The Bookstore (23 page)

“You should call them,” she repeats. “They will
support
you.”

“I know, I know. But if don’t tell them anything, then they don’t have to support me, and they don’t have to repress their disappointment, and they don’t . . .” I trail off. “It was fine for the termination plan, wasn’t it? And not fine when there’s going to be
a baby.” I cringe away from the thought of it. If I were in England, I would have to. But I have run away.

“Promise,” says Stella.

“Oh, I can’t promise. I was in the Brownies. If I promise, I have to do it.”

She waits. I promise. She gets up to leave.

“And one other thing, engaged girl. You got engaged today. Where’s your fiancé?”

“He’s seeing an economist. He couldn’t get out of it.”

IN THE MORNING,
after a cup of tea, I call my parents.

It isn’t a long call. There is no recrimination; they must be burning to do it. But I am crying, crying as I tell them, for shame at an obscure sense of having thwarted whatever hopes they had of me. I wish I had siblings, that I wasn’t all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too.

Although they can’t possibly be pleased, neither of them seems to mind so much about the baby, and my mother says she will come over now, next week, and certainly when the baby is born. I agree to the last; I want her to come then. I don’t know nothing about birthing no babies, or how to look after them afterwards. I wonder how much grief about this they are hiding, in the first shock of it. To my surprise, though, they openly mind about Mitchell. My father says, quietly, at the end: “Don’t rush into marrying him. You don’t need to panic.”

“It’s not that, Dad,” I say.

“They will change everything; the family will change your path. If there is a money issue, we can—”

“It isn’t money,” I say quickly. “I would take Mitchell if he were—barefoot in the park.”

“The scholarship—all you’ve worked for—”

“Is all still there; I am still working for it. I won’t slack up, this will make me work even harder.”

They are silent. Disappointment and fear are buzzing over the Atlantic. I say, “I love him, Dad,” and I blush into the empty apartment.

After the phone call, I stomp down to Columbia and stride into its precincts. What endless ripples of disappointment flow from that one unguarded moment. And I could have stopped them. No, I could have stopped these particular ripples, but there are always ripples.

Columbia itself feels different now that I am engaged. I feel uncomfortable. It is as if I have short-circuited the educational process somehow, and made the lights go out. As I merge into the flow of people heading towards their lectures, I don’t feel as if I fit any longer.

“Is this all you wanted?” say the names carved on Butler. “Is this what it was all for? A wedding ring?”

I stop, and sit down on the library steps and face them.

“Getting married won’t change anything,” I say. “This isn’t 1870.”

Herodotus Sophocles Plato Aristotle Demosthenes Cicero and Vergil all look back at me and purse their stony lips.

“A girl that knew all Dante once / Lived to bear children to a dunce,” they say.

“Mitchell isn’t a dunce,” I say, “and getting married and having children makes no difference now. I can still have a career. I don’t know why you lot should be annoyed, anyway. You’re the Dead White Males, remember?”

They take no notice. “A career?” they say. “If you marry Mitchell van Leuven? You’re dreaming. You got a scholarship here, Esme Garland, to study the history of art, and this is what you do with it? What a waste. What a waste. The old story.”

“I’m busy,” I say, standing up and slinging my bag on my shoulder. “It’s been a treat talking to you. Do you know my father at all?”

“In five years,” they say, as a parting shot, “you will be running a cupcake business.”

MY SECOND LECTURE
is on Impressionism, and the person who gives it, Dorothy Straicher, is only a few years older than I am. I like her very much. She mentions that there is a Sargent and impressionism exhibition on at the moment on the Upper East Side, in a hotel, and that even the die-hard modernists among us might well get something out of it. After I have eaten some dreadful lunch with Bryan from Columbia, I ask him if he would like to come with me, but he makes a face. I don’t know if the face is for impressionism or Sargent, but at any rate, I set out across Central Park alone. I wish Mitchell could come, but if I text him, I will get one back saying he is teaching or about to teach, and then I will feel rejected. It is better not to ask. I do have to remember that he has a job.

There are, as usual, various runners and tourists and walkers and peculiar people with cats on leads dotted about, even up near the top, so it doesn’t feel too scary. I go in at 108th Street and walk fast toward 77th on the East Side. I pause to send a text to Mitchell, just in case he has a break and can come with me.

I go down a little path between two great outcrops of silvery schist, and when I come out, I see a man alone, with his back to me, sitting under a tree with a guitar.

When I am in the park, I walk with my phone in my hand so that if I see anyone menacing I can pretend to be talking to someone who is both burly and only about thirty yards away. This is my only protection, as I can’t run fast and can’t fight. I am about to pretend to talk to Luke on the phone when I realize that this particular strange man in the park is, in fact, Luke.

I get closer and then stop. He doesn’t sense my presence; he is busy plinking away at the guitar. He plinks the same bit over and over. It sounds a bit tedious.

“Hi,” I say. He looks around.

“Hi!” he says. It is a bit cold to be sitting on the ground, and he might get piles, but I prudently do not mention this.

“What a good idea, to play in the park,” I say. “I love how hard they worked to make it look so natural. I suppose picturesque
works really well once people have forgotten that it was made up in the first place.”

“Yeah, sure, I guess,” says Luke, which is American for “no.” He hesitates, and then says, “It’s just a place that lets people breathe.”

