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For Richard and Oscar and Agnes
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, Turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you.
—WALT WHITMAN, LEAVES OF GRASS
ONE YEAR AGO
“Did you see? People all down the block, waiting for the doors to open. There won’t be enough chairs!”
Roy Clarke squirmed uncomfortably. He wanted to stand, but the bookstore owner had supplied a high stool. “I’d better not keep them here for too long then. Just a quick reading, sign a few books, and home.”
“They’re here for you.” Wendy Clarke, his wife, had already helped herself to the free prosecco. “Don’t be in such a rush. They’re our new neighbors. We’re all going to be great friends.”
Roy unbuttoned his cuffs, rolled up his sleeves, then rolled them down again. While he appreciated Wendy’s cheerful optimism, he wondered why he’d ever agreed to this.
On their first stroll to familiarize themselves with their new neighborhood, Wendy had noticed a sign on a scaffolded Smith Street storefront that read SMITH CORNER BOOKS: 2 WEEKS ’TIL OPENING DAY! Without hesitation, she’d stepped around the construction debris and gone inside to introduce herself. Roy lingered outside, pretending to be a smoker, even though he was not. The next day, Wendy forwarded him an email from Jefferson, the bookstore’s owner, with the subject Roy Clarke reading confirmed for opening day!! The body of the email was all lavish praise and buttering up. Never in Jefferson’s wildest imaginings could he ever have hoped for “the Roy Clarke” to open his store. Roy didn’t mean to be an ass. It was just that he’d wanted to slip into Brooklyn and discover it quietly, be discovered by it quietly. Not bang in—pow!—let’s welcome the big famous author who, sorry to disappoint, hardly thought of himself as an author anymore because he spent more time making tea and toast than he did writing pages.
Shy Clarke, Roy and Wendy’s youngest daughter, age fifteen, contemplated pretending she’d just gotten her period. Shy was nervous about starting at her new American school later that week. She also felt uncomfortable for her father, who she knew was in agony. Shy’s older sisters had come up with her unusual name right after she was born because she’d seemed to duck and look away whenever they cooed over her. Right now, Shy sat very still in the front row, her pale bare knees pressed tightly together. She wasn’t sure she could endure her father’s misery for much longer.
“Unlocking the doors now,” Jefferson announced. He wore a heavy black-and-green plaid wool shirt, despite the fact that it was the first week in September and seventy-five degrees outside. His long, bushy brown beard looked like it would make a nice home for a family of squirrels.
An excited murmuring throng waited outside on the sidewalk. Jefferson unlocked the glass door and held it open to let them in.
Roy and Wendy had moved to Cobble Hill, the charming brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood just south of Brooklyn Heights, from London almost three weeks ago. People from the neighborhood had actually stood around with their children and dogs and watched the movers moving in their furniture and boxes of possessions with great interest. Wendy wasn’t bothered. She was too busy unpacking boxes and giving orders. Roy watched the neighbors watching them. It was his first inkling that they hadn’t moved to the big city at all, but to a very small village where nothing went unnoticed.
Jefferson’s neat rows of folding chairs filled up fast. There was a lot of hugging. Everyone in the audience seemed to know one another. Roy didn’t know anyone. His agent and editor were both based in London. He hadn’t even told them about the event. Wendy was his agent for this one, bless her.
Roy sat stiffly on his stool in a state of faux alertness. Voices faded in and out. Someone touched his elbow. A copy of Orange, his most popular novel—the novel that had been adapted into an acclaimed HBO series starring Frances McDormand, Drew Barrymore, Kristen Stewart, Kevin Dillon, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Hugh Grant and had aired for four seasons—was placed across his stool-braced knees. He blinked and clasped the book between his hands. He would read the part about the firemen. It was recognizable from the TV show, a bit racy, and always made him laugh. His agent, a bright twenty-eight-year-old who had inherited the post when Roy’s longtime agent died, said it was “endearing” that his own writing still made him laugh. He thought it best to endear himself to his new neighborhood if he could.
