The Bookstore

by Deborah Meyler

  “Apart from a few things by Julian Schnabel that they hide in the basement?”

  “Exactly. Now you’re getting it. And a couple things by that woman who painted vaginas and penises and pretended she was just doing flowers. What was her name?”

  I give him a dry look.

  Mitchell continues. “Mostly, it’s just the Hoppers. So they have an exhibition and call it Hopper in Context—‘See now to avoid disappointment!’—and then they open up again with the same pictures and call it Hopper in New York, or Hopper and the East Coast.”

  “Hopper surprise,” I say, “Hopper and chips,” and that makes him laugh.

  His laughter makes me brave. I take a breath. He becomes aware of me, of my smile, of the fact that I want something. He smiles too, a little warily.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve just had an idea.”

  “Which is?”

  I lean over to Mitchell, bunching my breasts a little with my arms to give myself a better cleavage. He looks. I bite my lip to make it look redder and I say: “Let’s take a cab back to your apartment and—fuck.” The use of the word gives me a frisson. I don’t use it very often in its proper context.

  Mitchell pauses. He reaches for the salt, and shakes a little on his dinner, and then replaces the saltcellar in exactly the same spot. These are all big clues that there will be no afternoon on the mulberry-colored sheets for me.

  He leans back in his chair and looks regretful.

  “Esme. I can’t. I can’t just drop everything. I’m teaching at three. I always teach at three on Thursdays.”

  “Of course,” I say, color flooding my entire skin. “Of course. I am so sorry. I forgot about the teaching.”

  “And tonight I am staying in New Haven, remember? The lecture on Keynesian economics by Baring? You know how important it is for me to be there. We discussed this. You said you would respect that.”

  A few minutes ago I was basking on broad, sunlit uplands; now I’m looking into the abyss of a new dark age. I don’t exactly know how a proposal to have sex has become a refusal to respect his attendance at an economics lecture, but I do know I am suddenly in the wrong.

  “Oh, of course, please—it was just a thought. I don’t know what got into me.”

  Mitchell smiles, but in the taxonomy of his smiles, which I am learning, I hope this is a rare one. I feel as if I have transgressed.

  The embarrassment of rebuff does not, sadly, put an end to the horniness. On the contrary, it seems a bit more intense. I wonder if there was something in the soup.

  Outside the restaurant he says good-bye without any move to touch me, and I have already moved towards him when I realize this. I try to stop the gesture and end up looking like I’m having some sort of spasm. I turn on my heel and as I do, Mitchell catches my arm and turns me around again.

  “Hold that thought,” he says, as he kisses me. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’ll call you.”

  He goes downtown and I walk over to the New York Public Library, to research Thiebaud’s immediate antecedents. I am hoping that such an activity will dampen my suddenly fiery libido. I’ve never been here before, but my professor, Dr. Henkel, has recommended this library for the paper I am doing right now. With its dark mahogany and scholarly quietness it reminds me of Cambridge, except it is public, open to anyone who wants to study; there are no hoops to jump through, no porters at the gates of learning. I find the humanities and social sciences library, look up the books and journals I need, and go to the ordering desk.

  They have a messaging system that I would ordinarily find charming, but today it is not helping to cure my condition. The librarian inserts my order slip into a smooth brass cylinder that could appear quite phallic to an overheated imagination. Then he prods the cylinder into a tube and pulls a lever. There is a pleasing whoosh.

  “How does that work?” I ask.

  “It’s a pneumatic thrusting system,” he answers. I nod carefully.

  “And where does the order end up?” I ask.

  “It goes deep into the stacks,” he says.

  I nod again, and wait quietly for my books. When they come, I force myself to read, try to concentrate, but it is hopeless. At the end of about forty minutes, I look at the notes I have made and accept that I am wasting my time. I close the books, return them to the right table, and leave. I take the subway right back home. I wonder if this is what women who go voluntarily into the sex industry feel like all the time. If it doesn’t go away, maybe I will take up performance porn as a sideline.

