Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  It was a short service, and I was glad. I thought of the long services at St. Tom’s on Kimbark, which I’d sometimes attended with Mamma. I’d run my finger down the program and think we were almost at the end, but then we’d hit the “sermon.” I always forgot about the dreaded sermons.

  Sarah preached a sermon on Christmas Eve, but it was a good one. “I’m going to keep it short,” she said. “I’m not going to scold you for spending too much money on presents, or for drinking too much, and so on. I’m just going to remind you that you can’t always get what you want. And that that’s probably a good thing. Some of you will remember the song. Nineteen sixty-eight, the Rolling Stones with the London Bach Choir. It marked the end of the sixties, and that was probably a good thing too. At least that’s what my mother used to say. She loved that song, used to play it all the time. But I like the song because it sums up the spiritual life. Getting what you want isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.”

  After we exchanged the Peace, Sarah blessed the bread and wine; we recited the Lord’s Prayer; and Sarah invited us to share the consecrated host and the wine. Olivia was holding my hand. I felt a little tug, a sly invitation to take communion with her. But I stayed put—Saskia too—and sitting there in the darkened church, I realized that Olivia was embarking—had already embarked—on a spiritual journey. And then I realized that I was embarking on a spiritual journey too, but I had no idea where I was going.

  “Are you all right?” I asked when she got back to the pew.

  “You can’t always get what you want,” Sarah said to me as we shook hands in the narthex. She looked at Olivia and Saskia. “But sometimes you can!” And to Olivia, she said: “And you must be the fair Ophelia.”

  “No, I’m the fair Olivia.”

  “Sorry. Well, welcome. And you must be?”

  “I’m the fair Saskia,” Saskia said.

  “Well, doubly welcome. I hope we’ll see you again.”

  “I’m here to stay,” Olivia said. “At least for a while.”

  “Does that mean I’ll be seeing you for some premarital counseling?” She laughed, to indicate it was a joke.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Olivia said. She laughed too. “Gabe’s never been married before.”

  “Neither have I,” Reverend Sarah said, “but I’ve got plenty of good advice.”

  Whoa whoa whoa, I thought. I wanted to slow things down a little. Most of what I knew about marriage I’d learned from the advice columns in the newspaper, and from Anna Karenina, and from occasional glimpses into other people’s marriages—couples I knew who could go for two or three days without speaking to each other. But on the other hand—

  I kept my mouth shut.

  On Monday morning, before heading back to Chicago, Olivia helped me set up a Skype interview with Adam and Carla, who came as a pair. They’d be in Marcus’s office at six o’clock that evening.

  Olivia downloaded Skype onto my computer and added Marcus to my contact list. Then she added herself and Saskia. “All you have to do,” she said—words that always made me freeze up. All you have to do is drag the icon over to—

  All I had to do was find Marcus’s picture on my contact list, click on the little green call button and select video call.

  I followed the steps. “Nothing’s happening,” I said.

  “That’s because Marcus isn’t expecting a call this early. He probably isn’t even in his office yet. It will work tonight, trust me.”

  At seven o’clock, I dialed Marcus’s Skype number and there they were, two beautiful young people, Adam and Eve before the fall—hungry bright young booksellers in love with each other and in love with books. Adam, who was from the North Side of Chicago, had attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he’d had a work-study job in Special Collections, and had been working in the rare book department at the Strand, and Carla was a St. Anne alum from Detroit who’d been working for Marcus. Both were generalists with strong backgrounds in American and European history and in British and American literature. They’d met at CABS—the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar—and both wanted to come back to the Midwest.

  “I always take a book home with me after work,” Carla said. “It’s like having a new lover every night.”

  “What about Adam?” I asked.

  “We always look at the book together,” she said, “figuring out how we’d describe it, how we’d price it.”

  I made them an offer and they accepted.

