The Bookstore

by Deborah Meyler

  Mrs. van Leuven enfolds our hand-holding in her impassive gaze, and then accepts her glass gracefully from her husband.

  “And your trip over?” When she speaks to someone, she looks somewhere else, anywhere else, as if with a wistful hope that there will be something elsewhere in the room to engage her interest. When she gets an answer, her glance passes briefly over the speaker and then away.

  “It was fine,” says Mitchell. “Is everything all on track for your party?” He turns to me. “My mother’s Christmas parties are famed throughout the land.”

  Olivia does not react to this. She says, “Julia seems to have everything under control. I brought Hervé with me from Paris, and he is proving invaluable. That, I rather think, has been my only contribution thus far.”

  “Hervé is Mother’s hors d’oeuvres chef,” explains Mitchell.

  “Ah,” I say.

  “And the piano has been tuned,” Olivia adds.

  “Every year we sing carols around the piano,” Mitchell says. “At the party, not tonight. Esme has a nice voice, Mother, she’ll be an addition.”

  A ghost of an acknowledgment flits across Olivia’s face. Her absolute want of interest stifles any impulse in me towards polite denial.

  Cornelius sits down too, with his drink.

  “You’re staying at the Winslow House?” he says.

  “Yes,” says Mitchell. “It was decent of Winslow to give us the use of it.”

  “Carter Winslow is that kind of man,” says Cornelius.

  There is a silence. We all sip our drinks.

  Mitchell says, “Although I think someone else might be staying there too tomorrow, just for the party—a friend of Portia’s?”

  “Oh?” says Cornelius, his brow furrowed, “I hadn’t heard—”

  “He might not come,” says Olivia, “I believe it is a teacher. An old teacher of Portia’s.”

  “Ah,” says Mitchell. “Good.”

  I nod in affirmation that it is good.

  “It is a beautiful house, the Winslow House,” says Olivia tranquilly.

  “Yes, it is,” I say.

  “When I came up here for my first summer, as a bride, and I saw the Winslow House, I wished that the van Leuvens owned that house instead of this one,” she says.

  “The Winslow House is a lot smaller,” says Cornelius.

  “Yes,” says Olivia. She does not go on to say that of course she prefers her own, larger house now. She merely sits.

  “We are in a blue bedroom,” I say, to fill up the silence. “It is lovely, all different shades of blue. It has long windows that look out to sea. And it has its own dressing room!”

  Olivia’s face, not particularly animated so far, now shuts down, in a manner that reminds me irresistibly of Mitchell. I look back rapidly over what I have just said and realize that, of course, I have referred to our bedroom. Where Mitchell and I might be thought to be having lots and lots of sex.

  “Has anyone arrived here yet?” says Mitchell.

  “Anastasia is here, Mitchell,” says his father, with what I decide is far too much gravity.

  “Ah, yes, I knew that.” Mitchell nods. “How is she?”

  Olivia looks sharply at him.

  “She is very well,” she says.

  “Good,” says Mitchell. He steeples his hands together. “It will be nice to see her. I’m very fond of Anastasia. I am glad you’re going to meet her, Esme.”

  Cornelius gets up abruptly.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I have a great deal of work to do before dinner,” he says. He nods formally to me. “Pleased to have met you, Miss Garland.”

  I stammer something about being pleased too, and I glance at Mitchell. He is looking at the top of his steepled fingers.

  “Anastasia?” I say, and I don’t like the sound of her name in my mouth.

  “You won’t have met her,” says Olivia. “Her photograph is over there—she was in her late teens then.” She indicates a white bookshelf, on which are ranged a few silver-framed pictures, before she adds, with deadly timing, “We’ve always kept her with the family.”

  Mitchell gets up to go and have a look. It is a black and white photograph, a good one. She looks very fair, a kind of Swedish or Icelandic fairness, and the photographer has caught her in a moment of pure happiness. Her head is back, her glance is slanted towards someone; she is laughing, hard. The wind is whipping her hair around her face.

  “She looks lovely,” I say.

  “Oh, she’s by no means at her best there,” answers Olivia. “She was busy getting ready for—Milan, I think it was, Mitchell; the Milan show? Who is she wearing, there, darling? Is it Alexander McQueen?”

