Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  By Texas we’ve driven far enough to feel orphaned—good orphaned, hero-of-your-own-story orphaned. In the keening, buffeting two a.m. dark, halted on the side of a two-lane highway running west through a Texas stripped of every sign of life by subzero wind, we try an upright lap-dance sort of sex. The car was often devilishly hard to start, and if we could have spared the gas we would have left it running. With the engine off, the wind careens louder. He goes out into it to pee, turning on the headlights first, to find his way, and from the passenger seat I see the headlights’ corridor crossed by a grizzled, bounding herd, laggards tossed aloft, the scrum abruptly recognizable as tumbleweeds, dozens more scurrying across the frozen road in Chevrolet radiance. When he got back behind the wheel I told him I was ashamed to have been scared witless by tumbleweeds. There’s worse, he said. Look—he pointed and there it was, the apparition of prison lights starred along a fortress-steep wall, a windswept quarter mile between that wall and the high wire fence, and what came over us—both of us, I think—was revulsion at having fucked within its sight, the force field of the sleeping prison, its emanation of stifled and furious life carrying through the dark to us, blithe us, tainted now. Despite the wind, despite the prison, I got out and crouched to pee in the frozen fawn dirt between clutches of bunchgrass, and though rationally I knew that the Chevrolet looming above, screening me from the wind, also hid my lily-white bare ass from the slits of prison window, still I felt ashamed, and steam from my urine sailed past jittering seed heads. When I got back in he said I’m not going to look for a roofing crew, I’m going to find some other work, and started the car. What else was out there that we were unaware of, what worse thing? We drove through the wind-rocked hours until the horizon behind roused itself in a miles-long fire and the desert ahead came up mutely into the dawn, cutouts of yucca, islands of chamisa with their shadows unrolled, even the dashboard of the old car as glorious with glints and detail as a Vermeer, the needle steady on ninety, the east-west highway running on and on till it dead-ends in a T-intersection, two choices indicated by the black opposite-pointing arrows of the big bold highway signage, south to Albuquerque, where classes begin on Monday, north to Santa Fe, city neither of us has ever seen, where a Saturday-and-Sunday’s hooky-playing will cost money we can’t spare, an unjustifiable whim, a diversion from grown-up responsibilities, finding an apartment in Albuquerque, unpacking our shit, getting our bearings, but our rapport with each other was always intensest on the verge of transgression, what was plain as we climbed out of the car to stand on the road shoulder studying those yellow signs with their black arrows aimed south, aimed north, was how badly we wanted to stay in running-away mode. The morning’s brilliance gusted toward us across tawny vacancy and the thing between us of standing there on the road shoulder was crazy-sweet and entirely dependent on our not knowing what was going to happen. We stood there waiting for one of us to say This way or That way. After a while of our saying nothing he said Let’s toss a coin and fished a quarter from his tight jeans pocket and showed it to me to prove this quarter in fact has a head, that it has a tail, and when he tosses the quarter it spins upward and chases through its arc, his hand clapping over it, the girl I was saying Tails and the coin resting in the blond hair of his forearm and there it is, tails, and he says Want to go for two out of three? and tosses and it comes down and shines from blond forearm hair. Quarter—you I should have saved, drilled a hole in, worn around my neck, never let go. And a third toss because we like pushing our luck.

  Santa Fe.

  Santa Fe.

  Santa Fe.

