by Greg Baxter
Is that one of yours? I asked.
Yep, he said.
How did your books end up here in the first place?
Like I said, it’s not just books, he said. A lot of the stuff here belongs to me.
Well, I said, how did your stuff end up here?
I regretted asking it, because it was obvious. And if I had ever come to visit Miriam, I would not have had to ask. So I said, Never mind. Otis grabbed another book. He seemed delighted to see it. Then another. A little stack began beside him. I started to feel irritated, so I said, My father wants to ship all this stuff back to the States.
Oh yeah? asked Otis.
Yep, I said.
My father, of course, didn’t care. He hadn’t cared enough to save her things twenty years ago, and he had no connection to the woman Miriam had become, or the things she possessed. My father had needed to see her apartment, but only once, and not for any reason that he or I could define. Nor could I define the cause of my compulsion to be around Miriam’s things, or to organize them into stacks, or to fret over their destinies. I said, Did you give any more thought to getting Miriam’s friends together for a drink? He got up and moved to another stack, and another, and another, until he saw a lamp, a really nice antique lamp, and he pulled out the lamp, again, quite delighted with himself. Then he said, It’ll cost a lot to ship all this stuff, and the appliances won’t work in the States. I repeated my question about the drinks and Otis looked at me, realizing I had changed the subject, and that the new subject and the old subject were connected. Not yet, he said.
I was about to stand up and start going through a stack or two when my phone rang. It was the senior marketing manager from the aerospace firm. Her name was Chris. She first expressed her condolences, saying that she had heard the news about a death in my family. I sat down on the chair. I thanked her, and I said what I guessed she would expect me to say, which was that it was a difficult time but we were coping. Very good, she said, you should take as long as you need. Thank you, I said, I really appreciate that.
I looked up at the ceiling. It was badly stained from cigarette smoke. It was brown-gray and the stains were in streaks, as though she always sat, when she smoked, in the same three or four places, and the path her smoke made on its way upward from the ends of her cigarettes and from her nose and mouth was always the same. She would have come home, placed her keys on the table, grabbed a drink—possibly some tea, coffee, or a glass of water—and sat at the dining-room table to smoke. And after a while she would move to the couch to smoke. She read her books there and also in bed. She didn’t have much else for entertainment, just the radio. Though she never did anything for very long, or anything with much determination—so that from month to month her life outside the apartment was full of inconstancy—I imagined that her rituals at home were unwavering without ever being deliberate.
I said, I won’t be able to start on Monday. I’m not even in the country.
No, of course not, said Chris. Where are you?
In Berlin, I say.
Oh, she said, with some excitement, though she stopped herself from saying anything nice about Berlin.
It could be a couple of weeks, possibly a little longer.
There was a pause, which I had expected.
My sister died, I said. My father and I are in Berlin, waiting for her body to be released, then we’ll fly her home and bury her. We don’t know when her body will be released.
Oh, she said, this time utterly without excitement.
I’m sorry about the timing, I said.
Please don’t be sorry, how horrible for you.
At that moment Otis dug a small copper ashtray from a mound of small household items and stamped his cigarette out in it. Then he grabbed something else from that mound—a red-glass candleholder—and placed it behind him. Then he seemed to go about searching for the other candleholder in the set.
