Mitchell is looking above Luke’s head, at the sets of books that are above the CDs.
“Is that a Yale Shakespeare set?” he asks. Luke says it is, without looking. He is still standing; why doesn’t he sit?
“Is it complete?” Mitchell asks.
Luke takes the first volume down to look inside it. It clearly doesn’t help him, because he calls up to George and asks him.
George, disturbed from his studies, sees me on my knees under the table, evidently hiding. His gaze flows over me without any apparent pause. He says it is complete except for the sonnets.
“We could probably source a volume of the sonnets, sir, if you are interested in the set.” He meets my eyes before adding, “We have staff who are very adept on the Internet.”
Why am I hiding under the table? Because I haven’t got round to telling Luke and George about the proposal. The last thing they knew was that the father was “not in the picture.” And I decided not to wear my ring here either—it seems in bad taste to flaunt it in front of the homeless guys. And it feels so heavy. And I am not used to it yet.
I peep around the stairwell. Mitchell is holding his hand out for the book. “Could I take a look?” asks Mitchell. Luke hands him the little blue book. Mitchell says, “Is Esme here?”
I slide back into my seat and look over the railing. Is the tension in me or in the whole shop?
“Hello, Mitchell,” I say.
“Well, hello,” he says. They both watch me as I get up and come down the stairs. I am blushing again by the time I reach the bottom. Mitchell hands the book back to Luke without a look or a glance.
“Thanks, Luke,” I say.
Mitchell’s eyes widen at the implied rebuke. He turns and says, “Yes—Luke. Thank you so much.”
“This is Mitchell,” I say. “And, Mitchell, this is Luke, and up there, that’s George.”
Mitchell nods up at George, and then looks around airily. “I’ve heard a lot about this place but I have never been in here before.” He has, when he brought my shoe.
“Well, now you’ve found us, we hope you’ll be a frequent visitor,” says George.
“Esme is besotted, obviously. She can’t stop talking about you all for two minutes together. I think she sees you two, in particular, in a mentoring capacity? At any rate, she quite clearly looks up to you, Luke.”
Luke responds with the slightest motion of his head. I can’t remember talking at all to Mitchell about Luke.
“Do you own the store?” he asks.
“No,” says Luke. He doesn’t volunteer anything else.
“Luke’s a musician,” I say.
“I’m not sure I would say so,” says Luke.
Mitchell has already transferred his attention to me as Luke speaks.
“Do you have a minute?” he asks.
I am at the bottom of the stairs. I don’t feel like giving him a minute. Am I imagining him through their eyes, or is he simply behaving badly?
“Come here,” he says. His face softens as he says it. “Come here.”
I put a hand on each banister. I say, “Before I come there, I should explain to Luke and—”
“I’m sure they don’t mind waiting, just for a moment?” says Mitchell. “I’d like to see you outside.” It is said in that pleasant way that is still clearly an order. The very evenness, the very courtesy holds in it the iron of his will, and he puts his will into every exchange, so that each interaction with him becomes a thing to win or to lose.
“Mitchell . . .”
He stands there and waits. I have read Elaine Showalter, Simone de Beauvoir, Marilyn French, Hélène Cixous. And Mitchell is demanding that I demonstrate, what? My allegiance? My subservience? Hélène Cixous indeed. Our lovely mouths gagged with pollen.
He waits.
“I can’t right now,” I say.
He lifts his chin, and walks out of the store.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Luke turns to me, incredulity on his face, as Mitchell strides past the front of the shop. I cannot bear all this again. Despite Luke, despite Charlotte Perkins Gilman and all of them, I bolt out as well. I run after him down Broadway, call out his name, shame streaming in my wake.
He stops without turning.
I come and stand in front of him.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I just couldn’t come like that, like a dog to heel . . .”
He nods again; he always nods when he means, I thought as much.
“You wanted to demonstrate my subjugation, my allegiance . . . ,” I say. Pathetic to say so, when I have just run out howling into the patriarchal storm.
“Your allegiance? You demonstrated that, for sure. Your allegiance is to yourself.”
“No, it is to you,” I say, entirely losing my fragile hold on self-respect, and glad that nobody else can hear. Allegiance? Allegiance is more than loyalty. I am sure it is all about liege lords and suzerains and obedience, a hierarchical word. I am sure I have just abased myself. I hate myself for this, for the panic born in me when I think I might lose him.
I take a deep breath. “Come back,” I say. “Come back in, and talk to them properly. And put your club down.”
“My club?”
“Yes. You can leave it outside the cave.”
He looks downtown towards the Ansonia. He starts to smile.
“I want to ravish you in front of them,” he says.
“How thrilling,” I say, politely. “But I am supposed to be clearing a space to put our new four-volume set of Principia Mathematica.”
“I came by for a reason,” Mitchell says, abandoning the attempt to shock. “To invite you to my parents’ Christmas party. It’s at their place in the Hamptons. They’re in Paris right now, but they are coming back to New York soon. I knew they were—I can feel that cold wind starting to blow in. We can fly there with my cousin Pete and take the Jitney back.”
“Your cousin Pete?”
“He’s a pilot.”
