The Bookstore (45 page)

“We’re going on tour after the festival. I will most likely miss the—the birth.”

“You’ll see us when you get back.”

“Yep,” says Luke. We pull up at The Owl.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I
t is my first Friday with Bruce instead of Luke. According to Bruce, Luke has exchanged the next
eight
Fridays with him. As he breaks this news, a customer comes in, and as I am in the main chair, he says, “Oh, hello, miss. Do you happen to have a biography of Lorenzo da Ponte?”

I have not even had a chance to look mystified when Bruce surges forward.

“No, sir, we don’t, but interestingly enough, we just sold a biography of Emanuel Schikaneder.”

“Ah,” says the customer, knowingly. “But no da Ponte.”

Bruce shakes his head, and the customer departs.

“You don’t know who Schikaneder is, do you?” Bruce says.

“No,” I say.

“I’m disappointed, but—honestly?—I am not surprised. Groucho Marx often used Schikaneder as an example of a man who was lost in history. He was the librettist on
The Magic Flute
.”

I nod.

“I bet,” says Bruce suddenly, “that he is forgotten because he was Jewish. Hold on.”

He stomps up the stairs and goes to the computer.

“Oh, he wasn’t Jewish. He was just German.”

“Right. Bruce? The next
eight
Fridays?”

“Yeah,” he says. “But don’t worry—I don’t mind—Luke would do the same for me. In fact he did, when I was helping to make the set for
I’m Not Rappaport
. We had to cover every leaf with fire-resistant spray, did I tell you?”

“Yes,” I say, listlessly and dishonestly.

I am sorry about the Fridays. Fridays are my favorite night at The Owl; there is so often a lock-in. Even George sometimes comes, and Barney is a regular. I think of those lamp-lit nights, with the bottles of beer and the quiet friendliness, and my breath catches. I didn’t know they were going to be part of the past so soon. I thought the first couple of times that Luke would play his guitar, but he never does. We talk, or we’re quiet. It feels when we do this as if we are in a different era. But that won’t be happening if it is Bruce and not Luke who is in charge: Bruce locks up and goes home.

“Oh.” Bruce frowns. “I didn’t know I’d told you about
I’m Not Rappaport
. The set got a special mention. We were trying to recreate Central Park in the autumn, so we had quite a job with the leaves. And we got the lamppost from the 1975 Broadway production of
The Third Man
. We needed to change the style, because postwar Vienna lampposts and Central Park lampposts are not quite the same.”

“No. I don’t suppose they would be.”

“Although they are not as different as you might expect.”

“Both black poles with lights on top?”

“The man who designed the 1930s poles in Vienna was a Swede, Gustav Benriksson, who had died in 1890. The poles were still there because of course, lampposts can far outlive the person who invented them.”

“Yes.” This is what life will always be like now.

“But anyway, Olmsted had seen the poles in Vienna and wanted similar ones for Central Park. Of course, a lot of the ones that are in the park wouldn’t do at all for
I’m Not Rappaport
—we needed the bishop’s-crook-style ones, not the French cherub ones. Some
have been saved, you know, by the special effort of the Friends of Cast-Iron Architecture in New York.”

“Bruce,” says George, appearing from the back. “It is, as ever, a treat to have you here, but you’ve been working all day. Isn’t Luke taking over?”

“Oh, no. Luke’s got a rehearsal, so he’s working here tomorrow on the day shift, but I am pulling a double shift tonight. It’s fine. I have Esme to keep me company.”

George looks expressionlessly at me. “That’s good,” he says. “But, Bruce, make sure Esme gets all her book entries done. She has a tendency to hang around and listen to anecdotes instead of working.”

I HAVE TO
go to the midwives to see how I am doing. I have drunk several pints of raspberry-leaf tea since they recommended it for ease of delivery, so I am hoping I am doing fine. Misery can’t make any difference now to the baby; it is nearly ready.

I go into the waiting room, and smile plastically at a pregnant woman who already has a child she has to occupy and entertain. How do you do that when you’re feeling selfish and sad? I won’t be able to do it.

