The Bookstore

by Deborah Meyler

  The women laugh and say how romantic and yes, why not, they will have the bottle. I smile like a Barbie doll.

  The fact that it is champagne means we have to go through the painful rigmarole of the silver bucket and the little table to hold the silver bucket, and the ice, and the white napkin, and the grand withdrawal of the cork. And then, when our glass is finally poured, Mitchell holds it up to me and toasts me, and sips. Then he hands it to me.

  As I take the glass I have a powerful feeling that someone is looking at me. I glance to my left—near the exit, the old lady in the lamb’s-wool coat is staring at me. She is probably waiting to be picked up, and probably not smiling because I am pregnant and about to have a mouthful of champagne, but she seems suddenly baleful, the thirteenth fairy at the christening.

  I raise the glass to Mitchell. I am in tumult, fearful in the very temple of delight. If I rang out the bells to celebrate, would they sound dully, would they ring true? My mouth is full of champagne. I hold it there for a second or two. It is expensive and yeasty and tart. It is glorious. I won’t be allowed any more for months on end. I think of swans singing before they die, and butterflies with cornflower-blue wings living for a day, and then I swallow. As I do, I look back at the old lady, and raise my glass to her as well, but she does not respond. And then it is over.

  Mitchell looks comically at the glass I hand back.

  “Mitchell. You are sure?”

  “Yes. I am sure. I had aching gaps, Esme. You fill them up. You fill up all my gaps.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Outside the restaurant, he kisses me. “I have to go—I don’t want to go, but I have to. I have to teach—I’ll call you,” and then he is backing away with his arm up, to hail a cab that he will turn around to take him back to work.

  I watch the cab turn at the cross street, and carry on watching it until it blends in with the others. I do not wave. Mitchell will not be looking back. I walk up Fifth Avenue and then take the bus across the park at 86th. I try to think. It doesn’t work—I am in a kind of muted delirium. I accepted a marriage proposal half an hour ago, and now I am sitting alone on a bus, with a diamond on my finger. I wish he didn’t have to go back to work. I have that sense that you have when you come out of the cinema or the theater, the shock of transition from big drama to ordinary life. The performance is over.

  I get off the bus on Amsterdam. Before I get to The Owl, I take the ring off my finger and put it inside my change purse.

  Luke is at the front desk. The ring is pulsating in my bag. I need space and quiet to think about what has just happened. I am not going to tell anyone yet. I take my bag, with the purse right at the bottom of it, down to the basement, and hide it in one of the darkest corners of the dark basement. Then I stay down there, just for a second, curled up in a fetal position in the corner. I could not have dreamed of this. It is both my heart’s desiring and my heart’s breaking.

  David and George are sitting up on the mezzanine, dabbing brown shoe polish on the spines of some old leather-bound Dickens volumes where the leather has rubbed.

  About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters, but the same could be said of anything that happens to us. David and George have been dabbing shoe polish on old books and buffing them with soft cloths while I have been in the restaurant, being proposed to, while Icarus falls into the water. “You can take over from me,” says George. “I have a book dealer coming to see me in a second or two. Sit down.”

  “Isn’t this cheating?” I ask as I sit.

  George looks pained. “Cheating? On the contrary, Esme, it is treating. When you polish your furniture, is it cheating?”

  “I don’t polish my furniture.”

  “You don’t? Why not?”

  “It’s from Ikea.”

  “It’s from Ikea? You didn’t ship over the Hepplewhite cabinet, the Knoll sofa, the ormolu clock?” George does want me to come from some sort of English manor house, with a lovely black and white tiled hallway and a sweeping Queen Anne stair.

  “What is ormolu?” asks David.

  George’s features take on the expression that I have come to recognize as his Dangerous Chemicals face, which covers everything from smallpox to chocolate. His face contracts towards a central point, so that his brows are down, and his lips and chin are scrunched up to his nose. He looks at me from under his eyebrows, although now I come to think of it, everyone looks at everyone from under their eyebrows. He glowers.

  “Is it bad for you?” I ask.