When I started my business, I often contrived to take important telephone calls at inconvenient times. I liked the idea of being interrupted, and I liked to be seen to be interrupted, so I made sure a lot of calls came when I knew I’d be at the gym. My phone would ring, I’d slow my treadmill down and talk into the microphone of my headphones. I’d stop doing sit-ups, wipe my face off with a towel, and speak. I’d put the weights back on the rack and sit hunched on a bench, trying to catch my breath. I’d also schedule calls during chamber of commerce events, or business lunches. I was constantly looking for new clients. The search for clients was always my priority. I hoped I would finally get too much work and have to hire somebody. Sometimes potential clients offered me a full-time, salaried job. Sometimes the pay was very good, and I would spend a couple of days trying to decide whether to go for the job, sometimes agonizingly. I’d lie in bed and visualize my work routine the next day—at my supposed consultancy gig, the firm I’d left as an employee, only to return as a consultant—and all the days I could foresee, and of course I knew that the difference between what I did as a consultant and what I would be doing as a salaried employee was slight. But I was more comfortable as an outsider. I valued the degree of distance I could maintain from a client that I could not insist on from an employer, a distance that enforced cordiality and respect and also a fear of confrontation—so if I wanted to go out and stand on a bridge on a sunny day and watch ducks, I could say, I’m going out for a bit, without somebody saying, Where are you going? I also didn’t want people to thank me for working. I didn’t care if they were personally happy with me. I didn’t want a boss to knock on the door of my office, or the desk at my cubicle, and say, Good work on the such and such, or, Thanks for working late these last couple of months. I didn’t want to go for drinks with colleagues and celebrate anything. And as I’d lie in bed, thinking these things, I would tell myself, Your freedom only exists so long as you operate entirely within the parameters of what’s expected of you, you take shit from people anyway, you can’t go stand on bridges and watch ducks, people have called you in to tell you that they must have miscommunicated their wishes because your work was way off, and you hated them, then they came by later and said, Great work on the such and such, and you cherished the reinforcement, and you found yourself out with people from the office having a drink and it wasn’t so bad. So I’d think, Take the job, work for five years, then try your own business again. And I’d meet them. I’d make an effort. We’d sit down together in a room with them on one side of a table and me on the other. There’d be water, coffee, some cookies. They’d introduce themselves, they’d explain what they did, I’d tell them about the work that I’d done. The following exchange always took place—
You left your old firm.
That’s right. To start my own business.
But you’re back with them now.
As a consultant.
Are you willing to work here as a full-time employee?
Yes, I think this is a unique opportunity.
Why?
And I’d tell them, but during my explanation of what it was that I liked so much about the opportunity, a certain gloom always came upon me. I’d run out of energy to make eye contact. I’d look at my hands. I’d yawn. I’d start with ebullience and expansiveness, with wit and a sense of purpose, and with each sentence I seemed to tire myself out, as though I were trying to climb the circular steps of an inconceivably tall tower. The fatigue began before I noticed it, and when I did notice it, I always tried to wrap up my speech as soon as possible. After that, we’d go through other questions and scenarios. But I’d already talked myself out of it. I loved that moment—the moment I knew I was going to say no. It was like stopping, turning around, and coming down the stairway of the tower. I felt revived, and generally the interviews went exceedingly well after that, and though I’d get some questions that annoyed me or felt insulting, or outdated, I’d stay engaged, stay polite, because I knew that when I called them to tell them that I couldn’t take the position because my heart was still in my business, I would add, Please kee
p me in mind for the future.
I finally stopped interviewing for full-time positions.
We can set you up to work remotely, said Chris. You can start when you feel ready, from anywhere, and join us here when it’s appropriate.
Absolutely, I said, that’s perfect, let’s do that as soon as possible.
Perfect, she said, and I was glad to have made her happy, except that I had no energy to work, I had no ideas and I had no enthusiasm. Otis, at that moment, lit another cigarette as he found something else that was either his or that reminded him of Miriam, warmly, or that he figured was worth some money.
Let us know if we can do anything else for you, said Chris.
I sure will.
I could have ended the conversation there. There was nothing else to say. In a week they’d have me set up remotely and I’d be sitting in a café somewhere in Berlin, or in the living room of my father’s house, working on a computer. But I also knew that I could not possibly begin work in a week. I felt then, standing in Miriam’s apartment, that I might never work again, or I might at least leave marketing. So I said, She starved to death. And I said that I was standing in her apartment, sifting through the debris of her life with some guy named Otis, who probably, at one time, was her boyfriend, and didn’t even have the fucking decency to move out of her building after they split up. Chris was silent. I imagined her going immediately to the director and suggesting they find a way to cancel the contract. So I apologized and hurriedly got off the phone.
