The Bookstore (21 page)

Marrying Mitchell, by almost any measure, would be a Very Bad Idea. He is as beautiful and cold and hard as the diamond in his ring. If I were watching this scene play out in a movie or in a book, I would be willing the heroine to say no with all my heart. Yes, he is the father of her child, yes, he is looking earnestly into her eyes, yes, he is, after all, doing the decent thing in proposing to her. But. But. But. His motive. Run away. Run away.

I want to stop him. I want to ask him real questions, and hear real answers. But we are center-stage here. I can’t. Or is it that this is my very dream, and hearing the real answers would wake me up?

“Esme Garland,” says Mitchell, well aware of all the listening ears, “will you do me the signal honor of becoming my wife?”

Our audience emits a collective sigh of happiness and then turns to me, radiating an expectant goodwill.

This audience is a just-off-Fifth-Avenue audience, one that is, moreover, lunching at the MOMA restaurant on a Wednesday. Is the goodwill entirely without nuance? Is there nobody here who came to think about her feminist interpretation of Emil Nolde, nobody here who has just finished a paper on the New Balance of Power in Sexual Politics? Nobody here who can save me?

Obviously, I need to do the saving myself. But just as Mitchell has all those van Leuven ghosts behind him, prompting him to do the respectable thing now that all other avenues are closed, so I have a gathering of English ghosts behind me. The English kind are not quite so sure of themselves as the Dutch pilgrim kind. My English ghosts think it is terrible to make a fuss, terrible to derail such a set piece, terrible to disappoint the ladies who lunch, who will go home to their husbands and call their daughters and say, “Such a delightful thing happened today when I was having lunch with Sibyl in the Modern” . . . I don’t seem to have any of the strain of backup that won Waterloo on the playing fields of Eton.

I am lying. I believe that, but it is not that.

There is fury that he can set me up like this, but I can’t, I simply can’t, bring that out in front of all these people. If I were French, I would perhaps hit him or throw the quince jelly at his head. If I were American I might be able to articulate my anger in a more reasoned way, oblivious to the audience—or say “fuck you” and storm out. That’s tempting—leaving him with his figs and his diamond ring. But I am so dreadfully English. In times of stress I become highly agreeable.

I ought not to be thinking about myself, anyway. I ought to be
thinking not about how much Mitchell might love me or not love me, but about the baby. A baby ought to have a stable environment. I am sick of the phrase; it’s been dancing in my head and it was spoken out loud by Mitchell when he wanted me to terminate, and here it is again. Isn’t a loving environment much more important than a stable one? There is virtue in saying yes. Of course there is. He is my baby’s father. I have decided to have the baby; therefore I owe it to the baby to give it the best start in life. Doesn’t that mean I ought to at least try the old route—the two parents who love it, the economic stability—better than stability—
prosperity
? Not, for the sake of pride, to consign the pair of us to a walk-up studio and babysitters and to the worry about where the next twenty dollars will come from? The things we ought to do are more important than the things we want to do.

I am lying again. I believe that too, but it is not that.

“Esme,” says Mitchell, lifting my chin with his finger. “I want you to know—it isn’t just because of the baby.” (Our audience nearly faints. Not a single forkful of arugula has got any farther than it had two minutes ago.) “It’s because—for the first time in my life, the very first time, I’ve—” He opens his hands like Jesus when he gives the Sermon on the Mount. “I’ve fallen in love.”

The New York chorus responds as they have responded to the rest. Aren’t New Yorkers supposed to be cynical? People are taking out phones to photograph us.

Mitchell takes my hand again. “I was afraid,” he is saying. “I was afraid of loving you, of loving anyone. This is a big day for me.

“When I say I would be honored if you would be my wife, I mean it—from my heart. For you, for me, for the baby, for the sake of all that stuff you are forever babbling about—love and beauty and truth and all—please say yes. Please marry me.”

My eyes are full of tears. One gets very emotional when one’s hormones are swishing around one’s body like slops in a bucket.

“Don’t cry, honey! Just say yes!” An old lady in a black lamb’s-wool coat is nodding earnestly at me from a couple of tables away. After her the deluge.

They say I ought to, because of the baby. That “he’s trying to do the decent thing.” That we’re darling together. That I won’t regret it. That the diamond is from Harry Winston. I stare down at the ring that I do not care about, that I wish were red gelatin. It serves as a prop—I am an actor in this whether I like it or not. I look from the ring up to Mitchell. I want him to love me so much that I can’t work out where my desire ends and truth begins.

I have been so up, so down, so spun around by this mercurial man that I can’t remember what I was like before. I dimly remember a person who liked poems and pictures, a person who danced along in the happiness of paying attention, almost convinced of her freedom. This loving is greater than freedom.

“They will say it’s a shotgun wedding,” I say.

“They will say it’s a whirlwind romance,” he says. Then he gives me an arrested look. “ ‘
Will say’?
The future tense? Is that a yes?”

I smile. Our observers let out what, on the Upper West Side, would be a whoop.

“Yes?” repeats Mitchell, incredulous, making sure. He starts to laugh.

