Read Online The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer - Free Book Online

had dropped something earlier in the day, a valuable pin or brooch your mother would scold you for, and so you slid through the back door, closing it carefully, and hurried into the darkness of the grass, whispering, searching every blade, heedless of how you looked. I stood unbreathing in my dark corner. On your knees, cat-stretching your arms into the yard, I could see through the neck of your loose cotton chemise a pink landscape of skin. You turned and writhed in your cloud and I turned and writhed in mine. I saw your legs stretching and tensing as you hunted and jerked your body in hope; women’s pantaloons were devious things in those days, split down the crotch with overlapping fabric, and once you shifted just carelessly enough to allow the veil to part and I glimpsed the vulnerable blue veins of your thighs. A cat leaped in the yard; you froze, the chemise settling off one shoulder. Then, abandoning yourself to fate, surely imagining a lie that might save you, you ran to the back door, opening it to make a bright square and then, closing it behind you, a dark one. I spent all night looking for your jewel, darling, but found only a hairpin, a bird’s egg, and two battered coils of grass where your knees had been.
    The agony that one night caused me! The blueness of those veins colored everything in sight, and every night I had to rid the world of you just to sleep, just to survive another day. Sammy, close your ears. I did this in the most obvious, the most boyish of ways. I’m sure you think no one was ever like you in the world, and that young men in my day, adrown in love, secured their wrists in wolfman-chains until the dawn. No, we succumbed like all young men. Forgive my crudeness, Alice, but I was crude, and I hope you’ll find it flattering, now that you are old as well, to think of me in bed, staring at my memory like a French postcard, watching the starlight trickle into the darkness of your clothes.
    I did not climb down the trellis to peek into her window; I did
not hang a mirror discreetly from a tree so I could see every holy one of the nightly hundred brushes of her sweet hair as she stared bored into the looking glass; I did not sneak into the carriage house to touch the seat from which she had just descended, feeling the startling warmth my fidgeting girl had made there. I imagined all these things but did none of them. No, I was left standing on the carpet and trying to feel her soul’s vibration (damn those Brussels rugs) and holding the memory of what I considered to be the closest I would ever get to love.
    “Don’t go on so much,” Hughie told me when we went out on our bone-shaking bicycles. “You’ll get love. You’ll get better love than she has to offer, I can tell you. I’ve got some books you can read, but don’t keep them too long. I think my father knows I took them.”
    I read the books. They had nothing to do with love, but they kept me up very late night after night. One, perhaps acquired for the collection by Mr. Dempsey to convince himself this was a form of study, turned out to be a tract on spermatorrhea and terrified me for almost a week, but the others were a source of great knowledge and fascination. I especially enjoyed the pictures. I returned them all to Hughie and we did not speak of them, just exchanged an understanding flick of the eyes. I had been distracted, at least, but I still was no nearer to love.

    The opportunity I was looking for came through Mrs. Levy herself. Desperate, heartaching, red and ugly from lack of sleep, I decided I had to take a chance; I had to have another photograph to fondle in my bedroom. I rashly decided on the house-repair idea and went downstairs in shirtsleeves, a badly tied cravat, and with a yetunformed idea about needing to examine a leak in her daughter’s room.
    “Mr. Tivoli!”
    Mrs. Levy stood at the open door, smiling only faintly and touching her hair, which was middle-parted and done up with surprising sloppiness in