Book Deal (6 page)
Arch reached into the wastebasket they were using for a cooler, found another beer and opened it. “Eddie Lightner called a few weeks back. You know Eddie, don’t you?”
Deal nodded without enthusiasm. Lightner was a commercial real estate broker with a penchant for the offshore client. He kept one office in Miami, another in Grand Cayman. A goodly number of his stateside business associates had fallen into misunderstandings with one governmental agency or another, and Deal’s father had once threatened to make him part of the foundation of a condominium tower when Lightner came scavenging around the DealCo offices at a difficult time. But while so many others around him had gone down in flames, Lightner had endured unscathed for decades, friend and confidant to a dozen successive, wildly disparate city administrations.
“Well, Eddie was just calling me as a friend,” Arch continued. “He wanted me to know that someone had finally picked up the lease on the Trailways station.”
“The pedestrian mall people?” Deal said. That had been a much ballyhooed possibility for the property, which consisted of an entire city block, ever since the bus company had pulled out more than a year ago. Turn the whole thing into an inviting plaza with fountains, lush plantings, boutiques, and upscale shops that would lure Gables shoppers back downtown.
“I wish,” Arch said.
“The cineplex?” Sixteen theaters, a couple of restaurants, on-site parking, it was another proposal favored by Gables city fathers and business leaders.
Arch shook his head, still glum.
“Okay, the governor wants to build a prison there,” Deal said.
Arch tried to laugh, but there wasn’t much joy in it. “I’d be the first to sign a petition for that,” he said, taking a healthy swallow of his beer. “The fact is, Lightner called to let me know that my new neighbor was going to be a Mega-Media store.”
“Mega-Media.” Deal shook his head. “What’s that? Discount electronics?”
Arch nodded. “I’d forgotten, Deal. You don’t get out a whole lot.”
“I get out. I just don’t go shopping.”
“Mega-Media is that new super bookstore chain,” Arch said, wearily. “It’s been written up in
Time
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and so on. It’s more than books, actually. Movies, music, interactive texts, associated computer software, some peripherals.” He glanced out the window as if he could see customers already flooding through the competition’s doors.
“Their stores average thirty thousand square feet,” he said. “This one will be twice that, according to Lightner. They’re going to make it their flagship operation, maybe move some of their U.S. operations down here along with it.”
“Their U.S. operations?”
“It’s a fairly far-flung enterprise that a guy named Martin Rosenhaus put together,” Arch said. “He’s created a kind of media holding company. There are the stores, of course, but he’s also got newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets worldwide. He’s been going after independent cable operators, too.”
Deal took a breath, put his beer down on the table. That was one thing about the way the world turned. Just start figuring you have a corner on the misery market, somebody else comes along, tries to knock you right off the game board.
“So our good buddy Lightner put Mega-Media into the lease, huh?”
“He says if he hadn’t done it somebody else would have.”
“Eddie has a way with words,” Deal said.
“He’s probably right,” Arch said.
“Bullshit,” Deal said.
“No,” Arch said. “It’s true. They like to target guys like me.”
“Target you? Why would real estate developers want to target you?”
Arch shook his head. “It’s not the developers…” He started to say something else, then broke off. “Hold on a minute,” he said, struggling up out of his sling chair. He went behind the counter, pawed through a stack of papers, came up with a folder that he carried back to Deal.
“Here,” he said. He pulled a magazine out of the folder, put it on top, handed the packet to Deal.
The magazine was a copy of
Publishers Weekly
, opened to a feature story with full-color illustrations: “
THE BOOKSTORE WARS
” went the legend, accompanied by some cutesy art depicting a number of mom-and-pop, cottage-styled bookstores sprouting arms and legs and done up as Western settlers. The “little” stores were diving for cover as a multistoried structure the size of an office building and labeled
CHAIN STORE
strode down the street, six-shooters blazing.
“Take it home,” Arch was saying. “If I try to explain it to you, you’ll think I’m paranoid.”
