The Bookstore (27 page)

“Yes. ‘Walter C.’ I thought a lot of Cronkite.” She stands pensively for a few seconds, and then walks off towards her bedroom.

Luke calls out to her; “Do you want to keep it—his book?”

There is no answer. Luke jerks his head at me to indicate I should go in the bedroom. I go towards it cautiously and peep through the doorway. Mrs. Kasperek is sitting on her bed, staring straight at the wall, and evidently not seeing it. Her blue eyes are focused on the past, on the book signing decades ago, maybe. It is a high old bed, the kind that you can keep things under, and she is small enough that her feet, sticking out on thin ankles from her trousers, do not touch the ground.

“Luke wants to know if you would like to keep the Cronkite,” I say, trying to be gentle. “Since it is signed for you?”

“Do you know who he was?”

I do not really know. “Was he a historian?” I say.

She shakes her head. “He was a newsman. He was the man who told everyone that Kennedy had been shot. On CBS. He was upset.”

Luke is in the doorway. “I’ve seen the footage,” he says. “He took off his glasses when he had to say that Kennedy was dead.”

Mrs. K nods, and looks long at Luke.

“These books . . . ,” she begins, and stops. I am frightened; for her, for myself decades from now, struggling to retain dignity with two strangers as they take away my books. I can see the straight line to her grave, to mine.

“I know, ma’am,” Luke is saying.

“They are all my life. These books are all my life.”

She looks out of the window. I can see the muscles of her face
that are clamping her jaw. I know the action so well that it makes tears well in me too. She doesn’t speak. Luke stands still in the doorway; he doesn’t speak either. The silence goes on, and it is unendurable. It is the silence of the empty shelves, of the shutting down of a mind’s exploring.

“Don’t get rid of them all!” I say. “Keep your favorites. Keep the Walter Cronkite and the Churchill set. And the poetry and the Shakespeare. And the one you were reading.”

“You’re a good girl. A good girl. No, I don’t want to keep any. Let them all go.”

I don’t see why she has to let them all go.

Luke then offers her what seems to me a lot of money—hundreds of dollars. Mrs. K nods listlessly, and Luke pulls a great roll of dollars out of his pocket, counts them out, and gives them to the old lady.

We have dozens of bags of books to move out. We stack them all in the corridor to begin with. When we’ve finished we go back in. Mrs. Kasperek is still on the bed.

“The assisted-living place is still in New York?” I ask.

She focuses on me with a little difficulty. “Yes, it’s right here on Tenth. He might be able to make me give away my books, but nobody can make me leave New York City.”

“Then—buy some more. Buy new books. Buy better books. You’d be hard-pushed to buy better ones than these
,
I suppose, but you could try. You could enjoy yourself trying. And Barnes and Noble still isn’t far away.”

Mrs. Kasperek breaks into a chuckle. I look behind me. Luke is standing with his eyebrows up to his hairline.

“Barnes and Noble?” he says. “You don’t think maybe The Owl?”

“Oh, I forgot about The Owl. But at The Owl, Luke, she would see the outrageous markup George will put on all the books you’re buying from her.”

“That’s true,” says Luke, reflectively. “Maybe you should stick with Barnes and Noble, Mrs. Kasperek . . .”

Mrs. K spreads her hands. “Business is business,” she says. “I don’t blame a man for that.”

Luke shakes her hand again. “Good-bye, ma’am. It’s been a pleasure. I hope we will see you at The Owl, as Esme says.”

I turn to Mrs. Kasperek; this feels urgent to me. “Do you know what Caliban says when he wants to take away Prospero’s magic? ‘Remember, first to possess his books; for without them he’s but a sot.’ ”

Luke shakes his head at me, wanting me to leave it. Mrs. Kasperek says, “There comes a point when you don’t need the books, because they’re up here.” She taps her head. “Same with you. You don’t need a copy of
The Tempest
. Prospero’s in your head. Lucky girl.”

“All right,” I say. “Okay, I’ll stop.”

“You love the father?” Mrs. Kasperek says.

I stare.

“The baby’s father?” she repeats. “You love him? Because that’s all that matters in this world. At my age, I know some things, and I know
that
. So make sure you love him. Because nothing else is worth a red cent.”

I glance at Luke. He is already looking at me.

“Yes,” I say, “I do.”

She is looking from me to Luke. A false light dawns:

“Oh! You are the father!” she says to Luke. She strikes her knee with her palm, in exasperation that she didn’t see this before.

“No, ma’am, I am
not,
” answers Luke. He injects profound thankfulness into his voice. The old lady shakes her head.

“I thought you two were kind of a good fit.”

“But thank you, Luke,” I say. “That was very courteous of you.”

I hold my hand out to Mrs. Kasperek. “Good-bye,” I say. “We’ll see ourselves out.”

