The Bookstore Read online

  I take a breath. “The sign in the window. The ‘Help Wanted’ sign?”

  “Yes?”

  “I wondered how strict your rules were.”

  I tell him I have no experience whatsoever of working in a shop. I tell him that although I am in the country legally, as a student, it would be illegal for me to work, and also that if he hired me, he would be breaking the law too. “And,” I say, “I’m pregnant.”

  “You sound like our perfect employee,” says George.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I have arranged with George that I will come in after my classes, for my first shift. George says that he won’t be there, but Luke will. He then tells me to be sure and exercise regularly for the baby’s sake, and to drink distilled water whenever possible. I nod, and wonder if it is ever possible. Don’t you need a still?

  My classes are over at four fifteen; I get to The Owl a little before five. I push open the door, a little hesitantly, expecting to see George or Luke. Another man is sitting there. He is about forty, with grizzled black hair. On his T-shirt, which is in sore need of a good wash, the words REO and Speedwagon are just about legible.

  The man says, “Help you with anything?”

  “I’m Esme,” I say, “Esme Garland. George—”

  The man springs up.

  “Sit down,” he says, indicating his vacated chair. “Please, sit down. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Bruce. You need to sit down. Can I get you anything?”

  “She’s fine, Bruce,” says Luke, dumping down a big pile of books on the counter.

  “Can I get you some tea?” says Bruce.

  “Yes,” I say, playing my part. “Tea would be lovely.”

  I expect him to head towards the back, to a kettle, perhaps, but he pings open the till, takes out a couple of dollars, and makes for the door. He’s going to buy me some tea.

  Luke says, “Okay, so, this is your first time . . . just take a look around the store, tidy things up if you think it’s necessary . . .”

  As I raise my eyebrows in confirmation that it is very necessary indeed, the door opens and a woman comes in. She is in her fifties, with flowing blond hair and a frosted pink lipsticked mouth. She is wearing pale blue trousers with white running shoes and a pink fleece jacket. She smiles widely at me, and then around the shop. She is followed by a beige husband in a pale anorak.

  “Oh my. Oh my. This is such a cute bookstore. Isn’t it, babe? We don’t have anything like this back home.”

  “Can I help you?” says Luke.

  “Why, yes you can—I hope! I was looking for a book called The Power of Pendulums. Have you heard of it? Do you have it?”

  Luke looks at me. “What section, do you think?”

  I make a face to indicate the blankness of my brain.

  “Science?” I say. “Clock-making?” The woman laughs broadly, and nudges her husband. He snickers.

  “Nope,” says Luke. “Self-help.”

  He walks rapidly to a section, fishes out a book from an apparently random pile, and slaps it onto the countertop. The woman seizes it.

  “You have it!” she says. “That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. This is such a great book. Have you read it?” She flips through it fondly, smiling. Then she puts it on the counter. “Can I just leave it here while I take a look around?”

  “Sure,” says Luke. She moves off towards the true crime section, and her husband follows dolefully.

  “Shall I put it beneath the counter, so nobody else will take it?” I say to Luke.

  He shakes his head. “No. She’s gonna find a reason not to buy it in a second.”

  I don’t know why he says that—she seems keen enough to me. I have shelved perhaps five books when the woman comes back with a book called Bloodbath in Boise. It has an embossed blood spatter on its cover, and we are selling it for three dollars.

  “You know, I’m gonna leave The Power of Pendulums for now. I’m gonna take this instead. For my sister. She loves this kind of stuff.”

  Luke nods, takes the money, and slips the book into a paper bag for her.

  “Thank you, sir,” she says. “And this really is the cutest store. Bye now.”

  “Bye now,” repeats Luke.

  I pick up The Power of Pendulums and open it. I read out, “ ‘The pendulum is a dowsing tool that allows you to access and connect with your higher power so you can make the best decisions in all aspects of your life.’ ”

  “We get asked for that book a gazillion times a week,” says Luke. “I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list forever.”

