The Bookstore (30 page)

He carries on walking, then he stops and turns to say, “Do you
mind if I just walk by myself a little while? I’ll see you later? Is that okay?”

I still haven’t worked out whether Mitchell says things to wound, or because he is caught up in an idea of himself that he projects willy-nilly, wounds or no.

“Of course,” I say. There is no point in arguing with him, in following him doggedly through the undergrowth. I turn around and head back towards the Winslow House. I wonder if this is part of being grown-up, acquiescing to someone else’s needs. It doesn’t feel like it. It feels something like erosion.

I do not see him again for a couple of hours, when he comes back to dress for dinner. I don’t say anything when he comes into the room. He puts a hand on my shoulder and turns me round, and then kisses me hard, his hand on my breast. It is not an apology, it is what Mitchell does instead of saying sorry.

“Is there time?” he says.

“For what?”

“For this.”

Afterwards, we walk together over to his parents’ house.

Tonight, for the family dinner, he is in a black shirt and a jacket that feels liquid to the touch, as if it is made of thickly woven silk. Tomorrow, for the Christmas party, it will be black tie, and I have never seen him in black tie. It is quite cold; Mitchell slings his jacket over my shoulders. Just before we get to the door, Mitchell says, “I didn’t love Anastasia. I don’t want to talk about it, but that’s the truth. I know how I feel about you, and I know the difference.”

Anastasia is the first person to greet us, seconds later. That Mitchell has just declared this, moments before she comes forward smiling, makes me feel guilty, complicit in some sort of unspoken mockery—I wanted him to say it and now that he has I feel defiled by my own want, a kind of common or garden Salomé.

We have scarcely exchanged pleasantries when Olivia floats over to join us.

“My dear, have you heard any more from Harvard?”

Anastasia nods regretfully at her. “Yes, sadly I have. They appointed someone else. I was the second choice.” She pauses, then says, “And nobody likes to be that.”

“I’m so sorry. Still, perhaps the first choice will find it not to their liking, or something else will happen. One simply cannot say what fate has in store for us all,” Olivia replies.

When she has passed on to another group, Anastasia says, to me, “I was so destroyed by not getting the Harvard job. It looked
so
likely, at one point. I even started looking at rentals in Cambridge. Counting chickens.” She shrugs, smiles.

Mitchell is looking at her without speaking, and she doesn’t speak either.

“Second place!” I say, because my nature abhors a vacuum. “That’s not bad! Mitchell was offered one at Berkeley, but he didn’t take it.” Anastasia is hesitating; I realize too late the indelicacy of seeming to crow over Mitchell’s success. He looks appalled.

I try to say I am sorry. She shakes her head. “It’s fine. Congratulations, Mitchell.”

“It’s nothing,” he says. He takes my arm. “Come with me. We’ll see you later, Ana.” He steers me across the room. “Ana didn’t need to know about Berkeley. It wasn’t very sensitive. But never mind that now.” He stops before his mother and father, who are both standing next to a chair where an old woman is sitting. The matriarch.

“Esme, I’d like you to meet my grandmother, Marguerite van Leuven. Ninin, this is Esme Garland.”

The old lady grasps my hand. There is a robust, eighteenth-century quality about her that makes me wonder how she gets along with Olivia.

“Isn’t her hair lovely, Ninin?” says Olivia. “Esme was telling me that her friend cuts it, rather than a stylist—that tousled look is so charmingly kooky.”

“She does cut it, it’s one of her many talents,” I say. “She’s been asked to exhibit her portraits by the Richard Avedon Foundation—she’s a really good photographer.”

“What a coincidence,” smiles Olivia. “Richard is the person
who took that photograph you were admiring, of Anastasia. We all miss him very much.”

“Is it a boy?” old Mrs. van Leuven asks, cutting through Olivia’s malice without regard.

“I don’t know. I didn’t find out the sex.”

“They don’t have the technology, in England?”

