The Bookstore Read online

  “This is a weird job,” I say. I remember about shaking his hand, and reach for the hand sanitizer next to the till. While I am squirting it onto my palm, the door opens and DeeMo comes back in. He sees what I am doing, and looks straight into my eyes. I flush. He says nothing at all.

  Luke looks from me to DeeMo. “What is it?”

  “I’m pregnant,” I say to DeeMo. “I’m paranoid. I don’t want—to hurt it.”

  He nods his head. “It’s okay, honey, don’t worry about it,” he says. “Luke. Can you spot me ten dollars?”

  “Nope,” says Luke.

  He looks at me.

  “She can’t either,” Luke says. “But come back at eleven thirty and bring in the books for me, and you can earn ten dollars.”

  DeeMo appears to think this is a reasonable proposition, and disappears into the rainy night again.

  Luke hands me a Coke in a bottle. I say something about paying for it, and he shakes his head.

  “What does he smell of?” I ask Luke.

  “Ketones,” says Luke promptly. “His body needs calories, and it doesn’t have enough, so it’s breaking down his vital organs.”

  “And the smell?” It is like pear drops, I remember now, something nice from childhood. “The smell is . . . ?”

  “It’s the smell of acetone. It’s the smell of a man who is starving.”

  DEEMO DOES COME back, promptly, at eleven thirty, and begins to heave all the crates of books inside. Luke nods at me and says, “You can get the vacuum cleaner out of the back and do all the aisles and the stairs.”

  I have a feeling that Luke expects me to cavil about the task, that I will object along feminist lines to being assigned domestic tasks. The source of his irritation seems to be the idea that I’ve been taken on out of pity, and that I will expect an easy ride. So I get the vacuum cleaner out without a word.

  It is an ancient vacuum cleaner. It is made of thick white and brown plastic that has yellowed with age to the color of tinned rice pudding, like wallpaper in a pub, and it has a fabric bag, and the cord is looped round two catches. When I work out how to turn it on, from a switch on the base, it sounds like a jet engine taking off. I glide it up and down the aisles, pretending to be a happy housewife from the fifties. Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?

  When I have finished, Luke walks around, his eyes on the floor. He picks up a tiny speck.

  “You missed some.”

  “I’m surprised, because it’s such a state-of-the-art machine.”

  “You like vacuuming?”

  “I like things to be tidy,” I say.

  “Okay, you did fine. You can put it away.”

  When I come back to the front, Luke opens the till.

  “What time did you get here?”

  “Five.”

  “And what’s your hourly rate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He looks up at me. “You don’t know? You and George didn’t fix—no, why am I even asking? How about ten dollars an hour?”

  “How about twelve?”

  “How about ten?”

  “Ten is fine.”

  DeeMo is lounging at the doorway while we are discussing this, and suddenly breaks into a wide grin.

  “She’s on half my salary, man. I get ten for a half hour.”

  Luke counts out some bills. “That’s seventy dollars. Enjoy.”

  I take the money and stare at it.

  “I don’t deserve all this. I didn’t do anything.”

  He shrugs. “Then give it back.”

  I stick it in my pocket.

  “Right,” he says. “We should close up. DeeMo? You ready?”

  DeeMo nods and slouches out ahead of us. Luke turns out the lights and we go out onto the pavement. He locks the door, and then leaps up and pulls down a big metal grille, which he then padlocks to a metal loop on the ground. The grille has graffiti on it, in the style of the subway cars in old films. He straightens up.

  “Nobody meeting you?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I just thought the father might show up to walk you home.”

  “Oh! No, the—the father is not in the picture. I said, earlier, with Bruce . . .”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, where he wanted to get you on Oprah for keeping your kid. Well, okay. See you next time.”

  He raises his hand in farewell and walks off across Broadway towards the downtown subway stop while I am still struggling to answer him.

  DeeMo is still there. He says, “If you’re walking uptown, I can walk you home.”