  XVIII. PREMARITAL COUNSELING

  (March 2011)

  On Ash Wednesday, Olivia and I knelt next to each other in front of the high altar at St. Anne’s, our arms touching, to receive the ashes. Olivia asked me to go with her, and really there was no reason not to: “For dust thou art. And unto dust thou shalt return.” Who could quarrel with that? But I wondered if she was experiencing the same thing I was, namely, the slight pressure of Reverend Sarah’s thumb on my forehead, the grit of the ashes. Or was she experiencing something more?

  On Friday, we met with Reverend Sarah in her study for a premarital counseling session. Olivia had put her condo on the market, and she and Saskia had moved her clothes and books to St. Anne in the Jeep. Saskia and Nadia were going to stay in the condo till it sold. We hadn’t said anything to them about premarital counseling.

  A small wood fire was burning in a small coal fireplace. It was a good working study for an Episcopal priest, faded but elegant—a threadbare oriental carpet on the floor, a big desk, shelves lined with concordances, a Latin Bible, church histories, a dozen works by C. S. Lewis, a copy of Skeat’s Chaucer next to Tolkien’s edition of Gawain and the Green Knight.

  Sarah came in with a teapot and three cups on a tray. “I always think tea is better than coffee for talking about marriage.”

  “There’s a dark side of marriage, don’t you think,” Olivia said, “that needs to be plumbed. That’s what we need to do now, in a safe place—at least I hope this is a safe place—before we take the next step. I want to understand something about myself before I make another mistake.”

  “Safe as houses,” Sarah said. Pouring tea into cups, not mugs.

  But it didn’t feel safe to me. “Exciting,” but not “safe.” Too much going on. Happening too fast.

  “Here’s the usual drill for premarital counseling. We don’t have to stick to it, but it will give us an overview of the terrain, like a contour map: communication, sexual difficulties, child rearing, substance abuse, financial problems, anger, infidelity. Any place you’d like to start?”

  “Gabe’s a little shy in bed,” Olivia said, “but he’s learning.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Maybe I just haven’t had as much experience as you.”

  “Wait wait wait,” Olivia said. “I was just kidding.”

  “Let’s start over,” Sarah said. “You’re both a little nervous. That’s par for the course.”

  “I’m sorry,” Olivia said.

  “You don’t need to be sorry,” Sarah said, “but let’s stay focused. You’re going to love each other for your kindness and your generosity, for your smarts and your bedroom tricks, for your good will and your sassiness… But you’re never going to love each other for your selves alone. Only God can do that.” She paused to sip her tea. Olivia put her hand on my arm.

  “That’s the difficulty, isn’t it,” Sarah went on, smiling as if she were revealing a secret: “You will never love each other for your selves alone because you will never see each other as you really are. It’s like trying to see the dark side of the moon. The moon doesn’t rotate on its axis, you know. We always see the same face. Actually, over a period of time the edges of the far side can be seen due to libration—a kind of rocking motion. That’s what we’re trying to do this afternoon. Rock the moon so we can see a little of the dark side.”

  “I’m not so
sure,” Olivia said. “I think Gabe has seen me as I really am. I think he’s gotten a good look at my dark side.”

  I started to protest, but Sarah shushed me. “Let her finish.”

  “We were in love my last year at the University of Chicago. I let him think we’d get married—eventually—because I half believed it too. But then when I was at Yale, I stopped answering his letters. I started sleeping with one of my classmates, and then another. They were just boys. They wanted me to clean their rooms. Do their laundry. We’d rub up against each other till— till it was too late to stop, but it didn’t mean anything…”

  “Until David,” I said. Sarah held up a hand to tell me to butt out.

