The Bookstore Read online

  Mitchell is Old New York, old Dutch money. To him, the pilgrims on the Mayflower are Johnny-come-latelies. He was at Yale, did his PhD at the London School of Economics. And if I tell him, he might be enough of an economist to think that this accident isn’t one, that my motive for keeping a baby fathered by a van Leuven might just be economic. Even without his speciality, he might think that.

  Does he have a right to know? It is half his, so yes. It is my body, so no.

  When people say “to father,” they generally mean that one biological act—the act of begetting a child. It is different with the verb “to mother.” “To mother” implies care. A man’s act of fathering can easily be that one seed sown; a woman’s act of mothering can take up all the rest of her life. I do not have to accept this arbitrary burden. I have nobody to help me, and I shouldn’t bring an unwanted child into the world. I think of unwanted babies, the ones in the orphanages that never get cuddled, that don’t know what love is, that just lie there, not even waiting, not even crying, because there is nothing to wait for, and crying will not bring anyone. Better to adopt one of those than bring another one into the world.

  I can’t have a baby now. I can’t.

  A PhD at Columbia isn’t something you can squeeze into the nooks and crannies of your life. You have to devote yourself to it. I’ve worked so hard all this time—I want a career after Columbia. I can’t have a baby now.

  I am careful not to walk by any parks. I don’t want to see any adorable infants and have my heart melt. Right now, it’s cells. It won’t know. I will make an appointment at the clinic and arrange for a termination. It will be awful, but then it will be done, and I will reclaim my life. I won’t think too hard. I won’t tell my mother, and I won’t tell Mitchell.

  When I get back to my apartment, I call the clinic. The office is closed. It reopens on Monday morning. I sit on the sofa and for once I do not look out of the window, or try to work. I look into the air. People say it is killing. I hear that, but I don’t feel it. What moral imperative makes me think, even for a second, that I should have a baby? I should do it when I can love it, when I won’t feel as if it has killed me.

  MITCHELL CALLS ME a couple of hours later. He has made his presence felt at the Yale lecture, has come back to New York, and now he is interested in what I proposed when I was in the center of my hormonal maelstrom. His voice curls round his words.

  “You looked great yesterday, Esme.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I want to see you,” he says. “Now. I want to see you now.”

  Although the surge of desire that had me imagining a ravishing by the UPS man has subsided into a dull murmur, it flares up again at this. But how can I make love with Mitchell, knowing that there is a baby there in the dark of me, in the death row of my womb?

  I can’t.

  When you first come to New York, it is striking how many Jewish people there are, and striking too how, if you develop a liking for matzoh-ball soup and the rest, you are often unable to have milk with your coffee afterwards. Unexamined, this can be dealt with impatiently—God would mind if I had milk in my coffee? But the root of that injunction, according to a waitress I met in a Kosher diner, is in the Old Testament somewhere—Thou shalt not eat a kid seethed in the milk of its mother. Did the rabbinic fathers see this happen, see some Patrick Bateman of the ancient world relishing this particular practice? It must have offended against their sense of right and wrong in the cosmos. They could all get their heads round sacrificing lambs just fine, but to boil one in the very milk that was meant for its nourishment and life, that streamed out of its mother like love, they couldn’t manage that. It would not be an offense against God but a betrayal of our deepest selves, a crime against the universe. And that is what letting Mitchell into my bed would be tonight.

  It crosses my mind to tell him, to tell him about the baby, to tell him that I am going to terminate, to tell him that I can’t see him because of the rabbinic fathers and the book of Deuteronomy, but it is all too hard. I need time to consider.

  “Oh,” I say as breezily as I can. “It was one of those spur-of-the-moment ideas. Not a big deal.”

  There is a pause. He might be wondering how to engineer himself from “not a big deal” into my bed. He says, “Esme . . . listen to me. I want to come over and fuck you.”

  Despite myself, I thrill to this. But I say no. It is the first time I have said no to Mitchell for anything.

