“I talked to her a little. Yeah,” he says. “Waiting for Fiona—you know.”
“If I didn’t know better I’d swear you and she had been together before.”
“Together.”
“Like you knew each other, Will. More than polite bartender-customer talk.”
“Well, they say the things you tell your bartender, you know.”
“No, what do they say about that?”
“That was a joke,” Butterfield says. “Come on.”
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She pulls out into traffic, and, for a moment, neither of them speaks.
“Well,” he says, trying to keep the tone light. “We’re committed to socializing with them, I guess.”
“Thanks to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
No answer. He wonders why he should feel guilty, but he does. He looks out at the sunny street, the cool morning, and the light on the blue mountains in the near distance.
“Maybe they’ll turn out to be good friends,” he says.
Elizabeth looks at him with a perplexed frown that she takes some effort to turn into a smile. But the smile is sarcastic. “You know what I think?” she says. “I think they are going to be a perfect nightmare.”
a m a t t e r o f s m a l l
h i s t o r i c a l c o n s e q u e n c e
1.
Alison leaves Kalie with her grandfather and drives to the school for parent-teacher conferences. She meets with Mr. Petit, Jonathan’s math teacher, first. She comes to his door and finds that he’s still with someone, a man in a straw hat, whom she has seen before though she can’t remember where or when. Out here in the hallway, seated on the floor with his long legs stuck out, is the big, hulking boy who lives across the street from her—and now she remembers where she has seen the man who’s talking to Mr. Petit. It’s the boy’s uncle. She knows it’s school policy that students are not allowed to loiter in the halls.
“Hi,” Alison says to the boy.
He turns a playing card in one hand, making a clicking noise with it.
“Excuse me,” she says.
And now he glares at her. She’s in uniform and is used to people staring—but this is aggression. The unfriendly look, like a leer on his heavy face, makes her think of finding the strongest possible terms of speech to use with him. He’s someone who’s up to no good; she tries not to feel this, and, even so, she addresses him again.
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“Do you have some place to be?”
He appears faintly surprised. He puts one knee up and folds his hands over it. “Right here,” he says in a voice that she would not have believed came from him.
“You have an appointment with Mr. Petit?”
He answers with a sullen shrug.
“Well?” Alison says.
“You live across the street from us,” the boy says.
“Yes.”
The man in the straw hat comes out of Mr. Petit’s office and barely looks at her, moving across the hall to stand over the boy. “You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be in the STOP room. Get up.”
The boy rises slowly, as if he had been thinking of getting up all along and his action has nothing to do with the man standing over him.
When he’s at full height, he towers over the other.
“Go on,” the man says.
“Bye, now,” the boy says to Alison in that girl-high voice.
The man takes him by the arm and pushes him. “You want more trouble?” he says. They go on, and Mr. Petit comes to the door of his room.
“I’ve got an appointment as vice principal,” he says. “We’ll have to move quickly.”
She wants to say that she didn’t want to do this at all right now. But she follows him into the room, where he sits at the desk and shuffles papers. His hands shake. He seems more nervous than anyone ought to be in this situation.
“Did something happen?” she asks him.
“I’m looking for Jonathan’s work.”
“He’s not very enthusiastic about math, I know.”
“But he’s working hard.”
“I know you’ve been helping him—spending extra time with him.”
Petit stops and looks up at her, apparently distracted by something, a perplexed frown creasing his forehead, but then he simply seems to be waiting for her to go on.
So she does: “He says he feels good about it.”
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“Yes. He’s working hard. He’s a good young man and you should be proud.”
“I am proud.”
“Good.” Mr. Petit shuffles the pages again.
“Is something the matter?” Alison says. “I went through a separation and a divorce a while back—it’s had its effect on all of us.”
“I just can’t find the work—I had a folder of his work. I wanted to show you . . .”
She waits while he looks through the confusion on his desk. It’s evident that he doesn’t want to talk about the personal reasons for whatever failures there are in Jonathan’s performance. Finally, he sits back, folds his shaky hands under his chin, and begins to talk about the boy’s troubles with math. It isn’t anything so complicated that a little extra work can’t solve. He has some exercises he wants her to try with the boy at home. He hands her a few papers in a small folder, his hands still shaking. And then he stands and thanks her for coming in. She has the feeling that he wants to be rid of her. She says, “How is my son in class?”
“Oh, completely sweet.”
“Docile.”
“Pliable, you know. Not docile. But he never causes me any trouble.”
“I should have him do these exercises at home?”
“Yes, and we’ll just—go along the way we’ve been going.”
“His father’s no help, you know.”
“Oh, I’ll help him—I’ll keep helping him.”
Alison takes his offered handshake—a soft, clammy nongrip—and then walks down the hall to the English room and Mrs. Butterfield, whom she finds sitting at one of the student desks in the front of the room. Mrs. Butterfield looks busy, tired, even discouraged, but she brightens when Alison walks in. The two women recognize each other, of course, and through the whole conference—which is all about how wonderfully Jonathan is doing in her class—Mrs. Butterfield seems confiding and even, in some ways, conspiratorial about how Jonathan might be further encouraged to develop his gifts.
