, infinitely deferred.

  But I was not a father then. I did not know, Sammy, what happens to us in the presence of our sons. Today, for instance, when you and I built a fort among the honeysuckle and the blackberry, using an old refrigerator crate with Coldspot branded on the side. We shared no secrets in our little house. Instead, we lay side by side, barely fitting, our heads on the long cool grass of the forest. I felt the prick of the grass on my face and, beneath it, the moist earth coming through, smelling of blood. A strong breeze blew over a leaf, revealing the tiny husk of an insect. A drab butterfly, headed the wrong way, was being blown ceaselessly away from his goal. “Jeez, it’s boring,” you said, then smiled and did not speak for half an hour. Sound of desperate birds. Why would this make a father weep?

  We have no right to keep our friends from being happy, and if it seemed to me that Hughie, like a man searching for a religion, had found a life that had been led before, I never took him aside and scolded him for it. He was an extraordinary man, I’d always thought, and deserved an extraordinary life. But perhaps it’s the average men who need the extraordinary lives; the rest of us need the comfort of the common. He’d had fun with me, but I saw now that he’d always been unhappy, and terribly alone, even in my company. So I did not trouble his new world. I suppose in some way I envied it.

  The problem of Hughie, therefore, was not his life. I could not change that. The proble
m was merely that Alice might come across us together, realize we were friends, and discover my true identity.

  I did tell him about Alice, and my old friend was stunned and happy. I gave him all the details of our meeting, her unfading beauty, and how I had worked my way into becoming a regular at the House of Widows despite the terrifying presence of Mrs. Levy. He laughed at the foolishness of my life, and had a plain and happy expression on his face, perhaps remembering how in our youth the least important things were filled with an intensity he had forgotten.

  “My God, Max, really? Alice?”

  “Yes, Alice.”

  “Well, she can’t be the same. I mean, I guess what I mean is you can’t feel the same.”

  “I do, that’s what I’m telling you. It’s so strange, but I never forgot. And now here she is, thirty-two and a widow, but it’s like I’m seventeen.”

  “You’re a grown man, Max. And you hardly know her.”

  “It’s as if she’s something I’ve wanted since I was a boy. You can’t know what it’s like. I mean, first love.” We sipped our drinks and sat in silence for a moment before I finally told him what I wanted of him.

  He looked at me for a while with a look of sadness. “No,” he said. “I can’t, Max.”

  “Come on, I need your help.”

  “You can’t do this. A lie like this, it’ll wear you out.”

  “You just have to forget you know me. Forget all about me. It’s easy. If you see Alice and me together, just say hello to her and ask to be introduced to me. It’s simple.”

  “It’s not simple at all. We’re not seventeen. It’s idiotic.”

  “Please.”

  His mood changed. “Max, you have to tell her,” he said at last.

  “You know what will happen.”

  He looked down at his plate because he did know.

  “Please, Hughie,” I told him, startling him by taking his hands. “I don’t have anyone.”

  It was a month before it happened, but as I’d predicted, Alice and I did eventually run into Hughie. We were walking in the park to see the newly imported kangaroo, and she was telling me about a photography contest she had entered, pretending to be a man; she had anagrammed her married name and come up with the outrageous alter ego “Alan Liecouch.” I was walking along and watching our shadows together on the grass when I noticed that hers had stiffened where it lay beside, a stone. She had stopped laughing and I could hear the bamboo rattling in her parasol; her hands were trembling, but when I looked at her face she was smiling faintly, as if amused by her own reaction. I saw Hughie and his family coming towards us on the path. He must have seen us just moments before, because he was distracting his wife by pointing off towards the conservatory, leaning over to whisper in her ear before leading her off across the grass to follow what will-o’-the-wisp he had invented to save me.

  “I know that man,” Alice said.

  “You do?” She rarely spoke of her life before Seattle.

  “Yes, I was a girl.”

  “Really.”

  “I used to visit him at the Conservatory of Flowers.”

  “Oh, that’s not far from here.”

  But she was not listening to me. She laughed a little. “I was so young.”

  Just then, Hughie made a mistake. He looked back, and hooked our eyes with his own: bright blue. His boater was tipped far back on his head. What I read in those eyes was an intense sadness, the kind I had only seen before that night when I got so drunk in his apartment. This was not the first time, I guess, that he had been called upon to forget someone he loved, but who can say. At the time, I was merely grateful that he had done this simple thing, this crucial thing, to make me happy.

  Alice said, “He saw us!”

  “Oh.”

  He turned away with a bitter tenseness to his mouth but Alice continued to watch him. She held her hand to the ruffles of her blouse, as if checking her own heartbeat for this reunion that I think she had been imagining for as long as I’d imagined ours. Her smile opened out and she seemed pleased, embarrassed, amazed. She said, almost in wonder, “He’s avoiding me.”

  “Maybe he didn’t recognize you.”

  “He’s grown old,” she said.

  Hughie was far off now, chatting with his bundled son. I remembered our tea together, how she stared at a derbied shadow on the curtain, afraid. It had been his shadow that she thought she’d seen. I tried to laugh, saying, “Love of your life?”

