Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

I started to laugh, but it wasn’t very funny. “My insurance wouldn’t cover her.”

  “It would if you married her.”

  This time I did laugh: “How much do you know about love?”

  “More than I know about insurance.”

  “She can sign up for Affordable Care if the Republicans haven’t managed to trash it. What about your dad?”

  “He’s a full professor now. His wife’s the problem. Maybe not for too much longer, though.”

  “His first wife or his new wife?”

  “Either one. Both.”

  Saskia was quiet for a while. “I’m thinking of a Joan Baez song that Mom used to sing—along with the record. ‘The water is wide, I cannot cross over, And neither have I wings to fly. Give me a boat, that can carry two, And both shall row, my love and I.’ She’d sing along and cry. But that was a long time ago.”

  “Do you know the rest of the song?”

  She nodded. “‘Love grows old, and waxes cold, And fades away, like morning dew.’”

  “Do you think that would happen if your mom came to live with me?”

  “I don’t know. Mom always says that living together is a sure cure for love.”

  “Is that what happened with your dad? David?”

  “I was too young. I don’t know what happened. But I’m scared now. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. I think Mom’s scared too, but she won’t admit it. Maybe we could go into Chapter 11, or file for it, like Borders. What’s Chapter 11 anyway?”

  I explained Chapter 11, and I explained Chapter 7 too.

  “Mom has always seemed like she was getting one step closer to something she wanted, but not now. It’s like she’s walking backwards, or trying to walk up a down escalator.”

  People were worried about the storm. The shelves were emptying rapidly. There was no bread. The bottled water was almost gone. But we had the case of Perrier.

  “Get a cart with a prime number,” Saskia said. “That’s what Mom always does.”

  “How about one nineteen?” I said.

  “Divisible by seven,” she said. “I’ve got a list in my head. Here’s one thirty-one; that’ll work.”

  I bought steaks, shrimp, scallops, a pork roast, bacon, eggs. As if good food were the solution.

  I’d laid in a full cord of wood and had stacked it outside the sauna house. Saskia and I carried in armfuls of small logs, cut short to fit in the sauna stove and in the woodstove in the living room. I fixed spaghetti with scallops. I opened a bottle of Olivia’s pinot grigio and a bottle of Barefoot, for comparison. The Barefoot was slightly effervescent. We listened to NPR while we ate. Olivia didn’t eat very much. She was worried about the house. After supper I tried to get her to sit in Dad’s comfortable club chair in the reading nook, with windows on three sides, while Saskia and I did the dishes, but she was too nervous.

  We decorated the tree that I’d put up earlier. New lights. Boxes of old family ornaments were set out on the library table, along with wrapping paper, tags, ribbons. We wrapped presents, pretending to hide them from the person they were for. By “presents,” of course, I meant books. I wrapped up a nice copy of Coleridge’s poems for Olivia, and set up Mamma’s Italian crèche at one end of the library table and arranged the little figures around the manger.

  At first the storm looked like a black band that had been wrapped around the horizon, like a ribbon stretched tight, or a thick rubber band. And then the ribbon came loose, the rubber band snapped, and we watched the storm come rolling across the lake, rolling toward us like a big wave. The black band disappeared. Then the gray clouds disappeared. Then we couldn’t see the lake, couldn’t see anything except flashes of lightning, followed by claps of thunder. I should have closed the big shutters. Too late now.

  “I thought it didn’t thunder in winter,” Saskia said.

  “That’s what Gurov’s daughter says in ‘The Lady with the Dog,’” Olivia said. “Gurov explains it.”

  “What’s the explanation?”

  “Chekhov doesn’t give it. He just says Gurov explains it.”

  “It was a dark and stormy night,” I said.

  Booker was snoozing on his rug between the couch and the coffee table. Olivia was pacing up and down. “Why has that line gotten such a bad rap? I think it’s a good opening.”

  “Bulwer Lytton,” I said. “Have you ever read Bulwer Lytton? We’ve got a first edition of Paul Clifford, but it’s boxed up now. Three volumes. Dad liked it.”

