The Bookstore (40 page)

“You’re good,” I say.

“I know,” he says.

“You didn’t mention God.”

“God suffuses the whole.” He pushes himself back from the desk and says, “I’m just going to have a word with Meredith in the other office. I’ll only be a moment.”

Once he has left, Mitchell moves his eyes in my direction without moving his head. “Well?”

“It was a very impressive speech.”

“Yes.”

I pause. “But I didn’t need convincing that the institution is a good idea. It isn’t about any of that, or about this church; it is more that I think you might be doing something against your nature, that you won’t be happy, that it won’t suit you.”

Mitchell is staring at me with an arrested look. “Oh,” he says softly, “why didn’t I see before? What you need is for me to go down on bended knee and declare my undying love.”

“No,” I say quickly, “no, you’re not listening.”

“I am listening, and I was listening. I’m the east and the west, the sun and the moon. And I was supposed to say it back, when you told me you loved me. Wasn’t I?”

“I only love you north-northwest.”

His eyes crinkle, he relaxes. “Is that so? Then I am going to make you love me at every compass point there is.”

When James comes back in, Mitchell says, “Write us in your book, my man, write us in.”

“Really?”

“Really. Esme? Can he write us in?”

“If my parents can—”

“If your parents can. Of course. And mine, for that matter. Let’s call them today, and in the meantime, James, keep our booking.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

T
he next day I have my first shift at the bookshop since the bed rest. When I get there, the sun is shining. There is a homeless person whom I’ve never seen before, stacking up books for George to inspect. The multicolored roses that were tight buds the last time I was here have now exploded into flower, crammed cheek to cheek in the pot. There is a customer up a ladder and another one plowing deep into the fiction section.

George is peeling a couple of dollars from a big roll.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.”

“You’re all better?”

“All better. Ready to work.”

“Glad to hear it. We’ve missed you around here. Although your flowers seem to be thriving. I’m glad also—you know—” He waves a slightly embarrassed hand in the direction of my belly.

I wait for the street guy to leave before I say, “It’s a shame about Dennis.”

George nods slowly. “Mostly you don’t hear what happens to them. They just suddenly go off your radar, so you figure they’re either dead or in Philadelphia.”

“There’s no progress on finding his daughter?”

“No. Not so far as I know.”

“And Luke said it was an overdose?”

“That’s apparently what they said. They pretty much always do say that, of course, and it might be true, or it might be because most of the other possibilities don’t look too good on the stats. And government forms need one cause. Bureaucracy needs simplicity, and the call for simplicity sometimes means you can’t tell the truth.

“There have been some good guys over the years—Winston, Jerry, Michael—a lot of people. Some of those guys used to bring in some great books, and other things as well—maps and paintings and all sorts of things—and all of them are gone now. They weren’t all homeless, but the rents, the changing face of the West Side—they’ve all been forced out. Winston—he was an old guy, he used to live in a tiny apartment that was near that Irish bar on 79th, the Dublin. Never mind being able to swing a cat in there—you couldn’t
fit
a cat in that place. It was a pitiful place. I saw it when he was leaving—I bought a bookcase from him. It was a piece of crap—I had to throw it away once he’d left. The landlord put up his rent by seven and a half percent.”

“That’s not all that much . . . ,” I say. I am thinking that if you can afford a dollar you can afford seven and a half cents more.

George looks at me, unimpressed. “It depends on how much you’ve got.” He shakes his head and then says, “Listen. I hope I won’t become the victim of a feminist tirade if I say I would rather you didn’t pick up heavy piles of books, or go on the ladders, or do anything too strenuous, for the time being.”

“You are all immovable in your silly idea of what feminism is. Thank you. And thank you for sending Luke. He really helped me.”

George is setting up the books that he has just bought on the counter, and doesn’t reply.

“What’s missing?” he says. “There is at least one missing, I am sure.”

I look. He has green hardcover copies of
Adam Bede
,
The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner,
and a two-volume set of
Middlemarch
.

“There’s no
Daniel Deronda,
” I say, “but you’ve got all the good ones.”

“On the Upper West Side, that statement amounts to anti-Semitism,” says George.

He gets a big reference book from under the counter and starts to leaf through it. “There’s no
Felix Holt,
either. Or
Romola
. Jeez. I am losing my touch.”

“No, these are fine. They are a subset—you can sell these all together.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he says. “Price them, and then find them a happy home, will you? Hi, Luke.”

