The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  I considered this for a moment. If I’d had a pipe, I would have smoked it. I posed like a husband in a Sears catalog, in a sweater coat, considered how brief is the life of a rose, and said all right then, her mother could come and live with us.

  “Ugh, you don’t want that,” she said, then added, “Besides, Mama can’t travel. I’m going to have to stay with her.”

  In other words, they had to operate; they had to remove Alice from my life—I would rather they’d cut out a lung! My wife left the room to fill her trunk half with old dresses, half with new books and her cameras. She would be gone for three weeks, back for one, down again for three, and so on until her mother got better. Alice came back into the room and saw my face and sorrow shimmered in her eyes; she came and held my ears in her warm hands, kissed the nexus of my brow. “Oh, honey, it’ll only be a few months.” My heart brightened; was her mother so near the end? “No, Asgar,” she told me, studying my eyes. “No, a few months before she’s well.”

  She was wrong; the woman did not get well. And it took five years.

  Her absences destroyed me. Like Demeter, I made my world a winter without her. Clothes piled up, wineglasses stood in a redstained battalion on the kitchen table, and every night I slept with my arms coiled around a sofa cushion. Sometimes, when I awoke, smiling, joints creaking, whispering good morning to my lover, and found my arms full only of stuffing and fog, I wept real tears.

  We talked in letters, which was romantic. I told her about the stupid happenings of our living room, where I had last heard the scuttlings of our local mouse, what hinge or drawer I had fixed, and any change in the view. I read about her mother’s pain and sadness, her lost beauty, her selfish nature in full bloom at last. I read that Alice had joined a photographic club and was apprenticing in a local artist’s studio. In fact, she sent me a beautiful picture of herself in an orange grove, smiling at the camera with sly love (at her husband, that is, since the photo was made specifically for me), and it was embossed with the silver VR of the studio. I kept the photo by my bed, and when I thought of my distant wife, it began to take the place of my own memory.

  I became as jealous as Bluebeard. Meeting her at the Oakland station with a bunch of flowers or some ornament for her hair—something that would win a smile and then, unworn, a place in her Chinese box—I would catch her chatting with a man, frequently mustached and indistinct, letting him help her down from the train before she caught my eye and shot him a quick goodbye. He exited behind the scenery, the steam and boxes. Her smile went on like a filament bulb.

  “What was his name?” I’d ask once she’d admired my present.

  “Who? What? Oh, Asgar.”

  “I don’t want you talking to any men outside your photographic club.”

  “Asgar, I’m exhausted. Mother’s been making me read romance novels to her, it’s pretty shocking how boring those things are, and how explicit, really. Every possible act of love, it’s in there. You’d never guess it, but my mother is quite a sex fiend …”

  “His name.”

  “It’s Cyril, and he sells lumber and I love him. Oh, don’t be so typical. I’d never leave you for a Cyril. Now get me somewhere where you can kiss me,” she’d say, and I’d hurry her into the car, wondering all the while if I was warming my hands over the fire lit by another. Cyril, or Frank, or Bob; oh the images that emerged nightly in the chemical bath of my skull!

  But it all faded. When she was with me, for that one week each month, my life took on the heightened colors of a tinted photograph, and even Alice’s bad housekeeping, the socks and shoes found under the sofas, the scattered opened envelopes she left everywhere, came to be adored—they were the sign of my continued luck. My life’s hope had come true, and I instructed the maid to keep a sock or two lying around even when the mistress was gone, a hairbrush stocked with glossy brown hair, just to prove to myself I was not dreaming.

  It was about two years into her mother’s illness that our fortunes changed yet again. One week when Alice was in San Francisco, I came home from work to find her in our little parlor reading. I made a noise and Alice looked up at me with a lively expression.

  “What is it, darling?”

  Mischief fluttered across her face and departed. She said nothing and picked a card from the china bowl: Gerald Lassiter, Esq. Fairmont Hotel. A corner of it had been turned down to reveal the word Affaires. Business of some sort.

  “Oh, what’s this?”

  “Make a guess.”

  “How on earth am I … ?”

  She said, “Okay, I’ll give you three hints. Top hat. Oiled raincoat. Haunted eyes. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “My bastard son.”

