Book Deal

by Les Standiford

  Deal gave him a look. “I did,” he said. “I always thought so, anyway.”

  ***

  They both were drinking beers now, the front door had been locked, its shade drawn down. They were sitting in sling chairs in the magazine cum reading room with their feet up on a big wooden coffee table that looked like a thick cross section taken from a huge banyan trunk.

  Arch, who had been staring off at the ceiling, turned to give Deal a look. “My father wanted me to be a doctor,” he said.

  Deal nodded in commiseration. “My old man wanted me to be an attorney.”

  “There’s something to be said for the helping professions,” Arch said.

  Deal nodded again. “They help you get rich,” he said.

  Arch laughed. “I’ve always liked your take on things,” he said.

  Deal saluted him with his beer. “Speaking of attorneys, where is Uncle Els? I thought Sunday was a big day in rare books.”

  “He was in earlier.” Arch shrugged. “He probably went home to watch the game.”

  “Sure,” Deal said. He doubted Els knew what the Super Bowl was. After all, this was a man who had retired from the legal profession because, in his words, it had grown “too combative and tawdry.” Els, inveterate reader and longtime widower, had salted away most of what he’d made in his realty law practice, had backed Arch’s plans for the store from the beginning. He’d probably had the rare books annex in mind all along, Deal thought.

  He stared at the ceiling, imagining himself up there, burrowed into the leather Morris chair Els had installed, feet propped on the matching ottoman, fringed reading lamp burning at his shoulder, nose in some edition of Dumas or Dickens, untrimmed musty pages and color plates by the score…not such a bad life, he was thinking, pirates, dungeons, derring-do in the shadow of Old Bailey…then blinked, realizing he’d nearly dozed off, that Arch was speaking to him again.

  “…admire the way you hang in there, Deal. All the crap that’s come down on you the past couple of years…” Arch paused, shaking his head. “…now what’s going on with Janice…”

  Deal sighed. It brought him back from romance and adventure with a vengeance. “Who could blame her,” he said. Not himself, certainly.

  Arch nodded, waiting for him to say more.

  “I appreciate your offering her the job,” Deal added after a moment.

  Arch rolled his eyes. “Are you kidding? Janice is great. She gets things organized around here. Besides, you and I went to high school together. You set me up with Lilia Estaban. You dated my sister. You put my fireplace in, for God’s sake…”

  Deal held up his hand again, trying to smile. He was also remembering Sara, Arch’s sister. A truly lovely girl. Sweet, doting, kind. They’d gone out a few times in high school, some fewer times once Deal went off to college. He’d developed a taste for more complicated women, or so he told himself back then. Well, he’d sure gotten what he’d hoped for, no question about that, not where Janice was concerned.

  “How is Sara?” Deal asked. “Still in Chicago?” Last he’d heard, she was working for a publishing house, some outfit that churned out inspirational pamphlets, the occasional Dale Evans memoir, weekly readers for various denominations.

  Arch shook his head, glum now. “She took a new job, marketing for one of her clients.” He sighed. “It’s good money, I guess.”

  “Hey, Arch,” Deal said. “Sara’s a sweetheart. She’s happy…”

  Arch nodded, unconvinced. “My sister, out there spreading the gospel.”

  “She could be here in Miami, going broke in books and construction.”

  Arch glanced at him. “You’re right, I guess. It could be worse. She could have married you.”

  Deal laughed and they clanked their beers together. Back to good times, Deal thought. But a moment later Arch was staring at him solemnly.

  “If I could do something, put you and Janice back together, I’d do it in a second,” Arch said. “It breaks my heart…” He trailed off again, and Deal thought he saw a trace of moisture in his old friend’s eyes.

  That was Arch for you, of course, heart on his sleeve, aching for everyone else in the world. He’d always been that way. If there’d have been a Most Decent award in high school Arch would have gotten it, hands down.

  “‘A year, ten years from now, / I’ll remember this…not why, only that we / were here like this together.’” Arch was reciting now, waving his hand like an orchestra conductor’s to mark the lines.

  “And what is that?” Deal said.

