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

from a corner so that the body is free to go about its business. I awoke to find myself lying in the phlox, hardly able to breathe, while Mrs. Levy sat above me, glad-eyed; lunarly barebosomed, stroking my hair and whispering: You’re a good man, Max, don’t worry, you haven’t touched a woman in a while, have you? Max, you good, good man.
    I was Mr. Tivoli on the steps and in the mail, but I was Max in her arms, dear Max, handsome Max, strong and eager Max. I had never heard my name said so many times, in so many ways, all of them tender and good, as if that name—which always tasted of hard tack in my mouth—were so rich it could only be indulged in quietly, carefully, within the secret antechamber of my ear. It was the first and one of the last times I heard my name said like that, because though women have gasped a name into my ear, it has
seldom been Max. Sammy, have you heard it yet? You have had so many Sammys said to you—the “Get in here” Sammy, the “Aren’t you a laugh?” Sammy, the “Come out and play” Sammy, the “Don’t bother me” Sammy—but are you old enough, reading this, to have heard the very different and surprising Sammy that comes from a girl in love? For once, someone is not calling you or informing you or addressing you at all; it is not talk. She is saying it for her own pleasure, because though you are there before her, saying your name calls forth not the past Sammys she has held, but a future Sammy she imagines still kissing her like this. So Mrs. Levy conjured up a future Max, a strong man always lying in the phlox and breathing hard, and I was so unused to the feeling that I accepted him; I became him for a while, for I still answered her notes and, after a time, recognized the signal of shades in her window: one up, one down. A wink in the night; for young men in old bodies, my God, isn’t that reason enough?

    Of course I didn’t forget my Alice. It took everything I had not to let the ah-hiss of her name escape into Mrs. Levy’s ear, and I considered it a kind of tribute that Alice’s face often played fairy-lamp-style in my mind while I trembled in her mother’s embrace. Also, my situation allowed me greater access to the household below, and Hughie and I (complicitous Dempsey always came) spent many an evening carving at a fat, hard roast and surviving the older Levy’s version of “Listen to the Mockingbird” in order to delight in the pleasures of the younger Levy’s piano renditions of Civil War marching songs. Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! we would sing. Alice stuck her tongue into the air as she pounded the piano, Hughie would bellow along and punch the air to break his boredom, Mrs. Levy blew every word like a kiss to me, and dear old
page-turning Mr. Tivoli harmonized with a smile. I had one hand on the music and one pressed decorously against Alice’s lacy back, where I felt the buttons of her spine beneath the buttons of her dress and, on every blessed Pea!, the sweet convulsion of her frame.
    Mother did not come to these events; she was laid up the last weeks of her pregnancy and took daily doses of whiskey to keep her from the dangers of hysteria. Before my evenings at the Levys I would bring her dinner up to her and tell her, as always, about my day at work in the belly of Bancroft’s brick whale, how the funny white-haired hatless man sold me the Call and I read about the three Haymarket Square anarchists still waiting to be hanged. Together, as always, we went through the cards from the receiver. She told my tarot. I read to her from a Cosmopolitan magazine that she was perfectly capable of reading herself, but she always closed her eyes and listened. Later, after the parlor entertainment and before the tumble in the phlox, I came upstairs to kiss her lips and snuff out the smoking candle beside her.
    I was sent out of the house when she began to go into labor, and Hughie and I found ourselves in an old banker’s bar drinking growler after growler of