At 150 degrees I’d had enough. Augie picked up the ladle and, as we got out, splashed some water on me. Outside, we took turns standing under a cold shower.
“Now don’t that feel good?”
It did feel good. My core temperature must have been up so high that the water from the shower didn’t feel cold at all.
“Don’t you feel smagliante, clean?”
“That’s what my mother used to say,” I said, “when I was in the bathtub, but I thought it meant ‘floating.’”
“No,” he said. “Clean, dazzling.” He laughed. “Eddie was a great guy. He’d put his hand on my shoulder and say, La vita non è inesauribile? Non è bello essere vivi? Only after a while he didn’t have to say the words out loud. Just put his hand on my shoulder, like I’m putting my hand on your shoulder. Isn’t life inexhaustible? Isn’t it good to be alive?”
I gave Augie a couple of ripe tomatoes from the side of the house, and then Booker and I drove him back to The Dunes, and when we got home, I called Anne-Marie at Shoreline Realty and set things in motion.
“I thought you’d be mad at me,” she said. “Reverend Sarah said—”
But I interrupted her. “Isn’t life inexhaustible?” I said. “Isn’t it good to be alive?”
I talked to the contractor who was in charge of the remodeling about what was possible and what was not possible. The coffee shop (“Innkeepers”) and the children’s clothing boutique (“Ducklings”) had been framed in. The space on the south side—the old ticket lobby, the old men’s waiting room, the men’s baggage room—had been roughed in. The old waffle radiators had been torn out. Overhead pipes for heating and cooling were in place. It would have made more sense to sell books out of my house—how hard could it be? I’d just have to clear some space—but I could already see the books on the shelves in the shop—Chas. Johnson & Son, Ltd. Antiquarian Booksellers. Isn’t life inexhaustible? I thought. Isn’t it good to be alive?
Part Three: “At Least”
XVII. DEJECTION
(Christmas 2010)
By December—in time for the Christmas season—Innkeepers was serving espresso and cappuccino and caffè latte; the art gallery was hanging pictures by local artists and some Chicago artists too; Ducklings was having an opening sale. You could buy a nice watch at Workman Jewelers, or pick out your china and tableware.
The new shop was still a work in progress, but I hoped to move the books in January, as soon as the new shelves, which were being built from the shelves in the old shop, had been installed.
I was planning on spending a quiet Christmas at home and then flying to New York for a week, staying with Marcus and his family, taking in the Davidson sale at Christie’s, talking shop, schmoozing with dealers we’d done business with over the years, conferring with Toby Arnold at Swann’s, spreading the word about the new/old shop in St. Anne, and interviewing two bright young booksellers, Adam Byrd and Carla Berkhof, who’d been recommended by Marcus. I’d schmooze with dealers and buy some stock just to let the world know that Chas. Johnson & Son, Ltd., was back in business.
I was about to take Booker out to the rectory—he was going to stay with Reverend Sarah while I was in New York and I wanted to introduce him to her cat before I left—when Saskia called. It was the Tuesday before Christmas.
“I’m worried about Mom,” she said. “Something’s wrong. At first the doctor thought appendicitis, then she thought ovarian cyst, but now she’s worried that it might be irritable bowel syndrome or worse—non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is hard to diagnose because it mimics other diseases.”
The doctor was going to run some more tests, but not till after Christmas. Saskia wanted to know if she and her mother could come to St. Anne for Christmas. My heart did not leap up—Olivia wasn’t the only one who’d made mistakes—and I almost said “no.”
“There’s something else too,” she said. “Borders is closing the store in Hyde Park. It’s not official yet, no one’s supposed to know, but Mom had it from an inside source. She sort of knew anyway, when she didn’t get the job in Ann Arbor.”
I wasn’t surprised. The writing had been on the wall.
“She’s going to lose her insurance,” Saskia said. “And if she’s got non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma… I don’t know what we'll do.”
“She’ll keep her insurance as long as Borders stays in business,” I said. “They’re not going to close all the stores. Not yet.”
“They’ve offered her a job in Houston,” she said. “As an assistant manager.”
“Does your mom want to come to St. Anne for Christmas?”
“I haven’t told her yet.”
“You’d better speak to her. She won’t want to be rescued, you know.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be rescued, but I do. If it’s okay with her…?”
The time to say “no” had passed. Besides, I was enjoying an unmistakable sense of triumph. “Okay,” I said.
I called Marcus to apologize.
“Maybe something will come of this?” He inflected the last sentence as if it were a question.
Booker and I picked out a Christmas tree that afternoon in the parking lot in the marina and spent an hour looking for the old stand in the garage, which was still full of moving boxes. We found the stand and our old ornaments too. I put the tree up but didn’t decorate it. I didn’t feel like decorating it. I was restless. As if I’d turned a corner and found myself on a strange street where nothing was familiar. Jamais vu.
Booker was restless too. He was asleep on the couch, but his legs were twitching. On the beach that afternoon he found a dead herring gull. I shouted at him to drop it, but he carried it off and disappeared into the dunes and didn’t reappear.