  I look at him. I don’t know what to say. He leans his head back on the wall and laughs up into the night air. I am thinking that he is a black homeless crack addict, and if I need any protection on the way home, it is probably from black homeless crack addicts. And he is laughing because I am thinking it.

  “I live near Columbia; it’s too far for me to walk this late. I am going on the subway. You can walk me one whole block if you like.”

  He pushes himself off from the wall and walks beside me, and sees me right down to the turnstile.

  “You be okay now?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Thanks, DeeMo.”

  “Don’t talk to anyone,” he says, and retreats back up to Broadway. When I get to the platform, I see Luke on the opposite side. He lifts his chin in faint acknowledgment, and I give him an equally faint smile back. I want to shout that he has no right to judge me, to pass an opinion on what I do with my body, but how ridiculous would that be? My voice would probably come out too high-pitched, or too reedy; he wouldn’t be able to hear over all the train rails, and the stray commuters on my side would hear all too well. We stand in awkward self-consciousness, or at least I do, until his train comes. Next time I will bring a book.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Up the ladder at The Owl, shelving books, I am thinking about the lift in Lerner Hall at Columbia. I can’t bring myself to take it. It takes you up to the sixth floor only, and the university’s counseling service is on the sixth floor, so just getting into the lift is like a public announcement of your mental state. But taking the stairs might be worse. You would only take the stairs so that nobody would see you in the lift, so if you’re seen ducking into the stairwell you must have even more to hide.

  Luke says, from the front, “So, the guy? The father?”

  “Oh, yes. The guy. He’s—” I shrug. Sometimes I think I am doing fine without Mitchell, and that’s when the sadness of it sucker-punches me, when I am suddenly all skin and tears. I don’t think I can speak through it for a minute. It must be such small-time grief, compared to death, compared to real bereavement. But I don’t know what they are like; this feels bad enough. And grief, I see now, is for the loss of the future as well as the past.

  I cling on to the ladder and stare at the spine of A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley very fiercely, waiting for it all to subside. I can feel Luke looking up at me. After a while he moves away. I hear him shelving books, and then a customer comes in, asking for poetry.

  I bring the Jane Smiley back down with me to take home, hoping I will be able to lose myself in it when I get sad. I sit down on the second seat at the front. Luke is cashing up, reaching for the sales ledger to note down the takings for the day.

  “Are we doing all right, financially?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” says Luke, and then says, “I like the ‘we.’ We’re doing okay. When you take into account ebooks and Kindles and such, we’re doing pretty good. As long as the rent doesn’t go up. Then we’ll become a nail salon, like Bruce says.”

  “Maybe the landlord likes that this is a bookshop, and he won’t put the rent up.”

  “Yeah, landlords are like that, especially in New York.”

  I laugh, and Luke looks up. He says, “You know—about the guy. It will get easier.”

  “Yes. I just—you know. I loved him.”

  I am not looking at him, but I am not crying either. Progress.

  “You
’re pretty open about it,” he says.

  “I don’t see any reason not to be.”

  “That’s how you get hurt.”

  “I’m already hurt.”

  “Then maybe that’s how you got hurt.”

  I FINISH A short afternoon shift that I spent learning about book descriptions with George. It is an arcane system of codification that the Internet is putting paid to, where fair is foul and good is bad and perfect means you’re a charlatan. Price-clipped is bad. Second impression is bad. Inscribed is bad, unless it is by the author, and then inscribed is good, but not nearly as good as signed. Unless the inscription is to someone patently important—To my dear Laura, love from Petrarch. At the end of it I feel very tired, despite only having been working for three hours.

  “You okay?” George asks.

  “Yes. I had lectures this morning; I have a paper to write—I am just a little tired.”

  “You have to remember to take it easy—the baby—”

  “I know,” I say, hastily. “I know. I do.”

  He looks piercingly at me and then asks me to wait for a second, and pads off to the back of the shop. He comes back with a paperback, and hands it to me. It is called Shackleton’s Boat Journey, by Frank Worsley.

  “It’s one of the greatest survival stories of all time,” he says. “Enjoy.”

