by R.J. Ellory
‘Pretty much anything,’ he said, ‘except for sci-fi … don’t get on fire for sci-fi.’
‘What was the last thing you read?’ Annie asked.
‘I read The Weight Of Water by Anita Shreve on the plane,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed that.’
‘Plane from where?’
‘Northwest Territories in Canada.’
The man seemed to relax a little. He put his hands in his coat pockets and took a step towards the counter.
‘That’s where you’re from?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I’m from here … originally I’m from here. Moved into this neighborhood a month or so ago but I’ve been away working since.’
Annie resisted the impulse to ask the man what he did. She believed she had a right to ask him – an odd thought, but her thought all the same. She was sharing her time with this man, and more than likely he would be one of those that browsed and never bought, and thus she felt she should at least come away from this moment knowing something. She didn’t ask him about his work however, and instead asked him where he’d moved from.
‘East Village,’ he said. ‘Born in East Village. Work has taken me every place I can think of, but this has always been home.’
‘And you’re out surveying your new neighborhood?’
The man smiled, nodded. ‘Yes, surveying my new neighborhood,’ he replied, and then once again he took a step forward and extended his hand. ‘David,’ he said, ‘David Quinn.’
Annie instinctively wiped her hand on her pants before extending it in return. ‘Annie O’Neill,’ she said.
‘And this is your store?’
She nodded. ‘Was my father’s … now it’s mine.’
David Quinn took a few moments to look up and around the racks and shelves of books once again, and then said, ‘Hell of a place Annie O’Neill … hell of a place.’
He stayed close on an hour. He bought three books. Provinces Of Night by William Gay, A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and Cathedral by Raymond Carver. The total was thirteen dollars; he gave Annie a twenty and told her to keep the change.
‘You know something?’ he said as he started towards the door.
Annie looked up.
‘Apparently the average book passes through twenty pairs of hands in its life.’
Annie shook her head. ‘I didn’t know that.’
David Quinn held up the bag with his three books inside. ‘Sixty lives will connect with what’s in this bag … makes you think huh?’
And with that he smiled, nodded, and then turned and left the store.
Annie came from behind the counter, crossed between the stacks of hardbacks and reached the window just as Quinn disappeared at the junction.
She shook her head and sighed. She thought of every person who’d ever wandered into The Reader’s Rest over the years, every person who’d browsed, who’d asked for help, who’d perhaps been looking for nothing more than someone with whom to share a few moments of their life before they moved on. And she’d let them move on, every single one of them, and had never once considered that there might have been something in those moments for her. She had created her own loneliness, and but for Sullivan she could go from one week to the next without ever sharing anything but the time of day or the cost of a second-hand paperback with a real honest-to-God human being.
But why? she asked herself as she turned from the window and made her way out back to prepare coffee. What am I afraid of? Of gaining something only to see it slipping away? But then isn’t it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?
She smiled at her own clichéd thoughts and busied herself with the percolator.
She closed a little before five. After David Quinn there had been two other customers – one who bought a dog-eared and battered copy of Being There by Jerzy Kosinski, the other who asked if she had any early edition Washington Irving. She did not.
She walked quickly, the wind was cold, and she was home by quarter after five. Jack was out, more than likely playing chess with a couple of guys from his bar, and once inside her apartment she made a salad, doused some cold chicken in vinaigrette, and sat in the kitchen with a glass of white wine and Frank singing from the front room. ‘Chicago, Chicago …’
She smiled. She thought of her father, she thought of Forrester, and once again she sensed that fleeting moment of identification when she thought of them together. She shook her head. It could not be … surely it could not be. She shrugged such a consideration aside, and she remembered the events of the afternoon, the moments after David Quinn had left.
I will meet with Robert Franklin Forrester on Monday, she thought. Jack can come down there to protect me …
She stopped mid-flight.
Protect me from what? An old man in a worn-out topcoat who wants to ease his own loneliness by reading stories and bringing letters written by my father?
And with that she considered the possibility that Forrester might bring another letter … that he would open up something of her own life by sharing a little of her father’s. And that was what clinched it, clinched the decision that whatever vacillation and uncertainty she might experience over the weekend, she would have Forrester come down on Monday and she would talk about the manuscript he had brought, ply him for further details of her father’s life, and see what came of it. She had to do it if only to somehow keep alive the memory of her father. Her parents were her past, they were her life in some way. He deserved that much. At least that much.
Live a little Annie O’Neill, she told herself. Live a little before you die.
FOUR
From her bedroom window she could see Cathedral Parkway and the Nicholas Roerich Museum, beyond that Hudson River Park, and further on the water. Late at night, restless, perhaps seeking some sense of connection to the outside world, she would stand with her nose against the cool glass and wait until her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Then she would catch the reflection of the mainland lights against the underbelly of the sky. She imagined the source of that light – a hundred thousand homes, a million streetlights, alongside them the shops and stores and malls and hotels. And then she would hear the sound of the boats slipping effortlessly out of the 79th Street Basin and wonder who was on those boats, where they were going, and why. A billion intricate patterns of life, and in amongst all of this the six degrees of separation: the theory that each and every one of us is in some way connected to someone, and they to someone else, and on and on six times over until a map could be drawn between every single human being to show how they relate. But there were some, it seemed to Annie, who had fallen through the loop. The exception that proved the rule. The odd one out. And such an exception was she. Or so she believed. Sometimes.
