She takes no notice. “It is organic matter?”
“I believe it is.”
“It must be carcinogenic. I mean, ohmigod, you’re breathing dead owl dust. I have to get out of here. I’m gonna call city hall—this is crazy. You need to get rid of that thing.”
“Ma’am, ma’am!” says George, in a voice that stops her as she is halfway out. “Please don’t let this get any further, but I see I will have to let you into our secret.”
It is too tempting, despite the cancerous owl dust. She stops.
“It isn’t real, ma’am, we just like to pretend it is. We’re called The Owl, we wanted an owl for the store. But you are very right, that would constitute an environmental hazard. This looks like a real one, ma’am, but it is in fact a man-made artifact—in plain words, it’s plastic. And please don’t touch it, it’s a valuable piece.”
She doesn’t look remotely like she wants to touch it. She comes back in fully, approaches the bird warily. I’d love it to suddenly squawk.
“They look like real feathers to me,” she says. “I think they’re hazardous also.”
George says he isn’t qualified to say whether the feathers themselves offer a clear and present danger. Luke has come back to the front, and is standing on the first stair radiating contempt. George has lost interest in the game, and says, “Ma’am, if you are so troubled by the bookstore owl, then, reluctant as I am to discourage patrons of secondhand bookstores, could I suggest that you might be happier at Barnes and Noble across the way, which, I am pretty sure I am safe in promising, you will find to be entirely owl-free?”
When she has gone, George gets the next book in a pile and prices it. Then he stops, and looks up at Luke.
“City hall. These people.”
“Tell me about it,” Luke answers. “George, I’m taking these books to the post office for Mr. Sevinç. There’s nothing else to mail?”
“Sadly, no,” says George. “For Sevinç? Those are the cartography books?”
Luke glances down at the brown package. “Yeah. The Vatican one is cool.”
“Isn’t it though? I would love to see those for real,” says George.
“He’s in town November,” says Luke, looking impassive.
“Ah,” says George. They nod at each other very slightly. “Mr. Sevinç is a customer of ours who lives much of the time in Istanbul,” says George, in explanation, to me. “When he visits The Owl, he brings gifts from the mystic East.”
“What does he bring?” I ask. Maybe they just mean marijuana. But I am imagining silks, brocades, spices.
George must be able to see the pictures in my head. “Oh, treasures, treasures,” he says. “He brings elixirs made by wizards when the world was young, cloth of gold woven in Byzantium, he brings cardamom and cloves and nutmegs, he brings parchments from the great Library of Constantinople, plucked from the flames by good men and true. Some things they managed to rescue from the barbarous hordes.”
I nod.
“By which, of course, I mean the Christians,” he says. “The Fourth Crusade?”
I nod again. George is looking expectant. My knowledge of Crusaders is a little hazy; mostly I think of them as embroidered little men in St. George tunics. I begin to speak, hoping that inspiration or the memory of a history lesson will return, but Luke cuts in.
“Halva, and Turkish Delight,” says Luke. “That’s what Sevinç brings. And it’s outstanding. George doesn’t eat refined sugars or saturated fats, but he makes an exception for Sevinç’s candy.”
George spreads out his hands. “Once a year, some halva—and halva has nutritional value—from the old souk in Istanbul. So sue me.”
“Good seeing you,” Luke says to me on his way out.
I say to George, “The owl is real, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says, and grins. He cranes forward to check that Luke has not paused to tidy the outside books, and says, in a low voice laden with mirth, “You seem to have made some sort of positive impression on Luke. He is rarely so loquacious.”
I do not stay very long today; I am too restless to sink into that Zen state necessary for truly accomplished browsing. I still have this feeling that something is different, that there is something I have forgotten, that something is wrong. But it won’t come. I head for the park, to go to see the Hopper paintings.
Central Park is another place I can’t believe I see every day. I had thought that it would be as flat as a tabletop, and municipal, a large-scale version of an English park with swings and flower beds, neat and clipped and regulated and depressing. It is nothing like that at all. Today, there are cyclists and runners and tourists and inline skaters and skateboarders and people practicing ballet moves on a patch of grass, and police on horseback and a girl with a snake, and a woman with three cats on leads, and a motionless golden man on a plinth. It is the jubilant blazon of the city.