  It is very like George to think that a book about Antarctic exploration will sort out the stresses of being single, impoverished, and pregnant, with a job and a PhD to do.

  I go to Barnes and Noble to buy some books on how to be good at pregnancy. I can’t really afford them, but I’ve been using the Web so far, and it is too nebulous. I feel as if I need to impose a pattern on the days and weeks.

  It is symptomatic of the problems facing cute secondhand bookshops that I don’t think of looking for any pregnancy books at The Owl until I have completed my expensive and bulky purchases. As if the past can tell us anything about having babies.

  All baby books are enormous; why? It seems like a subtle infantilizing of the mother. We are going to be mothers instead of women, so we have to have everything presented in fourteen-point type. It is the same with maternity clothes; I looked at them one day with Stella, but have not bought any yet. They had card rosettes attached to them that read, “I am a nursing item,” or “I am a dress.”

  “I am a nursing item,” said Stella. “Subtext: ‘You are a pregnant woman, so you need to have your clothes talk to you.’ For fuck’s sake.”

  As I am walking uptown with my new springing step, I walk smack into Mitchell. He puts his hands on my shoulders and says, “Why, Esme Garland! What a wonderful surprise!” in a Cary Grant voice.

  I get kissed on both cheeks, and held back again, to be viewed. I do not know what is going on, but I suspect mischief and misrule. I submit to the kisses and the viewing, with my heart pounding and my mind racing. I can barely breathe. I must not abase myself with Mitchell van Leuven again. I must not.

  I do not ask him why he is up here, though this is far from any neighborhood he needs to be in.

  “I am never up here now,” he says. “It must be fate. It must be fate, Esme.”

  It is not fate.

  “You look great,” he says. “Come and have a coffee. Do you know the ratio of coffee shops to people in Manhattan? Three to one. It’s true. Come on, pick one. Not Starbucks.”

  There are some people who will realize and appreciate the tremendous accomplishment of my next words, and others for whom it will pass by unremarked.

  “I’d like to, but I’ve got a deadline,” I say.

  “I never knew you to refuse a coffee before,” he says. His eyes are smiley. They are crinkling at the edges.

  I shrug and say, “I’ve gone off coffee.”

  “Then,” says Mitchell gravely, “I’d better buy you a chai latte.”

  I shake my head, resolute.

  “What are your books?”

  I say, “Oh, they’re nothing in particular,” and I try to be casual, but I make a slight movement towards putting the bag behind my back, as if to conceal it from his gaze. He has seen that there are books, so the gesture is worse than useless. He makes a dive for the bag, as if he is a boy after a present. I grab for it back and say, “No, Mitchell, you have no right, don’t—”

  And he tugs the books out of the bag. There are two enormous matching ones: The Pregnancy Book and The Baby Book. Then I’ve got one called Eating Well When You’re Expecting and The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy. I’ve put the one George gave me in with them, so I’ve got Shackleton’s Boat Journey with them all. Somehow it is like buying four ball gowns and a tin of Spam; it makes me look mentally disturbed.

  Mitchell stares at the books.

  “Are you pregnant?” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. “And I’m going to the South Pole.”

  I managed a comeback, and my voice sounds pretty level. But after all, I knew, and he didn’t. He is pale.

  “Is it mine?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, “it’s mine.”

  I stand there, Mitchell stands there; the weight of all the baby books is in his hands. I am not thinking of anything.

  “You—weren’t going to tell me?” he says finally.

  I say nothing. He looks around at the people passing by. He says, “Oh, oh, wait—was it the park? Was that what it was? You were going to tell me that?”

  I lift my chin fractionally.

  He starts nodding, as if I have confirmed what he always thought about me. He looks as if he wants to rope in the passersby now, as audience to the gross crime inflicted upon him, as witnesses to my unreasonableness.

  “And you’re going to have it,” he says. “Just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “I—could I—just tell me something here. Could I have gone through my whole life being a father and not knowing it? You weren’t going to tell me?”