“You’ve done very well with him at home,” Elizabeth Butterfield says. “It shows. And now I hope you don’t mind if I change the subject.
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But you were so helpful that night. You know. My mother-in-law. On the roof.”
“I’ve been over to see them, you know. My father’s doing that work for them.”
“Yes, I knew that,” Mrs. Butterfield says.
They’re gazing at each other, and abruptly they begin to laugh. Alison hadn’t seen it coming, and this makes her reaction to it all the more pronounced; it becomes a jag. Elizabeth closes the door and they sit there in the student desks, laughing.
“I don’t know,” Alison says, coughing and trying to blow her nose,
“what came over me.”
“Well,” says Elizabeth. “They’re dividing the house. They’re having it demarcated.”
Alison talks about the broken glass that lies collecting dust in the dining room. And Elizabeth puts her hands to her eyes, nodding.
“I know, I know.”
“But I like them both,” Alison says. “I do. I like them a lot. And Oliver likes them.”
“Well,” says Elizabeth, wiping her eyes. “I’ve got to get ready for my next conference.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t apologize. I needed that. I did. Thanks for it.”
Alison touches her shoulder. “Thank you for being so good to my son.”
2.
Saturday morning, a man comes into The Heart’s Ease bookstore and spends almost seven hundred dollars, buying mostly novels but there’s also history and biography, all of it very serious and literary. He purchases an entire set of Dickens; another set, fourteen volumes, of O. Henry; all the Joseph novels of Thomas Mann; several first editions, including t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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an edition of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones with French newspaper print showing where the binder has peeled away; a seven-volume biography of George Washington; and a series of texts about the Civil War. The Washington biography alone is more than seventy-five dollars. He walks among the stacks, holding a sheet of paper before him and marking on it with a pencil as he chooses the books he wants.
Butterfield says, “Are you a dealer?”
“Just decided I like books,” the man says with a small shrug, looking at one of them. “Never owned any before, and I want to leave some for my son.”
“Did you say—” Butterfield halts. He can’t get it out, can’t quite believe what he’s just heard.
“That’s right,” the man says. “Never owned any. This will be my new library.”
Butterfield stares.
“I guess from the look on your face that you’ve already got a library.”
He nods, feeling rather dull, unable to think of a word.
“I met a man the other day, has over eight thousand books. Amazing.
I never would’ve believed it. Interesting man, too. Good talker. He gave me a list of these names.”
Butterfield says, “Maybe I know him.”
“This was in New York. Up near Buffalo. Guy claimed he was a poet.”
“What was his name?”
“Hell, I don’t remember. I just remember he had a hell of a lot of books and he was going to leave them all to his son. Thought I’d do something like that, too. He gave me a list of authors. These pretty good are they?”
“Yes.”
“I need this book by this Joyce woman. Joyce something or something Joyce. Guy couldn’t say enough about it, and I asked him for a list and then he didn’t write that one down. Joyce something. Supposed to be the best novel of the twentieth century according to some list he was talking about.”
“James Joyce,” Butterfield tells him. “Ulysses.”
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“Oh, shit. I got that one wrong. Ulysses, huh? And it’s a guy. Jesus.
You got any other recommendations?”
“Tolstoy,” Butterfield says.
The man runs a crooked finger down his list. “Who wrote it?”
“Tolstoy’s the name of the writer.”
“I want to leave a wealth of intellectual riches for my son. Don’t have much else to leave him. A lot of money.” He smiles. “Loads of money.
Rivers of it. Hell, the fucking Indian Ocean of dough. You know? Material things. A shall we say pleth-ora of material things. A lot of stuff.”
Butterfield nods, looking at him. A wide, long-jawed face, small mouth pulled back in a crooked grin, round, hazel eyes, wild, uncombed gray hair through which the soon-to-be bald pate shows, with its freckles and imperfections.
“You know what?” the man says. “You know all that crap about being there for your kids and making sure you spend time listening to them? That business about how they don’t want what you can buy them, they want your love and emotional support, and the talking to them and appreciating them and all that. Right?”
“Sure,” Butterfield says, thinking of Gail and Mark. “With my own children I—”
“Yeah, well it’s not true. The truth is they want you to buy them stuff. Lots of it. Oodles of stuff. The more the better. I’m here to tell you from experience. I’ve got a great relationship with my son and it’s because I buy him things. Things. He doesn’t know me from Adam’s house cat. Wouldn’t recognize a single thought I had as mine, not even this one about the material things. But he loves me deep—I’m the source of all his toys. And so, well, I want him to take something from the world of books, too, because I understand that’s where all the wis-dom is. That’s what they all keep telling me, anyway. Kid has no education except in his possessions, if you know what I mean, and he just turned forty. And I won’t be here forever.”
