by A. S. Patric
‘Are you sure? Do you want to check?’
‘No, I know.’
‘I can wait.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Check your computer or whatever. It’s not a problem.’
X doesn’t have a computer. He’s barely ever seen anything by Kosinski. ‘I know I don’t have that author.’
‘By Kosinski? Do you want me to spell it?’
‘Yes. No. I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’ X hangs up. There’s a pile of books he just bought in from a deceased estate. Some great military and history books in four boxes. A few good biographies. You can never have enough on Winston Churchill. Obscure novels in there as well—like Nog and Flats and Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer, like The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat—that will sit on his shelves for years without selling. But you never know, and usually the deal with deceased estates is that you take everything, even the things you don’t really want.
He opens his bottle of eucalyptus oil and begins cleaning the books. When he’s done a few he sits down to start covering them in plastic. The routine might settle him down.
The phone rings again. He looks at it, his heart beginning to beat faster. What if it is her and there is some explanation? Is there a laugh to be had here?
‘Hello there. Could you please tell me if you have a book called Wide Sargasso Sea?’ A woman’s voice, but not even similar to his wife’s. His wife’s voice has a lot of the musicality of her youth, even if she is now into her forties. Or had been. How is he to phrase that? Married twenty years. What is twenty years of nothing?
‘Remind me of the author,’ he tells the voice.
‘Jean Rhys. She called herself a doormat in a world of boots,’ the voice says hopefully.
‘No, I’m sorry. I haven’t seen that one in a while.’
‘You don’t want to check?’
‘No. I know I don’t have it. If you want to leave your number, I’ll give you a call when it comes in.’ He takes down her details. He has similar information in the same customerrequests book going back ten years.
X continues to clean his books with eucalyptus, covering each one afterwards. A few browsers wander in and out, no-one buying anything. Eventually a woman comes in and buys a book about raising autistic children. She flusters him with her beauty and bewilders him with her heady perfume. He can’t make up his mind what to charge her, so he asks her to decide. She asks him if he’s alright, and his head wobbles in response.
The phone rings again. ‘When are you coming over?’ a woman’s voice asks. The voice sounds familiar but he’s not sure who it is.
‘Is that the title of a book?’ he asks.
‘Yes. It’s by an American Indian author. His name is Arse Kicking. I know the author personally. I’ll be glad to introduce you.’ There’s amusement in her voice.
‘I’m sorry.’ He’s wracking his brain. ‘That’s funny. I want to laugh. But I’m having a difficult day. It’s busy here. And I’m not sure who this is.’
There’s a young man wearing a beret, leafing through the poetry books, clearly with no intention of buying anything, even the ones that would cost him five dollars. He reads poetry every day for free like that. His head lifts when he hears X say it’s busy, a grin on his face. X wants to throw a Winston Churchill at him.
‘You know it’s Jenny. You can play funny buggers if you like, but you’d better get your arse over here in the next half-hour.’
‘Jenny from the …’ He doesn’t know what to call her store. Never has. ‘From a few stores down.’
‘Yes, Wiseacres. From a few stores down. You’ve got twenty-nine and counting.’
‘Did I say I was coming?’
She laughs—a strange giggle in it—and hangs up. He looks at the poetry reader, and the reader looks at him, before ducking his head back into the book.
‘Let me ask you a question,’ X says to the poetry reader. ‘You’ve been here a hundred times, and heard me speaking on the phone. Have you heard me talking to my wife?’
‘How would I know if she was your wife just by hearing your side of a phone conversation?’ the poetry reader asks, his finger keeping his page.
‘Well, you would have heard me responding to various kinds of scolding. Things about food. Or what to buy on the way home.’
The phone is ringing again, and before X picks it up, he says to the poetry reader, ‘Think about it.’
‘Howdy!’ A male voice. Big. Expectant. A rooster in a world of chickens. This kind of greeting always makes X feel like hanging up.
He takes a breath and asks, ‘How can I help you?’
‘Have you got Shantaram?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ X tells him.
