Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “She said I deserved it. And she told me to thank you for the signed copy of Father Melancholy’s Daughter you gave her for her birthday. And she said she thinks you ought to go into business with Marcus in New York.”

  “She said that, or you’re just making it up? How could she know about Marcus?”

  “Gabe,” she said. “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about New York.” She paused. “But you really ought to think about it.”

  Just before we got to Ben Warren’s place, we came to the sign that marked a one-mile stretch of private road: if you are not a resident, turn back. I suppose I’d wanted Olivia to see that sign. Wanted to see her reaction.

  “That’s like the sign in your dad’s office,” she said.

  I didn’t ask her if she wanted to turn back.

  The Loft was unlocked. Mrs. Ogilvie had put clean sheets on the bed and turned on the electric baseboard heating. I was almost expecting to see Dad. “One year when Dad and Grandpa Chaz and I got here, the place was full of bats.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  “That was a long time ago. Haven’t had any since.” I looked around, just in case, inspected the curtains, checked above the windows.

  “I thought it would be quieter here.”

  “It is quiet.”

  “I hear a lot of rustling, something pounding.”

  “The waves. After a while you won’t hear them. Unless you want to.”

  We took off our shoes and walked down the steps to the beach. The air was warm but the sand was cold on our feet. We walked past a stretch of a dozen big houses on the bluff above us. We could just see the tops of the roofs. The moon was full and we could see slate blue waves shredded by invisible fingers as they rolled over the sand bars, and the lights of a freighter. Beyond the freighter the lights of Chicago glowed on the horizon.

  “Some nights,” I said, “if the weather’s perfectly clear, you can make out the Sears Tower. With a good pair of binoculars.”

  “It’s the Willis Tower now,” she said.

  “And Marshall Field’s is Macy’s.”

  We walked north along the shore until we came to a couple making love in the sand. On a blanket, but the blanket had scooched out from under them. The woman was on top, straddling the man, whose bottom was digging into the sand. I could almost conjure up the sensation. There was no easy way around them, but it was easy enough to imagine their story. Or maybe not. You never know. I had never actually seen two people fucking like that. Pictures, yes. But real people, no. Their clothes were spread out on the beach beside them. Bikini panties draped over a picnic hamper. An empty wine bottle by the remains of a fire. Maggio sauvignon blanc, the same wine we’d bought at Harding’s. I found it easier to imagine their story than my own story.

  I don’t think either one of us wanted to watch, but it was hard to look away. Not even when there were so many other things to see: glow of Chicago, summer constellations, a full moon, the lights of a big laker.

  “Is this an epiphany?” I asked Olivia, “or maybe a spot of time? Like Wordsworth seeing a dead body pop up out of the lake.”

  She suddenly stopped whispering and broke into poetry:

  “At length the dead man, ’mid that beauteous scene

  Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright

  Rose with his ghastly face.”

  The lovers didn’t hear her at first. So she spoke louder. And then she shouted: “Are you okay?”

  Now I had something else to ponder.

  The woman threw her head back and screamed.

  “It’s okay,” Olivia said. “Don’t mind us. We’re just going for a walk.”

  But the lovers uncoupled themselves and took off down the beach. Their buttocks blinking like white caps.

  “They left their picnic hamper,” Olivia said.

  “Why did you do that?” Gabe asked.

  “I wanted them to have something to remember.”

  I looked at Olivia. “Sometimes,” I said, “I look at you and think I know what you’re thinking, but I’m always wrong.”

  “You’re probably not wrong this time,” she said, pulling her summer dress over her head and then waiting for me to embrace her. I could smell the heat coming off her. Her skin shone like the moon. And I was a young man again, about fifteen years old, trembling inside, not understanding, remembering the old scary words from Krafft-Ebing. But at the same time full of love and gratitude. Exempt from the universal laws that govern mortality.

  “I don’t have a condom. They’re back at the Loft.”

  “I’m on the pill.”

  “On the pill?”

  “Gabe, I’m not a nun.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Gabe.”