  “The pen is mightier than the sword,” Olivia said.

  “He said that too?”

  “And ‘the pursuit of the almighty dollar.’ In The Last Days of Pompeii. I thought it was pretty good. It’s scary, though, but what’s really scary is that he was one of the most popular writers of the nineteenth century, and now he’s a joke, reduced to one line.”

  We talked about storms—the storms in Gawain and the Green Knight, in the Odyssey, in King Lear, in Kate Chopin’s “The Storm.”

  “How about Moby Dick? There must be a big storm in Moby Dick?”

  “There’s a huge storm,” I said. “Ahab tells the helmsman to sail right into it.”

  “Those storms were all the work of the gods,” she said. “Divine punishments or warnings. Nowadays storms are just storms. Cold air colliding with warm air. You don’t need the gods to explain them.”

  “The Arabic word for storm is haboob,” Saskia said, “but I think that’s a kind of sandstorm. It might be aasifa.”

  Later in the evening we lost power. The snow and the wind were battering the windows. Saskia couldn’t get a signal on her phone, but reception along the lake was iffy anyway. The landline would be okay, but whom would we call? It was dark, and the snow was pounding against the triple-glazed windows of the reading nook, as if it were falling in chunks rather than flakes. We hadn’t closed the shutters, but we couldn’t see out, only the reflection of our own faces in the glass, and the reflection of the books on the shelves behind us, and the flames in the ceramic windows in the woodstove doors.

  The gas furnace was putting out heat, but the electric blower wasn’t pushing the air through the ducts. We had plenty of wood, so we didn’t have to worry about freezing; and I had three Coleman lanterns, each with two mantels, so we had plenty of light.

  During a lull in the storm I went outside. It was really brutal. Maybe we should have gone to a hotel. Ten-to-twelve-foot waves were lashing the beach, crashing against the seawall. I didn’t know how much good the rock revetments could do against waves like this. Too late now. I was tempted to go down to the beach. Wanted to see what the lake was doing to the bluff. I was afraid that in spite of the seawall, the waves were chewing up the base of the bluff. I wanted to know. I knew it was foolish, but I felt that it was something I had to do. Confront the storm. Like Ahab. I found the railing for the steps. Tested it. Augie said Eddie had paid $8,000 to replace the old stairs, but I wasn’t sure I could believe anything Augie said. One step at a time. When I got halfway down, I discovered that half the stairs—everything below the landing, had been ripped off. I couldn’t go any farther.

  I started back up, feeling my way, feeling the remaining stairs twisting under my feet. It occurred to me that I’d made a fool of myself. Again. I was on a teeter-totter, like a child, up and down. An emotional teeter-totter. One summer Mamma and I took pictures of all the different stairs within a one-mile range. Old wooden stairs. New metal ones. More than a few in ruins. One had an old trolley track running down from the top of the bluff (to lower groceries, picnic stuff, beer). All these attempts to link high and low, heaven and earth. Sky and Sea. I thought about the enthusiasm and excitement behind all these stairs. Some with landings at different stages, some of the landings large enough to accommodate a screened porch. People imagining how they’d picnic on the beach, carry their ba
skets down, bottles of wine, pitchers of lemonade, sandwiches, meat to grill. Charcoal.

  Looking up, I could just make out Olivia and Saskia, indistinct forms that might topple over with the next gust of wind. They were waving at me to come back. I was almost blown off the stairs. As I kept climbing, I had the sensation of confronting a simple and obvious truth, like a child blurting out an obvious truth about the size of someone’s butt. But what was it? The storm let up for a moment. The snow kept falling heavily, but the wind dropped. Almost at the top, I planned to scold Olivia and Saskia before they started scolding me. But then they were not angry; they were exhilarated.

  “We closed the shutters,” Olivia screamed in my ears. “The wind kept tearing them out of our hands, but we managed to slip the bolts into place.”

