The Bookstore

by Deborah Meyler

  I can only think of flippant replies, so I keep quiet. He spreads his hands out.

  “For me, it is about making the right decisions at the right time. This might be the right decision if we stay together, Esme, but now? If we go ahead with this now, we’ll never know whether we would have been together without this.”

  I go over to the sink, reach for a glass, and fill it with water from the tap. He comes closer. I am not thirsty; I simply want to make something else happen in the room. I leave the water on and it surges, foaming, from the tap. As I watch it, I wonder if the fact that I have introduced a new thing into a closed room means all the other atoms are closer together now. Have I increased the pressure, when I wanted to release it? Only by the volume of a column of tap water. There is a Larkin poem: If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water. Cleanse me, wash away my sin, wash away my desire.

  “Esme!”

  I jump. I offer him the glass, the chalice; he shakes his head, impatient.

  “Tap water. I want to have you in my life as a matter of choice, Esme. I don’t like being constrained to it.”

  “You’re not being constrained to it.”

  “You’re forcing a connection between us.”

  “That connection is made whether we like it or not,” I say.

  He whirls away from me, as if we are in a movie.

  “You slept with me yesterday so that I would be easier to persuade,” I say.

  “You’re wrong,” he says, looking out of the window.

  “Then why?”

  He shrugs. “I wanted to? I thought I wanted to? Why did you do it?”

  “I wanted to.”

  “Okay. So no harm done.”

  Being pregnant tires you out as much as jet lag does. Sleep becomes a craving; if you could buy it, pregnant women would steal money to get it. I am desperate to lie down. I can see my bed through the doorway, and I want to lie on it. I want Mitchell to go away. I sit down on the sofa and then, because it is too tempting despite the big drama, I curl up on it, with a cushion under my head. If I am tired, then the baby might be tired. I must rest myself to rest it.

  When he turns back to me, his chin is up and his eyes are closed, as if he is trying to work out the irrationality of the person he is dealing with.

  “I had no idea that you were pro-life. Are you religious?”

  “No,” I say, “I am just sleepy.” I don’t feel like fighting my corner, explaining that pro-choice doesn’t mean pro-abortion, pleading that I just can’t do it, apologizing to him for keeping the baby.

  “I know you’re tired,” he says. “But we need to get this figured out. I don’t want a baby, Esme.”

  I say, to his trousers, because he is still standing, “You needn’t worry about it, you don’t have to have a baby. You needn’t see it as anything to do with you. The connection doesn’t have to be a big deal. You needn’t worry about either of us—me or the baby. I am not planning to turn up on your doorstep wearing a shawl, with a babe in arms.”

  He crouches down, puts a hand on my shoulder. His hand is big and warm and heavy. I wish it were there to protect me and the baby, instead of to sever us. “My family,” he says, “my family cares an awful lot about doing the right thing. Having an illegitimate child isn’t doing the right thing. I would be letting them down. And when you let my family down—you’re letting down generation upon generation who have striven, Esme, striven to do the right thing at every step.”

  “Your family? You definitely don’t need to worry about them. How would they ever know?”

  “How would they ever know? Are you insane?”

  “No, why would they? We’re not together . . .”

  “Not together?” says Mitchell. He looks incredulous. Then he gives me a self-deprecating grin. His grin is very charming. “Aren’t we?” he says. “I didn’t get the memo.”

  I sit up. “Of course we’re not. Of course we’re not. We never ever were. I thought we were, and we weren’t. We weren’t. You had all those other ones . . .” I hate crying. I will not cry. What possible use can tears have been, in early cultures? They just show our weakness; that can’t be good.

  There is a silence. Then he says, “Oh, Esme. I see now. That’s what this is. I see. This is Esme and her baby contra mundum.”

  “I don’t speak Latin.”

  “You know that much Latin. You are pissed that I was dating other women, and so you’ve got some Harlequin-romance idea in your head that you are going to go off and bring up the baby alone—”

  “Sleeping with other women,” I say, correcting him. This is an arrow shot into the dark—he didn’t actually say he had slept with anyone, the day that he dumped me in the park.