Deal folded the paper away. “Arch, I’m your friend. You tell me somebody’s after your butt, I’m not going to doubt you.” He raised the paper between them, tucked it under his arm. “Now what’s this all about?”
Arch took a breath, sat back down in his chair. “Targeting,” he said. “That’s what we—we little guys, that is—call it when one of the major bookstore chains moves into a town where there’s a thriving, locally owned store already.”
Deal nodded. “We have that in the construction business,” he said. “We call it competition.”
Arch waved his remark away. “Competition’s one thing, this is something else altogether. One of the chains’ll come in, buy up property right across the street from a store like mine, one that’s been doing well.” He paused to pick up his beer and wave it in the direction of the bus station again. “They’ll discount bestsellers forty percent, hardcover fiction twenty or thirty percent, give you a card for ten bucks, you can buy anything in the store for ten percent off for the whole next year. They’ll put in a café, a music bar with live entertainment, stay open until midnight seven days a week.” Arch broke off, took a slug of his beer.
Deal glanced at him, hearing the skepticism rising in his voice. “I don’t see how they could do all that.”
“Oh, they’ll do it, all right,” Arch said. “You can sit right here and watch.”
“But where’s the profit in it?”
“That’s just it,” Arch said. “We’ve found instances where they’re able to squeeze a bigger discount on the books they buy from the major publishers, of course, and our trade association has instituted a lawsuit over that. But the fact of the matter is there isn’t going to be any profit, for them.” He jabbed his finger angrily at the windows.
“Not unless they drive the little guy out, at least, because the market’s not big enough to support the independent and this huge store with all its overhead. That’s their strategy, you see. Look around, find a thriving bookstore, drive a stake into its heart, then take over once the corpse has been buried. You can stop giving away your big discounts then, trim your hours back to whatever’s reasonable, cut your staff to the bone, cut your list of titles to the bone, forget about your bands and all that, and run your big hairy store like a supermarket. Somebody comes in to ask for a copy of the
Paris Review
, the kid at the counter says maybe it’s in the travel section, go have a look!” Arch threw up his hands.
“Everything we’ve tried to do here would be wiped out. What you’ll be left with is books by the pound.”
Deal stared at him. “You’re telling me you’re just going to fold your tent and leave?”
“Of course I’m not,” Arch said. “Even though our friend Eddie Lightner suggested it’d be the smart thing to do, unload the subleases before I’m down to the short hairs.” He gave Deal a disgusted look.
“But I own the main building. I just refinanced last year, took out a new thirty-year mortgage so I could do this section over.” He waved his arm about. “I told Eddie to buzz off. After all these years, the store’s finally coming into its own, now here come these guys for the spoils. Well, forget it. We’re going to fight.”
He sat back in his chair, turned his gaze out the window again. “This isn’t just a business,” he said, his voice softer now. “It’s a way of life.”
The way he said it, Deal thought, he might have been talking to himself as much as to him. Deal nodded, glanced around the spacious room, took in the magazine racks with their offbeat, exotic titles, some of them in Spanish, one in Russian, another in Chinese ideographs. He noted the inverted funnel of the fireplace, remembered the August night they’d christened it, the temperature outside about ninety, the A/C going full blast inside. Not long after, he’d stood in the back of the room with Janice and at least fifty other people who couldn’t get seats, listening to Isaac Bashevis Singer read his nouveau Yiddish folk tales. Frail, pushing ninety at the time, the old man had worked the crowd like a master, then evoked the biggest laugh when he took his seat on the podium and crushed the straw hat he’d left there earlier.
“Dybbuks,” the old man had said, raising the smashed hat. “Devils made me do it!”
Deal had also listened to James Baldwin here, had been as mesmerized as everyone else by the incantatory power of the man’s words. Drawn by Janice or by Arch’s entreaties, and sometimes by his own interest as well, he’d heard poets, fiction writers, artists, reporters, photographers, social commentators, and crime writers, all of them connected in the common cause of books. It was an impressive array, and he wondered if Arch was right. Even the monthly readings by the local students and aspiring artistes had their charm. Would Mega-Media really mean the end of all that? No more Diego Quinteros. Usher in an endless run of famous ex-generals, first lady poets, and retired actresses come to hawk their fitness books? Anything was possible, Deal supposed, and still…
“This kind of thing you’re talking about,” he said to Arch. “It really goes on?”