A pause. Getting angry, ‘How can you not have Shantaram?’
‘It’s one of those books that stays bought. I don’t see it come in all that often,’ X informs him.
‘What kind of a store is that?’ The big voice won’t tolerate it.
‘I’m a second-hand bookstore,’ X says.
‘Sounds like you’re a pretty crappy second-hand bookstore.’ He doesn’t hang up—apparently he wants a response to his observation.
‘Maybe you’d be interested in Winston Churchill,’ X suggests, readying his dagger, ‘instead of New Age pseudo-hippie crap!’ X hangs up but feels guilty. Not because he’s got a copy of the book at home—a first edition (and not the pitiful paperback editions that came with a change of publisher)— but because he actually likes the book. The poetry reader in the beret has silently slipped out.
X locks the bookstore and walks down to Jenny’s shop.
The reason he doesn’t know what to call it is that it has everything and nothing in it. You could find light globes if you wanted ones with a pink tint, or wrapping paper in various shades of rose, or a florid little jacket for your chihuahua to wear during Melbourne’s cold winters. On some of Jenny’s walls are elaborate gilded mirrors, with the wood carved into ruffles and painted what she calls ‘blush’. There are ruby- and garnet-encrusted jewellery boxes. Vermillion slippers and scarlet dressing gowns with fuchsia-coloured feathers. Boxes of chocolates, heart-shaped, with removable violet arrows through them. And behind the counter she has sex toys, with pink things he doesn’t want to think about.
It is a theme store, he supposes. He calls it ‘the pink shop’. The woman’s place. He doesn’t really know what to call it. And it doesn’t matter. On a good day his bookstore brings in two or three hundred dollars. Jenny’s store uses that kind of money for weekly advertisements.
Hovering just inside the door, waiting for Jenny to finish a sale, he feels like he’s already been swallowed. He doesn’t know what to do, since there’s nothing he can look at without feeling ridiculous.
The two old ducks at the counter are arguing about who’s going to pay for the pink swimming caps they’re buying. One of them has paid for the bus fare, and the other for lunch, and now they aren’t sure who has paid for what, and who should pay now, and who’ll pay for dinner later on.
While they go on quacking, Jenny looks over at X and gives him an odd wink. Suggestive. Which is impossible, since he and his wife have been out for dinner with Jenny and her husband, Jerry, more than a dozen times. Jerry even comes into the bookstore for the occasional chat and a crime novel. He likes writers like Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Walter Mosley and James Ellroy. So X always has an eye out for them. Keeps them behind the counter for Jerry. X doesn’t have friends, but he thinks of Jerry as something along those lines.
Jerry owns a business that is struggling as well, so they share their cares. Jerry’s business is called Doggie Distress, which he thinks of as a dog ambulance. He has lights on top of the van, but he gets booked if he tries to use them to go through intersections. Mostly he just gets called to wash dogs or to pick up their droppings from the lawns of manicured mansions. Often he’ll have to bury someone’s pooch in a mournful backyard.
At dinner they all got on well enough. His wife and Jenny, X
and Jerry. She could have called herself Jen or Jennifer, and Jerry’s name is actually Philip Gerald, but they want to be called Jenny and Jerry. So no, X can’t explain the wink from one half of the duo.
Jenny sighs, her whole body collapsing for a moment with a noisy exhalation, as soon as the two old women have finally made their bickering way out of the store.
Jenny flips her sign to ‘Closed’. She locks the door.
‘I hope you’re not thinking of piking,’ she says, responding to the wiggling pinkie in his ear, which she seems to understand as well as his wife does.
She heads to the back of the store and steps behind a magenta and black lacquered faux-oriental partition. X watches her go and wonders what he might possibly want to pike on. He looks at the locked door and the turned sign, and realises that whatever Jenny has in mind, Jerry wouldn’t be happy. He follows Jenny behind the partition.