  “I don’t know,” says Mitchell, shortly. Then, “In fact, I do remember that dress. It’s Hermès.”

  Olivia’s graceful nod corroborates this. “Yes, that’s it. The McQueen I’m thinking of had a completely different neckline.”

  “Milan?” I say. “I didn’t realize she was a model.”

  “Anastasia?” says Mitchell, and his grin is perplexed. “She’s not a model now, she just did a little a few years ago, for fun. She’s working on Wittgenstein.”

  An ex-model who is working on Wittgenstein. God made her to make me humble.

  “He ate powdered eggs,” I say. I know two things about Wittgenstein: that he was partial to powdered eggs, and that he said the limits of our language are the limits of our thought. In this scenario, I’m going for the eggs. They both stare at me.

  “Well, there you are,” says Mitchell. “You’ll be able to have a conversation with Anastasia when you meet her.” He turns back to the array of photographs. “Do you have one of Clarissa, too, Mother?”

  Mother winces. “We did have one, of Clarissa and Devereaux on their wedding day. It was taken down.”

  Is the implication that Mitchell had some agency in this? Anastasia, Clarissa. Once, they must each have believed they were all in all to him, as I now do. It is impossible that they would not still love him. Once you have been bathed in that radiant charm, it is surely impossible not to want its light forever.

  “Was that you?” I ask him, in an undertone. He looks astonished, then widely amused. He bends over with laughter. It takes a while. He straightens up again and looks at Olivia. “Esme wants to know if I am responsible for Clarissa and Dev!”

  Olivia smiles. I wait for one of them to explain. Neither does. Mitchell sighs at the end of his laughter, and says, “And so is Patrick still persona non grata around here? Is he still—what was it—an apprentice DJ?”

  A wisp of genuine amusement crosses Olivia’s face. “He’s in law school now,” she says. Mitchell yelps with joy, and then begins to hum the opening bars of “Another One Bites the Dust.”

  “But Margot says that Clarissa is seeing someone else, someone at McKinsey,” says Olivia, pursuing the topic. “So perhaps all’s well that ends well.”

  My cranberry juice is finished. I fix my attention on the empty glass while they carry on talking about all these people that I don’t know. I might gossip about them one day too, but I do believe I wouldn’t be bad-mannered enough to do it in front of a stranger.

  I wonder who will bring this to an end. If it doesn’t happen soon I might fake an early contraction.

  “I have certain things to see to this afternoon,” says Olivia. “We are all going to gather for drinks in the drawing room at seven, if you would like to join us there before dinner. Just the family tonight—and Anastasia.” She rises from the sofa and I try to get up with equal elegance, but don’t manage it. Mitchell goes to open the drawing room door for her. She pauses at the door, and they look at each other. I can’t see her face. Mitchell smiles at her. It is a complicated smile. He is acknowledging whatever pain she has just presented to him, and asking her to be both staunch and sanguine.

  It is hard to take, the fact that I am the cause of all this stiff-upper-lip business. That I and the baby are disappointment made flesh.

  Mitchell a
nd I are coming down the steps at the front of the house when we hear the sound of hooves.

  I say, “People keep horses here?”

  “Yes, of course,” says Mitchell, surprised.

  “Surely it’s even more trouble to have a horse here than it is to import a Parisian hors d’oeuvres chef,” I say.

  “Don’t be a bitch, Esme. It doesn’t suit you,” says Mitchell.

  I stand still. It is as if he has slapped me.

  The sound of hooves gets louder, and a horse and rider trot round the corner.

  The rider is female. She is wearing jodhpurs, a warm jacket, and a black velvet riding hat. She looks startled when she sees Mitchell, and she pulls the horse up. Mitchell is standing still on the step, gazing at her. His eyes are soft, his aspect wistful. “Ana,” he says. Like a conclusion. He stands still for another second, and then comes down the steps, and she bends to have her cheek kissed. She closes her eyes when it happens. Her lashes against her skin, her eyebrows raised and drawn together in what looks like yearning. I am like a camera, intruding, taking. I see what I should not see. “Every blink is an elegy,” but I wonder for whom the elegy is written.

