The Bookstore (36 page)

I hear him open the door, and he calls out for me to take care. I call back, “Thank you.” The apartment door does not shut. He says, “Esme?” and then appears at the door of the bedroom. I am lying with the quilt up to my chin. “Have you had anything to eat? Since you noticed the—the problem?”

“No. I’m not hungry.”

He spreads his hands. “I’m not a doctor, but I would have said trying to keep everything normal would be good—eating right’s gotta be important. Can I go get you something?”

“I’m fine.”

He sits down on the little chair just inside the door.

“Honey, you’re not so very fine. I’m gonna go out and buy you some food, so you can either tell me what you would like, or I’ll get you something I’d like.” He waggles his McDonald’s bag at me. It smells wonderful. It is tempting to ask him just to give me that, but it might be true that they are made of cows’ eyelashes.

“I have some things in the fridge. You don’t have to go out. Could you—if you don’t mind—would you make me a sandwich? I’ve got bagels, and mozzarella, and rocket.”

“Sure.” He’s getting up to go to the kitchen.

“And I have some cans of V8, can I have one of those? Would you like one too?”

“No, I’m okay with Sam Adams.”

“And will you eat your lunch with me?”

“I guess—if you want me to . . .”

I smile at him to show him I do. Perhaps he can see from the
smile how scared I am, because he stops looking awkward and embarrassed to be there, and just looks at me from the doorway. I want to say to him that I don’t want to lose my baby. It is obvious, of course, but I want to tell him, I want to say something honest to him. I have not been honest to Luke, hiding things about Mitchell. If I can say this, it will be nakedly honest. But I can’t say it. I can’t say “lose” and “my baby” in the same sentence. The mystic power of words is too strong, I can’t risk it.

“Oh, Luke,” I say, instead.

“I know,” he says, softly, like he said to Mrs. Kasperek, grieving for her books. “I know. There’s a good heartbeat. It will be okay.”

I nod, and smile, because he wants me to.

He comes back in with the lunch on my floral Laura Ashley tray. He does not look like he belongs in my apartment. I sit up. I am hungry. He has his beer but no burger.

“Where’s yours?

“I ate it while I was fixing your bagel. They lose some of their culinary delicacy when they get cold.”

“You’ve been working with George too long.”

“I know it.”

I drink some of the V8. It was nice of Luke, to realize that I needed some food. I had forgotten all the rest, in my fixation on keeping still.

“When I was with the doctor at Columbia, he said that it was possible that I would experience fetal demise.”

Luke says nothing.

“Don’t you think that’s shocking? That he uses words like that?”

“I guess he’s trying to save your feelings.”

“Yes, but if he is, it’s not working, because it turns round on itself, so that you think they are not according the tragedy of it enough dignity. It’s—it’s warding off the moral imagination. You know they say ‘miscarriage’—I’ve been thinking about that too. ‘Miscarriage’? Like ‘miscarriage of justice’? Or like you are not carrying it right, like it’s the woman’s
fault
that she hasn’t
carried the child right. But, Luke, fetal demise—it’s horrible, it’s shocking—shocking, because it isn’t honest, it’s so cruel and clinical, ‘
you may experience fetal demise
’—if they say ‘demise,’ then you are not meant to think of a baby who will—never be born, a child that has died; you are meant to think of some process that you can’t quite understand—that isn’t to do with you. Why can’t they say, ‘Miss Garland, your baby might die’? That’s plain and honest. There’s a goodness in saying it like that, a kindness. The other way doesn’t allow you to feel; there’s a kind of command in it to see it as something that doesn’t touch you—oh, but if it dies, Luke, if it dies, it won’t ever be held by its mother and I won’t ever see it, and it won’t ever smell what wood smells like burning, or ever see the sky, or a flower, and I won’t ever see it, Luke—I won’t—see—”

He has his arm around me. I am crying into my hands, like a ridiculous nineteenth-century heroine. I’ve still got a bit of bagel in my mouth that I can’t swallow. And I was trying to keep calm.