A shadow passed in front of him.
“Thank you, friends and neighbors. Welcome to your new bookstore, Smith Corner Books. It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to open a bookstore and I’m thrilled so many of you are here this evening,” Jefferson began.
Roy shifted on his stool. It was almost time.
“Without further ado, I’m delighted to introduce one of my all-time favorite authors—I’m still pinching myself that he’s here in my little store. You know him from Blue, Yellow, Green, Purple, and the smash hit Orange, which The New Yorker described as Bridget Jones meets Waiting for Godot The Guardian has said of him, ‘If Jane Austen froze her eggs and one of them was impregnated by both Albert Camus and Tim Robbins, this author would be the brainchild.’ The New York Times calls him ‘Kafka for millennials and way, way funnier.’ An absurdist and a realist, a master of the microscope. No one understands the tragedy, the humor, and the romance in the everyday better than this guy. If you’ve read or seen the part in Orange when Mark stops up the toilet with marmalade, you know what I’m talking about. Boxed sets of the Roy Clarke Rainbow and individual titles are all available here tonight. Please welcome Roy Clarke.”
Roy looked up. Jefferson applauded with the crowd and backed into his seat. His introduction had been rather too swift, Roy thought. He sat up straighter, crossed and uncrossed, then recrossed his legs. Bloody uncomfortable stool. He cleared his throat and looked out at the audience.
At one end of the first row, next to her mother, sat his daughter Shy, her knees squeezed together, eyes on the wooden floorboards, vibrating up and down like she needed the toilet. Next to Shy, Jefferson beamed up at Roy through his beard. Wendy beamed up at Roy from beneath her blond fringe with a sort of pert but docile admiration he didn’t recognize. Roy opened his copy of Orange and thumbed through it in search of the firemen scene. He didn’t know the exact page number, but at some point he’d written a stream of foul words. That was what he looked for.
The firemen were chopping through a burning building with axes. Smoking embers stung their eyes. They could barely breathe. Like drunken fraternity brothers, they shouted out and explained the dirtiest, most disgusting sexual acts they’d ever heard of with cheerful camaraderie. Later on in the scene they did a full analysis of Julia Roberts’s entire acting career, starting with Mystic Pizza, which was their favorite. It was this scene that had won Roy’s writing critical accolades such as, “witty, sexy fun,” and “a man’s book you can take home to Mother.”
“I think I’ll read straight off and get to know you later,” Roy said without looking up. Titters of laughter. A few whoops. A whistle. He’d been told that he always came off sounding “very cool” at his readings, which was odd, because speaking in front of large groups of people made him sweat so much he was required to wear black or navy blue so no one wou
ld see.
Rusty Trombone. Mississippi Hot Pocket. Dirty Sanchez. Glory Hole. Julia Roberts. Mystic Pizza. Pretty Woman. Notting Hill.
There it was, the Dirty Words Firemen Scene. For a fleeting second Roy worried that Shy was about to be mortified. But she was fifteen. She’d watched the marmalade toilet scene from Orange. Nothing could possibly surprise her now. He cracked the spine and began to read.
PART I SEPTEMBER
Chapter 1
A MESSAGE FROM NURSE PEACHES
Welcome back, PS 919 peeps!
Thanks for returning your pediatric examination forms. If your child has specific medical requirements, please give me a holler.
Moving on to nastier things: EIGHT students have been sent down to me with lice. These are cases that began over the summer and are still lingering. Don’t let them linger on your child’s head. Now’s the time to comb through your child’s hair with thick white conditioner such as Pantene. If lice are present, they will be visible in the white stuff. A cursory visual inspection of dry hair is not effective, and those lice treatment kits from the drugstore are full of poison and do not work! Instructions on how to perform a proper comb-through are all over YouTube. Come by my office for a good-quality $10 lice comb. Proceeds go to our PTA. There are also professional “lice ladies” who can remove the bugs and nits from your child’s hair for a fee. I have a list of names and numbers. Feel free to call or email me, or stop by my office with any questions or concerns. My main advice: check those heads.
