The Bookseller

by Cynthia Swanson

  “Yes,” I reply. “I’m fine.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  Lars enters the bathroom, looking like the middle-aged Lars I am now used to. Nonetheless, he looks gorgeous to me. He may be balder and paunchier, but his blazing blue eyes haven’t changed. And I can tell that when he looks at me, he doesn’t see wrinkles or stretch marks. He just sees me, and what he sees is still beautiful.

  “I love you,” I blurt out. “I absolutely and positively love everything about you.”

  He smiles. “Hey, now, don’t get carried away.” He pulls a towel from the bar and places it on the edge of the vanity, where I can more easily reach it when I’m done. “You’ve been in here a long time,” he says. “You’ll turn into a prune.”

  I laugh. “You and your prune jokes.”

  He looks at me quizzically.

  “Do you remember our honeymoon?” I ask. “Remember the green bathroom in Paris?”

  “Of course. You said that’s why you wanted a green bathroom. You wanted one just like that one. Except larger.”

  “I did say that,” I concur. “And you know what, Lars? I remember saying it. I remember!” I know I probably sound childish, gleeful. But I can’t help it.

  Lars laughs. “I’m glad to hear you sounding more like yourself.” His voice lowers. “I’ve been so worried about you, Katharyn,” he says. “We all have been.”

  “Why?” I ask. “Why are you worried?”

  “Honey.” He comes forward and kisses the top of my head. “Just relax and finish your bath. The important thing is that you try not to worry.”

  “I’m not worried. I’m in love.”

  He shakes his head. “You’re cute tonight.” He turns toward the door. “Finish up, and I’ll pour us a nightcap.”

  A dream inside a dream. A dream of a minor—albeit pleasant—incident that never happened. All inside a dream of an entire life that never happened.

  When I wake up at home, alone in my own bed, I realize something quite unsettling.

  I have fallen in love with a ghost.

  Chapter 8

  I have to stop thinking about it. I have to put these dreams out of my waking mind. They are confusing and pathetic, and they do me no good whatsoever.

  Fortunately, I have other concerns with which to occupy myself. Forcefully pushing Lars out of my head—it makes me feel smugly self-satisfied, like refusing a second helping of dessert when I am trying to trim unwanted pounds from my hips—I instead turn my mind to the previous evening with young Greg Hansen.

  We began with Hardy Boys and Beverly Cleary books, but he struggled with the first few pages of each. “Use the pictures as clues to what the text might say,” I’d advised him—remembering how he’d noticed the sunset, I figured that Greg likely learns best when there are visual cues. But as soon as I provided this counsel, I realized how useless the suggestion was. Mine would have been fine advice if Greg were reading a picture book, something akin to the Madeline’s Rescue story that young Missy was reading the first time I dreamed about my other life. But books like the Hardy Boys series and Cleary’s novels, books with topics that might interest Greg, have only a few pictures scattered throughout, not one on every page.

  Setting the advanced books aside, I pulled my old Dick and Jane readers off the shelf. Greg scoffed when he saw the covers.

  “Those are baby books. They’re boring,” he proclaimed.

  “Can you read them?”

  Greg shrugged. I opened one and tapped the first page. He squinted at the words. “‘Spot has the ball,’” he recited. “‘See Spot run with the ball.’” He looked up at me. “There, you see? I can read that.”

  “Greg.” I closed the book with a swoosh of the pages. “Why do I get the feeling you’ve seen this book before?”

  He reddened. “Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. But I still read it!” he said defensively.

  “Okay.” I placed the book on the side table next to my davenport. “Let me poke around for something else.” I looked into his eyes. “Will you come back another time, if I can find something more interesting for you to read?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Remembering the conversation with Greg last night, I am eager this morning to get to the shop. My mail is arriving just as I leave my duplex; hastily I grab my mother’s postcard and read it while walking.

