My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  The most stressful part of the job is dealing with the authors themselves. Some writers are nice, ordinary people you wouldn’t mind living next to or allowing your daughter to date. Most, though, have the sort of large and colorful personalities you expect from artists. There are the flakes who, having devoted every cell in their brain to penetrating the unconscious, have forgotten how to do mundane tasks like getting themselves to a bookstore for a reading by seven P.M. And there are the social misfits who, as a result of cutting themselves off from the world outside their own head or spending too many years trying to climb through a blank computer screen, have a tendency to show up drunk, pick a fight with an audience member, make a pass at the person introducing them or not show up at all. In short, readings are scary, because you never know what’s going to happen when you unleash writers on the public.

  On that Thursday in late July I have an evening reading with Robert Pinsky and Jamaica Kincaid scheduled at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. I’m supposed to work at the deli in the morning, then jump into the car and drive up to Cambridge in the afternoon. However, Dwayne, who’s never even a minute late for work, inexplicably fails to show up when his shift starts. Half an hour passes, then an hour. I call him, and no one answers. When I finally see him coming down Atlantic Avenue, his gait is unsteady and his face looks mangled and swollen, as if he’s been in a brawl.

  “What happened?” I say.

  “Had a toothache,” he says woozily. “But it’s over. I got it out.”

  “You went to the dentist?”

  “Hell no. I ain’t gonna pay no hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “So who did it for you?”

  “I did it myself.”

  “With what?”

  “Pliers. Then I passed out. That’s how come I’m late.” He rubs his jaw with bloody hands.

  Hearing this I almost pass out myself, but there’s no time—I have to get on the road. I’m running at least an hour late, and by the time I get on the highway, the afternoon congestion has already started to build. It takes me an hour just to get out of New York City, and in Westchester there’s highway construction, and in Connecticut there’s a traffic jam that looks like it extends all the way to Hartford. This is terrible. I’ve always been bad at budgeting time, giving myself the smallest margin of error possible. And this time I’m going to pay for it by not showing up at a reading that I organized, where not only will the writers and the audience be unable to figure out what’s going on, but at which several writers and editors from the Boston Globe whom I personally invited will be on hand to witness the “professionalism” of the new Paris Review.

  Even worse, this is probably the most stressful reading in the whole series. Robert Pinsky is a man who seems to have made a terrible decision going into poetry, since he is handsome enough to have been a Hollywood leading man and has a voice that sounds either like God himself or a classic rock DJ. (He could have made a fortune intoning movie previews but instead chose to translate The Inferno.) As maybe the best-known poet in America, he will bring a crowd that I fear will overwhelm the bookstore.

  And then there is Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid is the sort of writer who unsettles people—me in particular—maybe because she once wrote about giving herself coffee enemas, or maybe because she famously quit a staff writer’s job at the New Yorker because she thought Tina Brown, the magazine’s outrageously successful editor, had sold its soul, or maybe because of the stories about her walking around Manhattan in a hospital gown and other outrageous garb. (Her best friend, the writer Ian Frazier, once wrote about the difficulties of getting a cab when accompanied by “a six-foot-tall black woman in pajamas.”) Quite possibly it’s because in the cozy little social world of writers and editors, she’s a true outsider, a writer from a poor country (Antigua) who came to New York to be a nanny for an Upper East Side family and worked her way up from there. Maybe it’s all of these things. In any case, the only thing I feel more strongly than delight in anticipation of her reading is sheer, abject terror, especially since I hassled her for months about doing the reading and never got a direct reply. She was supposed to be teaching a summer class at Harvard, but when I called her department no one seemed to know if she was in Cambridge or not, and when I tried her in Vermont, where she lives, no one answered the phone, and when I asked for her e-mail address, her department secretary said she didn’t use e-mail, so finally I resorted to sending her requests via someone at the Review whose brother’s Pilates instructor was married to someone who had once taken a creative writing class with her (or something like that), and eventually I got a response via this person’s second cousin saying she would come, but as the hour approaches I am anything but confident.