I walked on till I could see the plume of smoke rising from the power plant. A stiff onshore breeze was pressing down the waves and flattening the dune grasses: marram grass, American beachgrass, beach pea. Booker was waiting for me at the top of the stairs when I got home. I didn’t ask him what had happened to the gull.
Saskia and Nadia had come down several times during the summer to lay out on the beach, but I hadn’t seen Olivia since we’d said good-bye in the kitchen of the old house on Blackstone. My bedroom, like every room in the house, was full of books, but you could get to the wardrobe and to the bed itself. The same was true of the room that the girls had shared. They spoke Arabic to each other when they were alone. At first it sounded fierce and warlike, lots of glottal and guttural consonants, but after a while it started to sound like wind chimes.
I shifted some boxes of books in the extra bedroom, cleared a path to the bed, and then I tried to distract myself by reading the morning paper, the St. Anne Register-Mail, which was still folded up on the kitchen table. Last week I’d read an article indicating that the country was entering a period of growth that would top three percent, and I’d felt pretty good for the rest of the day. This morning’s paper, however, indicated that the U.S. economy, as if responding to the bad news about Olivia, was going to be stuck in the slow lane for the foreseeable future. Job reports were sluggish. Demand for durable goods was weak and growth was slow. Businesses were slashing their average work week to thirty-two hours. People were downshifting careers. Detroit was in financial trouble but had not yet filed for Chapter Nine. Wayne Country was heading for a demographic cliff as baby boomers retired in greater numbers. It wasn’t good news, but I didn’t feel much worse. I was seriously annoyed, however, to read that CC Sabathia had earned $23,000,000 in his second season with the Yankees. I did the math. If Sabathia had pitched, say, 33 games and had thrown, say, 100 pitches per game, he’d have thrown 33 x 100 = 3,300 pitches over the season. $23,000,000/3300 = $6,969.70. Almost $7,000 a pitch. If I skipped 10 stones a day, which I did regularly on my walks with Booker, I’d skip 10 x 365 = 3,650 stones a year. If I got $7,000 every time I skipped a stone, I�
�d get 3,650 x $7,000 = $25,550,000. I’d be making about the same amount as Sabathia. A little more, unless Sabathia had pitched 35 games, not 33.
But when I thought about it, I realized that I was in the same position as Sabathia, though of course, I was playing in a different league.
I got out my Claire Fontaine journal and my Aurora italic fountain pen—which had been repaired at Fahrney’s—and wrote a note to Olivia in which I tried to explain. We were old friends and I would stick by her through the illness and the Borders closing. I thought of the voice crying out of the tavern: “You can’t always get what you want.” But I already had what I wanted. I wasn’t planning to actually send the note, but even so I tore the pages out of my notebook and crumpled them up and threw them in the wastebasket. I had no idea what Olivia wanted.
I read about the cold front that was roaring down from Canada like a runaway freight train; I could feel it in the weight and smell of the air when I went outside to bring in some firewood. The sky was low and dark. I lit a fire in the woodstove and started moving books around, clearing a larger space in front of the woodstove. By the time Olivia and Saskia arrived, I was exhausted, and it was starting to snow.
Olivia didn’t look sick when she got out of her little blue Mazda. She looked beautiful. Her see-through skin was pale but not sickly. She looked younger, as if some kind of inner beauty was making itself felt. Or maybe I was romanticizing illness. You could romanticize TB, but there was nothing romantic about an ovarian cyst or irritable bowel syndrome or, for that matter, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which I’d looked up on the Internet. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas are any cancers of the lymphocytes that are not Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Duh. I could remember a time when cancer was spoken of only in whispers, as if it were a personal failure, but now it was shouted all over the Internet.
Olivia didn’t look sick, but she looked nervous. I looked at Saskia for clues, but her face revealed nothing other than she was relieved to be here. She helped her mother off with her long black cloth coat.
I’d always been on good terms with Saskia. I was the good uncle, as Marcus put it—the confidant, the one who poured her a glass of wine at the dinner table and remembered her birthdays. Last year’s birthday present had been especially successful: Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. A special edition, University of Kansas Press, 1999. Twenty-five drawings numbered and signed by Michael McCurdy, the illustrator. Foreword by Ray Bradbury. A beautiful book in a beautiful green silk folding box.
Olivia’d brought a case of Clos du Bois—pinot grigio and pinot noir—in the trunk of her Mazda Protégé. She thought I didn’t spend enough on wine. And a case of Perrier. Our repeated blind tastings had failed to persuade her that the eighty-five-cent two-quart bottles of seltzer from the grocery store were just as good as—better than—the three-dollar sixteen-ounce bottles of Perrier. She chose the grocery store seltzer almost every time. That was years ago, and she still wanted her Perrier. I carried the wine in from the car. The chat was normal. How was the trip? Fine. You beat the big storm. We made good time. Saskia drove all the way. I didn’t know whether I wanted to break through or not, but it was awkward with Saskia there. I’d made up beds for her and Saskia in the bedrooms upstairs.
We continued to talk for a while without saying what we really meant, and then I said, “I’m going to go to the store—to stock up before the storm. Would anyone like anything?”