Jenny is a nice-enough woman, although a little underweight—on the small side. All the pink she dresses in makes him feel like she is the kind of confection they put on top of wedding cakes but that you aren’t actually supposed to eat. One of those miniature brides. She comes into his store for books as well. She likes Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Jolley. But now she has her legs open, and everything between them is waxed and glistening.
X doesn’t really know how to respond—although his adroit body does. He doesn’t even watch pornography. Doesn’t like Henry Miller. Thinks back to a day when Jenny bought a trio of Anaïs Nin books for a ‘friend’.
‘Well, how long are you going to keep me waiting? I’m catching a draught.’
He makes a fumbling effort at his belt and trousers. He’s never cheated on his wife before. Or is it cheating if …
‘What are you doing?’ she asks, beginning to simmer.
‘You don’t want this?’ He motions vaguely to the area below his belt.
‘You know what I want!’
‘Let’s pretend for a moment that I don’t. Maybe you could ask me for it.’ He fakes being coy.
‘I want my birthday present. Like the birthday present I gave you two weeks ago in your store. And I’m already unwrapped.’
As far as X can recall, Jenny and Jerry gave him a pink card, on it a flamingo with a book stuck in its throat, signed by a few of the other local traders. But now Jenny opens her legs a little wider, and wiggles her pink bottom on the plush, crushed-strawberry velvet of her rococo chaise longue.
X looks around and supposes this is what he’s supposed to be doing. He walks over and picks up a salmon-coloured cushion. He drops it between her feet and their sharp-looking heels. He looks at the ready vagina, waiting for him.
Theoretically, he knows what he is supposed to do. There is the clitoris. That is where he should focus his efforts. He moves his head towards it, but the thighs suddenly clamped around his ears are those belonging to Jerry’s Jenny. Is Jerry even now valiantly racing to a canine rescue?
X thinks about his wife and her aversion to allowing his mouth similar adventures in those regions, and doesn’t know what he should be doing, or thinking.
He walks the few doors back to his own store feeling dizzy. Was he mad before, or is he mad now? The thing is to go along with whatever the reality is. He has to work out what that is, and then stick to it. If he is having an affair with Jenny, then that is what he is doing. He has to try to forget delusions of a wife.
Except that they aren’t delusions, he wails inside his own head. She went to bed with him last night. She sat up in bed applying seaweed clarifying night treatment to her face. And then went on applying almond-oil hand cream to her hands. Why would he invent that? There is just no way. No way. No way. No way. He goes on silently screaming that for a while as he unlocks his store and lets in a customer waiting patiently at the door.
X sits behind his desk watching the customer go for the cookbooks, as expected. The customer with the silent, motionless, doll-like Pomeranian in a canvas handbag memorises the recipes and refers to them as though they are part of his personal library. His name is Will, and the dog’s is Shakey. They like to chat. And complain when a book they like using is sold.
The phone rings. It makes X’s heart flip. He’s still hoping it’s her. He picks it up and listens to a click, and then a buzz, and he’s waiting for her to explain. An Indian accent asks him if he’d like to change his phone company. He usually hangs up on them instantly (with a brutal receiver crunch), but he listens to her voice extol the virtues of her payment plan and elaborate on various obscure benefits to him.
What if he gave in and bought everything they were selling? Would they eventually stop calling? Maybe other Indian voices would hear of him accepting everything they asked of him. There’d be more calls. How much could they take from him, if he gave them everything they asked for? And what did he want to retain? What could he not do without? He imagines the game of Jenga, where one block after another is pulled out from a tower of them, until the whole thing comes tumbling down.
A beautiful young woman comes in, speaking with a heavy Eastern European accent, telling him she wants books on dreams, because for the past week she has had dreams about a long salt river. Different dreams, all about the same salt river, for a whole week. He gives her a book on dream interpretation and won’t accept her money.
‘Just take it. Take it please,’ he murmurs.
For the rest of the afternoon X sits in his chair, behind his desk. Customers walk in and out, but he doesn’t say hello or goodbye. When the phone rings, he picks it up, listens, but doesn’t answer any questions. He hangs up the phone each time, and then doesn’t move. He closes the store at five o’clock as his opening hours sign instructs him to.
