The Bookstore (9 page)

THE NEXT DAY,
after I’ve had breakfast, I flip open my laptop and start to work on my paper. I can’t concentrate. If I have the baby, I won’t be able to concentrate for the next eighteen years.

I keep trying, and manage some workmanlike stuff that
doesn’t require inspiration, and then I check my phone, check my e-mail, go on Facebook. I read other people’s posts, make jaunty comments, flitter away the time, profane the time.

Bryan Gonzales, another art history student, calls me and invites me to a party at Columbia tonight. I say I can’t at such short notice. “Ah, come on, Esme. Bradley Brinkman is coming, and you all go weak at the knees for him.”

I refuse again, tell him I am tired, tell him I will come to the get-together at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Sunday instead. If I am going to do this, then I can at least pay some sort of respect, treat this with all due seriousness.

I lie in the dark. The rain is falling; I can hear the ebb and flow of tires on the wet tarmac, swooshing up dark spray. Through the blinds, blue ambulance lights flash on my ceiling from time to time, and car headlights arc by, ceaselessly repeated. Somewhere near, someone is playing a solo on a trumpet, making it sound more wistful than I thought a trumpet could ever sound, and I hear the notes dying, each one, on the air, like sparks from a fire fading into the dark.

The tiredness is real, but I do not sleep, cannot sleep. For hour after hour I keep vigil with the bunch of cells, the mourner and the executioner.

Sometime in the darkest part of the night, I notice that the trumpet has long been silent. There is nothing to indicate the time, no church clock chiming the hour, no early birdsong as advent to the dawn. I have been lying here the whole night long and it has been different from any other time in my life when I have been still and quiet and alone. I know why. It is because I am not alone.

I have been thinking about a lot of things—about what matters, what seems to matter, what doesn’t matter at all. About God, too. I don’t know if he’s a he, a being with eyes to see us, ears to hear us, tears to weep for us. Or, if he can hear us, whether he can help us. I don’t know—we none of us know—if he is there, or if he was there once, and then got tired and walked away, so that we were left alone. But whether there is a God or not makes no difference
to me. I have been doing my own creating, and I don’t believe
I
have enough of a reason to get tired and walk away. There are many, many reasons, good reasons, to terminate a pregnancy. But that my PhD at Columbia might be a bit trickier now is not one of them. Nor is the intolerable hurt that for this baby’s father there was no hot night for its making.

With the New York dawn chorus of clanking crates from delivery vans, I reach for my phone, call the clinic, and leave a message on their voice mail canceling the appointment. I finally turn my head on the pillow to sleep.

WHEN I TELL
Stella, she flings her arms around me and says that keeping the baby is cool, cool, cool. Then she says, “Hey, I’ll be your birth partner if you want. Like a doula or something?”

“What’s that? What would you do?”

She shrugs. “I dunno. I guess I would yell ‘Push’ or ‘Pull’ or something. But really, it’s great. And now, Esme?”

“What?”

“Call your
mother
.”

I still have no desire at all to tell my parents about the baby. When I was first offered the scholarship to Columbia they were perturbed—in part because of 9/11, in part because it is in New York City and I am their only child. What nameless dangers might await me? They could think of a few with names, but I don’t think pregnancy was one of them. I am too
sensible
for that to happen.

As New York hasn’t been a target since 2001, I researched the statistics in order to convince them I could come here and not get into trouble. It’s more dangerous to cross the road in London, you’re more likely to choke on a mint than become a victim of al-Qaeda, and so on. My father makes mathematical instruments for a living; if you present the right data, it calms him down. My mother is still nervous, but not because of al-Qaeda. I know that despite their visit, she is still afraid of gangs loitering on the brownstone
steps from
Sesame Street,
who might surround me and take my money or my virtue.

And so I don’t want to tell them yet about the baby, about how soon they are going to be grandparents and how there was, after all, trouble waiting. I need to get used to it myself first. The thought of my mother swooping in, imploring me to come home on the next flight, ready to enclose me in her ordered world—I will phone tomorrow. Or the next day.

In the afternoon, I go to the student welfare center at Columbia. They are surprisingly helpful. They do not seem to judge me as an idiot who doesn’t know how to use birth control. They say that sure, I can stay in that apartment for now, because I won’t be having the baby until the next academic year. And I can put my name down for accommodation for families. A mother and a baby; we will count as a family. It will just cost more, is all. She pushes the accommodation list at me, with the prices.

It will cost a lot more.

I ask if there are any jobs going, provided by the university. No, there are none available right now. The teaching jobs are like stardust; they and all the little extra ones are snapped up by those in the know before the semester starts. I can sign up to be told when new ones come, but they are usually grabbed before they get to the e-mail stage.

I sign up anyway.