  As a result, driving through New England I’m too stressed to eat or listen to music—all I can do is stomp on the accelerator and lean as far forward as I can, as if by doing so I can will the car faster. The state of Connecticut is so tiny that normally I feel as if I can see across it, but today it feels as wide as Kansas. Every ten minutes or so I calculate what speed I need to maintain in order to make it to Cambridge on time (according to the latest computations, two hundred and ten miles per hour), which gives me a horrible feeling—not just the physical sensation of Kay’s Honda shuddering like the space shuttle on reentry but the uncertainty, the not knowing, the feeling of Will I make it? And if not, when will I know? What will I do then? Stop? Give up? Run away?

  Yet as unpleasant as it can be, you can’t deny that this sort of seat-of-your-pants existence, which is what George cultivated at the Review, has its benefits. From day to day you never really knew how things were going to turn out, and that kept you focused on the task at hand, not next year, next month or even tomorrow. It also kept you alive to the smaller pleasures, like the discovery of a new voice, or holding a brand-new issue in your hands, or even something as prosaic (yet wonderfully satisfying) as proofreading a story. You couldn’t be distracted by money because there wasn’t any, and there wasn’t the zombielike drive of large institutions to exist solely for existence’s sake. To escape inertia, the only fuel was inspiration and a kind of back-against-the-wall, holy-crap-I’m-not-qualified-for-this excitement.

  In the anthology that the reading series is celebrating, my favorite piece, an excerpt from a story called “Nighthawks” by the Chicago writer Stuart Dybek, captures something of this heady feeling: the apparently mild-mannered narrator, a man driving through the Great Plains, stops by a restaurant late at night for a cup of coffee, and there he happens to meet a “gay divorcée,” who invites him to follow her home. Things subsequently turn surreal as the man finds himself chasing the woman through the wheat fields, driving faster and faster and barely maintaining control of his car as he wonders how in the world he ended up in such a situation and what he’s doing. In a mere two and a half pages, the story manages to build up, store and then release a powerful charge.

  That kind of spontaneous, in-the-moment energy is what being an amateur is about, and as I myself drive like a maniac through New England, it occurs to me that frustration with George had steered me into doubt of the amateur ethos, but the store had steered me back. The store, and of course George himself, who’d been so on my case last year, but whom as a result of all that sparring I now finally feel like I understand. I’m not sure if the Review can go on the way it did under him, but if I had the choice between being an amateur and being a professional, I know which one I’d pick.

  Of course, if I don’t get up to Cambridge it won’t matter, because I’ll have shamed myself out of whatever chance I have of holding on to my job, and unfortunately that’s precisely how it looks like things are going to shake out. But then at five-thirty a twelve-lane toll plaza signifying the Massachusetts border comes into view, and I know that I have a chance to make it. Pushing the Honda to the limit of its structural integrity, I blaze a comet trail down the Mass Turnpike and pull into Greater Boston with less than half an hour to go. Things are looking good (who says t
he work of an editor is stately and boring?) and I know that God wants me to pull this off, because when I get to the bookstore, the unlikeliest of miracles—a legal parking space in the middle of Harvard Square—opens up before me.

  Dashing inside wearing a crazed look, I find that crowds have begun to show up in the sizable numbers that I was worried about, and that a woman who in a nervous way looks just as crazy as me is standing by the door, scanning the faces of the crowd.

  “Are you the editor from the Paris Review?” she says.

  “Yes, I’m here!” I announce triumphantly. “I made it.”

  Her expression shows that she couldn’t care less. “I’m the readings coordinator for the bookstore,” she says. Then, a bit snappishly (but with good reason): “Where are your authors?”

  “What?!” I gasp. “They’re not here?” This is even worse than I had feared. Jamaica Kincaid I was nervous about, but Robert Pinsky I’d confirmed with by telephone the day before. “When does the reading start?”