“Don’t look so worried, Gabe,” Olivia said. “Ovarian cysts go away by themselves. ‘Watchful waiting,’ that’s what the doctor said.”
“Mom,” Saskia said. “You wouldn’t get an ovarian cyst if you’re on birth control pills. It has to be something else. That’s what Dr. Matthews said. You take birth control pills to prevent ovarian cysts. She said it might be non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That’s why she wants to run some tests.”
Olivia started to protest.
“Mom, we’ve got to face facts. We might as well get this out in the open. We’ve got some things to settle.”
Was she asking me to step up to the plate?
“‘Watchful waiting,’ sweetie. That’s what the doctor said. We just got here. And it’s Christmas. Why don’t you go to the store with Gabe and I’ll lie down for a little while.”
“I want to go down to the beach before we go,” Saskia said, shaking her hair out of her eyes. “I want to make sure the house isn’t going to slide into the lake while we’re here.” She disappeared out the front door (which was on the north side of the house). We watched her walk to the steps.
Olivia and I looked out the window at the weather. “Maybe we should stay in a hotel,” Olivia said, as if someone had already suggested it. “Just in case.”
“This isn’t like you,” I said. “I didn’t think you were afraid of anything.”
“I’m a little upset, that’s all,” she said. “I need a friend. How could Borders close the shop in Hyde Park? What went wrong? Our numbers were good. We were making money. What are they thinking? It doesn’t make sense.”
I carried her suitcase upstairs and put it in her room in the back (or the front, depending) of the house. I turned back the covers. She didn’t wait for me to leave before starting to undress. She lay down on the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand on her forehead.
“It’s not a fever,” she said; “it’s an ovarian cyst. Put your hand on my ovary.”
“Which one, right or left?”
“I feel full all the time. Bloated.”
I rubbed her stomach, below her stomach. I wasn’t sure where her ovaries were.
“Saskia wants to go to Jordan.”
“Next fall?”
She nodded.
“You don’t want her to go?”
“I do, but I don’t. It’s so far away. And expensive.”
“Nothing is easy.”
“I’m sorry, Gabe.”
“Your mom says you want to go to Jordan,” I said to Saskia as we pulled out of the drive onto the highway.
“Early days,” she said.
“Going to stay with Nadia’s parents?”
“I want to take a class at Princess Sumaya University in Colloquial Jordanian, but I’ll have a real job too, at the Ministry of Water and Irrigation. Nadia’s father can arrange it.”
“Did you read about that suicide in Tunisia?” I asked. “Last Friday, I think it was.”
“Mohammed Bouazzi? Nadia thinks it’s going to have repercussions all over the Arab world. Maybe even start a revolution or two.”
“What would you do?” I asked. “Or what would you advise King Abdullah to do?”
“I was at the doctor’s office with Mom when he called my cell phone.”
“What?”
She gave me a smile. Like one of Olivia’s mysterious smiles.
“Does he consult you regularly?”
“Only when there’s trouble.”
“What do you tell him?”
“I tell him the same thing I tell President Obama and all the rest of them. Crack down on corrupt politicians. Start giving breaks to the poor instead of to the rich. That sort of thing.”
“What do they say?”
“They say they’ll do it, but then—”
“Nothing happens?”
“Nothing happens. But I think King Abdullah’s a good guy. He’s stuck to his Decent Housing for Decent Living program; he’s pushed the parliament to work on press reforms and publication law. He’s worked for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.”
“Do you think the king will be able to sort things out? With your help, of course.”
After a short silence she said, “I don’t think things are going to get sorted out. I was a delegate at the Model Arab League last March in Georgetown. It’s too depressing.” She ticked off a list of problems: Iran seizing an Iraqi oil well
on the border, civil war in Syria. More suicide bombings in Afghanistan. Car bombs in Iraq. And now,” she went on, “the collapse of TIBC in Bahrain has destabilized the whole banking system in the Middle East.”
“What’s TIBC?”
“The International Banking Corporation in Bahrain. They’d extended twenty billion dollars in credit, but when the CEO died, it turned out there wasn’t a real bank. Just a bunch of computers. The customers were fictitious, the loan agreements forged, the records faked. They took a lot of other banks—real banks—down with them. I definitely want to go to Jordan, but I’m thinking I might switch my major to linguistics. I’d be in a good position to get a job. How many people know Arabic?”
“A lot of Arabs,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “I forgot about the Arabs.”
Vitale’s was closed, so we drove out to Harding’s Friendly Market. She talked all the way, explaining the differences between Modern Standard Arabic, which everybody learns in school, and colloquial Arabic, which they speak at home, and everywhere else. Nadia’s parents speak English, but at home they speak colloquial Jordanian. And then she explained the course requirements at Chicago. We drove a couple of miles in silence, and then she said as we crossed the bridge over I-94, “Borders will stay open awhile, but not for very long; that’s why Mom doesn’t want to take the job in Houston. She doesn’t want to go to Houston anyway. What’s going to happen to her? What’s going to happen with her insurance? What if it is non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma? COBRA’s expensive, and I don’t think she can get it if Borders really shuts down all the way. Maybe she could come and live with you? You have insurance, don’t you?”
Love, Death & Rare Books Page 19