I am on a student visa, and I am not supposed to work—except in those little, well-regulated Columbia jobs. But I am going to need a lot of extra money for the baby. More in rent. Nappies, a pushchair, baby milk. Other things that cannot be dreamed of in my philosophy. I do some research online. Nappies—diapers—cost a thousand dollars a year. A pushchair is at least $200. A cot is another $100, minimum. Apparently I need a baby bath, a bouncy seat, a breast pump, a high chair, a changing station, a Diaper Genie, a sterilizer, breast pads, a sheepskin rug. I don’t know what half these things are. A sheepskin rug? Is that for the photographs?

I call a few places about waitressing; it is all tips, no salary,
and they want people with experience. And, presumably, people who don’t panic when they have to divide twenty-four by four. I don’t mention that I am pregnant, of course, but that too wouldn’t go down so well. I go over to my window, look out on my beloved Broadway. I have a few friends who might be able to help a little, here and there. But not old friends, and not family. When you need help, extended, selfless help, you need your family, the family I don’t want to call because I can’t bear to ask for my mother’s selfless extended help. I want to do it myself. It is going to be so difficult, financially and in terms of time. Am I being absurdly stubborn about having everything—New York, the PhD, the baby? If I am going to keep it, I might have to go home.

In the next couple of weeks, I realize that that “if” is entirely rhetorical. There is no question at all, anymore, about whether I am going to keep it. Day by day, hour by hour, it becomes more precious to me. If it carries on at this rate, when it is born I will be mad with love.

I am walking down Broadway again. To think about Mitchell is still painful—the image is always of him having particularly lustful sex with some voluptuous beauty—so I am not thinking about him. Much. Except that I look for his face in every face, and when I think that I see him amid the surge of people on the pavement, my blood electrifies with desire and misery, and turns to dishwater again when it is not him. But the hankering will wear off more quickly if I do not indulge it. It wears off for everyone in the end, after all. Except A. E. Housman.

As I walk, I see every color, every form, every fall of light. It is like a Fairfield Porter watercolor, such bright sun and such shadows, and such radiance. I think that it is too beautiful to leave if I can possibly help it.

If I have to leave, it will only be because I don’t have enough money. So I should think of a way to get some. Waitressing is out, teaching via Columbia is out—but in New York, there must be a million ways to make money.

A dog walker with a pack of hounds surging around him walks past. How much per dog per hour? That guy could be on hundreds of dollars a day. But the drawbacks are obvious and manifold.

I try to think of other jobs; managing hedge funds pays well, according to the papers, but I don’t know what a hedge fund is. I could think of a fantastic Facebook or phone app that would take the world by storm—except I can’t think of any at all, and I don’t even see why people ever liked Angry Birds. Then I remember that I am only allowed to work in Columbia-sanctioned jobs. I am stuck. I could borrow from my parents, but I hate that idea. I must be able to make something work myself.

On the thought, I reach The Owl. I stand still. It has a lopsided “Help Wanted” sign in the window, a grimy one, written in marker pen. It was not there last time I came past. Signs and wonders.

I push the door open, and step inside. Luke is there, as he was last time, although it is ten
A.M
. There is music playing. He nods hello.

“You’re here a lot in the mornings,” I say. “I thought you were the night manager.”

“Yeah, I just opened up for George this morning; he had a book call. He’s back, he’s just in the john.”

“Right,” I say. I am embarrassed by the word “john.” Can’t help it. It is a word that makes it into a male toilet.

George reappears, and smiles vaguely at me. He looks at Luke.

“You thinking of pricing those cookbooks?”

“Nope,” says Luke. He is getting up. “I just came to open up for you, George. I’m not staying. If I do, I’ll miss
Little House on the Prairie
.”

Luke has a light stubble, is wearing a bandana, a red T-shirt, and a pair of Lucky jeans. He does not look at all like he’s going home to watch
Little House on the Prairie
.

“You’re joking,” I say. He looks surprised.

“I don’t know which episode it is. But I’m assuming Laura will do something wrong, see the error of her ways, and go on to help
the whole town of Walnut Grove learn a valuable moral lesson just in time to sing in church on Sunday.”

“Luke,” says George, “this is a shock. Are you trying to tell us something?”

“Yeah. This is my way of outing myself. I’ll see you.”

When he has gone, George says to the ambient air, “Maybe it’s me, but the older I get, the stranger everyone else seems to become.” He notices that I haven’t gone to browse the shelves, and says, “Can I help you with anything?”

I take a breath. “The sign in the window. The ‘Help Wanted’ sign?”

“Yes?”

“I wondered how strict your rules were.”

I tell him I have no experience whatsoever of working in a shop. I tell him that although I am in the country legally, as a student, it would be illegal for me to work, and also that if he hired me, he would be breaking the law too. “And,” I say, “I’m pregnant.”

“You sound like our perfect employee,” says George.

CHAPTER SIX

I
have arranged with George that I will come in after my classes, for my first shift. George says that he won’t be there, but Luke will. He then tells me to be sure and exercise regularly for the baby’s sake, and to drink distilled water whenever possible. I nod, and wonder if it is
ever
possible. Don’t you need a still?