The Bookstore (44 page)

This time, it really is an ending. This time, he has decided to cut me out of his life with surgical precision.

I used to be bemused by the heroines in Shakespeare’s comedies, who suffer any amount of injustice from their silly suitors and are still happy to accept them at the end.
Why would you?
I thought.
Shakespeare got that wrong.
He didn’t, of course. I am not sure he got anything wrong.

I look ahead down all the days that will not have Mitchell in them, and I think that in time, I will get over him. And part of me doesn’t want to, because that’s just another way of saying I will forget what delight feels like.
Let darkness keep her raven gloss.

Despite the grayness and pointlessness that has covered me like a blanket, I carry on doing all the things I am supposed to do. Depressed people don’t get out of bed. I get out of bed. Depressed people can’t make decisions. I make lots of decisions. I carry on writing, carry on studying, carry on attending childbirth classes, carry on working at The Owl. I do not mope about, I do not look glumly on as people laugh about something. I pretend I am as merry as the next person, and hope that they’re not pretending too.

I tell George, and I tell Stella. George says he is sorry; he looks grave, but not sorry. Stella says that he is not worth five minutes of my time, five atoms of my tears, and that he never was. I don’t agree. He is still radiant to me, and without him everything is dark.

I send him a text. I say that I hope it wasn’t something that I did that I don’t know about, I say that I am not ashamed of loving him. I ask him if he would like to know when the baby is born.

The act of communicating with him, even one-way, just knowing that he will read it, or at least see my name on his phone, is a bitter pleasure.

I wait for hours expecting a reply, and then days hoping for one. Then the hope fades altogether. There is nothing.

GEORGE HAS ASKED
me to come in, on Sunday. I have been reserving Sunday morning for staying in bed, hugging myself close, letting myself cry where nobody can see or judge. George
says, “If you can’t manage it, Esme, just tell me. I can ask Mary. I don’t want to pass you over just because of the pregnancy.” I say yes, then, of course. I should have said yes immediately, for the money.

At The Owl, George is sitting at the front desk, leaning back in the chair, his arms behind his head. He is grinning because someone, a customer, is leaning on the Southeast Asia section, telling him a funny story. He looks relaxed and happy, with his spirulina shake and his packet of triple-milled flaxseed. He is wearing a T-shirt too, instead of his usual shirt and leather waistcoat. His demeanor suggests a holiday.

When he sees me, he greets me, still laughing, and introduces me to Bob, who he says is a book scout.

“I don’t imagine your young friend here would know what a book scout is,” says Bob.

“I guess that’s true,” says George. “You’re like a black rhino, Bob. Esme, a book scout is someone who—”

“Scouts for books?” I ask.

“She was at Cambridge,” George explains. Bob nods thoughtfully.

“What can I do for you, Esme?” asks George.

“You
asked
me to come in.”

“I . . . did. Indeed I did. I asked you to come in because I have an important job for you. I hope you won’t find it too onerous.”

Half an hour later Luke and I are in a cab on our way to Manhattan Mini Storage on Riverside and 134th. We are surrounded by bags of books; there are more in the boot, and more piled onto the passenger seat in the front. I am under a paternal-care order from George not to do any lifting; my job is to take an inventory of the books as they get packed away.

“I don’t quite see the urgency of this,” I say.

“You have to make a record of the books when you are about to lock them away from sight. Otherwise you might as well throw them into the Hudson. We’re here.”

It is one of those parts of New York that is not on anyone’s
mental map, just bleak streets and warehouses and no trees. The place itself, apart from its perky blue styling, is depressing, because it is a square box with the ghost outlines of windows that are now bricked up. I help Luke put the bags of books onto a trolley.

“We’re on the third floor,” he says.

The lift is cavernous, big enough for a stash of grand pianos. When we get out, we stare down the corridor. It looks like a morgue—or what I imagine a morgue looks like. Doors, just doors, sealed, clinical, receding.

“This is creepy,” I say, as Luke pushes the trolley along. “Don’t you think? I mean, you could kill someone and stash them here, and if you put them in a Ziploc bag, perhaps nobody would ever know.”

“You can’t get Ziplocs that big,” says Luke. “And it would burst. It would burst because the body would rot.”

“All right, then—what if you got one of those bags that you use to store fur coats and special dresses, the kind that has a fitting so that you can vacuum the air out? You could put the body in one of those, and then suck the air out, and then it wouldn’t rot, and then nobody would ever know. It could be that there are hundreds of dead bodies in here.”

“People are not using Manhattan Mini Storage to store dead people. They are using it to house textbooks that nobody’s ever gonna open again, and old computers with stuff on them that one day someone is going to figure out a way to extract, and clothes that people are paying to store for a lifetime, so the bargain sweatshirt ends up costing them five hundred bucks . . . this one is ours.”

He opens up a door and switches on a light. There are lots of boxes of books, labeled by subject, on metal shelving. There is a chair right in the middle of the room. It looks like an art installation.

“Sit down,” he says. “I’ll make up a couple new boxes, and then we’ll get going. I’ll read out the author and title to you, and you write it down. Real quick, or we’ll be here until dark.”

I open my notebook and wait to begin. Why does nothing seem to have any savor? Luke is crouched on the floor, sorting the books into sizes.

“Hardcover,
Pools,
Kelly Klein—”

“Oh!” I say. “Let me see that! That’s got photos by great people in it—Bruce Weber and Mapplethorpe and people like that . . .”

“First edition, one hundred seventy-five dollars. You can’t look at it. We’ll be here all day. Write it down.”

“I’ve always wanted to see that book . . .”

“Then go to Barnes and Noble and take a look in the photography section. Helen Levitt,
Here and There.
Seventy dollars. What?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I just like Helen Levitt. She took photographs of street children in New York—she died not that long ago. Why are these books getting packed up? It’s silly, they’re great.”

