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

of moonlight. When she was gone, I was the one who fell to the floor at your knees and wept; I can’t say why. You were the one who touched my hair and said soft things that gave, as always, little comfort.
    Then I heard you murmur something I cannot forget. You said, “I feel so old.”
    I lifted my face. “What?”
    You shook your head, latching the thought back in.
    “You can’t feel old,” I said.
    You just rocked a little in your chair, your hand on my head as you lit another cigarette. The room held you in the curve of some shadow. You looked as old as you would ever be. You said, “Like I’m floating above my body. And I watch myself and my little stupid movements, how I put the kettle on for tea or brush the dust from the braid on my dress, complaining how it gets so filthy, sitting with Mother and reading the visiting cards. It takes so little to be myself, and I’ve done it for so long, being so little, doing such little things. But most of me is floating above, watching. As if it weren’t my body. Part of me knows something that it can’t bear to tell the rest.”
    I sat, stunned, feeling the burn of your words. A woman whose body wasn’t hers, floating outside her life; you would understand, I thought. You would know what life was like for the sick, timetwisted boy who was in love with you. I watched you smoking, as if the smoke could keep the coldness in your face.
    “I want to tell you something, Alice.”
    “I don’t want to talk.”
    But it was too late; I had begun to say the thing my mother taught me never to say. It felt like the first words of a spell, though, the kinds of words that try to lift a curse. “I have to tell you. Listen to me. You don’t have to talk. Just listen.”
    You took your eyes down from the gaslight and they were alive again, for a moment, and I think you hoped I was going to say something about Hughie; I think that even after this last no, still it was not beyond belief that there would be a yes.
    “I’m not … what you think I am, it’s not what I am. I know what I look like.” I was speaking roughly, between hard breaths. My throat was gagging on this foolish thing, but I went on: “Alice, I’m … I’m seventeen. Do you see? Alice. I’m just a boy.”
    I felt a little rapture when your looks broke open. I think you had never considered me to be another person in the room; here I was, listening all this time, the messenger of renounced love; here I was, kneeling before you on the carpet; and all this time I had been as wretched as you.
    “I’m just a boy.”
    I saw a sadness beating at the back of your eyes, an insect dying behind a screen.
    “Do you believe me?”
    “Yes.”
    You will remember: you held my face with both hands and, thumbs out, wiped the tears from my cheeks. There was blood in your face again; your eyes were moist like my own; you were my old Alice thinking, Let’s one of us be happy. There in the parlor you saw through me and knew how young I was, younger than you; you gripped my face and were the soothsayer for both of us, pursing your lips over something bitter, then nodding your head in slow degrees before you kissed me. You will remember: it was you who kissed me that evening in the parlor. I tasted that last coil of smoke held in your mouth; it tasted like a word, like a yes . From some other room we heard a baby’s undulating oh. You kissed
me and did not pull away or change your mind; you drank from me like a thirsty girl. I was the first to say he loved you. You will remember.

    I wanted to see her first thing in the morning; I could not wait. It’s true I had not slept since she whispered, Mr. Tivoli, Mr. Tivoli, and stood to rearrange her hair and calm her swarming breath (I did cause something there, at least) before leaving me. I sat in my chair as my sister wailed into the night, and of course in my imagination I continued that evening with Alice as far as a moral man could, and then I set the cylinder back in its