Book Deal (5 page)

She gave him her bright smile, the one that said, Lay off my rear, Deal. “Richard helped me bring some things over, that’s all.”

Deal felt himself nodding again. “I’d like to meet him,” he said.

“Calm down,” she said. “He’s sixty-five.”

“Then he’s lived long enough,” Deal said mildly.

She gave him a wider smile this time, then turned to Arch. “Tomorrow,” she said. “And thanks. You don’t know how much I appreciate this.”

“We’re just happy to have you back,” Arch said. “Right, Deal?”

“You bet,” Deal said. But she was already down the hall, and he wondered if she’d even heard.

***

He was watching through the window, saw her open the door of the white car, saw her get in, lean across the front seat, offer a peck on the cheek to the man who was silhouetted inside. Sure, he thought, she would do that. A polite gesture, that’s all it was.

“You want to be careful with the blinds,” Arch said. “I just had them installed last week.”

Deal looked down, saw that he had a handful of wooden slats bunched in his fist. He let go, turned to Arch, who was bent over, stuffing the last of the books back in the shelf. “Sorry,” he said. He pointed. “I meant to tell you, I wanted one of those books.”

Arch gave him a look. “You’re sorry you want a book? You don’t have to be sorry. I like to sell books.”

“The Christmas book,” Deal said. “About a little girl and her big brother.”

“It was big for us,” Arch said, nodding.

“So I hear,” Deal said. “So I hear.”

***

They were at the front counter of the store now, Arch running the register through its final sales tally, Deal sipping a beer Arch had produced from the back room refrigerator. When the machine finally stopped its whining, Arch ripped off the tape, glanced at the figures, shook his head.

“Poor Diego,” Arch said. “I was worried about the date, but it was the only time he could come.” He gave Deal a smile. “It was good of you to come, though.”

Deal held up his palm. He was getting a lot of mileage out of this, it seemed. Maybe he’d make a habit of it, every six months or so, come to a reading where he’d never heard of the author, couldn’t pronounce the title of the book.

“All the trouble I had finding a place to park, I figured the place would be jammed,” Deal offered.

Arch nodded, glanced outside. Even the loading zone across the street had filled up. Deal thought one of the illegally parked vehicles might have belonged to the lady who was going to shoot him with her memo book.

“Yeah, that’s probably the Colombians,” Arch was saying.

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s some big Super Bowl bash at the Colombian consulate down the street,” he said.

Deal stared at him. “The Colombians give a rat’s ass about the Super Bowl?”

Arch waved his hand at the jammed street. “I guess they do. I have an invitation around here someplace if you want to go.”

Deal held up his hand. “I’ll pass,” he said. “Who’s playing, anyway?”

Arch laughed again. “You are an original, Deal.”

“Because I don’t know who’s playing in the Super Bowl?”

“That’s one reason,” Arch said. He was stowing cash and credit card receipts into a zippered bank bag.

“Look,” Deal said. “The day the Browns go to the Super Bowl, I’ll be there. In fact,” he added, “you’ll be my guest. Seats on the fifty. Doesn’t matter where it’s played.”

Arch zipped the bag shut, tossed it in a drawer beneath the register. “The Browns, huh? I guess that’ll give us twenty years or so to get ready.”

“Could be a couple of years, smart guy.”

Arch nodded. “Let it never be said you are a fair weather fan, Mr. Deal.”

Deal shrugged. “It’s really Janice’s fault,” he said. “She got me into rooting for them. That was our first date, in fact. Browns and the Dolphins. The Orange Bowl.”

“You asked her to go to a football game on your first date?”

“She asked
me
,” Deal said. “I mean, I asked her out, and she said sure, as long as I didn’t mind going to this football game.”

Arch stared at him, bemused. “Janice is a football fan?”

“She’d just moved down here from Ohio,” Deal said. “I think she was kind of homesick or something. Anyway, the place was packed, Kiick and Csonka were playing then, the crowd was crazy, beer was coming down from the upper deck like a rainstorm…we had a great time.”

Arch shook his head, still trying to comprehend it, apparently. “So who won?”

Deal gave him a look. “I did,” he said. “I always thought so, anyway.”

