A Window Opens: A Novel (9 page)

“Alice, before you proceed to your final discussions, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how we would envision your role. Because with your qualifications, naturally you’re interviewing us as much as we’re interviewing you.” Genevieve smoothed a tendril of hair off her forehead and flicked open the single, paperbag-brown file folder on her desk.

I waited. What could I say? I desperately need this job and would kill to be part of something so cool?

Genevieve cleared her throat. “I envision you in a hybrid role of tastemaker and curator— of course, contributing to ScrollOriginals would fall into this bucket. And I’m also thinking you might be a nice fit for a role we’ve cooked up, known internally as ScrollCrier.”

I tilted my head to the side, curious.

She went on. “You see, we’re looking for someone to liaise with the publishing community at large. As you can imagine, we’ve received an exceptionally warm reception to our Scroll concept—who doesn’t want to see more bookstores, right? But we’d like to have a designated staffer who makes sure these contacts are up-to-the-minute on our mission as it continues to evolve. Does that make sense?”

“You mean, just keep the publishing community in the loop about what’s happening with our plans?”

“Exactly. An ambassador of sorts.”

“That actually sounds like it could be right up my alley.”

Genevieve grinned. “You’ll learn, nothing at MainStreet, or at Scroll, is set in stone. We’re experts at dealing with ambiguity, which can be both liberating and frustrating, I’m not going to lie.”

“I get that. Remember, Genevieve, I’m a magazine person. We’ve relaunched
You
three times in the past five years—and every time the editors have had to embrace a new look and message. That’s been an exciting part of my job.”

Genevieve stared at me for a long second, then nodded. “Okay, then. Well. I have a good feeling about you, Alice Pearse.”

Awkwardly, I said, “I have a good feeling about you, too, Genevieve Edwards. I mean,
Andrews
!” I cringed. How could I have gotten her name wrong?!

Genevieve motioned for me to follow her, and we walked down the long white hall to a door marked Authorized Visitors ONLY. She paused, her hand on the brushed metal doorknob. “Now. This is our simulated Scroll lounge. You’ll have your phone interviews in here. But before we proceed, I have to underscore the importance of the NDA you just signed. This area is highly confidential, only for the eyes of employees above Level Five and our most serious recruits.”

I nodded and held up two fingers. “Scout’s honor.” Serious recruits? This job was actually within my grasp—a mind-boggling stroke of luck.

The door swung open on a high-ceilinged circular room painted a warm buttercup yellow. The floors were dark, wide-plank wood, and the ceiling soared into a pale blue dome. We stepped in and Genevieve gestured for me to pick from a small army of leather armchairs, each accompanied by its own gooseneck reading lamp topped off with a different-colored glass shade. I selected a red one, settled in, and was surprised when the bottom of the chair coughed up a padded footrest.

Genevieve giggled. “Yeah, they don’t look like recliners. But we’ve
learned that readers want the La-Z-Boy feel. The Rockwells commissioned these chairs specially for Scroll—the idea being that chic library feel with a down-home yet decadent touch.”

“Decadent is right. Wow. This place looks like the private screening rooms on
House Hunters: Million Dollar Homes
.”

“So true. I love that show!” We laughed. I resisted the impulse to ask Genevieve if she watched
The Bachelor,
too. Forget a successful first date—this was starting to feel like love at first sight. She went on: “Before you call in to Cleveland, can I grab you a warm beverage, Alice? We’re not staffed up with baristas yet, but I can make you a coffee from one of our instant cold-press machines. We have a roaster on the premises so we know our beans have been treated humanely.”

“Sure, I’d love a cup. Are you sure I can’t get it myself?”

“Please.” Genevieve pressed my shoulders down into the chair and made her way over to an oak counter next to a glass case piled high with scones, muffins, and madeleines. “Can I interest you in an earth-friendly baked good? We’re fine-tuning our gluten-free, wheat-free, dairy-free menu. That’s one of the perks of the job—you get to taste everything.”

“Thanks, they look delicious, but I’m fine. I just can’t get over these bookshelves!” Around the perimeter of one side of the room, the shelves ran from the floor to the bottom of the dome—oak, gently curved, with a sliding ladder connecting the bottom shelf with the top.