“Yes,” I say, laughing too, and nodding. “Yes.”

AS MITCHELL IS
sliding the ring with erotic deliberation over my finger, the old lady in the black lamb’s-wool coat comes over to us. She has a small diary and a pen with her.

“What are your names?” she says. “I’ll keep a lookout for you in the Metro section.”

Mitchell grins at me. There is a complicity in his eyes now that makes my heart soar. I know I will regret this, I know that worthy heroines in Regency romances never say yes when there is any doubt as to the state of the hero’s heart, but I am made of flesh, not words. I want to be with Mitchell. If I am with him, I can make him see that I am worth loving. Perhaps it is the other way round,
and he doesn’t see yet that he is worth loving too. I can make him see that. And if it all goes wrong, I will suffer, but the suffering won’t be for the strangled impulse, the unlit lamp. I will light the lamp and burn myself on the flame.

“This is Miss Esme Garland, and I am Mitchell van Leuven,” he says.

There is a kind of aftershock to this statement, and another whisper ripples round. A van Leuven.

The woman nods, as if she expected as much, and her old bejeweled fingers write it down painstakingly. She shuts the diary with a snap. “Then I guess you really will be in the Metro section.” She looks piercingly at Mitchell. “You did a good thing today.”

“I think so,” says Mitchell, with a well-timed glance of pride at his newly affianced bride, who is still reeling from the actual proposal, let alone the idea of announcements in the
New York Times
. Mitchell is good at playing to the crowd. When it is this sort of crowd, at any rate.

We accept the smiles and congratulations for a minute or two, and then, the nine-minute wonder over, people resume their own lunches and we are left alone.

“A fig?” says Mitchell, picking one up. Its plump body is the color of claret, with a flash of pale green at the top and that dusting of powder all over it. I don’t know if that powder is a natural bloom, or if everyone dusts figs with icing sugar as a matter of course, to make them look prettier.

I say yes to the fig, since it does not seem polite in the circumstances to say no. As with figs, so with marriage proposals. Oh, but I want to, I want to. Why does
he
want to? Mitchell slices it, and adds some of the cheese and quince jelly. He hands me the plate.

“Mitchell,” I say, urgently.

“Not here, Esme,” he says quietly.

“It isn’t that. It’s—please will you order a glass of wine?”

He grimaces before he answers. This habit he has of first making gestures to illuminate what he is about to say ought perhaps to drive me insane, and indeed might, over a lifetime. But now it just
increases the tenderness; it is a foible that I know and recognize, that somehow belongs to me.

“But you can’t drink,” he is saying.

“I can have a mouthful. Order a glass of wine—anything you like—and let me have a mouthful. Please please please.”

“No. It will harm—”

“It’s my body.”

“The baby’s ours. Are we really having this argument again? Really?”

“No. But one mouthful. In England, some people even say you can have one small glass a day. I am asking for one mouthful in nine months. Come on. I got engaged today.”

Mitchell holds himself still, tense, and then he relaxes. He signals to the waiter.

“One glass of champagne, please. Your best.”

The waiter smiles, but bends over Mitchell, and mutters to him. Mitchell holds up an understanding hand.

“Yes, of course. Just a second.” He leans over to the ladies at the next table. “Excuse me. I am ordering one glass of champagne for my wife-to-be and me to drink. The waiter says I would have to buy the whole bottle. I’m fine with that, but I’m not fine with it going to waste. Would you oblige us by having the rest?”

The women laugh and say how romantic and yes, why not, they will have the bottle. I smile like a Barbie doll.

The fact that it is champagne means we have to go through the painful rigmarole of the silver bucket and the little table to hold the silver bucket, and the ice, and the white napkin, and the grand withdrawal of the cork. And then, when our glass is finally poured, Mitchell holds it up to me and toasts me, and sips. Then he hands it to me.

As I take the glass I have a powerful feeling that someone is looking at me. I glance to my left—near the exit, the old lady in the lamb’s-wool coat is staring at me. She is probably waiting to be picked up, and probably not smiling because I am pregnant and
about to have a mouthful of champagne, but she seems suddenly baleful, the thirteenth fairy at the christening.

I raise the glass to Mitchell. I am in tumult, fearful in the very temple of delight. If I rang out the bells to celebrate, would they sound dully, would they ring true? My mouth is full of champagne. I hold it there for a second or two. It is expensive and yeasty and tart. It is glorious. I won’t be allowed any more for months on end. I think of swans singing before they die, and butterflies with cornflower-blue wings living for a day, and then I swallow. As I do, I look back at the old lady, and raise my glass to her as well, but she does not respond. And then it is over.

Mitchell looks comically at the glass I hand back.

“Mitchell. You are sure?”

“Yes. I am sure. I had aching gaps, Esme. You fill them up. You fill up all my gaps.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

O
utside the restaurant, he kisses me. “I have to go—I don’t want to go, but I have to. I have to teach—I’ll call you,” and then he is backing away with his arm up, to hail a cab that he will turn around to take him back to work.