The Bookstore (33 page)

W
hen we come back from the Hamptons, I have an immediate shift at the drab little store that Olivia really would be pained by. It is sunny and cold. Tee, the guy from the South Bronx who sometimes cleans the windows, and sometimes sets up at midnight outside Barnes and Noble with a sheet full of books (“When Barnes and Noble closes, I open”), is at this moment fast asleep in the middle of Broadway, outside the shop. His hood is up, he has his bag under his head, his fingers are interlocked on his stomach, he is having a noonday snooze in the sun.

I watch from behind the counter. People stride or saunter around him, and he just sleeps. He doesn’t care that people can see his face while he’s sleeping, while he’s not in control of it. Someone nudges someone else to look at him and his restful unconcern; a girl on her own, covert and uncertain, takes a picture of him with her phone. Someone else says that phrase that someone was bound to say, the prideful announcement of belonging and singularity: “Only in New York.”

A thin man in jeans and a faded yellow sweatshirt looks intently at him as he passes, then glances quickly around. He has an undirected twitchiness about him that looks like guilt, but might be need. He has some mark of affinity with the ones I know
are homeless, but I don’t know what it is. He comes back, crouches down next to Tee with his back to me. When he gets up again, Tee is still asleep, but his bag is gone.

I put my hand on the counter as if I can vault over it, but my body stays disappointingly grounded. Instead I skirt around the counter, out into the street, and run as fast as I can downtown, after the guy. He has not even dodged down a side street; he is just walking along. I run past him and turn around to face him.

“Give it back,” I say furiously at him. “Give it
back
. How
could
you?” I manage not to say,
And at Christmas too!,
but only just.

The guy stares right at me, and he is just as furious back. He rips the strap off his shoulder and slaps the bag into my arms.

“Who the
fuck
are you to tell me who I am?” he spits out, and pushes me out of his way.

I don’t understand. “I didn’t!” I say. And then, to his back, I yell, “But he’s a street guy, he’s homeless! You don’t
do
that.”

“
Fuck you,
” he shouts out, without turning around.

I run back again to the shop, running because I am still angry. Tee is still fast asleep.

I sling the bag underneath the counter and cover it with the
New York Times
. Luke is putting dust jackets in acetate on the upstairs table. I take the key out of the till and go up the stairs.

I recount to Luke everything that has just happened. He runs his thumb along the top of the acetate to make a crease, and turns the jacket to make sure it looks right.

“Dennis found this,” he says. It’s a first edition of
The Old Man and the Sea
.

I don’t know why he is saying that instead of responding to my story. I stand still at the top of the stair and wait. Nothing happens. I go downstairs again and sit down. Customers come in and ask things, and I answer and look for books for them, and chat, and help them. The man with the towel on his head comes in and takes himself up to the mezzanine to look at the first editions, and I hear Luke chatting to him. Tee eventually stumbles in, rubbing his face.

“You seen my bag?” he says.

I give it to him.

“Thanks,” he says, half out of the door again. “I’ll see you later.”

Towelhead Man comes down to buy a signed copy of
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,
and Luke comes with him.

“You’ll like it,” says Luke to him. “I did.”

Luke goes out, and comes back with a takeaway cup that he puts on the counter.

“Chamomile,” says Luke. “I thought it might calm you down.”

“I’m calm,” I say. “You have a rapport with Towelhead Man.”

“Or John, as he likes to call himself. Esme, you shouldn’t have chased that guy for Tee’s bag, it was really dumb. You know, he could have had a knife, yadda yadda yadda.”

“How could he steal from Tee?” I say. I’m repeating what I said before. “I mean, they’re both homeless. I don’t get it.”

“Oh, you really don’t,” says Luke. He is smiling at me. I find it disconcerting. “You want them all to be in a union? A merry band of thieves, like Robin Hood? The only people they’ll steal from are Bill Gates and Donald Trump?”

“No,” I say, injecting scorn into it, but I think,
Yes. That’s exactly what should happen.

He is cradling his brow in his hands now.