  He stops. He is suddenly glittering.

  “I didn’t sleep with all of them,” he says.

  I turn away from him, so he cannot see that my own arrow has curved around and pierced me, but turning away makes no difference. The hurt isn’t something seen but something known, communicated along the atoms that make up the quivering air.

  “Esme, I’m joking. About sleeping with them all?”

  As he hasn’t succeeded yet, he is still talking. “This was just an accident!” he is saying. “It was just a mistake. We don’t need to pay for that mistake for the rest of our lives! You are punishing me.”

  “I am doing nothing to you.”

  He looks at me as you would look at a recalcitrant child. He changes tack: “Babies should be brought into a stable environment. They should be—planned. They should be wanted. They shouldn’t be forced into the world come what may. This—it isn’t even a baby yet, Esme.”

  “It is a baby.”

  “For God’s sake!” He slaps both hands down on the table. His hands are pale; his face is pale too, and his eyes are once more like the eyes of a bird. He continues more quietly. “If you have a termination now, it wouldn’t know, it wouldn’t suffer, and it would be getting rid of something that is smaller than—a—a . . .”

  “A what? A cockroach? A rat?” I say. No, I shout. I am shaking. I think he is right—it wouldn’t know, it wouldn’t suffer—and yet I can’t do it. Regret that it has happened consumes me.

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  I stare up at him. He is quivering with fury, with passion. It seems as if the sheer force of his will could annihilate the small thing inside me. He stands there like a pale white god in the center of the room. If I turned out the light, I have the uncomfortable feeling that he would shine.

  “Choose,” he says. The one word.

  “Choose?”

  “Choose.”

  “Between you and the baby?”

  He assents with a tiniest motion of his head, a Bond villain. I stand up too. I am frightened of him, of his power, of his will, I am even frightened of him physically. And I am liquid with rage.

  “I do choose,” I say. “I had already chosen when you met me in the street. And so, if you remember, had you.”

  He does not move at all. He says, with the same repressed violence, “Then that’s the end. I am sorry you have brought it to this. It could have been a wonderful relationship. We were special, Esme. I am sorry that you didn’t realize that.”

  I walk over to the heavy brass bolt on the door and yank it open.

  He gets his bag, and walks past me and out.

  On the table is the untouched glass of water.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I am in a lecture hall in Columbia. I am going to devote myself all day to the PhD, without diversion. The first lecture is called “The Renaissance and the Pitfalls of Presentism.” I sit at the front.

  I replay the scene from last night with crucial, feel-good differences. I respond to Mitchell’s arguments with a quiet wisdom beyond my years, and Mitchell sees that I am a noble and admirable person. He also realizes how desirable I am, and is overcome with lust.

  “It is important,” booms the professor’s voice from the front of the lectu
re hall, “to challenge hegemonic assumptions about the Renaissance—we must remember that in large part, our ideas of it have been culturally normative.”

  He is pushing me backwards upon the sofa, his mouth hard on mine, his hand between my legs as on that first night.

  “And we can better avoid the many pitfalls of presentism if we are thorough in our research into the history and context of the Renaissance. The word itself is politically freighted . . .”

  But he didn’t do that, and he didn’t want to do that. I think again of how pale and cold he looked. Presentism. I never heard the word before I saw the title of this lecture. I remember googling it last night but I don’t remember what came up. I must have had four hours’ sleep, with all the thinking about Mitchell. What are hegemonic assumptions? I need some coffee. If they are going to ban coffee for pregnant women, they should give us some substitute, some sort of caffeine equivalent of methadone. Not herbal tea.

  The lecture ends. I have taken no notes. Some people are still manically scribbling; the guy next to me is typing notes on his phone. Bryan Gonzales, who was friendly on the first day and still is, despite my uneven displays of friendship in return, comes over to say hello.

  “Hey,” he says. “You going to Fischer’s lecture now?”

  I am. I get up to walk with him.

