rethinking max
by rachelle rogers

When Lucy Minelli turned thirty-eight, her mother reminded her she was no great beauty.

Judging from the absurd men who sporadically paraded through her life, Lucy thought her mother must be right. Her recent dating history read like a Who’s Who of men on the edge. There was Bernard, who reminded her of Stewie Arugalano, a nerdy kid in her junior high school history class who could curl his ears in on themselves. The top part became wedged in the opening, the folded ear corners sticking out like perogi. Even though Bernard’s ears seemed relatively well anchored, the ungraceful rest of him gave the phrase “cruel cosmic joke” new meaning. And there was Sidney who suffered from the need to apologize for everything—the over-cautious way he drove, the local weather, the starving children in Africa.

But it was after Floyd that Lucy decided men weren’t worth the effort. At first, there was something about the way he’d called her “Looseee Huneee” she found downright sexy. Floyd, however, had a thang for a certain country singer, and at a precipitous moment, he whipped out three feet of Dolly Parton wig and tried to cajole her into wearing it.

“Come on, Babydoll, please put it on for me,” he begged, his cheeks flushed with excitement. “I…ya know…need you to wear it.”

Lucy’d backed away, reached for the skirt and sweater Floyd had already peeled from her body. “I suppose next you’ll want me to have breast implants,” she said, heading for the door.

“Only if you want to, Sugarpie.”

It was too depressing, and Lucy soon found herself often taking refuge in fantasy. Be careful what you wish for, some part of her cautioned. But Lucy hadn’t been careful. They were her musings and she pushed their limits, a reasonable thing to do to escape a love life filled with disappointment. In fantasy, Lucy could avoid the pitfalls of human fallibility. Her lover could be anything she wanted him to be. The Romeo to her Juliet. The Tristan to her Isolde. The Adonis to her Aphrodite. Wait, she thought. Didn’t all those affairs end in tragedy? So in her imagination, Lucy resolved to move beyond the possibility of poisons or betrayals or boar wounds. In her imagination, there would be only singular bliss.

Lucy found the notion of creating her perfect lover titillating. She contemplated identities for him. She tried Seriozha, a name she loved the sound of. But then he would have to be Russian, and she didn’t want the melodramatics of Tolstoy or Pushkin in this affair. Maybe he ought to be French, she mused. Très romantique! Guillaume or Jean-Pierre. No, the French could be rather insensitive. She entertained the idea of an Italian. Roberto, Marcello, Giuseppe. Too intense. Too in love with love — although she thought it very romantic to be called Lucia, like the great-grandmother for whom she was named. Lucy once came across a photograph of her in a family album. She had a slender, graceful stature with smooth hair, full breasts and a child-sized waist. Lucy, with her frizzy black curls and wide hips didn’t look much like her namesake, but she had inherited her great-grandmother’s blue-violet eyes. She would have preferred Lucia’s skinny genes.

A Snickers bar in hand, Lucy settled into her favorite recliner. She covered herself in a soft rose-colored throw and, thought by thought, began to build her perfect lover. Foreign temperament, Lucy decided, was out, so she opted for easy American charm and a solid reliable name—Max. Mindfully, she shaped how he would speak and walk and caress her, what kind of disposition and inner qualities he would possess. She rendered him carefully, balancing the blue-green of his eyes, the gold-brown of his hair, adjusting the slant of his jaw, the curve of his shoulder, adorning him with the graceful hands of a lover until he was fully formed—her very own endearingly sensitive, unswervingly devoted, eternally adoring, fantastically sexy, but nevertheless, totally insubstantial lover.

At first, Lucy created scenarios to play out. She introduced Max to her mother who, from the shock of his blatant affection for her daughter, was finally at a loss for hurtful words. She choreographed a romantic Valentine’s dinner at La Bonne Auberge—she had the Tournedos à la Béarnaise, Max the Chateaubriand. Lucy noticed how after cutting his meat, Max did not switch the fork to his right hand.

Soon, all Lucy had to do was think his name and she would sense Max there, always happy to be with her. And the scenarios began to take on continuity, to build upon themselves as if they had a life of their own. Once Max showed up in a shirt Lucy had never before thought of. Another time, he spoke in a way that surprised even her imagination.

Yet he was still perfectly her Max. Lucy could tell him anything, everything, and he always understood. When she expressed her most bizarre conjectures or confessed her deepest fears and longings, Max offered only support, compassion and remedy.
"I’ve often thought chocolate could save the world", Lucy said to him after indulging in her favorite semi-sweet truffles for which he never criticized her.

"Sounds profoundly and entirely plausible to me," Max replied. In her creation, Lucy hadn’t sacrificed intelligence for beauty.

"I’m feeling old and ugly. I wish I were twenty-one again," she sighed.

"To my eyes, you are ageless and only grow more radiant."

It was lovely.

Within weeks, Max’s invisible presence had dropped into every aspect of Lucy’s life. It became second nature for her not to roll over onto Max’s side of the bed during the night. She invited him into her morning shower, letting his dreamy hands circle the scented lather on her back. She automatically set the table for two, and even bought a new coffee mug with a deep aqua glaze especially for Max. She gave it to him at breakfast, watched him pick it up, test its weight in his hand.