  “It’s just that I’m so tired, Mitchell . . . ,” I say. “I really—”

  “Are you having a period?”

  Nobody has ever asked me that question in my life before. I say so.

  “Are you?” he repeats. “Because if that is the problem, we can do something else . . .”

  “Oh, you mean like a drink or something?”

  There is a silence, while I realize he doesn’t mean a drink or something.

  “Look,” he says. “I’ll meet you in Trebizond on 95th and Broadway in a half hour. They do food as well. Say yes, or I’ll have to start looking through my little black book. Say yes, or I’ll call Clarissa.”

  “Call Clarissa,” I say instantly. She is Mitchell’s ex-girlfriend, apparently the sum of all human perfections, except that they “grew apart.”

  “Oh, you know very well I don’t want to call Clarissa,” he says. “My threats are disappointingly lacking in weight. I want you. Why don’t you just come out with me?”

  “I’ll come out for one drink,” I say. I can almost hear his smile.

  I go to my bookcase (a trusty Billy) and put one finger on the Bible, to get it down and swear on it that I won’t let myself be seduced by Mitchell tonight. But then it feels wrong. Let alone the fact that I am altogether unsure of the whole God business, what, exactly, am I doing swearing on Bibles when I am about to go to that clinic? I push it back into position. Is there anything I wholly believe in that I could swear on? Shakespeare? I pull out the Riverside Shakespeare. What does it mean to swear on Shakespeare? That you believe in the perfect alignment of content and form? I stick it back. This is superstitious nonsense. I can keep some sort of honor through this black time without swearing on anything.

  When I get to Trebizond, he is surrounded by girls. There are two sitting very close to him on the banquette to his right, and one on his left. He is laughing up at me as I stand there.

  “Did you rent them?” I ask.

  “I was sitting here on my own waiting for you!” he says, choking with laughter. “Wasn’t I, Caddie? It is Caddie, right? They just sat down around me. There was nothing I could do! Anyhow, I was telling them all about you.”

  “He was,” affirms Caddie, shaking back her white-blond hair. “He was saying that you were, like, really really smart?”

  “It’s Tania’s eighteenth birthday,” says Mitchell, indicating Tania with his head.

  The girls make small screaming noises to indicate that this is indeed the case.

  “Happy birthday,” I say.

  “Thanks,” says Tania. She snuggles closer to him, and stares up at me, measuring me. The whole scene looks like a painting of the Restoration Rake. “If one of you could dangle grapes in his mouth, and contrive to have a white breast accidentally showing, that would be perfect,” I say.

  The girls exchange glances to show that I am weird, and then they giggle.

  “What does she mean?” says Caddie or Tania. The one on his right lets her hand drop onto his inner thigh. Mitchell looks down at the hand and then looks appreciatively up at me.

  “She means that your table’s ready,” he says as a waitress heads towards their empty table. He picks the girl’s hand up and deposits it back in her own lap. “Have a lovely evening, ladies.”

  “See you on Facebook!” says Caddie or Tania over her shoulder, with a seaside-postcard burlesque of a seductive glance.

  I sit down. I know this role now.

  “ ‘See you on Facebook’?” I say to Mitchell. “You’ve been here two minutes
and it’s ‘See you on Facebook’?”

  Mitchell stretches contentedly. “Yep. That one was Tania, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I got them both.”

  “So how many friends is that now?”

  “One thousand four hundred and fifty-one. All of them very dear, close friends. But the one who was on my left—guess what she is called.”

  “No.”

  “Eden.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh? It’s funny, Esme. Don’t you get it, scholarship girl?”

  “I don’t want to get it.”

  “I’d be in paradise . . .” My sour expression amuses him. “Come on, you know I don’t mean it. It’s just our shtick, it’s what we do.”

  “Yes. I know. I am not sure that I like it that much.”

  “Those girls—they were just—nothing. They’re just sexual objects.”

  “I want to be a sexual object.”

  Mitchell, laughing, raises his eyes to the heavens. “Your Cambridge professors would be very proud.”

