The closing on the house on the lake took place at The Dunes on March 15, the Ides of March. It was cold, bleak, brutal, but beautiful too. Anne-Marie drove. Ice caves had formed on the lake, and frost flowers that had been extruded from the plants along the road. The piers were still covered with thick layers of ice. The marina was empty, the boats in storage barns or shrink-wrapped and left in lots south of town, along Water Street, or on the other side of the river.
Signor Palmisano had his lawyer at his side; I had Anne-Marie. It was a decent room, with heavy drapes admitting shafts of gray light, maps of Berrien County and of the Great Lakes on the walls.
Signor Palmisano’s lawyer had drawn up a private mortgage—which I’d had vetted by our attorney—that would be held by the Fifth-Third Bank of St. Anne, which had a branch in Hyde Park: a $50,000 down payment, and $50,000 a year for the next three years. Signor Palmisano was not a happy camper. His lawyer had to restrain him.
The first thing Signor Palmisano said was: “You’re the man who wants to steal my house. You’re a thief, un ladro. There’s a special place for you in hell. With Vanni Fucci. You make figs at God.” He made a “fig” at me, his thumb sticking out between the second and third fingers of his clenched right fist.
“Signor Palmisano,” I said. “You and I both know that the house could fall into the lake. I can’t get insurance. I can’t get a regular mortgage. The housing boom in St. Anne is over. There was an article in the New York Times about it. I can’t even get an appraiser to look at it.”
He bared his lips: “Cazzata. You can get an appraiser to look at anything. Besides, that house has stood there for seventy years. Hasn’t moved an inch.”
“The house hasn’t moved,” I said. “But the lake has. The bluff.” I wasn’t sure just what had moved. There was only one way to deal with people like Signor Palmisano. But I wasn’t sure what it was.
“The wood alone is worth fifty K. Those beams are solid spruce. I could make a call,” Sig. Palmisano said.
“Is that a threat?”
The lawyer intervened. “Augie, you don’t have to go through with this. You haven’t signed anything.”
“If I live another five years, I’ll be broke and they’ll throw me out on the fucking street. Ah, t’ hell with it. With any luck I’ll be dead by then.” He gestured with both arms this time, holding his thumbs between his first and middle fingers and shaking them at the heavens, or maybe at me.
We signed the papers, each of us initialing every page. I signed with my Aurora fountain pen, which had a black cap and a green barrel. Augie signed with the lawyer’s silver ballpoint pen.
“My dad had a pen like that,” Augie said.
“It’s Italian,” I said. “Aurora. Aurora Optima. Take it.” I held out the pen. “It’s yours. I’ve got another one. Almost the same, but the cap is green and the barrel’s black. This one’s got a broad italic nib. The other one’s got a fine nib.”
“Why is the barrel green and the cap black?”
“Something’s wrong with the threads in one of them. The black cap screws on tight on both pens, but the green cap only works on the black pen.”
Signor Palmisano hesitated. “I don’t want to give you the satisfaction,” he said. But he wanted the pen. And I wanted him to have it. It was the least I could do. I didn’t think it was polite to laugh, but I was laughing to myself anyway on the drive back to the Loft with Anne-Marie. Laughing at the memory of Sig. Augustus Palmisano making figs at me. I was tempted to buy Anne-Marie a glass of wine at Stefano’s, but Stefano’s wasn’t open yet, and I decided to head back to Hyde Park.
I picked up my car at the real estate office and headed for home. On the way I stopped at the marina. All the boats were in dry dock, but I remembered the story I’d told Olivia about the couple having coffee, or was it wine, and talking about their marriage. Maybe I hadn’t been passionate enough for Olivia? I felt a kind of coldness toward her now, and this was a terrible feeling, like losing an arm or a leg.
When I got back to Hyde Park that night, I looked up Vanni Fucci in the Samson edition of the Inferno. Canto 25. Poor Vanni is bitten by a snake, then incinerated, then he regains his human form, and then he’s bitten again. Hmmm. His crime? Stealing holy objects from the cathedral in Pistoia. At the end, Vanni directs his anger at God, making figs with both hands. “Togli, Dio, ch’a te le squadro!” he shouts. “Take these, God. Up yours.”