Here’s to a totally un-lousy school year!
My very best,
Peaches Park, school nurse
[email protected]
The warning letter from the new school nurse had come home in Ted’s backpack. Stuart felt like the letter was speaking directly to him. And of course now he had lice. They were everywhere—on car seats, in his fellow riders’ hair on the crowded F train coming home from work last night, in Ted’s hair, on Ted’s pillow, in Ted’s towel, on the hood of Ted’s hoodie, on the leaves that drifted crisply down from the dried-out, summer-weary trees.
Stuart loved Nurse Peaches’ tone. Last week, on only the third day of school, she’d left a message on his cell: “You don’t know me, but I have your son. He seems fine now, but he puked his guts up after lunch. Better take him home before he pukes on my floor.”
When he went to pick up Ted from her office and first laid eyes on her, he could not stop smiling. Curvy, strawberry blond, merry but cool. Peaches. She was busy with a crying girl who’d scraped her knees pretty badly in the schoolyard, so she’d only glanced up and pointed to the sign-out sheet. Stuart hardly heard a word Ted said as he signed Ted out and led him home. Peaches—it was practically an invitation. Her black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off was an invitation too, or at least a suggestion: there was more to Peaches than met the eye.
“I can’t believe you still do that,” Mandy, his wife, commented now as he stood in front of the full-length mirror in their bedroom. She was sitting up in bed, wearing the same old mustard-yellow Blind Mice T-shirt she’d been wearing for two weeks. It was his, a collector’s item, and he wanted it back.
“Still do what?” Stuart stopped scratching his head and put his hands in his back pockets. His black Levi’s were looser than ever, as if they belonged to someone else even though he’d been wearing them since his early twenties. Was he losing muscle now that he was approaching forty? He didn’t really exercise, just walked a lot. The jeans were still in pretty good shape too, no holes, zipper still functioning. When did you know you needed new jeans?
Mandy folded her arms over her boobs, which were still massive—even bigger than they’d been in high school—and smiled her foxy, pearly-toothed smile. She used teeth-whitening strips religiously, and they worked. But there was something embarrassing about her boobs and her smile, like they were saying something about him. His songs might be deep, but he himself was shallow, or he had been when he met and married Mandy. Who was even named Mandy anymore anyway?
“Aren’t you too old to be like, checking yourself out?”
Stuart looked at himself in the mirror again and then at her mocking reflection. She was the one in bed. Her incredibly shiny, silky black hair—she also gave herself a VO5 hot oil treatment every Friday—was matted flat in the back from lying down all the time. At least Stuart was up and dressed. Ted was up and dressed too, eating Cheerios and watching Cartoon Network. Mandy was just lying there.
“I’m thirty-six. So what? I can’t look at myself?”
“Just saying,” Mandy said.
She said a lot of things, from bed.
“I think you’re even cuter than when you were in the band,” she added, a little unconvincingly, Stuart thought.
Stuart’s band, the Blind Mice, had been in the top twenty on the Billboard Hot 100 list for three years running before they’d broken up ten years ago. Ever since, Stuart had been virtually silent, working quietly for a company that provided music and sound editing for advertisements.
Lately, entertaining Ted had somehow brought out the urge to make noise again. Stuart had even thought of trying to get the band back together to make a kids’ album, but becoming that dad, that guy, that band, singing about bubble baths, marshmallows, cement trucks, and poop was not something he was ready for, and he was pretty damned sure the other two Mice weren’t ready for it either. Robbie, the charming, handsome guitarist, spent half his time on far-flung beaches in Australia and the other half in Nicaragua, surfing and growing pot. JoJo, the aloof beats genius and techno wizard, produced music in LA and lived in a hotel. Neither of them were married, and they certainly didn’t have any kids, or if they did, they didn’t know about them. Stuart Little, affable front man of the organization, chief lyricist and rhyme-smith, and not so little anymore, had been the only one to settle down.