I feel better when I reach the gallery. The first gallery I went to in New York was the Met—like everyone else—and I saw a sign that said “No strollers on the weekend” so I zipped through all the rooms at breakneck speed, looking reprovingly at people if they seemed likely to loiter. When I reached the picture I most wanted to see—Garden at Vaucresson by Vuillard, whose exuberant joy you can feel even as you walk into the room—I barely stopped to look at it for fear of Met officials bearing down on me with a loudspeaker: “Miss! No strolling! Step along there, miss. Look lively. It’s the weekend.”
All of it is like that, at the beginning. Every conversation seems fraught with difficulty, every pronunciation produces a frown. I spend time learning how to use the transport system, learning how to speak so that people understand me, learning how to melt into the pot.
You can’t be slow. You can’t hesitate, you can’t ask questions with the usual polite packing around them—“Excuse me, would it be all right if . . . ?” Those are courtesies for a place where English is everyone’s first language. Here, it is the lingua franca, and it has to be boiled down to its simplest form. If you want to be understood, you can’t use irregular past participles. “Has he left?” results in blank stares. You have to say, “Did he leave?” You can’t ask for tuna in a deli and pronounce it “chuna”—because the men, with a big queue of people and no time, will hear the “ch” and make you a chicken sandwich. You can’t sound the “t” in “quarter” or “butter,” because “quarter” and “butter” don’t have any “t” in them here. You can’t even ask for a hot-water bottle—it is one of the first things I need, being a sovereign remedy for period pains, and nobody seems ever to have heard of them. A hot-water bottle? A what? No, we don’t sell them, miss. No, I don’t know where you could buy one. Eventually I corner a hapless assistant who has already denied the existence of hot-water bottles in America, and I explain exactly what I am looking for. It is flat, and made of rubber. You pour boiling water into it, and then fasten it with a stopper and slip it into your bed. It then warms up the bed.
“Oh, yeah. We sell those. You mean a water bottle.”
“Yes, that’s it! A hot-water bottle.”
“Yeah. Miss? They’re not hot.”
Once I get to the Whitney, the aesthetics of which escape my grasp, I breathe more deeply and move more slowly. I spend a long time with the Hopper pictures. I like to look at how he paints light. Somehow he uses light to make everything still. I am glad I am going to focus on Thiebaud, though, and not Hopper. Mitchell has a Hopper on his bedroom wall—the one with the gas pumps that looks like it is an illustration for Gatsby. Everyone is lonely in Hopper, everyone is sad. Everyone is waiting.
Unless I leave now, I will be late for lunch. I hurry.
I am meeting Mitchell at a diner. He doesn’t take me to fancy restaurants, apart from the first night we met, and that was just for a drink. He loves discovering great hole-in-the-wall places. I don’t think he wants to be told where is good by Time Out or the New York Post; he wants to find it for himself. Or he wants to already know a great place, so
that he can be irritated when Time Out finds it too.
I am still perplexed as to why Mitchell ever asked me out, ever even approached me. Mitchell is the kind of man you expect to see with someone who has that sort of easy sun-kissed I-just-stepped-out-of-my-Calvin-Klein-shoot look. I am not bad, but I am not in that league. Men don’t vault over things to get to me, or get tongue-tied in my beautiful presence. Most of the time, sad to say, they can’t shut up. He has a kind of confidence that I really like. I’ve never met anyone like him, with even a fraction of his easy assurance. I spend a lot of time trying to second-guess other people, and hoping that they like me; Mitchell doesn’t move through the world like that. He is like a sun; people react to him as if they are being warmed by the first spring sunshine. It is exhilarating to be with him, to be a satellite to that radiance.
On a more practical level, he tips waiters to get the best table, and it works. How do you know how to do that? How do you know how to give an amount that isn’t stingy or stupid, and won’t cause the waiter to stare down broadly at the note and say, “I’m sorry, sir, is this a bribe?”
