The Bookstore (8 page)

O
n Monday morning, the deadly gloom of the weekend weather has been replaced by crisp New York sunshine. The decisions I have to make don’t seem so terrible any longer. On the brief walk to Columbia for my lectures, I think,
I will just do it right now. I will just get it over with
. I fish the business card of the clinic out of my bag and dial the number, standing on Broadway outside the big Rite Aid. A woman answers. I explain my situation. It is the situation they must hear all day every day. There are no appointments for two weeks.

“Two weeks!” I say, in the tone universally adopted to indicate that this isn’t very good service at all, regardless of the fact that two weeks gives me breathing and thinking space. Then she says that a cancellation for Wednesday has just come up.

“A cancellation?” I echo.

“Yes, ma’am,” says the voice. “For Wednesday, November fifth, at eleven
A.M
.”

“Does a cancellation mean—someone changed her mind?”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” I say. Phone conversations are especially difficult in America. If you don’t say what they expect, you may as well be jabbering at them in Esperanto. I think about that cancellation. What if the cancellation becomes a Mozart, a Shakespeare, a savior?

“Miss Garland, do you want the appointment?”

I look at the bright blue sky and the yellow cabs and the dove-gray plane trees and the energy of all the people, and I think what I am denying to the child inside me, and I swallow and for a moment I can’t speak.

“Miss Garland?”

“Yes, I do. I feel terrible about it, but—”

“Wednesday at eleven
A.M
., for Esme Garland,” says the voice, and hangs up.

WHEN I GET
home, there is music thumping from Stella’s apartment across the hall. At last, she is back. I ring her doorbell. When she answers, she throws her arms around me and pulls me into her apartment, which is strewn with bags and open suitcases.

“I have so much to tell you,” she says. “Let me make some coffee first. It was so great. L.A. is amazing. I want to move there. But not yet.”

“Like St. Augustine,” I say.

“Yeah, I don’t know, I want to split myself in two—be in New York, be in L.A. I have made
so
many connections, there are
so
many possibilities right now. You know that feeling? I met a guy, Jake, Jake DuPlessy—I love his work—who wants me to direct a short, and another who wants me to be
in
a short, and Adele introduced me to all sorts of influential people, and oh my god, I milked the opportunity.”

“I bet you did,” I say.

“I did, I’m totally psyched. And when I
wasn’t
schmoozing the Patrik Ervell guys in Beverly Hills, I was in a hot tub with Adele and Michaela, drinking frozen raspberry daiquiris. I know how to make them. It’s so cool—you don’t use ice, you just freeze the raspberries. We’ll make them.”

“That sounds great!” I say. I say it with an exclamation mark, and she immediately stops heaping piles of clothes from one spot
of the room to another. Perhaps I am not normally so enthusiastic about cocktails. She is looking intently at me.

“What’s the matter?” she says.

“I won’t be able to drink them,” I say. And then, because I have annoyed myself with that arch observation, I say quickly, “I’m pregnant.”

“Sweet holy Christ,” she says. She casts around rapidly and grabs her camera. This, I am used to. Stella is studying film, but she isn’t really, she is studying humans. She wants to catch the mind in the face.

“Tell me,” she says, from behind the SLR. “Look straight into the lens.”

“You could be hugging me and telling me that it will be okay,” I say.

“Yeah, because that’s what girls do. Come on, Esme, it’s important. Tell me.” She holds the camera underneath, the lens protruding. The thick webbing of the strap is swinging free; Nikon, Nikon, Nikon.

“I got pregnant. I knew there was something—I felt—different.”

The shutter whirrs, that familiar noise from photo shoots in movies.

“What kind of different? Look into the lens. What kind of different?”

“As if something had changed. But that might be my imagination—no, I don’t think it is. I
knew
I was. It just came to me. And so I bought a test, and—” I shrug. The shutter clicks.

“Go on. Go
on
. Esme, please.”

“And it was positive. There was a thick line. Not a ‘maybe’ sort of line.”

“Oh, God,” says Stella.

“Is that compassion or artistic excitement?”

“I don’t know. It’s amazing,” she says. She appears from behind the camera. “I mean, oh, fuck!”

“I know.”

“What are you going to do?” she asks, and raises it up again at me.
Click click click
.

I want to tell her about the clinic, that I’ve got the appointment. I try to heave the words to my mouth, but they won’t come.

“Everyone always says they ‘take pictures’ or ‘get some shots’ or ‘capture images,’ ” I say (although to be fair I have never heard anyone in real life say they are going out to capture some images). “Have you noticed that? The verbs are all about acquisition. But cameras don’t really work like that. Cameras are receptive—they are just holes that let in light. But because men use them more than women, we get different words, words that don’t go with what happens. Imagine if men went about saying, ‘Hey, I’m just going to grab my camera because I want to receive some photos.’ ”

“They’d hang up their cameras,” says Stella. She has let hers fall to her side. Then she grins. “Or, they would think about hanging them up, but the words aren’t as important as the action”—she puts her hand again at the base of the lens and lifts it up with a wicked smile—“and the action’s not as important as the shape. If cameras were vagina shaped, it would be a different story.”

This makes me laugh, but she is still looking at me. She knows what I am doing.

“You must need time,” she says. “Give yourself some time.”

