It was this taste of cold sweetness that Lizzie distinctly remembered years later, a delicious evanescent treat laced with an unspeakable fear. She remembered Max’s small house situated on the edge of the dank canal—his cottage, he called it. She remembered feeling safe in that house—Max ordered pizza and installed Lizzie and Sarah on the couch with multiple blankets despite the day’s heat, told them they could watch whatever movies they chose. (“You sure Godfather II is okay for Sarah?” “It’s fine!”) She could recall all this as well as the conviction of her feeling: her house would burn. She would never see her father again.
But when Lizzie woke up the next morning, her father was sitting at Max’s tiny metal kitchen table. He was filthy in his old NYU Med sweatshirt, sweat-stained and dirt-streaked, but his eyes were bright. Lizzie could see white in his hair, what she would later learn was ashes.
Joseph hugged her tightly, and Lizzie could smell the smoke and sweat emanating from his clothes, his skin. “The wind,” he kept saying, “the wind.” The fire had barreled through the mouth of the canyon, edged past Sullivan, and Joseph and his neighbors were ordered out of their houses, off the roofs they were trying to protect by hosing them down. But the wind abruptly changed course, and their houses were spared. Lizzie could remember her father laughing and shaking his head. “I’m a lucky man, Lizzie. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been incredibly lucky.”
She remembered Max vividly from that time too. He was younger than her father. Lizzie remembered thinking that he was still old, though, close to forty, she had guessed. She remembered the way the reddish hairs in his beard would catch the light and gleam. He spoke to her like she was a real person, not a kid. And she remembered telling him: “You’re very different from my dad.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah,” she had said. “You’re much quieter.”
“I talk,” he said, with a sly smile, but then, as if he couldn’t help it, he fell silent.
He was a listener then and he was a listener now. Because here Lizzie was, back in Max’s house, the Venice canal nothing more than a silvery streak out the window, a trick of reflection. Here were his nimble hands, exploring the territory of her body. He was a detailer, that Max, a recorder, a collector; he brought fierce attention to whatever task was at hand, unwrapping the cellophane of a cigarette pack, unwrapping her. Lizzie lay back on his couch and looked up at the wood slicing the living room ceiling, those same thick roughhewn beams that she’d slept beneath on a night more than twenty years earlier when she feared she was once again losing all that mattered. Max had taken care of her. Now he brought the same steadied attention to the tracing of her.
And my God, did it feel good. How in the world could something feel this good? She was dizzied by her desire, under a spell. The only part that made sense was that something that made so little sense was transpiring. She and Max shouldn’t be happening. If her father were alive, they wouldn’t be happening. This, she tried not to dwell on.
She called her senior partner. “I think I need that bereavement leave after all,” she said. She told him that her father’s estate was a shambles, her sister a wreck. “I need to be here,” she said in a gust of prevaricating self-righteousness. “I’m sorry, but I do.”
Marc agreed to two weeks. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s all I need.” She thought to herself: Two weeks, and I’ll figure it out.
But what needed figuring out? She knew, even if she couldn’t admit it to herself, even if she hadn’t said a word to Max, she wanted to stay here in this delicate bubble, an unreal time that wasn’t the past and wasn’t the future but a surreal melding of the two.
Her life was like this: during the day, she went for runs in the morning and then read for hours at a time. Max would come home from work, and they would open a bottle of wine and make do with whatever was in the refrigerator, quick cobbled-together meals—pasta and sausage, a frittata with onions and cheese—as if it didn’t occur to either one that supermarkets and gourmet shops and dozens of restaurants were just around the corner, provisions theirs for the asking.
While Max cooked, Lizzie asked questions. They both drank. They didn’t talk about their shared profession. They rarely spoke about Joseph. Lizzie learned that Max had lived in Australia for a year after college. His mother never tired of telling him that she had wanted a daughter, and barring that, a doctor for a son. Max had been a pudgy kid, looking out at the world from behind thick-lensed glasses. He worried about his ex-stepdaughter, a cool, distant seventeen-year-old named Kendra, whom he tried to see once a month. He was a quiet, relentless competitor, a marathoner who only gave up racing a couple of years ago when his knees gave out. He said he loved going down on her.
They brought glasses of wine to his bed, and she was eager for him to indulge. Max’s chest hair had turned mostly white, with some patches migrating to his shoulders. At fifty-five, his stomach was ample, soft, and there was something slightly comical about the way it looked, perched atop his still-muscular runner’s legs. But Lizzie couldn’t remember ever feeling this hungry for someone’s touch. Their time in bed was marked by an urgency, shorn of any niceties, a tumbling down into what felt like her own true hard self. It won’t last, she told herself. It couldn’t.
Could it?
Her first Monday, after Max went to work, she spent the morning examining his prodigious shelves, crowded with art books—Courbet and Ellsworth Kelly and the architecture of the desert—and European histories and biographies and many a volume on the Civil War. She pulled down the doorstopper of The Power Broker, which she had always wanted to read, but New York and Robert Moses’s machinations felt far away, and after several pages she lost interest, was back inspecting the shelves. Closer to the window, she spotted the creamy spine of The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig. Years ago, a boyfriend of hers had thrust the xeroxed pages of a short story of Zweig’s into her hands with the fervor of a convert. She could remember little about the story’s particulars, only that it took place on an ocean liner and followed two men who played chess. But she had been compelled, she recalled, gripped by a story about a game that she cared little about.