  Her eyes widened in amusement. “Wouldn’t that be fun? No, an old man. Very odd and irritated. Walked with two ivory-tipped canes.”

  “I’m assuming it’s not a fellow clerk? Nothing as boring as that?”

  “No, no, nothing as boring as that. Come on, guess, Asgar!”

  “I give up. William Howard Taft.”

  She sighed. “You’re terrible at this. He wouldn’t tell me anything. He just asked for the man of the house. He said it concerned you and another.”

  “Mrs. Taft.”

  Her eyes came alive again and she leaned forward in her chair. “Asgar, I think it must be your father!”

  I went the very next morning to the Fairmont Hotel and managed to be allowed in, though it was not a place for a poor clerk, even in what passed as my best suit. I had the concierge call up to Mr. Gerald Lassiter, Esq., and I waited a long time on a piercecarved couch beside an explosion of tulips.

  The concierge returned, his buttons sparking in the lobby air. He waved a hand and from behind him emerged a man in a greatcoat, trim gray beard, his left eye clouded, blind, and his nose barnacled with spots. Alice’s powerful imagination had doubled the canes; there was only one, with a carved ivory head. I stood up. The cane was handed to the concierge and the man stared at me with a shuddering intake of breath.

  “Father?” I ventured.

  “What?” he asked.

  Deaf, deaf and hobbling, I thought. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say?”

  Louder: “You are, you are …”

  “Mr. Tivoli, I am a lawyer,” he said with a hissing throat. “I am here as executor and would have been here long before had you not been so goddamned hard to find. I assumed you did not want your wife to know your real identity. Asgar Van Daler indeed. You are a fool and your father is dead.”

  It was perfectly simple: my father’s footsteps through the snow had led straight to the harbor, as we always knew, and not because he had been stolen out to sea. He had simply walked away from his life and never returned.

  He had arrived in Alaska a month after he disappeared from San Francisco and there, with the money he had managed to take with him, bought a small supply store and began a little business in the remotest possible region of America. Who knows what pleasure he had sought there in the lonely cold, the sun a mere gray star? Surely some shivering joy. Perhaps the sudden snow had shown him a vision, a reminder of his long-lost homeland in the north. The shop grew into two, and three, and that was when my father began investing in real estate and mining ventures, which brought him even more profit—in copper, not in gold—and so on in a dull and spiraling accumulation of wealth and stature.

  “He did marry,” the executor informed me. “A half-Indian woman named Sarah Howard, but she gave him no children and had no family. Of no fiscal importance here. I believe she died in an influenza outbreak near the end of the last century.” There was no more to be known of Sarah Howard. I picture her, of course, in buckskins and a bonnet, tending a woodstove and making johnnycakes for scribbling Dad. Except of course they were wealthy: a maid to tend the stove, to serve the drinks. Indian Sarah would be sewing in the parlor. No buckskins, no bonnet. Silk dress and wearing bustles years after they had gone out of style, her black Aleutian hair lit by the never-setting
sun. Poor dead Sarah. Of no fiscal importance, but he loved her.

  He lived a decade without her, his mines failing a little, his cannery prospering. The houses were slowly repaired and rented, the business turned over to more willing hands. He got gray and weary of the world and died. There is no deathbed scene, no dying phrase. How could there be? My father had already left without a word.

  “A satisfactory life, as your inheritance proves.”

  This was the life he wanted? A cold and happy, far-off life? He left his house and clothes, he left us, in our famous city? It seemed impossible. Raucous, beautiful San Francisco always seemed to me like the favored daughter of a merchant, whom every man adores, gorgeous and perfumed and gay, and yet there will always be a man who finds her charms too shrill. One who prefers a whisperer with a mole and a sable brow, a chilly smile. There is always my father to choose the wrong, wrong life.

  Why do they leave us? Why?