  I flick through it. Pendulums are apparently in use the entire time by the CIA, the U.S. Navy, and the United Nations. These respected bodies are all holding pendulums over maps to locate the Enemy. You too can find your enemies, and ask the pendulum questions that it will answer with “genuine truthfulness.”

  “People believe this stuff?” I ask, turning it over. The paperback copy is $18.99.

  “No. They just want to,” says Luke.

  Bruce comes back with tea from the Columbian café next door. He grimaces at the pendulum book, and moves it off the counter, before he presents the tea to me in a way that is curiously reverent. I am not in the least bit used to being pregnant yet, but I am beginning to feel that my status has changed. Unmarried, unpartnered, not very old but old enough to have known better, I am nevertheless being treated by this man as special. And it can only be because of the baby.

  I am grateful for the tea; I was tired after my walk here. Bruce’s manner makes me think suddenly of the Virgin Mary; she is the only famous woman I can think of off the top of my head who gets to do things when she is pregnant—which says something, right there. What did she say when she had had her baby, and the wise men brought her myrrh and gold and frankincense? What do you do with myrrh? They used myrrh to mask the smell of corpses, in ancient Rome anyway. Not the most sensitive gift for a newborn baby, if that was a normal use when Jesus was born too. I bet Mary hated it. I bet she shoved it under a pile of straw in the stable before they left. I wonder what she really wanted. I think, nothing at all; no myrrh, no frankincense, certainly no gold. Nothing that would draw attention to the fact of her child’s existence, nothing that would distinguish him from other children. I am very glad that there will be no wise men and no star for this one. You don’t want notice to fall on your precious love; you want blessed, blessed obscurity. I am luckier than Mary—most women are.

  I notice that Bruce is watching me drink the tea.

  “Thank you,” I say. “It’s very kind of you.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” he says, and smiles shyly. I don’t mind so much now about his REO Speedwagon T-shirt; he’s nice. “When you’ve had a rest, I’ll show you the store. Unless it will tire you?”

  I am about to say that I am not quite that delicate when Luke appears again. He says, “Bruce, I said she’s fine. This isn’t a sixties love-in. And it isn’t gonna work if we treat her like she’s disabled.”

  Bruce ruffles himself up in his chair and glowers at Luke. He turns back to me.

  “I think it takes a lot of guts to do what you’re doing. You’re not in a relationship, right? I am sorry if that’s too personal.”

  “No, I’m not in a relationship . . .”

  “But you still decided to have the baby. That’s brave. I respect that. I really do. If there’s any way I can help you . . .”

  I thank him, glowing with a pleasant sense of nobility and selflessness. But I remember the abortion clinic and say, “But I am not that virtuous. I did consider—you know—a termination.”

  Bruce nods understandingly.

  “But when I rang to make an appointment, there had been a cancellation, and it struck me that that cancellation could now become anything—that for every baby there is every possibility—it might become a Mozart or a Shakespeare . . .”

  “Or an ordinary happy human being,” says Luke.

 
CUSTOMERS COME IN all the time. It’s a good sign, I think, for the intellectual health of the city, at least from this small sampling. I say so, but Bruce shakes his head. He emphasizes each of his words as an old-fashioned Shakespearean actor would, with a kind of manic pungency: “Believe me, that’s a very optimistic viewpoint. The reality is that we live in daily fear of being turned into a nail salon or a Starbucks. There are hardly any real bookstores left in the city; they’ve all gone. Arcadia, Book Ark, Endicott, there used to be a great Shakespeare and Company just across the street, there was a wonderful bookstore on Madison, and that’s just the start. Gotham closing was the end for me. It’s all Barnes and Noble and the Internet now.”

  “There’s still a great one on Madison,” says Luke. “Crawford Doyle are world class. But yeah, of course, mostly it’s the Internet now.”

  “But in a bookshop you find things you didn’t know about,” I reply. “It’s much more exciting than Amazon’s ‘customers who bought that book also bought this one.’ ”

  “Honey, you’re preaching to the choir,” says Luke.