  When I put my hands on her upper arms, I could feel the life force coursing through her and into me, breaking like the waves breaking behind us. We started out parallel to the shore, but we scooched around and pretty soon I could feel the waves caressing my feet, our feet.

  Her eyes were glued shut, but she touched my face and her long fingers felt like rain. She pulled the beach blanket up over us, but not before I got a glimpse of a tattoo on her butt that hadn’t been there before. It had been a long time since I’d seen her butt. Twenty years. Longer. Maybe I just didn’t remember. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to imagine her naked and laughing with another man, or exposing her buttocks in a tattoo parlor. How did they arrange that anyway? But when I twisted around to get a better look at it, she told me to wait till she came; then I could look at it all I wanted. I was seeing with a strange new sight.

  The tattoo, a black panther, seemed to glow in the moonlight, like luminous paint. “It looks like it’s digging its claws into your butt,” I said.

  “Just be quiet for a minute and keep moving. Like that.”

  I kept moving underneath her, a slow easy roll, and the waves kept breaking and licking our feet.

  After a long drawn-out orgasm, she said, “The panther is supposed to save us from the Evil One. Its breath is very sweet, signifying the sweet influence of Christ.”

  “I thought it signified Dionysus?”

  “That too.”

  “The tattoo was part of my spiritual journey.” I looked up at her to see if she was serious. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said, pulling on her panties. “But if you tell anyone about it, I’ll kill you.”

  “Orwell had tattoos,” I said. “On his knuckles. I think the tattoo’s a good sign, don’t you? A black panther. Very suave. And the lovers too, another good sign. Olivia opened the picnic hamper and discovered another bottle of sauvignon blanc.

  “Epiphany?” I said. “Or just a coincidence?”

  “You know I don’t believe in coincidences,” she said, tucking the bottle of wine under her arm.

  “Are you going to steal it?” I asked.

  “It may be a ‘sign,’” she said, “but it’s not an ‘epiphany.’”

  In the morning we ate toast with butter and soft-boiled eggs with salt and pepper and Trappy’s green hot sauce. The eggs were double yoked, and I regarded this as still another good sign. After breakfast we stood at the top of the steps, as if about to take flight. I wasn’t sure if anything had been settled, or even if there was anything to settle.

  “Some of these have close to two hundred steps,” I said. “The Loft has only sixty-seven.” The bluffs get higher the farther north you go. There are one hundred twenty steps at the state park about two miles down the beach.”

  Olivia was wearing the strappy sandals she’d bought at the truck stop. Her toenails were dark purple. We walked past the spot where we’d surprised the lovers—the picnic hamper was gone—and kept going till we came to a house that I hadn’t seen in years, just past the public beach that was part of Duva
l State Park. It was the most beautiful house I’d ever seen, and I was astonished to see a for sale sign in the window. It made me think of first love, first sex, second love and second sex; it made me think of the Kelmscott Chaucer, and of my mother in her fur coat shouting Ci stiamo avvicinando all’angolo della cacca numero uno. It made me think of the time Mamma danced with the bass player outside the Rush Tavern on Maxwell Street. It made me think of Grandpa Chaz’s snap brim fedora. It made me think of Olivia reading “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” in a southern accent.

  I was trembling inside. “This would be a good place,” I said, “to cocker up your genius and live free. That’s what Dad wanted me to do. This is a place where you could be happy.”

  “Whoa. Slow down. ‘Cocker up your genius and live free’? What does ‘cocker’ mean anyway?”

  “It’s from Middle English cockren, ‘to baby or pamper.’”

  “Hmmm. How do you ‘cocker up your genius’? I mean, What would you do?”

  “Read Montaigne all the way through in French. Maybe do a translation. Take up drawing. I’ve always wanted to draw. Dig Grandpa Chaz’s old Gibson out of the garage and take up the blues or The American Songbag. My teacher would not approve, but she’s in New York now.”

  “Your little Greek Athena?”

  “Atene,” I said. “Her mother spelled it wrong on the birth certificate.”

  “You could wear your grandpa’s hat,” she said.

