The Bookstore (2 page)

There is the smell, too, of course—the reassuring smell of paper, new paper, soft old paper, recalling each person to the first time they really did press their nose into a book. But what I like best is the company—I like the people who work there, and the customers who come in at night to hang around and chat. George works there a lot, and less often, a guy about my age called David. On Sundays the person in charge is a woman called Mary; she brings her dog with her, Bridget, a huge German shepherd. I would have thought that the presence of a large Alsatian simply could not encourage custom, but the contrary seems to be true. People rush in to see Bridget, and sometimes buy a book by accident. In the evenings there is a night manager called Luke who often wears a bandana. He is broad of shoulder and taciturn in aspect—he looks to be around thirty. When Luke is at the front counter at night, without George there, he sometimes has a guitar with him, and sits playing bits of tunes to himself. He nods in acknowledgment whenever I come in, but I can never think of anything much to say to him. I like to crouch down on the cheap brown carpet and browse the art section when Luke is learning some tune or other. He can’t see me because of the Southeast Asia section, but I can hear him.

Now, I push open the door. On an ordinary day, coming in from the glare of sunlit Broadway, you will be able to see nothing at all, and you will stand there blinking, trying to adjust to the gloom. And gradually, you will notice that two eyes are fixed on you, and that these eyes, though apparently penetrating, belong to a stuffed owl that is nailed to a tree branch that juts out from a wall of books.

The store is narrow, about ten feet across, with a central staircase leading to a mezzanine. There are books on both sides of the stairway, in ever more precarious piles, and it is a hardy customer who will pick her way carefully up the stairs to the dusty stacks beyond. Downstairs is a tumble of books that I sometimes surreptitiously straighten. There are sections labeled with old notices, but they flow into each other in an unstoppable tide, so that history
is compromised by mythology leaking into it, mystery books get mixed up with religion, and the feminist section is continually outraged by the steady dribble of erotica from the shelves above. When books do manage to make it to shelves, instead of being in piles near their sections, they are shelved double deep, and the attempts at alphabetization are sometimes noticeable, with “A”s and “Z”s serving as bookends to the jumble in the center.

I would like to know how long the store has been here; it looks as if it predates most other stores on the Upper West Side. It always looks as if it has descended from its peak to a sort of comfortable scruffiness, as Venice does, and, as with Venice, it might be that there never was an immaculate peak, where gold was all burnished and wood did not rot, nor paint peel. The store has probably had this cockeyed, lovably crooked look since it first opened its little door onto Broadway.

This morning, George is already there, and so is Luke. George, tall and stooping, is wearing a homespun shirt and a knitted garment in olive green that might have started life as a cardigan. He has a green stone pendant on a black shoelace around his neck. I think he might have been at Woodstock in his youth. He has the abstracted air of an old-fashioned scholar—as if he’s pondering the great questions of Kierkegaard or Hegel, and has perpetually to wrench himself back into the quotidian world. He smiles in recognition when I come in, though I think he would be hard put to remember my name. Luke is up one of the ladders that run round the shop on a rail; he nods at me and says, “Hey.”

His ladder is blocking the art section, so I wait at the counter.

“I keep meaning to ask how old the shop is,” I say.

George is leafing through a book with tipped-in plates, making sure they are all there. He attends to one carefully before answering.

“It’s been open for the browsing pleasure of New Yorkers for a fair number of years now.” His speech, as always, is unhurried, and every sentence has a falling cadence. It is a restful voice.

“I thought it had been here for a while. It has that
feel,
doesn’t it?”

He considers. “Yes, I think it does. They say that Herman Melville bought
A History of the Leviathan
here—”

“Really?”

“And Poe lived just three blocks north—if he came in here on a dark night, we could have been his inspiration for ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ . . .”

“This is incredible. I had no idea . . . I should have looked it up . . .”

“Uh-huh. Hemingway used to look in a lot. On his breaks back here from Paris. And Walt Whitman, when he got tired of Brooklyn. They even say that Henry Hudson looked in when he sailed his boat up the river. It wasn’t the Hudson then, of course, but I don’t recall the Indian name for it.” He pauses, casting a glance around the book-filled walls, and then says, with a bland countenance, “I would imagine he would have found something to interest him here.”

“Henry Hudson,” I say, finally getting it. “Okay. When did the store open?”