  “You know something? First, they weren’t nothing, they were women. To them, you’re probably an object too.”

  Mitchell looks pleased. “I’ve got no problem with that.”

  “Second, I think it is really bad mannered to talk about being sexually attracted to other women in front of me.”

  Mitchell leans back again. Satisfaction seems to be flooding his whole body.

  “Bad mannered?” he says. “Ouch.”

  I lean my chin in my hand and look the other way.

  “But do you really? You don’t think it adds an extra . . . capacity to our intensely erotically charged relationship?”

  “No.”

  “I like it when you’re mad at me. It means I get to look at your profile, which is stunning. And your neck, likewise. Stay mad for a couple minutes, Esme.”

  I don’t say anything. Mitchell sighs.

  “What can I say? I look at women who look like that. And I’ve been looking since I was twelve years old.”

  “Why are you going out with me?”

  “For your mind, sweets.”

  “Do you divide women into Madonnas and whores, Mitchell?”

  He cranes to look past me, over to the dining area. “Caddie? Where are you? Tania? Come back, come back . . .”

  “Very funny,” I say. The waitress comes over.

  “I’ll have another merlot,” says Mitchell, “and the same for . . .” He does not call me anything, just indicates me.

  “I’ll have soda water with ice and lemon,” I say to the waitress. The same obscure idea of honor is at work. As she turns away, Mitchell says, “Esme, you are no fun tonight.”

  Outside Trebizond, with Mitchell full of wine and me full of water, I turn to him and say good night. He says, “Good night?”

  “I’m really tired,” I say, “too tired even to walk home. I’m going to get a cab.”

  “You can’t go home yet. I want to show you the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, and it’s just near here.”

  “It’s dark,” I say.

  “By moonlight is the point. Come on. You won’t regret it.”

  He has hold of both my hands, he is pulling me around the corner towards West End Avenue, and I am letting him.

  “I should go home,” I say.

  “Come down here,” he says, and whirls me down a step into a doorway. He pushes my shoulders hard against the wall and kisses me.

  “I told you I wanted you,” he says into my ear.

  “I can’t . . . ,” I say.

  “I know, your period,” he says. He puts his hand up my skirt and his fingers slide into my underwear. “But you can do this. Just—enjoy it. Just my fingers. Let go, Esme, let go.”

  I shut my eyes, and let go.

  Afterwards, he says, “That was good?”

  I nod, still with my eyes shut. I cannot open them, like a child who hides from itself by shutting its own eyes.

  “Then why are you crying?”

  I shake my head, shrug. He will probably put it down to an overabundance of ecstatic sexual pleasure.

  “Esme?”

  “Yes?”

  “My turn.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When I wake up, six hours later, I feel better, fresher. I have a grapefruit for breakfast, and as I drink my tea, I think that I mustn’t have much faith in Mitchell if I don’t even contemplate telling him. He said that thing in the diner about loving me—what if he does love me? If I have a termination now, and we stay together, if we got married—would I have to keep this a secret forever? If we were to have a baby in the future, he would think that child was our first, while I would always know it was our second. It would be starting off with a dishonesty. And what if he is glad that this one is here?

  I should tell him.

  His voice is hazy with sleep when I call. “It’s seven thirty A.M. on a Saturday. I could trade you in, you know . . .”

  I ask him to meet me in the Conservatory Garden in an hour.

  “Let me check,” he says. I wait while he pretends to be looking at all his Saturday-morning appointments. “Yeah, that should be fine. But I’ve got to go to the gym after that.”

  I think of that garden, at the very top of Central Park, because I went there once before, in high summer, when I first got to New York. Then, there were roses clambering up trellises and rambling over hedges, blue violets and pink-edged daisies tumbling from the flower borders onto the paths, a fountain where Pan played the pipes, and another where the three Graces danced, delphiniums and hollyhocks aiming too high, probably a bee with honeyed thigh . . . It was a pastoral idyll of a place; there was the sound of sap rising, there might even have been a shepherd or two. It is possible that I am remembering through rose-colored spectacles, of course, but roses there certainly were, scented and dazzling and abundant.