"It’s perfect," he said. "Thank you, my Lucia." (There was no reason Max couldn’t call her Lucia.) Lucy filled the mug with their favorite hazelnut coffee. After a while, she hardly noticed he never drank it.

Like all women in love, Lucy’s demeanor changed. Pheromones hovered in her air, and people in the real estate office where she worked couldn’t help but notice. The men asked if she had done something different with her hair. The women, who recognized the signs, assumed her new glow came from an affair of the heart. In a quiet moment, Marguerite, one of her co-workers, pulled her aside.

“Whomever it is you’re sleeping with, my dear, certainly must be doing something right. Do tell.”

But Lucy didn’t. She simply smiled and walked away leaving a trailing cloud of mystery in her wake.

A month into her affair with Max, Lucy noticed strange things happening. Like the day she turned on the TV and immediately heard “take it to the max.” Or the time someone dialed Lucy’s number asking for Max Minelli. She wondered if Max could be sending her messages. Fantasy had its reality, and at times Max felt more real than anyone, but messages didn’t come from a figment of imagination. It’s just coincidence, she told herself. She knew how to keep her inner and outer lives separate. In “reality” she went to work, cooked food, did laundry, interacted with friends. She did not cast her pearls before anyone who might mistake them for something worthless.

Coincidence or not, Lucy wasn’t about to give up Max, and one rainy Saturday, perfect for shopping, Lucy let him accompany her into department store dressing rooms. There, entirely unnoticed by those with little imagination, he placed soft kisses upon her shoulders, told her how absolutely breathtaking she looked in whatever she dared to try on. On the drive home they had a lively conversation about the pros and cons of psycho-therapy, her favorite neo-classical painters, their choices for the Oscar.

"It’s got to be either Shakespeare In Love or Private Ryan," Lucy said. "And I’m betting love will triumph over war. Don’t you think so, darling?"

"Yes, I absolutely do. The writing was flawless, and Joe Fiennes was amazing. And I will tell you, my sweet, his words confessed the feelings of my own heart."

Lucy thought it considerate of Max not to speak the name of oh-so-perfect Gwyneth Paltrow whose charmed countenance, golden tresses and young sinewy body wreaked havoc with Lucy’s self image. But she felt it appropriate to steal Gwyneth’s best line just for Max.

"I love you beyond poetry," Lucy said.

Then, one evening two months into her new found ecstasy, Lucy was about to slip out of her work clothes when she sensed Max behind her. As her eyelids lowered, she imagined him unzipping his jeans, unbuttoning that ecru linen shirt she loved. She felt his lips against her neck, the fire of him burning into her. He began to undress her, slowly, like he always did, with no concern for non-existent time. She’d spent $120 on intimate apparel just for Max — a slinky camisole trimmed with embroidered roses; a shimmering bra and matching panties in iridescent pink. Lingerie she was sure other lovers would have found unattractive on her body. Lingerie that drove Max wild. With his familiar touch, Lucy felt her bra unfasten, her underwear slide and fall leaving her in the freedom of naked skin. She heard Max whisper the things she loved to hear, clichés she knew belonged only in the realm of fantasy—I want you desperately; you are the center of my universe; I will worship you forever.

Winding her way back to the reality in which her stomach growled, Lucy, trembling, pulled on her old sweats. But when she turned to head for the kitchen, her toe got caught on Max’s black silk Armani briefs lying on the floor behind her feet.

Within days, Le Male, the scent that permeated Max’s etheric air, appeared in her bathroom cabinet. Several times, Lucy felt a weighted hand against her cheek seconds before she fell into sleep. On occasion, she even found the toilet seat raised. And twice, she walked away from the breakfast table only to discover on her return, Max’s previously full coffee mug empty.

It was seamless, this slipping through, until one morning, awakened by the sound of gentle snoring, Lucy found an entire body lying next to her. She curled at the corner of the bed hugging her pillow, nightgown anchored beneath her feet like a tent, and gazed at Max. He was very beautiful. His eyelids fluttered like a real person having real dreams. His skin glowed with the color of summer, hair fanned across the pillow as if it had been visited by a sudden wind. Folded on his side, the moon of his shoulder seemed to be waiting for Lucy’s familiar kiss. She bent to brush her lips against it, swept a lock of hair from his smooth face.

New breath rose and fell in Max’s perfect torso. He looked like “David” come to life in Lucy’s bed. A wave of earthly insecurity washed over her. Suddenly her Rubenesque disproportion seemed hardly a match for a Michaelangelo. What had she done? What she’d allowed in fantasy felt foolish and uncomfortable in practicality. She was not the Lucy she’d secretly invented herself to be.

Lucy whimpered and Max stretched. He rolled onto his back. Slowly, he opened the blue-green eyes Lucy had conceived for him. He smiled and spoke. “I want you desperately; you are the center of my universe; I will worship you forever,” he said, and in the real world, Lucy knew she had a problem.