He lives in an apartment on Sutton Place for free. It belongs to his Uncle Beeky. He really has an Uncle Beeky. Mitchell’s family also has a house on Long Island, at the seaside, but I think it’s empty most of the time.
His apartment looks like Edith Wharton has just vacated it. There are curtains made of lush brocade, sofas you sink into, fringed lamps, walls painted in heritage colors, books that are bound in fat shiny leather with raised bands, gilt mirrors, space to walk around. When I stay over, I curl my toes into the deep pile of the carpet and forget about my flat Ikea rugs. Mitchell doesn’t notice the apartment, doesn’t connect to it. There should be a person there who wants to stop and slip his hand over the curved oak banister, with its dull gleam, or pause at the sudden presence of a ghost, a spirit from an older New York, at home in the soft shadows. Mitchell would be better fitted to somewhere designed by Mies van der Rohe, somewhere with clean lines and clarity. Somewhere that doesn’t weigh down into the earth and into a thousand social precepts from long ago.
In a place he’s borrowing from Beeky, perhaps he can’t imprint his own personality too much. There are a few things that are his—the sheets, I would hope, are his rather than Beeky’s. They are a dark sinful mulberry color, but are redeemed by being made of the most beautiful cotton that has a sort of downy pile on it.
Mitchell is definitely tidy; his apartment is the most controlled space since NASA. This is, of course, very important indeed. I can’t imagine falling in love with a messy person. He is thirty-three, ten years older than I am, but it doesn’t feel as if there is any age difference. He teaches economics at the New School, but the nearest thing to a book in that apartment, aside from the leather ones that Edith and Henry left, are this year’s copies of the New Yorker in the bathroom. He says he has put them all in storage, that he has everything he needs on his laptop and his iPad, but I don’t agree. Loving my little bookshop, I don’t agree.
CHAPTER TWO
When I get to the diner, on 3rd and 28th, he is already there. It’s one of the many things I like about him; he’s never late. I see him through the window as I get there, and I stop for a second just to look at him. It is a curious thing, to feel so glad that someone else is in the world, to feel that it is almost a privilege to love them. That I should love a bright particular star. I would like to watch him for a few minutes without his knowing I am there, to take pleasure just in his being, rather than in his relation to me, but of course he looks up, and smiles at me. I come inside.
“How are you, English girl?” he says.
“I’m feeling very English today,” I say. “It’s such a beautiful day, and everything I have looked at today has seemed . . . strange and foreign. Not alien, but not English. Doesn’t it seem to you that everything is on display in New York, everything is spilling out—from the shops, from the cafés, from the people—and the result is a kind of psychic overload, a kind of sensory bliss? There are no hidden layers here, it’s all just out there. What you see is what you get.”
Mitchell leans forward, intimating that I should as well.
“You are so wrong,” he says, his lips just lighting on the soft flesh of my ear. “There are layers, upon layers, upon layers. What you’re getting—is theater.” He sits back, flaps his hand at me, mock-impatient. “You should order. I am ravenous.”
It’s a Jewish diner, so I order matzoh-ball soup. I knew nothing at all about Jewish food when I got here. I thought Jewish people ate hummus and falafels and things to do with herring. I was in the outer darkness.
The soup comes. It is in a white bowl with a blue floral rim round it. The ball of dough sits like an island in the bowl. In a practiced movement, the waiter pours the golden consommé around it, with all the noodles. It is lovely. I eat it too quickly.
I look at Mitchell’s plate. “Can I have some of yours? I am so hungry. I can’t stop eating.”
He grimaces. He often makes a movement—a facial expression, a gesture—that illustrates what he is about to say before the words come. “No,” he says now. “Europeans are overly comfortable with stealing from each other’s plates. It’s not hygienic. Order something else.”
“You’re dating me. You kiss me. That’s not hygienic either,” I point out, but Mitchell clearly isn’t for sharing. I attract the attention of the waiter and order more soup, with bread. Mitchell raises his eyebrows.
