The Bookstore (43 page)

“I think we should try to connect to people,” I say. “Not in a commercial way, but in a real way. You ignored him.”

“Yes, I did. I should have paid attention, but he at least tried to get it. This time he failed. Next time he won’t. We’re not going to serve lattes. We’re going to sell books.”

I AM REWRITING
my male-gaze essay for a feminist art journal when I get a text from Mitchell, asking me if I have time to meet him at Señor Swanky’s for a coffee. Coffee is now code for “hot drink that won’t contain anything interesting for Esme.”

“I wouldn’t have had you down as a Señor Swanky’s fan,” I say, as I sit down on the yellow chair at the yellow table outside the yellow restaurant. “I suppose I still don’t get you . . .”

Mitchell takes my hand, sandwiches it between both of his. The gesture is tender.

“That’s where you make your mistake,” he says, in a voice to match the gesture, as soft as rainfall. “Don’t you understand yet, my poor Esme, that there is no me to get?”

This demeanor does not match the choice of restaurant. Mitchell is meticulous about this sort of thing—as he showed when he picked the Modern for his proposal. So if it seems like it doesn’t match, I am just not getting it. Again.

“There is a you to get,” I say. “You notice people, when there is something wrong, when there is something sad about them—you have a sort of quick sympathy. Unless it’s fake.”

He shrugs, laughs. “It’s mostly fake.”

“Why?”

“Because I know how to behave. Because I know that’s what you do.”

“I don’t believe you. I see you do it. I see that you mean it.”

He looks weary. “That’s part of it.”

I sit without speaking, and so does he. Mitchell has switched off whatever it was that always glowed at me before. When I was walking here from Columbia, I thought I was coming to an ordinary lunch date.

This is something he has to get through, this uncomfortable scene. He has to get through it in order to get to the clear blue air beyond me. That’s how he feels. I am sure.

He leans forward, his face in his hands. He is curled up, resistant. There is a flush of speckled red under his cheekbone; I can’t tell what it means. Is he upset or angry? It might be a shaving rash. I have never seen him shave, or thought of him shaving. It would be an intimate thing to be there for; more intimate than sex, since it is a thing he keeps entirely private, the door always firmly shut. Imagining him with the soap on his face, the razor poised, brings a sudden rush of fondness. Mitchell always has the door shut.

Still shielding his eyes from me with his hands, he says, “I used to be very good friends with a couple of guys from Yale, Tam and
Greg. We went everywhere together; we went to Rome together, Paris. In the summers when we all started working in New York, we always went to Long Island together. I thought the world of them.

“One day when we were all staying at someone’s house in Cape Cod, I woke up and I thought,
This relationship with these guys is hollow, there is nothing to it. They don’t matter at all to me.
And I got up and I drove back to New York, and I never saw them again.”

He emerges from his hands, and stares down Columbus Avenue. “And that’s how I feel about you now,” he says.

I do not move or speak.

Can you love someone
because
you see through all the barbed defenses to the center of a person, to his wounded heart? But what if it is a mistake? What if you peel back all those layers of cruelty to find a kernel, not of kindness that can’t risk itself, but of more cruelty?

“It was—enchanting—wasn’t it? For a while?”

“Yes,” I say.

“I was enchanted. But I woke up. From the spell.”

“Oh.”

“So that’s the end, I’m afraid.”

“Just like that.”

“Yes. Just like that.”

“No wedding.”

“No wedding.”

“You should tell James—”

Compunction flickers briefly across his face.

“I have.”

He does not make a move to go. I know, when he does, that we will never be together again, and I can’t bear it. When he gets up to go, I won’t be able to breathe.

“Is it because—is it because I said no to that thing—with the girl, in the coffee shop?”

“No.”

“Because if it is, I can . . . I can do that . . . ,” I say.

“Don’t. Don’t say it. Don’t embarrass yourself.”

“It
is
because of that. I can do it. I wanted to . . .”

He closes his eyes. “For God’s sake.”

“You think I don’t grab hold of life, that I am too scared to live life to the full, but I’m not, Mitchell, I can live life . . .”

This time he covers his ears. See no evil, hear no evil. But he doesn’t do the last one.

I say, slowly, “You’re frightened of getting hurt, so you are pushing me away. You push everyone away so that you won’t get hurt. If that’s what it is, you will do it again and again, and you’ll always think it is because it’s the wrong girl.”

He rears back from his fetal position and glares at me. There is no sea for these eyes; they’re like ice-blue fire.

“Can we just stop this? I am telling you that I don’t love you, Esme, that I don’t love you at all, and you are trying to—to
help
me. It’s like trying to piss off Florence Nightingale.”

“I don’t believe you. I think you love me.” I do think it. I am absolutely sure of it. It is a thing you are not supposed to say, but it feels too late to be holding back.

“You think I love you? What monumental confidence you have. And all of it misplaced, I’m afraid. Sorry about that, toots.”

“I love you,” I say.

He shrugs. “What can I do with that?”