  Kitty, darling,

  We’ve had a turn of foul weather here. I must say that tropical storms are much more frightening than landlocked ones. The way the waves whip up, the debris that lands on the beach—yesterday, after the storm passed, I went walking and found a woman’s necklace on the sand. Just a string of clear beads, very simple and humble. I left it hanging in on a bush by the beach’s entrance, though I doubt anyone will return for it. Such incidents make one wonder what other mysteries lie deep under the sea.

  Such dark thoughts for a mother writing to her daughter from paradise! I hope your day is sunnier, my dear.

  Love,

  Mother

  Poor Mother. I am distressed to hear her sound so melancholy; it’s not like her at all. As I unlock the shop door, I resolve to write her a long letter this evening, after work.

  Frieda and I don’t have a large selection for kids, just a few classics and some newer children’s books from the publishers’ catalogs, books that we find interesting and salable. But surely, I think as I comb the children’s section, there must be something that would appeal to Greg, at a level he can comprehend.

  To my surprise, I discover nothing appropriate. The books he’d find interesting would be too difficult for him to read. And those he could read are too lackluster to hold his attention.

  On my lunch hour, I walk over to the Decker Branch Library, just a few blocks from Pearl Street. It’s the same story there as at our shop. Plenty of beginning-reader books . . . as long as one assumes that the beginning reader is five or six years old. I check out a few Dr. Seuss books. I know they will not satisfy him, but I need to start somewhere.

  “This isn’t much better than the one from last night,” Greg complains that evening, after a few pages of Green Eggs and Ham. “I’m sorry, Miss Miller, I know you’re trying to help me, but . . .” He looks down at his feet, embarrassed.

  “Greg,” I say, an idea suddenly forming in my head. “If you could read a book about any subject, what would it be?”

  “Baseball,” he says without hesitation. “I would love to read a story about baseball.”

  I nod. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Of course, there are no baseball stories for nine-year-olds who can’t read. I look through our catalogs, I go back to Decker, and I even make a trip to the downtown library—my second time there in as many weeks, I note, and the reasons couldn’t be more different. But I find no stories that would appeal to Greg.

  So I decide to write some for him.

  I start by asking him questions. “How exactly does the game work, Greg? What are the rules?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Everyone knows the rules of baseball, Miss Miller.”

  “Well, pretend that I don’t. Pretend you’re explaining it to someone who’s never heard of baseball. Maybe someone from another country, where they don’t play baseball.”

  He looks astounded. “Don’t they play baseball everywhere?”

  I smile and shake my head. “Actually, they do not.”

  It’s a warm evening, and we’re sitting on my porch, he on the railing and me in my aluminum rocker. I have a notebook in my lap. As he talks, I take notes on what he says.

  “In major-league baseball, there are two leagues, the American League and the National League,” he tells me. “The best team in the National League right now is the San Francisco Giants. They’re a shoo-in for the series.”

  “The series?”

  He scoffs at me. “The World Series, Miss Miller.” He looks up, thoughtful. “You know . . . it’s funny that they call it the World Series, if they don�
��t even play baseball all over the world.” He shrugs. “I’ve never thought about that before.”

  I smile again. “Neither have I, actually.”

  “Anyway,” he goes on, turning back to me. “My favorite player is Willie Mays. He’s colored, and some kids at school say you shouldn’t like him because he’s colored, but that’s just stupid, if you ask me.” His eyes narrow. “If a player can hit the ball, who cares what color his skin is? Not me. You should see Willie Mays hit. He can send it screaming out of Candlestick Park—that’s where the Giants play, in San Francisco.” Greg looks up at the twilit sky. “I would give anything—anything—just once, to sit in a major-league ballpark and see Mays hit a home run.”

  “Anything,” I repeat, scribbling in my notebook. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Two nights later, I knock on the Hansens’ door. Greg answers.

  “I’m sorry the pictures are so basic,” I tell him as I hand him a set of stapled, handwritten pages. “I’m no artist. But I thought you’d enjoy this story anyway.” I smile. “And even if the drawings are terrible, it’s nice to have some pictures to go with the story.” Unlike the first books I tried to read with him—the books by Beverly Cleary, and the Hardy Boys stories—in the book I’ve written for Greg, I have included drawings, minimal as they are, on each page.