  “Five minutes,” the readings coordinator says. “I’m going to go look outside—you check the aisles and see if they came in without my realizing.”

  So I start inspecting the aisles: poetry, fiction, cookbooks, dictionaries. The store is like the inside of a car that’s been in a hot parking lot all day. There’s no air-conditioning, and people are taking off their clothes and fanning themselves with the books they’ve brought for Jamaica Kincaid and Robert Pinsky to autograph.

  And then I see her in the classics section, sitting on the floor, almost as if she were hiding. She isn’t wearing a hospital gown. But she does seem to be wearing at least six dresses, along with a pair of baby blue running sneakers. I almost trip over her long, pretty legs.

  “Ms. Kincaid,” I practically shout, “you’re here!”

  Her face does not exactly respond with equal delight. She looks as if she has been sitting on the floor for a long time and would prefer to go on doing just that.

  “It’s hot in here,” she says. “Did you notice?” In her hands is a copy of The Iliad.

  “I don’t think the air-conditioning is working. I’ll see if I can get someone to open a window. In the meantime, I don’t know if you want to come over to the part of the bookstore where you’ll be, uh … where you’ll be …”

  Jamaica Kincaid is looking at me suspiciously. And who can blame her, given how demented I look? Then she starts taking off her shoes.

  “Yes?” she says somewhat quizzically.

  “You know, where you’ll be, uh …” I suddenly feel lightheaded. As if the heat in the bookstore and driving for four hours straight like a pizza deliveryman and not eating all day weren’t enough, I missed my afternoon coffee. Nevertheless, I manage to squeeze out that final word, “reading,” though more in the manner of a petrified rodent than the way I normally would.

  “Reading?” says Jamaica Kincaid, causing a terrifying series of questions to flash across my mind: Does she know she’s reading? Or did I just happen to find her here in the Harvard Bookstore? What if my message never got through? Anything seems possible—anything but things turning out the way I had planned.

  “Yes, well, I … You are going to read, right? That’s what all these people … the audience …” I look around: the store is practically rippling in the heat, like a desert mirage. Is it a dream, I wonder, and, if so, how much will I remember when I wake up? What does it all mean—The Iliad, the baby blue sneakers and Dwayne pulling out his own tooth?

  “Yes, of course!” Kincaid suddenly says with the utmost good cheer, while putting her shoes back on. “Is the audience here? Where do you want me to go? Should I sign books afterward?”

  Intense relief. I feel like kissing her toes. But then as we’re walking over to the podium, the readings coordinator hisses at me, “Where’s Robert Pinsky?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “We have to start without him.” She goes up to the podium to begin.

  The audience is seated in a part of the store that fits about eighty chairs—not nearly enough. The aisles are packed. Scanning the crowd, I see, among several familiar faces, the people from the Globe I invited. Jamaica Kincaid and I are standing in an area just slightly out of everyone’s view. The readings coordinator gives a short speech, apologizing for the temperature, and then out comes Jamaica Kincaid—who casually takes off her shoes.

  “Well,” she says, frowning at the microphone, which appears to be dead. Then she picks up a copy of the anthology, which I had carefully opened to the page where her story began, and, holding it as if it were something from another planet, she turns to me and says in a skeptical voice, “Is this the book?”

  Offstage, where no one can see me, I nod frantically. Something doesn’t feel right.

  “It has my piece? That’s what you want me to read?”

  I nod again. I had assumed, of course, that she would read her own piece, a kind of fever dream called “What I Have Been Doing Lately.” And somewhat reluctantly she does. But then the story, being short and recited in a hurry, is over almost as soon as it began, and the bookstore is filled by awkward silence.

  “Hmm … should I read something else?” Jamaica Kincaid says. She starts scanning the nearby bookshelves, while the crowd shifts uncomfortably. We’re in the atlas section, with cookbooks nearby. Through my sweat-soaked shirt you can almost see my heart jumping.