  We fought our way to the front door. We rejoiced in the warmth of the woodstove. I refilled the cast iron humidifier that sat on top of the stove. Olivia poured more wine. I put more wood in the stove. The wind batted the smoke around, but eventually the chimney started to draw again. I was shaping the story in my own mind, turning my foolishness into an adventure. Maybe I’d had too much pinot noir, but I left that out of my story and opened another bottle. Olivia asked me for a copy of Coleridge’s “Dejection.” I gave her the Christmas present I’d wrapped earlier, a nicely bound copy of Coleridge’s poems, Number 15 in the Canterbury Poets series.

  “Small square octavo,” I said, “Original quarter vellum, green cloth boards, brown morocco label, flower stem decoration to spine in gilt, boards ruled in gilt, top edge gilt. Corners of boards bumped and rubbed, label lightly rubbed, boards very faintly marked, slight loss to board gilt, tiny loss to initial blank and closed tear to one leaf (page 135). A very good copy.”

  Saskia laughed. She was sitting on the couch, her bare feet on Booker’s back. “Are you trying to sell Mom the book?”

  “That’s enough,” she said. “Is that for my tombstone?” She laughed. “Do I need to wash my hands before I open it?”

  “It would be a good idea.”

  “Pay attention to Gabe,” she said to Saskia. “You’ll learn something.” I was glad to see that her spirits had lifted.

  When Olivia returned with clean hands, I adjusted one of the Coleman lanterns. Olivia sat at one end of the library table; Saskia and I sat next to each other on one side. Olivia found what she was looking for and read aloud, though she hardly looked at the page. In the poem “Dejection,” the speaker anticipates a storm coming, but laments his ability to respond, the loss of his imaginative power. Olivia was a good reader and threw herself into it, like an actress with a script.

  O Lady! we receive but what we give,

  And in our life alone does nature live:

  Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!

  That’s the fear, isn’t it, I thought. That there’s nothing really out there except what we project. We think we’re looking out a window, but all we’re seeing is our own reflection in the glass. The storm is just a storm. It doesn’t mean anything. We’ve lost our power to invest nature with joy. But as the speaker in the poem listens to the wind, he regains his power. Perhaps without realizing it. I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe Olivia was regaining her own imaginative power.

  “If ‘Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!’” I said when she’d come to the end, “then there’s nothing at all ‘out there.’”

  “It’s our power to project that counts.”

  On that note, Saskia decided to go to bed. I’d gathered extra blankets. We would keep the bedroom doors open to get heat from the stove, but it would still be cold by morning.

  In the night, Olivia came into my room. When I felt her nudging my arm, I thought it was Booker, who sometimes jumped up on the bed in the night. She lay down beside me. Booker was sleeping on his blanket between a large wardrobe and the door to my study. Olivia was very passionate that night, and I thought she was incorporating the sounds of the storm into our lovemaking, or the sounds of the poem—the “rushing of a host in rout,” the “groans of the wounded, a rushing crowd, tremulous shudderings”; and in the end, a “tender lay… of a little child, Upon a lonesome wild, not far from home, but she hath lost her way.”

  In the morning, before Saskia came down, Olivia and I drank coffee in the kitchen. I let Booker out. “Gabe,” she said, very businesslike. “Do you still want to marry me?” She didn’t look at me. I could see that she wanted to say more but was having trouble. Great sex is not the same thing as love, I thought. Though it’s close.

  The power had come back on and the furnace fan was running, but I was still tending a fire. I went outside and opened the shutters. When I came back in, the sun had laid down large rectangles of light on the floor.

  “I feel better,” Olivia said. “A lot better. It’s a miracle, really. Are you mad at me? For last night? What I want to say…is…that I feel revitalized after the storm. It is a miracle. Like Coleridge in ‘Dejection.’ He gets his power back. The storm jump-starts his Imagination.”

  “The great esemplastic power?”

  “Gabe, don’t make fun of me.”

  We heard Saskia’s footsteps on the stairs. “You guys look so serious,” she said. “Am I interrupting something important?”

  “I’m propositioning Gabe, but he doesn’t know it yet, or else he’s pretending not to hear me.”