He goes for a long walk, leaving his car in its space behind the store. Walking all the way from Port Melbourne to St Kilda, he wanders for hours still further, not knowing where he should go. Eventually he finds his way home with a pizza under his arm. It’s enough to feed him and his wife, if she should happen to have returned. But apparently she never existed— even if her favourite pizza toppings were a combination of Thai and Tropical from Renix on Acland Street. He eats the pizza himself. Doesn’t turn on the television. Doesn’t read a book. Doesn’t turn on the lights when the last rays of the day fade from his windows.
He gets into bed thinking he won’t be able to sleep, even with a double dose of sleeping pills. He puts the bottle beside his bed, next to a glass of water. The empty pillow beside him doesn’t hold any of her scent, but he swaps it with his anyway. He closes his eyes and thinks about his wife. He can’t have invented all the different kinds of laugh she has. She laughs in different ways for different things. For different kinds of jokes. Different kinds of events. She probably has twenty of them, as unique as bird calls. Can he have invented those? Can his madness have generated so many variations of laughter?
The birds are singing when he feels the wash of sedation break from his submerged mind, but it’s still not past the six o’clock threshold. Outside, the birds go into a riot of joy and hope. Each new day brings them such sun-filled gifts. X looks at the bottle of pills and considers them. In the bottle is unconsciousness (and there is death—of course, that is in there too), but there are no dreams. And they are what he needs most of all. Maybe she’d be able to tell him from there where she’s gone to. Or she’d be able to explain from a dream why his soul is filled by a love that never existed.
The birds go on singing. They call to each other and answer with different parts of the same song. Among those sublime sounds he hears his wife laughing and he listens. He wants to sing. Even if it is madness. Please my love, please. Even if it is insanity. Please don’t vanish love. He almost opens his mouth but doesn’t. He doesn’t move. He lets the numbness spread through his limbs and organs and soon he falls away into a very long sleep.
BIRTHDAY
They walk across the park. It is morning but high summer already flares across the water of the lake and the rising heat makes her skin feel red
in the cool of the air. That coolness is the last breath of the evening just gone, and when it passes entirely, the heat of the day will be a taste of annihilation.
For now there’s lingering delight along the water’s edge as the swans and ducks move through the tall grass nearby. She tells her child, who is a year old today, that her favourite lie is that the ancient Egyptians could keep flowers alive in a vase for nine months! Her daughter squawks with the babbling waterfowl and seems happy to keep their secrets.
THE SLOW FALL
Fuss
Old Man walks into the bookstore. Imagines the painted footmarks they used once upon a time for dance steps. He steps into each of them precisely. Brings out his magnifying glass from a careful inside pocket of his jacket. It’s over the atlases that he spends the most time looking through his circle of refracted light. For long moments that are big sacks of time that have nothing to do with minutes or hours.
Old Man walks along the painted footmarks of the dance steps on the floor. Because you never know where you’re going. Only where you’ve been. There’s safety in neither but there’s a way to walk between them.
He never talks to anyone in the bookshop. He may have come in a thousand times in the last few years he’s been living at the nearby Sacred Heart Mission, but he doesn’t know the names of anyone who works in the store. Doesn’t know their faces because he never looks at any of them.
It’s been a long time since anyone knew his name. And maybe he’s not so sure himself these days. It’s not about forgetting the words. More about it not mattering. What mattered anymore was a difficult thing to determine. You were either on the ground or in the air. Either it was a desperate thing you hung on to with everything you had, or it was something you couldn’t even see.
The people who named him are long dead. The people who knew him, also buried in the ground. There was a time where he bet his life every day on this one thing, sometimes many times in the same day before it was done with. He didn’t know what it was now. Something to do with being in the air and wearing a silver eagle over his heart. Something to do with having mates and family you didn’t want to let down. But then there was the ground and all these painted-on dance steps he had to be careful to place his feet into.