I am lost in him, and I can’t be lost in him. I have to present a semblance of detachment.
“How did you end up in economics?” I ask.
Mitchell looks quizzical. “I’m sorry, are we on our first date?”
“Really. I was just wondering what it was that made you choose it.”
“Have you met my mother?”
“You know I haven’t. So, why?”
“Because,” he says, stroking the inside of my arm with one slow finger, from my elbow to my wrist, “because advertising would have been too obvious. Your arms are nice.”
“You managed to cope with the lack of lust, this time?” I say.
He nods thoughtfully. “Yes. It was pretty tough, but I got through it somehow. If maybe next time you could wear a bag over your head?”
I try to hit him. He catches me again, tickles me again. I am laughing and so is he. He leans up on one arm.
“See, Esme? Oh, I have missed you. We have a good time. Listen, I’ve been thinking, since the initial shock—do you think that—maybe—I don’t know—maybe we’re too young for this? That it might destroy us?” He pauses, looks out of the window and then back to me. “I think, if you do go ahead, that it will destroy us.”
I lie there like a rag doll. The energy in the room—or was it in me?—has been turned off like a switch. A trick. It was a trick.
“I would take such care of you, Esme. I would be there with you through all of it. I’ll find out the name of a good clinic. The best. I can set it up now. And I’ll come with you, of course. I’ll be there every step of the way.”
He touches my cheek with the backs of his fingers.
“I think it’s important to do it quickly. Before you get attached to it.”
As I get up, and get dressed in silence, he watches me. I do not speak, have not spoken. I wish I could just zap myself instantaneously back to my apartment; I cannot find my shoe and all I want to do is go.
“Don’t be upset.”
“I can’t find my shoe.”
“We’ll talk about this some more later.”
“I can’t find my shoe.”
He makes no move to help me look.
“If you have it, Esme, it will start us off on the wrong note. Don’t you see that?” He sits up. “I want to be with you. I think you’re amazing. But don’t do this to us.”
How can a shoe disappear from the universe without a trace? Mitchell’s apartment is immaculate, but it is not under the bed, not entwined in the despised mulberry sheets, not in the bathroom. It has gone.
“Think of your scholarship,” he is saying, as I get down on all fours again to look for it. “A Forster scholarship—you don’t think you have a responsibility to the people who awarded you that?”
I STAND BAREFOOT outside Mitchell’s building. The pavement is cold beneath my feet. There are no cabs—Sutton Place is in its usual postapocalyptic state, devoid of humans. It would be all right to do this in summer; I could pass myself off as pleasantly whimsical. I walk down the street, and pretend that I have shoes on, and eventually a cab comes by. I take it, and go home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When I go in to work the next morning, I am at odds with all creation. It was so easy to get me back—I was so easy. There wasn’t a word of regret or remorse, and I was never going to speak to him again after being so demeaned. Ten words and one caress later I was spread across his bed. I cannot bear myself.
I am opening The Owl up for Bruce, who has been beguiled away from his shift by a symposium on cars from the fifties. Dennis, the white homeless man, is going to be my assistant for the morning setup. He is already there, sitting on the pavement outside Staples, tucking into what looks like chili in a white enamel dish.
He beams at me in welcome. I was intent on gloom, but I look at Dennis, and think of his minute-by-minute life, maybe rooting through trash cans and sleeping in doorways, and I think how paltry that resolve was.
“Is that good?” I ask him.
“No,” he says.
He gets up as I unlock the shutter, gives me a hand scrolling it up. We can’t get in until we have wheeled out all the outside books that are currently blocking the aisles, but he won’t let me help him.
“I heard you was expecting,” he said. “So don’t take risks.”
“It isn’t a risk,” I say. “They’re not heavy. They’re on wheels.”
He fans out the copies of National Geographic in their yellow curves and minutely adjusts the sign that says all books are a dollar. Then he steps back to make sure all is in order.
I turn the lights on in the shop and straighten the bookmarks and postcards. As I do it, I notice a tiny sculpture of a tree, finely modeled out of some dark wood, and hung with even tinier wooden apples that are painted gold. It is exquisite. When Dennis comes back in, I hold it up and say, “Have you seen this? Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Oh, yeah, I brought that in. I brought a whole bunch of other stuff too, but George just wanted that and a book. One book.”
“I wonder if he would sell it to me.”
“Bet he would. It’s pretty, right? They were throwing it out, the house clearance guys. They got no souls.”
“ ‘This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.’ ”
I stand on the chair to put the precious little tree high above the normal line of sight of the customers. If we could stop it from being accidentally sold, it would be better if it could stay here.
“Dennis,” I say, “I am going to get something to eat. Don’t let anyone buy that tree. Do you want anything?”
He says he will have a plain bagel, and recommends a diner five blocks away.
“It’s a good place. Tell them I sent you. You should try their breakfast—it’s better if you stay there, because it don’t taste so good from those aluminum cartons.”