Luke says, “We’ll all help you the best we can, Esme. If we can save your baby by keeping you still, we’ll all keep you very, very still.”

WHEN HE HAS
gone, I lie still again and focus on flowing love at the baby. I wonder if this is a kind of prayer. It feels a bit like praying. I haven’t done any of that for a long time, though, ever since the evangelical Christians tried to ambush me when I was at college at home. And if you don’t believe particularly in God when you aren’t in trouble, it seems a bit fair-weather to me to decide to believe in him when you need some help. So I don’t pray, I do this. I lie in the quiet, while the Broadway traffic outside murmurs on.

With nobody here, it is easier to think that something powerful is sustaining the baby, something I can’t begin to understand,
as if this focus is a real force, one that you could measure with machines. I don’t want any music, or the laptop, or the radio, obtruding into our silence. If I stay quiet, I will be able to reach it, and it will know, and stay alive.

Stella comes after her classes and offers to get me some dinner, but I want to wait for Mitchell. She has even offered to cook for me, which I hope we don’t have time for, because she would have to learn first. When she goes out to get my key copied so that I don’t need to get in and out of bed for her, she comes back carrying two bright green smoothies from Whole Foods. I sip one. It’s like drinking someone’s garden.

She perches on the end of the bed, texting people and talking to me between texts or tweets or whatever she’s doing. She does it all with a kind of blithe grace that wards away my attempting to express gratitude.

“I thought Mitchell would be here by now,” I say to her. “Do you think anything has happened to him?”

“When people are late, it’s never because they’re dead.”

“It must be sometimes,” I say.

She says, “Mitchell’s not dead, and he’s not lying unconscious somewhere either. He will definitely come. He just won’t come quickly.”

As she says it, the buzzer goes. Stella smiles blandly and goes to answer it.

Mitchell appears holding a huge bunch of flowers. I don’t recognize them as being part of the Koreans’ repertoire, or from any of the other delis around here. He might have bought them from a real florist.

“Are you okay, Miss Esme Garland?” he says. He holds the flowers aloft and says, “I thought you might prefer these to grapes.” There is the predictable sound of a shutter clicking, and Stella lowers her camera. “Thanks,” she says.

He bends to kiss me. Stella takes the flowers with the air of a disapproving servant. She says, “I’ll do these in my apartment. Text me when you need me.”

“Oh, yes, Stella—thanks so much for helping out here,” says Mitchell. “Esme will be all right now.” He turns to me. “So, okay, let’s sort you out. What do you need?”

Stella turns, and says to Mitchell’s back, “She doesn’t need anything, because other people have helped her out all day. The store knows, her professors know, I’ve been shopping for her, and she’s fine.”

“Great. That’s great,” says Mitchell. He rolls his eyes at me comically.

“Esme, I’ll bring the flowers back in the morning. You shouldn’t have them at night because they give out more carbon dioxide then.” She slides her eyes towards Mitchell. “Grapes would have been better.”

“Thank you,” I say, “and thanks for all you’ve done today.” She waves a careless hand. When she has gone, Mitchell says, “Grapes? That lesbian friend of yours takes photographs of me
all the time
. I’m just saying.”

“She takes photographs of everyone.”

“No, she doesn’t. She’s irresistibly drawn to my animal magnetism.”

“I think she’s immune to your animal magnetism.”

He shakes his head. “There’s not a woman born. Hey, I’m starving. You can eat regular food, I take it? I don’t have to get you broth or something like that?”

“You don’t have to get me broth. I can eat.”

“That is excellent news. I am famished. Should I order Mexican?”

“Yes,” I say, feeling exasperated and fond at the same time.

He gets the menus out, sits down at the table, and says, “You look hot in those pajamas. I haven’t seen them before.”

I look down at the pajamas. The brushed cotton, the pale blue shade, the cupcakes. I am ashamed of them.