  Skip ahead a year, and you’ll find no graduate-school me at the seminar table. Whichever professor would have impressed me as most brilliant goes about his business unadored, at least by me. Even in dreams, I’ve stopped digging up bones. That imagined seminar table excites the same worried dread as those prison lights in the distance, and I never write to explain why I’m missing, not to anyone at the university, not to my mother and father. The rapprochement we stitched together before I left Illinois depends on my making something of myself academically, is my fear, and to write or call to tell them we’d come to Santa Fe because of a coin toss and never left is to risk hearing Want nothing more to do with you again. As if a second rift is inevitable, I inflict the severance myself, by means of a silence that feels necessary to me, and at the same time dangerous. Meanwhile my young husband, the non-fugitive in our marriage, has figured out more about our new existence than I have. He’s working and I’m not, an asymmetry we can’t afford. The Chevrolet’s been replaced by a pickup truck, each month’s payment a cliff-hanger, as is the rent check for our low-ceilinged converted stable on Upper Canyon Road, and he keeps taking things in trade, a buffalo pelt for bathroom cabinets, a wine-stained Two Grey Hills rug for restoring the shutters on our landlords’ Territorial adobe, next door in the old Santa Fe fashion of being virtually on top of our place, meaning we sometimes hear them making love, and surely, sometimes, vice versa. The new bookstore, the competition that has opened two blocks down from stodgy old Lawson’s on the Plaza, I answer, that’s where I want to work. It’s a question he’s asked after having held off as long as he can. He says That’s it? Out of the whole town? Do you think you’ve maybe narrowed it down too much? He’s right. I let him be right. He says So go there on your lunch hour if you work someplace else.

  He says There are people I don’t want to work for that I work for.

  He says Jobs I don’t want that I take.

  He says I get that you’re having kind of a rough time.

  Says Okay so it has to be this bookstore. Have you asked them if they need someone?

  Yes, I lie.

  Okay, he says. Okay, that’s a start.

  No openings yet.

  Which I know not because I’ve done anything as direct as asking but because my hanging around and eavesdropping would’ve yielded mention of a new clerk’s being sought, if one was.

  We can get by a while longer, he says.

  We can’t. Lately a great day for me is one when I make it out of bed. When I do, it’s only ever for one ritual, the long downhill walk from Upper Canyon Road toward the Plaza, past old houses whose doors and window sashes have been painted evil-repelling Virgin’s-cloak blue. To follow the narrow verge past these dream-sunk irregular old adobes is to be wounded by the fecklessness of rentership and whiteness and recent arrival. Apart from images snatched in passing—windowsill geraniums with parched leaves, a bald forehead gleaming from a brown portrait—I understanding nothing about these houses except their—to me, enormous—desirability, nothing about the mother ditch they front or the time they were built or which family had hung on to them until forced to sell by some calamity, taxes or cancer or quarrels, nothing about who was likely to have acquired the house then, though I was aware the acquirers were likely to be what was called in Santa Fe Anglo, and rich, and I was Anglo without being rich, the condition of rootlessness, of failing to belong, and when house-covetousness wears me out I sour-grapes it, because isn’t there, in those crouching adobe warrens with their period details, some feeling of the most meaningful part being over, of aftermath or echo? Isn’t the desire to own such a house a wish to insert oneself into—but whatever insight I’m pursuing peters out and I walk along under rustling cottonwoods whose leaves broadcast a dry vanilla scent, through the Plaza with its vendors and mimes and homeless, down the traffic-jammed street to the bookstore, whose door opens with the chiming of antique sleigh bells on a leather strap fastened to its inside handle. I don’t conceive of what I want from the bookstore as a job, because I don’t believe the transformation I’m after is anything a person can or ought to be paid for. In a poem I read for the first time in a corner of that store, the archaic torso of Apollo tells Rilke: You must change your life. What is a bookstore but a gaze, now turned to low, emanating from thousands of books longing to break from the borders of themselves? I’ve overheard the owner explaining to the sullenest of the clerks, a pla
id-shirted boy whose pony forelock flops over his glasses, that some people will not come back to a place where they haven’t been smiled at when making a purchase. Because I hardly ever have money for books I contribute to the atmosphere of the store by radiating quiet ardor. Nobody notices, but I have a good pre-employment feeling of doing my part. More virtuous, still out of reach, is the clarity working here will bestow, the honorableness of bookstore clerk mitigating the taint of grad student who failed to appear. The clerks I want to be one of are ruthlessly tribal, given to puns and rankings of the ten greatest novels in English, to jokes that wither into disuse only to be resuscitated, some moment when laughter will be awkward, in the form of an insinuatingly murmured first phrase—I would fall for that! Would laugh and look stricken. Would love them. All three. Sometimes my heart runs after one, sometimes another. Fairly often when some dispute comes to a boil—whether the dog’s point of view in Anna Karenina is sentimental; if a pedophile can read Lolita unscathed—a clerk will say Let David be the judge and they will laugh, reunited by dread of having to go and knock on David’s, the owner’s, office door. He is a former professor, mild and sardonic with his employees. Behind the closed door he is working on a novel narrated by Lord Byron’s valet Fletcher. The clerks make a game of conversing for an entire November afternoon in Byron quotations. I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long—such a strange mélange of good and evil. They only seem to be improvising, I soothe myself, they must have boned up on the Collected—which I’m going to need if I want to ingratiate myself with the owner, but which can’t actually be bought, since to slide that volume across the counter to one or another of the clerks will be too frank an admission of the eavesdropping they are of course aware of, and genteelly ignore. Occasionally I have seen the owner out in the open, rousted from his warren to meet with publishers’ reps. I’ve imagined telling him But this is the most beautiful bookstore in the world. Wouldn’t his response be What’s the second most beautiful? and how would I know, having never been to Paris, surely that will rule me out, never having been to Paris, how am I going to get to Paris and back in time to be able to answer There’s a bookstore in Paris that comes close. At, probably, thirty-six or -seven, the owner seems much, much older than us, the imaginary us of the clerks and me. His corduroy jacket has buttons of dark leather conspicuous as dachshund noses; he wears suede shoes, aviator glasses, the topiary sideburns of a Civil War cleric. He is the first person I have seen who is writing a novel. The clerks run things, insofar as they need running, so his door can stay closed.