“Nineteen seventy-three,” says George. He glances at me with his fugitive smile. “We do get Pynchon in here from time to time.”

I shake my head. “You’re not getting me twice.”

“Oh, sure,” says George, “believe Melville writes
Moby-Dick
because of this place, but not that Pynchon, who lives a few blocks away, would ever cross our threshold.”

“Yeah. That part is true,” says Luke. He comes down from the ladder. “So you stop by in the mornings too?” He walks with a pile of books to the back of the shop.

“Yes, sometimes,” I say, to his retreating form. As he seems to think it is fine to ask a question and then walk away, I say to George, “I’m on my way to see the Edward Hopper exhibition. He’s a big influence on Thiebaud—I’m working on Wayne Thiebaud, for my PhD.”

“Oh, that guy,” says George, managing to dismiss the man, his art, and my doctorate in three syllables. I decide not to get into Thiebaud with George.

“Have you always been a bookseller?” I ask him instead.

He considers. “It sometimes feels like it,” he says. “Certainly for most of my life. After college, I was a teacher. I taught English at a small but perfectly formed college called Truman State. It’s in Missouri. You won’t have heard of it.”

I shake my head to show that he’s right.

“Anyway, at a yard sale on a street in Kirksville, I came across a book by E. B. White. You’ve heard of E. B. White?”

“
Charlotte’s Web
.”

“Yes indeed, and the less well-known but equally rewarding
Trumpet of the Swan
. The book I found was called
Here Is New York.
If you read that book in your early twenties and you don’t want to move to New York, there’s something wrong with you.”

Leaning past me, he selects a slender little hardcover book from the New York section and flicks to the last page. “He’s talking about a tree, listen to this. ‘In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: “This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.” If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.’ ”

He twists a smile at me, half-wry, half-solemn.

“Your bookstore is like his tree.”

He nods as he closes the book, and looks up as another customer comes in. She makes a little shocked noise, so I look up where she is looking; she is staring at the owl nailed to its perch, and is backing away. As the backing away is theatrical rather than discreet, George obligingly asks if anything is wrong.

“That owl,” says the customer—a woman who looks like she subsists on a diet of wheatgrass and worry—“is it—was it ever alive?”

George considers the owl for just long enough to make me want to laugh.

“Yes, ma’am, it was. But I don’t think you should worry—its nocturnal peregrinations are long since over. Could I perhaps cross the border of good manners and ask why you seem so concerned? Are you missing one?”

She takes no notice. “It is organic matter?”

“I believe it is.”

“It
must
be carcinogenic. I mean, ohmigod, you’re breathing dead owl dust. I have to get out of here. I’m gonna call city hall—this is crazy. You need to get rid of that thing.”

“Ma’am, ma’am!” says George, in a voice that stops her as she is halfway out. “Please don’t let this get any further, but I see I will have to let you into our secret.”

It is too tempting, despite the cancerous owl dust. She stops.

“It isn’t real, ma’am, we just like to pretend it is. We’re called The Owl, we wanted an owl for the store. But you are very right, that would constitute an environmental hazard. This
looks
like a real one, ma’am, but it is in fact a man-made artifact—in plain words, it’s plastic. And please don’t touch it, it’s a valuable piece.”

She doesn’t look remotely like she wants to touch it. She comes back in fully, approaches the bird warily. I’d love it to suddenly squawk.

“They look like
real
feathers to me,” she says. “I think they’re hazardous also.”

George says he isn’t qualified to say whether the feathers themselves offer a clear and present danger. Luke has come back to the front, and is standing on the first stair radiating contempt. George has lost interest in the game, and says, “Ma’am, if you are so troubled by the bookstore owl, then, reluctant as I am to discourage patrons of secondhand bookstores, could I suggest that you might be happier at Barnes and Noble across the way, which, I am pretty sure I am safe in promising, you will find to be entirely owl-free?”

When she has gone, George gets the next book in a pile and prices it. Then he stops, and looks up at Luke.

“City hall. These people.”

“Tell me about it,” Luke answers. “George, I’m taking these books to the post office for Mr. Sevinç. There’s nothing else to mail?”

“Sadly, no,” says George. “For Sevinç? Those are the cartography books?”

Luke glances down at the brown package. “Yeah. The Vatican one is cool.”