“You order bread with matzoh? That’s like ordering bread with a side order of bread. You should be careful. I might not be so madly in love with you if you get fat.”
“Are you madly in love with me?” I ask, ignoring the fat comment because I am so thin people mistake me for a twig. He hasn’t said anything like that before.
He pours some sparkling water into our glasses. He is not looking at me. He is smiling, and trying not to.
“Oops,” he says.
His eyes crinkle at the edges, and he looks almost wistful as he says, “It is a word that’s much too laden, don’t you think? I do know that you’re different from anyone I’ve ever met, Esme. I think I’m—enchanted. You’ve enchanted me.”
I am flushed through with happiness. I want to say, “You’ve enchanted me too!” but I can’t—we’d be verging on Hallmark territory. And I think I am supposed to receive statements like this, rather than respond to them. So instead I start to gabble.
“I haven’t been eating properly. That is, I have, but I am still hungry. I am just always hungry. Maybe I have been working so hard that my brain needs more foo—”
You know when a thought strikes you and at the selfsame time you know with dreadful certainty that it is true? Here is the thought that has just struck me. The restlessness I have felt all day, that feeling of something forgotten, or wrong, crystallizes into this. I am pregnant. This is the unnameable anxiety that has been troubling me all day, the reason I felt that something was different. I feel sure of it. If I go and buy one of those tests from the pharmacy it will come up positive. I don’t know how they work, because I have never thought about buying one, never thought about being pregnant—except one day, in the hazy future, when I am married and living in North London, with my architect husband and my collection of antique patchwork quilts; then I will be pregnant. But not now, at the age of twenty-three, near the end of my first semester of a PhD at Columbia. Because that would not be smart. And it would not be tidy.
The thought is so massive, and so personal, that it is difficult to maintain any degree of normality. I can’t tell Mitchell. We’ve been dating five minutes. There has not been so very much sex to get pregnant from, for all his dedication to the erotic. And only one time unprotected. One time. If I tell him, and say I know I am, like some sort of touchy-feely, at-one-with-Mother-Earth-type person who weaves things out of hessian, and then it turns out that instead I have a tapeworm, I will not look good.
I don’t think I am even late with my period. It i
s due to begin around now. I am frightening myself with no basis in fact. What I have to do is go and get one of those tests. And then see.
As I sit there, resolutely not worrying, I realize that I am also in the grip of a sudden and intense sexual desire. Not only for Mitchell, but for the waiter and the fat man by the window eating two cheeseburgers with a napkin stuffed in the top of his greasy T-shirt. They all look great to me right now. Fleetingly, I imagine the fat man’s penis, and then the waiter’s. Do penises match body type? Will the fat man’s be pudgy and short, the waiter’s long and droopy? Despite the imagery, the desire increases.
Logically, perhaps this means I am not pregnant. Surely the female body works well enough that if I am suddenly and unaccountably lustful, it means that my body is trying to get pregnant? Once it has achieved its aim of reproducing, of a sperm meeting an egg, don’t all those pheromones just shut down? Sorry, boys, we’re closed for business.
I feel a little better. Perhaps I am just having some sort of hormonal upset.
Mitchell is cutting a steak. I like to watch Mitchell in all his actions, in all his particularity. The tiny ripple of his tendons on the backs of his hands as he holds the knife and fork, the light tan of his skin contrasting with the white cuffs of his shirtsleeves, then the charcoal wool of his jacket. It is a part of loving, this delight in all the aspects of a person.
Once he’s cut the steak into little pieces, he lays down his steak knife on the table and picks up his fork, in order to use it as a spoon. All Americans do this. It means that swanky restaurants have to wash a lot of tablecloths.
“I went to see the exhibition of Hoppers at the Whitney,” I say, banishing both the noticing and the lustful thoughts. “I am really lucky that they’re having one.”
Mitchell shakes his head while he chews. “No, you’re not, they’re always exhibiting Hoppers at the Whitney because that’s where they all are. In fact, that’s all they’ve got.”
The Bookstore Page 2