The Confessions of Max Tivoli

by Andrew Sean Greer

  Hughie wasn’t with me; after much arguing, he had agreed to stay in the car, but he kept a wary eye on me on that newly painted porch; he was not sure what I would do. I wasn’t sure myself. I could see Ramsey’s shape moving deep in the interior, like a beast in dark water, arranging frames or carrying boxes. I could not, however, see him.

  A second miracle: the door was open.

  The place smelled of vinegar and smoke. Large, striking photographs of ocean waves filled one entire wall, and the other was all billowing wheat, but otherwise the pictures on little stands were of weddings, family groups, babies. A broom leaned exhausted against a wall, a counter and cash register filled the far corner, and two doors were open beyond: one to darkness, the other to wavering light. The waver was the movement of a shadow.

  All of a sudden, there he was, standing in the room with me. A tall man, and old, a puff of white hair with bulging eyes and an intellectual’s tapering nose. How could she have loved him? Tall, with rolled-up shirtsleeves and large, bony hands. Ordinary, utterly ordinary, but can you tell a villain when you meet him? He stared at me. It began to rain once more against the windows, tear-streaked. He seemed more stunned than I expected.

  “Sammy?” he stammered.

  It took me a moment to realize I looked exactly like my son.

  “No, no I’m Tim.”

  “Well, Tim, I don’t give to the Scouts,” he said. British accent, unexpected. He smiled and gave a comical salute. “Military training, it’s horrible.”

  “You’re Victor Ramsey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alice and Victor Photography. Your wife?”

  “She was. Still has a share in the shop.”

  “But she no longer lives here. Where did she go?”

  He stared at me curiously. “Tim, let me make some guesses about you. I’ve been reading detective fiction. Let’s see, you came from California.”

  “She had a son.”

  “I’ll tell you, I knew from the license plate. Not very sophisticated, I know.”

  “Alice and Sammy.”

  He waved that aside. “Yes yes, Alice and Sammy, but that’s not very current stuff, Tim. Are you writing a report for school? I hate to tell you I’m not a very famous man. Not in this town, not since before you were born, those pictures on the wall are all I’m remembered for, but only in New York, not here. Look at them, take your time. You’ve done your research, though. Well done, it’s swell to meet you, is that what teenagers say? I try to be modern. Just swell. Come again, Tim. Goodbye.” And before I knew it he had vanished into the other room. I followed him.

  “I have a question.”

  “Could you hand me my little brush?” he asked. I had emerged into a sun-dappled glen—one of his photography sets—a gorgeous illusion of falling leaves, a summer haze in the distant sky, an unmended fence. My enemy stood on a ladder, painting a leaf on a tree. What did I want from Victor Ramsey? To kill him? There was Teddy’s gun in the car; no one would have heard the shot—the nearby choir was bellowing “Rock of Ages,” heavy on the soprano. Nor, if I had pushed the old ladder and sent Victor Ramsey flailing into his painted glen, would anyone have found his knotted bones for days. I could have murdered Victor Ramsey in a thousand awful ways, but you see the thought never occurred to me. In that room, an old man and a little boy among the autumn leaves, we were not rivals. We were both lost husbands, jilted lovers; we were both members of the same religion, that Sunday. No, I found I wanted more even than an address: I wanted words from someone who had also lost his muse.

  “Victor Ramsey, did you love her?”

  “Who?”

  “Alice. Did you love her?”

  “No.” He worked at the leaf, effortlessly creating it, moving on to the next. He did not seem to think anything of a boy asking about love; I was discovering that he was unlike any other old man I’d known. An artist, I guess, also as if he, too, were a child. “Not the way men seem to love their wives in this town, now I don’t know your mom and dad, but not like that.” Closer, I could see the ugly wings of his nose. “I worshipped her, Tim. She was like no one you will ever meet. Strong, independent. I never took her for granted for a moment, or pretended I understood her, and when she wanted to go I let her go, because she was art and she was music.” He made another leaf, another, each turning precisely in the breeze that he imagined. “You won’t understand. I can’t express things. Look behind the door, there’s a photograph.”