  The alphabetically first volume in paperback fiction shows, on its black-and-white cover, an egg-shaped visage whose closed eyelids are blind to the threat of the dune looming over her, and though I know this book is too cool for me, likely to punish my beginner’s solemnity with avant-garde duplicities, whenever I come into the store I drift toward it. I leaf through it, head bowed. I slip it back into its slot. For anyone else to buy it would derail my covert progress toward becoming its worthy reader. To walk away, as I do repeatedly, is to toss a quarter into the air, heads You’re smart enough, tails Not smart enough yet. The morning I finally feel ready, the boy with the hanging forelock waits behind the register. I come forward in apologetic ballet slippers, emerging—so it feels—from the grove of lurkers and browsers into the clearing where taste declares itself, but it takes barely a minute, an unimpressed minute, for him to bag the little book, slip in the receipt, and dispatch me with Come again soon, precisely as if this is the ten thousandth copy he’s sold—wait, wait, can we do that over, can you look at me? Am I really going to be alone with this book? Over and over during my long uphill trudge to Upper Canyon Road the pony-forelock clerk taps two fingers on The Woman in the Dunes and says:

  It will change your life.

  Taps two fingers on the book and says:

  Tell me what you think. When you’ve finished it.

  Taps the book, says:

  You should obviously work here.

  Days when there was little chance of my getting out of bed, I lived for the downshifting of my husband’s truck turning into the dirt driveway. This was tucked between our house and the landlord’s. Upper Canyon Road was winding and narrow and he drove it fast enough the driveway always came as a surprise. He would bring in the newspaper so I could sit up, my back braced against the headboard, and go through the want ads with a pencil, crossing out waitress, caretaker, receptionist, bartender, nurse. One night I came across a description infuriatingly close to the ad I was hoping for. I read it out loud.

  From the kitchen where he was pouring a beer he called back, Part-time is maybe more realistic than full-time.

  More realistic given my depression.

  The fridge door kissed shut. Not a lot for supper. Fridge door opened, in case fridge emptiness had spontaneously corrected itself.

  My It’s the wrong store was loud enough for him to hear. Even more plaintive was my quoting the ad’s concluding line: Call for an interview.

  You’re good at interviews.

  Often when he got home I would feel hungry for the first time all day. Make me some toast.

  You make a good first impression. Unwrapping. Thunk of the toaster lever depressed. I mean: reach out your left hand. He could tell I wasn’t. Really. Reach out your left hand. He could tell I was. Lower it. He could tell. K, now say what’s under your hand.