I went back to wander among the stacks of Miriam’s possessions. Not everything was in an orderly stack, or separated into uncontaminated categories, though my mind keeps trying to remember it that way. There was the couch, which I had turned on its end and surrounded with rolled-up rugs. There were tall standing lamps I had gathered and stood in a crowded circle, and they looked a little bit like brass and chrome flamingos. There was the wardrobe and the sideboard and the squat drinks cabinet, and I had pushed them close together. Close together, it was easy to see how fine these pieces of furniture really were. I thought it was telling that Otis wasn’t saying anything about them, or going near them. I assumed it was because he wanted them the most. It was fifties furniture, what was called Contemporary in the fifties. And they were original. And as I saw how conspicuously Otis ignored them, how transparently little attention he was paying them, the three pieces assumed a great weight in my thoughts, and I felt that I had better protect or destroy them, or whatever it took to make sure Otis could not get his hands on them. Miriam’s wardrobe and sideboard and cabinet were not in perfect condition, but all the brass knobs and handles were original, the keys were original, the glass was original, and the panels were original. They needed some oil, but they weren’t chipped anywhere. They were just the things a young family might spend a month’s salary on in an antiques store. I knelt down by the pile of books. She had a huge variety of books, a variety that, all by itself, dispelled any fear that she had lived a life of imaginative surrender. I opened one of them and saw that she had made notes throughout the margins, in pencil. I opened another. It was the same. And another. Mostly these notes were one-word or brief responses to passages she’d underlined, but also, in the bottom and top margins, sometimes, the passages themselves, transcribed in her own handwriting. At first I couldn’t believe my luck. The first day I arrived, I had gone superficially through drawers and shoeboxes looking for notebooks, diaries, anything that might have contained her everyday thoughts. All I could find were meaningless scribbles on bits of paper, to-do lists, numbers, addresses. I was not looking for an answer to the cause of her death, because I didn’t believe such a thing could exist, but I felt as though it would be the closest thing possible to having a conversation with her. I hadn’t looked inside the books because I never wrote anything inside books, in fact I was sure I had told her, when we were young, that she was not to write in books. But there it was—the thing I sought, a record—contained within her disordered library. But then the feeling of luck was supplanted by distress, because the notes were self-evidently too multitudinous to achieve shape—either in isolation each note would imply its own incompleteness or in the wholeness of them would be torrential white noise, and anything between was an illusion. I also felt distress because her library, though it appeared disarranged, might actually have had some structure, and in my haste and in my presumptuousness I had mishandled it, and erased it. And I felt distress because I could already see that the discovery was lost. Otis had removed some of the books and whatever he did not take we would leave here. We had the money to ship them, of course, but we had already let her discard her things once, and to act, now, as though we were the kind of people who would unbox them at home and go through them was only going to feed our desire to put off, or possibly delay forever, an appreciation of her death. I knew instantly that I wasn’t even going to tell my father I had found them.
Otis had a long dress in his arms, and he was holding it high. He examined it and decided he liked it, and he put it in a pile behind him. The mound of clothes behind him was bigger than the one in front of him. I also saw that he had taken all her jewelry. It was in a small mound by his feet. Hold on with that stuff, I said. He stopped and put his hands on his knees. I said, I just want to make sure there’s nothing that belongs to our mother. He reacted in a way I hadn’t expected, which was to ignore me and continue, and I reacted to him in a way I didn’t expect, which was to do nothing at all, to simply pretend I hadn’t spoken. I went back to reading. Otis kept separating out the things he wanted. I was building up the courage to demand that he stop—but that meant preparing for the possibility that I would have to physically stop him, and I hadn’t had a physical confrontation since I was a teenager. Then Otis stood. He held another dress up by its hanger. It was a dark spring green. It, too, seemed from the fifties. Otis said, This is the dress she got married in. Married? I said. He said, It was a fake marriage, he was gay. Oh, I said. But it was a nice day, we had a big party, said Otis, and Miriam was really happy. I felt a little disarmed by the fact he had said something affectionate about Miriam, and I asked, Have you asked him to meet us for drinks? Otis said, I think he moved to Boston about ten years ago, or Portland. I said it would have been nice to have the husband around for a drink, even a fake husband.
I thought he was going to give me the dress. I nearly put my arms out to receive it. But he turned as if to place the dress in the pile of clothes behind him and I said, Hey, wait. He stopped. Do you think we could have that? I asked.
