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

about light all the time. You know that when it got dark in winter and there wasn’t much light, you would have to do everything before sundown, well, there weren’t any streetlights on country roads back then, were there? How frightening. And you couldn’t read at night except by candlelight, and you probably saved your candles very carefully. Not like us. You made your own, they were everything to you, if you read books. And you had to read, what else was there to do? They had so few nice clothes they never went out. They didn’t have parlors or nonsense like Wardian cases and kaleidoscopes or watching magic lantern shows. There wasn’t any of that to do. There were just …people. Think of it.”
    Alice lay silent and I worked my nerve up to say something: “They went to balls.”
    She shook her head, still facing the moon. “I mean a long time ago. I mean before kerosene lamps, and I don’t mean special evenings like balls, I mean evenings like this. Ones we like to kill with a parlor game.” Then my young love looked at me at last and my chest went cold with fear: “How could anyone fall in love by gaslight, I ask you?”
    “And yet they do,” came a voice behind us. Her mother was back.
    Alice was still looking at me. “Was it like that, Mr. Tivoli? Candles and long hours in the evening? When you were a boy?”
    “No,” I said softly.
    “Mr. Tivoli isn’t that old, Alice! Really! We had kerosene lamps when I was a girl, you know. And pianos.”
    Alice blinked for a moment and faced the moon again. “Too bad. I’m in the wrong time. I want all my nights to be like this.”
    Mrs. Levy seemed to be smiling. “I do like the moonlight.”
    Alice considered this. “The dark, too, and the cold,” she said. “And the silence.”
    The last word came almost as a command; we were silent. Alice closed her eyes and breathed in the night air, and this action, just the contraction of her shoulders under the oily gleam of sealskin, detached the invisible hair. I was alone again. Mrs. Levy stood before me against a tree. She was looking up at the stars; you could just see her breath forming in the chill air before her face, a ghost mask. We were all breathing, all wearing these masks. It was like a play of some kind, with the bright moon and the furs and hats and the little audience of spoons below us; I did not know what it meant. I saw Mrs. Levy lower her head and smile; I saw Alice breathing openmouthed up to the stars, her cheeks webbed with color; I saw my old hand resting against her sleeve, desperate to tap a code of some kind to her. I saw how the moon had dropped into her cup of coffee. It struggled there like a moth. Then I saw her lean forward, her mouth in a silent kiss, and as she blew on the furrowed surface to cool it, I saw the moon explode.

    Later that night, after I had lit the gaslights, carried in the tête-à-tête, and started a fire in the Levy house, after I had lit the shortburning
candles in their rooms, I went upstairs to find Maggie standing like the sewing bird with a sealed note in her grip:

    Max: It’s more than I can bear. Come to the garden at midnight.
    —the girl downstairs

    Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like memory. So I didn’t hesitate. I took the note from Maggie and threw it on the fire. I changed my clothes to finer things and blackened a wet handkerchief by wiping the day’s soot from my face. I remembered the moon in a cup of coffee.
    She was there in the garden. The moon had set; I could only see the glow of white showing from under furs. She was sitting on a bench beneath the trees. The twigs cracked under my feet in the dark garden and she stood, silently watching me