The Bookstore (19 page)

I go down into the subway, and the train does not come. From the fretful aspect of most of the people already on the platform, I gather there hasn’t been one for a while. I try to calm down. I hate to be late.

The rain falls through the grating onto the track, making it glisten. I like that about the New York subway, that it is so close to the surface. In London, you are plunged down into the bowels of the earth, but here, you can tell what the weather is like outside. I hope they reinforce the ground where the tunnels are. It would be scary to think we are all walking about on a pastry crust.

After ten more minutes, the train arrives. It takes me to 79th and I join the press of soggy people on the subway stairs, then run full tilt to work. I burst into the bookshop full of apologies and explanations and raindrops, and they all peter out as I look around. The two lamps on the walls that nobody ever remembers to turn on are lit. There are no customers. It is all tidy. George is not here. Luke is sitting on the chair with his eyes closed, his iPod earphones in his ears. He hasn’t heard me. I can hear the scratchy banjo music blaring out of the earbuds. Anyone could reach the till and rob the place.

I lean over to the till and press the “subtotal” button to see. The drawer whooshes open. I look back at Luke, who is now regarding me with steady brown eyes. He tugs the earphones out so they are around his neck.

“I was just seeing if I could rob you without your noticing,” I say.

Luke nods. “That’s what most thieves say, right before I beat the crap out of them.”

“I am sorry to be late. My lectures ran on.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says.

I sit down heavily. Luke is now fiddling with the iPod. Without looking up, he says, “Go take your coat off, dry off, then you can come back and do some work.”

But now that I’ve made it to work, a new urgent need takes over. I am so hungry I can hardly function. I am hallucinating hamburgers.

“Do you mind if I just go quickly to Zabar’s before they close? I—I haven’t eaten all day. I had seminars and meetings and lectures all day and I didn’t—”

“Yeah, go.”

When I come back, I sort myself out properly, then sit down and arrange my dinner on the counter. I have bought a piece of poached salmon with dill, and a rocket salad, a bagel, a slice of chocolate cake, and some water. Luke looks impassively at all this. I tuck in.

“So, Columbia and Zabar’s. You have expensive taste.”

I have just tasted the poached salmon. It is outstanding. I smile in delight at him because it tastes so good. He looks discomfited.

“I don’t shop at Zabar’s normally,” I say. “It’s just that it was close and it was raining and I was hungry.”

I don’t bother explaining again about Columbia and the scholarship. When someone has decided to resent you for your privilege, it takes a lot of work to shift their perceptions, and I am tired.

I eat some more. I waggle a bit of salmon at him and ask him if he wants to try it. He shakes his head quickly, looking repelled.

When I have eaten everything and tidied it all away, I go upstairs. I am going to spend the night doing data entry, uploading books onto the Internet. It will keep me from arousing the ire of Luke.

I spend a soothing couple of hours on the mezzanine, typing in authors, titles, ISBNs, keywords, condition—condition is my special favorite. I am learning book lore from George, and now I can do basic condition quite well. The words are becoming familiar and beloved, in the way that the shipping forecast is for my father. Very good in fine. Fine in very good. A bright copy. A crisp copy. A fair copy. A small quarto in three-quarters calf. Rubbing to spine. Lightly sunned. Slightly foxed. Signed on front free endpaper. Top edge gilt. All edges gilt.

I work so hard and so silently through the rainy evening that my lateness or spoiledness, or whatever it is that bothers Luke about me, seems to lose its power. By ten thirty, he is a lot more mellow. He comes up the stairs with some books and puts them away at the back. When he comes past me again, he pauses and says, “Quiet night.”

I agree. There is a sudden run of customers for about half an hour, and then one customer all the rest of the night, the man who comes to look for dictionaries. He comes in his mackintosh, stashes his umbrella in a plastic bag, looks damply at the dictionaries for a while, buys a biography of Jimmy Durante, and goes away again.

“I burned you a CD.”

I am surprised. He shrugs, looks the other way, says it’s no big deal, that someone ought to teach me something about music before it is too late, that this will make me see where the big stars got things from, that he is thinking of getting a beer, that he hopes the Yankees will win Saturday.

“Put it on!” I say.

He looks reluctant. I say it again. He goes downstairs and puts the CD on the player.

As the first caterwauls sound, he says, “I’m gonna get some beers. Can I get you anything?”

“Yes. Can I have dandelion and burdock, please, or ginger beer, or—something that looks a bit like a beer but isn’t?”

“Dandelion and burdock? There’s a drink made from dandelions?”

“Yes,” I say innocently. “Mashed-up dandelions, that have to be picked on a full moon. No idea what a burdock is. But the drink is delicious.”

“It might be, but the Koreans won’t have it. I’ll bring you a root beer if they have no ginger. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

I come down the stairs and sit in the main chair while he’s gone. The second song is another plaintive one, like the ones he played me the other night. I am not sure how we’re going to get to Lady Gaga from these sad old men on porches in the Deep South. But as it did the other night, the music resonates with me, and I am again close to tears by the time Luke comes back.

“That’s my chair,” he says. The tears recede. The next song is “You’ve Got a Friend.”

“Oh, I know this one!” I say. I don’t see that it has anything in common with the others. I say so. To be specific, I say, “This isn’t like all those banjoey fiddley things you keep playing.”

Luke raises his eyebrows fractionally, but says nothing.

