The Bookstore (38 page)

I
n the morning, early, I wake up to the sound of shoveling. I lie and listen to it for a while, to the rhythmic scrape of spade on pavement. It is another sound that makes me think of England rather than Manhattan, but I am not sure why; do we shovel things more often in England? The Koreans are calling to each other, and I can hear Spanish too; there are Hispanic guys employed at the deli who slice the watermelon and pluck the brown petals off the roses, so that New York can live in a dream of perfection. They sound happy today, even though it must have been very hard to get to work, and it is only about six thirty now. I go to the window again, and I can see one of the Hispanic guys scraping some snow together to make a snowball. He aims it with fatal accuracy at the woolly hat of a coworker, who yells and bends to make his own revenge snowball. They have shoveled a channel through the snow so now there is a pathway through two steep banks. There is still no traffic.

When I check, there is no bleeding at all. I am sure the danger is over, with a curious certainty that I would be embarrassed to tell anyone about. But Dr. Sokolowski said two or three days, so I decide to stay inside again today, despite the temptation of the snow. Stella is in and out the whole time, reporting tweets and
making me laugh and bringing me things to eat. Luke does not come. I knew that he wouldn’t. George calls to check that I am all right.

After lunch, I call Dr. Sokolowski to tell him. He sounds pleased.

“It doesn’t feel like I need to stay in bed . . .”

“I don’t think so, I don’t think so. If the bleeding has stopped, and there isn’t any pain, I would say no longer is there any need. You can get up. And come and see me tomorrow. I will check everything is now good.”

I GO TO
see him the next morning. Everything is now good. The one thing that is not good is that Dr. Sokolowski is retiring.

“I am going to go back to Estonia,” he says. “America is better; there is not much to doubt about that, but I miss my country.” He beams up at me suddenly, émigré to émigré. “That is love, no?” I say I am glad he is going back. He looks a lot more chipper than when I saw him last.

“I recommend to you therefore,” he says, “a move—this is an opportunity for a move. It is not too late. I think it would be good to move to the midwives.”

“The midwives?”

“The Manhattan Midwives. They are on 87th and West End. Go and see them. You will like them.”

“Isn’t there going to be a replacement for you?”

“Yes, but who knows what that means. These women are good. But Anya, she will make you drink so much raspberry-leaf tea, you will turn green.”

“Not red?”

“Leaf tea. Leaves are green. The tea relaxes the cervix. The baby—it will slip out.” He makes a slightly unpleasant slithery sound. “But not to drink yet! From five months. You are nearly there.”

He gives me the card for the Manhattan Midwives. He stands up to open the door for me, and I give him a quick hug. I don’t know if you’re allowed to do that.

“Have a lovely time in Estonia,” I say. “A lovely life.”

“I will see you before that,” he says, waving me away. We both know he won’t.

Outside, I call Mitchell to tell him that Dr. Sokolowski says it all looks good for the baby.

I also tell him about the midwives, which he sounds doubtful about.

“Even the word ‘midwife’ creeps me out,” he says. “It sounds medieval. It sounds like someone will be boiling cauldrons and casting spells. Stop being so old-world. Find an obstetrician.”

“ ‘Obstetrician’ is a different word for the same thing. You guys just decided you would use a nice Latinate term instead, and take the job away from the women,” I say.

“And add a sanitary environment.”

“And forceps.”

“Oh, please.”

“Dr. Sokolowski likes these women, Mitchell, and he’s a
man.
Anyway, I am going to see them.”

He sighs. “You’re so willful. Why did I choose a willful one?”

“I have something else to tell you, something upsetting.” I tell him about Dennis.

He says, “Really? In a basement? Did he OD?”

I say that they don’t know, and decide it isn’t quite the right moment to ask if he has any spare money for a funeral. But if he does, then at least we would have ashes to give to his daughter, if we ever found her.