  “But you seem to me to get plenty of people in here. And they buy.”

  “Yeah,” says Luke. “Some of them buy. A lot of them fall in here and tell us we have a really cute store, and that they love to read, and that they read Catcher in the Rye once, and then they leave again. We get a lot of regulars in too; you’ll meet them. Some of them are—a little on the odd side.”

  As he speaks, an elderly man comes in and nods with old-fashioned courtesy at the three of us. He is wearing a camel-colored mackintosh. He takes plastic spectacles out of a case, and, perching them on his nose, begins to look through the little grammar section we have near the door.

  “He’s Romanian,” says Bruce, in what is meant to be an undertone. “He comes in to look for dictionaries to send home to schools in Romania. If he wants to buy something when you’re at the register, give me a shout. We give him a discount.”

  “Though why we do, when he lives on Riverside Drive, is a little bit of a mystery,” says Luke.

  “Because you’re nice?” I offer.

  “Oh yeah, we’re nice. Nice and losing money subsidizing millionaires.”

  I look again at the man patiently perusing the columns in an old dictionary. His mac is a little greasy at the cuffs; his scarf is one of the cheap ones that you can get on any street corner. Nothing about him suggests affluence.

  “There’s a whole bunch of people you’ll get to know,” says Bruce. “There’s the guy who’s really into Nabokov; he comes in looking for new editions, editions in paperback, everything. He’s kind of weird.”

  “Kind of weird?” says Luke. “He hyperventilates if you mention Lolita. And he wears incontinence pants.”

  “They’re not, Luke, they’re just green.”

  “They look waterproof and they have elastic cuffs, is all I’m saying. Anyhow, there is a street guy, Blue, who is in the whole damn time. He is always on the point of going to make it big in Vegas. He always needs a couple of dollars to tide him over before he goes. And there’s DeeMo and Tee; they’re homeless too. Tee cleans the windows. And Dennis helps with the outside books—he’s another street guy. He’s an alcoholic. And there’s a guy—a customer—who comes in wearing a towel on his head.”

  “A towel on his head?”

  “Yeah, a green bath towel, he wears it like a turban. Don’t ask why. Nobody knows why. And there’s the Oz crowd. They’re gay, mostly a little older, they’re into L. Frank Baum.”

  I look blank again.

  “He wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

  “So—are they into it because of Judy Garland?”

  He considers. “You know, I never thought of that. Which gay icon came first, Frank or Judy?”

  Bruce purses his lips. “The people who like L. Frank Baum are not always gay, Luke.”

  Luke flickers a glance at me, and there is a change around the muscles of his mouth, but he does not smile.

  At six o’clock Bruce stops work. He looks anxiously at me.

  “I’m leaving you alone with Luke,” he says.

  I am not sure what he means. Will Luke turn into a seducer when he’s gone?

  “You worried about her virtue, Bruce?” asks Luke.

  Bruce slaps his clenched fist down on his knee.

  “Where the hell were you lurking this time? I was saying that to Esme in confidence.”

  “I think she’ll make it through the evening,” Luke says.

  With a sympathetic nod towards me and a scowl at Luke, Bruce is gone.

  It is now dark outside. I shelve more books, try to learn the sections, have a go at being on the till. Luke, who is fairly talkative when Bruce is there, relapses into monosyllabic responses to my questions, and sits listening to a raspingly miserable song about a downtown train on the CD player. I want to ask him if this is all he does, or if, like most people in New York, his day job is just a way station on the road to glory. I don’t ask, though, because he clearly does not want to be particularly friendly. He wants to listen to the music.

  I do not know how to be with one other person and not be friendly; it is a severe trial to me not to say all the chatty things that pop into my head. I shouldn’t really want to try, given how he’s behaving. I wonder if that line about my virtue was another dig.

