Ghostheart (7 page)

Annie turned over and buried her face in the pillow. It couldn’t have been later than five a.m. The room was chilled, and she could see her own breath in the cold air. She shuddered, buried herself deeper into the mattress, and though she fought with wakefulness it had arrived with best intent, and after ten or fifteen minutes she rose and switched on the thermostat.

She pulled on a sweatshirt and some pants, busied herself making coffee in the kitchen, and when she sat down at the table, her hands clasped around the mug, she closed her eyes for a moment and wondered what had caused such dark aspects to fill her mind. She thought of the manuscript Forrester had brought, and instinctively glanced towards where it lay on the kitchen counter. Images came back, and with those images a sense of panic and apprehension.

She could hear Sullivan’s voice in her head.

‘Body bags all lined up waiting for the choppers to come down. Crew of guys collecting the dead. Killed In Action Travel Bureau we called ’em … and they used to douse those bags with Old Spice of all things. Could feel the decay in your throat … the stench of warfare, and above and beyond all of it the overpowering smell of Old Spice … made you sick like a dog Annie, sick like a dog.’

She thought of Daniel Rosen, a man no different from those Sullivan had fought alongside in Southeast Asia. Sergeant Daniel Rosen who witnessed the liberation of Dachau and brought a child back to America as if in atonement for the sins of others. And what had happened to the child? What was it he’d become that his foster mother would have been so unwilling to recognize? And who was writing of these things, and who was it they had written them for?

She thought of Forrester, and for a second wondered if there was any possibility in the world …

Why had he come? What did he want? Why did he want her to read these things? What, if anything, could it have to do with her father?

Annie shook her head and rose from the kitchen table. She walked barefoot to the bathroom, stripped her clothes off and stood for some minutes beneath the pounding heat of the shower. The feeling didn’t leave for some time. The feeling that something ugly had gotten inside her and was damned if it would leave without a fight … but it did leave, eventually, and as she dried herself and dressed again she believed the tension of the nightmare, the thoughts that had crowded her mind afterwards, were passing. She was relieved. Her life was simple, too simple perhaps, but sufficiently full to permit no room for the horrors of which she’d read. Perhaps she would tell Forrester that she wanted no part of his club, that it had been good to meet him, that she’d been happy to receive the letter he had given her, but of his manuscript, of the things it contained, she wanted no part. All she wanted to know was what he remembered of her father. That was important, perhaps
the most important thing in the world, but everything else that he carried with him he could leave beyond the door.

Seemingly resolute in her decision, she made breakfast, and then she listened to Sinatra, and by the time the sun finally peeled away the shadows within her apartment she felt at least somewhat settled.

She checked on Sullivan before she left for the store, found him sleeping the sleep of a dead man on his couch, and leaning forward she touched his salt-and-pepper hair. She could smell the alcohol even now, wondered how a man could drink such a quantity and not die of liver failure. She smiled, closed his door behind her, and made her way downstairs to walk the same fifteen minutes to The Reader’s Rest on Lincoln by West 107th.

John Damianka brought her a sandwich a little after twelve, told her that his first lecture that day wasn’t until quarter after one.

‘Be a miracle if more than a dozen show up,’ he said, and she could hear the bitterness in his voice.

‘How you doing on the girlfriend front?’ Annie asked.

‘Had a date last Tuesday,’ John said. He smiled broadly, a child at show-and-tell who brought the best thing going. A
real
salamander. An
honest-to-God-hand-on-heart
rock from the moon.

‘It went well then?’

‘Sure did,’ John said. ‘Took her to that Italian place on Park near the Drake Swissôtel.’

‘And what’s her name?’ Annie asked as she leaned across the counter.

‘Elizabeth … Elizabeth Farbolin.’

‘What does she do?’

John shook his head. ‘Something at the International Center of Photography, research or something.’

‘John, I told you … you have to know everything it’s possible to know without taking away all the mystery. You
have to pay attention. You want to have someone interested in you then you just ask them questions about themselves and shut the hell up.’