These were her thoughts in the early hours of Saturday morning and after a while, after returning to her bed and sleeping fitfully, she once again woke up as dawn water-colored the sky. She showered, she breakfasted, and then she walked out of the apartment. She did not take her usual route, did not approach The Reader’s Rest, and though a clock could have been set against Annie O’Neill’s tracks, though there had never been a Saturday in the last God-only-knew-how-long that the store had not been open for the hours between nine a.m. and one p.m. each Saturday, that morning – for no other reason than some sense of necessity – she walked the other way. Down Cathedral Parkway onto Amsterdam, out towards Columbia University and St John the Divine; slower than usual, a little hesitant perhaps, and had you seen her, had she passed you in the street, you would have seen nothing more than an attractive brunette, petite, her aquiline features almost implacable, and yet her eyes bright and inquisitive and searching. She would have appeared to be looking for something. Or someone.
Annie stopped after a little while, went into a delicatessen and ordered coffee. She sat at a small table on the sidewalk and watched the world pass her by. Some people numbed with sleep, others purposeful and direct, and yet more of them seemingly absent-minded and witho
ut direction, a little like herself. The coffee was good and strong, and for the first time in as many years as she could remember she wanted to smoke a cigarette. She’d quit some eternity ago, had been determined never to start again, and yet always there seemed to be something vaguely romantic about it. The brunette at the sidewalk café, her coat pulled up around her throat against a bitter breeze, men walking by believing that such a woman as this must be waiting for someone. A rendezvous. The beginning of an affair. He’s late. She is wilful and certain enough not to care that he’s late. She is sufficiently single-minded to amuse herself with her own thoughts, and if he comes … well if he comes he comes, and if he does not, then there will always be someone else who can amuse her for a while. Very Marlene. Very Ingrid.
And very imaginative, Annie thought, and smiled to herself.
‘Annie O’Neill,’ a voice said.
Snapped from her reverie she looked up. The sun was behind him, and with a step he moved forward. David Quinn stood no more than five feet from her. He was smiling. Smiling like a child who’d found a long-lost friend.
‘David?’ she said, surprise evident in her voice.
He didn’t hesitate to take the seat facing her. ‘What are you doing up here?’ he asked.
She shrugged, felt a little awkward. ‘Just took a walk.’
‘You don’t open the store on Saturdays?’
‘I do, yes,’ she said, ‘but today … well today I just didn’t feel like it.’
She thought then of coincidence, and before the thought had even half-formed in her mind she remembered that he’d mentioned his move to the other side of Morningside Park. From East Village to the north-western edge of Harlem.
From his jacket pocket he took a pack of Marlboros.
‘Cigarette?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘I quit a long time ago,’ she said.
‘You mind?’
She waved her hand nonchalantly. ‘Have some coffee too,’ she suggested.
He smiled, seemed so at ease in that moment, as if they had indeed been long-lost friends. A chance meeting after so many years.
How’ve you been?
Good … very good. And you?
Fine. Working hard.
And what do you do now … seem to remember you always wanted to be an architect.
I am, yes, and actually I’m down this way working on a plan to level some of these tenements and build a godawful mirrored monolith …
Annie smiled to herself as David Quinn rose from his chair and went inside to order coffee.
He came back with two cups, set one ahead of Annie, and then he sat again, was quiet for a time as he poured cream, as he stirred, as he lit his cigarette.
‘You have nowhere to be?’ she asked.
He shook his head, his hand around his cup as if to draw warmth from it. ‘Nothing special,’ he said. ‘I was going to get some groceries.’
She didn’t say anything in response, and for a little while there was silence between them. She felt strangely at ease. She sipped her coffee, her third cup of the day. Living on the edge Annie, she thought, and then Well, you know what they say … if you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much room.
And it was then that she asked him. ‘And what is it that you do? If you don’t mind me asking.’
‘Not at all,’ David said. ‘What I do is marine insurance.’
She frowned. ‘Like boats and things?’
He nodded, smiled a lazy half-smile with an undercurrent of warmth she found immediately appealing. He wasn’t what she would have called a handsome man, not in the classic sense of the word, but his face had that lived-in feeling, the same way that Jack Sullivan carried his whole life in a single expression.
‘Like boats and things yes,’ he said. ‘Especially the things.’
Annie smiled. His humor was dry, a little caustic. ‘So what is marine insurance?’ she asked.
‘Commercial stuff mainly, cargo ships, ferries, things like that … we cover the insurance, and then when they sink or go aground I go out and investigate, make sure it wasn’t scuttled just to claim the insurance money.’