  “A poem,” Arch said. “By Adrienne Rich. About this couple who’ve been having their troubles.”

  Deal lifted his eyebrows. “Sounds cheery.”

  “The point she’s trying to make,” Arch said, “they’re going to get through it. It’s a bad time, but they’re going to make it, talk about it together years from now.”

  Deal nodded. “It would be nice to think so,” he said.

  Arch watched him a moment, his enthusiasm seeming to ebb. “Yeah, what do I know?” he said. “Me, the grizzled bachelor…” He lifted his hand, began again in a softer voice this time, “…‘but there’s got to be somebody / Because what if I’m 60 years old and not married / all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear / and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!’”

  Deal glanced at him. “Adrienne Rich again?”

  Arch laughed. “Hardly. That’s Gregory Corso. They had slightly different esthetics.”

  Deal thought about it a moment. “Maybe that’s the problem with Janice and me,” he said. “Maybe our esthetics don’t mesh anymore. Maybe I should take that up with her shrink.”

  “Like she says, Deal. One step at a time. At least she’s back in town, right?”

  Deal took a deep breath, as if that might drive out the ache in his chest. What Arch said made sense, if you looked at the matter logically. But if love were a matter of logic, there’d be a hell of a lot fewer problems in the world, wouldn’t there?

  If he were able to turn a clear mind upon the matter, he might want to suggest to Janice that she take a flying leap at the moon while he went on about his life. But that was assuming he could look at her and not feel the same goddamned tidal-strength pull in his gut that he’d felt since the day they’d met. And even if he could drown it out, there was the tiny matter of their daughter, Isabel, wasn’t there? Didn’t he owe it to his daughter as well, to go along with his estranged wife and her one-step-at-a-time notions?

  And of course, there was the guilt that never really left him, the nagging, irrational voice that insisted that all the terrible things that had befallen them were, in the final analysis, Deal’s fault. Janice might have always been wrapped a little tight, but as Arch had made clear, who could blame her for buckling under the stress: two different attempts on her life, and either one of them could have taken Isabel as well. Crazed men who wanted Deal, but didn’t care who else got in the way. The first time, she’d nearly been drowned by a psychopath who tried to make her miscarry, the second time, after Isabel’s birth, it had been fire—you’d have to look close to notice, but the scars from the many skin grafts were still there, and in Janice’s mind they were a lot larger than life.

  Two different teams of psychiatrists had attempted a diagnosis of her condition—the abrupt mood swings into depression, despair, and anger, the inability to cope with what she called her “former life.” The best the doctors had come up with was to describe it as a form of post-traumatic stress reaction, not unlike that experienced by combat veterans, a psychological distress that endured long after any signs of physical trauma had vanished. Be patient, they advised him, endlessly. Offer love and support. It had taken a long time for such complex symptoms to manifest themselves, they were not going to go away overnight. Logical, perhaps. But to Deal, it sometimes seemed a lot more clear-cut than what the doctors wanted to make it.

  Think of it this way: Hang aro
und Deal, someone tries to drown you, then burn you to a cinder. What would anyone expect next? Earthquake? Avalanche? Most guys, when they pissed somebody off, at the worst you’d have to duck a haymaker, maybe get a call from a lawyer. Deal, on the other hand, seemed to have a knack for attracting psychotics and assassins.

  He laughed mirthlessly and shook himself from his thoughts, turned back to Arch. Decent, sensitive Dylan Archibald Dolan. His friend through thick and thin. The shy kid from high school who’d grown up to be tall, dark, and as exotically attractive as the poets his mother had insisted he be named after.

  “You’re the one who ought to be married, Arch,” Deal said. “I see all these women in here, running you around the sexology stacks. If there was anybody who could keep from screwing it up, it’d be you.”

  Arch laughed. “It comes back to my basic human decency,” he said. “I look into the limpid pools of a woman in love and I remind myself how that fervent expression is going to change when I show her the bank statement at the end of every month.”

  “Come off it,” Deal said. “One slow Sunday and you’re going to sing the blues?”

