The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

  “We can’t let another summer pass without a trip to Europe.” She kissed his cheek and peered into the viewfinder. “You can look at the Mona Lisa every day without leaving the house, but in nine months we could be standing this close to da Vinci’s own hand.”

  “I can only imagine,” George said.

  “You don’t have to imagine. We can go. Promise me you won’t reach thirty without seeing Europe?”

  In fact, George had never been farther east than Cleveland, farther west than the Union Stockyards. “The world has come here,” he said. “We’re becoming a great cultural center.”

  “You needn’t be so provincial.”

  “What about work? I can’t just drop everything and set sail for a month or two.”

  “Father won’t mind.” Margaret changed a slide in the magic lantern and urged George to peer into it: a large group scene of men and women in red, yellow, and blue garments in an ancient open courtyard.

  “Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana. You should see what an enormous canvas it is. It would take up the entire wall of our living room,” Margaret said. “Some of the trip could be business. You could meet prospective clients in Paris, help grow the agency overseas. Who knows? If all goes well, we could live there for a while.”

  Lazar would never let George do such a thing. If he were to ask, Lazar might say it’s a fine idea, but he’d send Kennison instead. George never confided in his wife his frustrations at work, and though Margaret must have known, must have heard details from her mother, they rarely talked about the office. It was the horse in the corner.

  Then again, Margaret did have a talent for getting her way, and her father spoiled her. Perhaps she could convince Lazar to make an arrangement overseas. George’s arc at the agency was on the descent, so what harm would it do? He could start over, in Paris of all places. What would people back home think of him then? What would Helen White think?

  She wouldn’t be impressed, he decided. She’d think he’d lost his way. It was when he put on airs this afternoon that she gave him a certain look—of having seen through him, of disappointment, perhaps. He couldn’t go to Paris. What good would it do him to idle about European capitals and depend on his wife to translate the language and customs? He wasn’t a college man, wasn’t born to be a gentleman of leisure. He was George Willard of Winesburg, Ohio.

  “Well, I love the stereopticon. It’s a beautiful gift,” he said. “And you can tell Nettie McCormick that we’re keeping her chef. I’ve never had such a meal!”

  “I’m not letting you off the hook yet. I mean it about Paris.” Margaret put another slide on the plate: Bathsheba at Her Bath, Rembrandt’s painting of the famous nude, King David at her feet. “I intend to go back to Europe at least once more before we fill this house with children. And I shall need an escort.”

  He knew she would keep pressing if he didn’t make some gesture toward a promise. “Paris. Next summer. Okay, then,” he said. “And speaking of culture—I heard the most astonishing violin recital today.” He went on to talk about stumbling upon a prodigy at Hull House while taking a client on a city tour. “And of all the coincidences, I ran into a schoolmate from back home in the bargain. She helps coordinate some of their arts programs.”

  George hadn’t meant to bring up Helen, nor had he expected that Margaret would be familiar with the settlement’s theater. But to his surprise she brightened. “You know someone at Hull House?” she said. “I’ve been wanting to see a play there since college. Everyone says they have the best little theater in the city.”

  “Why did you never go?” George asked.

  Margaret brushed her curls from her temples, her bracelet sliding down her arm. “For a visit to that neighborhood I would need a bodyguard.”

  “It’s not that bad. We could have Virgil drive us,” George said. “If you’d like, I can find out what’s on.”

  That week he intended to buy tickets but was mortified to discover that the current play was George Bernard Shaw’s comedy The Philanderer. He wondered if this was some devilish sign that he should abandon the thought of ever seeing Helen White again, but he chose to dismiss the idea—he had done nothing wrong—and continued to check the papers for the next production.

  Meantime, his work life had grown ever more unpleasant. Lazar broke the news that Kennison was taking over the Nuvolia contract. Tidy Town was officially retired, shuttered like Hindman’s Harness Shop in Winesburg, its moment eclipsed.

  George demanded an explanation, and Lazar said it was time for Prove They Need It.

  “What’s the campaign?” George asked.

  “We have an entirely new approach here, if you haven’t noticed. The trick is to introduce a problem and then go about demonstrating that your product is the solution,” Lazar said. “Clyde talked to some doctors and found a dozen bacteria that cause body odor. The one with the best ring to it was bromhidrosis. We’ll make a big fuss about the evils of this chronic condition, bacteria that emanate from the skin. We’ll say that millions don’t even realize they’re suffering from it. And then we’ll provide the remedy. Nuvolia: the Bromhidrosis-Fighting Soap.”

  George thought this would never work, but over time he would be proven spectacularly wrong. Within a year Kennison would bring Nuvolia back to second place, and within three years the brand would reclaim the top position. For now, George refused to believe that such a dull campaign could ever succeed. “I guess we’ll see,” was all he said, resignedly.

  “We’re lucky even to keep Nuvolia,” Lazar added. “Do you want to tell me what you were thinking on your ill-begotten tour? Richard Trumbull did not come to Chicago to visit the slums or be converted to socialism.”

  “I thought he had a perfectly decent time.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  “Should I have taken him to the slaughterhouses?” George asked.

