The Bookstore (11 page)

“Really? Just one?”

“No, I can’t. They have that picture of me on the side, with a black line through it. I’m not allowed.”

“Okay. I won’t be long.”

I look at my watch. It is ten o’clock.

“Is it all right for me to be—on my own?”

Luke shrugs. “I’ll be gone two seconds. What do you think will happen?”

“A . . . a huge sale?” I don’t tell Luke I am nervous. When I first took a cab in New York, I thought my chances of survival were around fifty-fifty. The cab driver was sure to drive me to a deserted parking lot, à la every American movie ever, and murder me after taking all my money. Then he would put my body in the trunk of the taxi, drive to the East River, and tip me in. As it happened, the actual driver of my first cab was a Chinese guy, wearing a sky-blue shirt and a pink tie. He drove me in polite silence across the park at 66th Street, charged me seven dollars, and told me to have a nice day.

Luke is half out of the door. “If you get a huge sale at ten o’clock on a Monday night in November in the rain, sweet-talk him for the three point two minutes it will take me to cross the street, buy a beer, and cross back again.”

I subside back to the transport section. A minute or so later, I hear the door open, and a voice calls out, “Luke? George?”

My heart sinks. The voice is deep, rough. I stand up again, at the top of the stairs, and look to see who is speaking. It is one of the men that the bookshop men call street guys, and Mitchell called bums. I like “street guys” better. He is enormous, about six two and not thin. I don’t really see how you can be homeless and so well endowed with flesh. As I come down the stairs, I realize that he isn’t fat at all—he is just swathed in layer after layer, as if to protect him from a New York winter, although November is only just beginning. There is a powerful smell of sweat, and something sweeter. The sweeter smell is scary; it reminds me of something, but the context is wrong.

“Can I help you?” I say. My voice sounds frightened. I am angry at its treachery. But really, why would he not pull a gun on me and make me empty the till? I am not sure I can remember how to open the till. If it happens, maybe I can hand him the entire cash register.

“George around?”

“No, George isn’t in tonight.”

“Where’s Luke?”

“He’ll be back soon—he’s just gone out for a minute.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Esme, Esme Garland. It’s my first night.”

“Hi, Esme. I’m Don’t Matter.”

He is holding out his hand to me. Instead of instantly grasping it, I look at it. It has bumps on it in odd places. They might be warts, or they might be buboes. And I am pregnant.

I grasp his hand and shake it firmly. His hand is big, and rough as a gardening glove. “Hello, Don’t Matter.”

“You can call me DeeMo.”

“Right. So Don’t Matter is your more formal name.”

He grins. “Yeah. That’s my Sunday name.” I am surprised that he gets this and feel instantly ashamed.

He is holding a big black plastic bin liner with books in it, which he starts to unload onto the table. They are all smeared with tomato sauce. I watch as the pile gets bigger and tomato sauce dribbles onto the counter.

“Ah—DeeMo?”

“Uh-huh.”

“These books—they’re covered in—”

“Oh yeah, the ketchup. I know. But you can wipe that off.”

It seems reasonable to me. We have paper towels.

Luke comes back into the shop with two beers. He takes in DeeMo, the ketchup books, and me in one quick glance, and says, “DeeMo. What the
fuck
do you think you’re doing?”

“You don’t like the ketchup. I get it. I get it. I like your new assistant, Luke.”

“Yeah, she’s swell.”

I don’t know if “swell” is yet another barb, but I do know that DeeMo is good-naturedly shoving his tomatoey books back in the bin liner. When he has gone, I sit back in the chair.

“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

U
p 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.”