The Bookstore Page 5

  “If whatever you have to say is hard for you, I should maybe go first,” he says. His words are cold.

  “No,” I say, alarmed at the new shut-down Mitchell I have in front of me. “I can say it—it isn’t that bad—”

  “Esme, we’ve been seeing each other for a little while now—a few weeks.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I think you’re terrific. You’re a joy to be around.”

  He seems entirely devoid of joy.

  “But I think we both know that it isn’t really working out. Sexually, it hasn’t been all that wonderful, has it?”

  I am silent. A tiny beam of merriment sparks in me, so that I want to say, Really? Even the time with the goose quill and the blindfold? But the beam dies, vanquished by the overwhelming message.

  “Look—there has to be—there has to be—lust. Pure and simple. And for me, when I have sex with you—there is no lust. At all.”

  I say nothing. There is nothing to be said.

  He looks earnestly at me. He says, “I am sorry, Esme. That must hurt.”

  I smile.

  “But I feel as if I have to be honest.”

  I nod. Does the nodding imply forgiveness, understanding, agreement? Does it say, Yes, how could there possibly be lust when you are sleeping with me?

  I think back—flip-book style—to the sex I have had with Mitchell. He isn’t like a Borgia prince or anything, waking me up five times in the night, but there has been some. There was some last night, in the doorway. I think of the time when, the time when, the time when. My foot in a high-heeled shoe trying to get some grip against a bathroom basin; the time when he led me into a lecture theater in the dark at the New School. “You’re going to learn something now.” No lust?

  I say, in a small, puzzled voice, “No lust—at all?” It is a question I will very much regret. Self-respect is hard to hold on to all the time. Especially when you are twenty-three and fail to incite lust in your boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend.

  He shakes his head, sorrowful, regretful, his knife glinting.

  “From that first time you kissed me—when you put your hand between my legs—it always seemed that there was lust . . .”

  Mitchell shrugs. “I do that,” he says.

  The cruelty is almost funny. A wicked grin flashes up; he catches my eye, ready to make me complicit in my own abasement. I flicker a smile back at him. I will not let him see that this is a tragedy rather than a comedy.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “For me, it has to be—I want disgusting sex. With Clarissa, it was always disgusting. With you—it’s nice. You know?”

  I nod again. I even infuse a little sympathy into the nod. Poor Mitchell. “Then why . . . ?”

  “Then why did I hold on this long? I like you, Esme. You’re fun to be around, you’re smart, you—I enjoy your company.”

  “Oh,” I say, dully. “Thank you.” That’s what I say, instead of a stream of abuse or vitriol, because how does the world benefit from that? Thank you.

  “You don’t need to thank me,” he says, his eyes alight with amusement. “That’s so English, Esme.”

  He takes my hand between both of his.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. A new kind of smile comes.

  “No,” I say, “no, of course . . . Mitchell—it didn’t seem as if you were going to break up with me when—when I last saw you, or spoke to you. Have I done something wrong?”

  He grimaces. “As to ‘breaking up,’ Esme, I’m not sure that’s exactly the right term. I mean, it’s not as if we’re exclusive . . .”

  I think dimly of country clubs, fancy hotels, Bergdorf Goodman.

  “Exclusive?” I say.

  “I mean, we never made that commitment to each other.”

  “You’ve been seeing other people?” I say. My voice sounds level, conversational almost. Mitchell knows it’s bad, though.

  “Esme, you know how it works . . .”

  The nanny, with the princess, is walking sedately past again.

  “No,” I say, carefully. “Ask me anything about the Italian Renaissance though. I know how that works.”

  He says nothing. I feel as if I am falling, falling through air and space. I can’t hold on to all that is happening. I am pregnant, and I am not supposed to be, and my boyfriend isn’t my boyfriend. I am one of the girls he dates. I am alone amid the alien corn.

  “You’d better tell me how it does work,” I say at last. “Are you dating a lot of women?”