  “As usual, it isn’t bad for the people who own it, so much as for the people who make it. It is illegal now, even in your country. They used mercury to make the powdered gold stay put, and so of course, the fumes were deadly. Most ormoluists didn’t make it past forty.”

  “Oh, yes, mercury. That is bad. That’s what made the hatters go mad, wasn’t it?” David says.

  George looks gratified that the chemical instruction has been taking effect. “Yes, and not only hatters. I hope you don’t have mercury fillings, Esme. That would be very bad for the ba—”

  “ ‘Ormoluists’?” I say. “Come on, George. You just made up ‘ormoluists.’ ”

  Luke calls out from downstairs. “Hey, Esme, have you asked George to check out the shoe polish? He might be poisoning you.”

  George stands at the top of the stairs, holding the tin of polish aloft.

  “It is a good question, Luke, and I appreciate your concern. I’m not poisoning her. Take a look. I bought it online from California. It’s made with natural plant dyes and free-range beeswax.” Free-range beeswax? Can you get battery bees?

  Luke shakes his head. George regards the tin pensively as I rub in the polish.

  “It cost more than we’ll get for the Dickens,” he says.

  WHEN I LOOK at my phone, there are seven texts from Mitchell. I open them, and the first one says “Mrs. van Leuven!!!” The next is a long line of kisses. The next is, “I managed that well, don’t you think? You had to say yes!” The next wonders where I am. So does the next. The one after that wonders if I have changed my mind. The last is an apology for not being able to see me tonight, because something has come up. I immediately wonder if something has come up because I did not answer all the others. I call him to ask this, and he says no. There is an important economist here unexpectedly from out of town. Mitchell has to talk to him.

  The shop begins to fill with the regular Friday-nighters, and George, who often takes himself to the Angelika or Film Forum to see something searing in black and white, decides to stay too. Barney strolls in, and Mary turns up. At midnight, we lock up, turn the main lights off, and sit up in the mezzanine with just the upstairs lamps on, with their pools of amber light. The wood of the bookcases and the leather spines glow warm, and people find places to sit, and become as mellow as the light.

  “I think I should introduce a little test at The Owl for prospective employees,” says George, accepting an organic ginger beer with shredded orrisroot from Luke. “You know, ask them who wrote Winesburg, Ohio, who wrote Hamlet, who wrote Plato’s Republic . . .”

  “That one would be easy,” says David.

  “They used to have such a test at Strand,” says George. “I believe it was very effective.”

  We wait, and he grins, holding up his palm as if it is a piece of paper.

  “You have a list of five books—let me see if I remember. Oliver Twist, Das Kapital, Ulysses, The Origin of Species—and I forget the last one. And then, jumbled up on the other side, are the authors. You have to draw lines to unite the right book to its writer.”

  Luke shrugs. “Seems like a plan to me.”

  “But if you pass this arduous test,” says George, “then you might get hired, but for the first six months, all you’re allowed to do is shelve. That’s your apprenticeship at Strand. Esme, you’re very blessed in learning book lore here, not down in that devil’s punch bowl.”

  “Oh, Strand’s fine and you know it. You’re just jealous,”
says Barney, waving him into silence. “But my favorite place to buy books before I came here, of course, was the New York Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory.” This makes people chuckle, and he holds up both his hands. “Because really? Used bookstores—I mean, really? I was a lot more particular in those days. I only tolerate The Owl because my apartment is ten feet away and I like to watch Luke play the guitar.”

  “Listen, you mean,” says Bruce.

  Barney looks at him with exquisite blandness. “But the armory fair,” he says, “it is a joy to go in there. The prices. I used to bring my mother down from Westchester for it, every single year.”

  “The prices?” I ask. “Do you get bargains?”

  Barney shudders. “No, darling, never ever. Did I mention that I take my mother? And of course, they’re not really used books, right? They’re antiquarian.”

  “Used” is such an odd word, so much stranger than “secondhand.” A prefix for condoms, and there’s a certain squalor attached to the idea of reusing those. “Used books,” as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn’t the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There’s no such thing as a used book. Or there’s no such thing as a book if it’s not being used.