***

They both were drinking beers now, the front door had been locked, its shade drawn down. They were sitting in sling chairs in the magazine
cum
reading room with their feet up on a big wooden coffee table that looked like a thick cross section taken from a huge banyan trunk.

Arch, who had been staring off at the ceiling, turned to give Deal a look. “My father wanted me to be a doctor,” he said.

Deal nodded in commiseration. “My old man wanted me to be an attorney.”

“There’s something to be said for the helping professions,” Arch said.

Deal nodded again. “They help you get rich,” he said.

Arch laughed. “I’ve always liked your take on things,” he said.

Deal saluted him with his beer. “Speaking of attorneys, where is Uncle Els? I thought Sunday was a big day in rare books.”

“He was in earlier.” Arch shrugged. “He probably went home to watch the game.”

“Sure,” Deal said. He doubted Els knew what the Super Bowl was. After all, this was a man who had retired from the legal profession because, in his words, it had grown “too combative and tawdry.” Els, inveterate reader and longtime widower, had salted away most of what he’d made in his realty law practice, had backed Arch’s plans for the store from the beginning. He’d probably had the rare books annex in mind all along, Deal thought.

He stared at the ceiling, imagining himself up there, burrowed into the leather Morris chair Els had installed, feet propped on the matching ottoman, fringed reading lamp burning at his shoulder, nose in some edition of Dumas or Dickens, untrimmed musty pages and color plates by the score…not such a bad life, he was thinking, pirates, dungeons, derring-do in the shadow of Old Bailey…then blinked, realizing he’d nearly dozed off, that Arch was speaking to him again.

“…admire the way you hang in there, Deal. All the crap that’s come down on you the past couple of years…” Arch paused, shaking his head. “…now what’s going on with Janice…”

Deal sighed. It brought him back from romance and adventure with a vengeance. “Who could blame her,” he said. Not himself, certainly.

Arch nodded, waiting for him to say more.

“I appreciate your offering her the job,” Deal added after a moment.

Arch rolled his eyes. “Are you kidding? Janice is great. She gets things organized around here. Besides, you and I went to high school together. You set me up with Lilia Estaban. You dated my sister. You put my fireplace in, for God’s sake…”

Deal held up his hand again, trying to smile. He was also remembering Sara, Arch’s sister. A truly lovely girl. Sweet, doting, kind. They’d gone out a few times in high school, some fewer times once Deal went off to college. He’d developed a taste for more complicated women, or so he told himself back then. Well, he’d sure gotten what he’d hoped for, no question about that, not where Janice was concerned.

“How is Sara?” Deal asked. “Still in Chicago?” Last he’d heard, she was working for a publishing house, some outfit that churned out inspirational pamphlets, the occasional Dale Evans memoir, weekly readers for various denominations.

Arch shook his head, glum now. “She took a new job, marketing for one of her clients.” He sighed. “It’s good money, I guess.”

“Hey, Arch,” Deal said. “Sara’s a sweetheart. She’s happy…”

Arch nodded, unconvinced. “My sister, out there spreading the gospel.”

“She could be here in Miami, going broke in books and construction.”

Arch glanced at him. “You’re right, I guess. It could be worse. She could have married you.”

Deal laughed and they clanked their beers together. Back to good times, Deal thought. But a moment later Arch was staring at him solemnly.

“If I could do something, put you and Janice back together, I’d do it in a second,” Arch said. “It breaks my heart…” He trailed off again, and Deal thought he saw a trace of moisture in his old friend’s eyes.

That was Arch for you, of course, heart on his sleeve, aching for everyone else in the world. He’d always been that way. If there’d have been a Most Decent award in high school Arch would have gotten it, hands down.

“‘A year, ten years from now, / I’ll remember this…not why, only that we / were here like this together.’” Arch was reciting now, waving his hand like an orchestra conductor’s to mark the lines.

“And what is that?” Deal said.

“A poem,” Arch said. “By Adrienne Rich. About this couple who’ve been having their troubles.”

Deal lifted his eyebrows. “Sounds cheery.”

“The point she’s trying to make,” Arch said, “they’re going to get through it. It’s a bad time, but they’re going to make it, talk about it together years from now.”

Deal nodded. “It would be nice to think so,” he said.