On the morning of the move, March 2, Delilah stopped by on her way out to The Warehouse. Then Olivia and Saskia. We stood in the kitchen. The packers had packed everything up the week before. The kitchen was empty except for a small espresso pot and a single cup with two blue stripes just under the rim. No saucer. Through the window you could see Grandpa Chaz’s daylilies, about ten different kinds, which he’d divided every three or four years till they filled most of the small yard. I’d removed the dead leaves and fertilized the plants at the end of March. The scapes that produce the buds had begun to shoot up above the leaves. In the fall I’d raked leaves over the small tomato patch, but I wasn’t going to plant any new tomatoes.
Delilah gave me a hug and banged out the door, swinging her big purse. Olivia picked up the little espresso cup and examined it.
“Nadia and I are coming this summer to lay out on the beach,” Saskia said. “If the house hasn’t fallen into the lake by then. We’ll bring Mom with us.”
“It should still be there in July.”
“You look sad,” Olivia said.
“Look at this,” I said, holding up a black urn. “Punch’s ashes. I just found it in the garage. You didn’t know Punch, did you.”
“No, but I remember the dog bed in your dad’s office. And the sign.” She turned to Saskia. “Gabe’s dad had a sign on his office door that said I’d turn back if I were you.”
Saskia laughed. “Do you wish you could turn back now?” she said to me. “I mean right this minute?”
“‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,’” I said, turning to Saskia. “Your mother doesn’t think it matters which one you take, but I think it makes all the difference. In any case, I’m ready to move on.” And I was ready to move on.
Saskia looked at her mother: “That’s ridiculous. That’s like saying it won’t make any difference if I move to Ann Arbor and live with Dad and pay instate tuition, or if I stay right here.”
“You’re not moving to Ann Arbor,” Olivia said. “Don’t even think of it.”
And I realized that Olivia had not been offered the job at Borders headquarters.
Later that morning I shared a cup of coffee with our cleaning lady, Mrs. Farmer, in the kitchen. She’d brought her own thermos, and I fixed an espresso. She had spent most of the month in the house, arriving at eight and leaving at five, taking an hour for lunch, which she ate with me in the unreconstructed kitchen. She’d brought a sandwich, which she offered to share. I didn’t feel like eating, but I chatted with her while she ate.
“You’d better get going,” she said. “You want to be at your new house when the movers get there.”
“They’ve got to drop some stuff off at The Warehouse on Eighty-Seventh Street,” I said.
One of the movers came out of the house with two coats slung over his shoulder—Mamma’s fur coat and raccoon coat I should have given to Saul Bellow. “You don’t want to forget these,” he said.
“I’ll put them in the van,” I said. “With Punch’s ashes.” I’d sold the Cadillac to a vintage car dealer in Tinley Park.
I signed a form clamped to a clipboard and made sure the movers knew how to find The Warehouse and the house on the lake. And then I offered Mamma’s fur coat to Mrs. Farmer.
“I remember your Mamma used to wear this coat everywhere. It never made sense that she left it behind.”
“It should have been stored professionally,” I said.
I was still holding the coat. “Try it on,” I said.
We unzipped the special breathable long-garment storage bag. I held it up so Mrs. Farmer could slip her arms into the sleeves.
“Look at you,” I said. “Look at yourself in the mirror.”
She stood in front of the large mirror in the front hall. She turned around and looked at herself over one shoulder, then over the other shoulder.
“You look beautiful,” I said. “I want you to have it.”
“It ain’t right, Gabe,” she said. “What if your Mamma comes back and is looking for her coat?”