John shrugged. ‘I know, I know Annie, but –’

Annie shook her head. ‘But nothing John. I’ll tell you the most interesting guy I ever went out with let me talk about myself for the best part of two hours, and I came away from the date thinking he was the most fascinating person I’d ever met.’

John looked down at his shoes, a little sheepish.

‘So when d’you see her again?’

‘Week Monday … we’re gonna go see something on Broadway.’

Annie reached over the counter and punched John’s shoulder. ‘That’s my man. You listen to her now … ask half a dozen questions and let her do all the talking and she won’t be able to leave you alone.’

John nodded, reached for his ham and swiss on whole, pushed the bag containing Annie’s sub towards her and talked a little about a weekend football game he was planning on attending.

He left fifteen minutes later, told her he was lecturing nineteenth-century drama, focusing on Goethe’s
Faust
and its influence on twentieth-century European television melodramas.

Annie frowned, smiled, and said, ‘Knock ’em dead John, you go knock ’em dead.’

He came in as she was halfway through the sub, mayonnaise on her cheek, her hands sticky with salad oil.

He came slowly through the door, tentatively almost, and when he paused in the shaft of light that flooded in through the dusty front window she believed for a moment it was Forrester. He turned then, turned and looked right at her, and though he did not smile, and though his gaze was direct and unflinching, there was nothing menacing or disquieting about his silence.

He walked towards her then, between the waist-high stacks
of battered books, around the central shelves that reached for the ceiling and could never have released their uppermost treasures without the assistance of a stepladder. He seemed lost, as if he’d wandered into The Reader’s Rest by mistake, and even now would open his mouth to ask her for directions, for help with something he was trying to find.

But he didn’t. He merely stopped and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Hi,’ Annie replied.

‘So many books,’ he said.

Annie shrugged. ‘We’re a bookstore.’

He looked at her for a second, tilted his head, and then he reached with his hand and touched his cheek with his finger.

‘Mayonnaise,’ he said.

Annie frowned.

‘On your face … here.’

Annie smiled, a little awkward. ‘Oh,’ she said, and reaching for the serviette she touched the smear of mayonnaise away and then set her sub aside. She wiped her greasy fingers on the serviette and dropped it in the trash can beneath the counter.

The man looked slowly around the store, and then turned once again to Annie. ‘This is alphabetized, right?’

Annie shook her head. ‘No, not really.’

He frowned. ‘Not really?’

She laughed, a gentle echoey sound in the emptiness. ‘Some of it sort of hangs together around the same sort of bit of the alphabet, and some of it doesn’t.’

‘So how d’you find anything?’

She shrugged. ‘You wander, you look, you take your time … if you’re really stuck you ask me, I look in the inventory, and if we have it then we try and find it together, or I find it for you and you come back tomorrow.’

‘And this system works?’ he asked.

‘Well enough,’ she replied. ‘This is a bookstore for people who just love reading books, people who don’t really have a thing for a particular author or genre. We have regulars, quite a few of them, and each fortnight a new crate comes in and I
stack them by the front door. They come in and go through the new stuff before I put it somewhere else.’

‘Well, if it works it works,’ the man said.

Annie smiled. She looked at the man more closely. She placed him at thirty-five, thirty-six perhaps. He was five-ten or eleven, reasonably well built, his hair a sandy color, his eyes gray-blue. He was dressed casually, a pair of jeans, a worn-out suede jacket over an open-necked blue shirt. His clothes were expensive nevertheless, and he wore them as if they had been cut exclusively for him.

‘You after something in particular?’ Annie asked.

He smiled. ‘Something to read.’

Annie nodded. ‘Sure, something to read. Well, something to read we can do.’

She waited for him to say something, but he stood there in silence, still surveying the semi-organized chaos around him.

‘So what do you like to read?’ she prompted. ‘And don’t say books, okay?’

The man laughed, and there was something meaningful in that sound. The sound of a man who had learned to laugh because he had to, because he’d realized it was therapeutic.