I look at him. “Oh, you don’t like it when I say it isn’t real?” I say.

“Like you say, I don’t think it matters if it wasn’t real at the start. It’s real enough now. The schist is real, the trees are real, the way it changes in the seasons is real.”

I don’t say anything. As so often with Luke, I can’t quite say the right thing. Perhaps I am trying too hard.

“The park might be like a picture to you,” he says, “but to me, it’s like music. It’s about time. I think I like it because it changes. It changes like music does. It has rhythms, like music does.”

“Pictures change over time as well,” I say, stealing shamelessly from Professor Caspari. “We look at a painting over a period of time, so it is experienced sequentially. And we can go back to look at them. They change, we change.”

Luke nods. He starts to speak and then stops, as if he is venturing onto territory he’s not confident will take his weight. “Yes, but—but not just in that way—the park changes for people as well—it is different things for different people, at different times. You know, for lovers, for guys walking in the Rambles, for the softball players and the beer sellers and the children, the tourists, the runners . . . they all move through the park, like notes in music—they all sound different notes, it all seems like discord, but it isn’t. It’s a harmony.”

There is a silence. I don’t know what to do. There is such a flash of gladness at what he says that I feel as if, in the very gladness, I am wronging Mitchell.

“Do you play here a lot?” I ask.

He scans his surroundings, nodding. “Yeah, I do.”

“And don’t you feel self-conscious, playing in public?” I say.
I wonder if he can hear that my voice sounds brittle. I can. He is looking around again, this time very deliberately. There is nobody in sight.

“I play gigs all the time, you know. That—if you can imagine it—is even more public.”

I can’t think of anything else to say. I say, “Well, I’d better be—”

“You just out for an afternoon stroll?” he asks. “Or are you going to work?”

“No, neither—I am going to look at some paintings.”

“You walking across the whole park on your own?”

“Yes, but I’ll be fine.”

Luke gets up, and reaches for his guitar case. It is more of a guitar bag.

“I’ll keep you company.”

I am about to launch into an automatic polite protest but his expression is that of a man anticipating this and not looking forward to it.

If I were out with Mitchell, or Stella, and we were in a quiet part of the park, I would unbutton my shirt, so that the bright sun might penetrate to the darkness of the womb. Instead of blackness, it might be like being inside a plum.

“Thank you,” I say instead.

“You’re welcome.”

As we walk, he says that the impetus for the park in the first place was not really to make something pretty.

“If it looks nice, that’s fine by me. But that’s not what Olmsted was doing, first off, right? When he designed the park? The idea was to make a democratic space, where people could just be. In New York City, where everyone is scrambling to make it, everyone can come to Central Park and look at the leaves in the fall, the snow in winter . . . we all see the same patterns, we’re all moving through the same time. See?”

I don’t really see, but I like how his mind works in a different way from mine, in a way that could open mine up.

“I sort of see,” I say, smiling at him.

He asks me which paintings I am going to see, and so I talk about Sargent, and since Luke always makes me feel a little uneasy, I find myself in a long and complicated story about Madame X in the Met, and how everyone was shocked because the strap of her gown was painted as having slipped, and how her purple skin wasn’t artistic license but the lavender powder that she wore.

“What did she want to look purple for?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t look purple like a Ribena man, or anything.” That will mean nothing to Luke, but we both let it pass. “It was more a lilac pallor. The painting is really famous, and it’s about twenty blocks from here. You should see it.”

“It’s in the Met? Let’s go see it.”

“You mean me as well? I was going to see the Sargents in the Mark Hotel, on 77th . . .”

“Oh, I thought you were going to the Met—forget it. It’s okay.”

“But—you could go and see it.”

“I will, sometime. I thought it would be more fun with a know-it-all English guide, that’s all.”

“We could pay a dollar each, and just go and see that painting, and then I could go on to the Mark.”

“Sure. We love it when the tourists rip off the city.”

“I’m not a tourist.”

“Yeah. You are. Pay the damn money.”

It is very different, walking with Luke. Mitchell strides everywhere as if compelled by his own energy, and that energy streams out towards other people. Perhaps it bounces back from them and reinvigorates him, because he walks as if he is going to turn over the tables in the temple, hack the faces off the wooden angels, cut through the mediocrity to a purity as clear as ice.

Luke strolls along with his guitar, by contrast, with a kind of easy amplitude, as if he is about to break into something from Simon and Garfunkel. He is chatting about George’s love affair with wheatgrass.

As we reach the band shell, where Boticelli’s Venus should
really be singing a number, I get a text from Mitchell saying that he can’t come to see the Sargents, but he hopes I will enjoy them, and that he will see me tonight. I ought to be annoyed at this last assumption, but I am just pleased. I am no more sure of him now than I ever have been.

Luke pauses on the outskirts of an intent little gathering of people. “We’ve maybe come down too far,” he says. I want to see what they are looking at. A dancer on the stage, in cherry Lycra and a turquoise scrap of a skirt, falls forward without moving her hands to save herself. Without intervention, she will smash her brains out on the concrete. She falls like a plank, and inches from the ground, her partner catches her. It is all performed, or practiced, with a silent solemnity. They do it again, and again. Every time, she could die, and every time, he catches her. I stand and watch, the same thing, over and over, the fall, the risk, the catch.