“Then I’ll buy her another coat,” I said.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
I walked through the house one last time. All fifteen rooms. Built for comfort, not for speed. And then I said good-bye to Mrs. Farmer, who was still wearing Mamma’s coat. She was going to spend another week going through the empty house, cleaning the attics and the closets, dusting, mopping the floors, washing the windows on the inside. She’d be there when the electrician came to replace the old knob-and-tube wiring in the attic, which was part of the contract with the Al-Dajanis. Then she’d lock the doors and drop the keys off at the real estate office on Fifty-First Street.
On the way out of town, I stopped at the cemetery to say good-bye to Dad and Grandpa Chaz. And my grandmother, too, whom I barely remembered. There were four plots. My French Canadian grandmother was on the right: et dieu essuiera toutes les larmes de leurs yeux. Then Grandpa Chaz: bookman. Dad’s stone wasn’t in place yet. On Dad’s left was a plot for Mamma, or maybe for me.
I told them that the shop had closed and that I’d bought a house on the lake, not far from the Loft, and then I drove to the monument company on Cottage Grove to see why Dad’s tombstone wasn’t in place. They were very busy, they said. People kept dying. They couldn’t keep up.
What could I say to that?
XIV. THE GOOD LIFE
(April–May 2010)
Montaigne was thirty-eight when he retired to the country. I was fifty. Montaigne had his library—about 1,000 books—in a tower on the family estate; I had my library—about 20,000 books—in a house overlooking Lake Michigan.
Four o’clock in the morning, Thursday, April 22, my fifty-first birthday. It was the end of my third week in St. Anne. Everything that needed to be done had been done—two loads of gravel spread out on the drive, the restaurant stove hooked up, the dark green shutters given a fresh coat of paint, a new gas dryer, the septic tank pumped, the well shocked—and I was sitting in my study, which, like every room in the new house—except for the kitchen and bathrooms—was chock full of books. The auction houses had all been eager to handle the sale of Grandpa Chaz’s Americana—I’d had several calls, in fact—but I’d been busy and had missed several consignment deadlines. Now I’d have to wait for Swann’s Printed & Manuscript Americana sale in November, but that was fine. Grandpa Chaz had been a friend of Arthur Swann back when he (Grandpa Chaz) was scouting for Harry Gold on Book Row, and we had a long history with Swann’s.
I’d been feeling good about the estimates—over two and a half to three and a half million for eighteen books and two maps. It would be a big sale for me, huge, and a big sale for Swann Galleries. Toby Arnold, who managed the auctions, was eager to get his hands on the books and offered to cut me a little leeway on the consignment deadline for the November auction.
I was waiting for first light, waiting for the sun to come up, waiting for my new life—the good life—to begin. My MacBook Pro was at the ready. My Aurora Optima, the one with the black barrel and fine nib, loaded with fresh Aurora black ink, was at the ready. My deep red Claire Fontaine notebook was at the ready. My Old French dictionary—Randle Cotgrave’s seventeenth-century Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues—was at the ready. My copy of Montaigne—Les Essais, edition nouvelle. Paris, Abel L’Angelier, 1595—was at the ready, the boards supported on two tightly rolled towels to prevent it from lying flat. It looked like a bird spreading its winds as it’s about to take flight. I sat there in the dark. Waiting. Excited, but frightened too.
I’d learned enough about happiness to know that you can’t aim at it directly. You have to sight off to one side. But what are you supposed to aim at in the first place, before you sight off to one side? “Reason and sense remove anxiety,” Montaigne writes in “Of Solitude,” quoting Horace, “Not villas that look out upon the sea.” This was one of several warnings that seemed to be directed at me, but I wasn’t worried, because I already had a feeling that I was going to have a good day. I just had to figure out how to cooperate with this feeling.
“Reason and sense” was only one target. I had several others in mind. My new how-to-draw book, for example—a “complete course”—promised to teach me to connect my mind to my hands and eyes like never before! To teach me to see in the light of reason and measure. To teach me to make marks with vitality and freshness. And to draw the human figure and discover new depths to my own humanity! I was skeptical but excited. My old guitar teacher, Atene, had made similar claims for music: “Music is the greatest good that we can experience. It’s beyond words, beyond thought, beyond language. It brings us into harmony with ultimate reality. The music of the spheres is a metaphor, but it’s not just a metaphor. It’s a metaphor at the edge of language. Language can’t take us any further. That’s why we need music.”