“It’s no picnic for the little guy,” Arch said. “Not anymore. Read the articles, you’ll see for yourself.”
Deal nodded, but something else had occurred to him. “Look,” he said. “Maybe it’ll be good for business, like, one antique store moves in beside another, it makes for more traffic, helps them both out.”
Arch fixed him with a disbelieving stare. “Deal,” he said. “This is a serious problem. Who’s going to come into my store for a book they can buy for eight bucks less just across the street?”
It stopped Deal, and he sat staring at Arch for a moment. “Me,” he said finally.
Arch made a sound that might have been a laugh, but it was hard to tell. “I wish everybody were as stubborn as you. I wouldn’t have to worry about these guys.”
Deal glanced around. “Like you say, you offer personalized service. People like that. And there’s the rare books. I don’t expect Mega-Media is going to get into those, are they?”
Arch sighed. “The rare books are wonderful, but they can’t support the whole store.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“I know you are,” Arch said. He mustered a smile then and rose, tossing his empty beer into the trash. “Hey, we’ve spent enough time wallowing. We’ve got a new assistant manager, we’ve got that fireplace, we’ve got a community here. We’re not going anyplace.”
He gestured toward his office in the back. “Now, I’ve got some paperwork to do. Maybe I can get out of here in time for the second half.”
Deal put his own half-finished beer on the table, nodded. “You’re welcome to come by the fourplex,” he said as he stood. “I suppose I ought to tune in, see what all the fuss is about.”
“It might be good for you,” Arch said. “I’ll see when I can get loose.”
“And if there’s anything I can do about all this…” Deal trailed off, nodding out the windows toward the abandoned bus station.
“I know,” Arch said, moving toward the front now. “But don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen overnight. They could always change their minds, go after some poor bastard in another city. Besides,” he added, “I might have a trick or two up my sleeve. Something for Mega-Media to think about, anyway.”
Deal studied him for a moment, waiting for more, but Arch seemed to have finished what he had to say.
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” Deal said. “For all of us.”
They were at the front door now, and Arch nodded as he turned the key to let Deal out. His smile was genuine this time. “‘For poetry makes nothing happen,’” he said. “‘It survives / in the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper…it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.’”
“Corso?” Deal asked.
“Auden,” Arch said.
“Right,” Deal said. He was outside now, turned in the cool evening air toward his friend. “What’s it mean?”
“It means you don’t get involved with books if you want to make a lot of money,” Arch said. And then he closed the door.
His bookkeeper had been on vacation for the week, and it took a good hour for Arch just to sort the mail that had accumulated in her absence. He’d spent the first fifteen minutes after Deal had gone wondering whether he should call Eddie Lightner, see if what the man had suggested to him yesterday were really true, but in the end, he’d decided against it. How could you trust a guy like that? Sentence the House of Books to heinous assault one month, show up a few weeks later with dirt for sale on Mega-Media. He should have talked to Deal about Lightner’s claims, he thought. Deal was in construction, he might have known what to make of it, how to check out the value of Lightner’s information. But it all seemed too sleazy, too pathetic, admitting he’d even think about turning to Eddie Lightner for help of any kind.
Maybe tomorrow, Arch thought. A good night’s sleep, maybe he’d go see Deal after all. Deal would understand, he had a practical mind. If they could use Eddie Lightner, then use him. But first find out if Lightner was simply peddling another come-on.