Butterfield stacks the piles of books in boxes, and the other man watches him in silence. The books fill six big boxes. The man pays with cash, and then Butterfield and he move the boxes out to his car, the man letting Butterfield carry the heaviest of them, which he does without t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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complaining or showing that he’s noticed this. The whole thing’s rather amusing, actually. They get all the boxes into the trunk, and, while they’re accomplishing this, Ariana Bromberg pulls up. Butterfield sees that it’s Ariana and feels a tightening in the muscles across his lower abdomen. She sits behind the wheel of the car and seems to ponder both men. Finally, she steps out of it and says, “Are you closing?”
“Not yet,” says Butterfield.
She slams the car door and walks on into the shop, jingling her car keys. She’s wearing a print skirt that comes to just below midthigh of her long, tan, perfectly smooth legs, and a white blouse; the skirt reminds Butterfield of the line from Herrick: “The liquefaction of her clothes.”
He puts the last box of books into the back seat of the man’s car.
“I might be back, tomorrow,” the man says. “I saw a few other things I thought might do.”
“Have you really not read any of these?” Butterfield can’t help but ask.
“Well, I don’t say I haven’t done any of them. Some, I guess. I mean I must’ve. I went to college.”
Butterfield ponders this.
The man smiles. “Ain’t it a bitch?” It’s as if he’s enjoying a joke at Butterfield’s expense.
“Hey,” Butterfield tells him. “As long as you’re paying for the merchandise.”
“Right-o.”
“And they say a book is like a mirror.”
“Whatever, sport. Bye.” The man gets into the car—it’s a beat-up little compact, nothing like what one would expect a rich man to drive—and pulls away with a little honk of his horn.
Butterfield stares after him and says the rest of the line: “If an ass looks in, you can’t expect a saint to look back out.”
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3.
From behind him comes the now weirdly familiar-feeling, scheming laugh. Ariana leans against the frame of the open door. “I’ve never heard that one before,” she says.
“Mrs.—um, Ms. Bromberg,” he says. “What can I do for you?”
“So formal,” she says, jingling the car keys. “Thank you for remembering in time that I don’t go by the other name. And you might as well know I don’t like the music, either. The Shostakovich. I’m not what you would call a classical-music person.”
He steps toward the entrance, and she backs inside, out of the light, half-turning, looking over her shoulder. The expression on her face makes him hesitate; it’s unsettlingly as if she’s leading him into somewhere secret or private, a bedroom. The thought brings him to a complete stop. And so she stops, too. It’s all in her facial expression—that strange, devious ease.
“Well?” she says. “I came to look at your store. Aren’t you going to help me buy some books?”
“Sure,” he says, and swallows.
He walks with her into the central bay of the place, among the shelves stocked with history and historical biography—the troubles and triumphs of the famous dead. Accounts of migration and war. Descrip-tions of the heroisms, sorrows, depredations, monstrosities, and folly of the politically powerful. His favorite section.
“What do you like to read?” he asks her.
“What’re you selling?”
It strikes him that the strangeness of this question requires a literal response. “I’ve got a little bit of everything.”
“I like biographies. I like reading about people’s tortured inner lives and sufferings. That way I find out I’m not the only neurotic who ever drew breath.”
He says, “Well, there’s political biographies here. There’s also a section of literary biography, too, and celebrity stuff. The usual. If you need anything, let me know.”
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“What do you like to read?” she asks.
“History. Art history, too. And some fiction.”
“That covers pretty much everything, doesn’t it.” There is no hint of a question in her tone.
He says, “Well, no.”
“What about your wife?”
“Elizabeth? Well she does read everything. She teaches—”
“Right, she said that.”
“And you do too,” Butterfield says. “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes.” She takes a book down, an academic biography of Lincoln published by a university press. It happens to be one that Butterfield knows, one of those exercises in intellectual fantasizing, every line of which reveals the stubborn refusal on the part of the writer to give the slightest nod to reality whenever that reality tends to be a stumbling block to his unstated agenda.
“I’ve read that one,” he tells her.
But she was speaking. She stops herself. “What?”
“No, go ahead.”
“You’ve read this?”
“Yes, and I’m afraid it’s a bit dull and uninspired.”
“How will you sell it if you talk like that about it?”
He shrugs. “I’d rather my customers trust me.”
“And do they?” she says. And here’s that expression again, that smile as if there is a subtext, something entirely else that they are talking about.
“I like to believe they do.”
She flips the pages of the book, then closes it and holds it up, looking at the spine. She puts it back in its slot and makes sure it’s even with the others, talking as she does so. “I was saying that my husband doesn’t like to read. Or I was starting to say that.” She folds her hands in front and turns to him. “I believe I was starting to tell you something.”
Butterfield swallows again and finds that he can’t speak.
“My husband,” she goes on, “is always talking about buying a book -
store. You ever think of selling a bookstore?”
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