“Pretty spectacular, right?” Genevieve grabbed a chunky clay mug and gestured for me to spin my chair around. “Don’t miss the screens on the other side of the room. Get it? Past meets future? I’m sure Keith told you about our ScrollFirst program. We’ll store those books on the shelves; and then you can just swivel your chair around and order an e-book for your device. Milk? Sugar?”

Keith!
So that was his name. Indeed, Will had gotten into hot water for pummeling a classmate by this name during a game of four-square in 1983.

“Just black, thanks. Wow. I like the idea of marrying e-books with real—I mean, carbon-based books. The old with the new. It’s very . . .”

“Inclusive?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Inclusion is one of our most valued tenets. See, Alice, you’ll fit right in here.”

•  •  •

As soon as my last interview was over, I called Nicholas from the lobby of a hip hotel around the corner from the Scroll offices. I had forty-five minutes to kill before the next train to Filament and I was more than happy to sink into a maroon velvet couch with a large goblet of white wine. Even though I’d barely moved all day, I felt sore and drained to the point of catatonia. But I did have the wherewithal to notice that I was the only person in the vicinity not wearing a wool skullcap and also the only person clad head to toe in clothing from the Boden catalog.

“So?”

“I’m exhausted. My face hurts from talking. But . . .
Nicholas!
I love Genevieve. And you should
see
this place.”

“Are the offices nice?”

“Gorgeous. Just . . . unbelievably
stark
, but in this really elegant way. Genevieve showed me what their stores are going to look like, and basically it’s like the most beautiful library you’ve ever seen, with bookshelves on one side and high-tech flat-screen monitors on the other.”

“Wow. When do they open?”

“Ha. Not soon enough. And Nicholas, one thing the
New York Times
story didn’t mention? They’re selling
first editions
along with e-books, and you can get a membership that gets you into this upgraded area and a little hot plate for your coffee and access to books you can’t get anywhere except Scroll. I’m telling you, it’s
amazing—
” In the background, I heard a soft hiss and then a clink. “Nicholas? Are you still there?

“I’m here. Sorry. Just opening a beer. Wow—cheers, Alice, this all sounds great! Did they love you?”

“Wait, are you in your office?”

“No, I came back early and sent Jessie home. I’m just hanging with the kids.”

“Oh. Okay. What time is it, anyway?”

“I have no idea. Four thirtyish?

“Wow, cocktail hour starts early in your line of work. Hey, one weird thing: the subject of the kids hasn’t even come up yet.”

“Of course the kids haven’t come up yet! It would be illegal for them to ask if you have kids, and why would you volunteer the information? It’s irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant? Well. The kids are . . . my life, I guess. They’re my best work.”

Nicholas laughed—warmly, but still. “Just relax. We’ll see what happens.”

•  •  •

I wrote thank-you notes to all my interviewers on outrageously expensive cream-colored cards printed with funky red reading glasses. I thought they struck the right balance between hip, intellectual, and modern.

Oliver paused at the dining room table, soccer ball tucked under his arm. He studied the translucent box of cards—harder to open than a CD wrapper—and said, “Mommy, are you writing a letter to our eye doctor?”

“Our eye doctor? No! I’m writing to the people I met with about a job.”

“Do they wear glasses?”

“Some of them.”

“Did you tell them kids used to call you ‘four eyes’?”

“Actually, no. My eyesight didn’t come up.”

“Why not?”

“It just didn’t.”

“Mommy, can we get an Xbox?”

“No.”

“Why not? Everyone has one but us.”

“Because we’re
readers
in this house.”

“But Mommy—”

“Oliver! Please throw the Frisbee around with poor Cornelius; he hasn’t been out since this morning.”

This wasn’t the first time the subject of an Xbox had come up. A kid in Oliver’s second-grade class got one for his birthday and that opened the floodgate of lobbying for Kinect Sports, FIFA Soccer, Sonic Generations, and Kinectimals, which Oliver assured me would be “just the thing” for Georgie. “It’s animals, Mommy! And you can get Harry Potter for Xbox! The games are educational!”