“I think that’s the thing I don’t want,” I say. “It isn’t as if things don’t happen when you take time. It doesn’t all stop while you think.”

“No,” says Stella, raising her camera again. “But the important thing is that
you
stop while you think.”

“I wouldn’t stop. I would change. I would get attached.”

“That’s the risk. But the other risk is that if you run at it, you will do something that you’ll regret.”

“Gosh, really? I wonder what that feels like.”

“I know, honey. I’m sorry.”

I turn away from her, and from the camera, and fiddle with an odd little wire thing she’s got on a table; it has four tiny cards hanging on it, the four suits. The red diamond is at the front.

“Do you know something?” Stella says suddenly. “You’re actually
living
. I’m not. This is living, Esme.”

“I’ve just called the clinic to make the appointment,” I say.

There is a silence. Then a click. She has taken a picture of my back.

“I’ve thought about it,” I say to the table, “and it’s the only real choice.”

I look round at her. “I want to take your picture,” I say. “You should see your face.”

“When are you going?” she asks.

“Wednesday. They had a cancellation.”

She says nothing.

“The coffee is burning,” I say.

She leaps to the stove, throwing the camera on a beanbag. “Okay,” she says. “It’s not burning. It’s just done. Wednesday. What does Mitchell say? Is he the father?”

“Is he the
father
?”

She grins. “You never know—you might have met a decent guy in the last few weeks.”

She does not have a high opinion of Mitchell. He first met her when he came with me to meet a bunch of Columbia people at a bar in August, and said to her—to rile her, to flirt with her?—that she was gay because she hadn’t met the right man yet. She stared straight at him and said, “I don’t like dicks,” and that was the end of a wonderful relationship.

“I haven’t,” I say. “Mitchell—though—everything is over with Mitchell. I was going to tell him; I thought he had a right to know. But when I met him, I didn’t have the chance to tell him before he dumped me. He said that he liked me, but that the sex wasn’t all that great. So I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t see the point except to abase myself.”

Stella opens her hands, to show that everything I am doing is obvious and obviously wrong. “You get pregnant, you are about to tell Mitchell—why are you about to tell him? Because he might be delighted? Because he might put you on his white charger and
ride off up Madison Avenue with you? But what he actually does is dump you without knowing about it—and the next thing you do is call the clinic? Stay
still
for a second, and think about what you want, from this point. Not because of what has happened, but because of how you want the future to look. You have to have time to see it and feel it. You have to stop, and you have to look.”

“I am stopping, and I am looking,” I say.

“Okay. But really stop, really look. We all spend so much time reacting—”

I shrug again. “Of course. Things happen, and we react.”

“Mitchell being an asshole and Mitchell being the father of your baby are two different things. And another different thing is that you are pregnant.”

“I didn’t mean for it to
happen
. It was one time. I don’t want to change my whole life because of some guy’s—
whim
.”

“Yes, but that’s what I mean, that’s a reaction to Mitchell. You need to react to the
pregnancy
.”

“Stella, are you a secret pro-lifer?”

“You are not listening; I am talking about choice. I am talking about choice in the most profound way. Be still. Be quiet. And then decide.”

“I am not sure that there is a choice, or that there are ever choices. Everything that has happened leads up to the next thing. It can look like a choice, but the way we fall is always determined by what went before. So we can’t choose.”

Stella is shaking her head. “Someone says that about photographs—about how the circumstances that lead to the shutter clicking mean that the photograph is a sum of all the events before it. But I don’t believe it—it sounds great, it’s really top-notch philosophical bullshit. But you do have a choice.”

“Yes,” I say.

She nods, and stands for a moment, considering me. “If you want to know, I think the whole business of this, all the guilt that you’re suddenly in the middle of, is, is . . .” She gives me a rueful smile, and then, with her head at a cutesy angle, says, in a singsong
voice, “A bourgeois social construct, imposed on us by men and internalized by us in the
worst
way.”

I am quiet. The thick blue line isn’t a bourgeois social construct.

“Aristotle didn’t have a problem with abortion,” she says.

“Oh, well, good. That’s a comfort,” I say. There’s no point asking how she knows this. Americans have all these classes that mean they just know odd things, so engineers know about William Blake and poets know about analytical geometry. She probably took one on Aristotle and the politics of gender.

“He thought it took time for the soul to get into the body.”

“Well, if he’s right, all the more reason to take the cancellation,” I say. I say “cancellation” on purpose, to brutalize myself.

Stella’s shoulders suddenly go down. She walks to me, and puts her hand on my arm. “I’ll go with you,” she says. “I will.”

I feel hot quick tears come, and try to stop them. “Are you going to bring your camera?” I say.

She looks how I feel. “I’ll restrain myself,” she says.

She strides away back to the counter, and pours the strong black coffee into her round white mugs. As she brings one to me, she says, “This does not happen when you’re a lesbian.”

“It’s definitely a plus in the lesbian column,” I say.

“What does your mother say?” she asks.

The reluctance to tell them is visceral. To inflict such disappointment. One of the lures of traveling down this road is that that telephone call never needs to happen. I watch as the cat settles himself comfortably on a beanbag strewn with underwear. “Earl’s glad you’re back,” I say.

Stella just regards me over her coffee cup.