  “I wish that was all I had to worry about,” Arch said, his voice growing more somber. He finished his beer, used the empty bottle as a pointer. “You know what’s coming across the street?”

  Deal turned in his seat. The view out this set of windows was not particularly remarkable. A bank building on one corner, the abandoned Trailways station on the other. The VW convertible Deal had earlier taken for Janice’s was gone now, replaced by a Cadillac as new and shiny as the Grant Wood couple’s. The traffic seemed to have died away, everyone in place before the consulate’s big screen by now, he imagined.

  “What am I supposed to see, Arch?”

  “The bookstore that ate the Gables,” Arch said.

  Deal turned. “What are you talking about?”

  Arch reached into the wastebasket they were using for a cooler, found another beer and opened it. “Eddie Lightner called a few weeks back. You know Eddie, don’t you?”

  Deal nodded without enthusiasm. Lightner was a commercial real estate broker with a penchant for the offshore client. He kept one office in Miami, another in Grand Cayman. A goodly number of his stateside business associates had fallen into misunderstandings with one governmental agency or another, and Deal’s father had once threatened to make him part of the foundation of a condominium tower when Lightner came scavenging around the DealCo offices at a difficult time. But while so many others around him had gone down in flames, Lightner had endured unscathed for decades, friend and confidant to a dozen successive, wildly disparate city administrations.

  “Well, Eddie was just calling me as a friend,” Arch continued. “He wanted me to know that someone had finally picked up the lease on the Trailways station.”

  “The pedestrian mall people?” Deal said. That had been a much ballyhooed possibility for the property, which consisted of an entire city block, ever since the bus company had pulled out more than a year ago. Turn the whole thing into an inviting plaza with fountains, lush plantings, boutiques, and upscale shops that would lure Gables shoppers back downtown.

  “I wish,” Arch said.

  “The cineplex?” Sixteen theaters, a couple of restaurants, on-site parking, it was another proposal favored by Gables city fathers and business leaders.

  Arch shook his head, still glum.

  “Okay, the governor wants to build a prison there,” Deal said.

  Arch tried to laugh, but there wasn’t much joy in it. “I’d be the first to sign a petition for that,” he said, taking a healthy swallow of his beer. “The fact is, Lightner called to let me know that my new neighbor was going to be a Mega-Media store.”

  “Mega-Media.” Deal shook his head. “What’s that? Discount electronics?”

  Arch nodded. “I’d forgotten, Deal. You don’t get out a whole lot.”

  “I get out. I just don’t go shopping.”

  “Mega-Media is that new super bookstore chain,” Arch said, wearily. “It’s been written up in Time, the Wall Street Journal, and so on. It’s more than books, actually. Movies, music, interactive texts, associated computer software, some peripherals.” He glanced out the window as if he could see customers already flooding through the competition’s doors.

  “Their stores average thirty thousand square feet,” he said. “This one will be twice that, according to Lightner. They’re going to make it their flagship operation, maybe move some of their U.S. operations down here along with it.”

  “Their U.S. operations?”

  “It’s a fairly far-flung enterprise that a guy named Martin Rosenhaus put together,” Arch said. “He’s created a kind of media holding company. There are the stores, of course, but he’s also got newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets worldwide. He’s been going after independent cable operators, too.”

  Deal took a breath, put his beer down on the table. That was one thing about the way the world turned. Just start figuring you have a corner on the misery market, somebody else comes along, tries to knock you right off the game board.

  “So our good buddy Lightner put Mega-Media into the lease, huh?”

  “He says if he hadn’t done it somebody else would have.”

  “Eddie has a way with words,” Deal said.

  “He’s probably right,” Arch said.

  “Bullshit,” Deal said.

  “No,” Arch said. “It’s true. They like to target guys like me.”

  “Target you? Why would real estate developers want to target you?”

  Arch shook his head. “It’s not the developers…” He started to say something else, then broke off. “Hold on a minute,” he said, struggling up out of his sling chair. He went behind the counter, pawed through a stack of papers, came up with a folder that he carried back to Deal.

  “Here,” he said. He pulled a magazine out of the folder, put it on top, handed the packet to Deal.