  I realize that the Esme Garland who got a first in art history at Cambridge is not the same as this Esme Garland. This one is the living cliché of a girl who throws everything up for love, or would, given half a chance. All I want is to be in the warm sunshine of Mitchell’s approval once more, but to do that involves terminating the pregnancy, and the pregnancy is now something that stands beyond my own desire. So I have to stay in this drear world instead. And instead of fastening on to the difficulties and fascinations of an art history degree, I am going through the motions. Sitting in the lecture hall, staring at the lecturer, pencil poised, I dream of boys.

  Maybe the daydreams of ravishings on the sofa are hormonally induced. After all, in my present state, even Thiebaud’s paintings of hot dogs have an undesirable effect.

  Bryan says, “Want to get a coffee after this one?”

  I say that would be nice. My nefarious plan is to be friendlier to Bryan so that I can have his notes.

  “Why didn’t you take notes?” Bryan says, pleasingly on cue. “When I came over, you had a blank notebook.”

  “I forgot,” I say. “Bryan, please can I borrow yours? I know it’s a lot to ask . . .”

  He shrugs. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll type them up and e-mail them to you. But—you forgot?”

  “Yes. I’m pregnant.”

  He says, “Oh, right. So you were thinking about that.”

  I stare at him. It has so shaken my world that I expect everyone to stand still in shock and say “ohmigod” several times.

  “Yes,” I say, nodding at him. “I was thinking about that.”

  NEXT TIME I have a shift at The Owl, George is waiting for me or Luke to turn up, having been on his own in the shop for several hours. He is going out to get some sustenance in the shape of vegan soup and distilled water, at a new place that has opened up, to his high delight. It is called Fallen Fruit and caters to all the Georges on the Upper West Side. I ask him if I can buy the little tree hung with golden apples. He looks up at it and says I can have it in exchange for the night’s work.

  “But I want it to be here. It should be here. I am just worried, in case it gets sold. Imagine if there were price tags on things in museums, how stressful that would be.”

  “I like it too,” says George, standing up to get a better look at it. “Yes—let’s put a note underneath it, and keep it up here, and let the little tree take its chances.”

  “Under our curacy.”

  “Curatorship, I think. But yes.”

  Then, with promises to bring me back a green tea muffin, he leaves me alone.

  I do not put music on. There is always music in the shop, whoever is taking the shift. When it is George, it could be Gregorian chant or violin concertos or Bob Dylan. When it is Bruce, it is often English stuff from the sixties. He is always disappointed when I haven’t heard of it. David, who is nineteen and wants to be an actor, plays lots of things that apparently sound like Radiohead.

  Luke comes in, and takes his guitar upstairs. He carries it in with him most nights, and carries it away at the end. I don’t ask him why, probably because he is so taciturn. I so often feel this tension with Luke—I wish I could batter down whatever barrier is between us.

  “No music?” he says when he comes down.

  “I was between CDs,” I say. I have discovered that saying you don’t mind silence makes everyone who works in the store uneasy.

  Luke does not reply, but sits down in the second chair. He does not speak. I decide I am not going to force him to speak with an opening gambit; I will just be quiet too. We go on sitting, silently. I wonder how a person can be so quiet, why he doesn’t want to make friends. Why does he sit with me, if he doesn’t want to talk to me?

  He gets up, as if to end this line of questioning, and scans the CD shelves.

  “What do you like?” he asks.

  I can’t think what to answer. I wish I had a smattering of knowledge of jazz or folk or hip-hop. To Luke, I am going to sound as if I’ve landed here from another century. He turns his head to make sure I heard. “What kind of music?”

  “I like that aria from Lakmé, and Strauss’s Four Last Songs, and I love the bit in Dido and Aeneas when she is laid in earth. A lot of Purcell, in fact. And Debussy and Satie.”

  Luke is staring at me.

  “And absolutely anything by Mozart,” I finish.

  “I’m kind of relieved you mention him, because I was thinking that you weren’t showing enough appreciation of the classics, there.”

  “Yes, well, be funny if you like, but Mozart is—”

  “You like anything from the twentieth century, or beyond?”