  “They told me you had arrived,” she said. Her voice has a foreign lilt to it—I didn’t expect that. She holds her hand out to me.

  Mitchell half turns to me. “This is Anastasia Stael von Halmstad,” he says.

  “Ana is fine,” she says. “And you are Esme. Congratulations. When are you due?”

  She is the first person in the Hamptons to mention the inescapable fact that I am pregnant. I could kiss her. I could kiss her except that I think Mitchell wants to. I tell her it is due in July.

  “Do you know the sex?” she asks.

  “No. I didn’t want to know,” I say, thinking of Mrs. Kasperek and her empty shelves. I say “I” and “me” on purpose, instead of “us.” I think “we” would be less than generous, if there has been something between them.

  “That’s nice. So often now it is ‘Baby Joshua will be born at three P.M. on Wednesday,’ ” she says. The horse is becoming restive, and she pats his shining brown neck. “I would get down, but Foldar needs a run,” she says. “We’re going to gallop at the Cove. It is lovely to meet you.”

  “We will see you at Mother’s drinks before dinner,” Mitchell says.

  “Oh yes, for sure,” she says. She wheels round the other way and lifts her hand in farewell. The horse picks its way down the coastal path. Mitchell stands and watches, then turns to me, businesslike.

  “Let’s walk over to Beeky’s,” he says. He strides towards the icy woods.

  Stepping on a woodland floor instead of a New York sidewalk feels lovely—spongy and full of possibility, even at this time of year. Dark greens and russets and browns and sudden flashes of limes and white. I wonder what American toadstools look like. I can’t see any.

  “This is such a nice wood. Do you have mushrooms here?” I ask him. He doesn’t say anything. “It’s so beautiful,” I continue, in his wake. “All the blue peeping through the trees, and the sparkle on the sea, and all of it is clean and fresh. You’re lucky, Mitchell.”

  “My mother decided to be embarrassed when you were impressed with the dressing room. Did you notice? She is a piece—of—work.”

  “She’s very close to Anastasia,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why it didn’t go anywhere?” I feel quite breathless when I ask this, both with my bravery and my phenomenal insight.

  “Don’t do that, Esme.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t give me your—your handy-pack Freud, your pocket Piaget, your Melanie Klein lite. I did all that stuff, for years, and that’s not it. There isn’t an ‘it,’ there isn’t a mystery. It just didn’t work out.”

  He carries on walking, then he stops and turns to say, “Do you mind if I just walk by myself a little while? I’ll see you later? Is that okay?”

  I still haven’t worked out whether Mitchell says things to wound, or because he is caught up in an idea of himself that he projects willy-nilly, wounds or no.

  “Of course,” I say. There is no point in arguing with him, in following him doggedly through the undergrowth. I turn around and head back towards the Winslow House. I wonder if this is part of being grown-up, acquiescing to someone else’s needs. It doesn’t feel like it. It feels something like erosion.

  I do not see him again for a couple of hours, when he comes back to dress for dinner. I don’t say anything when he comes into the room. He puts a hand on my shoulder and turns me round, and then kisses me hard, his hand on my breast. It is not an apology, it is what Mitchell does instead of saying sorry.

  “Is there time?” he says.

  “For what?”

  “For this.”

  Afterwards, we walk together over to his parents’ house.

  Tonight, for the family dinner, he is in a black shirt and a jacket that feels liquid to the touch, as if it is made of thickly woven silk. Tomorrow, for the Christmas party, it will be black tie, and I have never seen him in black tie. It is quite cold; Mitchell slings his jacket over my shoulders. Just before we get to the door, Mitchell says, “I didn’t love Anastasia. I don’t want to talk about it, but that’s the truth. I know how I feel about you, and I know the difference.”

  Anastasia is the first person to greet us, seconds later. That Mitchell has just declared this, moments before she comes forward smiling, makes me feel guilty, complicit in some sort of unspoken mockery—I wanted him to say it and now that he has I feel defiled by my own want, a kind of common or garden Salomé.

  We have scarcely exchanged pleasantries when Olivia floats over to join us.