  “Why would I tell you, if you didn’t want to be with me?”

  “It’s my right? For instance?”

  “Why is it your right? Why isn’t it your burden, if I tell you?”

  “Why can’t a right be a burden? You’re going to have my baby?”

  I am silent. He screws his eyes up, and then says, “You don’t think—it didn’t cross your mind to think, that in this situation, you—it—someone—might need me? You, you . . . I . . . you don’t see that this changes things?”

  “I see that it changes things,” I say, hotly. “It’s because I see that it changes things that I didn’t tell you—”

  He is shaking his head. “You—are—unbelievable.”

  I am being subjected to this on the most public street on earth. I want to escape from him, to bolt. In most places, if I walked away, he would just be able to follow me, telling me how unbelievable and bad I am. But this is New York. I walk to the edge of the pavement and raise my hand. A yellow cab curves to my feet. I open the door.

  He strides up to me and catches hold of the door so that I can’t move it. I think for a second that he is going to shout at me, but when I lift my head to face him, he looks stricken.

  “Why is this happening like this?” he says, and I think I can hear tears in his voice. “Surely we could manage it better than this? You are hurting me, Esme. This hurts.”

  A thousand petals of penitence unfurl in me—I have not considered him properly. I was too busy being hurt myself to think about him.

  “I am sorry—” I say, “I didn’t—I didn’t think that you—”

  “I miss you,” he says, his voice as soft as a flower. My breath catches. Slowly, he raises his free hand and tucks a lock of hair behind my ear; it is something he used to do.

  I am electric at the touch of his hand. He knows. He looks, unsmilingly now, into my eyes for a long time. His eyes are like the sea. The North Atlantic.

  He leans forward, his breath brushing my ear. “I chose you, Esme,” he says. “I singled you out from all the world.”

  I STRETCH OUT on the m
ulberry sheets.

  He walks back in from the kitchen with a cheese board and a dish of peaches. He is still naked.

  “Where are they from?” I say, peering at the peaches. “Not Gristedes?”

  “What have I wrought?” he says. “No, Miss New York, not Gristedes. They’re from Apple Tree Market.”

  I bite into one. It tastes like a peach ought to taste.

  “You should buy some melons there,” I say, “they might taste like melons instead of cucumbers.”

  He grins as he looks away and then meets my eyes, the special, secret grin, that makes me feel I am loved “I have made you in my own image,” he says. “I’m very proud.”

  “I can be annoyed when fruit doesn’t taste good all by myself.”

  “No, you can’t. You were like all the English in England when I met you. ‘This peach tastes like shit, and it cost five dollars. Oh well, at least we won the war . . . ’ ”

  “Yes, I do, I talk about winning the war all the time. But it’s true that you’ve taught me to be a real New Yorker.” I glance over at his closet. “Or a gay New Yorker . . .”

  “Cheap, Esme, cheap. And I’ve only taught you how to be a gay male New Yorker. Lesbians don’t care. Lesbians don’t eat peaches. They’re too busy eating—”

  “Apples!” I say, and slap my hand over his mouth. He is laughing, tumbling sideways on the bed. He pulls me on top of him, and starts to kiss me, and forces the peach that is already in his mouth into mine.

  I push him away and make a face. He laughs.

  “You’re revolting,” I say.

  “I’m adorable,” he says. “And you’re all tousled. A tousled girl in a tousled bed.”

  “I can’t be tousled. Only my hair can be tousled. Mitchell, what you said—did you really break up with me because you thought I was going to break up with you?”

  “Of course. I play by the old rules. Get in first.”

  “But—you made me so sad.”

  He shrugs lightly. “Self-defense. I’m a master. And you’re not sad now.”

  “No. I’m not sad now.”

  “Neither am I. I’m happy, Esme.”

  He looks over at me—one look. But it is a smiling glance of such unadulterated happiness that I think he does love me, that in this one connecting glance I know he does, I know he does, as I know the sun will rise in the morning to flood the cross streets—and my bedroom—with radiant light.