  “Yes,” I say. It is not a good time to mention that Satie made it to the twentieth century. I know what must be the inevitable next question, and my mind is boiling with nothingness, as it used to chemistry lessons, when my teacher asked me to balance moles. The twentieth century. I try to think of obscure bands to impress Luke. But all I can think of are the Beatles and Abba.

  “So? Who?” says Luke, turning to the CDs again.

  “From the twentieth century?”

  “Or the twenty-first.”

  “I like Radiohead,” I say.

  Luke laughs. “Which songs?”

  “Lots of them. All of them.”

  “Who else?”

  He is waiting patiently.

  “Lady Gaga,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Interesting. Any more?”

  “Björk.”

  “Right. And what about Elbow? You’re English. Do you like Elbow?”

  “He’s okay,” I say.

  “So, if I suggested that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, how would you feel about that?”

  “I would feel that you were an insightful sort of a person.”

  Luke nods. He flicks the corner of a CD down from the ranks, and opens it.

  “We’re going to listen to this, from start to finish. You can go upstairs and listen if you like. Your musical education is going to start with this album.”

  “Is it Elbow? What is it?”

  “Never mind. Just go upstairs, sit in the armchair at the back, and pay attention. I don’t think you let yourself pay enough attention, Esme.”

  I look at him, but he is not looking at me; it wasn’t as portentous a statement as I thought. Should I feel offended? I don’t, at any rate, even though he is surely wrong. I go upstairs, obedient as a well-trained puppy, and sit in the leather chair in the back, reserved for people who are considering making a lavish L. Frank Baum purchase, and I wait for the music.

  Now that the pressu
re is off me, I think I can guess what the music will be. I think that it will be Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis. It’s one of those iconic albums that is always on people’s lists on Amazon and Facebook and everywhere. I hope it is that, because I have heard it before, and I think it’s quite good.

  The chair is that old-fashioned leather that is glossy from decades of bottoms, and it is plump and taut. It probably has horsehair in it. Nothing comfortable, anyway. But it is nice to sit far away from the door, with a bookcase hiding me, under instruction to be still and listen.

  A short silence, a crackle, and then the song begins. It is sung by an old man, with a voice that seems thin, and recorded in the bottom of a saucepan. It doesn’t sound right. It sounds like he can’t sing very well. There are no instruments with him. But as I listen, it is no longer a thin voice, but a rich one, with experience in it that I can’t imagine. It is full of suffering, full of hope, with a plaintiveness that is hard to listen to. It speaks across all the years.

  Then I notice the words:

  “Takin’ away all of my sin, takin’ away . . . all of my sin . . .”

  Luke is making yet another jibe at me. Is he?

  I stand up and go to the edge of the mezzanine. Luke looks up.

  “You like it?”

  I am being narcissistic, oversensitive. There is no twinkle of mischief in Luke’s eye.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s the foundation of modern music. If you get this, the rest falls into place.”

  I come down the stairs, and reach over for the CD case.

  I read out: “Negro Folk Music of Alabama, volume five.”

  “Yeah,” says Luke.

  “Negro Folk Music of Alabama, volume five, is the foundation of modern music?”

  “No, sweetheart, not one CD, not ten CDs. But this music, from Alabama, from Mississippi, this is . . .” He stops. He must be thinking he is wasting his time. “It’s beautiful, is all. Go back upstairs. I knew you had a problem with your attention span.”

  I go back, a little sulky now, and I sit down again, and listen. The music rises and falls, and I listen to the man’s voice, and sometimes a woman singing with him, and I know that he is expressing something that I can’t express for myself, that I haven’t been able even to acknowledge to myself, ever since I saw that blue line in the window in the test. He is being more honest than I can be. I have been pushing it all away; this man is letting it all come in. I don’t quite know what he is singing about—something about God—but I do know it is about being in all the dust and the dirt and yet being given the grace to touch the eternal. Tears, of gratitude, or pain, or delight, are pouring down my face. I let it happen. I let the Negro folk music of Alabama, volume five work its strange magic of release and renewal upon me.