  As I come up from the subway, a UPS van is parked on the street. The UPS man leaps out with a parcel and a clipboard. He is black, about six feet two, and wearing shorts. The muscles of his legs are glinting in the sun. I almost faint from sexual need. I wish I were the sort of girl who could just go up to the UPS guy and say something cheesy like, Hi, Big Guy. Want to deliver a package to my apartment? But I am not that sort of girl. This is going to have to be a solo trip.

  I do not own a vibrator. As I say, this rampant sexual desire is a new thing for me, and I’ve never felt the particular need for one before. I cast around my apartment for some accessory that would do the job better than I would on my own. Presumably its phallic nature is more important than the vibration—women must have been doing this since long before they invented batteries. John Donne’s wife made use of the bedpost, for instance. And penises don’t vibrate.

  My deodorant looks about the right shape. And smooth. It wouldn’t hurt. I could buy a banana, but the Koreans are probably the last of many to touch them, and bananas are usually a bit scraggly round the end. Or do you peel it? Carrots would be a better bet, but the carrots they sell downstairs are organic, with the tops. They are a little slender. I wonder if they sell parsnips?

  Should I google the history of female masturbation? Maybe the women out there can teach me something. Switching the computer on and getting online is just more than I can bear in terms of delay. I pull down the blind, grab the deodorant, get under the covers, and wriggle out of my jeans. I often walk around my apartment with barely anything on, so undressing under the duvet must be about guilt. I think that even if God, my grandfather, and my Auntie Elsie can see me as I walk around New York, there is still a chance they can’t see through quilts. They might know what I am up to, but they’re not getting a visual.

  As soon as I begin the procedure I realize that I am a gynecological nitwit. Inspired by necessity, I go and get my electric toothbrush. Five hundred vibrations a minute. As long as I keep the bristles pointing the other way, I should be fine.

  I have been missing out. It is very enjoyable, though rather brief. I look at my watch when it is over. It is only twenty past two. Mitchell could have squeezed me in.

  When I am dressed and feeling almost respectable, I feel ravenously hungry again. I realize that this, indeed, may be something very close to a mess. I go downstairs to the nearest Duane Reade and buy a pregnancy test. I come back, and read the leaflet in the packet, which must be written on the assumption that the purchaser is in a wild panic and needs very big print and very simple instructions. You are supposed to pee on the stick, not forgetting to first unwrap it from its sealed packet. Would anyone be in such a tizzy that they would urinate on the packet instead?

  I pee on the stick, and having two minutes to kill before it will tell me anything of note, I leave the bathroom and look up the history of female masturbation on Wikipedia. In Arizona, vibrators are outlawed. I’m guessing handguns are fine. Sometimes, in Victorian times, in England, a woman was told to stimulate herself in order to relieve stress. Sensible enough. But other times, the doctor obliged, if it was felt that the woman was in need of immediate relief. That’s just the kind of doctor I needed this afternoon.

  This is taking longer than two minutes, of course. I don’t want to go back in there and read it. If I am not pregnant—all well and good. I will be more careful, and thank my stars. If I am, what then?

  I go into
the bathroom, read the instructions again. If there is a blue line in both windows then it is a positive result.

  As Schrödinger and his cat were well aware, these things cannot be until you look. I pick up the white plastic stick, averting my eyes until the last minute, as if some magic, hovering in the unknowing minutes, could change what my looking will forever fix as true. The control window has a pale blue line, as thin as a spider’s thread. The real window has a deep, wide blue stroke. There is no ambiguity, no wondering when things begin. Someone is shouting, “I am here!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  It is not a thing to panic about. It does not mean that my life as I planned it (with great care, I might say) is ruined in a single second. It was an accident, and we do not have to be ruled by accidents.