  “What kind of question is that?” she said, smiling playfully at me with eyes surrounded by the creases that I loved. Age will tell you what a woman is; if she has never been happy, you will know it from her eyes. Alice’s eyes were full of private joys, and though I had caused none of them, still it didn’t matter; I loved what they had made of her. Now she lifted her parasol again and we watched Hughie’s family disappear behind a parade of orange ice sellers and begging children. What kind of question, Alice? Simply one that, years later, I am still asking.

  It was a week after that event, I think, that I received an interesting letter. As I opened the custardy envelope, I smelled its faint cologne, recognized the handwriting, and was brought back to an awful morning when I lost the girl I loved:

  April 15, 1906

  Mr. Asgar Van Daler,

  My daughter and I are leaving this Tuesday for the Del Monte and we would be pleased if you escorted us for our stay through Sunday. Alice says you are busy with work, and that I am old-fashioned and a fool, but we have no male relatives in the area and it is always helpful, when traveling, to have a man.

  Mrs. David Levy

  I’m sure the Del Monte hotel looked exactly the same as it did nearly forty years before, when my young parents met there: the long avenue of cypresses that cut the sun in stripes across our carriage (the Widow Levy would not take a car), the great ship of the hotel itself, barnacled with green shutters and balconies, the flagsnapping spires, the veranda of wicker chairs where a band in whiteblue military suits played waltzes, the interchangeability of the parasols and the table umbrellas, the ladies and the peacocks, the people and the statues. I’m sure society editors still scribbled as they watched the arrivals, and brothel madams passed as baronesses, and shopgirls as debutantes, but all I noticed was the practiced calm, learned from its guests, of a place that knew its luck would never end.

  “Are we here?” Alice asked as I opened the door for her. Her hat had slid off to one side and she struggled with it, squinting at the building.

  “You know,” I said, helping her from the carriage, “my parents met in this hotel.”

  “What a funny place to fall in love.”

  “In the pool, there used to be a net separating the men and women, like a veil, that’s where they met. Strange, isn’t it?”

  She considered me as their servant, Bitsy, chatted with the driver. “Strange, yes, that’s the word for you, Asgar.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked quietly.

  She blinked at me in the strong sunlight, smiling mysteriously, then looked up at the hotel. “Lord, isn’t it ugly.”

  “Alice!” her mother whispered, then stepped forward and took my arm. “It’s positively Shakespearean, don’t you think, Mr. Van Daler? A summer house of the Capulets, before all the trouble of course, all the old families with their young daughters, a masked ball and everything.” My old lover gave me a wink. Masked ball indeed!

  She let go of my arm, saying, “I need to lie down after that awful carriage ride, the bouncing, I swear I don’t see why we didn’t take an automobile. Alice, we’ll dress. Mr. Van Daler, we’ll see you at supper and I hope you can recommend a book from the library as I don’t know anybody anymore, and I’m bound to be bored. Bitsy, do you have my sleeping drops?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  As the other two made for the hotel, Alice stood there on the drive, passing a glove from one hand to the other, watching her mother. The look on my love’s face was that of someone solving a math equation or, perhaps, plotting
a murder.

  “Your mother’s fascinating,” I said, coming up beside her.

  Her eyes shifted towards me. “I’ve lived with her almost all my life.”

  “That must be nice.”

  “Hmm. I can’t even really see her anymore,” she said, looking back at her mother.

  “Well, I love her,” I said, and felt a blush of shame for saying so carelessly something that would have made all the difference nearly twenty years before.

  Alice said something very quietly.

  “Pardon?”

  The Widow Levy’s voice pounded through the spring air: “Alice! Stop mooning over that handsome young man! I need your help up here.”

  Alice turned to me with her eyes blazing in the sun. What message was encoded in that brown-white semaphore? She only said, “You better tip the driver, handsome young man,” and then was off, picking up her skirt to climb the stairs, one hand keeping firm hold of her wayward straw hat with its trim as pink as ribbon candy. A peacock made its bored way across the sidewalk, dragging its gorgeous and filthy ballgown of a tail. It made a shimmering noise. I saw Alice turn back to look at me.

  She was going to love me.

  Even as she was stepping into the hotel, I felt the realization warming me like a new sun: she was going to love me. I looked up at the battlements and balconies of the Del Monte and realized, as the flags lashed in the bright sun, that it would be here, in the very building where another woman had loved another Asgar. Perhaps tomorrow night, in the ballroom with Ballenberg’s waltzes playing, on the same balcony, with the same tolling Mission bells and the sound of the sea, the smell of Sweet Caporals. Or on the veranda, very quietly, as we sipped lemonade and watched the old maids chirping at their croquet, perhaps in that white wicker chair where I would take her hand and hear her sigh and know she loved me. Or in her room, as she sat by the window staring out at the lawns and pines that led onto the ocean, as she cranked the glass open and let the salt air into the room and began to weep. After all these years, it would happen here. Who would have guessed it? In one of these rooms, I would take her face in my hands and kiss both cheeks, then whisper to her as I undid the buttons of her jacket, of her shirtwaist, of all the unnecessary, ridiculous garments widows wear. Her look on the stairs told me everything I needed to know, and honeyed hope—the same hope of my seventeen-year-old self, bottled and stored so carefully on that high shelf—now broke and leaked down through my body.