There are, as usual, various runners and tourists and walkers and peculiar people with cats on leads dotted about, even up near the top, so it doesn’t feel too scary. I go in at 108th Street and walk fast toward 77th on the East Side. I pause to send a text to Mitchell, just in case he has a break and can come with me.
I go down a little path between two great outcrops of silvery schist, and when I come out, I see a man alone, with his back to me, sitting under a tree with a guitar.
When I am in the park, I walk with my phone in my hand so that if I see anyone menacing I can pretend to be talking to someone who is both burly and only about thirty yards away. This is my only protection, as I can’t run fast and can’t fight. I am about to pretend to talk to Luke on the phone when I realize that this particular strange man in the park is, in fact, Luke.
I get closer and then stop. He doesn’t sense my presence; he is busy plinking away at the guitar. He plinks the same bit over and over. It sounds a bit tedious.
“Hi,” I say. He looks around.
“Hi!” he says. It is a bit cold to be sitting on the ground, and he might get piles, but I prudently do not mention this.
“What a good idea, to play in the park,” I say. “I love how hard they worked to make it look so natural. I suppose picturesque works really well once people have forgotten that it was made up in the first place.”
“Yeah, sure, I guess,” says Luke, which is American for “no.” He hesitates, and then says, “It’s just a place that lets people breathe.”
I look at him. “Oh, you don’t like it when I say it isn’t real?” I say.
“Like you say, I don’t think it matters if it wasn’t real at the start. It’s real enough now. The schist is real, the trees are real, the way it changes in the seasons is real.”
I don’t say anything. As so often with Luke, I can’t quite say the right thing. Perhaps I am trying too hard.
“The park might be like a picture to you,” he says, “but to me, it’s like music. It’s about time. I think I like it because it changes. It changes like music does. It has rhythms, like music does.”
“Pictures change over time as well,” I say, stealing shamelessly from Professor Caspari. “We look at a painting over a period of time, so it is experienced sequentially. And we can go back to look at them. They change, we change.”
Luke nods. He starts to speak and then stops, as if he is venturing onto territory he’s not confident will take his weight. “Yes, but—but not just in that way—the park changes for people as well—it is different things for different people, at different times. You know, for lovers, for guys walking in the Rambles, for the softball players and the beer sellers and the children, the tourists, the runners . . . they all move through the park, like notes in music—they all sound different notes, it all seems like discord, but it isn’t. It’s a harmony.”
There is a silence. I don’t know what to do. There is such a flash of gladness at what he says that I feel as if, in the very gladness, I am wronging Mitchell.
“Do you play here a lot?” I ask.
He scans his surroundings, nodding. “Yeah, I do.”
“And don’t you feel self-conscious, playing in public?” I say. I wonder if he can hear that my voice sounds brittle. I can. He is looking around again, this time very deliberately. There is nobody in sight.
“I play gigs all the time, you know. That—if you can imagine it—is even more public.”
I can’t think of anything else to say. I say, “Well, I’d better be—”
“You just out for an afternoon stroll?” he asks. “Or are you going to work?”
“No, neither—I am going to look at some paintings.”
“You walking across the whole park on your own?”
“Yes, but I’ll be fine.”
Luke gets up, and reaches for his guitar case. It is more of a guitar bag.
“I’ll keep you company.”
I am about to launch into an automatic polite protest but his expression is that of a man anticipating this and not looking forward to it.
If I were out with Mitchell, or Stella, and we were in a quiet part of the park, I would unbutton my shirt, so that the bright sun might penetrate to the darkness of the womb. Instead of blackness, it might be like being inside a plum.
“Thank you,” I say instead.
“You’re welcome.”
As we walk, he says that the impetus for the park in the first place was not really to make something pretty.
“If it looks nice, that’s fine by me. But that’s not what Olmsted was doing, first off, right? When he designed the park? The idea was to make a democratic space, where people could just be. In New York City, where everyone is scrambling to make it, everyone can come to Central Park and look at the leaves in the fall, the snow in winter . . . we all see the same patterns, we’re all moving through the same time. See?”
I don’t really see, but I like how his mind works in a different way from mine, in a way that could open mine up.
“I sort of see,” I say, smiling at him.
He asks me which paintings I am going to see, and so I talk about Sargent, and since Luke always makes me feel a little uneasy, I find myself in a long and complicated story about Madame X in the Met, and how everyone was shocked because the strap of her gown was painted as having slipped, and how her purple skin wasn’t artistic license but the lavender powder that she wore.
“What did she want to look purple for?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t look purple like a Ribena man, or anything.” That will mean nothing to Luke, but we both let it pass. “It was more a lilac pallor. The painting is really famous, and it’s about twenty blocks from here. You should see it.”
“It’s in the Met? Let’s go see it.”
“You mean me as well? I was going to see the Sargents in the Mark Hotel, on 77th . . .”
“Oh, I thought you were going to the Met—forget it. It’s okay.”
“But—you could go and see it.”