I glance back as I am pulling the door shut. I can see Mrs. Kasperek on her bed, in the apartment denuded of the books that were all her life.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

W
e are in a restaurant on Columbus Circle for lunch, exquisite in every particular, high above the city. It is so exquisite that I am subject to the now-usual sense that I do not match up—that this is the kind of New York that demands finish, and I am not finished. Their menu says that they don’t want to impress me (oh, come now) but they do want to cook for me and make me happy. I am about to say something about this, when Mitchell says, “We’re here to celebrate. I’ve just been offered a job.”

“A job? What do you mean? What’s wrong with the one you’ve got?”

“Nothing. But this one is at Berkeley. How does that sound?”

As I look at him, it is borne in on me that I am now joined to another person’s will and desire. That in loving him, and meaning it, I might have to forswear so much I also love.

I spread upon my lap the heavy linen napkin that was probably embroidered by Andalusian Carmelites, smoothing out its ironed lines. I am much sadder at the sudden possibility of giving up the bookshop than I am about Columbia.

“It sounds amazing,” I say. “Honestly—that’s impressive.”

“Thanks. Don’t look so stunned. These things happen when you’re an up-and-coming young professor . . . I told my mother
about it today. They’re just back from Paris. She said that if I was pleased, then she was pleased for me, but perhaps I should find out if there were any positions at Oxford or Harvard that I could think about. Isn’t she a peach?”

“Berkeley doesn’t cut the mustard for her?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s not that. If I’d been offered Oxford, she would have wondered why I couldn’t manage to get a job at Cambridge.”

“But what does it mean, to be offered this?”

He beams at me. “Shall we order a single glass of champagne? Not a bottle, this time.”

I nod. Oh, I will get another mouthful.

He calls the waiter over and orders it.

“It’s a great department,” he says.

I am a person. I am not an adjunct. “Mitchell, I—”

“We could live in Marin County. I love Marin.”

“But, Mitchell—”

“Wherever we live, though, Esme, you will be able to concentrate a lot more on fitness and diet than you do at present. Running each morning, of course, but I think beach volleyball would also be a good choice. I bet you can find a group of other pregnant women who play it too.”

“Beach volleyball?” I don’t so much say this as echo it faintly. “You know, it might be rats for Winston Smith, but I think that for me it would be beach volleyball.”

“Esme. I am turning it down. I am just teasing you. I mean, yes, it is pretty fine to be offered this, but it isn’t what I want. It’s very much a sideways move, so it wouldn’t look like I was such a smart player. I am playing the long game.”

“But then, why did you apply?”

“I didn’t. I was asked.” He smiles. “And then, you’re at Columbia. If you wouldn’t come with me, that’s a heck of a commute. You need to trust me more, Esme. You are not a trusting person. Now, you won’t mind meeting all my people at this party? My family and everyone? Uncle Beeky will be there, so that’s good.”

“No, I don’t mind at all,” I say. “I
want
to meet them.”

“I am worried about your meeting them. They can be quite sharp.”

I give Mitchell a Paddington stare over the top of my menu. He might see it as the furious stare of a human being, not the inscrutable one of a fictional Peruvian bear. “Some people think I’m quite sharp myself.”

Mitchell shakes his head.

“Not that kind of sharp. Not everything is about how smart you are. Some of it is—social.”

“Is it?” I say, marveling.

“You know it is. Don’t be silly. My family can be difficult, if they feel there is a challenge to the accepted order of things. I am just trying to prepare you.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I say brightly. “And now I had better concentrate on eating, or I’ll be late for work.”

“That’s another thing,” he says. “Your job. I don’t think you need to work for extra money any longer. I will provide for everything you need because of the baby. You don’t need to worry about any of that. And I know it isn’t up to me—of course, you’re very much your own person—but I really think you should resign.”

I hope they don’t find other ways to make the pressure work in New York; the water towers are so beautiful. And simple, and intelligible. Can you love something because you understand it? Why don’t they advertise on the water towers? You could do such funny things with them. They could make them look like giant tins of Bird’s Custard. Bournville Cocoa. Lyle’s Golden Syrup. A kind of English retail nostalgia across the skyline of New York. I bet there is a city ordinance to stop it.

“In fact, I don’t want to insist, but please give it some serious thought, Esme. I don’t want you working in that drab little secondhand store when you meet my mother.”

AFTER MY LUNCH
of quails and hegemony I come back to The Owl and say to George, who is in the main chair, “Who cleans the shop?”

“Excuse me?” says George. It is not a good sign.

“Who cleans? Do you have a cleaner?”

“Tee cleans the windows,” says Luke.

“And Luke does the nightly vacuuming,” says George.

“Esme does the vacuuming,” says Luke.

“I don’t mean that so much as actual cleaning. Who cleans the toilet?”

The toilet down there is revolting; it has a spongy red mouth glued fast to the seat, voluptuous and red. It bothers me for symbolic reasons as well as hygienic.

George gazes at me. “It’s a question that has never occurred to me. Somebody must, I assume.”

He has had the shop since 1973.

“Where are the cleaning things?” I ask.

“They would be—at the drugstore. If you take some money out of the register, Esme, you can go buy them.”

“Okay,” I say, but before I can even open it, George says, “But be sure not to get anything with harmful chemicals in it. Especially in your condition.”