I think that all the words he hurls at me are poisoned arrows and boiling oil and sharpened stones to protect the forlorn man inside. So that I won’t see he is there at all. There is a kind of blank agony in me, because I am losing him, and because I think he is in despair.

“I don’t even particularly like you,” he says now.

I say nothing.

“And if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t dream of going to that gallery opening.”

“Whereas I would,” I snap back, “because all of my time since meeting you has been such a treat.”

“I told you once before, being a bitch doesn’t suit you.”

“You said that I was your redemption, you said that I filled up all your gaps—”

“The past doesn’t interest me. I don’t feel like that now.”

“You asked me to
marry
you, you took me to the
church
. . .” I know it is pointless, but I have to say the words. I have to say them out loud, I have to say them to him. The wild sadness of it; I won’t get another chance.

“I told you, it was an enchantment. I’ve woken up.”

“The baby. You—what about the baby?”

“I will have children when I choose to have children. And I will choose who to have them with.”

“But there’s a child already, you care about that, don’t you—it will be your baby—”

“I know that. We’ll get lawyers. That’s what they’re for.”

“But I think you are rejecting me because—”

“Esme. For once in your life stop talking.”

“What have I done? What is different?”

“Nothing. I am different.”

“You’re pushing me away on purpose.”

“Finally, a breakthrough.”

“It is because you are so sad—what you said about being depressed, about there being no point to anything—I can help you, Mitchell, I can save—”

“No, you can’t,” he says, angry. “You can’t. Do you know how many women before you have tried?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t know. How many? You’re thirty-three years old. There can’t be that many.”

He smiles a wide parody of a smile at me. “Do you want to know? I can start counting . . .”

“No.”

“Sure? I can tell you how many I’ve fucked, or how many thought they could help me. It isn’t the same figure, because some of the women didn’t give a shit about me either. I preferred those, in fact. Less fuss.”

I do not react to this. He puts his face close to mine. “This is where you storm off in tears.”

“I am not going to storm off in tears. You have to walk away from me.”

“I have to walk away from you?” He laughs. “What, for the symbolism to work? Man walks away from his beloved and his baby?”

“If you like.”

He gets up.

“Fine by me,” he says. “Good-bye, Esme.”

“Good-bye, Mitchell,” I say. I look up at him. He turns uptown, and he walks away.

I leave Señor Swanky’s. I walk across to Amsterdam, and then to the park.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I
thought that love was flowing through the cosmic strands of right and virtue in the universe, falling on us, making all things well. As if it were outside of us, that we just opened ourselves to it. But it can’t be like that, it must be that we made it, and now we are unmaking it.

I try to think of what I have done. Is it that the wedding is closer, is it that I hesitated about marrying him that day at St. Thomas’s? That was the day I told him I loved him. Is it that? The plain declaration that voided the game?

I don’t think he was playing a game. He was as serious as I was. If it was a game, it was Mitchell, afraid of losing, who tipped the board up, sent the pieces flying.

I have to try to pin that curtain back up, that is needfully drawn between all of us. I ripped it down, thinking there was no use for it, thinking we could discard all convention, all withholding, and say what we thought, say what was real, speak out the truth.

All the wild words in the universe, spoken or written or sent, that the speakers ought to wish sucked back in and obliterated forever in the minds of everyone, the ones that cause wars, the ones that cause death and hatred and the suffering of thousands, all those; should we repent of “I love you” as well? Is it just a weakness,
to love? I can’t see it, I can’t see how there is any point to life without it. Isn’t relationship all in all?

All the errant “I love you”s don’t have such an effect, they don’t spark bonfires, either of tragic or magnificent dimensions. The spark they send out into the world whistles on a brick and dies.

I go home, and look in the mirror. In the same way that a person might draw a sharp blade across their flesh in order to have a physical pain to meet the pain in the mind, so I take my clothes off and stand naked there; naked, big bellied, alone, and sad. I smile at myself, because the haunted face does not improve the general impression. I look like a sad girl smiling.

The next morning, I wake up and remember, and the feeling is instantly there—the emptiness, the sense that there is no point doing anything, that all joy has drained out of the world.

I try to study to push it all away, but I can’t. I decide to clean.

The apartment does not need to be cleaned, but I clean it anyway. I sweep the floor with my floral-handled broom (bought from University Student Supply), and I vacuum my little rugs. The vacuum has the suction power of a giant limpet, and my rugs are like postage stamps. I stand on both sides of the rug and try to push the vacuum over it, but it still chews it up like some sort of deranged Muppet.

I take a damp cloth and put a dab of Ecover cleaning fluid on it, and wipe all the light switches and the doorways and skirting boards. I clean the entire bathroom, although I cleaned it a couple of days ago. I get an old toothbrush and scrub the grout between the tiles around the bath. In the kitchen, the iron things that surround the gas hobs so that your pan isn’t balancing on the hob itself—who knows what they are called—they actually do need cleaning. With great thankfulness I seize upon them and plunge them into hot soapy water. I get a pan scrub and set to work. I concentrate on the black bits that are cooked on. I work on them until they are gleaming.