  “Well?” Jamaica Kincaid says, looking directly at me.

  No time to think. I come out onstage, take the anthology from her hands and open to “Nighthawks.”

  Now, “Nighthawks” is perfect because it’s readable and fast, with almost no dialogue. She starts reading:

  “The moon, still cooling off from last night, back in the sky—a bulb insects can’t circle.”

  The crowd is spellbound. No one, including the reader, knows where this story is headed. And come to think of it, I’m a bit unsure myself. It’s been a few months since I read “Nighthawks.” However, there’s no time to stop. The story picks up momentum quickly, and we’re already flying along. Then Kincaid gets to a part where the narrator meets the “gay divorcée” and starts necking with her in the parking lot. She stops.

  Panic! I had forgotten that part of what gives “Nighthawks” its momentum is a good deal of sexual energy. Oh my God, I think, have I asked Jamaica Kincaid to read a sex scene?

  “What is this …” she starts to say in my direction, looking more puzzled than annoyed. I have the urge to run out and take the book away, but it’s too late: I can’t breathe, can’t swallow, can’t move. My fists are two hand grenades. Is the piece lewd? Does it have any nudity? Why can’t I remember anything? It’s only two and half pages long, for God’s sake!

  “You intend to sit out here all night like teenagers,” the gay divorcée says, when the narrator starts trying to get under her shirt, “or do you want to follow me home?”

  This is going to be the worst day of my life. The car chase through the wheat fields is obvious. Everyone knows what it means. But does the piece ever cross the line? Jamaica Kincaid is now coming to the end, where the piece gets really frantic, and I swear to God if she doesn’t finish soon I’m going to run out of oxygen and pass out at those feet I wanted to kiss. Please finish, please …

  “She kept driving faster, and I could imagine the toe of her high heel pressing down on the workboot-sized gas pedal of her truck … By the time we hit the dirt roads she was driving like a maniac, bouncing over railroad crossings and the humps of drainage pipes, dust swirling behind her so that her taillights were only red pinpoints, and I wondered what radio station she must be listening to, wondered if she was drunker than I’d realized and she thought we were racing, or if she’d had a sudden change of heart and was trying to lose me on those back-roads, and I wondered if I ought to let her.”

  And then it’s over. We made it. The piece is done. The audience is clapping and Jamaica Kincaid is wearing a somewhat dazed expression.

  “Now that,” she
says, “is writing.”

  Which means I can breathe again. And then as I peek around the corner I see the handsomest man in poetry, Robert Pinsky, striding into the bookstore just in time.

  CLOSING TIME

  “YOU MUST ALWAYS KNOW WHEN TO PULL OUT,” SAYS THE merchant Nazruddin in V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, one of the many excellent novels about running a store. “A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty.” Shopkeepers make good narrators because they’re passive and steady, and they tend to want relatively small things, while the world keeps taking more from them than it gives back. Plus, in the end something awful always happens to them, whether it’s the anarchic revolution that sweeps away the postcolonial African nation that Naipaul’s shopkeeper has patiently worked to build up, or the equally pointless churn-and-burn of New York commerce that ruins Morris Bober, the Jewish shopkeeper hero of Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant.

  How do you know when to get out? For Bober, one of the signals he hears but is too stubborn to act upon is the arrival of energetic and ruthless competitors. (Malamud’s parents were in fact Brooklyn deli owners, part of the last generation of Jewish immigrants to ply the trade.) “The chain store kills the small man,” he remarks abstractly. The world changes on him, and he does nothing to protect himself. Like a lot of shopkeepers, he lives in Plato’s cave, a hermetically sealed world where the only evidence of a reality outside are the shadows dancing on a cold wall. “Everything will be fine as long as I manage my affairs in here,” he thinks, while outside, beyond his awareness, things change and contingencies grow, nowhere as fast as they do in New York.