The Bookstore (5 page)

“Are you very interested in this painter, or is it just that you don’t know anyone?”

“It’s the painter,” I said, “I know everyone here. All of them. I’ve just decided to snub them all.”

He inclined his head to the picture on his left, which he hadn’t even looked at, and asked me what I thought about it, and I told him.

He says that when he first saw me, he decided to indulge in a mild flirtation for a minute or two, but that it is because of what I said about that one painting that he asked me out. All I said about the picture was that it was painfully derivative of Ivan Albright without the skill, and did the world need another miserable painting about How We Are All Going to Die Eventually? That is scarcely code for I’m So Hot in Bed You Would Not Believe It, but
perhaps Mitchell was hoping otherwise. While I was still talking he cut through my words to say, “I’m incredibly attracted to you right now.”

I felt breathless and frightened and ready to do whatever he asked me to do next. I must have been gunpowder, dry and black and unknowing. He lit me, and I flared up.

He asked me to go out for a drink with him at the Algonquin. The Algonquin was another trick, a rabbit pulled out of a hat, and I knew it, but I didn’t care. I wanted to go and have a drink at the Algonquin with Mitchell van Leuven.

We never got there. I went to the bathroom first at the gallery, to the ladies’ restroom, and I was checking my face in the mirror when he burst in, pushed me back against the wall, and kissed me. While he was kissing me, he thrust his hand between my legs, his hand like a fin, slicing upward. If he had carried on then and there, I would have let him. I have never felt like that before. But he didn’t carry on. He stepped back, and smiled again, as if there was a secret joke, and said: “So. That drink?”

When we crossed the street, he peered in at the window of the Algonquin and said, “Full of tourists.” He took me to the Royalton instead.

That was late summer, and now it is autumn. He was a total stranger when I was getting ready to go to that gallery launch, and now I am looking at a blue line on a plastic stick, as thick as a Franz Kline brushstroke.

The test was cheap. I’m sure it was out of date. And the tiredness might be due to all the concentrating I have done, because of all the notes in the margins I have made about the hegemony of content in art. I can’t be pregnant.

“YES, YOU ARE
definitely pregnant,” says the doctor. She is pretty, young, and is now sitting waiting, ready to take her cue from me.

I say, “I can only be about two or three weeks pregnant. I think I know when it happened.”

She nods, looking helpful.

“Do you have any questions?” she says.

“How big is it?” I ask.

She smiles. “It’s just a bunch of cells right now.”

I nod, relieved. I have spent many minutes of my life persuading wasps to find the open window, I am as unhappy as Uncle Toby about swatting flies, and I wouldn’t think of killing a spider. I always assume they must want to live just as much as we do. Why would there be a difference? But I don’t feel so squeamish about cells.

I ask a few more questions. The legal limit for abortion in the state of New York is twenty-four weeks. Why do they talk in weeks about abortions when they talk of pregnancies in months? I divide twenty-four by four, but that doesn’t seem to make sense. Six fours are twenty four, but that would mean six months, and they are always showing triplets or octuplets on the news who are born at five months, red faces with white hats above the line of a blanket, with all their fingers and all their toes, healthy as apples. Those babies
look
like babies, too. So I haven’t got very long before things start to take human shape; I need it to be “just cells” if I am going to be able to do it.

The doctor says that there can be a termination within days, if I go for that option—that she could get me in on Tuesday. This reassures me because it could all be over as soon as Tuesday, and it frightens me because it could all be over as soon as Tuesday. Macbeth was forced by pressure of circumstance to kill the king before he had fully thought things through. Well, no. He might have killed the king from a sort of erotic entrancement with his wife, or because he thought it was written in the stars. But look how different it might have been if he’d sat down on his own and had a good think.

That was a king and this is just a bunch of cells. But that was a story and this is real.

“In any case,” she says, “I’ll give you a quick examination, and weigh you, and take your blood pressure.”

While she is doing all that, she says that if I like, I can talk to an obeegeewhyen. It takes me a second to realize she what she means. She says that if I decide to go ahead, I might want to interview several of them. And then she gives me the card of a counseling service I can call to talk all about it. “No judgments” is written on the card. I am grateful. I leave.

Outside, I walk fast, as if I have urgent business, but I am not heading anywhere. I just want to walk. I should be in classes right now. But instead I walk.

Mitchell is Old New York, old Dutch money. To him, the pilgrims on the
Mayflower
are Johnny-come-latelies. He was at Yale, did his PhD at the London School of Economics. And if I tell him, he might be enough of an economist to think that this accident isn’t one, that my motive for keeping a baby fathered by a van Leuven might just be economic. Even without his speciality, he might think that.

Does he have a right to know? It is half his, so yes. It is my body, so no.

When people say “to father,” they generally mean that one biological act—the act of begetting a child. It is different with the verb “to mother.” “To mother” implies care. A man’s act of fathering can easily be that one seed sown; a woman’s act of mothering can take up all the rest of her life. I do not have to accept this arbitrary burden. I have nobody to help me, and I shouldn’t bring an unwanted child into the world. I think of unwanted babies, the ones in the orphanages that never get cuddled, that don’t know what love is, that just lie there, not even waiting, not even crying, because there is nothing to wait for, and crying will not bring anyone. Better to adopt one of those than bring another one into the world.

I can’t have a baby now. I can’t.