We open the beers—mine is bitingly strong ginger—and we sit in silence and listen.

I can’t help myself. I say, “But really. Isn’t this just straightforward
American stuff? Like Frank Sinatra and—and Perry Como?”

I am briefly proud of myself over Perry Como. I pull him out like a rabbit from a hat. But maybe I should have said Elvis or the Everly Brothers.

There is no reaction from Luke. He doesn’t change his position, he doesn’t look at me, he doesn’t say anything. Then, after a minute or two, he stands up. He is bounded by the bookshelves and the counter; the only way out is by passing in front of my seat. I get up, and he goes past me and upstairs without a word.

I think he has gone up there to have a good sulk because I have hurt his feelings about the song. But he comes down again immediately, holding a guitar. I have to get up again. All in total silence.

He turns the CD music off, sits down with the guitar, and twiddles the knobs to get it tuned. Is it likely to have become untuned since he last played it?

He is wearing a red checked shirt, jeans, and a denim jacket. He has stubble on his face. His jaw is very American and angular, like the Prometheus statue at the Rockefeller Plaza ice rink. Not quite so golden, though. His hair is dark. It needs a bit of a cut. Sometimes he wears a bandana, but not today. I never really look at Luke, because I worry that he would see me looking. He is intent on tuning the guitar, so he doesn’t know he is under scrutiny. He looks nice.

“It’s really kind of you to make—”

He shakes his head, in a fine amalgam of “it was nothing” and “shut up.”

Without taking his eyes from the neck of the guitar, he says, “It isn’t a straightforward song. It just
sounds
like it is.”

He is strumming a little now.

“You probably think James Taylor wrote this song,” he says. He is still overestimating my musical capacities. “But it was Carole King. She used to work in the Brill Building—just down the road here. Broadway and 49th. Carole King played it on the piano. James Taylor put the twang into it by playing it on the guitar.

“Everybody thinks it’s a modern American folk song, but it isn’t, it’s a New York song. It’s taking elements from the things I played you already, from Mississippi, Tennessee . . . it’s got bluegrass in it for sure . . . but it’s like New York—it takes all those things and makes something new.”

I feel like a nature photographer who has managed to get very close to a mountain gorilla. I am worried that if I say something encouraging or pretend I know what he means, he will notice I am a human and bolt. I have to crouch there, Attenborough-like, and be as inconspicuous and nonirritating as possible.

He is plucking the strings now, seemingly at random, and suddenly the plucking resolves itself into something that promises beauty. A little late, I realize it is the opening bars of “You’ve Got a Friend.”

“See, that was all the minor stuff at the beginning—
‘
nothing is going right’
—
all minor, everything mournful and miserable, and then it builds up—‘even the darkest night’
—
and then you fall into the chorus with a major seventh—‘You just call . . . ’—and then you build, you build to the climax
—
‘I’ll be there’
—
and then the suspension, and the opening riff again—it’s just beautiful—and just when you think it’s going to end he introduces the bridge, ‘I’ll be there / Hey ain’t it good to know that you’ve got a friend . . . ,’ and see, he pedals with a G on the bottom, but he plays an F, then a C over it—it’s great—you get chords just thrown in that hadn’t been there before . . . and the chorus . . . Carole King did it straight, but James Taylor used Joni Mitchell and stacked up those fourths, just great harmony . . . it makes it lonesome even though you feel better when you’re in it—”

“Will you play it?” I almost whisper. “The whole song?”

He does. He plays those opening bars again, and sings the song, and his voice has yearning in it like that old man’s in the Deep South had the other night.

His hands are brown, so different from Mitchell’s. His fingers press hard on the strings and go white where he presses, and his fingernails are as big as dimes. He’s right about the lonesomeness in
the chorus. Lonesome, not lonely, because it has a whiff of mouth organs and mint juleps about it. It has the same magic a violin sometimes has, of being lost, and longing, and then, even when you think there is a resolution, of there still being heartache in it.

When he finishes, my eyes are full of tears, and I get up and walk to the back of the shop so he won’t see. I am sure Luke would interpret the tears as sentimentality. He is fiddling about with the strings, playing a chirpy little thing. I think he is playing it to get us back to somewhere ordinary. I am glad.

“Come back and finish your beer,” he calls out after a minute or two. “There’s nothing going on tonight. You’ve done enough work.”

I come back.

“That was lovely,” I say. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, well, you need someone to teach you something,” he says. He turns and looks out of the window. “It’s one hell of a night.”

The rain is still crashing down in the dark. It is nearly midnight.

I love it most in the rain, I think, in the night rain when it rains and rains and rains like this, and Broadway glistens, and the Zabar’s sign glows, and the wet street reflects all the headlights and the traffic lights and there is the canary yellow of the cabs against the black, and people running by, a short burst of speed to get somewhere sparkling and warm again. On these winter nights we are still open until midnight, so a Monday night in the rain in January, like this, this is a good night. When it rains here it’s torrential, drenching and incessant, and I want to dance outside in it and turn my face up into it.

But I don’t, of course. We sit without speaking, and listen to the music, looking out from our glowing little jewel of a shop onto the rainy night of New York.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
get up very early. Five forty-five
A.M
. Today I have my twelve-week scan, the “dating scan.” After this, I get an official due date, although I know it is going to be 266 days from the no-condom day. That would make the baby due on July 20.