  “I might reread the Odyssey in Greek. Marcus and I read most of it in Professor Blake’s Homer class. I’ve still got my old onionskin Oxford text, Iliad and Odyssey in one volume, and we’ve got an Aldine Homer in the rare book room.”

  “You need a job,” Olivia said. “You need to work, to have something you have to do when you get up in the morning. Me too. You’re not the cocker-up-your-genius-and-live-free type.”

  “All right. But just think about it for a minute. You want to know what my ideal day would be like?” I took her by the hand. She pulled back at first, and then she relented and gave my hand a squeeze.

  “Up at first light,” I said, “for a swim; then breakfast; then at my desk with Montaigne till time for lunch; then an hour to read Homer; an hour to do some sketching; and hour to practice the guitar. I could get a chainsaw, look after the trees. We could out sit out on the balcony, watch the sun set in the evening.”

  We climbed up the steps to get a better look at the house, which had big wooden shutters over the front windows. The little outbuilding, on the south side of the house, which we could barely see from the beach, wasn’t locked. We went inside.

  “It’s a sauna,” I said. “I don’t know how it works, but how hard could it be?” We sat down on a wooden bench. “Look, you heat the wood in the stove, and the wood heats the rocks. I think you splash water on the rocks and that makes the steam. And a big thermometer. Look, it goes up to a hundred ninety degrees.”

  “That’s hot.”

  I turned to Olivia. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think? Gabe, the house looks like it’s about to slide into the lake. Look at the bluff. It’s been eaten away. It’s collapsing. Going to collapse.”

  “That house has been here ever since I can remember. We don’t usually walk this far, so I haven’t seen it in three or four years.”

  “But it’s not going to be here much longer. You’d never get insurance. Maybe Lloyd’s of London.”

  “It’s post and beam construction. You can see that the piers are set back from the edge of the bluff. It’s not going to go anywhere.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while.

  “Do you ever wonder,” I asked her, “what would have happened if you’d said ‘yes’ when I asked you to marry me? After the bombing, when you came back to Chicago. I saw the reflection of a pregnant woman in the window—just starting to show—and when I realized it was you, I thought I understood what love was.”

  “Yes, I remember, but how did you know I wasn’t married?”

  “You didn’t look married.”

  “Gabe, pu-leeze. How did I look?”

  “You looked like you were in trouble.”

  She didn’t say anything, but at least she didn’t blow her stack.

  “Gabe,” she said, “how many times do I have to say it?”

  “You’ve already made enough mistakes, you didn’t want to make any more. That was twenty years ago. I’ve never understood that.”

  “I’m not sure I can explain. I was a girl then and now I’m older. Let’s just leave it at that and have an uncomplicated dirty weekend? We’ve got one more night after tonight. Let’s not spoil it.”

  “If we’d had children, they’d be in college now.”

  “I have a child, Gabe. She’s a sophomore at the University of Chicago. She still hangs out at the shop on Fifty-Seventh Street. She studies her Arabic at the big table in the front of the second floor where you used to do your Latin homework. She still has the Big-Little books you gave here when she was just starting to read. And a copy of Peter Rabbit when she was six. She’s got all her birthday books—the ones you sent her in Ann Arbor too. They’re lined up in her dorm room at Burton-Judson. She wants to go to Amman with Nadia this summer, but it’s too dangerous: Nadia’s parents would freak out if they found out their daughter’s a lesbian.”

  “You know what our problem was?”

  “Our problem, or your problem?”

  “We didn’t have any big hurdles to leap over. No parental disapproval to work around. No one to defy. Dad encouraged us, smoothed the way, practically tucked us into bed. Remember how we used to go skating, the three of us? I had my own space over the garage. And you didn’t have anyone keeping tabs on you. Nobody put a sword in the bed between us. Your aunt too. She called me when you were in labor. She told them at the hospital that I was your husband. ‘Go to her.’ That’s what she said when I got to the hospital. ‘Go to her.’”

  “And I appreciated it, Gabe. You did good.”

  “You don’t think it would work?”

  “What would work?”