  “Congratulations.”

  I was suddenly overwhelmed. Something inside me pressed against my chest. At first I thought it was anger, but then I realized it was happiness.

  We were snowed in, and I was glad I’d traded the old van for a Jeep Wrangler with four-wheel drive, like Anne-Marie’s, but with four doors. Augie called as I was pouring coffee, regular coffee, and looking out the kitchen window at a foot of bright snow.

  “You still there? Didn’t go into the lake? The National Weather Service reported twenty-foot waves up at St. Joe, winds up to fifty knots.”

  “Still here,” I said. “You’re up early.”

  “I’m an old man. It’s part of the deal.”

  “The house is still here.”

  “You check for damage?”

  “The stairs are gone. At least halfway down. Or up.”

  “They’re the first to go. Come on out. Coffee. I want to talk to you about something.”

  “Not Eddie again?”

  “No. Something else. I lost some money at the Casino. I’m gonna need some help.”

  I pretended not to hear him. “What am I going to do about the stairs?”

  “This morning? Nothing. But I can make a call, give you a name. Nobody’s going to do anything till spring. You can forget about that. But I need you to stop by.”

  “How am I supposed to get down to the beach?”

  “You’re not supposed to do anything. There’s not going to be any beach left. That storm shifted it over to Indiana. You’ll just have to wait till another storm shifts it back.”

  “A reverse storm?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You still want your house back?”

  Augie laughed. “The sun is shining. What kind of coffee do you like? Forget I asked that. They can make a decent cappuccino. I had to buy the machine myself. Gaggia. There’s a woman here, Barbara. She’s on her toes. I’d marry her if I were a young man like you.”

  “We’re snowed in.”

  “We? You got a woman out there?”

  “Two of them.”

  “That real estate woman?”

  “Someone else.”

  Then you’re doing better than I am.”

  I went outside to call Booker. When I came back in, Olivia was paging through the Coleridge. She read the poem again while I cooked bacon and poached eggs. After breakfast we sat around the table and drank more coffee in white ceramic cups.


  No newspaper this morning—too much snow. Yesterday’s newspaper was still half open on the table, along with a jar of marmalade and our eggy plates.

  “It is a miracle,” she said. “I feel wonderful.”

  I thought she was right. I thought we all felt revitalized. Even Booker, who’d been out playing in the snow and was now banging at the door.

  Saskia got up to let him in.

  It was nice to be snowed in. For the morning. Everything stopped. Everything was quiet. We didn’t have to do anything.

  By afternoon we’d been plowed out, not just Pier Road but our drive as well. We drove into town.

  We had an espresso at Innkeepers and walked through the new shop, which was coming right along. Olivia loved it. She explained the software we’d need to keep track of everything. Software that could distinguish between used books, rare books, and new books too, just by reading an identification number.

  When we got back to the house, Olivia touched everything. The Magnum pepper grinder, the dirty espresso cups. As if she hadn’t seen them before. The little silver spoons from Italy. She felt the fabric of her blue cloth napkin.

  “I had days like this when I was a little girl,” she said. “My mother would take me out of school and we’d sneak off and go to a movie or go kayaking on Fidler Pond. It was wonderful.”

  I still wasn’t sure what had happened, or where we stood. Had she really been propositioning me when Saskia interrupted us?

  Olivia wanted to go to church on Christmas Eve. “Reverend Sarah,” I warned her, “is very attractive, but very intense.”

  “Does she wear a collar?”

  “Not exactly. I think she modifies her blouses so they have a kind of collar look. Don’t call her ‘Father Sarah,’ though. She’s ruffled some feathers. Some members of the congregation think she ought to stick to saving souls, ministering to her flock—instead of worrying about the dune mining and the radioactive water leaking into the lake. Salvation versus social gospel. I think she’s a force. Unpredictable.” Olivia tossed her head, shook out her hair.

  I remembered Christmas Eve with Dad in Hyde Park. Then waking up in the morning and Olivia gone, but then hearing her voice in the kitchen.