  “… and then with my professor. I completely lost my head. His wife found out. He dropped me, but it was too late. He lost his job, denied tenure, landed on his feet in Ann Arbor. I came back to Hyde Park and Gabe gave me a job. He wanted to take up where we’d left off, but I didn’t want to be rescued. I went out with other men, but not Gabe. But then Gabe was there in the delivery room when my daughter was born. David—my ex-professor, ex-boyfriend, ex-lover, I don’t know what to call him—didn’t even know I was pregnant, but then when David got divorced—this was six years later—I went back to him, and we got married. After a year, we were both unfaithful to each other. So I guess I don’t have a very good track record. And now I’ve lost my job, my daughter’s a lesbian, and I don’t know how I’m going to pay her tuition at the University of Chicago, or for her to go to Jordan. I’ve been sick and I’m going to lose my insurance. And Gabe’s taken me in. He probably thinks I trapped him and now he feels sorry for me and doesn’t know what else to do. I’m sorry I’ve made myself so unhappy, other people too.”

  “Gabe,” Sarah said. “Do you feel trapped? If you do, now’s the time to get it out on the table.” Olivia started to cry. I moved to comfort her, but Sarah stopped me. “Just let her cry. And don’t start crying yourself. That would be too much.”

  “I thought you were going to say something about God,” I said to Sarah.

  “I was, but then I changed my mind. I’ll let God speak for himself. Or herself.”

  “I was sick when Saskia and I came to St. Anne just before Christmas,” Olivia said. “That was the night of the big storm, and the storm was like the storm in Coleridge’s ‘Dejection.’ It restored me. I think that was God’s way of speaking to me. It was a miracle. I should probably make a special offering.”

  “Well,” I said, “it wasn’t really a miracle. Ovarian cysts usually just go away. That’s what the doctor said. And now you’ve been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. And non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas have a natural tendency of recurrence and remission.”

  “I refuse to entertain the idea of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. What kind of a name is non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma?”

  “Non-Hodgkin lymphomas are any kind of lymphomas that don’t involve Reed-Stromberg cells.”

  “You’ve been searching the Net,” Sarah said.

  “What does Reverend Sarah say?” I said, not looking at either woman. “If it’s a miracle, won’t the Church have to authenticate it?”

  Sarah laughed. “There are miracles and then there are miracles.”

  “And?”

  “Let me tell you a story: A woman was unhappy in her marriage. She believed that her husband didn’t love her anymore and loved other women, so she went to a sorceress, and the sorceress told her to bring her a consecrated communion wafer. The woman was afraid, but she did it. She kept the wafer in her mouth after receiving it at mass and took it out later and wrapped it up in a cloth and took it to the sorceress, but on the way, the wafer started to bleed and she panicked and went home and hid it in the bottom of a trunk. That night she and her husband were awakened by a bright light coming from the trunk. It filled the whole room. The woman confessed, and she and her husband knelt and prayed till morning, and then they called for the parish priest.”

  “This happened when?”

  “In Portugal, in twelve forty-seven.”

  “And you believe this?”

  “The bloody host is still there, in a monstrance. The blood is still liquid and the host looks like real flesh with delicate veins in it. I’ve seen it. Last summer. In Santarem.”

  “You went to Portugal?!” I asked.

  “Why shouldn’t I go to Portugal?”

  “I don’t know. No reason. I guess I’ve never met anyone who’s been to Portugal.”

  “Santarem. On the Tagus River, about forty miles from Lisbon.”

  I felt that I’d been catapulted into a different world. “I still don’t know exactly what the doctor told Olivia,” I said to Sarah. “Did he use the words ‘clean bill of health,’ for example? Did he use the word ‘remission’? Did he say ‘non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma’? I try to look inside her head, but my X-ray vision doesn’t work.”

  “It doesn’t matter now, Gabe,” Olivia said. “I’m all right.”

  Sarah started to explain that the Episcopal Church doesn’t have anything comparable to the Roman Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which authenticates miracles.

  This was more than I’d bargained for.

  “Gabe,” Sarah said, “what would you like to say to Olivia right now?”