The child is of course chocolatey and sticky, and comes over to lay a grubby hand on my pristine dove-gray trousers. The woman’s faux-apologetic smile means
I know you now have a dirty mark on your trousers but my child is the cutest
ever
and toddlers will be toddlers and in a way this physical contact with him is putting you in touch with your motherly side, so soon to manifest itself, and in fact by my
total
lack of discipline, because I will start that when I find him doing cocaine in his room when he’s fourteen, I have enhanced your day
.

I pick up a magazine. It is a baby magazine, naturally, because what else would you care about if you’re in the midwifery center? Famine? The economy? It has more pictures of loving fathers in it. The big beehived air-bound candyfloss lie.

I am not in a good place.

The midwife this time is a comforting woman named Melanie who combines competence with warmth. I haven’t met her before.

“Okay. You’re two centimeters,” she says as she examines me.

“I’m what?”

“You’re two centimeters. Your cervix is dilated two centimeters.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re in labor.”

I take a breath. And another one.

She smiles. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen right away. You can be a couple of centimeters for a day or so, longer, before labor starts for real.”

“But soon.”

“Yeah. Soon.”

Melanie is taking off her gloves, moving around the little room. I do not move. She looks back and says I can get dressed, so I do.

“You don’t feel any pain? Around your pelvis or belly or back?”

I shake my head.

“Maybe you’re gonna have an easy delivery,” she says. “It might be this weekend. I’m on call Friday, and then it’s Anouska.”

Anouska is the one who looks like a supermodel. I hope I get Melanie.

I ARRIVE AT
Lamaze class a few minutes early the next day. It is likely to be my last if I am in labor. I should have a partner, because you need one for the breathing and the smiling, but I haven’t got one this week.

The instructor, even older and cooler than she was the last time, asks me how I am. I decide to tell her, since she is a person who has involved herself in such things all her life, what the midwife has just said. She is nice enough to look excited for me.

“And now I am just waiting for the pain,” I say.

When the others come, we get the chairs and sit in a circle as we have done the other times. I am hoping that she will get out the knitted breast I have heard tell of, because I have fairly vague notions of what breastfeeding is all about.

“Everyone, Esme has some very exciting news,” the instructor says as her opening gambit. She turns to me. “Esme, please share your news with the class.”

“Er . . . yes . . . er . . .” Doesn’t she understand that I am English, and we don’t do this sort of thing? I feel a deep flush rise up.

“Go on,” she says, gently prompting.

Ten faces look expectantly at me. Five men, five women.

“Apparently I am in labor,” I say. “My clitoris is two centimeters engorged.”

One of the men puts his face in his hands. His shoulders are shaking. His wife looks incredulously at me. I wonder if I misjudged my American audience, and that they are more squeamish or more easily amused than I thought. The instructor is a study in barely repressed mirth.

“I think you mean,” she says, “that your cervix is two centimeters dilated.” Alan hiccups into his hands.

“Yes,” I say, as evenly as I can. “That’s what I mean.”

I wonder if I have everything for the baby. I have nappies. I have wipes. I have a Moses basket and bedding and a pretty blanket, a car seat but no car. I have little baby outfits that are called onesies, with snaps under the crotch. I have baby socks from the Gap. They are heartbreakingly small. I have a little hat made of turquoise and yellow stripes in stretchy material. I have cardigans, and two pairs of little trousers and two T-shirts. I have black and white and red toys, because babies can’t see colors when they are born, except for red. How does anyone know that? Stella has bought a “flowing rhythm” mobile for it from the Guggenheim, in the prescribed black and red. I have a cheap stroller that is not the pale gray one of my Madison Avenue dreams. Have I missed anything? I do not know. What if something is wrong? What if it all gets messed up and something
happens to my baby? What if I can’t bear the pain? What if I die in childbirth? People still do. Does my mother get the baby? Will she be allowed to take an American baby home? I should write a letter saying what I want. A death coda for my birth plan. If I die, perhaps Mitchell will want it, as long as I am not there to be despised. And then Olivia would look after it a lot. What cool attendance that would be.