  “Our job as advertisers is to give people what they want. If we don’t agree with what they want and try to force our beliefs on them, we doom ourselves to failure,” Lazar said. “Our industry is changing. You can lead, or fall behind. That is up to you.”

  As 1906 wound to a close, George felt increasingly that he had no choice, that he was washed up at twenty-nine. He had lost his major client, and the campaigns that fell to him were for local businesses or products on the verge of obsolescence: cylinder records, straight-front corsets, patent medicines. He did manage to keep his office, he still had a place at the conference table, but Kennison and his adjutants ran the show.

  Brought low by the situation at work, George hadn’t checked the papers to see what was on at Hull House since noting a puppet show and children’s operetta that had played in November. But soon after the New Year an article appeared in the Chicago Daily News about a new book Jane Addams had written, calling for peace in a troubled time. This sent George to the entertainment listings, where he found that a play had recently opened at Hull House: Odysseus in Chicago, a three-week run with an all-Greek cast that critics were raving about. He brought the reviews home, Margaret said she would love to go, and on a frigid night in early February 1907, a Thursday, one of the days when Helen would likely be working, George and Margaret set out for the theater on the dodgy side of town.

  11

  Ravenous Bookstore & Café sat at the end of a stretch of boutiques and restaurants on Armitage, the main shopping avenue in Lincoln Park. It was more café than bookstore, with a clutch of tables in the middle, floor-to-ceiling shelves along the left wall, and on the right a huge mural of a raven on the shoulder of an especially unflattering likeness of Edgar Allan Poe. Lucy had arrived before me, and she was standing at the shelves in profile, one of only a couple of browsers. She wore a slim-fitting lilac dress and her hair loose, tumbling in a sandy sheen to her arms. She’d told me she was working from home today, so I tried to make sense of why she’d dressed down for our first meeting and up for this one.

  “What are you reading?” I asked as I approached.

  Sh
e smiled and gave me a quick hug, then turned the book so I could see the cover: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. “The Press published it a couple years ago. Have you read it?”

  “I’ve been woefully behind on reading,” I said. “But I did drive by Hull House yesterday. Does that count?”

  “No—and you’re missing out. Jane Addams was incredible, one of the great women of the century. And a surprisingly good writer, too. That combination of thinker and doer is so rare.” She pressed the book into my hands. “I’m buying it for you.”

  “Lucy—”

  But she was already on her way to the register, pulling her wallet from her purse.

  “Let me,” I said.

  “I insist. Now aren’t I a model employee—supporting the company’s books?”

  When we sat down for lunch, I couldn’t help saying, “I have a good job, you know.” Lucy had always paid for everything, wouldn’t have it otherwise, and when I used to tell her I wasn’t a starveling, she would bristle and say There are worse sins than generosity. “I work at Imego.” I came out with it, because she was going to find out one way or another.

  “I thought you were a proud Luddite. I don’t remember your taking computer science.”

  “Actually, I’m on the books project. I was going to tell you, but I thought you might never speak to me again.”

  She sat back in her chair and gave me a look that said If this is a hoax, I’m on to you. But I held her gaze long enough for her to realize I wasn’t kidding. She asked how I got the job, and I told the whole story about Dhara and Lakeside and how I wound up, almost accidentally, at one of the world’s wealthiest and most ambitious companies.

  “Well, this is surprising news,” she said.

  “I guess we’re on opposite sides of the table.”

  “Yes, I’m here and you’re there.” Lucy’s neck flushed red. “And apparently I’m David and you’re Goliath.”

  “We’re not out to kill each other.” I picked up a menu and cast my eyes over the list of sandwiches. “Imego and publishers just signed a settlement agreement, right?”

  “And a lousy agreement it was,” she said. “We’re looking at a future where a single company could control all the world’s books. All the pricing, all the distribution. If the Internet is killing print publishing, Imego is robbing its grave.”

  I made an effort to appease her. “You know, we’ve had a slowdown at work. Libraries are nervous.”

  “That won’t last long. How many books have you scanned so far?”

  So much for appeasement. “Close to ten million.” I slid Lucy her menu, but she left it on the table.

  “And what about copyright? Why should U. Chicago and other presses do all the work of finding writers, editing their manuscripts, managing their neuroses, and bringing good books into the world, only to have Imego copy them and rake in the proceeds?”

  “Most of the ten million are orphaned or in the public domain,” I pointed out.

  “But some are not, and that’s troubling, especially since Imego’s idea of fair use is pretty much the entire text.”

  “When you search, you can only read a snippet,” I corrected her. “You have to pay for the rest.”

  “Again, why is the book yours in the first place?”

  “Because Imego undertook one of the craziest, most daunting tasks in the history of civilization,” I said. “No one else was going to do it.”

  “If I had twenty billion dollars to burn, I would have. But I’d partner with publishers and writers, not screw them.” She picked up her menu, tapped it on the table, and put it down. “You’re a writer, Adam. Aren’t you worried about how your books will be published?”