  Twelve copper mines in various locations in Alaska and Montana, three sawmills, two steamers, a fishery, a cannery, one dozen pairs of men’s shoes, size 10 (my size, too, Dad, until my feet began to shrink), two dozen silk ties and cravats in a Turkish bazaar of hues, a kinetoscope with slides of China, India, and various bathing beauties, a collection of grotesque farmyard majolica, cuff links in jet and lava, a female hand carved from bog oak, a startling and ingenious variety of electrical items meant to mix, grind, drill, illumine, project, mesmerize, and cure (none of which worked), a gold pocket watch engraved “for my love Asgar” which I did not remember, a silver ring which I did (bringing back a sudden memory of the mark it left when he removed it, a double welt in pink), various pieces of rental property, and a check from the estate which embodied not my father’s account (which was all wisely invested) but the proceeds from the sale of four houses in Fairbanks, one in Anchorage, furniture, paintings, and other items too lacking in sentiment for Father to itemize as mine, including, apparently, a cast-iron fountain portraying a boy beneath an umbrella.

  And that is all I ever got from my father.

  That evening, I told Alice and her face became electric.

  “What do you mean?”

  We were rich, I said, not grossly rich like bankers or railroad men she’d known, but still beautifully and comfortably rich just as she had been before, as I had been as a child; the wheel had come around for us again. I said I loved our life, the wild kitchen with its rose-filled teacup, the miracles she could make from her modest grocery list, the lace she bought by the yard to retrim old dresses, our pure and perfect life in this pure and perfect room. I said we should be careful not to change a life we loved. And yet. “And yet I’ll give you anything, Alice. Any desire in your heart.”

  My fantasy was that we should take one of the new cruise ships around the world. No earthquake could tumble us; no war could reach us. I could make my dream come true; I could buy a gilded island. Is there not a people, in some desert place, who are promised this in heaven? The waves themselves would hypnotize her, insominate her, keep her sleeping where I could watch her, gazing at her dreams, my wave-borne Alice under a porthole filled with sun, perhaps forever.

  I told her this (or some abridged version) and she listened, leaning against the mantel with her cheap earrings jingling faintly with the movements of her head.

  “No. No. That’s not what I want.”

  “Then what? Alice, tell me.”

  She held the thought in her mouth, like a cupped bird. Her eyes searched the wallpaper, as if something were written there, some message from her future self. When she spoke at last, it was like a direct current: “I want my own business, a photography studio, and space besides for my own work, yes, yes, oh I want …”

  You wanted freedom. It’s what we always wish for, and I should have known it. I’m surprised, looking back, Mrs. Ramsey, that you didn’t leave me long before, that I didn’t return to the rooms soon after our marriage and find them empty, or full of everything but you and your favorite dress—the red. Why did you stay so long?

  “We’ll see, Alice.”

  A laugh, a fountain of joy. “Oh what a chance! Asgar, what a chance!”

  “We’ll see.”

  She began to dance and then caught my reflection in the mirror and winked at me. “Asgar, I think we should celebrate,” she said with her timeless smile. “Kiss me right here on my neck. Yes.” With the scent of her so willingly given to me, the young parts of me began to burn. I heard her whisper: “Asgar, take this damned dress off of me.”

  Oh I did, with hot and grateful hands I did. I pulled the wings from the moth. And she got her shop.

  “You need to touch up your hair color, Max,” Hughie mumbled through his new scimitar mustache.

  “What?”

  “You look like a paperboy. You could be my son.”

  “My worst nightmare, Hughie.”

  We sat in Hughie’s club, one that I had been invited to join because of my newfound wealth. So once more I found myself alongside Hughie almost every night in a leather chair carbuncled with upholstery tacks, reading a newspaper still warm from the butler’s iron. With Alice gone so often, I was grateful for those evenings with Hughie.

  “I like you better rich, Max.”

  “You idiot, you used to say you liked me better poor.”

  “I did?”

  “You did.”

  He considered this. “Well, that’s because I was poor. But the least you can do is buy a decent haircut.”

  “Hand me my drink.”

  “Are you enjoying it, at least? I mean, all this sudden wealth? And Alice? Seems like you’re the luckiest man alive.”