“I dunno. Maybe they’ll get more valuable, maybe they’re dupes. Just make the note. Next, hardcover, Josef Sudek, first edition,
The Window of My Studio.
”

“Oh!” I say. “Oh, Luke, I don’t care about the pools one, but I love Sudek, I really do, and particularly the ones he took through his window in the rain, that kind, so please let me see it—please, just that one . . .”

He passes it to me, bemused. “The Owl must be like a candy store to you,” he says.

I look through it. George has it marked at forty dollars.

“Forty dollars,” I say, “that’s not much. If I am here with you for four hours . . .”

“Give it back to me,” says Luke. “You’re going to need your money, Esme.” His tone is gentle.

I pass it back, wordless. I had been keeping it all at bay.

“You know you’ll be okay?” he says, keeping his eyes on the books. I watch him. He is rearranging them in the box, and they were already fine.

“No,” I say. “I don’t know that.”

“You’re interested in stuff. You’re hurting, and you’re still interested
in stuff. That’s the sign. The sign you’ll be okay. Maybe”—he hesitates—“maybe you didn’t even really love him.”

I start to nod my head, not in agreement, but in politeness, to acknowledge his kindness. But even the shallowest acquiescence to that idea is such a monumental untruth that revolt sweeps through me. I have to bolt for my bag, wrench it open. In front of Luke, because there is no alternative, I am sick into it. I am vomiting and crying at the same time, all for loss, and all under the male gaze.

“Or maybe you did,” says Luke.

This makes me laugh, to add to the sickness and the tears.

“You vomited into your purse. There’s a concrete floor in here.”

“I know. I thought it was better to be sick into a receptacle.”

“Your purse. I’ll go and get some water.”

“No, I will go downstairs to the toilets.”

In the little gray bathroom of Manhattan Mini Storage, I try to rinse my vomit-covered possessions. I stuck a copy of
All the Pretty Horses
that I borrowed from The Owl into my bag before I left; I keep dutifully starting to read it. I wash it a little but then give up and drop it into the waste bin. My phone is not happy, either, but I have to clean that up. My phone. It used to connect me to Mitchell. Since Señor Swanky’s, it has felt like a dead thing.

I do not believe that I will be okay. I believe that I can look at a photograph by Ansel Adams or Josef Sudek and think it is good without my heart being mended. I will not say so to Luke.

I go back up and help him finish the rest of the books. When we get back outside, Luke says, “In a few minutes I’ll be back down in the basement at The Owl.”

“Let’s walk for a bit then,” I say. “We can get a cab when we get tired.”

“The subway,” says Luke. “It was a cab here because of the books. But sure, we can walk for a little while.”

We walk down the unprepossessing bit of Riverside.

“I wish we could do something about Dennis,” I say. “I am sure if we tried harder we could.”

“But this isn’t the movies. We’ve got to let it go. You tried, we tried. And it will be too late now.”

“I hate the thought of that cemetery.”

“I know. But then, don’t just keep focusing on Dennis. It’s over for him. Join a campaign; if there isn’t one, start one. Make something happen.”

“I’m one person.”

Luke says, “Everyone is one person. Look at the history books. Rosa Parks was one person. The other people moved.”

“What other people?”

“On the bus, the other people moved. She didn’t. I’m just saying.”

I say, “I don’t know if I can. I would hear so many awful stories, it would be so sad—and, Luke, it’s too near—it’s too close.”

He nods. “I know, sweetheart. But nobody ever wants to go near those things. That’s how nothing happens.”

I decide that I will go home and see if the Wikipedia assertions about the babies and the city hospitals is true, and if it is, I will see if there is a campaign, and I will help. I don’t say this out loud, because you can sometimes think you’ve done a thing when all you’ve done is declare it.

“All the same,” I say, “I do believe that there ought to have been some sort of send-off for Dennis.”

Luke looks down the street. I look in the same direction, and see a big New York church. He says, “You can go in there and say a prayer for him.”

“I don’t think I believe in God.”

“No, neither do I. Maybe God doesn’t care whether we believe in him or not.” He looks wryly at me. “Go on, go in. Say a prayer for Dennis from the both of us. Who knows what works and what doesn’t work? I’ll wait for you.”

Luke hails a cab when I come out again, and we get in. I do not say anything about the subway.

We are nearly back at The Owl when Luke says, “I’ve got a lot of rehearsals coming up, and they’ve got to be on Fridays. That
was the only way we could work it. Bruce is doing my Friday shifts for me. And after that, I’ve going to the New York Folk Festival.”

“Are you playing at the festival?”

Luke shrugs. “Yeah, sure. I’ll take my guitar. It’s one of the few places left where you can just jam. It’s cool.”

“I mean, are you playing? Performing?”

“You mean on the main stage at nine
P.M
., looking out at ten thousand eager faces in Battery Park? No.” Luke shakes his head. “Oh, Esme,” he says.

“Don’t you want to?” I ask.

“No, I really don’t.”

“I don’t believe you. You have something to say. So surely—you would want to say it?”

“I don’t have anything to say, Esme. I have something to be. I am being it. I thought I should mention it,” Luke says.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

I want to say that I will miss him, because it will be true. But it is not as true as if I were saying it to Mitchell, for whom I am made of yearning. I have learned, in chastened-heroine style, that words are more important that I could possibly have imagined. You can’t flip them into the air like ping-pong balls, rain them down on someone like confetti, just throw them about so happily. Saying what is true is difficult. So I don’t say anything.

“You’re quiet these days, sometimes, you know. Since—you know, I guess since Mitchell.”

I smile at him. “Fridays won’t be so good with Bruce instead of you,” I say. “What are you practicing for?”