“Oh, no, they do—I was in New York—but I didn’t
want
to find out.”

“Why not? You need to make plans. If it’s a boy, you’ll have to make sure you get a good surgeon.”

“A good surgeon?” I ask.

“For the circumcision. And get his name down for the right schools.”

“Ninin,” says Mitchell, “don’t worry about that kind of thing.”

“Don’t worry? If it is anything like it used to be, you’ll have to get his name down for Browning before he’s born. You’re leaving it a little late. We put you down for Browning when your father
married
Olivia.”

“We didn’t, Mother,” says Cornelius. “They don’t accept names on their waiting list until the name belongs to a human being.”

“They do if you know the right people. Don’t be naïve, Corny.”

Cornelius must be used to his unsuitable nickname, and to his mother’s manner, as he just looks resigned.

Then she says, “And then St. Paul’s, of course. And that’s coed now, I believe.”

“For about forty years, Ninin,” says Mitchell. “As you very well know. Stop playing the grande dame.”

“If it is a girl, we can put her name down for Nightingale,” says Olivia. “That’s a pretty school. Isn’t that near the Y, Mitchell?”

“Further east, but still on 92nd,” says Mitchell.

“Nightingale-Bamford?” pipes up old Mrs. van Leuven. “No, no, not so good as Hewitt. Put it down for Hewitt.”

They all carry on squabbling about the schools. My heart is racing away. Then I cry out, in a contorted squeak, “I am not going to circumcise my baby.”

It is loud enough to be heard over the high-society bickering. For a second, nobody speaks. Mitchell looks at the ceiling. Then Olivia turns her head to me and says, “Why not? Boys are always circumcised.”

“No, they’re not,” I say. “Not in England, not in most places. It is so . . .” I want to say it is barbaric, but I am not brave enough or bad-mannered enough. My heart is beating even more madly. I peter out.

Mitchell leans towards me and says, in a low voice that he knows his grandmother will still be able to hear: “I didn’t hear you complain about the finished result.”

Old Mrs. van Leuven bursts out laughing.

“He’ll be an American. You must circumcise him,” says Olivia, taking no notice of whatever crudity has amused her mother-in-law.

“But why?” I ask her.

She shrugs her elegant shoulders and quivers slightly, as if she has just inhaled some sherbet. Mitchell is leaning back now, his face averted from his mother.

Olivia says, “Isn’t it—Cornelius—isn’t it hygiene?”

“I believe so,” says Cornelius shortly.

“And tradition also. The boy—if it were a boy—would feel himself to be very much an odd one out if he were not circumcised. You wouldn’t want him to feel alienated from other boys, from the very beginning of his life.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care at all. I would rather alienate him than—than
maim
him.”

There is a general recoil at this word.

“My dear,” says Olivia, her voice a scalpel, “it isn’t
maiming
. I did not maim my son. It is an absolutely normal surgical procedure. You use such emotive words.”

“It
is
maiming,” I say. The fear that they will somehow get their way over this has me in its thrall. I can’t retreat into silence. They all look so sure that circumcision is the best way to go. I say, with an earnestness I know Mitchell despises, “It is
genital mutilation
.” Olivia turns her head away, in sharp distaste.

“Please,” she says, “this is a sensitive issue. The Steins live just next door.”

She accompanies this with a concerned glance at the wall, as if we are in a little terraced house, and the Steins are all crowded round a glass on the other side. In reality, I don’t think she is in the least bit concerned about what they might think, and you probably need a golf buggy to get to the Steins’ house within a reasonable amount of time.

“When it’s religious, it’s different,” I say, assuming that the Steins are Jewish, rather than that they are particular advocates of random circumcision.

“I don’t follow your logic,” says Cornelius. “This is a cultural issue for us. Are cultural issues so very far from religious ones, in your opinion? Where does the divide lie?”

“Esme, shall we talk about this if and when we do have a boy?” says Mitchell. He smiles fixedly at me. “It seems pointless to have that argument now, when it might just as easily be a girl.”