  The magazine was a copy of Publishers Weekly, opened to a feature story with full-color illustrations: “THE BOOKSTORE WARS” went the legend, accompanied by some cutesy art depicting a number of mom-and-pop, cottage-styled bookstores sprouting arms and legs and done up as Western settlers. The “little” stores were diving for cover as a multistoried structure the size of an office building and labeled CHAIN STORE strode down the street, six-shooters blazing.

  “Take it home,” Arch was saying. “If I try to explain it to you, you’ll think I’m paranoid.”

  Deal folded the paper away. “Arch, I’m your friend. You tell me somebody’s after your butt, I’m not going to doubt you.” He raised the paper between them, tucked it under his arm. “Now what’s this all about?”

  Arch took a breath, sat back down in his chair. “Targeting,” he said. “That’s what we—we little guys, that is—call it when one of the major bookstore chains moves into a town where there’s a thriving, locally owned store already.”

  Deal nodded. “We have that in the construction business,” he said. “We call it competition.”

  Arch waved his remark away. “Competition’s one thing, this is something else altogether. One of the chains’ll come in, buy up property right across the street from a store like mine, one that’s been doing well.” He paused to pick up his beer and wave it in the direction of the bus station again. “They’ll discount bestsellers forty percent, hardcover fiction twenty or thirty percent, give you a card for ten bucks, you can buy anything in the store for ten percent off for the whole next year. They’ll put in a café, a music bar with live entertainment, stay open until midnight seven days a week.” Arch broke off, took a slug of his beer.

  Deal glanced at him, hearing the skepticism rising in his voice. “I don’t see how they could do all that.”

  “Oh, they’ll do it, all right,” Arch said. “You can sit right here and watch.”

  “But where’s the profit in it?”

  “That’
s just it,” Arch said. “We’ve found instances where they’re able to squeeze a bigger discount on the books they buy from the major publishers, of course, and our trade association has instituted a lawsuit over that. But the fact of the matter is there isn’t going to be any profit, for them.” He jabbed his finger angrily at the windows.

  “Not unless they drive the little guy out, at least, because the market’s not big enough to support the independent and this huge store with all its overhead. That’s their strategy, you see. Look around, find a thriving bookstore, drive a stake into its heart, then take over once the corpse has been buried. You can stop giving away your big discounts then, trim your hours back to whatever’s reasonable, cut your staff to the bone, cut your list of titles to the bone, forget about your bands and all that, and run your big hairy store like a supermarket. Somebody comes in to ask for a copy of the Paris Review, the kid at the counter says maybe it’s in the travel section, go have a look!” Arch threw up his hands.

  “Everything we’ve tried to do here would be wiped out. What you’ll be left with is books by the pound.”

  Deal stared at him. “You’re telling me you’re just going to fold your tent and leave?”

  “Of course I’m not,” Arch said. “Even though our friend Eddie Lightner suggested it’d be the smart thing to do, unload the subleases before I’m down to the short hairs.” He gave Deal a disgusted look.

  “But I own the main building. I just refinanced last year, took out a new thirty-year mortgage so I could do this section over.” He waved his arm about. “I told Eddie to buzz off. After all these years, the store’s finally coming into its own, now here come these guys for the spoils. Well, forget it. We’re going to fight.”

  He sat back in his chair, turned his gaze out the window again. “This isn’t just a business,” he said, his voice softer now. “It’s a way of life.”

  The way he said it, Deal thought, he might have been talking to himself as much as to him. Deal nodded, glanced around the spacious room, took in the magazine racks with their offbeat, exotic titles, some of them in Spanish, one in Russian, another in Chinese ideographs. He noted the inverted funnel of the fireplace, remembered the August night they’d christened it, the temperature outside about ninety, the A/C going full blast inside. Not long after, he’d stood in the back of the room with Janice and at least fifty other people who couldn’t get seats, listening to Isaac Bashevis Singer read his nouveau Yiddish folk tales. Frail, pushing ninety at the time, the old man had worked the crowd like a master, then evoked the biggest laugh when he took his seat on the podium and crushed the straw hat he’d left there earlier.