  There was. Alice at the age of fifty or so, lying in a pool of floating duckweed like a bathing girl; she was naked. Her arms were soft and dimpled, her breasts lopsided under the water, the nipples large and pale, and she gazed grinning up at a sky that had, through some trick of exposure I will never understand, become a lake-surface pitted with rain. She was not beautiful. Not the way I had preserved her in my memory, all symmetry and wet lips, fast asleep. Silt rose around her in tiny particles, and that smile rose above the water. How mystifying: my Alice, old, but lovely in some new way, floating happy and free.

  Students of art, you may recognize this portrait from its brief and minor fame, or so I’m told. If you do, keep quiet. Let my love live out her life in peace.

  “She did that one,” Ramsey said. It did not seem to cross his mind that old men should not be showing nude portraits to little boys. “I taught her the basics, but she was really something, she became a new person behind the camera. Most of these are hers.”

  I looked around and realized there were portraits of her everywhere, leaning against the walls: Alice eating figs with an amused expression, Alice nearly nude behind a clothesline with the sun in her squinting eyes, Alice asleep the way she always looked, Alice older and older in every frame. All the photographs that you grew up with, Sammy. A catalog of the years without me. I kept staring at this woman whom I guess I never really knew.

  From behind me, the quiet voice of my fellow man: “She made me younger, year by year.”

  “Where did she go?” I asked at last.

  He mentioned the name of a village, two days’ drive from here. I didn’t dare ask for an address.

  “You met her in California?”

  He nodded, closing his eyes as he contemplated the next color he would choose. “In Pasadena. I knew her mother, and invited her to work with me. It was such a gift that she arrived.”

  “Why?”

  “Hmm?”

  My voice came out too harsh: “Why did she go?”

  I meant me, why did she leave me? But Victor didn’t hear it that way. He looked at me with no pity for himself or for anyone. “Well, my boy, she didn’t love me.”

  “I see.”

  “Could you hold the ladder?”

  “Sure.”

  He grinned again, so impossibly innocent. Instantly I was able to picture him with his bride: Alice fussing clumsily with baby Sammy, old Victor mumbling and smiling as she filled the room with laughter. Tulip tree in the window, macaroni pie in the oven, Rediviva floating in the air. What a lovely life he’d lost. He said, “I have a theory about my wife. Since you seem interested, though I can’t think why. Like all women before her, she couldn’t change except by marrying. She wanted to change all the time, be a new woman, so she kept marrying, first Calhoun, he let her be brilliant, and then Van Daler, he let her be beautiful, and gave her a child. I … well. I taught her the skills with which she could leave me. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s married again, who knows what she’ll be next? She didn’t love me, but I understand. I do. Sentimental girl. There was only one, I think, she ever really loved.” And I knew from his expression that it wasn’t him or me.

  Forgive this last interruption, Sammy, but I have heard bad news. Just yesterday, my wife and son and I visited a friend of Dr. Harper’s who lives by a lake. A fat man, happy and generous; also a psychoanalyst, which terrified me. But he gave me no more than one probing glance—that of a botanist identifying a pleasant, common flower—before making us all play a baffling new kind of boar
d game. Both Alice and I lost instantly and she announced we were going for a walk. Lucky me you’ve always been such a bad sport, Alice. Outside, night birds sang in the moist air, and it was after we walked and listened that she told me.

  We stopped by the lake (no moon, but a bright phosphorescence in the clouds) and sat in the shimmering darkness, the lampless darkness she’d said she loved as a girl, the darkness of olden times. There was a distant splash; she said maybe some monster lived in the water. I said I was cold, but luckily she had a sweater with her (good mother), so she had me lift my arms in surrender while she lowered the pullover onto my body. It smelled of my son. We threw some rocks—I was a terrible throw with these shrinking hands—and she laughed, and I tried to laugh, but I was a nervous child in love with an older woman he could never have. At last she told me that Harper had asked her to marry him and she had accepted and that you, Sammy, already knew.