  I am trying to be calm and rational, but it is not working very well. I call Stella, across the hall, but her phone goes to voice mail. She’s not back from California yet and I am not up to leaving a message. Stella and I only met because our rooms are across the corridor from one another. When I first saw her, I didn’t think she would want to be my friend. She is doing a master’s in film theory at Columbia and she spends a lot of time grumbling about Fellini and telling me how marvelous Antonioni is, because he films the barriers between us all. She was recently offered a job as a receptionist in a lesbian sex dungeon, in part because of the way she dresses. She turned down the job—“Even as a receptionist, you’re crossing a line, right? Working in the sex industry?” She asked if she could take photographs there instead, and some of the ones she’s already taken make me think of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas. Not what I expected. I wish she would hurry up and come home. I feel aggrieved that Stella is not there, because feeling aggrieved about something so little is much better than thinking about this unthinkable thing.

  I go downstairs and buy two Payday bars and a take-way coffee from the Koreans. The older Korean man is behind the counter. He looks piercingly at me.

  “Yooo . . . ,” he says, in a way that is not meant to be menacing but has that effect.

  “Yes?”

  “Yooo in trouble. I know! I know!”

  I stretch a smile over my face and pretend he is teasing me. How can he know that? Does he have some strange Eastern sixth sense? When I first got here, he pressed the palm of my hand near my thumb and said, “Yooo . . . constipated. I know! I know!” And I snatched my hand away and laughed, and said, “Not at all, not at all!” But I was.

  I shouldn’t rely on the facts as offered by some half-price pregnancy test that is probably past its sell-by date. When I’ve eaten the Paydays, I make an appointment to see the doctor. They say I can see her tomorrow. I am not used to such promptness.

  I read theoretical papers on art history for the rest of the day and go to bed at nine, tired to the bone. I am not going to believe it until I am told by a doctor. It cannot be true. I hardly know Mitchell; I met him just a few weeks ago. Late August, at a gallery launch on 57th Street. I had gone with my friend Beth, who works as a curator at a cheekily expensive gallery down in the Meatpacking District. She always wears black, of course, and high heels, and her hair is smoothed and in a tight ponytail, like a Clinique girl. She’s got a degree in philosophy from NYU, and the combination of sex and brains means she can extract large sums of money from a high proportion of the men who cross her threshold. Come into my parlor.

  That night, when I first met Mitchell, Beth was swooped on by people in the New York art world, all air kisses and black leather. I moved away from the black leather people to find myself near a little coterie of men and women where the air kisses were still abundant, but the fabrics had changed. The women were in shiny golden cocktail dresses with leopard-skin accessories, not a tummy between them, and in very high, pointy heels. I—well, I can’t remember what I had on. It might have been knitted.

  I pretended to look intelligently at the pictures so that nobody would notice I was on my own. You can’t, though. You throb with self-consciousness instead of thinking about what you are looking at. Mitchell—although I didn’t know who he was then—was leaning on the wall a few yards away, alone, a man in a black suit with a black shirt underneath, a glass in his hand. He was looking out at the street, at the trees or the people below, with a look of wistful desolation, as if he were a soldier, looking far off to where his wounds had bled. As I was moving from one huge and very bad canvas to another, he smiled at me. I smiled back. He came over, and I thought he was going to look at the same painting as I was—that practiced pickup trick favored by men in galleries—but he didn’t. He leaned on the wall between two of the paintings and looked straight at me. I thought it was a little bold to lean on the wall between two ridiculously overpriced pictures at the very opening of a gallery; surely you aren’t supposed to get that close to them? He just stared at me. His eyes are blue; when he laughs, they are as blue as the sky. When he stared at me that night, they were as cold as the sea. Perhaps because seduction is a serious business.

  “Are you very interested in this painter, or is it just that you don’t know anyone?”

  “It’s the painter,” I said, “I know everyone here. All of them. I’ve just decided to snub them all.”

  He inclined his head to the picture on his left, which he hadn’t even looked at, and asked me what I thought about it, and I told him.