I go obediently to the diner, but just buy two sesame bagels and a cup of herbal tea to go. It is only when I am on my way back that I realize I left the whole shop in the charge of a homeless alcoholic. I run the rest of the way.
Inside the shop, Dennis is not immediately in evidence, but DeeMo is sitting in the main chair looking through the newest batch of CDs. He has a can of Fanta open by the register.
“Have you seen Dennis?”
DeeMo jerks his head back towards the right-hand aisle. I peer behind the Far East section. Dennis is shoveling one art book after another into a big mail sack.
“Dennis? What are you doing?”
He looks up in surprise, but finishes packing the book he is on.
“I’m a thief. You’re not supposed to leave me here alone. Didn’t they tell you?”
“No. You don’t seem to be very good at it, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“No. Guess that’s why I’m in jail a lot.”
DeeMo stands up. “Which jail you in last time, man?”
“Hudson,” says Dennis briefly.
DeeMo looks respectful. “That’s a good jail.”
“I know. It was okay.”
DeeMo says to me, “People commit crimes to get into Hudson,” and then turns back to Dennis. “There’s fucking meadows there, right?”
Dennis looks at DeeMo blandly, and after a couple of beats, he says, “Didn’t see any meadows.” They both start laughing.
I think of what it must be like in a state prison here; I only know from what I’ve seen on TV and from The Shawshank Redemption, which the BBC must have bought cheap at some point, because it is on every seven minutes in England.
“Meadows!” moans Dennis. “Fucking meadows!” They are both helpless now with laughter. When it subsides, I say, “DeeMo, have you been in prison?”
“Yeah. Last one, I was ninety days in Rikers.”
“Rikers is okay,” says Dennis, and DeeMo agrees.
“What makes it okay?” I ask.
“Nobody in there doing triple life,” says DeeMo. “You get on the wrong side of someone doing double life, t
riple life . . . he just kills you. ’Cause what’s gonna happen? You’re dead, and he gets quadruple life. That’s what.”
This is making Dennis laugh again.
“So, Dennis—you’ll put the art books back?”
He stops laughing and sighs.
“I guess.”
I stand over him while he puts them back. As he does it, he says, “You got no ring. You’re pregnant, though, right?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s no father?”
“No. No father. Well . . .” I amend that. “There is a father, he just . . .”
Dennis nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.” He stands up, dusting himself off as if he were pristine before the thievery, and says, “D’you get my bagel?”
I give it to him, and offer the other one to DeeMo, who lifts his can of Fanta to show he’s fine. He says he’s going to go.
“Don’t go yet,” I say. I have forgotten to check the till, and if all the money is gone, then the chances are that Dennis stole it. But would he be stupid enough to stay on to steal the art books? I have some ill-formed idea that if he has, then keeping DeeMo there for a minute might mean I can persuade him to give it all back. I open the register, and the money is all there. All of it.
I shut the drawer, flushed with guilt that I could suspect him.
“It’s okay,” I say to DeeMo. He is looking at me with raised eyebrows. So now I look as if I thought it was DeeMo.
“What’s okay?” he says.
“I mean, it’s okay, you can go.”
“That’s good, but I could go anyhow. Masser Lincoln sez I’m free.”
“No, no, I wasn’t . . . I’m not . . . I didn’t—I just thought Dennis might have stolen the money, and you could help me get it back,” I say. That lets me off the hook with DeeMo, but Dennis straightens up, looking aggrieved.
“You think I’d steal from George?”
“You were stealing the art books.”
“They’re just books. I wouldn’t steal from George. I sold him a book last week; it was a first edition. He gave me a hundred bucks for it! You think I’d steal from George?” He looks disgusted.
“I’m sorry,” I say. The niceties of thief etiquette are lost on me, but he is offended.
“I’m really sorry,” I say again. “I just keep getting everything wrong.”
Dennis says, with quick forgiveness, “Don’t worry about it.”
DeeMo lifts a hand in farewell, and says he will see us later.
I watch Dennis finishing his bagel. He eats it as if he has been brought up by wolves, tearing at it and swallowing. I do not think it is because he is terribly hungry; it is more that he eats as if nobody has ever looked at him.
“How do you manage about eating?” I ask.
“There’s places. Soup kitchen on 72nd. When people give me money I buy food.”
“Do you?”
“No,” says Dennis. “No. If I get money, I buy liquor.”
“Do you go through the bins, through the garbage?”
“No!”
“I’m sorry, that wasn’t a polite question—”
He shrugs. “I do. Sometimes.” Then he says, “I have a daughter.”
I feel more guilt, because I am surprised. Why shouldn’t homeless men have daughters?
“What’s her name?”
“Josie. Josie Jones.”
“Does she live in New York?”
“No.”
“Right.” I am nodding away, wondering what it must be like for Josie, to have her father living rough on the streets of New York. Unless he had hoped to set his rest on her kind nursery, and is rooting through his rubbish bins with a broken heart.
“She got me an apartment, wanted me to live nice. She’s a good girl. But I couldn’t do it. I like the street.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Dunno,” he says. It is the easiest answer, the one everyone gives to prevent the obligation to think. Or perhaps nobody ever really expects Dennis to think, or wants an answer.