“Esme, honey,” he says, and raises his face. “Neither one of us has any idea how rough, how raw, it is out there. No
idea.
But I like how you want the world to work.”

“It
can
work that way,” I say. “If we
imagine
it that way, it will be closer to happening.”

He smiles again. “Drink your tea,” he says.

I feel a flaring up inside me. “No,” I say. “You’re wrong.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. You’re—” I cannot think of the right word to express the enormity of his error. He waits.

“You’re
acquiescent
.”

He stares at me. I stare at him. He has the most beautiful eyes.

“I don’t know if I mention this very often,” I say, “but I do like you, Luke.”

He gives me a wintry smile. “No, you don’t mention that too often,” he says.

I HAVE FINISHED
my shift and am waiting for Mitchell to pick me up. It is just past six o’clock. George is sifting through the contents of a new pink cardboard folder. He fishes out a letter and a postcard.

“Hmm. Is this a treasure, I wonder? It’s a signed picture postcard from Percy Lubbock to—someone indecipherable.” He hands the card to me.

“Who is Percy Lubbock?” I ask.

“Oh. That makes me think we’re maybe not going to make our fortune on this one,” says George, plucking it back. “We might do better on our inscribed first of
Three Guineas
. Unfortunately, Virginia Woolf is a woman.”

“This just in,” I say. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a nebulous thing, but it is my belief—my experience, also—that women do not have that need to collect that men have. The number of women who have come in here over the years, thirsting for first editions, or things that are signed, or—speak of angels”—he nods a greeting to our resident Nabokov expert, Chester Mason, as he slides into the store—“or for the possessions of famous novelists, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.”

“Hello,” says Chester.

“Men seem to believe that there is some spirit imbued in these things, some extra sanctity from the fact that the writer touched them, as if there is a magic that will rub off on them, as if they can share the greatness.” He smiles crookedly. “I hold fast to the belief that you can share the greatness, but only through the words themselves. The material texts are important, of course, but in a historical sense, a cultural sense. I have never been too sure about the people who want signed books. Still, an inscribed first. It won’t do badly.”

I cast an anxious glance at Chester, worried that his world is about to fall apart. It is not. He isn’t listening.

I wonder whether to mention that in Cambridge I once held a small, hard leather-bound copy of
Tristram Shandy
, signed neatly by the author, and felt a shiver down my spine at the idea that this very book, this very object, had once been held and opened by Laurence Sterne, and that I am a woman, but I decide not to say anything. I didn’t buy it, it is true, but it wasn’t for sale.

“George, did you ever take peyote?” Chester says. “You did, right? In the old days?”

George says, “Violet ink,” and nods absently.

“Once you’ve had it,” he says, his eyes fixed on George, “you understand music differently, you understand color differently, you understand these things in relation to each other once you’ve had it. Don’t you think? I mean, you and I, George, we remember those days, those hazy crazy days, and we know, don’t we? With peyote, you become synesthetic. I wonder if Nabokov took it. He was synesthetic. I think he did, I think he took it.”

“I doubt it. You don’t get much peyote on the Russian steppes,” says George. This is both dampening and provocative—George must know well enough that Nabokov didn’t have anything to do with the Russian steppes. I think George finds Chester difficult. We all do. Luke asked him to stop telling a couple of girls about Balthus the other day, and he pleaded the First Amendment.

He begins to explain to George that Nabokov’s Russia was the Russia of St. Petersburg, but George holds his hand up to him and says he was just teasing. Chester looks delighted at being teased.

“Anyway, in my eclectic batch this morning, aside from Percy Lubbock and Virginia Woolf, and two books on Maimonides, I got this thing.” He pats a large, dirty, creased paperback Bible.

“Is it valuable?” I ask, with some misgivings. It is not a thing of beauty. He hands it to me as Mitchell comes in.

“Valuable?” says George. “Oh, hi there, Mitchell. Well, Esme—what is value? I am sure Mitchell could tell us.”

“Value? I could try,” says Mitchell.