  “My dear, have you heard any more from Harvard?”

  Anastasia nods regretfully at her. “Yes, sadly I have. They appointed someone else. I was the second choice.” She pauses, then says, “And nobody likes to be that.”

  “I’m so sorry. Still, perhaps the first choice will find it not to their liking, or something else will happen. One simply cannot say what fate has in store for us all,” Olivia replies.

  When she has passed on to another group, Anastasia says, to me, “I was so destroyed by not getting the Harvard job. It looked so likely, at one point. I even started looking at rentals in Cambridge. Counting chickens.” She shrugs, smiles.

  Mitchell is looking at her without speaking, and she doesn’t speak either.

  “Second place!” I say, because my nature abhors a vacuum. “That’s not bad! Mitchell was offered one at Berkeley, but he didn’t take it.” Anastasia is hesitating; I realize too late the indelicacy of seeming to crow over Mitchell’s success. He looks appalled.

  I try to say I am sorry. She shakes her head. “It’s fine. Congratulations, Mitchell.”

  “It’s nothing,” he says. He takes my arm. “Come with me. We’ll see you later, Ana.” He steers me across the room. “Ana didn’t need to know about Berkeley. It wasn’t very sensitive. But never mind that now.” He stops before his mother and father, who are both standing next to a chair where an old woman is sitting. The matriarch.

  “Esme, I’d like you to meet my grandmother, Marguerite van Leuven. Ninin, this is Esme Garland.”

  The old lady grasps my hand. There is a robust, eighteenth-century quality about her that makes me wonder how she gets along with Olivia.

  “Isn’t her hair lovely, Ninin?” says Olivia. “Esme was telling me that her friend cuts it, rather than a stylist—that tousled look is so charmingly kooky.”

  “She does cut it, it’s one of her many talents,” I say. “She’s been asked to exhibit her portraits by the Richard Avedon Foundation—she’s a really good photographer.”

  “What a coincidence,” smiles Olivia. “Richard is the person who took that photograph you were admiring, of Anastasia. We all miss him very much.”

  “Is it a boy?” old Mrs. van Leuven asks, cutting through Olivia’s malice without regard.

  “I don’t know
. I didn’t find out the sex.”

  “They don’t have the technology, in England?”

  “Oh, no, they do—I was in New York—but I didn’t want to find out.”

  “Why not? You need to make plans. If it’s a boy, you’ll have to make sure you get a good surgeon.”

  “A good surgeon?” I ask.

  “For the circumcision. And get his name down for the right schools.”

  “Ninin,” says Mitchell, “don’t worry about that kind of thing.”

  “Don’t worry? If it is anything like it used to be, you’ll have to get his name down for Browning before he’s born. You’re leaving it a little late. We put you down for Browning when your father married Olivia.”

  “We didn’t, Mother,” says Cornelius. “They don’t accept names on their waiting list until the name belongs to a human being.”

  “They do if you know the right people. Don’t be naïve, Corny.”

  Cornelius must be used to his unsuitable nickname, and to his mother’s manner, as he just looks resigned.

  Then she says, “And then St. Paul’s, of course. And that’s coed now, I believe.”

  “For about forty years, Ninin,” says Mitchell. “As you very well know. Stop playing the grande dame.”

  “If it is a girl, we can put her name down for Nightingale,” says Olivia. “That’s a pretty school. Isn’t that near the Y, Mitchell?”

  “Further east, but still on 92nd,” says Mitchell.

  “Nightingale-Bamford?” pipes up old Mrs. van Leuven. “No, no, not so good as Hewitt. Put it down for Hewitt.”

  They all carry on squabbling about the schools. My heart is racing away. Then I cry out, in a contorted squeak, “I am not going to circumcise my baby.”

  It is loud enough to be heard over the high-society bickering. For a second, nobody speaks. Mitchell looks at the ceiling. Then Olivia turns her head to me and says, “Why not? Boys are always circumcised.”

  “No, they’re not,” I say. “Not in England, not in most places. It is so . . .” I want to say it is barbaric, but I am not brave enough or bad-mannered enough. My heart is beating even more madly. I peter out.