  I say some of this to the assembled company.

  “What would you like instead?” says Luke. “ ‘Pre-worn’? ‘Pre-read’?”

  George looks wry. “Oh, if only,” he says, and reaches behind him for a first—it is upstairs so it must be a first—of The Information by Martin Amis. “The publishers missed a trick in not printing the last three quarters of this baby blank. I’ve not read it myself, though I rate Amis. Sometimes books don’t take.”

  WHEN I GET back, late, to my apartment, I get the ring out of my bag. I am not as attentive as I ought to be about the economic disparities in the world, but a piece of jewelry like this, an example of such conspicuous consumption, can do the trick. How many cataract operations would this pay for? How much clean water? Could it train a teacher, a midwife, a doctor in the third world? And what is its significance here, when it isn’t translated into something beneficial? That I am owned, perhaps. Or that I am loved. The fact that I accepted it means, at any rate, that I love. I look into its glinting, ice-blue depths, the shifting angles of light, like sunlight in a swimming pool, that bounce together and apart.

  I take the ring off, and put it in my teapot, and put the lid back on. Hiding it from view makes no difference to its power.

  While I am sitting there contemplating my pulsating teapot, there is a knock on the door—Stella, it could only be Stella. I let her in, and she says that she heard me come in and wants to tell me something. She is lit up—she’s been invited by the Richard Avedon Foundation to take part in an exhibition of new portraiture. I feel once more the tiny shock that we, vain we, feel when we remember that other people have lives, which are going on as we sit hiding diamond rings in teapots.

  She sits on my sofa.

  “I’ve got to submit an artist’s statement for the exhibition,” she says. “I am trying to think about why I love taking photographs. Why do I?”

  I think. “The obvious answer is to capture the moment,” I say. “To notice things. To signify paying attention.”

  Stella is nodding. “Yes, that’s true, but it is all sorts of other things. The woman from Richard Avedon said that there was an elegiac quality to my work.”

  “There is,” I say. I think of her photographs. “Yes, there definitely is. They are so sad!”

  “But all photographs are sad, because they record something that’s gone,” says Stella. “They make us pay attention to the fact that time is passing, that nothing lasts. But who doesn’t notice that? I mean, I notice it anyway, all the damn time, camera or no camera. I sometimes think I do nothing except notice. Everywhere I look. Every blink is an elegy.”

  “That will do for your statement,” I say. “Quick, write it down or you won’t remember it.”

  She is tapping it into her phone. “Cool. Great. So, what’s up with you?”

  “I’ve got an engagement ring in the teapot,” I say.

  After a pause, she gets up, goes over, and lifts the lid. She peers in.

  “Oh, yeah,” she says. “So you do.” Predictably, she isn’t showing signs of great joy. She replaces the lid without getting the ring out or attempting a photograph.

  “Mitchell has asked me to marry him.”

  “And you said yes. The ring. And it’s in the teapot because . . . ?”

  “Because I am not sure how I feel about it.”

  “Why did you say yes?”

  “Because I love him.”

  She hugs her knees up to her chin and says, “Then I guess you’d better get it out of there and wear it.”

  “But I don’t know if he loves me.”

  My phone buzzes. It is a text from Mitchell. Stella nods at it. “He’s doing a good impression of it. But then, attention isn’t necessarily love.”

  I look at her. “But we just said it was, sort of,” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  “He doesn’t do it for attention,” I say. “He’s not like that.”

  “Okay,” says Stella. “Anyway, what does your mom think, about the baby? She’ll be pleased about Mitchell?” Stella took to my parents when they came over. She thought they were sweet. They are, I suppose. Other people always like one’s parents.

  “She doesn’t know yet,” I say.

  Stella’s jaw drops. “What is the matter with you? Why don’t you want to tell them? Your parents would support your decision. They’re cool.”

  They are not in the least cool. When they were in Manhattan for that week, they lamented missing a program about tea caddies, and part of a BBC documentary series on the history of hedgerows. “Cool” must mean something different for Stella.