“Shakespeare could tell us also,” George adds. “ ‘What is aught, but as ’tis valued?’ ”

“What
is
your most valuable book,” says Mitchell, casually, “just as a matter of interest?”

“There is a copy of
Pale Fire
upstairs,” says Chester, with the air of someone who can’t help but disclose his precious secret and is taking a terrifying gamble on the chance that this man will walk away with it. “They have it priced at three thousand dollars.”

“
Pale Fire
by . . . ?” asks Mitchell pleasantly. The book is safe.

Chester looks pained. “Nabokov.”

“What would you give me for this?” asks George of Mitchell.

Mitchell looks dispassionately at the Bible. “I don’t want it,” he says, “but I would price it at three or four dollars.”

“No, you don’t want it, and we are all used now to being told what we do want by Amazon, which is busy protecting us from accident, precluding the serendipitous discovery. It belonged to Gregory Corso, who was one of the Beat poets—writers, I should say. Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and such.”

“
Howl,
” says Mitchell, like Lear. “Oh, and
On the Road
.”

George nods. “Yessir,
On the Road
. Although in my opinion,
On the Road
can’t hold a candle to some of the other material produced by the Beats, particularly Ginsberg, as you say. Corso’s poems outshine it too, at times—‘Marriage,’ and ‘Bomb.’ Esme, have you read ‘Marriage’?”

I shake my head.

“You maybe should, both of you. It casts a cold eye, et cetera.” George turns back to Mitchell, like the Ancient Mariner to the Wedding Guest, and says to him earnestly, “Corso was a New York street urchin. He showed up every day for school, he was even an altar boy on Sundays, and nobody knew he was sleeping in tunnels and such at night. And when he becomes a Beat he still manages, in the face of that showy, idealistic craziness, to hold on in some very real sense to his Catholic faith—I think that such a thing is oddly impressive; certainly it is moving.”

Mitchell is stopped in his tracks. He gets impatient when he has
to keep still and listen to anyone, but George seems to be exerting some strange Coleridgean power.

“In my opinion, there are moments in Corso’s poetry that approach a kind of momentous lyricism that contains a kind of understanding of something both of the world and beyond it. There are moments, anyhow, when something divine happens in Corso’s work.”

“I’ll have to look him up,” says Mitchell.

“But to your question. You’re an economist, and you ask what the most valuable book in here is? Well, the truth is, I don’t know. Is it
Hamlet,
where every sentence is a mine, every word a gem, every thought a treasure house? What about the Old Testament, or the New, or the Qu’ran, or
Nicomachean Ethics,
or Plato’s
Symposium
. . . we have no shortage of magnificent books. But for all that value, I think we have a copy of
Hamlet
for three dollars, and there are many places in the city where you can get a Bible or a copy of the Qu’ran for nothing.”

“Sure.” Mitchell smiles. “I was thinking more of a few pages of the Gutenberg. Or something quintessentially New York.”

“We haven’t so much as a molecule of the Gutenberg Bible. But perhaps we should consider this unprepossessing thing.” He holds up the Bible. “It is, after all, linked even by our conversation right to New York City, right to where we are right now, and to the modernist poetry of the twentieth century, to the tension between existentialism, where everything is held absurd, and faith, where everything is invested with meaning. So might it not be the case”—here, he leans forward towards Mitchell, his eyes and being intent upon him—“might it not be the case that this ragged Bible, with coffee cup stains on the front, is the summation of New York? This Bible—is it Corso’s? It’s likely not to be, it’s likely to be the line that some sharp New York dealer has spun—it hardly matters, Corso took a Bible
like
this through the streets of New York, from the church. When the city rejected him he stayed anyway, with a book
like
this in his pocket, and this book, with all its stains and all its creases, who knows how many subways and
streets it has gone through, who knows how many times Solomon has built his temple, who knows how many times Jonah has been spewed forth from the whale, who knows what pyrotechnics of imagination it has wrought, whether it was in Corso or in some mute, inglorious Milton. I think, I really think, that this book is a symbol of the city, not because it is rare and strange but because it
isn’t
.”