If Oliver was eager for a gaming console, I was equally unenthusiastic about having one in the house. I already had enough trouble monitoring television and computer use, which skyrocketed on weekend mornings when Nicholas and I were desperate for extra sleep. Anyway, why couldn’t Oliver go outside and play real basketball or take our real dog for a real walk? As for Harry Potter, he belonged inside a book. End of story.

W
hen Nicholas’s time at the firm dwindled to six weeks, he started lugging bags and boxes back from his office in the city. We designated a corner of the basement for storage of items that would go to the new office when his lease started: file folders, legal pads, stapler, a framed drawing of the New York Public Library.

Less important items never made it to the basement but got absorbed into the flotsam and jetsam perpetually at sea in our house. In the playroom, I discovered an unfamiliar toaster among the plastic bowls and utensils in Georgie’s miniature kitchen. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a Lucite deal toy from GE, sent to my husband by investment bankers at the close of a particularly grueling transaction. There were a squadron of these trinkets lined up along his windowsill on Park Avenue, all tiny replicas to commemorate whatever had been at the crux of a particular deal: a cement mixer, a magnifying glass, a pill bottle. Each one represented months of dinners in a conference room and fresh shirts hastily purchased by Gladys from the Charles Tyrwhitt around the corner.

Was he really going to walk away from the past ten years of his life without a backward glance?

One night, we were in the basement, sorting the recycling together, and I discovered that the glass bin was too heavy for me to lift. “I got it,” Nicholas said, throwing on a Red Raider hockey sweatshirt left over from his high school days. “Can you grab the door?”

As he strode past, holding the towering pile of brown bottles and one lone Hellman’s jar at an arm’s length, I said, “Do you think we’re drinking more than we used to?”

“No, why?” Nicholas made his way gracefully to the curb, sidestepping hula hoops, a pogo stick, and two soccer balls, one deflated. The still-round one he kicked into Oliver’s soccer goal, using a fake sportscaster voice to say “Score!”

I let the screen door close behind me, making a mental note to buy more mayonnaise.

•  •  •

My mom called to check in. Will called to check in. The timing of their outreach indicated that they had consulted one another first and taken it upon themselves to give me pep talks.

“Good things come to those who wait” was my mom’s theme. If I didn’t get the job, we would have the “Things happen for a reason” conversation; if I did, we would go in the direction of “Hard work and persistence are always rewarded.”

My mom is a docent at the Thomas Edison Museum in West Orange. Two days a week, she leads tours of schoolchildren and senior citizens through Edison’s newly refurbished lab, where they can see the little cot he slept on so he wouldn’t have to go home and be bothered by his eight kids; the wax-faced dolls Edison wired to sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb”; and the hulking tarpaper Black Maria movie studio where Edison screened early silent films like
The Great Train Robbery
.

Will and I grew up steeped in Edisonia. In fact, above the crucifix
in my still-intact childhood bedroom is a quote from the great inventor, cross-stitched by one of my aunts: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.” Open the closet and you’ll also find a picture of River Phoenix, long ago clipped from
Tiger Beat
and still clinging to the door with yellowed tape twenty years after its subject’s death.

My brother’s call was more transactional: “Look, Alice, if you get this job, great; if not, you can continue to help women achieve their lifelong goal of having flat abs.”

Will always had a snide attitude toward my job at
You,
possibly because his wife, Mary, is blessed with a perfect physique and doesn’t have time for the frippery of disposable reading. Her subscriptions are to journals, publications with indices instead of perfume strips. Mary is an ophthalmologist; Will owns Jersey Boy Portage, a kayak school on Bailey Island, in Maine, where they live with my two sweet nephews, who write music and show no signs of their father’s brutish behavior from childhood.

Even though my wrists were always red from Will’s Indian burns and he’d ruined my favorite doll with a Mets “tattoo” in permanent ink, the two of us had been close as kids. Now we’re respectful of each other. Sometimes I wonder what happened to the guy who bought rounds of tequila shots for everyone at Dive Bar on Broadway on my twenty-second birthday. His solemn outdoorsman replacement is so earnest, I feel like I have to watch my language when we’re together.

“Gee, Will, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“So what does your bookstore friend think of Scroll? A little healthy competition?”