Have what?
Obviously the dress.
He said, If I hadn’t told you what it was, you wouldn’t care. But you did tell me, I said, why did you tell me? He held it out and up in front of me and said, What are you going to do with it? I was about to say we could bury it with her, then I remembered the wedding wasn’t real, and I had no answer, except to say something sentimental, and for many reasons saying something sentimental about wanting to save that dress was unthinkable. I said, Listen, I have to go, I need to lock up.
Right now?
Right this minute, sorry.
Otis was reluctant to go, he moved directly in between me and the things he’d set aside behind him, so I said, Take whatever you can grab now and I’ll let you know when I’m coming back so you can get the rest. He didn’t believe me so I said, Take the dress now if you want, take anything you can carry out of here. I moved away and gave him a little bit of space. He didn’t have a bag with him, so I went and got a bag of my own and handed it to him, and when I handed it to him I looked down at his stack of books, fifty at least, and all of which were nice hardbacks, and saw my father’s book. I said, That’s my dad’s book. He said nothing. Now that I knew that Miriam had made notes in her books, I bent down to reach for it. Otis bent down, too, as though to stop me. I stood up and said, You cannot have that book, Otis, I’m sorry. He said, I was just going to get it for you. He picked it up and opened it and a yellow page of tablet paper came out
. He gave me the book but he held on to the piece of paper. Give me the piece of paper, I said. He was reading it. I said, Give me the piece of paper, Otis. I didn’t want him to read it, I didn’t want him to touch it. So I grabbed it and yanked it from him, and it ripped in half. He immediately gave me back the other half, and gave me a look that said the violence hadn’t been necessary. Sorry, I said. He stood and waited for me to look at the piece of paper, but I wouldn’t look at it, not while he was in the room. He grabbed some books and some clothes but for some reason he left the jewelry, and I suspected it was because he thought I might confront him over that, too. Anyway, he left. I walked over to the table and placed the two pieces of paper back together again. It was the first page of a letter written by my father to Miriam. I’d never received a letter from him, but that was because, I assumed, we spoke on the telephone, and I visited. I remembered I had seen some Scotch tape around, I went to get it, I came back and taped the letter up. I taped it so thoroughly that it looked laminated. I folded it up and put it in my back pocket. I got the book and went through it, to see if there were any other pages of the letter in it, but there weren’t. And there weren’t any notes in the margins, either. I closed the book and put it in a bag. It was a big hardback, a thousand pages long, and on the back flap it had a photo of my father that was outdated even at the time. The picture is of a man my age now. It’s fuzzy, he’s wearing a suit, his hair is brown, and he’s standing in front of the sea. It’s clearly not a professional photo, he just found a photo of himself he liked and used it. My mother had been alive when the photo was taken.
I didn’t take anything with me but the book and the letter. I had a feeling that he’d want to know immediately about this, about the fact that she’d kept the book all these years, and I was excited about being able to hand it to him. I felt as though my time here, from his point of view, would finally be justified. But then I did something that completely contradicted this excitement. I brought the book downstairs and put it in the basket on the front of my bicycle. It was still wet, still chilly. The roads and sidewalks were full of puddles. The roadsides were muddy. When I felt I had got far enough away from Miriam’s apartment—I guess I was about halfway between her part of town and ours—I got off my bike, found a spot of wintery, wet muck, and threw the book into it. Then I got back on the bike and rode to our hotel. I walked in and the lady at reception informed me that I’d checked out. I’ve checked out? I asked. That’s right, she said. Am I leaving town? I asked. She didn’t have an answer, so I telephoned Trish and she told me the woman was supposed to give me a message saying that my father had had my things moved—later I would learn that it had been done by an embassy intern—to a new place, an apartment he’d rented. So I went straight there. It was the penthouse apartment of a building of luxury, boutique rental apartments. The penthouse had a rooftop terrace that was a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide. You could see everything from it. Every inch of horizon. We had three bedrooms and four flat-screen televisions. Though I didn’t know it yet, we were going to rent a car in two days and get away, but we would keep the apartment, we would just leave it empty and return to it.