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

approach. Off far away a fire engine sang in steam. A night-blooming cactus in the yard was on full show for no one in particular. I came closer and I could hear her gasp; I could see her holding her hands together and then, when I was close enough for her to see me clearly, she took my arm and whispered something before she kissed me. I was still and quiet and shocked. Seeing my frightened eyes, the widow was unable to hold in her laugh; she leaned back her head and out it came, that string of pearls. Reader, I was seventeen years old.

    Dear Mrs. Levy is dead now, buried south of San Francisco in the Jewish part of Colma. She died in her seventies, after a prolonged
illness in Pasadena, where her good daughter tended to her almost daily. Her skin became spotted and pale and she allowed no visitors in her last years; she took to wearing her old widow’s veil when her lawyers would come with documents for her to sign. She died without a penny to her name, and I picture an older Alice weeping by her mother’s bed, holding a hand so thin that the rings no longer fit her fingers. The cold hand of my first lover.
    I will be discreet. We must be gentle with the dead; the dead can say nothing for themselves. I will only tell you she was kind and generous with me over the weeks we spent together in the darkness of the garden and, more than once, in the midnight dangers of our South Park. She was confused and touched by the innocence of old Mr. Tivoli, and I think she took my trembling and moodiness for love, because after we were done and I lay shivering and gasping on the ground, Mrs. Levy would stare at me and, just for a little while, her eyes would star over in tears. She was a woman, not a girl, and though she had often been lonely, our nights were not desperate ones for her. They were simply “a little honey for my heart,” as she always whispered in my ear. Mrs. Levy, you never said it but you probably loved me. You were kind to me and I treated you badly and in some hell you are all smiles today, measuring my private seat of fire.
    Why did I do it? Why, when my poor eyes squinted into the garden and saw not my sweet Alice’s face among the fuchsia but her mother’s, did I not step back into the house? No one would have been hurt; it could easily have been construed as nerves or, better still, propriety calling for nothing further to be said of women in dark gardens. And nothing magic happened; the strands of starlight did not bind me to the spot; I could have left at any moment. But I was young. She thought I was an old businessman with a butterfly heart, but I was an ordinary boy of seventeen who had never known what it was to smell a woman’s hair that close, or feel a hand brushing his skin, or see a face unlatched with longing.
It is almost another kind of love, being loved. It is the same heat but from another room; it is the same sound but from a high window and not your own heart. Brave or carefree people will not understand. You, Sammy. But for some of us, the young or old or lonely, it might seem a palatable substitute and better than we have. We are not in love, but we are with someone in love, and the spare dreams of their days are all for us.
    Think of it: I had never been kissed. And I had no sense, from my life as an old man, that I would ever be touched or loved by a woman. I was unprepared for my own body; Hughie’s books had taught me what was what, but not what I might feel, and it all happened quicker than my dull mind could handle. From the moment Mrs. Levy took my arm under those trees, she moved without doubt—my very presence there meant I was willing—and I, heavy with doubt, could not keep up with her hands and kisses and her little whispers like folded birds placed in my ears. I could not keep up with the heat under my skin, or the scrape of her nails as she undid my shirt buttons and I was bare to the night. The body, that pale spider, stuns the mind; it wraps it up in silk and hangs it