“Any plans today?” Stuart asked, the same way he’d been asking for weeks.
“My plan is to do this,” Mandy said from bed. It was the same answer she always gave.
“Will you please call Dr. Goldberg?”
For over a month Mandy had been promising to go back to the doctor and get a referral for a specialist. Both times she’d “made an appointment” she’d come back smelling like toasted everything bagels and told Stuart the traffic was so bad she’d missed her appointment, but it didn’t matter because she was doing everything the doctor had told her to do back in July, and everything was fine. But she was not fine. She’d gotten much, much worse.
“Today?” he prompted.
“Okay,” Mandy yawned.
Stuart glanced at the time on the cable box beneath the large flat-screen TV he’d installed over the summer. “Ted’s going to be late again. I gotta go.”
Mandy slid back down under the covers. “I love you,” she called. “You’re totally hot.”
* * *
Ted was in fourth grade at the small public elementary school on Henry Street that was available only to families who lived within the designated district of Cobble Hill. Ted had turned nine in August and could definitely walk there on his own, but Stuart still took him to school every morning on his way to work, half out of habit and half because he enjoyed it. Three times a week Ted stayed at school for the after-school program, Hobby Horse, an extra two and a half hours of games in the schoolyard or gym, depending on the weather, before Stuart picked him up. Twice a week he went with a group of boys to the Brooklyn Strategizer, where they played complicated board games, like Settlers of Catan, until Stuart picked him up. Every day Stuart would text to see if Mandy was up and wanted to go get Ted herself, but Mandy was never up.
Stuart and Ted rolled their skateboards down Cheever Place and turned onto Kane Street. As usual, Roy Clarke, the famous author, was pacing slowly up the street ahead of them. Later on, he’d sit at the bar inside the Horn and Duck, the overpriced brasserie on the corner of Kane and Court Streets. Stuart had never spoken to the man, but he’d decided that Roy Clarke pace
d because, according to Google, he hadn’t published a book in six years. Stuart also knew that one of Roy Clarke’s books had been made into a TV show. Mandy had watched a few episodes and said it was “annoying.” Stuart hadn’t read the books or seen the show, but he’d always been aware that “the Roy Clarke Rainbow” existed. He knew the books were supposed to be good and that they were named after colors—Blue, Yellow, Green, Purple, and Orange. At some point he’d attempt to read one and see for himself.
Roy Clarke’s gray head bobbed as he paced slowly and deliberately away from Stuart and Ted, hands clasped behind his back, eyes on the sidewalk. Maybe he wasn’t thinking about his writing or anything at all. Maybe he was just counting his steps. It seemed like a lot of people in Cobble Hill were very busy doing not a lot.
“Morning,” Mr. Swiss Family Robinson greeted Stuart from his doorway. Mr. Swiss Family Robinson was Stuart’s nickname for the tall, thin, auburn-haired gentleman who every morning stood at the door of the beautiful brick house on Kane Street, directly across from the schoolyard, wearing a crisply ironed shirt and looking nervous, as if he didn’t quite trust the school to take care of his children. Stuart couldn’t even remember where the name Swiss Family Robinson came from, but it seemed to fit. The house had a bright blue door with a brass door knocker, matching blue shutters, and immaculately curated seasonal flower boxes in every window. Even the sidewalk was cleaner in front of the Swiss Family Robinson house. It was possible that Ted had gone to preschool at Little Mushrooms in the basement of the local church with one of the Swiss Family Robinson children, but Stuart had never encountered any children or even a wife on these morning walks to school, and he had absolutely no idea what Mr. Swiss Family Robinson’s real name was.
Still, every morning, Stuart always said, “Hey.”
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