  I stared at her like a rabbit in a garden.

  “What do you think?”

  I said, “Marry Harper?”

  “Yes, Dr. Harper. He makes me happy. He says he’ll take us all on a trip around the world, imagine that! Any place you ever dreamed of going? I’ve dreamed of so many.”

  Alice, you wore your hair down like a girl, and I felt it made a mockery of the girl you used to be, someone who needed no sunburned doctor to take her on trips. Did I invent that girl? Or had she hidden herself decades ago, and lived now only in my memory?

  I asked her if her other husbands had made her happy.

  “Of course they did.”

  I am insane; my mind was burning and I could not control it. I have not yet found your diary, Alice, if you have one, so I am forced to ask these things out loud. “Then why’d you leave? Sammy’s father, why’d you leave him? Didn’t you love him?”

  For a moment the old intelligence, cruel and exciting, arose in her like a magic sign, and I thought she was going to say something one should never say to a child. My heart shuddered, terrified that she’d seen through me, and my skin shrank on my bones. Then, like a swan shaking its feathers into the water, she smoothed away her memory and looked at my pure, childish face.

  She said, “That was all a long time ago.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be happy together.”

  A chuckle. “Thanks.”

  With a whisper of love that surprised her, I fell into her lap.

  If Harper ever finds these pages, I’m sure he’ll show them to his psychoanalyst friend, and, oh, what a thrill for the old boy! I can hear his pencil chattering away. Let me imagine the notes: “Subject attempts intercourse with mother”—oh, not with my miniaturized equipment, Doctor, but I’m sure you mean something symbolic. Though is it exactly Oedipal if I married the mother before becoming the son? Is there some other myth with a better correlation? No, I am too twisted a knot. There is no untying me, Doctor. To release me, you must cut me in two.

  We had the address through a trick at the library, and with the help of a map posted near City Hall, the old Chrysler was humming homeward within an hour.

  “What are you thinking, old man?” Hughie asked me.

  We had turned the radio off and the only sounds were lingering birds and the rumble of a motorcycle on some adjacent, invisible street. “That I just want to see my son.”

  “Just him?”

  “And her.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A green strip of land appeared beside us: Lincoln Park, where you play your baseball, Sammy. Hughie drove on slowly—too slowly for the car behind, which passed us, radio blaring. He said in that voice I hated: “I know you. We’ve come too far. You’re not just going to peek through a window and come back into the car, are you?”

  “I thought we’d knock on the door.”

  He laughed. “That’s stupid. She may recognize me.”

  “I know. That’s all right. Say you’re passing through town. And I’m your son.”

  His hand smoothed over his scalp, an old gesture, searching for hair that had been gone now for years, then lay once again on the gearshift. With the smell of rubbing metal, he shifted into the right gear. Then I told him.

  I told him what I had planned in Ramsey’s chemical-smelling studio. No, we were not just going to knock on the door. Or take a mental picture. I told him my final dream; a poem, really, a work of art. What I wanted from this place, and from Alice, and Sammy. And him. It was a great thing to ask of someone, too great a thing, I guess. But I took his silence for agreement, because he had said it himself: we had come too far.

  “Are you going to tell?” he asked at last.

  “No. I think now I won’t ever tell her.”

  “I mean Sammy.”

  “He wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Will he believe you’re just a little boy?”

  “Everyone else does.”

  “Well, what do you want me to say your name is?”

  I looked out at the road and saw a baby staring at me from its pram, as wary as a woman in an opera box.

  “Hughie, of course. Little Hughie. After my father.”

  He laughed.

  But there we were, 11402 Stonewood, and Hughie parked noisily before the car went silent, revealing a quiet barking from behind the house. A plain house, yellow and black, decorative window on the door and the slightly askew woodwork of an added second story, done on the cheap. Church spire above the trees. A side fence opened, and out slipped the cagey dog itself, and there was old Buster, golden as a cake, woofing from a corner of the lawn. Then he paused, turning his head to the doorway. His owner stood there, chewing gum like a maniac. A little boy who looked like me.