Bury yourself in minutiae meantime, Arch
, he told himself. “I spent the entire day at the desk / and it nearly pulled me down like all the rest…” Lines from Machado rattling through his head. Furiously, he tossed circulars, magazines, and assorted junk mail into the trash can, and then, when that had filled, began what had become a mountainous pile on the floor beside him. Bills went into a sizable stack of their own on the left side of his desk. And there was a much smaller pile of personal correspondence on the right side of his desk, most of which would turn out to be drum-beating hype for new books from their publishers, along with an occasional letter from an author, or note of complaint or thanks from a customer. In front of him, in a spot all its own, sat the thick white envelope, addressed to him in a florid hand and bearing the return address of his sister in Nebraska.
By the look of it, he could assume what was in that envelope as well: another wad of the tract material she was fond of sending along to him, more of the Reverend James Ray Willis’s press releases, full of glad tidings and exhortations to join the multitudes who had already seen the light.
Sara was his older sibling, three years his senior. She’d fussed over and protected him as much as his own mother had, and, while they were close enough in age for that relationship to endure, there had always been sufficient distance to insulate them from the petty squabbles and rivalries that might have developed otherwise.
He had idolized her in his early years, admired and respected her later on—when she went off to college in New Orleans and later landed an impressive-sounding job with a publisher of inspirational books in Chicago. Though her visits home had dwindled over the years, they had maintained an earnest correspondence that flowed equally in both directions, at least until the last few years, when she had left her job in Chicago for a position as executive assistant to James Ray Willis, one of the few televangelists who had not been sullied in the era of the Jim and Tammy scandals.
Though Arch still loved his sister dearly, it had become increasingly difficult for him to conceive of a member of his own family, certified agnostics all, working for a self-righteous egotist like Willis, who had seemed to gloat as his fornicating peers were picked off one by one. Nowadays, Willis seemed to cut less of a public figure, but Arch suspected that was because the man didn’t have to. With his high-profile competitors out of the picture, tithes by mail to the Willis compound had probably grown astronomically. Willis likely had to spend most of his time supervising his investment portfolio, his real estate holdings, and his growing business empire, lucky to carve out time for a Sunday sermon.
Arch’s sister was fond of sending him copies of press releases from the Willis mill, announcing this and that new enterprise: the construction of a ten-thousand-seat “tele-chapel” designed by Arquitectonica; the development of the largest privately owned broadcast and production center in the U.S., on a sprawling site just outside Omaha; a series of planned Christian-living communities, actual little cities to be constructed on various sites around the Midwest; and on and on. She meant it as testimony to the vitality of her boss’s vision, Arch knew, but each fresh packet of material only sent him into a deeper funk concerning his sister.
Cursed with the combination of a certain sweet but prim countenance and a growing career interest that was daunting to many less confident men, she had passed through a series of quiet and unsatisfying relationships into middle age, never coming close to marriage, or so it had seemed to Arch. Now, he was convinced, she had sublimated whatever earthly passions she might have still possessed into a near-obsession for Willis. How else to account for the breathless quality of her letters: “The kindest, most generous, most gifted and visionary person I have ever known…,” a phrase he could still see burning on a not-so-long-ago page.
In reply, Arch had, by his own lights, lost it. He’d run off a copy of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” highlighted selected passages in yellow marker, had sent it off Express Mail without a covering letter. There’d been no reply from Sara.
Now he stared doubtfully at the fat letter, wondering what exercise of Christian charity it had taken for his sister to respond. How had she finally overcome his invitation to imagine the Reverend Willis in Yeats’s context: “…what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Still, curiosity gnawed at him. He could tear open the letter, pitch the Willis crap without even looking at it, force himself into his sister’s letter far enough to where he’d begin to sound her soft voice in his head, forgive her for whatever claptrap Willis was responsible for seducing her into. Soon enough, she’d leave off with that part of things, say she forgave him, and get into how she was doing, what she’d been reading of “worldly” literature, he could love her once again. That’s how it usually worked with her letters, after all.
He took another glance at the formidable stack of bills, and nodded. No contest. Commerce would just have to wait. He flipped open his Swiss Army knife, slit open the fat envelope with a blade he knew he’d ruined cutting paper, then watched a typewritten sheet flutter out onto the floor. Strange, he thought, bending to retrieve it. His sister almost always wrote her letters in longhand, just another of the old-fashioned traits that endeared her to him. He tossed the fat part of the packet aside and turned to the letter.
