The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer Page A

nothing of love, nothing of passion, a man who could offer only his own sad poison. But to see that hatred in her eyes; it felt as if she was gone forever and no plan of mine would ever bring her back. Hughie might wreck her heart a hundred times, but if I told my Alice to forget him, to find a sweet and loving boy nearby (perhaps nearer than she ever imagined), she would send me out of her life. She would turn again into the sullen downstairs girl who never thought of me. Those eyes, threaded with hate like opals, burning off the tears; I would have done anything to change them. So I sputtered as she looked on. And then I discovered what she had come to hear:
    “I’ll talk to him, I’ll tell him … I’ll mention you …”
    “You will?”
    “I’ll tell him how beautiful you are.”
    “Does he think I’m beautiful?”
    “He does. He thinks you’re the most lovely girl.”
    “Oh my.”
    “Yes, the most lovely girl he’s ever seen.”
    “The most lovely girl …” she repeated.
    Alice left my parlor happier than when she entered it; she left with all these stupid promises of mine, done just to keep her in the room, just to force one more occasion for us to talk and to make a secret between us, for this was to be kept from her mother at all costs. I nodded, pursing my lips. When she left, she kissed my forehead, and as I smelled the soft cotton at her throat, I thought of how I was more than a confidant to her, more than the sharer of a secret; I was her only route to love. As she had once depended on me to light a Sabbath fire, so now she depended on me to bring some word to warm her heart. And though I knew the smile faintly forming on her face as she left was not for me,
and the sleepless night she would spend was not over my bearded face, still I was there in it somewhere. I was a houseboy of her heart. When we are very young, we try to live on what can never be enough.

    Alice, what are you thinking, reading this, now that you are old? You know where this is leading and I’m sure you have a different story. One, perhaps, in which you are more lost and innocent, a little piece of Alice-glass chiming in the window, or one full of details I can never know: how Hughie laughed at your cleverness; the thick, erotic pads of the Victoria Regina; the angry way you missed your father; the weird sensation of that old man undoing the ribbon in your hair. While in my version Hughie is just the man who happened to block the light, in your memory I’m sure you loved him for specific reasons, as we think we do; you still warm your hands over the ember of that early love; you could never be convinced, in your old age, that it was only chance.
    I told your mother—did you know? Of course I did. I told her, as a secret between us, that you were in love with Hughie and that he did not deserve you. This was not a lie, but it was cruel; it was meant to make her huff and sigh if you ever mentioned Hughie. Looking back, this could only have made you love him more.
    One night, you were different. You will remember this. One night, Maggie let you in and you were a stone daughter striding into the room. You didn’t sit on the rug and blush; there was no blood in you that night. You chose my father’s old chair, arranged your braid, then stared at me and said, with no accusation in your voice: “He doesn’t love me.” You waved away every one of my words, wincing just a little, and kept repeating what you were now too smart not to see. He didn’t love you; no, of course he didn’t. It had been clear from the beginning. You wore a gaudy
young girl’s necklace and cheap shoes that fell from your heels. You produced a cigarette from a reticule and it was as if you said: I am now a woman who does these things. At fourteen, a woman who does these things. I stopped talking and let you build this other woman from smoke, breathe her into being there in the room. There was silence while she turned, all hair and tendons, in the slant