‘Pretty much anything,’ he said, ‘except for sci-fi … don’t get on fire for sci-fi.’

‘What was the last thing you read?’ Annie asked.

‘I read
The Weight Of Water
by Anita Shreve on the plane,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed that.’

‘Plane from where?’

‘Northwest Territories in Canada.’

The man seemed to relax a little. He put his hands in his coat pockets and took a step towards the counter.

‘That’s where you’re from?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I’m from here … originally I’m from here. Moved into this neighborhood a month or so ago but I’ve been away working since.’

Annie resisted the impulse to ask the man what he did. She
believed she had a right to ask him – an odd thought, but her thought all the same. She was sharing her time with this man, and more than likely he would be one of those that browsed and never bought, and thus she felt she should at least come away from this moment knowing something. She didn’t ask him about his work however, and instead asked him where he’d moved from.

‘East Village,’ he said. ‘Born in East Village. Work has taken me every place I can think of, but this has always been home.’

‘And you’re out surveying your new neighborhood?’

The man smiled, nodded. ‘Yes, surveying my new neighborhood,’ he replied, and then once again he took a step forward and extended his hand. ‘David,’ he said, ‘David Quinn.’

Annie instinctively wiped her hand on her pants before extending it in return. ‘Annie O’Neill,’ she said.

‘And this is your store?’

She nodded. ‘Was my father’s … now it’s mine.’

David Quinn took a few moments to look up and around the racks and shelves of books once again, and then said, ‘Hell of a place Annie O’Neill … hell of a place.’

He stayed close on an hour. He bought three books.
Provinces Of Night
by William Gay,
A Confederacy Of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole and
Cathedral
by Raymond Carver. The total was thirteen dollars; he gave Annie a twenty and told her to keep the change.

‘You know something?’ he said as he started towards the door.

Annie looked up.

‘Apparently the average book passes through twenty pairs of hands in its life.’

Annie shook her head. ‘I didn’t know that.’

David Quinn held up the bag with his three books inside. ‘Sixty lives will connect with what’s in this bag … makes you think huh?’

And with that he smiled, nodded, and then turned and left the store.

Annie came from behind the counter, crossed between the stacks of hardbacks and reached the window just as Quinn disappeared at the junction.

She shook her head and sighed. She thought of every person who’d ever wandered into The Reader’s Rest over the years, every person who’d browsed, who’d asked for help, who’d perhaps been looking for nothing more than someone with whom to share a few moments of their life before they moved on. And she’d let them move on, every single one of them, and had never once considered that there might have been something in those moments for her. She had created her own loneliness, and but for Sullivan she could go from one week to the next without ever sharing anything but the time of day or the cost of a second-hand paperback with a real honest-to-God human being.

But why? she asked herself as she turned from the window and made her way out back to prepare coffee. What am I afraid of? Of gaining something only to see it slipping away? But then isn’t it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

She smiled at her own clichéd thoughts and busied herself with the percolator.

She closed a little before five. After David Quinn there had been two other customers – one who bought a dog-eared and battered copy of
Being There
by Jerzy Kosinski, the other who asked if she had any early edition Washington Irving. She did not.

She walked quickly, the wind was cold, and she was home by quarter after five. Jack was out, more than likely playing chess with a couple of guys from his bar, and once inside her apartment she made a salad, doused some cold chicken in vinaigrette, and sat in the kitchen with a glass of white wine and Frank singing from the front room. ‘Chicago, Chicago …’

She smiled. She thought of her father, she thought of
Forrester, and once again she sensed that fleeting moment of identification when she thought of them together. She shook her head. It could not be … surely it could not be. She shrugged such a consideration aside, and she remembered the events of the afternoon, the moments after David Quinn had left.

I will meet with Robert Franklin Forrester on Monday, she thought. Jack can come down there to protect me
…

She stopped mid-flight.

Protect me from what? An old man in a worn-out topcoat who wants to ease his own loneliness by reading stories and bringing letters written by my father?