“I will, sometime. I thought it would be more fun with a know-it-all English guide, that’s all.”
“We could pay a dollar each, and just go and see that painting, and then I could go on to the Mark.”
“Sure. We love it when the tourists rip off the city.”
“I’m not a tourist.”
“Yeah. You are. Pay the damn money.”
It is very different, walking with Luke. Mitchell strides everywhere as if compelled by his own energy, and that energy streams out towards other people. Perhaps it bounces back from them and reinvigorates him, because he walks as if he is going to turn over the tables in the temple, hack the faces off the wooden angels, cut through the mediocrity to a purity as clear as ice.
Luke strolls along with his guitar, by contrast, with a kind of easy amplitude, as if he is about to break into something from Simon and Garfunkel. He is chatting about George’s love affair with wheatgrass.
As we reach the band shell, where Boticelli’s Venus should really be singing a number, I get a text from Mitchell saying that he can’t come to see the Sargents, but he hopes I will enjoy them, and that he will see me tonight. I ought to be annoyed at this last assumption, but I am just pleased. I am no more sure of him now than I ever have been.
Luke pauses on the outskirts of an intent little gathering of people. “We’ve maybe come down too far,” he says. I want to see what they are looking at. A dancer on the stage, in cherry Lycra and a turquoise scrap of a skirt, falls forward without moving her hands to save herself. Without intervention, she will smash her brains out on the concrete. She falls like a plank, and inches from the ground, her partner catches her. It is all performed, or practiced, with a silent solemnity. They do it again, and again. Every time, she could die, and every time, he catches her. I stand and watch, the same thing, over and over, the fall, the risk, the catch.
“What is it?” Luke asks. I realize he has said it more than once. I do not know what he m
eans.
He says, “You’re crying?”
“Oh,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s nothing. Hormones. Let’s go.”
We turn to walk uptown again, and Luke says, “I guess it’s all a little tough for you right now.”
I think guiltily of how I have just been proposed to by the man I am besotted by, who is also the father of my baby, and who also happens to be very rich.
I say, “Oh, it’s not all that bad.”
When we get to the Met, Luke asks for one adult ticket and one student. The ticket person says, “Thirty dollars.”
He pays the money, and then turns to me to give me my little metal badge.
“Thirty bucks? Do we get to keep the picture?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I am on an afternoon shift. I have left my ring at home as usual, in the teapot.
David has been called in as extra help, because George is out on a big book call. David is always friendly, but I get the feeling he regards me as an object lesson in what might happen to him if he is not careful with the girls he dates. His taste, judging from the ones who come into the bookshop, runs to plump and pretty—the one who comes in most, Lena, is apple-cheeked and wholesome. David usually takes her “to look at the mystery section” for a few minutes if there aren’t many customers.
Luke is shelving. Bruce is hanging around until George gets back—apparently a book call of this magnitude requires all hands. Bruce still gallantly brings me tea whenever I come in, and so I sit and dunk the tea bag in and out, vainly hoping for flavor, as David and Bruce chat.
David is saying that it is about time we asked Towelhead Man why he wears a towel on his head. Bruce shakes his head. “Luke!” David says. “You should totally ask him!”
“I’m ‘totally’ not going to,” replies Luke, ramming some unhappy cookbooks into an already bulging shelf. “If the guy wants to walk around the city with a towel on his head, that’s his business. He’s a good customer.”
“Man, I’d love to ask him. I’ll get you a double caramel macchiato latte with extra whipped cream if you ask him.”
“Tempting,” says Luke, with no enthusiasm at all.
“Oh come on. And it’s always the same one, right?”
“He might have several in the same shade,” I say.
“The guy’s a freak. Does he take it off in the house?”
“What about the woman whose hair is sort of solid on her head?” Bruce asks. “Or Captain Jim, with his parrot?”
“Or the entire family who dress up as the Romanovs,” says David. “Freaks, man, I’m telling you.”
“Who cares?” says Luke, suddenly impatient. “Are we all so perfect? Give them a break.”
David looks abashed. Then he perks up and says, “I guess we could all come into work with green towels on our heads, make him feel at home . . .”
George pokes his head in the door.
“Can I get some help out here?” he asks. We all go outside to the cab that George is unloading—every conceivable space in it is filled with bags full of books. The driver is barely visible.
We lug all the book bags back into the shop. There is no room for any customers.
George gets us all to price the easy ones—the paperback fiction, the cookbooks, and so on—and sets about pricing the art books himself. He takes up the first one, looks through it, raises his pencil to write the price on the first page, and then he pauses.
“You know, what I’ve always done is take a look through a book, look at the paper stock, the printing, the publisher, the actual content, and, taking everything into account, I price it.”
We wait.
“And?” says David.