‘And that’s why you were in Canada?’
He nodded. ‘An icebreaker went aground in the Amundsen Gulf, a boat that does the trip round Sachs Harbor, Cape Prince Alfred and back down the Prince of Wales Strait. Tore its belly out and sank like a stone.’
‘You don’t dive, do you?’
‘Out there, minus three thousand degrees, God no. If it’s a big enough contract they’ll haul it up. If it’s not so big we send underwater cameras down.’
‘And the icebreaker?’ she asked.
‘Was driven ashore intentionally, at least there’s every indication that was the case.’
Annie frowned. ‘How can you tell?’
David smiled. ‘The same way I’m sure you can tell if a book’s gonna be good from the first paragraph. There are all sorts of signs you look for.’ He paused for a moment to drink his coffee. ‘Anyway, enough of work … what are you doing today?’
Annie shook her head. ‘Nothing much of anything really.’
‘So let’s take a walk, go see something, have some lunch.’
Annie O’Neill looked at the man facing her, this David Quinn, marine insurance investigator, and she remembered the thoughts she’d woken with – the exception that proved the rule, the one that fell through the loop. Perhaps the loop was closing, and even now she had a choice: step through it and allow the loop to close behind her, or stay and be closed within it.
What had she to lose? A few hours, perhaps nothing more than that.
‘Okay,’ she said quietly.
‘Sorry?’ he asked.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay, let’s do that.’
Later – that same evening in fact – when she had left him after the walking, the talking, the quieter moments when neither of them had anything much of anything to say, she would remember a small thing. Always the small things. It was the way he would pause every once in a while, and reaching with his right hand he would sort of massage the back of his neck, like there was a tension there, something psychosomatic, something neither physical nor muscular, but nevertheless as real as any ache someone might feel. He did it several times, even as they ate lunch together in a small bistro off Riverside Drive, and she’d wanted to ask him if he was in pain, if there was something she could do. But she did not. She did not reach too far, for to reach too far was to lose your equilibrium, and the weight of a rejection could only serve to cause a fall. She did not wish to fall, not this time, not any time, and prevention was always better than cure. Her mother would say that. But then her mother would say a lot of things.
She had wondered if she would always be the anachronism, the odd-one-out, the incongruous literary recluse who spent her life in a bookstore.
Until that Saturday afternoon. And it was during that afternoon, as she walked and talked with the stranger that was David Quinn, as he smiled and made her laugh, as he showed her things in the neighborhood that she had never seen before, that she realized that perhaps there might be hope. Not necessarily with David, for David seemed complete, a word that came to mind without searching for any description. He seemed like a whole person, a person without attachments and appendages, without all the emotionally complex baggage that so many men seemed to carry as if it was their life’s purpose. Here, she believed, was a man who would take the 5:36 for Two Harbors, nestling there beneath the Sawtooth Mountains, where on a clear day you could almost reach out and touch the Apostle Islands and Thunder Bay, and if there were those that cared to walk with him he would let them. And those that were not … well, he would leave them standing on the platform and never give them another thought. They would wave perhaps, and then watch him roll away soundlessly into the indistinct distance of memory. He did indeed appear to travel alone, packing only sufficient for his needs, not burdening himself with things too weighty, like lost loves, forgotten dreams, jealousies, f
rustrations and hatred. He carried with him the finer things. Things to share. Things that weighed next to nothing but held the significance of everything. These were the things he carried, and in some small way they also carried him.
She appreciated his independence, his sense of balance and closure, and when he spoke of himself he spoke humbly, as if there were no great matters to understand, no great depths to fathom. He was neither pretentious nor vain nor ostentatious. He seemed neither possessive nor jealous nor quick to rebuke. He listened well, and in speaking she found a silent mouth and a receptive ear. He was there – and that was enough.
A little after four they had parted company, he heading north to the other side of the park, she heading south towards home. They had shaken hands, nothing more than that, and though in itself such an action seemed almost incongruous, it also seemed so right. They were not yet friends, merely acquaintances at best, and to read anything further into their meeting was to read into fiction.
He said he might come by sometime, perhaps to get some more books, and she had nodded and smiled and said he was welcome anytime.
And so, later – Saturday closing itself up around the night-people that haunted the streets of New York, the theatergoers, the clubbers, the drinkers, the hookers – she watched from the same window as the night before, and yet her thoughts were still. For once they were still. Sullivan was out there somewhere, out among the six degrees of separation beyond her window, and she wished he were home. It was a moment to share. She wished her father were there. Her mother had always been the one with which to share such things, but now, after Forrester’s visit, with her memories stirred, she was acutely aware of how absent he was. Her mother had been there for so much longer. They had talked and laughed and cried together. She possessed a suitcase of memories of her mother, but of her father she possessed nothing. That, of all things, was the thing that hurt most. She did not think of him long, for to do so was to feel once again the irresolute sense of loss that accompanied such thoughts. He was gone, gone for ever, and somehow, some way, she had to come to terms with that.