  “I’ve been on dates with a couple of other girls, just one-off things. One—a few dates with one. I am sorry if there was a misunderstan—”

  “Do you sleep with them?”

  “Esme.”

  “Do you?” My voice is on a rising wail, but I can’t help it. “I think I should know that. I didn’t realize that when I went to the—when I had a checkup, I should have been asking for tests for HIV and, and herpes!”

  I look at him; his eyes are glassy, as pitiless as a bird’s.

  I wonder how horrible it is to have an abortion. If it hurts. If I will need an anesthetic. If the nurses will secretly hate me. If my insurance covers it. If it will break my heart.

  “Before I go—what did you want to say to me?” Mitchell asks.

  The pregnancy is nothing to do with him, after all. I must walk away from him, call the clinic, and terminate what should never have begun.

  “Nothing that matters now,” I say.

  He nods. “I thought so.”

  I hold my hand out to him. “Good-bye, Mitchell.”

  “You’re hurting, I know,” he says. “But, Esme, this is only me—just the chemistry of it, I guess. I daresay there are going to be a lot of men out there who will find you very attractive. Very attractive indeed.”

  After he has swiftly kissed my cheek and turned on his heel to the Fifth Avenue entrance, I sit down again on the bench. I have very pressing issues to address, but I think that for a minute, I won’t address any of them.

  This bench was given as a memorial. A brass label says it is in memory of “Mamami and Papapa.” The nearest bench to this one has a brass label as well, so I go over to it. It says, “Sleep serenely, my darling Alice.” The next one says, “In memory of Priscilla, from A., who adored her.” What was a distillation of a garden is suddenly a churchyard full of love and loss. I find myself going from inscription to inscription. It seems both intrusive and courteous. Some are celebrations of lives lived long and well, wishing the dead peace among the flowers. Some are still stark with grief.

  THE PATH I wanted to travel down was with him; all the other paths, which before I met him blued into endless possibilities, now seem long gray routes to nothing in particular.

  I sit in the corner of the room, huddled on my bed. I watch as the light changes across the room, as the weary day pulls its grayness through thickening time.

  There is a baby. There is a baby. I cannot have this baby. Will it bow out under the force of its unwantedness, loose the hawsers, slip away through the watches of the night?

  On impulse, I walk all the way to The Owl. The destination is just so that I have some sort of purpose—you can’t just walk for no reason, unless you have a dog.

  Every beautiful woman I see in the street might incite Mitchell to the lust he cannot find for me. I look with a kind of secondhand carnality, desiring that girl’s breasts and that girl’s poise . . . the way this girl tosses her shining hair, this one’s soft dark eyes say love me fuck me love me fuck me—other women have appraised me this way once in a while, and I thought it was simple jealousy. Now I see it is fueled by desperate longing, and a conviction that we can never measure up. This is how we are divided, and how we are conquered.

  It is very restful inside the warm folds of The Owl. It smells of all that paper quietly turning to dust, and of a small electric heater that is on at the back, in contravention, surely, of all New York fire regulations. What do you smell when you smell an electric heater? Are molecules of warmed-
up metal going up your nose?

  I find a book that I always meant to read—Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. It is one of those old-style American paperbacks on soft aging paper with yellow edges. It has nothing to do with anything I am working on; I should have read it when I was actually doing a degree that involved Victorians and their eminence. But now it represents a gap in my knowledge that I should fill, or that’s what I tell myself. Really, it represents a link to the comforting past for me, back to when I was young and easy under the apple trees. I open it and read about Cardinal Manning. I dawdle.

  George is at the front, deep in conversation with a bald earnest person who is holding a small, rolled-up rug. Nobody else who works here seems to be around.

  “It’s a question of being attuned,” George is saying. “Attuned to the rhythms of the earth, the rhythms of nature.”

  “You’re right, and I want to do that. But it’s pretty hard to do it in New York,” says the bald man.

  “No, it’s not, not if you try. The earth is the earth. You don’t have to be in Taos, you don’t have to be looking for a healing vortex in Sedona. You just have to pay attention.”