“And now I can’t. The fact that I can check this book”—he is holding a book of photographs by Yousuf Karsh, and he weighs it in his hand as if he can value it that way—“the fact that I can check this book on the Internet means that I have to check this book on the Internet. This could be the Karsh that all the Karsh fanatics out there have been thirsting for—I might be pricing it hundreds below its market value. And, equally, I can’t take the chance that for this book, Abrams didn’t have some sort of mental breakdown and had a print run of fifty thousand, so we’d get five bucks for it if we were lucky. It’s a sad truth, but it is a truth nevertheless, that I can’t price it without doing my due diligence. I have become imprisoned by the freedom of the Web.”
He hands me the book.
“Or to be more precise, you have become imprisoned, Esme. Go up there and make a start, and I’ll bring you some more when I have sorted through them.”
“How do you know what to pay for the books, then, if you’re so uncertain about what to price them at?” I ask.
George smiles mystically.
We work hard until the books are absorbed into the tiny space, and then Bruce leaves. I have a small pile of art books that I want to keep—working here there are constant temptations. One of them is a Christie’s catalog of medieval Islamic astrolabes, another is on the sketches of Lyonel Feininger (Stella would like that), another is on Jim Dine’s flowers. It is a fantastic batch. But I am being paid so little, and the baby is going to be so expensive. I can’t buy them, even with George’s discount. I can’t let them go, either. I put them in the reserve cupboard with my name on them, as I have with my wonderful career as an art historian, where my burning and single-minded passion for art makes me a byword for incisive critique.
David is settled comfortably downstairs with George and Luke. They have put on some Bob Dylan, and he and Luke are discussing his music, with an occasional interjection from George. The shop is often like this; they just hang out and talk. George is never out of patience when people want to learn; he must have made a great teacher before E. B. White lured him here. I think I will just have a quick look at prams and pushchairs on the Internet.
Stella saw a pram on Madison Avenue the other day, in the window of a chi-chi baby shop. She says it was in dove-gray fabric and had shiny chrome hubcaps, and it was eight hundred dollars. Now, in my mind’s eye, this pram is the platonic ideal of all prams, and it is the one I want. I keep meaning to stroll down Madison so that I can look at it.
But obviously, eight hundred dollars of pram would be lunacy. I might feel obliged to have more babies to get the wear out of it. I need to be more pragmatic.
I type “best pushchair” into google. Instantly, a pop-up comes to the middle of the screen that does not seem to have much to do with pushchairs and prams. It is saying “CLICK HERE FOR LIVE PUSSY!” It is flashing. The words are red on black.
I look downstairs. They have opened a CD, unfurled the paper booklet, and are arguing about lyrics. It is the word “live” that catches me, as if “pussy” is something that produces a repellent fascination, writhing under the gaze of the camera. Perhaps it gives a clue to both the fascination and the repellence. I could use this when I am presenting my paper on the male gaze; would that silence Bradley Brinkman? I click. I look. I am immediately sorry. They deliver on their promise. All the pictures look more or less the same to me, but then I’m not a connoisseur.
My curiosity is more than sated. I click on the little X to get rid of it. It does not go.
George is of course starting his ascent up the stairs with a new pile of books for me to check. I click the cross more frantically. More things pop up. There are many improbably large breasts, and ever more explicit pages are proliferating all over my screen. George is nearly here. I try to click on more Xs; nothing happens.
“These might need looking up on a number of sites,” says George. “And for Principia Mathematica, you might try the auction records—”
I duck under the table, get hold of the cord, and pull it, hard. American plugs are much easier to pull out than English ones. The computer dies with a gentle electronic sigh.
George is frowning at me.
“You did that because . . . ?” he says.
“It . . . it was making a really weird noise,” I say.<
br />
“What sort of a noise?”
“A kind of ratchety beeping noise,” I say. I am scarlet.
“Were you doing something of a nefarious nature?” asks George politely.
“A bit,” I say. “I was looking at prams.”
“Prams?”
“Pushchairs.”
“Pushchairs?”
“Strollers.”
“Ah. And I came up and caught you.”
“Yes.”
“Next time, just try the confession part without the breaking-the-computer part.”
He puts down all the books.
“I have another book call next week, Esme, on West End Avenue. I thought it might be informative for you to come along, if you would like to?”
“I would,” I say. “I’d like to see how it’s done. Are we going to play good bookseller, bad bookseller?”
“Almost certainly. It’s at four next Thursday.”
I check my diary, and have no lectures or seminars. “I can come. Thank you. It’s nice of you.”
“As a matter of fact, it isn’t. I have a feeling you’ll be an advantage in my hard-nosed dealings. I take a pregnant English girl with me, I might get a break on the books. Now, do you think you can put the computer back on?”
While I am back under the table, sticking the plug back in, I hear a voice I recognize. An assured, East Coast voice. He is saying he doesn’t need help with anything, that he is happy to browse.
I freeze under the table.
George is sitting opposite me, reading the start of the first volume of Principia Mathematica. He hasn’t noticed Mitchell. Instead of getting up, I peep from under the desk, down the stairs. He is standing at the counter, and Luke is standing too, almost as if he is squaring up to him. They make an interesting contrast. Mitchell looks immaculate, full of poise. Luke doesn’t.
The Bookstore Page 16