  I go upstairs and tackle tidying up the transport section. Nobody has done that in a long time. It is really a section about how to have wars. This is a very male store. In among books such as Jane’s Historic Military Aircraft Recognition Guide and From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, I find Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It seems shelving is an art, like everything else. I decide to do it exceptionally well.

  “Esme?”

  I stand up. “Yes? Do you need me? I was just straightening things up here—”

  “No, I’m just gonna step out for a second—maybe get a couple beers. You want one?”

  I do, of course, and I can’t have one. “Nice thought, but no, thank you.”

  “Really? Just one?”

  “No, I can’t. They have that picture of me on the side, with a black line through it. I’m not allowed.”

  “Okay. I won’t be long.”

  I look at my watch. It is ten o’clock.

  “Is it all right for me to be—on my own?”

  Luke shrugs. “I’ll be gone two seconds. What do you think will happen?”

  “A . . . a huge sale?” I don’t tell Luke I am nervous. When I first took a cab in New York, I thought my chances of survival were around fifty-fifty. The cab driver was sure to drive me to a deserted parking lot, à la every American movie ever, and murder me after taking all my money. Then he would put my body in the trunk of the taxi, drive to the East River, and tip me in. As it happened, the actual driver of my first cab was a Chinese guy, wearing a sky-blue shirt and a pink tie. He drove me in polite silence across the park at 66th Street, charged me seven dollars, and told me to have a nice day.

  Luke is half out of the door. “If you get a huge sale at ten o’clock on a Monday night in November in the rain, sweet-talk him for the three point two minutes it will take me to cross the street, buy a beer, and cross back again.”

  I subside back to the transport section. A minute or so later, I hear the door open, and a voice calls out, “Luke? George?”

  My heart sinks. The voice is deep, rough. I stand up again, at the top of the stairs, and look to see who is speaking. It is one of the men that the bookshop men call street guys, and Mitchell called bums. I like “street guys” better. He is enormous, about six two and not thin. I don’t really see how you can be homeless and so well endowed with flesh. As I come down the stairs, I realize that he isn’t fat at all—he is just swathed in layer after layer, as if to protect him from a New York winter, although November is only just beginning. There is a powerful smell of sweat, and something sweeter. The sweeter smell is scary; it reminds me of something, but the context is wrong.
<
br />   “Can I help you?” I say. My voice sounds frightened. I am angry at its treachery. But really, why would he not pull a gun on me and make me empty the till? I am not sure I can remember how to open the till. If it happens, maybe I can hand him the entire cash register.

  “George around?”

  “No, George isn’t in tonight.”

  “Where’s Luke?”

  “He’ll be back soon—he’s just gone out for a minute.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Esme, Esme Garland. It’s my first night.”

  “Hi, Esme. I’m Don’t Matter.”

  He is holding out his hand to me. Instead of instantly grasping it, I look at it. It has bumps on it in odd places. They might be warts, or they might be buboes. And I am pregnant.

  I grasp his hand and shake it firmly. His hand is big, and rough as a gardening glove. “Hello, Don’t Matter.”

  “You can call me DeeMo.”

  “Right. So Don’t Matter is your more formal name.”

  He grins. “Yeah. That’s my Sunday name.” I am surprised that he gets this and feel instantly ashamed.

  He is holding a big black plastic bin liner with books in it, which he starts to unload onto the table. They are all smeared with tomato sauce. I watch as the pile gets bigger and tomato sauce dribbles onto the counter.

  “Ah—DeeMo?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “These books—they’re covered in—”

  “Oh yeah, the ketchup. I know. But you can wipe that off.”

  It seems reasonable to me. We have paper towels.

  Luke comes back into the shop with two beers. He takes in DeeMo, the ketchup books, and me in one quick glance, and says, “DeeMo. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “You don’t like the ketchup. I get it. I get it. I like your new assistant, Luke.”

  “Yeah, she’s swell.”

  I don’t know if “swell” is yet another barb, but I do know that DeeMo is good-naturedly shoving his tomatoey books back in the bin liner. When he has gone, I sit back in the chair.