“Isn’t it though? I would love to see those for real,” says George.

“He’s in town November,” says Luke, looking impassive.

“Ah,” says George. They nod at each other very slightly. “Mr. Sevinç is a customer of ours who lives much of the time in Istanbul,” says George, in explanation, to me. “When he visits The Owl, he brings gifts from the mystic East.”

“What does he bring?” I ask. Maybe they just mean marijuana. But I am imagining silks, brocades, spices.

George must be able to see the pictures in my head. “Oh, treasures, treasures,” he says. “He brings elixirs made by wizards when the world was young, cloth of gold woven in Byzantium, he brings cardamom and cloves and nutmegs, he brings parchments from the great Library of Constantinople, plucked from the flames by good men and true. Some things they managed to rescue from the barbarous hordes.”

I nod.

“By which, of course, I mean the Christians,” he says. “The Fourth Crusade?”

I nod again. George is looking expectant. My knowledge of Crusaders is a little hazy; mostly I think of them as embroidered little men in St. George tunics. I begin to speak, hoping that inspiration or the memory of a history lesson will return, but Luke cuts in.

“Halva, and Turkish Delight,” says Luke. “That’s what Sevinç brings. And it’s outstanding. George doesn’t eat refined sugars or saturated fats, but he makes an exception for Sevinç’s candy.”

George spreads out his hands. “Once a year, some halva—and halva has nutritional value—from the old souk in Istanbul. So sue me.”

“Good seeing you,” Luke says to me on his way out.

I say to George, “The owl
is
real, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, and grins. He cranes forward to check that Luke has not paused to tidy the outside books, and says, in a low voice laden with mirth, “You seem to have made some sort of positive impression on Luke. He is rarely so loquacious.”

I do not stay very long today; I am too restless to sink into that Zen state necessary for truly accomplished browsing. I still have this feeling that something is different, that there is something I have forgotten, that something is
wrong
. But it won’t come. I head for the park, to go to see the Hopper paintings.

Central Park is another place I can’t believe I see every day. I had thought that it would be as flat as a tabletop, and municipal, a large-scale version of an English park with swings and flower beds, neat and clipped and regulated and depressing. It is nothing like that at all. Today, there are cyclists and runners and tourists and inline skaters and skateboarders and people practicing ballet moves on a patch of grass, and police on horseback and a girl with a snake, and a woman with three cats on leads, and a motionless golden man on a plinth. It is the jubilant blazon of the city.

I feel better when I reach the gallery. The first gallery I went to in New York was the Met—like everyone else—and I saw a sign that said “No strollers on the weekend” so I zipped through all the rooms at breakneck speed, looking reprovingly at people if they seemed likely to loiter. When I reached the picture I most wanted to see—
Garden at Vaucresson
by Vuillard, whose exuberant joy you can feel even as you walk into the room—I barely stopped to look at it for fear of Met officials bearing down on me with a loudspeaker: “Miss! No strolling! Step along there, miss. Look lively. It’s the weekend.”

All of it is like that, at the beginning. Every conversation seems fraught with difficulty, every pronunciation produces a frown. I spend time learning how to use the transport system, learning how to speak so that people understand me, learning how to melt into the pot.

You can’t be slow. You can’t hesitate, you can’t ask questions with the usual polite packing around them—“Excuse me, would it be all right if . . . ?” Those are courtesies for a place where English is everyone’s first language. Here, it is the lingua franca, and it has to be boiled down to its simplest form. If you want to be understood, you can’t use irregular past participles. “Has he left?” results in blank stares. You have to say, “Did he leave?” You can’t ask for tuna in a deli and pronounce it “chuna”—because the men, with a big queue of people and no time, will hear the “ch” and make you a chicken sandwich. You can’t sound the “t” in “quarter” or “butter,” because “quarter” and “butter” don’t have any “t” in them here. You can’t even ask for a hot-water bottle—it is one of the first things I need, being a sovereign remedy for period pains, and nobody seems ever to have heard of them. A hot-water bottle? A what? No, we don’t sell them, miss. No, I don’t know where you could buy one. Eventually I corner a hapless assistant who has already denied the existence of hot-water bottles in America, and I explain exactly what I am looking for. It is flat, and made of rubber. You pour boiling water into it, and then fasten it with a stopper and slip it into your bed. It then warms up the bed.