I do not like the idea of flying anywhere with someone called my cousin Pete, in a tiny plane. Rich people often die doing the things that they can afford to do—the skiing accidents and the hunting accidents and the hurtling-to-a-watery-grave-in-your-personal-aeroplane accidents.
“I don’t want to fly, Mitchell. I would rather go by train.”
“By train?” says Mitchell, as if I’ve suggested going by dragon or by magic carpet. Apart from the subway, trains are not in his ambit. He thinks they are there especially for poor people, along with Greyhound buses and Taco Bell. “Don’t be silly. Flying is fine.”
“I think it is better not to, when you’re pregnant. I would much prefer not to, Mitchell.”
He shrugs. “Then we’ll drive,” he says.
“Have you got a car?”
“Of course I have a car.”
“Your parents won’t like me. I never made it to Swiss finishing school.”
“I know. But you’ve got a Cambridge degree. They’ll cling on to that.”
“So will I.”
“Then we should all be fine.”
“Come back to the shop, Mitchell. Just for a minute.”
He nods. We turn back uptown.
I don’t quite see how Mitchell is going to manage his reentry since he just left in a petulant huff. My own, I am not looking forward to.
We go inside, with Mitchell guiding me in by placing his hand on the small of my back. Luke is now sitting in the chair behind the counter, clearly still in the middle of a bi-floor chat with George. Mitchell smiles up at George and encompasses Luke in the warm glow.
“Shall we start that again?” he says. “I’m Mitchell van Leuven, great to meet you.” He holds out his hand to Luke, who rises to shake it.
“I meant to say this earlier, but Mitchell asked me to marry him a little while ago,” I say.
“And Esme accepted,” says Mitchell.
“Yes, yes—I meant that. We are going to get married.”
“Congratulations,” says Luke
.
Upstairs, George has drawn his eyebrows together to give me his Special Look. “Yes, indeed,” he says. “Congratulations.”
Luke is now tidying up the postcard rack, a thing nobody except me has done in living memory.
“We sell used postcards,” I say to Mitchell.
“Used?”
“A lot of them are already written on. ‘Having a lovely time in Coney Island, hope Auntie Margie is okay now’ . . .”
“Right. Interesting.”
“Everyone else sells them new,” says George. “We like to inject a little bit of history into proceedings.”
Mitchell leans over to get one with a picture of a boring landscape on it. He turns it over. “It’s to Eileen Hastebury in Michigan,” he says. “Dolores is having a lovely time in Normandy. She went out snail hunting with Herman in the early morning.”
“You see?” I say. “You miss out if you buy them new.”
“So this is The Owl,” he says, yet again as if he has never set foot in here before. “It’s a cute store. Want to show me around?”
“There’s not much to show you,” I say. “It’s really tiny.”
As I take him down the first aisle, to the paperback fiction, Luke calls up to George that he is just going out for a minute or two. The door bangs closed. George comes down the stairs to look after the front desk.
“The fiction is stacked double deep,” I say to Mitchell, repeating The Owl’s mantra, “and there’s no order within the letter.”
“So I see,” he says. He reaches for a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. “This is a cult book, a phenomenal book. Have you read it?”
“No,” I say.
“You should. It’s great. Her other one is as well.”
“Okay,” I say. “You could buy it for me.”
He looks on the flyleaf. “It’s eight dollars—eight dollars for a beat-up used book. I bet you can get this free online.” He puts it back.
“That’s the kind of thinking that will stop people writing them in future,” I say.
“No, it won’t. People write for ego gratification, not money.”
“We’ve got a postcard over there—a used one, of course, that has the John Ruskin quote on it, that people would rather buy a turbot than a book.”
“I would, certainly. I love turbot, and I don’t need to buy books. I’ve got the whole of the library at the New School, as well as my iPad. Why do people still buy books? They just take up space.”
“What is the space for if you don’t fill it with books?”
He smiles at me. “Light? Freedom?”
George says, “I hate to interrupt. But I feel that I owe it to Ruskin to say that he really wasn’t positing a world where everyone is wondering whether to buy turbot or books, and that turbot wins every time. He merely observes that people will spend a very long time looking at even the best book, before parting with the price of a large turbot for it.”
“I’ve never talked about turbot for this long before,” says Mitchell.
“Really?” asks George. “Turbot could fetch very high prices in the nineteenth century, or quite reasonable ones—it fluctuated a lot according to the yield of the fishermen. It has always been a highly prized fish, I believe. There is a story of a bishop sewing its fins back on with his very own episcopal fingers, when his housekeeper was seen to have dressed it badly.”
Mitchell raises his eyebrows at me. So does George. “It’s odd to see you in here,” I say to Mitchell. It is. He doesn’t fit.
“I don’t see why. I came before.”
“I’m glad to see you.”
“You work with men—just men?”
“Yes, just at the moment, though Mary is here on Sundays. David is around as well, the one I told you about who works at Starbucks too and wants to be an actor. And you just missed Bruce.”
“But I didn’t miss Luke. I don’t think you mentioned him.”
“Didn’t I? Oh, Luke—I think he disapproves of me.”
“Why?”