I google potter’s fields, and Hart Island, to find out what Luke was talking about, where they will put Dennis unless we can find a different way. It makes very grim reading indeed. The city buries the homeless there, but also prisoners—and also babies. They bury them in mass graves. If your baby dies in a New York hospital, you might, in the whirl of grief and pain, sign a paper that says
“city burial” without knowing what you are signing. It means your baby, your child, will be taken up to that island, piled up with others in a trench. It sounds like a horror story, but it happens.

Torrents and torrents of rain came down in the night, so that New York is transformed once more—this time away from the white wonderland into a sliding slush of gray ice and water and mud, and it seems as if there is too much of it ever to go. But the day after that, when I step out onto Broadway in the fresh sunlight for my first morning back at Columbia, the gray slush has gone in its turn, and the city has a look of being washed through and sparkling again. The yellow cabs are zipping by; people are all hurrying in different directions muffled up in woolly hats and scarves; the blue sky is bluer than I remember, and the reds redder. The watermelon deliveryman is throwing his watermelons to the Hispanic guys at the deli, because they are too heavy to move any quicker way. There is a young guy walking past with about eight dogs that continually get tangled up in each other, and around the legs of another man, who swears and aims a kick at one of the dogs. A woman bends to them; “Oh, puppies, oh, my babies,” she says, crooning, “I’m a doggy mommy too! I’m a doggy mommy too. Yes, I am, beautiful, yes I am.” The dogs all step on each other to be scratched and patted, tangling the man up further.

“Take them to the fucking park,” says the man to the dog walker, through his teeth, like Jack Nicholson. The woman looks up from the dogs and says, “The
fucking
park? What about some fucking courtesy, you asshole?” The guy looks murderously at her for a second, and then lifts his hands to the heavens and walks on downtown.

I have been lying with the blinds down for too long.

I have a meeting with my professor that was postponed because of the bed rest, but first I call The Owl to see if there is any word on Dennis and his last name. There isn’t.

Professor Hamer likes my paper, but she recommends a trip to San Francisco to see the light, the better to understand the light in many of Thiebaud’s landscapes. I have already decided,
because of the bleeding and despite having no medical knowledge whatsoever, that I won’t fly while I am pregnant, so this trip would be after the birth. I picture what little I know of San Francisco, and what that trip might be like. Me and my baby in a cab to LaGuardia, going through security, spending hours on the flight, the baby crying, everyone on the plane wishing I could shut it up, all so that I can stand at the bottom of a lot of hills, thinking,
Hmmm. Lovely light
. But it must be fairly close to Los Angeles, so perhaps Stella could come with us, and then it would be fun.

Mitchell comes up to meet me for lunch outside Columbia, and takes me to V & T’s for pizza. I wouldn’t have ever gone into V & T’s, because the décor must have looked tired in 1960, but Mitchell says that if a place can survive in New York looking like this, the food must be good. I pretend we don’t both know that he has the Zagat app on his phone.

As I start on my pizza, which is good, I say, “I was in bed for hardly any time at all, and yet everything feels new.”

“Did anyone visit apart from Stella?” Mitchell asks.

I say, fatally, “What?”

He is instantly taut. “You heard me.”

“Yes,” I say, “Luke did once, from the bookstore. George sent him, to tell me about Dennis.”

That is more or less a lie. No, it is straightforwardly a lie. Why am I lying to Mitchell?

“Did anything happen?”

“Of course not,” I say.

“Esme. Something did.”

“Yes, something did—but not the kind of something you mean,” I say. “For God’s sake, Mitchell.”

“ ‘For God’s sake, Mitchell’? You have a man in your bedroom, and you don’t tell me, and you’re ‘For God’s sake, Mitchell’–ing me? Tell me what happened.”

“All that happened,” I say back, “was that he told me about Dennis and that it was likely he would be buried in what they call
a potter’s field, where they bury homeless people. They bury them in batches. Isn’t that awful to think of?”

