They unpacked Max’s records of Gregorian chants and Yemenite rock and roll and plugged in the stereo. They poured a little rum into their cups and then poured some more into the teapot.
“You take off your shirt,” he said.
Elizabeth sighed and unbuttoned her shirt, thinking, This cannot be what he really wants, my hair’s sticking up all over the place, this bra is unraveling, I smell like Lysol.
“ ‘I love to kiss her breasts. They have the same faint, gold down that you see on those gorgeous Seattle peaches. I hope I die with that velvet feel on my lips.’ ”
Elizabeth lay down on the floor, and Dan lay down beside her, the two of them closing their eyes.
“I wished he would die, sometimes. He caused my mother such pain.” Dan laughed. “It was a two-way street, I guess. Is this okay?” he asked, one hand skimming over the places Max wrote about.
“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Yes.”
Like tired babies, like collapsing balloons, they lay flip-flopped over each other, ignoring belt buckles digging into soft parts, ignoring the impulse toward sex that death brings out in people even more ill-suited than Dan and Elizabeth.
“Good night, you banana,” Elizabeth said, folding up the rug corner with his shirt to make a pillow for him.
“Good night, Lizzie. Dobrounuts. Thank you.” He threw both arms over the shirt and the rug and closed his eyes.
Elizabeth kissed his forehead and took her bag out to the car. She came back for her jacket and put the apartment keys on the table and kissed him again, as if he were the Max she’d never met.
PART THREE
The Greatest of These Is Love
I know he’s on the road. I feel him coming. I don’t know when or why or what he’ll expect my house to be. Funny enough to me that it’s my house. That I own a house. Safely in the middle of the middle block, and the only thing that stands out is the wild army of tulip trees in the front yard. I never even thought about making this place interesting. It is comfortable, it is normal; it lies on the lower end of the neighborhood spectrum, true, but in a way that arouses tolerance, not disgust. I am not like the Gilroys, who don’t water, and I am not like the Boenches, who have built a three-car garage and subtly but definitely offend in the other direction.
When he gets here, he’ll try to figure out which house is mine (the letters have fallen off the mailbox), and as he is driving slowly by, he’ll see Max on the lawn, turning cartwheels.
Huddie sits in his car, wondering where to park, and sees a young white boy on the lawn turning cartwheels, and he knows — the hair, something in the face — the boy is Elizabeth’s. And queer. He can see the boy’s queerness from two houses down. Jesus, he thinks, just get him a tutu. Huddie reaches for the bouquet, studying him. Once he’s with Elizabeth, been invited into her house, he’ll have to pretend not to see the narrow, puffed chest and the thin shivery shoulders. Boy life will be a horror for this child, and some man will have to take up for him. A mother will not be enough. You’d have to make him a faggot to reckon with, a queer you’d think twice about bothering, even on a hot, dull evening.
Huddie climbs out of the car slowly, flowers first, wishing he weighed fifty pounds less, feeling like a beached black whale in the eyes of this very white, very thin kid. The boy averts his eyes from Huddie and goes right to the flowers, apparently approving. Huddie would throw them away if the boy hadn’t seen them already; how could he have brought something so obvious, so desperate? He knows enough about wine to have chosen something impressive. One red, one white, maybe two big-bowled glasses. He could have brought her interesting cheeses from local farms, seven different kinds of crackers nestled on damask in one of the big willow baskets he now charges fifty dollars for. These flowers are bleeding away their purple foolishness, wetting the pretty tissue, the bottom of it limp, falling away in his hand.
The huge bouquet of lilac and purple irises is visible all the way from my living room window. There must be four dozen flowers in all that pink tissue. It’s the Kilimanjaro of bouquets. He’s studying my child. Max bangs on the window for my attention, and when our eyes meet, he stretches up his skinny arms and puffs out his chest. Even as he goes into his backward walkover, he has the sweet obsessive look of a leaping cat, and a cat’s light slant eyes. His legs spring out supple and wide as a wishbone beneath baggy grey shorts that slide up his smooth thighs, revealing his underwear. He wears inconspicuous boy clothes — a dirty T-shirt, ratty sneakers on bare dirty legs — but they’re useless as disguise when he’s shrugging his shoulders or tossing his straight blond hair back like a starlet. He is the perfect thing in my life, and I would like to get him some adequate protection. I wouldn’t flash gold jewelry in the bad part of town and I wouldn’t send this child into the world without a man. I am not only not enough, I think I am trouble.
I see Max watching Huddie as he gets out of the car. He still moves easily, but he needs more room. Much more room, he’s a big man after fifteen years, almost as wide as his father and taller than I remember. Huddie puts his legs out of the car carefully, scanning the street. I have half fallen for a dozen black men over the years for no other reason than that they exit their cars the way he does, the slow, self-possessed unfolding of a big man to his full size, making clear that he will not be threatened, that there is nothing to fear. And if there is, if you insist, he will reluctantly give you the trouble you’re looking for, kick your sorry ass, and go on about his business. It says Don’t. Fuck. With. Me. and it is the required daily grace under pressure of a black man in a white place, and although it must exhaust him, it moves me, and although I would think that understanding its ugly root would make excitement impossible, it excites me.
He must look enormous to Max. I don’t think he’s ever seen anyone so big in every direction, coming wide and high and black-oak solid into his speculative, pale green gaze.
I think Max knows exactly which house Huddie is looking for, knows why he’s come, knows that this is the man who has come for his mother. I want to think this. I’m beat. I have been explaining single motherhood and conception and marriage and homosexuality and commitment to Max since before he could listen, and I am tired of saying things clearly and reasonably in hopes of warding off trauma. Mad giggling is Max’s response to my sensible, sensitive explanations, and right beneath that, furious disbelief. When he is most angry and disbelieving, he sticks out his tongue and pulls down his lower lids, making faces so ugly and not-funny that it’s clear his only wish is to make me stop telling these ridiculous and frightening lies. He finds most adult men terrifying beasts, especially the fathers of the little girls he plays with, and he does not believe, for one minute, that there are women who like to live with them or that pairs of men make happy, healthy lives (I say the three words together always, banishing all disease, grief, and loneliness) in the worlds of Provincetown and San Francisco, and certainly not that I actually parted my legs and let a man put his penis into my vagina. He prefers to believe that I lay very close to, was perhaps sandwiched between, his idols, Mr. Rogers and Peter Pan; their united sperm would in fact explain why I have a child like Max.
“Hi,” Huddie says. I spy behind the curtains. Mothers have divine dispensation for listening in, sheet-reading, dream interpretation, and interrogation. I don’t say we should, just that we do. I do. How else can we know what to do, whom to save, where to go when they don’t come home? The amorality of my childhood, my shoplifting and wholesale lying, is nothing to what I do, and am prepared to do, every single day for this boy.