  Greg shuffles through the pages. “It’s about baseball,” he says, scanning the artwork and maybe—maybe!—even the words.

  I nod.

  “It’s about Willie Mays.” He turns page after page. “I know how to read his name from the headlines in the sports section of the newspaper. You wrote a story about Mays . . . and . . . and . . .” He looks more closely at the pages. “And my name is in it, too.” He looks up. “What am I doing in the story?”

  “Well.” I smile. “I guess you’ll have to read it to find out.”

  “I’ve never seen a book about baseball that I could read.” Greg is beaming. “And I’ve never seen a story that had Willie Mays and me in it.”

  I reach into my dress pocket and pull out another item: a stack of about twelve index cards. I have punched a hole in each card and tied them together with a string. On each card, I’ve written a single word: bases, pitcher, strike, catcher. For each word, I’ve drawn a picture—again, terribly basic—that illustrates what the word means. “These cards will help you read the book,” I explained to Greg. “If you get stuck on a word, look in this stack of cards and see if you can find it. Once you learn to recognize these words every time you see them, reading will get easier, because you won’t have to stop to think about words you already know.”

  He takes the card stack I hold out to him, closes the book, and puts both items under his arm. “Thank you, Miss Miller,” he tells me. “I can’t wait to get started on this.”

  His words are music to my ears.

  Besides the joy of teaching a child to read, there is another benefit: for more than a week now, the dreams have disappeared. Each night of that week, I sleep well, solidly, like a stone, without any dreams.

  During the day, my energy level skyrockets. I hustle around the store, rearranging everything and creating a fall display in the window: leaves that I cut from red, yellow, and brown construction paper and scatter artistically (or so I tell myself) about the window shelf, best sellers that I set up in display racks, and a banner I’ve made: COLD WEATHER IS COMING! COZY UP WITH A GOOD BOOK!

  Frieda rolls her eyes and tells me I’m getting downright annoying. “I liked you better when you were as grumpy as me,” she says.

  “I’ll take it into consideration,” I reply.

  Greg tears through his book in a single day. “I read it start to finish,” he tells me proudly. “The words on the cards really helped. I know them all now. After I read the book, I read it again, and then I read it to my mother. She . . .” He looks down, sheepish, his face reddened. “She said she was really proud of me.”

  “I’m proud, too,” I say. “Very proud.” I put my hand lightly on his shoulder. “Shall I write another one?” I ask. “Would you like that? I can make more cards, too. We can add to your collection of words you know.”

  “I would love that,” Greg replies. “Thank you, Miss Miller. Thank you very much.” He rewards me with a big smile, then hops enthusiastically across our shared porch and goes inside his own house, cheerfully banging the door behind him.

  Chapter 9

  And then, after over a week of dreamless sleep, my nighttime visions return.

  We are out of the house again, Lars and me. Goodness, we socialize a lot in this fanciful world. In my real life, I go out in the evening two or three times a month, perhaps. Every now and then I go see a movie with old friends from my teaching days, but many of those friends have to plan weeks in advance to get a night out of the house without their husbands and children. Frieda and I dine in a restaurant now and again, and once in a while we attend a book signing at one of the bigger bookstores or department stores around town. These stores are always the venues for such events; our little bookshop does not attract celebrity authors—or even noncelebrity ones, for that matter.

  But most evenings I’m at home, curled up on the sofa reading or watching television, Aslan at my side. Thinking about this, I wonder if my subconscious wishes I spent more time dressed up and running around, like I do in my dream life.

  In any event, I find myself standing next to Lars at a cocktail party. He is in a suit and tie, and I am in a satin party dress—coral-hued, a color I actually like quite a bit in my real life, too—with a sweetheart neckline, a full skirt, and a wide bow at the waist. It reminds me of something I saw Jackie Kennedy wearing in Life not long ago; clearly, when doing my clothes shopping in this world, I follow the First Lady’s trends. On my feet, I am wearing pointed heels in the same shade as the dress.