I pick a pile of books up off the floor. “I don’t know. Perhaps because he thinks everything comes too easy to me. Cambridge, Columbia, the scholarship, even this job.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
The door of the shop opens, and Blue, one of our regulars, comes in. I’ve met Blue once or twice now. I nod towards him, and say quietly to Mitchell, “That’s Blue. Remember? I told you about him—the one who is always just about to leave for Vegas.”
He is a small man, of Hispanic stock. His hair is black and hangs in lank curls to his shoulders. He has a narrow face and a goatee that accentuates his general angularity; he puts me in mind of Rumpelstiltskin. He never smiles. All his movements are rapid and jerky—he darts everywhere, like a wren.
Blue is unloading books onto the counter. I go over to him.
“Hi, honey. This is the last time I’m coming in,” he says, “ ’cause I’m going to Vegas the day after tomorrow. Got the ticket booked and off I go. So if you could give me a good price for these . . .”
His books are candidates for the outside dollar shelves at best. I wish he had some good ones among them. He sees my expression.
“There are some good books there,” he says. “I’m happy about that, you know, because it takes some money to start you off in Vegas. That’s an expensive city. Oh boy.”
Mitchell comes over. He leans against the poetry section. “You’re pretty keen on Vegas,” he says.
“Keen?” says Blue. “Best city in the world. Best city in the world. Oh, man, I can’t wait to get there. A man can go there with the shirt on his back and come out with his pockets full of diamonds.”
“You’ll need more than the shirt on your back to start you off in Vegas,” says Mitchell. Blue looks quickly at him; the statement sounds as if a cash donation might follow. Mitchell has his hands in his pockets, but they are not fishing for money to give to Blue.
“Yeah,” says Blue, “but I can work once I get out there. And if you give me something for these, miss, that’ll help me out a real lot.”
“I don’t think these are the sort of thing we can take,” I say, reluctantly. They are not. I know without asking him that these authors fall within the wide net of George’s disdain. “I can’t give you anything much for these. They’d be going outside so they’d be a quarter each. It’s not very much to help you out, I know.”
Blue uses every muscle in his body to illustrate his disappointment. “A quarter apiece? Ah, miss, can you help me out? These are good books. They are books people like.”
He calls out to George, who is reaching for a book. I see it is The Anatomy of Melancholy. The chances of George being able to hand over that book to his customer without opening it are slim to none. “George, come on over. She’s new, she might be missing something.”
George does open the book, and says absently, “No, no, she knows what she’s doing, Blue.” I am quite pleased that George has said that in front of Mitchell.
“A quarter apiece,” I say again. “It might buy you a couple of coffees on your way to Vegas. That’s the best I can do.”
Blue nods sadly, and I open the cash register and count out his money.
Mitchell is leaning against the bookshelves, still in the attitude of a disinterested observer.
“Why do you bother with the Vegas thing?” asks Mitchell. “We all know you’re not going.”
I look up at Mitchell fast. I can’t believe what he just said. “Mitchell, don’t—”
“Esme, it’s okay. You don’t understand this, but this is my field.” He turns back to Blue. “Going to Vegas is your shtick—we get it. But honestly, you would do just as well without it.”
Mitchell stops slouching against the bookshelves and comes forward to Blue. He takes his wallet out of his pocket and selects a ten-dollar bill. He hands it to Blue.
“I’ll take the two Robert B. Parkers,” he says, and picks them up.
Blue takes the bill wordlessly, and then sl
ides the three dollars and change I have given him off the counter. As he puts it in his pocket, Mitchell says again, “You don’t need the shtick; you have an absolutely valid economic operation without it.”
Blue is turning and pushing the door open, just as Luke is coming back in.
“He didn’t mean it—” I call out, but he is pushing past Luke and then is gone, skittering down Broadway, weaving rapidly through the people, his head always down.
I turn to Mitchell.
“How could you? How could you hurt him like that?”
“Esme,” says George, “I thought you knew better than to put Michael Connelly outside for a dollar.”
“And, Esme,” says Mitchell, “where is your ring?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It is Thursday, three forty-five. I am at The Owl prior to going on my first book call with George. The shop is full to bursting with customers. It is as if they’ve all been released in here for some sort of browsing competition; they are up the ladders, balancing on the little stools, crouching down looking at the piles on the floor. I catch sight of George; he is opening up the best cupboard for someone. It is usually kept padlocked; George and Luke are the only ones with keys. George sees me, and raises his eyebrows to show his astonishment at all this unlooked-for bounty.
He takes two or three books out of the cupboard, places them on the desk, and then takes the top one up carefully. He treats good books with as much reverence when he is alone as when he is with a customer. His solicitude for the books is genuine; I think it imbues the purchasing process with some charm. He looks down at Luke from the mezzanine.
“Luke—can you get David?”
Luke yells for David at the top of his lungs, and David appears from the back, with a pretty girl in tow who isn’t Lena.
“You getting a lot done back there?” asks Luke.
“Enough,” replies David, with an irresistible grin.
George comes down the stairs. “I have to stay here. Luke, can you go with Esme to this book call on West End? David can take over from you at the front.”
The Bookstore Page 17