  Attention. I believe in that. I would like the bald earnest person to evaporate; I would like to be the one deep in conversation with George, ask him what he thinks of my predicament. Or Luke, or any of the people who work here.

  George smiles a hello at me, and holds his hand out for the book.

  “Ah, Strachey,” he says. “A classic. I’ve sold many copies of this in my time.”

  I mutter something about having always meant to read it, and pay him the money. While he is ringing the sale through the till, George goes back to his conversation with bald earnest man, who is trying to talk over him, taking him to task for having no yogic writings at all in the store except for the Bhagavad Gita. I take my book and bolt out of the shop. I am ridiculous. It is a bookshop. They are not priests to absolve me, or therapists to guide me; they sell books. George doesn’t even know my name.

  I walk all the way home again. It feels like a very long walk. I try to overexert myself on the walk, so that there will be an unfortunate gynecological mishap, but nothing happens.

  I call my mother as I am crossing 96th Street. She is worried about the cost, so I pretend I have a new phone plan. I ask her how she is, and she says that she and my father have just been to the garden center, and got a hydrangea that promises to be blue, but Dad reckons that unless you plow as many rusty old tools as you can spare into the earth around hydrangeas on a weekly basis, they will turn pink in revenge. She sounds happy. The ordinary, heavenly happiness makes me catch my breath, and I feel tears sting.

  “That blue,” I say. “The blue of the hydrangeas we used to have when we lived in Sheepfoot. I always think that’s what T. S. Eliot meant when he talked about Mary’s color. You must take a photograph if this one is the same blue.”

  “We will,” she says. “And we got some more wallflowers to plant for spring.”

  “Oh!” I say. “It was you who taught me about wallflowers—their smell—I love that smell.”

  “What’s the matter, darling?” she says sharply, as if liking hydrangeas and wallflowers is a sure sign that all is not well in New York. “Is college all right, and Mitchell . . . ?”

  Well, no, not really, I want to say. I should say, I fell in love with him, and he doesn’t love me; he’s gone. And not only that, but he—did I mention this?—he got me pregnant. And not only that, but he got me pregnant without feeling any lust. Having sex with me was “nice.” Nice, like cups of tea with digestives. And so here I am, grieving and pregnant with the baby of a man who wants nothing to do with me. And I can’t seem to connect myself to the fact that I am pregnant; I can only see that Mitchell has gone. And how was the garden center?

  It is shocking that I don’t know what they would say. Don’t have the baby, it would ruin your life, or Don’t get rid of it, we’ll help you every step of the way . . . Shouldn’t I know my parents better than that? I don’t know what they would say, but I don’t want to turn their blue-hydrangea Saturday into a whirling maelstrom of rights and wrongs, duties and desires.

  I tell my mother I am fine. I talk a little about the paper I am doing, about missing Stella, about going to see the Hopper exhibition. I say that I am “not quite sure” about Mitchell any longer, that maybe that is what is the matter with me.

  “Oh,” she says, and I can sense her brow clearing. “Oh, I see. I’m sorry, darling . . . We thought Mitchell was very nice, but if he’s not the right one . . . but don’t do anything hasty. And you can always talk to us . . .”

  My parents came for a week not long after I started seeing Mitchell, and they met him for coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Because they were so worried about my living in New York, I gave them a carefully choreographed version of it, including lunch at the Pierpont Morgan library, a trip to a violin maker’s studio in Chelsea, a concert at Juilliard, and a tour of Columbia. They went home comforted. If I really had been thinking of keeping it, I would have told her.

  I do not want a baby. The baby would have a resentful mother, a father it would never even meet. The resentful mother would not have much money, and not much time to devote to the baby. And babies need the devotion of time. If I have one, I should do it properly. I can’t do it properly now.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On Monday morning, the deadly gloom of the weekend weather has been replaced by crisp New York sunshine. The decisions I have to make don’t seem so terrible any longer. On the brief walk to Columbia for my lectures, I think, I will just do it right now. I will just get it over with. I fish the business card of the clinic out of my bag and dial the number, standing on Broadway outside the big Rite Aid. A woman answers. I explain my situation. It is the situation they must hear all day every day. There are no appointments for two weeks.