  “Right this minute? I don’t think I should say anything. I keep thinking that all of a sudden I know the truth about love, but then there’s always some other truth coming along behind that truth. Like one appetite coming along right after another, each one different. You’re hungry, you’re thirsty, you’re horny, you want some ice cream, you want a drink, you’re tired. It never ends. When she got on the Lakeshore Limited—in Union Station in Chicago, going to New Haven—and I saw her face in the window, I thought I understood the truth about love. It’s not something you can put into words. It’s something you experience in your whole body. And then when she came back to Hyde Park, right after the shop was bombed, and I saw her reflection in the broken glass in the window on Fifty-Seventh Street, and I thought I understood; and then when I held her daughter in my arms right after she was born—it was better than holding the pipe bomb that I’d carried out of the shop earlier that year, two days after the first bomb, and I thought I understood; and then when she told me that David’s divorce was final and that she was going to join him in Ann Arbor… every time I thought I understood the truth about love, but it was always new, always painful. But then when Saskia called just before Christmas and said that Olivia was sick and that Borders in Hyde Park was closing and asked if they could come to St. Anne for Christmas… I almost said no. I thought the truth was always something new, but at that moment it seemed like it was just the same old truth over and over again, not really a truth at all, just the same old story over and over. Olivia never wanted to make another mistake. Fair enough, but why was I always the mistake she didn’t want to make? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  Sarah laughed.

  “Stop it,” Olivia said. “This isn’t a joke.”

  “You’re right, Olivia,” Sarah said, “and you were right when you said there’s a dark side to every marriage. Something that needs to be plumbed. But I hear worse every week. A lot worse. Infidelity is part of the dark side, but it isn’t the darkest thing. And it’s not really the issue here.”

  “And what is the issue?”

  “The issue isn’t infidelity; the issue is accepting love. Don’t worry about what you deserve. Just allow yourself to be loved.”

  “Are you saying we need to forgive each other?”

  Sarah laughed. “Don’t worry about forgiveness,” she said. “Forgiveness will take care of itself.”

  “Do you think we’re going to have more problems than ordinary people?”

  “Olivia, there are no ‘ordinary people,’ there are just people, like you and Gabe. A lot of couples can tolera
te each other only when they’re in love. And then down the road they have troubles that are a lot more serious than yours. Now here’s the way I see your situation: Olivia, you don’t want to be rescued. You’re afraid that you’re not bringing enough to the table. I think you need to swallow your pride. Here’s a man who has loved you all his adult life. Now you’re living together like husband and wife in a beautiful house on Lake Michigan. You’re going to be the IT person at a brand-new bookstore. Gabe says you know how to set up a software program that will tell your computer everything you need to know every time you sell a book. It will even post the books on different websites for you. And you’re bringing your self to the table. Your wonderful sassy passionate self, with a wealth of sexual experience. You know what my grandfather used to say? ‘You take the cookies when the cookies are passed.’ It’s like divine grace. It’s on offer right now. You can choose to accept it, or you can reject it. You can choose to be happy, or you can choose to be unhappy. You’re lucky to have that choice. Not everyone has it.”

  “Was your grandfather a priest?” Olivia asked.

  “He was an auctioneer.”

  “I thought he was a bishop?”

  “That was my other grandfather. And Gabe, I say the same thing to you. You’ve loved this woman all your adult life, and now here she is, opening her arms to you. She loved another man more than she loved you, and she caused him a lot of grief, herself too. So what? That just shows how hard she can love. And she spread her legs for other men when she wouldn’t spread them for you. Get over it. You had no claim on her. You weren’t married, you weren’t engaged, you hadn’t plighted your troth. You know what this tells me? It tells me you were special. It tells me that she put you in a different category from these other men. So I say unto you: Put your resentment aside, count your blessings, and take the cookies when the cookies are passed.”

  “Beh, ce l’abbiamo fatta, sani e salvi,” I said on the way home. “Well, we made it through, safe and sound.” Olivia laughed. “Do you want to go to a justice of the peace? There’s one on Schoolcraft Road. Or are there more depths that need to be plumbed first?”