“Yeah, it sucks. Did he hold you?”

“Who? Luke? No!”

“Where was he when he was in the room?”

“Sitting on the chair.”

“Did you cry?

“I don’t know—no, I don’t think so.”

“He didn’t comfort you in any way?”

I push my plate away.

“If he comforted me, he’s allowed to. I liked Dennis, and he liked Dennis, and we were both sad, and I was scared about the baby. Luke is my friend, he came to check that I was all right, and George wanted him to, and he brought me some watermelon, and I love you, Mitchell, I love you. But that doesn’t mean I can’t talk to any other man in the world. You’ve got to understand that. You’ve got to understand that you are everything to me, the east, the west, that nothing matters to me except you. You’ve got to believe me, and you’ve got to trust me, or we’re nothing at all.”

I have never said it all before, like that, straight out. Probably it is a bad idea, but surely there is a value in honesty? Mitchell leans back in his little wooden chair. The triumphant smile that he tries so hard to keep in check is back.

He glances around the restaurant, and turns up the volume a notch before he says, in a voice that is full of laughter, “I’ve got to understand you, and I’ve got to believe you, and I’ve got to trust you?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

He has some more of his pizza. Then he says, much more quietly, “You know, I play this game very, very well. And you play it very badly.”

“I am not playing a game.”

“Then you’ll lose.”

I shrug my shoulders at him. I think he is absolutely wrong. His face softens into wistful gentleness. He reaches for my hand.

“So listen. We should get married soon.”

A voice behind me calls out, “If she’s got other guys in her bedroom, buddy, I would hold off on the whole marrying thing.”

“I can’t help it,” he calls back, grinning. “I fell in love with her.”

“Oh. Then you’re fucked,” says the voice. I do not turn around.

“Please can we go?” I ask Mitchell. He looks down at his unfinished pizza but assents. I catch the waiter’s eye and ask for the check. He says it is under the pepper flakes, and we can pay when we’re ready. I pay the bill, and tell Mitchell I will wait for him outside.

He comes out, smiling from some final interchange with the other man.

“That guy said that if you are willing to pick up the tab then you’re a keeper.”

“I am pretty sure,” I say, “that I’m supposed to stay on an even keel, and this isn’t helping. Why do we have to be a spectacle?”

“You’re the one who declared your undying love in a pizza parlor.”

I tell him I’ve got to go to work.

“To the bookstore?”

“To the library.”

“I mean it, about getting married soon,” he says. He turns his footsteps in the same direction as mine, then stops dead.

“I’ve just had a great idea,” he says. “Do you have any time now? When do you have to be at The Owl?”

“We’re going to get married now?”

“No, no, Jesus, I’m not crazy, Esme, I’m just charmingly impulsive. I’m also making sure things are as they should be. I just had an idea about the venue. When do you have to be at work?”

“I have to go to the library before work. I have to put a lot of time into this paper; it’s got to be good, it’s in front of the whole department.”

“This will be really quick. I’ll just check.” He gets his phone out and calls someone. I ask him what he’s doing, but he cuts me off to speak enthusiastically to somebody called James.

When he’s finished, he says, “We’re in luck, he’s there.”

“Who is there? And where is there?”

He is striding towards the traffic, his arm in the air. A cab comes; he holds open the door.

“Where are we going?”

“I’ll have you at your library in an hour,” he says. And then, to the driver, “St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth, please. The cross street is 53rd.”

Mitchell leans back in the cab and grins at me. “I think you’ll like James. He’s right up your alley. And I was baptized at St. Thomas’s; my parents still go there when they are in town. I think my mother even listens to some of their audio feeds in Paris.”

The cab zips down Central Park West and across the park.

“Mitchell, I think it is terrible that Dennis will be buried in a grave for the homeless,” I say.

“Yeah, it sucks. But if they can’t find his family, then there’s no one to pay for a funeral.”