  It’s The Magic Mountain.

  Ideal answer for a bookstore clerk.

  This ad is for Lawson’s.

  The old bookstore on the Plaza? He waited. Is that the end of the world?

  It’s depressing. It’s for tourists. Going in there makes me want to kill myself.

  So you work there till the other store needs someone, you gain experience, you’ll be more desirable. Is how it works, and before I could come back at him resistance evaporated, leaving, in its stead, a scared readiness to see how this would turn out, and I heard myself say All right.

  We both listened to see if I would take it back, that slender All right.

  He came into the bedroom carrying his beer and my toast. What else’ve you eaten today, he said, extending the plate. I watched him register the despair bomb that had gone off in the room, clothes lying where I shucked them off three days ago after my last foray into the world, his thrift-store birthday cowboy boots shoved under the bed with the tar-stained work boots he hadn’t worn since Illinois. On the crate nightstand, saucers with crusts and smears, burned-down candles, condom wrappers. The filigree Victorian birdcage he’d accepted from the broke client whose back stairs he’d repaired, which we kept meaning to strip of rust, repaint, and get birds for. Stacks of books, cups balanced on top, a sin that ought to have disqualified me from clerkdom for good. With a forefinger I printed my first initial on his cheek. Your face is all sawdust, I said. He must have wondered, since I was going on thirty-six hours’ immobility, what the chances were of my making it into work on time every morning. Don’t worry, I said. I’m going to get up. He said Are you going to get up? I said I’m going to get up. I’m going to clean this room, then the whole house. He said You don’t have to clean the house but it would be good if you could get up. It would be good if you could make that phone call. I don’t know how long this job’s going to last and I don’t have anything lined up after. Winter’s always harder, people stop wanting things done, they don’t want dirty boots tracking in and out. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched me eat toast.

  Lawson’s never made you feel what you hope to feel, walking into a bookstore. Morning after morning brought the same revelation: the absence of a distinct threshold means a place will forever feel unmeant. Lawson’s leased half of the ground floor of a grand 1930s faux-adobe building right on the Plaza, but it got the back, light-deprived half, and to reach it you first had to pass through the territory of a dealer in Native American art, display counters livid as saltwater aquaria with lapis lazuli, malachite, ivory, turquoise, coral, mother-of-pearl, and
jet, silver in rings and cuffs and concha belts unbuckled long ago from some velvet waist and pawned, rugs, too, eye dazzlers and pictorials and chief’s blankets whose geranium-red wool had been hard to come by in the 1800s, magical slit-eyeholed masks of pale doeskin tattered from use and never meant to be in the possession of a white person.

  Lawson’s belonged to Leo as bookstores have always belonged to their most obsessive clerks. If you took Leo’s appearance apart the pieces refused to add up to his actual attractiveness: hyperthyroid eyes of extreme paleness, glossy plump clean-shaven skin, hair razored into a bristling white-blond nap, flawless shirts. Leo preferred days devoid of customers. He preferred the owner, when present, to stay in his office at the back of the store with the door closed. So that was a thing. I had done a brave forty-five minutes’ self-invention in that slovenly hideaway while the owner frowned and rumbled in deaf interrogation from behind a desk strewn with apples and biographies. Help yourself, he said, waving at the motionless onslaught of apples. Was he serious, did I look like I could bear to eat an apple in front of him—was it a test? No, thank you. They had a tree. Old tree, neglected. Never did anything for it. Never watered. Never fertilized. He sounded proud. But then, every summer. As you see. What does one do? In my head I echoed, in my own voice, What does one do? Not mockingly. Because I found it irresistible. Ha! I was alive in there, inside the nervousness—that was me, doting on What does one do? while the owner went on. Biographies were the highest form of literature. The timbre of his voice, its cavern resonance, was too grand for the quailing tactfulness of his interview style. Your favorite biography? The fat biographies cluttering the desk were mostly of Republican presidents. Had I ever read a biography? Never. Not a single one. Lincoln was there. I felt encouraged by Lincoln’s gaunt and riven homeliness.