  “You should call them,” she repeats. “They will support you.”

  “I know, I know. But if don’t tell them anything, then they don’t have to support me, and they don’t have to repress their disappointment, and they don’t . . .” I trail off. “It was fine for the termination plan, wasn’t it? And not fine when there’s going to be a baby.” I cringe away from the thought of it. If I were in England, I would have to. But I have run away.

  “Promise,” says Stella.

  “Oh, I can’t promise. I was in the Brownies. If I promise, I have to do it.”

  She waits. I promise. She gets up to leave.

  “And one other thing, engaged girl. You got engaged today. Where’s your fiancé?”

  “He’s seeing an economist. He couldn’t get out of it.”

  IN THE MORNING, after a cup of tea, I call my parents.

  It isn’t a long call. There is no recrimination; they must be burning to do it. But I am crying, crying as I tell them, for shame at an obscure sense of having thwarted whatever hopes they had of me. I wish I had siblings, that I wasn’t all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too.

  Although they can’t possibly be pleased, neither of them seems to mind so much about the baby, and my mother says she will come over now, next week, and certainly when the baby is born. I agree to the last; I want her to come then. I don’t know nothing about birthing no babies, or how to look after them afterwards. I wonder how much grief about this they are hiding, in the first shock of it. To my surprise, though, they openly mind about Mitchell. My father says, quietly, at the end: “Don’t rush into marrying him. You don’t need to panic.”

  “It’s not that, Dad,” I say.

  “They will change everything; the family will change your path. If there is a money issue, we can—”

  “It isn’t money,” I say quickly. “I would take Mitchell if he were—barefoot in the park.”

  “The scholarship—all you’ve worked for—”

  “Is all still there; I am still working for it. I won’t slack up, this will make me work even harder.”r />
  They are silent. Disappointment and fear are buzzing over the Atlantic. I say, “I love him, Dad,” and I blush into the empty apartment.

  After the phone call, I stomp down to Columbia and stride into its precincts. What endless ripples of disappointment flow from that one unguarded moment. And I could have stopped them. No, I could have stopped these particular ripples, but there are always ripples.

  Columbia itself feels different now that I am engaged. I feel uncomfortable. It is as if I have short-circuited the educational process somehow, and made the lights go out. As I merge into the flow of people heading towards their lectures, I don’t feel as if I fit any longer.

  “Is this all you wanted?” say the names carved on Butler. “Is this what it was all for? A wedding ring?”

  I stop, and sit down on the library steps and face them.

  “Getting married won’t change anything,” I say. “This isn’t 1870.”

  Herodotus Sophocles Plato Aristotle Demosthenes Cicero and Vergil all look back at me and purse their stony lips.

  “A girl that knew all Dante once / Lived to bear children to a dunce,” they say.

  “Mitchell isn’t a dunce,” I say, “and getting married and having children makes no difference now. I can still have a career. I don’t know why you lot should be annoyed, anyway. You’re the Dead White Males, remember?”

  They take no notice. “A career?” they say. “If you marry Mitchell van Leuven? You’re dreaming. You got a scholarship here, Esme Garland, to study the history of art, and this is what you do with it? What a waste. What a waste. The old story.”

  “I’m busy,” I say, standing up and slinging my bag on my shoulder. “It’s been a treat talking to you. Do you know my father at all?”

  “In five years,” they say, as a parting shot, “you will be running a cupcake business.”

  MY SECOND LECTURE is on Impressionism, and the person who gives it, Dorothy Straicher, is only a few years older than I am. I like her very much. She mentions that there is a Sargent and impressionism exhibition on at the moment on the Upper East Side, in a hotel, and that even the die-hard modernists among us might well get something out of it. After I have eaten some dreadful lunch with Bryan from Columbia, I ask him if he would like to come with me, but he makes a face. I don’t know if the face is for impressionism or Sargent, but at any rate, I set out across Central Park alone. I wish Mitchell could come, but if I text him, I will get one back saying he is teaching or about to teach, and then I will feel rejected. It is better not to ask. I do have to remember that he has a job.