“You
want
it to be circumcised?” I say.

“Circumcision hasn’t done Mitchell any harm,” states Olivia.

I turn to her, astonishment trumping decorum. “But you’re his mother, you can’t—” But of course, I can’t go down that route. “And anyway,” I say, “it
has done him some harm—
the sensitivity is seriously—”

Mitchell stands up. I feel as if the walls are about to burst apart.

“Excuse me,” he says. He nods to his mother as he walks out of the room. She receives his nod and turns back to me, her face a placid mask.

“I would really,” says Olivia, “so much rather talk about something else.”

THE NEXT DAY
I wake up in the blue room, with sea light flooding through the edges of the curtains. I glance over at Mitchell, who is asleep and facing away from me. He hasn’t said anything
about yesterday’s unfortunate conversation. I tried to apologize afterwards, but he wouldn’t let me. I have alternated ever since between feeling self-righteous and shamefaced. I am right but I was rude.

I slip out of bed to the window, to look out at the sea beyond the fence and sand. Yesterday was gray; today is cloudless and the sun is shining. I stand and look out at that pale mystic blue, bathed in the fresh light of morning.

I suppose you need a lot of money for everything to look this simple. The iron beds were probably shipped from an antique shop in Chipping Norton; the fence is probably from Bloomingdale’s or flown in from Antigua. But if they can afford it, why not make things beautiful?

Mitchell is still sleeping. I would like him to wake up and make love to me; on the thought, my nipples harden under my T-shirt. I take it off, and slip with nothing on into the little bed behind Mitchell, curving my body round to fit his. I like the feel of my skin, cool from being out of bed, next to the warmth of his. I put my hand round to the front of him, to stroke him into being hard, and as I do he jerks awake, pushes me away, and sits up. I am nearly thrown out of the bed.

He says nothing. He sits and rubs his face. I lie still.

“You can’t just do that, Esme, I wasn’t ready.”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to, I thought it would be okay. I even thought of sucking—”

“No!” He clutches his hair. “No, not like that. It can’t be like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

He stalks away to the bathroom. I lie there on my own for a minute, but I don’t want to look as if I am waiting for him.

I go down to the huge and icy kitchen; sunlight stripes the great oak table. The cold of the stone floor seeps into my feet. I wander around—it is as lovely as everything else; if I could paint, I would paint an ink wash of it. There’s a sketch by Diebenkorn that looks just like it. The sink is one of those heavy square ones; there are
pans hung up all around, and bunches of lavender. I have never seen anywhere as unrelentingly beautiful as this place; everywhere the eye falls is a delight. Why didn’t Mitchell want to make love to me? Because he wants Anastasia. I look in the fridge—there is a huge bowl of blueberries in there, and a jug of cream. It wasn’t there last time I opened the fridge, and yet I have never seen anyone here. It is like living in
The Elves and the Shoemaker
. I help myself to a smaller bowl of blueberries, and pour the cream on. The cream delineates those little stars that blueberries have where the flowers were.

There is a newspaper too, on the table. I didn’t see it before. The
Green Light
. I look through it while I eat the blueberries. There are articles about mooring rights, and about someone who is retiring from the post office after forty years of dedicated service. In the classifieds, there are lobster boats for sale—some are scallopers too. I try to be interested in what kind of extra machinery you might need for your lobster boat to qualify as a scalloper.

Mitchell walks into the kitchen. He goes over to the stove without looking at me, gets out the hexagonal coffeepot, asks me if I would like some. I say I would.

His eyes are on the coffeepot when he says, “Esme—I know that maybe I should be more modern, not so stuck in my ideas of how women—but really, I think of you as pure. When I think of you, I think of you in your cotton nightdress, or your pajamas, or, or in calico. You don’t have to change for me. You don’t have to do that.”

“It isn’t really like that,” I say. “I do find you very—”

He kneels down next to my chair.