  “Two weeks!” I say, in the tone universally adopted to indicate that this isn’t very good service at all, regardless of the fact that two weeks gives me breathing and thinking space. Then she says that a cancellation for Wednesday has just come up.

  “A cancellation?” I echo.

  “Yes, ma’am,” says the voice. “For Wednesday, November fifth, at eleven A.M.”

  “Does a cancellation mean—someone changed her mind?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing,” I say. Phone conversations are especially difficult in America. If you don’t say what they expect, you may as well be jabbering at them in Esperanto. I think about that cancellation. What if the cancellation becomes a Mozart, a Shakespeare, a savior?

  “Miss Garland, do you want the appointment?”

  I look at the bright blue sky and the yellow cabs and the dove-gray plane trees and the energy of all the people, and I think what I am denying to the child inside me, and I swallow and for a moment I can’t speak.

  “Miss Garland?”

  “Yes, I do. I feel terrible about it, but—”

  “Wednesday at eleven A.M., for Esme Garland,” says the voice, and hangs up.

  WHEN I GET home, there is music thumping from Stella’s apartment across the hall. At last, she is back. I ring her doorbell. When she answers, she throws her arms around me and pulls me into her apartment, which is strewn with bags and open suitcases.

  “I have so much to tell you,” she says. “Let me make some coffee first. It was so great. L.A. is amazing. I want to move there. But not yet.”

  “Like St. Augustine,” I say.

  “Yeah, I don’t know, I want to split myself in two—be in New York, be in L.A. I have made so many connections, there are so many possibilities right now. You know that feeling? I met a guy, Jake, Jake DuPlessy—I love his work—who wants me to direct a short, and another who wants me to be in a short, and Adele introduced me to all sorts of influential people, and oh my god, I milked the opportunity.”

  “I bet you did,” I say.

  “I did, I’m totally psyched. And when I wasn’
t schmoozing the Patrik Ervell guys in Beverly Hills, I was in a hot tub with Adele and Michaela, drinking frozen raspberry daiquiris. I know how to make them. It’s so cool—you don’t use ice, you just freeze the raspberries. We’ll make them.”

  “That sounds great!” I say. I say it with an exclamation mark, and she immediately stops heaping piles of clothes from one spot of the room to another. Perhaps I am not normally so enthusiastic about cocktails. She is looking intently at me.

  “What’s the matter?” she says.

  “I won’t be able to drink them,” I say. And then, because I have annoyed myself with that arch observation, I say quickly, “I’m pregnant.”

  “Sweet holy Christ,” she says. She casts around rapidly and grabs her camera. This, I am used to. Stella is studying film, but she isn’t really, she is studying humans. She wants to catch the mind in the face.

  “Tell me,” she says, from behind the SLR. “Look straight into the lens.”

  “You could be hugging me and telling me that it will be okay,” I say.

  “Yeah, because that’s what girls do. Come on, Esme, it’s important. Tell me.” She holds the camera underneath, the lens protruding. The thick webbing of the strap is swinging free; Nikon, Nikon, Nikon.

  “I got pregnant. I knew there was something—I felt—different.”

  The shutter whirrs, that familiar noise from photo shoots in movies.

  “What kind of different? Look into the lens. What kind of different?”

  “As if something had changed. But that might be my imagination—no, I don’t think it is. I knew I was. It just came to me. And so I bought a test, and—” I shrug. The shutter clicks.

  “Go on. Go on. Esme, please.”

  “And it was positive. There was a thick line. Not a ‘maybe’ sort of line.”

  “Oh, God,” says Stella.

  “Is that compassion or artistic excitement?”

  “I don’t know. It’s amazing,” she says. She appears from behind the camera. “I mean, oh, fuck!”