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

events, chance encounters, bloom like ink spots on the page. So while the Levys only needed me on rare occasions, these are the times I remember from those months at South Park when they lived below us. I usually brought Hughie along for reassurance, and once he even came with Mother, on one of her few outings in the months before my sister was born, to a meal at the Levys. We all dressed carefully and had a few sips of sherry before we made our way down, and I had the time of my life because, somehow, with joke-cracking Hughie to distract the mothers, Alice at last began to notice me. Seated between me and my friend, she paid no attention to the younger man but kept drawing letters in her potatoes that I tried to mimic in my own, and while I knew this was a childish game we were playing, I pretended that these were messages for me, and that if I paid attention she might spell out some urgent call for love.
    “Alice! What are you doing! And Mr. Tivoli, I’m ashamed of you. A man of your age. But you’re forgiven as long as you tell us the story of that chain around your neck.”
    Alice leaned forward and touched my necklace. “Nineteen forty-one. What does it mean?”
    “Nothing.”
    “The year the world’s gonna end?”
    Hughie broke in and said it was the number of stagecoaches I’d robbed as Black Bart, which made the women laugh and forget my little golden tombstone, which I now hid under my cravat. I looked away from the conversation. Mirrors were set between the windows of the room and so gave me a view alternating between a scene of the backyard—in which an orange cat crawled across the lawn—and each of our reflections:
    There was Mother, in her pearls and a jacketed charcoal dress that she had altered following a pattern in Godey’s Lady’s Book. She had an air of such elegant patience in the lustred light of the room that, rather than looking like a woman on hard times, she seemed like a duchess fleeing from her country in the costume of her maid. There in the window was the cat, padding through the grass. There was Mrs. Levy in curled Roman hairdo, canted forward with her head on her gathered hands, touching everybody with her intelligent eyes, as in a ritual. Now she looked at me with those light-catching girandole eyes, now she turned them on my mother. There, in the next window, the burning tail of the cat on its quest. Hughie, florid and sweating a little, was dressed all in butternut as if he were a Rebel soldier or a man heading out to picnic, touching and adjusting his oddly small-knotted bow tie in a gesture that might have been uncertainty or pride. In the window, the cat was on the fence, hovering, considering a leap into the darkness of the next yard. And there was Alice. Plainly dressed, neck long as a plume, hair up and womanly, she fondled her borrowed earrings with polished fingers, turned away from Hughie’s joking as if from a burning thing. I froze and tried not to let her know I saw: there was Alice, sideways in the mirror, looking at me at last. The cat leapt out of sight, a flame off to another hell.

    I should explain the wetted ink; these are not tears. Last night we had a thunderstorm.
    We never had these in my San Francisco, so I hope I am not revealing my location too much by saying the hills east of this flat town act as nets, bagging us eel-swarms of electricity. I am unused to storms, and tend to bark and huddle like the family dog. In a way, this is useful, since it keeps my childish cover, but I don’t want to be this sort of child. I want to be your sort, Sammy, the
shouting kind, the brave kind. But there I am under the bed with Buster, both of us bristling and shivering away until the woman of the house comes to flick on the lights. Is it old-fashioned of me to abhor the electric?
    Last night it burglarized the middle of a dream. I was with Alice again, in love again. I won’t give you the details, doctors. All I will say is it was a lily pond of Alices, old and