A PhD at Columbia isn’t something you can squeeze into the nooks and crannies of your life. You have to devote yourself to it.
I’ve worked so hard all this time—I
want
a career after Columbia. I can’t have a baby now.

I am careful not to walk by any parks. I don’t want to see any adorable infants and have my heart melt. Right now, it’s cells. It won’t know. I will make an appointment at the clinic and arrange for a termination. It will be awful, but then it will be done, and I will reclaim my life. I won’t think too hard. I won’t tell my mother, and I won’t tell Mitchell.

When I get back to my apartment, I call the clinic. The office is closed. It reopens on Monday morning. I sit on the sofa and for once I do not look out of the window, or try to work. I look into the air. People say it is killing. I hear that, but I don’t feel it. What moral imperative makes me think, even for a second, that I should have a baby? I should do it when I can love it, when I won’t feel as if it has killed me.

MITCHELL CALLS ME
a couple of hours later. He has made his presence felt at the Yale lecture, has come back to New York, and now he is interested in what I proposed when I was in the center of my hormonal maelstrom. His voice curls round his words.

“You looked great yesterday, Esme.”

“Thank you.”

“I want to see you,” he says. “Now. I want to see you now.”

Although the surge of desire that had me imagining a ravishing by the UPS man has subsided into a dull murmur, it flares up again at this. But how can I make love with Mitchell, knowing that there is a baby there in the dark of me, in the death row of my womb?

I can’t.

When you first come to New York, it is striking how many Jewish people there are, and striking too how, if you develop a liking for matzoh-ball soup and the rest, you are often unable to have milk with your coffee afterwards. Unexamined, this can be dealt
with impatiently—God would mind if I had milk in my coffee? But the root of that injunction, according to a waitress I met in a Kosher diner, is in the Old Testament somewhere—
Thou shalt not eat a kid seethed in the milk of its mother
. Did the rabbinic fathers see this happen, see some Patrick Bateman of the ancient world relishing this particular practice? It must have offended against their sense of right and wrong in the cosmos. They could all get their heads round sacrificing lambs just fine, but to boil one in the very milk that was meant for its nourishment and life, that streamed out of its mother like love, they couldn’t manage that. It would not be an offense against God but a betrayal of our deepest selves, a crime against the universe. And that is what letting Mitchell into my bed would be tonight.

It crosses my mind to tell him, to tell him about the baby, to tell him that I am going to terminate, to tell him that I can’t see him because of the rabbinic fathers and the book of Deuteronomy, but it is all too hard. I need time to consider.

“Oh,” I say as breezily as I can. “It was one of those spur-of-the-moment ideas. Not a big deal.”

There is a pause. He might be wondering how to engineer himself from “not a big deal” into my bed. He says, “Esme . . . listen to me. I want to come over and fuck you.”

Despite myself, I thrill to this. But I say no. It is the first time I have said no to Mitchell for anything.

“It’s just that I’m so tired, Mitchell . . . ,” I say. “I really—”

“Are you having a period?”

Nobody has ever asked me that question in my life before. I say so.

“Are you?” he repeats. “Because if that is the problem, we can do something else . . .”

“Oh, you mean like a drink or something?”

There is a silence, while I realize he doesn’t mean a drink or something.

“Look,” he says. “I’ll meet you in Trebizond on 95th and Broadway in a half hour. They do food as well. Say yes, or I’ll have
to start looking through my little black book. Say yes, or I’ll call Clarissa.”

“Call Clarissa,” I say instantly. She is Mitchell’s ex-girlfriend, apparently the sum of all human perfections, except that they “grew apart.”

“Oh, you know very well I don’t want to call Clarissa,” he says. “My threats are disappointingly lacking in weight. I want you. Why don’t you just come out with me?”

“I’ll come out for one drink,” I say. I can almost hear his smile.

I go to my bookcase (a trusty Billy) and put one finger on the Bible, to get it down and swear on it that I won’t let myself be seduced by Mitchell tonight. But then it feels wrong. Let alone the fact that I am altogether unsure of the whole God business, what, exactly, am I doing swearing on Bibles when I am about to go to that clinic? I push it back into position. Is there anything I wholly believe in that I could swear on? Shakespeare? I pull out the
Riverside Shakespeare
. What does it mean to swear on Shakespeare? That you believe in the perfect alignment of content and form? I stick it back. This is superstitious nonsense. I can keep some sort of honor through this black time without swearing on anything.

When I get to Trebizond, he is surrounded by girls. There are two sitting very close to him on the banquette to his right, and one on his left. He is laughing up at me as I stand there.

“Did you rent them?” I ask.

“I was sitting here on my own waiting for you!” he says, choking with laughter. “Wasn’t I, Caddie? It is Caddie, right? They just sat down around me. There was nothing I could do! Anyhow, I was telling them all about you.”

“He was,” affirms Caddie, shaking back her white-blond hair. “He was saying that you were, like, really really smart?”

“It’s Tania’s eighteenth birthday,” says Mitchell, indicating Tania with his head.

The girls make small screaming noises to indicate that this is indeed the case.

“Happy birthday,” I say.

“Thanks,” says Tania. She snuggles closer to him, and stares up at me, measuring me. The whole scene looks like a painting of the Restoration Rake. “If one of you could dangle grapes in his mouth, and contrive to have a white breast accidentally showing, that would be perfect,” I say.