“You’re kidding,” I say.

“No, you look innocent. Deflowerable.” He taps the number into the phone and says in an aside as he’s waiting for them to answer, “Don’t let any men in here.”

When he’s ordered, he says, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“How are you feeling?” As he asks me, he doesn’t look at me, but he fishes out his iPad instead and frowns at it. I don’t say anything, because it doesn’t seem to me to be a real question. He produces a handkerchief and rubs the glass with it, painstakingly.

“Ah,” he says, sitting back and regarding the screen. “That’s better. I feel like a new man.”

“So do I,” I say. I grin at him, because I think that’s funny.

He looks speculatively at me over the top of his iPad. After a moment, he comes over, sits down on the bed, stretches one arm to the other side of my body.

“You do
see,
” he says, “that I am trying to keep things as normal as possible? You see that, right? It is important not to panic. You will be fine. We will all be fine.”

He leaves me after the food, so that I can rest. I pass the night in an anticipation of the sudden and desperate pain that will herald loss, but it does not come. The morning comes instead, and I decide that after all bed rest does not mean the blinds have to be kept down, but when I pull them up a blanket of dull white cloud is revealed, which makes me think of home. I pull them down again.

I think that the bed rest is working. I am
sure
the baby is still alive. And perhaps the longer it stays alive, the more likely it is to keep on going. I can’t feel any bleeding either.

I will be all the sadder, thinking like this, if it doesn’t work. I have such a conviction that my own will, my own love, my own body, can save it. As if love is the only fortress strong enough to trust to. As if that ever works. Where would the tragedy be if love could save us? Love can’t save all those soldiers killed in battles. It didn’t save them at Agincourt, it doesn’t save them in Afghanistan; instead the immense love of the mothers for their sons flows on, with no recipient, like light flowing into space, never ending and never coming back. “The family has been informed,” they say on the news, when you hear of another twenty-year-old pointlessly
dead. “Relatives,” they often say instead, because “family” hurts more. There is a solemn face from a government person, as permanent as a leaf, and a photograph of a grinning guy my age or younger, with short hair, in an army shirt. Sometimes they’re not smiling, but look grave, as if to show they have undertaken a serious business. First battalion, second battalion. Royal Fusiliers. Wootton Bassett. He was nineteen, he was eighteen, he was twenty-one. His commander described him as. It is with deep sadness. He will be greatly missed.
Dulce et decorum est. When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Love doesn’t work, love doesn’t save anyone, love can’t save anyone.

And yet do I get up, go to the library, abandon the chance? I do not.

I go, with extreme care, to the bathroom. There is still bleeding. Perhaps quite not as much, but I don’t know if hope is skewing my judgment.

As I am prudently getting back into bed, Stella comes in with a box of herbal tea called Bedtime.

“You know I swear by pharmaceuticals normally, rather than granola-head stuff, but this tea is great. It helps me sleep. It doesn’t have any health warnings on it, even for Californians, so I figured it was safe. It will help you to rest.”

“What’s in it?” I ask.

She reads. “Valerian root. And it’s got St. John’s wort in it. I think that cures the blues.”

“It doesn’t cure the blues, it cures insurrections,” I say. I was trying to say “impotence” and something about erections at the same time. I start laughing. For some reason everything is funny. “What’s the word I want?”

She says, “ ‘Erectile dysfunction,’ though it’s not a phrase I have to worry about too often. I’ll put the kettle on.”

Once she has made me the drink that will cheer me up/make me sleep/cure my erectile dysfunction, she has to go out to a lecture. I am left to silence again, and so I do the same as I did
yesterday, because there is nothing else to do except be still and hope.

It is late afternoon when Luke phones up to see if I am all right. I say I am, and he says in that case he will not come up. I ask him where he is, and he says he is on 116th and Broadway. About three minutes from me.

“Then come up,” I say.

“Oh, no, not if you don’t need anything . . .”