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

gaze, but which made the older woman laugh in a downward, separating scale like a string of pearls.
    Alice turned to me at last. “I hope you don’t make noise upstairs like the last couple. They sounded like cattle.”
    Mrs. Levy attacked her daughter with a reptilian noise. “Besides, Mr. Tivoli,” the widow added, “I noticed the beautiful rugs you’ve brought from your old home on Nob Hill. What a soft, lovely household you’ll have!”
    Mrs. Levy had a charming way with conversation, and I was a
child of seventeen, so I could only follow where she led. I spoke of rugs, Brussels rugs, their color and feel, and I could almost taste them on my tongue as I kept up this dusty, woolen conversation while all the time I could have been asking Alice about her schooling, her piano, her travels; I could have been hearing Alice’s voice. Instead, I had to watch the sweet girl staring off beside me and falling ever further into her own thoughts. The pain of the sting must have subsided under her mother’s care or the dull growl of my voice, and dear young Alice was dropping, dropping into some imaginary life I longed to share.
    “ …I think, I think it’s nice to have rugs around.”
    Alice: “Ugh.”
    “And damask love seats, I saw them too,” Mrs. Levy said, as proud as if they were her own. “I’m impressed, Mr. Tivoli. You seem quite taken with the household, for a man.”
    But I’m not a man! I wanted to say, but she had already paused politely and then asked about the person beside me, whom I had completely forgotten.
    “I’m Mr. Hughie Dempsey,” Hughie said with all smoothness, tipping his hat to Mrs. Levy and her blinking, dreambound daughter.
    “Ah, Hughie,” Alice repeated.
    “He is a close friend of the family,” I said.
    Mrs. Levy was gathering her daughter together by the waist, as one carries cut flowers to a vase. “Wonderful, wonderful. I should get poor Alice in and treat her neck. I hope to see you visiting, Mr. Dempsey. And of course, Mr. Tivoli, we will have you and your sister-in-law over for dinner soon.”
    Bows, nods, smiles, and as the girl was carried into the house, worrying once again about the sting’s poison, I stood as still as any of our ornamental iron dogs. Some people were making a commotion in the park behind me, and through my haze I could make out a man walking along, waving a flag of caution as a
steam-powered carriage made its exhibitory circle to general shouts and jeers, but the wonder of it was lost on me, for I was working to think how I could get into our lower story without my mother, find Alice alone, and convince her of what I truly was.
    Beside me Hughie’s amused voice: “Mr. Tivoli, I believe you are wearing my hat.”

    All of a sudden, life was gorgeous broken glass. There was no moment when I did not feel the pain of Alice’s presence underfoot, and sometimes when I stood in the parlor listening to Mother’s explanation of our accounts, or weary recitation of her night beside the spirit lamp, I stepped to different places on the carpet, wondering, Is Alice underneath me now? Or now? And so I would move across the parlor like a knight on a chessboard, hoping that when I reached the point above Alice, when I stood in shivering alignment, I would feel the warmth of her body, the scent of her hair rising upwards through the house.
    Hughie thought I was acting like a fool. “Don’t think about her,” he said. “She’s fourteen. She wears her hair down and probably still plays with dolls. She doesn’t know about love.” Then he would flip another card into his hat across the room, intimating that he knew—as we often do at seventeen—all about the matters of the heart.
    But I could not be stopped. She swam like a mermaid in the swamp-tank of my dreams. I lay in bed with the window open, hoping I would hear the sound of her voice screaming at her mother from the kitchen—“I’m going crazy in this house!”—and it would enter like a sweet