Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather
Page 15
I repented, and throughout the sixties and early seventies dedicated myself to selfless service, and became familiar with the particular tastes of individual patrons, so that I could make discreet recommendations. This was easy, because most of the patrons are regulars, some coming in once a week, most every three. Even the casual patron can be categorized without too much overt information. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but fiction types somehow carry themselves differently from biography people, and romance-lovers wear their hair differently, or use a heavier perfume or something. And of course severe intelligence, like severe stupidity, is unmistakable.
I actually kept written records, set down in code, of the books my regulars checked out. In no time I could predict which new books would please them. I never put this in a threatening way: I was extremely circumspect. I would never, for instance, hold up some garish piece of garbage and announce, “This would be just perfect for you.” I’d let the person ask me, “Would I like this?” Or I’d say, “Everyone likes this. I haven’t actually read it, myself.”
I was so caught up in the challenge, the game, that I was unaware of exactly what I had in those coded records until ten years ago. Of course, I knew that, technically, I shouldn’t be keeping them. But I had always excused myself because my motives were pure. Which they were. I would never have shared the information with marketing companies, no matter how great the bribe, or government agents, even under torture. The privacy of my patrons’ reading history was, is, sacred to me. But I wanted to do the best job I could. I looked at the records with only one perspective: how best to please my customers.
One day—this was about the time Abigail took up with Conrad Lowe—I looked down at one of my secret index cards, and this is what I saw:
Colosanto, Mildred, n. 1931
1966: Hw Gr M Vy, A T Grws in B, etc., hrtwrmg sprwlgfam. saga [later abbreviated to hsfs]; affirm hometruths!/old vals
myst—AC [Agatha Christie], EQ
1967: O’Hara XXX, Christy, GmesPplPl, Human Sex Response!!!
Myst—AC
ColdBlood? R’s Baby
1972: Grp, Pplce, etc.—sens expose seamy underb Am life
also—Bio—MQ of Scot, J Arc, Plath
myst—hb [hard-bitten]
And so on. In the mid seventies Mildred entered into a brief Rod McKuen period, but then it was back to the downward spiral of smut, dysphemism, and despair about the future of American life. So much for home truths and old vals! Once, in 1975, she checked out a pleasant memoir about Yorkshire veterinary life, but this was just a blip. Something had happened to our Mildred, and it wasn’t pretty.
It turns out that my index cards are real time-capsule material, concise historical records of a peculiar sort, outlining the spiritual and intellectual course of a citizen’s adult life. If a sociologist got ahold of them, of course over my dead body, he could probably eke out some sort of trend, even a town portrait. It is possible, for instance, to scan these three-by-fives and learn who’s being seduced by L. Ron Hubbard, who’s given up astrology for God, who’s given up on traditional storytelling altogether. This one had a pregnancy scare in 1969. This one’s developing into a serious hypochondriac. This one’s about to cheat on her husband, who is reading everything he can get his hands on on the subject of bass fishing.
I don’t know what to do with this stuff. Have it burned up along with me, when the time comes, I guess. Anyway, I won’t feed it into the computer. I’m sticking with the home truths and the old vals.
We have two classes of vandal at Squanto: the building defacer and the book defacer.
The building defacers are children, who, if they get past me, have a good chance to grow up to be responsible adults. People who write on walls are simply naughty, and though I would happily punish them, I bear them no real ill will.
Pork The Dork
In a way they belong here. They are writers. The walls are their pages, chalk and marker their instruments.
Free Abigail
They turn my library into a large brick book. Their writing is not much more ephemeral than the published stuff. How well do you remember that, say, six-year-old six-hundred-pager the Times assured you was destined to become a classic? You know. The “monumental work of fiction” that you were supposed to run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore to purchase, the book that was going to change your life, that you must read this year if you read nothing else…Winner of the National Book Award. You remember. Handleman’s Jest. Parameters & Palimpsests. The Holocaust Imbroglio. We sell these babies for fifty cents apiece, or try to, seven years after they come out. We sell them because no one has checked them out for four years.
David Nunes is a Ass Wipe
I Love [Illegible]
One Nuclear War Could Ruin You're Whole Day
So Couldn't My Dick
They write knowing it won’t last, knowing they can count on me, as on nothing else in this fickle world, to come around in a day or two with my Janitor in a Drum and my sponge, and scrub their pages clean.
Sanctify Devils
David Nunes is Full of Shit
Eat Me
That's Not Nice Denise
David Nunes & S. P.
They write on all the outside walls and on the walls of the single toilet in the basement.
Read Pippi Longstocking
Yea isn't it Neat?
Read Pee-Pee Longstocking Gets Aids
That's Not Nice Denise
We here in Frome, R.I., are right on the cutting edge of the new illiteracy. So that when I see a grammatically irreproachable sentence without misspellings
Have a Nice Day Until Some Idiot
Screws It Up
I am absurdly heartened, and want to glue gold stars beside the passage. And then the opposite happens
Niger Go Home
and I want to correct the spelling or the syntax and then erase it and wash the kid’s face in the dirty water
Free The Dork
and make him drink his words.