“I mean it,” I say. “Why do you prefer the street to an apartment? I would really like to know.”
He sits down heavily in the second chair, staring ahead of him. I make a bustle of opening a book and starting to read. I’ve read three extraordinarily dull paragraphs when he says, “See—in the apartment, nobody was going to come, and nothing was going to happen. There was nobody there except me.”
As he says that last thing, he lifts his eyes to mine. It is a confession of vast loneliness. He indicates a battered money belt fastened around his waist and says, “I’m gonna look after the outside money.”
When he goes outside, I feel a vast loneliness too. The loneliness is much worse when you want someone you can’t have than when you are just on your own. All of yesterday with Mitchell is crowding in on me, to show how singularly alone I am now. Should I have left? Was it really a trick? Did I overreact? Underreact? Have I lost him again? Should I care? I wish Dennis hadn’t gone outside. There are no customers in the store, and I cannot stand my own company. There is nobody here except me.
That thing that Hamlet says—there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Not quite true if you are stuck under a grand piano, not quite true for genocide, but surely it must be true about love. If I could stop believing that I love him, I would be free. I don’t even believe he makes me happy, it is just that now that I love him, I don’t know how to go back. He is the apple I should never have bitten.
I look up to the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away. I will ask if I can put some outside for a dollar, free up some space. It is not going to help very much economically, and thinking about what to do with old books is not enough to obscure unrequited love, but it is a start.
As I am staring at old Tom Clancy spines, the door opens and Mitchell comes in. He looks all around, indulgent and rather bewildered, as a stockbroker might look at a children’s birthday party.
“Cute,” he says. “I brought you a present.”
He puts my shoe on the counter. I swallow the impulse to ask where it was.
“Can I talk to you? We have to resolve this.”
We don’t. It’s resolved. I’m resolved. Do not talk to me, do not touch me, do not persuade me.
“I can’t really talk here,” I say in a low voice, to give the impression that there are hidden depths to the shop, where browsers lurk unseen.
Mitchell looks down the aisle, up at the mezzanine, and steps forward to check the right aisle.
“Not in front of the cockroaches?”
“There are no cockroaches,” I say. “There are customers. Not at this moment, but there were some, there will be some.”
As Mitchell smirks, Providence very obligingly sends me a customer, a woman who asks if we have any Helmut Newton. I have to ask who he is, which makes Mitchell shoot a glance of amusement at the woman, but she does not notice. I send her to the ordinary photography section while I check the expensive ones upstairs, searching especially diligently, to give me time to calm down. No Helmut Newton, but she has found other things she likes, so she might stay for a bit.
“Isn’t anyone else here, who can cover?”
“Only Dennis, outside, and he’s a homeless alcoholic,” I say. I think this sounds very funny, especially as I, his coworker, am illegal and pregnant, so I add, “We were both headhunted by the same company.”
Mitchell doesn’t laugh. He says slowly, “A homeless alcoholic?” and looks around again, this time as if there is a bad smell. “I am not sure I like you working here.”
“In that case I’ll resign immediately.”
“I’m serious.”
I laugh up at him. “I know.”
“Let’s talk tonight. I’ll meet you at your apartment
. Let’s figure this out.”
“I can talk, Mitchell—”
“That’s for sure.”
“—but I can’t do what you want me to do. I can’t.”
Mitchell makes a gesture of acquiescence to that. I agree to meet him later, after I’ve finished my studying for the night. He is clearly not pleased at taking third place to the bookshop and school, but I can’t see a way around it. He leaves looking stony; two seconds later he sticks his head back in.
“Your homeless guy?”
“Yes?”
“He just took ten dollars for a pile of books from some guy and walked off downtown.”
AFTER MY SHIFT at the bookshop, I go to the Avery Library and settle down for some real work. It is difficult to get to at the moment, but once I am in it, it is almost like being in a bower. Because the critics say that Thiebaud is in the grand tradition that Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin exemplifies, I have a look at Chardin and for the first time, I wonder if I was right to settle so early on Thiebaud. I thought I was being directed towards some staid old pictures from three hundred years ago that it would be hard to find the merit of with modern eyes, but instead, I am moved to tears. To look at his water glass, or his strawberry basket, is like feeling the sun on your face; it is to be filled with rapture. I want to know if I can locate the rapture; why do these paintings make me happy, why do I want to cry?
Becoming enraptured makes me late, and when I finally get to my building it is quarter past nine, fifteen minutes after I said I would meet Mitchell. He is in the lobby, sitting in the only chair. There is that shock of pleasure, which all the rationalizing about how he is Bad for Me will not dispel. Then fear stirs and moves in me, like a cat woken from its sleep. Can he bewitch me into what he wants?
I start to apologize for being late. He holds up the palms of his hands. “I come in peace,” he says.
We go up the stairs to my apartment, and he stands in the center of the room. “Esme,” he says, “how did we get here?”
The Bookstore Page 9