  Although summer is long gone, every season is concentrated in New York—the firework profusion of the summer flowers will have given way to a golden autumn.

  I walk along the sinuous path along the top of the park. It is a gnarled day, nearly November, dull with white skies, not the golden autumn you might imagine for New York. There are leaves, heaped in piles, but they are touched with a baser metal than gold. There is no wind to send them skipping, no energy, no anything.

  I pass a playground, with a couple of children playing in it, adults in drear attendance. The play seems desultory, as if they would rather be inside, and have been brought out “for their own good.”

  Around Harlem Meer, a couple of people are sitting on the benches, clutching plastic bags and gazing out at the steely water. A little while later, I reach the Conservatory Garden. I am much too early.

  The garden looks like a black and white photograph of that other time. The three Graces are still there, but in summer, the sun and water and flowers lent them life; you could almost hear their laughter as they danced. Now the fountains do not flow, and the dancing girls are leaden. The flower beds that not so many weeks ago were an insane acid trip of color are now bare, and the soil, invisible before in the explosion of petals, is now as gray as boiled mince, and raked smooth. It begins to rain, one or two drops, and then gives up even on that.

  The Pan statue with the girl is similarly wintry. The fountain, which in summer fell sparkling from the girl’s bowl into a jostle of air-blue water lilies, now dribbles into the drained pool, soaking the few leaves that are stuck to the concrete bottom.

  It isn’t of Pan with a maiden at all; there is a flagstone that says it is the characters in The Secret Garden. This feels like a setback. Pan was from Arcady, his song was of love and death and birth, so it seemed a good idea to tell Mitchell about a baby with Pan in the background.

  It is only an hour and ten minutes since I called Mitchell. An hour on the weekend is more elastic than an appointed time in the week. He isn’t really late yet.

  A nanny appears with a little girl walking
demurely at her side. It’s a Saturday—do her parents work so hard they can’t even play with her on a Saturday? The little girl is in a cream wool coat with big buttons, and suede boots. She looks very well-to-do, a little New York princess.

  Children are not in my purview. I feel a stab of fear. If I did this, I would be in a world where I would have to buy children’s coats and boots, and it isn’t time for that yet. I am twenty-three. I want to buy fancy boots for myself.

  When they have gone, there is only me. I am so still that when a raccoon comes, nosing around the trash bins, he doesn’t notice me. He is enormous, as big as a dog. How does such a creature live wild in Manhattan?

  Mitchell strides up, and the raccoon is gone in a streak of gray.

  He sits down next to me on the bench. He has a cardboard tray with two coffees and a paper bag.

  “I brought a selection. Just in case you were hungry again.”

  “I am.” I open the bag. “Oh, pain au chocolat! Lovely. How come the bagels are still warm? How did you get here?”

  “It’s a chocolate croissant in these parts, and I took a cab.”

  “There was a raccoon! I think so, anyway.”

  “No, they’re nocturnal. It was probably a rat. So what’s the matter? Hurry up, because I have to call my mother at ten.”

  “What do you have to call your mother for?” I say, momentarily distracted. He has mentioned her once in all the time I have known him.

  “I always call her at ten on Saturdays. And she always says, ‘What occasions your telephone call?’ as if I always have a different reason for calling at ten on a Saturday. Sometimes we’ve had conversations that have lasted—oh, minutes. Especially if one of the horses has thrown a shoe.”

  “Don’t you like her?” I ask. Mitchell laughs into the autumn air. I sip the coffee.

  “Mitchell,” I say, and stare at the statue that isn’t Pan. “Mitchell,” I say again. “I’ve got something to tell you, and I don’t really know how to say it.” I turn to look at him.

  Mitchell was all smiles a second ago and now is not. He looks back at me intently. Across his face comes a kind of withdrawal, as if a blind is coming down. A second later he is as closed as a wardrobe.