The other class of vandal is the book defacer. These people are serious menaces, and these I would kill. They are almost always adults. I know who some of them are. Because of my index cards.
I didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Old Lady Whistler, or Old Man Whistler, two false Yankees, pretenders to the Miles Minden class, was deleting the words Jew and Jewish and Judaism and Judaic from every book they checked out, bearing down so hard with a soft, blunt pencil that each shiny perfect rectangle stood out in relief on the backside of the page, and a thick sheaf of pages beneath it was indented. In a couple of places so much pressure was applied that the pencil went through the page, and these holes were painstakingly repaired with tiny squares of Scotch tape. This conscientious detail never fails to give me the willies. These are law-abiding people.
They stopped after I confronted them. It was a classic WASP brouhaha. Mrs. Whistler returned the book, a Bellow, and I quickly thumbed through it before she had a chance to move away. “Look at that,” I said, showing her a black mark, inviting her to share my consternation, which she did. “Yes,” she said, “imagine. I was just sick when I saw it.” I told her to be sure to let me know if she ever came across any more of those, and she promised me she would, and that was the end of it. We never made eye contact, and it was perfectly clear to her that I knew who was responsible. We still exchange pleasantries when she comes in, and shake our heads over the declining American attention span, the entropic regress of the best-seller.
I still come across the Whistlers’ old dirty work from time to time. It takes me, on average, fifteen minutes to erase each mark, for I must bear down very carefully on the outraged, distended paper, and the carbon is so thickly applied that I must remove it in layers, using the eraser tip like a sponge, scrubbing it clean. And even then the word, Jew, Jewish, Judaic, is faint and blotched and suspect, pariah, like any cripple in a healthy crowd.
This is a whole subclass of book vandals, the Delet
ers, and they are to me the most horrific. Often they delete the sex words, often neatly, with razor blades. Sometimes they razor out whole pages, whole chapters—page whatever-it-was of The Group; half of Myra Breckinridge. Sometimes they grind a smaller axe, and so we get the single-book offender. Someone went through a biography of John Barrymore and obliterated all reference to his first wife. Someone took out every reference to John and Robert Kennedy in a book on Marilyn Monroe. (And every reference to Monroe in a recent study of the Kennedys. I think of him—surely it’s a male—as The Keeper of the Flame.)
There is even a sub-subclass of Deleters, the picture thieves. Instead of stealing the whole book (which would not be quite as objectionable) they steal their favorite section, which is always, given their intellectual capacities, nonverbal. They delete not to censor but to appropriate, and so they are not, in my view, quite as contemptible as the rest. These people I would merely draw and quarter. Coffee-table books, especially books about the movies, are vulnerable to their depredations; and we have been unable to keep intact a single picture book about Princess Di.
And in the far corner, we have the Expanders, the margin-writers. Some write for posterity, some, apparently, just as a mnemonic device. The latter use my books as their own notebooks, producing incidental poetry, so that we get, in an overview of Keynesian economics, at the end of a difficult chapter, in the pure white lower half of the page, in green ink:
Germans Export Steak
French Export Knockwurst
French Produce More Knockwurst
Germans Produce More Steak
I like this one. It’s like a hornpipe for silverfish. I hear fiddles and clapping hands, the rowdy laughter of pirates’ molls.
And in a collection of Flannery O’Connor stories, evidently borrowed for a high school course, we get
Can You Really Blame Mother For Society Taboo's?
Q Can People Live Together
A No
If your Not a Religious Phanatic Forget It
These people are solipsists, not communicators.
Other expanders imagine themselves wise, or cute, or both. They underline or circle passages which they find egregious, and give us a big exclamation mark in the margin, or
But See p. 96. Quel Airhead!
And among their number is Moriarty, who has been operating since 1979, whose MO never changes, whom I pursue through shelves and files and secret codes. His judgment is impeccable, his style ruthless and minimalist. With a blue ballpoint pen he prints just one word, in small lowercase, each letter formed around an imaginary O, as plump as a pumpkin. The word is always
wrong
He writes it on the title page.
I’m OK, You’re OK wrong
Are You Running with Me, Jesus? wrong
Death Shall Have No Dominion wrong
He writes it under photograph captions.
Here’s Bunny looking wise beyond his years wrong
Mums, Dada, Bampa and my beloved Pookie wrong
He writes it to single out passages in books he apparently otherwise tolerates.