Luke is just coming in, maneuvering his guitar through the piles of books.

“Hey,” he says. Then another hey to me, and a look of doubt. “You’re sure you’re well enough?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Lift more than three books at once and I’ll wring your neck.”

“Oh, and Luke,” says George, “thanks
so
much for doing what I—er—asked, and checking in on Esme. That was very thoughtful.”

“No problem,” says Luke, and takes his guitar upstairs.

“Let’s put all the George Eliots in the window,” I say. “With a nice bright sign for their price as a sort of set.”

George is grinning into his reference book for some reason, and isn’t listening, so I have to say it again.

“Sure,” he says, and raises his head to look for Luke, who is still upstairs. He calls out, “Do as the lady says, would you?”

“It’s okay, I can do it, I’m fine,” I say. I take out some of the books that are in the window, to make room, and decide that I am going to tell them about the wedding date. I didn’t tell them about the proposal, and that all went badly wrong.

I say, “By the way, I have a date for my wedding, providing my parents can come, and they are looking for flights today. It’s the seventeenth of June, so quite soon, and it is going to be at St. Thomas’s Church, which is on—”

“Fifth Avenue,” says George.

“Yes. Mitchell and I will send out invitations, I expect, but it is going to be a very small wedding. You are all invited; I really hope you can come.”

Neither of them says a word.

“What’s wrong?” I say.

Luke says, “I thought you were going to wait, going to be married in England, once the baby was born. Didn’t you say something about that one time?”

“Yes,” I say. “I did. And that was what I thought. That way my friends from home would come, and from Cambridge, and I imagined it like that, but Mitchell—he has a friend who is a priest at St. Thomas’s, and he said he wants to marry me before the baby—and they have a space.”

“Is legitimacy an issue?” asks George.

“I don’t think so,” I say. George is waving a torch towards caves best left dark. It is a motive that hadn’t even occurred to me, and now I feel miserable again, unsure of Mitchell again. “I didn’t think of that. It might be that.”

“I don’t think it’s that,” says Luke. “I think he knows a good thing when he sees it.”

I smile at Luke. “Will you come, if you can?” I ask him, and glance at George to encompass him. Luke looks back at me.

“Sure, if we can, we will,” George says. “Won’t we, Luke?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

T
oday is Saturday. I get up to streaming sunshine, as ever. I am six months pregnant. I stand naked in front of the mirror—the bump curves very pleasingly, from the front, but once I am dressed, and I turn to the side, I look like a wobbly man who won’t fall over. How very irritating, that our haywire hormones mean that we can feel so erotically charged while we look like Weebles.

Yesterday I paid my first visit to the midwives recommended by Dr. Sokolowski. They made me feel as if I were back in England. They talked about home birth, about water birth, about natural birth, about all the birth that is far away from a tubular metal bed, far away from all those green hospital garments. I spoke to two of them, and I will meet all seven in due course, so that I will already know whichever one I get on the day. I also have to go to some childbirth classes. They were shocked that I haven’t been already. They let me sign up for them, and I formally signed away my connection with Dr. Sokolowski. They also recommended someone on the Upper West Side for the childbirth classes, who has a practice quite near The Owl. I asked them, as they were all European, if I could ever have a drink, just a small one. They all said no. They told me to drink lots of raspberry-leaf tea.

I am meeting Mitchell for an early coffee at Sarabeth’s. I would like him to stay over more often than he does, but he says he wants there to be a significant difference between being engaged and being married, so last night he went home at midnight. I am supposed to move into Sutton Place once we’re married, and then about six weeks after that, the baby will be born. None of it seems real.

It is quite warm outside—the women walking down Broadway are not wearing coats. They all look pleased to be walking down Broadway in the sun. I look in my cupboard and wonder if I have any clothes at all that can transform me into a desirable woman. The short answer is no. People say pregnant women can look sexy, but I can’t see it.

Mitchell is walking up to Sarabeth’s as I am walking down to it; I feel that stab of happy surprise when I see him.

“You look good,” he says.

As we sit down with our coffees, we pass a girl at a table in the window, with a low-cut blouse on; her breasts look perfect, like two big scoops of vanilla. Even to me, they look beautiful. Mitchell looks, and then looks at me, raising his eyebrows, the naughty schoolboy.

“I know exactly what they’ll be like. Exactly. Round and creamy and firm, with big nipples—nipples, I think, of the palest pink. Coral. Delectable.”