  “Don’t you think we could be happy here in this beautiful house? On this beautiful inland sea? Borders is in big trouble. Their stock is down to nothing. Get out now before they go under. We could sell books out of the house.”

  “Are you crazy? This is the sort of thing that’s fun to think about when you’re young, but nobody in his right mind would consider it seriously.”

  “Uncertainty is a way of life,” I said. But the moment had come and gone. “I thought I was having a vision,” I said. “But I guess it was just a waking dream.”

  “I’m sorry, Gabe,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. “It’s a waking dream, and it’ a good one. But I’m applying for a job at Borders headquarters in Ann Arbor. I want to be part of the team that keeps Borders out of Chapter 11. The job hasn’t been posted yet, so please don’t say anything to anyone, but I’ve been invited to apply, and all signals are go.”

  Part Two: The Good Life

  XIII. THE HOUSE ON THE LAKE

  (2009–2010)

  Saul Bellow used to say that Chicago had three great universities and that Chas. Johnson & Son was one of them. I heard him say it twice—once to Grandpa Chaz, right after Mamma went away—and once to Dad, right after Punch died in 1976. I was just finishing my junior year at the Lab School. Bellow had come into the shop to get one of his early novels, The Victim, and was admiring our raccoon coat while Grandpa Chaz went to look for a copy. He turned to me and asked how I was doing.

  “My dog just died,” I said. “My grandfather wanted to call him Edgar, after Edgar Allen Poe, but my mother called him Punch, which is short for Pulcinella.”

  Bellow put his hand on my shoulder. “When he was about your age,” he said, “maybe a little younger—my son promised
me that if he could have a dog, he’d never be sad again. But it doesn’t work that way, does it?”

  “I understand that now,” I said.

  He was right, of course, and now, thirty years later, I was thinking of that conversation as I walked through the empty shop for the last time, and I wished I’d offered him the raccoon coat, which was in the back of our front hall closet, along with Mamma’s fur coat.

  The books from the rare book room had been crammed into the house on Blackstone—Jefferson bookcases at odd angles in every room, archival storage boxes stacked in the upstairs halls and bedrooms. Two hundred thousand used books had been moved to our warehouse on the South Side, where Delilah was setting up an online operation. The metal bookcases along the perimeter and along the load-bearing columns that ran through the center of the shop—which had originally been two buildings—had been moved too. Not a book in sight. Just crumbling brick and rough plaster.

  Olivia and Saskia were in Ann Arbor.

  It was already dark when I locked up and walked home. The streets had been plowed and the sidewalks shoveled. Most of the front yards along Blackstone were alight with Christmas displays. I hadn’t gotten around to stringing lights around Grandpa Chaz’s crabapple tree, which had weathered more than fifty Chicago winters, but the tree was still full of bright red berries, and that was enough. The house was cold, but instead of turning the heat up, I got Mamma’s coat out of her closet and put it on, and suddenly I was warm. I ate some salami and cheese, being careful not to get my greasy fingers on the coat.

  Life as I had known it had come to an end. I was going to have to invent a new life, one that was not rooted in the old shop on Fifty-Seventh Street, one that did not depend on Olivia.

  I’d never found the Italian translation of Montaigne that Dad had given Mamma for Christmas, but the copy of the Essais that I’d bought at the Boston fair was sitting on my desk in my bedroom upstairs. The book had summoned me at the fair, and now it summoned me again with a sudden urgency.

  How many of us, Thoreau asks in Walden, have dated a new era in our lives from the discovery of a book, a book that explains us to ourselves, a book that addresses the same questions that trouble us, all of us? Marcus and I had read Montaigne in Jock Weintraub’s seminar on autobiography, my senior year at Chicago, and at that moment I thought that maybe Montaigne’s Essais would be that book. Not Plato—too suspicious of pleasure, always hankering for an ideal realm beyond the world of the senses. Not Aristotle—maximizing our unique capacity for reason. But easygoing Montaigne. “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” That was the most important thing I remembered from the Weintraub’s seminar. I searched for the passage in the French text, but I couldn’t find it and finally fell asleep at my desk, still wearing Mamma’s fur coat.