  He says that when he first saw me, he decided to indulge in a mild flirtation for a minute or two, but that it is because of what I said about that one painting that he asked me out. All I said about the picture was that it was painfully derivative of Ivan Albright without the skill, and did the world need another miserable painting about How We Are All Going to Die Eventually? That is scarcely code for I’m So Hot in Bed You Would Not Believe It, but perhaps Mitchell was hoping otherwise. While I was still talking he cut through my words to say, “I’m incredibly attracted to you right now.”

  I felt breathless and frightened and ready to do whatever he asked me to do next. I must have been gunpowder, dry and black and unknowing. He lit me, and I flared up.

  He asked me to go out for a drink with him at the Algonquin. The Algonquin was another trick, a rabbit pulled out of a hat, and I knew it, but I didn’t care. I wanted to go and have a drink at the Algonquin with Mitchell van Leuven.

  We never got there. I went to the bathroom first at the gallery, to the ladies’ restroom, and I was checking my face in the mirror when he burst in, pushed me back against the wall, and kissed me. While he was kissing me, he thrust his hand between my legs, his hand like a fin, slicing upward. If he had carried on then and there, I would have let him. I have never felt like that before. But he didn’t carry on. He stepped back, and smiled again, as if there was a secret joke, and said: “So. That drink?”

  When we crossed the street, he peered in at the window of the Algonquin and said, “Full of tourists.” He took me to the Royalton instead.

  That was late summer, and now it is autumn. He was a total stranger when I was getting ready to go to that gallery launch, and now I am looking at a blue line on a plastic stick, as thick as a Franz Kline brushstroke.

  The test was cheap. I’m sure it was out of date. And the tiredness might be due to all the concentrating I have done, because of all the notes in the margins I have made about the hegemony of content in art. I can’t be pregnant.

  “YES, YOU ARE definitely pregnant,” says the doctor. She is pretty, young, and is now sitting waiting, ready to take her cue from me.

  I say, “I can only be about two or three weeks pregnant. I think I know when it happened.”

  She nods, looking helpful.

  “Do you have any questions?” she says.

  “How big is it?” I ask.

  She smiles. “It’s just a bunch of cells right now.”

  I nod, relieved. I have spent many minutes of my life persuading wasps to find the open window, I am as unhappy as Uncle Toby about swatting flies, and I wouldn’t think of killing a spider. I always assume they must
want to live just as much as we do. Why would there be a difference? But I don’t feel so squeamish about cells.

  I ask a few more questions. The legal limit for abortion in the state of New York is twenty-four weeks. Why do they talk in weeks about abortions when they talk of pregnancies in months? I divide twenty-four by four, but that doesn’t seem to make sense. Six fours are twenty four, but that would mean six months, and they are always showing triplets or octuplets on the news who are born at five months, red faces with white hats above the line of a blanket, with all their fingers and all their toes, healthy as apples. Those babies look like babies, too. So I haven’t got very long before things start to take human shape; I need it to be “just cells” if I am going to be able to do it.

  The doctor says that there can be a termination within days, if I go for that option—that she could get me in on Tuesday. This reassures me because it could all be over as soon as Tuesday, and it frightens me because it could all be over as soon as Tuesday. Macbeth was forced by pressure of circumstance to kill the king before he had fully thought things through. Well, no. He might have killed the king from a sort of erotic entrancement with his wife, or because he thought it was written in the stars. But look how different it might have been if he’d sat down on his own and had a good think.

  That was a king and this is just a bunch of cells. But that was a story and this is real.

  “In any case,” she says, “I’ll give you a quick examination, and weigh you, and take your blood pressure.”

  While she is doing all that, she says that if I like, I can talk to an obeegeewhyen. It takes me a second to realize she what she means. She says that if I decide to go ahead, I might want to interview several of them. And then she gives me the card of a counseling service I can call to talk all about it. “No judgments” is written on the card. I am grateful. I leave.

  Outside, I walk fast, as if I have urgent business, but I am not heading anywhere. I just want to walk. I should be in classes right now. But instead I walk.