“
Dear Dylan
,” he read, wincing at the name he’d managed to drive from everyone’s usage but hers. “
I am sure that you suppose I have not written sooner out of spite, though that is not the case at all. I know you don’t approve of my work, nor of my employer, and, though, you’ve never come right out and said so—don’t worry, little brother, I read you like one of your beloved books—you think I’ve squandered my life. The poem you sent along speaks eloquently in that regard. The fact of the matter is, your letter (not really a letter, though, was it?) arrived at a time of some crisis for me—and don’t worry, I am not ill, though I am confused, perhaps somewhat sick of heart. I might have contacted you sooner, but to tell the truth, I am not sure that the interpretation I find myself wanting to place on the materials I have enclosed is the proper one. But I have kept my own counsel long enough and know that I can trust you to read these documents and tell me if what I sense is of true concern. I love you, and I know, despite the miles and the many barriers that have seemed to distance us over the years, that you care for me just as dearly. I will be eager to hear from you. Your devoted Sara
.”
Arch put the letter back on his desk, closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair with a sigh. Just what he needed. His sister suffering some kind of midlife spiritual crisis and turning to him for help. Worse yet, she must have seen some intention to undermine her faith in his sending her that poem, but his target had been that oaf Willis, not her whole way of life. God knows he didn’t have any corner on the way to enlightenment. What was he supposed to say now? Great. You finally came to your senses. Let’s nuke your whole past and start all over again? He’d be plenty happy if she just shitcanned the Reverend James Ray and went back to the publishers of
Inspirational Thoughts for Moderns
.
He shook his head and opened his eyes, glancing around for what he’d done with the fat part of the packet. He was curious, at least, trying to imagine what she’d run across that could have her doubting Brother J.R. and the promise of joy and Christian zoning covenants all of a sudden. Tibetan mysticism? Secrets of the Rosicrucians? Tammy Faye’s letters to a prisoner?
He swiveled about in his chair, spotted the packet on top of the pile on the floor, bent to pick it up. He ripped off the cover, unfolded the wad of papers inside. As he had anticipated earlier, there was a glossy brochure from Willis’s PR mill atop the stack, this one with a headline about a Christian cable service soon to be up and running. The God Squad cometh via satellite. Arch scanned a couple of more paragraphs, pitched the flyer over his shoulder.
The second sheet was a Xerox of some crude spreadsheet, a series of inked or penciled figures with categories that didn’t make sense to him. This he stared at for a moment, until he was sure that it wasn’t his sister’s writing, then put aside. Beneath that was a typewritten letter to the Reverend Willis in what he thought might be German, and he put that aside as well. It was the fourth piece that caught his attention. he scanned the memo once, then a second time, to be sure he had not misconstrued. He flipped quickly through the rest of the papers, feeling a sense of sadness and despair descending upon him as he went.
Sara
, he found himself thinking.
Oh, dear Sara. No wonder you feel those foundations quaking
.
He put the papers carefully aside, reached quickly for the phone. Though they hadn’t talked since Thanksgiving, and he kept almost no phone numbers in his head, he dialed hers without hesitation. There was a maddening pause until finally the call went through, then another frustrating period as the rings echoed futilely in his ear. He had almost returned the receiver to the hook when he heard the connection make and what he took for the sound of a voice on the other end.
“Sara?” he called, snatching the phone back. “Is that you, Sara?”
There was a hissing silence on the other end.
“Sara,” he repeated, trying to keep his voice even. “It’s Arch. In Miami.”
“She’s not here,” he heard a male voice say suddenly, and it startled him so that it took him a moment to answer.
“Who is this?” he managed, finally. When there was no response, he tried again. “Listen. This is her brother, in Miami. Where is Sara?”
There was another pause, and then the voice came again: “She’s in church,” the man said. And then the connection broke.