  “Did your mother make this pie?”

  Hughie sat in the glow of the kitchen lamp, smiling and holding out a forkful of apple pie. I could not eat mine; I had already had to visit the bathroom to empty my stomach and sigh into the mirror. Now I could only stare at the boy who blinked at us and tossed a baseball from one hand to the other. He shrugged.

  “Well it’s very good,” Hughie said.

  “I guess.”

  “And you’re very kind to let us wait here for your mother.”

  Another shrug and Sammy stared into the backyard, where Buster made stupid loops around the old hemlock tree, terrorizing a squirrel. A moth was trapped behind the back screen door and nobody, nobody would set it free.

  “You’re in school now, Sammy?”

  Pause, as if this were a trick. “I’m at Benjamin Harrison. I’m in fifth grade. I’ve got Mrs. McFall and she’s been sick so we didn’t have any homework for a week last week.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “She’s all right. Next year I’ll have Mrs. Stevens and I hear she’s a …” You stopped there before you said some crude word, then you looked at me and smiled. My brain filled with black stars.

  Victor Ramsey had prepared me for your looks—not a spitting image of your diminutive father, but alike enough, with enormous ears and blond hair in a cowlicked swirl—but you mangled your dad’s face beyond any recognition. It was never still: you elongated it in boredom, or crunched it up in thought; your restless eyes rolled and narrowed and snapped shut as if what Hughie said might put you to sleep; and your lips, God, smack, smack, smacking with the gum you chewed like a betel nut. One elbow was freshly scraped and oozing a little yellow fruit-juice; the other was bruised and blue. You bit your nails even as we sat there. You leaped out of your chair from time to time to yell out the window at Buster, who was doing nothing particularly interesting, but who I suppose was the best friend of your life (and whom I never truly replaced). You were polite to a point (inviting us in when you heard we were old friends) but bossed us around, making us sit in particular chairs and telling us, “Don’t eat all the pie ‘cause I’m saving it for later.” There was no sign, in all of this, that you loved a girl named Rachel. Or that you sat alone in your room and prayed for your mother. That you then imagined awful deaths of teac
hers and schoolmates, or that these dreams made you fear the devil. That you were like me, a little, in the end. I saw none of it then; I only saw a champion baseballer, a cowboy fan, a runt who thought that everything he said was so brand new and brilliant that he smiled at his own words. A perfect, maddening little boy.

  “We’re studying Asia,” you said.

  “Sounds good.”

  Your face collapsed in disgust at the entire continent. “The swell place has about a million swell little people on it, and about a hundred swell little nations, all of them exactly the same and can’t say their names even, except there’s China, you know, whose main export is tea. No, silk. No, rice. One of those. And Japan. Would you like to hear my haiku?”

  “Yes.”

  He arranged his head very sternly beneath the light and recited this masterpiece:

  A little sandwich

  Sweetly singing to itself

  “Tunafish salad.”

  He added, “That’s because I was pretty much starving when I wrote it. I got an A, though. I get all A’s.”

  Hughie said, “Now you’re twelve years old, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well that’s the same age as little Hughie here! Isn’t it? Isn’t it, son?” My old friend looked at me so strangely—almost angrily, or as if he were going to cry—and I recognized, crazily, my dead mother’s face: Be what they think you are.

  “Yes, Dad.” I said in my sad, hiccupy little voice. “I am twelve.”

  “You got a gun?” Sammy asked me, and I wondered what kind of child my old wife had raised.

  But Sammy didn’t wait for an answer. “My mom won’t let me have one. She doesn’t know anything about it, she never had one, my dad would let me have one, I’m sure of it. Danny Shane down the street’s got a BB with a double pump but it busts up sometimes and his dad screams at him like heck, and Billy Easton’s got a Daisy.” All of a sudden, with remarkable joy, he shouted the advertising line: “It’s a Daisy!” Buster ran to the screen door barking and Sammy teased him until he jogged away.