  Music is playing from the speakers of a gleaming hi-fi stereo cabinet in the corner of the room. The Kingston Trio is singing about how they don’t need booze to be high; apparently, seeing their woman smile does the same thing for them as a good stiff drink.

  Well. I’m not sure my dream persona can say the same for herself. In my hand is a half-empty martini glass. Unlike Frieda, who adores a good martini, I rarely drink martinis in real life; nonetheless, I take a sip. It’s surprisingly sweet. It must have something else in it, besides the usual gin and vermouth. I sip again, thinking that I could get used to this—if it were real, of course.

  Lars and I are standing with a redheaded woman who is wearing a black satin sheath dress and holding a martini like mine. The room is crowded with couples, the men in suits and the women in cocktail dresses. I scan the room for Bill and Judy, our dinner companions from a few dreams ago. I smile inwardly; even here in a dream, a recognizable face would be a fine thing to see. But I don’t see them.

  We are in a house, but it is not our house. Like ours, however, this home is contemporary and lean. The living room stretches the width of the front of the house, with a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows looking toward the street. Over my shoulder I see that the dining area is open to the kitchen, which in turn has a sliding glass door that presumably leads to the backyard—which is no doubt as expansive as everything else in this world.

  “Katharyn, that color is gorgeous on you,” the redhead says, bringing my attention to the conversation in front of me.

  I smile and sip my fruity drink. “Thank you . . .” Of course, I have no idea what her name is, so I cannot call her by it. This bothers me greatly. My mother always impressed upon me the importance of learning—and using—other people’s names. “You’ll always have plenty of friends and social invitations if you remember names,” Mother told me throughout my formative years. I’m not sure she’s right about that, because I am quite good at names—yet in the real world, at least, I have a fundamentally nonexistent social life. I give a little laugh, and suddenly realize I feel a bit light-headed. I wonder how many martinis I’ve already put away.

  Gently but firml
y, Lars takes my elbow. “Jean, I always tell Katharyn that she’s pretty in pink.” He raises his eyebrows. “Of course, I told her that tonight before we left home, and she insisted that it’s coral, not pink, that she’s wearing.” He lifts his shoulders in the playful shrug of a hapless male. “What man could be expected to know a thing like that?”

  I laugh merrily. “Jean,” I say, planting the name in my mind. “Would you call this more of a coral, or more of a peach? The saleslady called it peach, but . . .”—I finger the sateen fabric of my skirt with my free hand—“I think it’s more of a coral.”

  “It’s coral,” Jean says firmly. “Peach would be lighter, which wouldn’t be suitable for this time of year. But that . . .” She looks me up and down. “It’s perfect, my dear.” She glances toward the darkness outside the front windows. “Just make sure you bundle up before going home. What a storm! You didn’t walk, did you two?”

  “Sure we did,” Lars replies. “It’s only a block.”

  A mustached man walks up and hands Jean a fresh drink. “You looked thirsty,” he says to her, taking her empty glass from her hand. I notice that their fingers touch for a few extra seconds.

  “Ah, George.” Jean looks impishly at the man over the rim of her glass, her green eyes large behind false eyelashes. “Such an attentive host.”

  Suddenly I realize who he is. It’s the man with the dog, the one I saw on the street when I walked alone past where our house would be. When I walked there in the real world.

  So actual, live people reside in the dream world, too. This strikes me as amusing, and I laugh aloud. Everyone looks at me, puzzled. “Did I say something funny?” Jean asks.

  “No, of course not,” I reply quickly. “I’m just in a happy mood tonight.” I raise my glass. “It’s so nice to be here with you all!”

  Lars still has a solid hold on my elbow. “Katharyn, do you need to sit down?”

  Suddenly, what I need to do most is use the bathroom. How is that possible, when I am not even awake? I laugh again, absurdly wondering if I am wetting my bed in the real world. “No, thanks,” I say to Lars. “I’m off to the little girls’ room.” I extract myself from his grip and weave toward the back of the house, figuring there must be a bathroom somewhere in the vicinity, if I just keep my eyes peeled.