But what I was going to aim at was something more modest—a working, or at least workable, conception of the good life.
At first light (6:12 a.m.), I took off my shoes and rolled my pants up and climbed down the sixty-seven stairs to the beach. The water was still too cold to swim, but it felt good on my feet. The wind was coming off the lake and I listened to the sound the waves made as they collapsed upon themselves, listened to the waves themselves, not representations of waves, not recordings of waves (like Dad’s sleep machine). My eyes took in the beauty of the lake, the silvery lakelight, the dunes, the gulls, the sturdy beach grasses that held the dunes together. Beauty itself, not representations of beautiful things, not photographs or paintings, but the things themselves.
Was it overwhelming? Yes, but was it enough? Would it be enough? Would translating Montaigne’s Essais—my immediate agenda—be enough? Or would I wind up like a priest who’s abandoned his vocation and is searching for ways to distract himself?
I climbed back up the steps to the top of the bluff, rinsed my feet off in the shower outside the sauna, wiped them on the front door mat, and made my way from the front door to the kitchen. It was like negotiating a maze. My study was the only room in the house not choked with books (though it was full of books).
Jefferson bookcases in front of Jefferson bookcases lined the walls in the large living room and in the bedrooms upstairs. I hadn’t removed the boards that covered the books, so I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what order they were in, if any, and of course, there were boxes of books everywhere. The reference library was in the billiard room, along with more books from the shop. The old card catalog was in the garage. The entryway and the upstairs hall were full of boxes of books. I’d calculated that I had about 550 linear feet of wall space in the house, excluding windows and doors. I thought the house could handle 20,000 books. If you figure 8 books per foot of shelf space, 8 books times 6 shelves is 48 books. For 20,000 books, you need about 500 feet of wall space. And of course, some books won’t fit on the shelves and will have to be shelved separately, but that’s par for the course.
I made a large caffè latte the way Mamma used to make it, in a Neapolitan pot, and carried it upstairs to my study. My intention was to start at the beginning—Book I, Chapter 1—and translate them myself, for myself, one
page a day. It would be a way of shaping my day, like a real job. Even if I took a day off now and then I’d be done with a draft in two years.
But instead of starting on page 1, I turned to my favorite chapter—“Of Solitude”—in which Montaigne compares his own study to an arrière boutique—a back shop or room behind the shop, “in which one can withdraw and enjoy real liberty, in which we can converse with ourselves without family, servants, possessions.”
What would I talk about with myself in this arrière boutique? Would I bring my thoughts and desires and fears into the light of consciousness? Would I learn to accept things as they are and not wish them to be some other way? Would I put aside what Montaigne calls “conditions populaire”—ambition, greed, fear, irresolution, lust (les concupiscences)—and learn to belong to myself? Or would I take my chains with me?
Bookselling, of course, is a less exalted vocation than that of the artist or musician, than that of the statesman or the diplomat, than that of the priest or the philosopher, than that of the deep sea diver or the mountain climber—just as Montaigne is a less exalted philosopher than Plato or Aristotle. But it had been my vocation for many years. And now? I could almost hear my books in the living room, boarded up in their Jefferson bookcases, crying out to me, like someone stuck in an elevator, or a coffin: “Let us out of here. We’re suffocating. Let us out. Let us OUT!” And I started to laugh. “I’ll be down in a minute,” I said.
I located Grandpa Chaz’s tool box in the garage and spent two hours removing the boards from the front of the bookcases. I pried out the nails and put them in a Duralex bowl and stacked the boards in the garage. When I came back inside, the house was redolent with the smell of old books. I took a moment to savor it before going back up to my study, my arrière boutique. I was just settling down with Montaigne when I heard a gonging I hadn’t heard before—the doorbell.
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