Arch watched him a moment, his enthusiasm seeming to ebb. “Yeah, what do I know?” he said. “Me, the grizzled bachelor…” He lifted his hand, began again in a softer voice this time, “…‘but there’s got to be somebody / Because what if I’m 60 years old and not married / all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear / and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!’”

Deal glanced at him. “Adrienne Rich again?”

Arch laughed. “Hardly. That’s Gregory Corso. They had slightly different esthetics.”

Deal thought about it a moment. “Maybe that’s the problem with Janice and me,” he said. “Maybe our esthetics don’t mesh anymore. Maybe I should take that up with her shrink.”

“Like she says, Deal. One step at a time. At least she’s back in town, right?”

Deal took a deep breath, as if that might drive out the ache in his chest. What Arch said made sense, if you looked at the matter logically. But if love were a matter of logic, there’d be a hell of a lot fewer problems in the world, wouldn’t there?

If he were able to turn a clear mind upon the matter, he might want to suggest to Janice that she take a flying leap at the moon while he went on about his life. But that was assuming he could look at her and not feel the same goddamned tidal-strength pull in his gut that he’d felt since the day they’d met. And even if he could drown it out, there was the tiny matter of their daughter, Isabel, wasn’t there? Didn’t he owe it to his daughter as well, to go along with his estranged wife and her one-step-at-a-time notions?

And of course, there was the guilt that never really left him, the nagging, irrational voice that insisted that all the terrible things that had befallen them were, in the final analysis, Deal’s fault. Janice might have always been wrapped a little tight, but as Arch had made clear, who could blame her for buckling under the stress: two different attempts on her life, and either one of them could have taken Isabel as well. Crazed men who wanted Deal, but didn’t care who else got in the way. The first time, she’d nearly been drowned by a psychopath who tried to make her miscarry, the second time, after Isabel’s birth, it had been fire—you’d have to look close to notice, but the scars from the many skin grafts were still there, and in Janice’s mind they were a lot larger than life.

Two different teams of psychiatrists had attempted a diagnosis of her condition—the abrupt mood swings into depression, despair, and anger, the inability to cope with what she called her “former life.” The best the doctors had come up with was to describe it as a form of post-traumatic stress reaction, not unlike that experienced by combat veterans, a psychological distress that endured long after any signs of physical trauma had vanished. Be patient, they advised him, endlessly. Offer love and support. It had taken a long time for such complex symptoms to manifest themselves, they were not going to go away overnight. Logical, perhaps. But to Deal, it sometimes seemed a lot more clear-cut than what the doctors wanted to make it.

Think of it this way: Hang around Deal, someone tries to drown you, then burn you to a cinder. What would anyone expect next? Earthquake? Avalanche? Most guys, when they pissed somebody off, at the worst you’d have to duck a haymaker, maybe get a call from a lawyer. Deal, on the other hand, seemed to have a knack for attracting psychotics and assassins.

He laughed mirthlessly and shook himself from his thoughts, turned back to Arch. Decent, sensitive Dylan Archibald Dolan. His friend through thick and thin. The shy kid from high school who’d grown up to be tall, dark, and as exotically attractive as the poets his mother had insisted he be named after.

“You’re the one who ought to be married, Arch,” Deal said. “I see all these women in here, running you around the sexology stacks. If there was anybody who could keep from screwing it up, it’d be you.”

Arch laughed. “It comes back to my basic human decency,” he said. “I look into the limpid pools of a woman in love and I remind myself how that fervent expression is going to change when I show her the bank statement at the end of every month.”

“Come off it,” Deal said. “One slow Sunday and you’re going to sing the blues?”

“I wish that was all I had to worry about,” Arch said, his voice growing more somber. He finished his beer, used the empty bottle as a pointer. “You know what’s coming across the street?”

Deal turned in his seat. The view out this set of windows was not particularly remarkable. A bank building on one corner, the abandoned Trailways station on the other. The VW convertible Deal had earlier taken for Janice’s was gone now, replaced by a Cadillac as new and shiny as the Grant Wood couple’s. The traffic seemed to have died away, everyone in place before the consulate’s big screen by now, he imagined.

“What am I supposed to see, Arch?”

“The bookstore that ate the Gables,” Arch said.

Deal turned. “What are you talking about?”