  “These days the only readers of so-called literary fiction are other writers: faculty and students, the wandering herd of MFA graduates,” I said. “A ‘writer’s writer’ used to be the name of a critical darling the masses ignored. Now the critics have disappeared along with the book reviews, the masses don’t read, and a ‘writer’s writer’ is anyone fool enough to spend three, five, forty years type-type-typing into the void.”

  “So you’re a fool?” Lucy asked.

  “The title of my thesis was A Brief History of the Fool. Now I prefer the term grotesque.”

  “I’ve seen more grotesque than you,” she said.

  “Like Edgar Allan Poe over there. I hope the food isn’t as bad as that mural.”

  She relented a little at that. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “And why did we come here again?” I asked.

  “I’ll do anything to support books.”

  My salad was mostly candied walnuts, my iced tea undrinkably sweet. When Lucy asked how lunch was, I said I’d met my monthly sugar quota.

  “Complaining about sugar is anti-American. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  I was grateful that Lucy had lightened the mood, glad to move beyond our little back and forth over Imego. But I felt I owed it to her, or perhaps to myself, to say how I really felt about my job. “I know I sounded like I was defending the Library Project,” I began. “I’ve been working there for five years, so I guess I’m programmed to take the company line. You know Imego’s motto: Remember what your mother told you. Well, I don’t know many mothers who would tell their children to take over the world. And though I’m pretty sure the founders and current leadership are not capitalist wolves but true believers in making information universally available, I do worry what would happen if their stocks crashed and survival depended on the bottom line.”

  I acknowledged other concerns people had about my employer: privacy, censorship, control of information. These were legitimate fears, which I shared. But mostly I wanted to say that I wasn’t happy there, and would leave if I could. “Though not in this economy,” I told her. “I owe quite a bit of money for my MFA.” I moved swiftly past the subject, since I wasn’t about to revisit the debt I owed Lucy. I didn’t so much as look up for her reaction. “Like everyone else these days, I’m kind of stuck,” I said. “But I’m still working on that novel.” I don’t know why I kept telling her that I had a book under way.

  “When do you write?” Lucy asked.

  “Nights,” I lied. “My wife is rarely home.”

  This hung in the air while the waiter returned to see if we were interested in dessert. Lucy suppressed a smile, and we both declined.

  “I’ve been married little over a year,” I continued. “Though we work at the same place we hardly see each other. And now Dhara decided to apply for a position at Imegoland. I guess she wants to Rollerblade to work.”

  “In California?” Lucy asked.

  “I don’t want to move there.” I told her about my father, the heart-failure brochure, how I worried that he’d not survive another uprooting. I said Chicago was home; nowhere else felt as real to me. “Dhara can’t see where I’m coming from. I know it’s terrible, but I hope she doesn’t get the job.”

  Lucy wasn’t saying much, nor was she prompting me, so I filled the space with far-too-candid talk. I knew it was a betrayal, and I had to worry I was becoming like my father or one of those grotesques he talked about, cut off from the world. It shouldn’t have been that way. I’d had my circle of friends in college, but the ones who’d come to Chicago had moved to the suburbs and nearly all had kids by now. I had a job, but worked on the margins and spent so much of my time on the road. I had a family, sickly, scattered, or gone. I had a wife. Yet in some fundamental way I was alone, and here was Lucy, across the table, hearing me out.

  We paid the check, and when we stepped onto the sidewalk, I asked, “Where do you live?”

  She pointed down the block in the direction of the El, then we walked along talking about the neighborhood. Lucy said she’d thought about living in Wicker Park, Bucktown, Ukrainian Village. “But those places have become as bougie as Lincoln Park. I don’t care if you’ve got tattoos covering 80 percent of your body and the Sex Pistols blasting on the stereo, you’re still charg
ing five dollars for a cupcake,” she said. “I’m running out of years to be cool, so I might as well live here.”

  When we got to her street, a couple blocks past Armitage Station, she put out her arms and I leaned in for a quick embrace. “I’d show you my apartment, but it looks like something out of Doctorow’s new novel.”

  I was relieved she hadn’t invited me to her place. I was married. I loved my wife. What did I have to complain about? The thought that Lucy and I could just be old friends seemed much more appealing at that moment than embarking on a misadventure that couldn’t possibly end well. “I like Doctorow. What’s the book?” I asked.

  “It’s not out yet, but I scored a galley in a trade. It’s called Homer & Langley, about famous hoarders in New York.”

  “The Collyer brothers,” I said. “I know that story all too well.”

  “Your father?”

  “The very one.” As we stood there on the corner of Armitage and Dayton I told her about the storage locker in Little Italy and how over the course of three months it had gone from full to nearly empty. I wanted to say I’d staked my father out, followed him across town, but I worried she would think I’d gone off the deep end.

  “How sick is he?” she asked.

  I told her about stages A through D, but said I didn’t know. And, like Dhara, she urged me to confront him, once and for all.

  “I don’t mean to sound alarms,” she said, “but I had a friend in college whose father killed himself—left the car running in the garage—and during the year or so beforehand he’d been casting off everything he owned, taking out insurance, getting his house in order. You used to complain all the time about your dad, but you also worried about him. Do you think—?”