For the first hour Leila read as the half-empty train racketed wrong
Racism isn’t a black problem. It’s a white problem. wrong
You can say what you like about him, but Steinbrenner is a business genius wrong
He gives the raspberry to gothic novelists, children’s how-to books, sociological studies, books on psychology and the history of music. He almost never defaces a classic, but then we don’t have many of them, due to our four-year discard rule. And he lays off the reference section, though clearly the encyclopedias must afford him ample opportunity for comment. I picture him as a borderline-deranged bibliophile, a bibliomaniac, a man or woman of refined taste and insatiable outrage, pushed over the edge by the general mediocrity. He doesn’t enjoy doing what he does; it gets harder and harder for him. And he’s not an exhibitionist either, except, perhaps, when he writes in best-sellers. I picture him as a Bartleby type and his study, where he pores over my books with burning eyes, looking for mendacity, moral ignorance, further proof of cultural rot, as a kind of dead letter office, where he must labor against his will. I don’t think he imagines that anyone reads his work.
But I do. I read, remember, think. Argue points with him. I don’t always agree—he is a harsher critic than I, and a socialist, which makes him vulnerable, fallible. Not his particular choice of political belief, but the espousal of any orthodoxy. He’s a feminist too, and a bit predictable on that score. I don’t know where he finds the energy to take on the bodice-rippers and the hard-boiled PIs. Surely there’s no pleasure in it. I picture him as middle-aged. He still pays dues to the ACLU but he does not read their newsletter anymore. He does not read for pleasure, or for information. Reading has become a painful chore for him, and most of what he reads is
wrong
At the beginning when I came upon a Moriarty-defaced book, I would refer to my files on that book, and match that list up with other lists, of other books he had touched, looking, of course, for a common denominator. This was brute work, involving hundreds of names, the sort of thing that constitutes modern metropolitan police procedure. And in the end it proved mostly unhelpful, for often he would write in a brand-new book that had not even been checked out once. Obviously he did some of his work here, or pilfered the book and then returned it, and so his name wasn’t noted anywhere. That is, I knew his name must appear on the lists, too, but this fact, the fact of pilferage, threw everything into doubt.
Now we have a computer. This changes the odds. I’ll bet I could discover him now in one afternoon. This afternoon. What used to take me hours and cause my vision to blur, and in the end be so unreliable and confusing that I couldn’t profit from it, would take seconds on the machine. Sooner or later there would be one common denominator, and I would have him.
Then what?
He is my henchman, really. He does my dirty work for me and absolves me of the moral responsibility. I don’t tell him to do these things. I can’t be held accountable. He is my thug. I worry about his health. What will I do when he is gone?
And what will he do with this book? I will place it lovingly on the New Book shelves, like a plate of cookies on the Christmas hearth. I will tremble for his opinion.
In the Driver’s Seat wrong
For Dorcas who knows and won’t tell wrong
Chapter Fourteen
Up the Flagpole
Chapter 14
A Marriage Made in Hell
Imagine this: A honeymoon hotel by the New England sea. Feather mattress four-poster, milk glass globe lamp hand-painted with lavender thistle. Dormer window with lace curtains, overlooking a rocky beach. Deep brick fireplace generously supplied with sugar maple logs. Ten days here, in this peaceful place, with nothing to do but talk, sleep, walk in the sand, make love in front of a blazing fire.
Now, imagine:
Four handcuffs, attached to the four spiral-cut cherrywood bedposts…
Three brand-new dresses hanging in a small mahogany armoire, a bridal trousseau, crisp and clean and never worn…
One antique porcelain chamber pot, furnished purely for decoration, for ambiance, now reekingly functional, filled almost to overflowing, standing beneath the unkempt bed…
…and a par-tri-hidge in a pear tree.
What Hilda is telling us, with reekingly functional coyness, is that he took her to Block Island, chained her to the bed, and starved her for a week.
Here, in the middle of the book, are the Doomed Couple photographs. Snapshots of both must have been taken by strangers. Abigail, unchained, on the Block Island ferry. Conrad and Abigail, uncuffed, on the veranda of the Seawitch Boarding House. Conrad in his ratty tweed jacket, chinos, and dirty U.S. Keds, looking annoyed on a pebbly beach, the sunlight glinting off his tooth. Still life: a hideous red, white, and blue afghan, somehow constructed of interconnected wagon-wheel shapes, arranged like a dropped mink on the canopied hotel bed.
“You made this?” Abigail had never made anything on purpose in her life. The blanket, though ghastly, had been constructed according to some plan, with orderly repeating patterns. “For me?”
Abigail slumped into her old La-Z-Boy. She seemed depressed. “If you don’t want it I’ll give it to Anna.”
“You’ve lost more weight.” She must have lost twenty pounds at least since taking up with Conrad. She was starting to look deflated and old, and anything but healthy. I thought of cancer. Conrad the busman-on-holiday had somehow given it to her. “When was your last checkup?”
“Just before the wedding.” Abigail looked down at her thighs. “I’m perfectly all right. I’m just on a diet.”
“When did hell freeze over? Hey, look at me.”
“Doctor’s orders, as a matter of fact.” Abigail gave me a glancing, unfocused look when she said this. She didn’t expect to be believed.