  I was. Alice and I, after years in that stuffy apartment, now had a broad-shouldered house on Green with a chilly view of Alcatraz, a modern garage to hold our Oldsmobile, as well as all the new and foolish things that people have when they come back into money, the trinkets and indulgences we missed so much—the clothes and food and miraculous habits—and which are never half as pleasing. Of course, with this new house, I had to find new hiding places for the evidence of my secret, a few letters and the pendant and chain Grandmother made for me. While it had been easy to keep it in its old grave among my shoes, now I was afraid no hiding place would be good enough; servants will go through everything. Eventually, I slipped it with the letters into a locked box in my dresser and told the maid not to dust it.

  I didn’t worry about Alice, prying as she was; my wife was hardly ever there. When she did come up to see me, I lavished her as best I could, and she enjoyed it, I think, laughing at the ludicrous jewels I brought to her in little velvet boxes, screaming at the new car when I drove it in front of the house for the first time, but she never wore the jewels and she never drove the car. In fact, with money behind her, she dressed in her same eccentric, inexpensive clothes—and sometimes those pants, underneath, when she could get away with it—and concentrated only on her business plan, on that studio of hers, the one I’d sworn to buy her. I longed to travel back in time and pluck that promise from my lips. But how could I have known? My only hint came too late: on the morning when she stepped from the train, kissed me flutteringly, and, like a magician producing a handkerchief, pulled a piece of paper from her coat: the lease she had just signed. She was so happy; that night she practically melted in my arms. The photography business she had dreamed of. A little studio on an up-and-coming corner. Of course it was in Pasadena.

  “She’s got to be near her mother,” I explained to Hughie when he raised an eyebrow. “They’re closer than I realized. Like those fig and cypress trees that grow inside each other in Eastern gardens, it’s unexpected. And her business partner, he’s down there. She apprenticed with him, he was once quite a famous artist and she says, well, she says she’s his muse. He’s got clients and experience.” An old friend of her mother’s, old Victor. I liked to think of him with long white mustaches, brows singed off from flash-powder burns.

  “You’re taking this pretty well, Max.”
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br />   I said. “It’s what she wants. When you love someone, don’t you want their dreams to come true? If you can help them? And she has to be down there anyway. I see her when I can. That’s enough, isn’t it? When you really love someone.”

  “I guess,” he said quietly.

  “So things are good, Hughie.”

  “Are they?”

  “Oh yes.”

  He stared at me with those blue eyes, fringed by albino lashes. Then he shook his head and touched my sleeve. “You’ve got to tell her, Max,” he said. “You’ll lose her.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “It’s idiotic,” he hissed. Other men looked and smiled at the noise of our argument. “Dying your hair, and I hear you’ve got a cane now. I’m sure you don’t think she’s stupid. You’ll lose her.”

  I looked at him, at his ridiculous mustache, as sober and stupid as a bad disguise. “Shut up, Hughie,” I snapped. “I don’t know why you give advice. Everyone knows you’re no good at love.”

  What I meant, I suppose (must we explain what alcohol makes us say?), was that he was no good at marriage. I had gone to his house one afternoon to deliver an invitation and the maid made me wait for Abigail, who arrived in a long brocade gown with a hallucinated look, her blond hair dull as dust. Shouts from her son rang from the upper stories. “He’s not here,” she said, and gave me her old social smile. “He’s attending to our old property, he’s staying there while he makes repairs.”

  “What old property?”

  She winced. “The Pumpkin.”

  My first thought—and hers, I assume—was a mistress housed quite fairy-like in a pumpkin shell. Of course I ran over as soon as I could, only to find nothing more than rooms of Oriental carpets and lamps, bookcases filled with gleaming new books, a new manservant, and Hughie in shirtsleeves. Simple enough: a masculine retreat. Hughie explained quite innocently that he could not get his reading done in the house with his wife’s shouting and her headaches, the child and the numerous cats they had collected. I saw he had covered the walls with army portraits that Abigail would never have allowed, men who were strangers to me, smiling with touched-up faces. Then his man brought in a pipe and—as in the old days—we smoked hashish until we were giggling on the floor. I remember thinking in my state that the manservant, Teddy, was as young as I looked, with slick black hair and red cheeks, but with an almost frightened look of youth that I could never reproduce. Teddy propped my head on a pillow and lay a blanket over me without a word. “Thank you, Teddy,” I said.