The Bookstore

by Deborah Meyler

  Mitchell leans towards me and says, in a low voice that he knows his grandmother will still be able to hear: “I didn’t hear you complain about the finished result.”

  Old Mrs. van Leuven bursts out laughing.

  “He’ll be an American. You must circumcise him,” says Olivia, taking no notice of whatever crudity has amused her mother-in-law.

  “But why?” I ask her.

  She shrugs her elegant shoulders and quivers slightly, as if she has just inhaled some sherbet. Mitchell is leaning back now, his face averted from his mother.

  Olivia says, “Isn’t it—Cornelius—isn’t it hygiene?”

  “I believe so,” says Cornelius shortly.

  “And tradition also. The boy—if it were a boy—would feel himself to be very much an odd one out if he were not circumcised. You wouldn’t want him to feel alienated from other boys, from the very beginning of his life.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care at all. I would rather alienate him than—than maim him.”

  There is a general recoil at this word.

  “My dear,” says Olivia, her voice a scalpel, “it isn’t maiming. I did not maim my son. It is an absolutely normal surgical procedure. You use such emotive words.”

  “It is maiming,” I say. The fear that they will somehow get their way over this has me in its thrall. I can’t retreat into silence. They all look so sure that circumcision is the best way to go. I say, with an earnestness I know Mitchell despises, “It is genital mutilation.” Olivia turns her head away, in sharp distaste.

  “Please,” she says, “this is a sensitive issue. The Steins live just next door.”

  She accompanies this with a concerned glance at the wall, as if we are in a little terraced house, and the Steins are all crowded round a glass on the other side. In reality, I don’t think she is in the least bit concerned about what they might think, and you probably need a golf buggy to get to the Steins’ house within a reasonable amount of time.

  “When it’s religious, it’s different,” I say, assuming that the Steins are Jewish, rather than that they are particular advocates of random circumcision.

  “I don’t follow your logic,” says Cornelius. “This is a cultural issue for us. Are cultural issues so very far from religious ones, in your opinion? Where does the divide lie?”

  “Esme, shall we talk about this if and when we do have a boy?” says Mitchell. He smiles fixedly at me. “It seems pointless to have that argument now, when it might just as easily be a girl.”

  “You want it to be circumcised?” I say.

  “Circumcision hasn’t done Mitchell any harm,” states Olivia.

  I turn to her, astonishment trumping decorum. “But you’re his mother, you can’t—” But of course, I can’t go down that route. “And anyway,” I say, “it has done him some harm—the sensitivity is seriously—”

  Mitchell stands up. I feel as if the walls are about to burst apart.

  “Excuse me,” he says. He nods to his mother as he walks out of the room. She receives his nod and turns back to me, her face a placid mask.

  “I would really,” says Olivia, “so much rather talk about something else.”

  THE NEXT DAY I wake up in the blue room, with sea light flooding through the edges of the curtains. I glance over at Mitchell, who is asleep and facing away from me. He hasn’t said anything about yesterday’s unfortunate conversation. I tried to apologize afterwards, but he wouldn’t let me. I have alternated ever since between feeling self-righteous and shamefaced. I am right but I was rude.

  I slip out of bed to the window, to look out at the sea beyond the fence and sand. Yesterday was gray; today is cloudless and the sun is shining. I stand and look out at that pale mystic blue, bathed in the fresh light of morning.

  I suppose you need a lot of money for everything to look this simple. The iron beds were probably shipped from an antique shop in Chipping Norton; the fence is probably from Bloomingdale’s or flown in from Antigua. But if they can afford it, why not make things beautiful?

  Mitchell is still sleeping. I would like him to wake up and make love to me; on the thought, my nipples harden under my T-shirt. I take it off, and slip with nothing on into the little bed behind Mitchell, curving my body round to fit his. I like the feel of my skin, cool from being out of bed, next to the warmth of his. I put my hand round to the front of him, to stroke him into being hard, and as I do he jerks awake, pushes me away, and sits up. I am nearly thrown out of the bed.

  He says nothing. He sits and rubs his face. I lie still.

  “You can’t just do that, Esme, I wasn’t ready.”

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted to, I thought it would be okay. I even thought of sucking—”

  “No!” He clutches his hair. “No, not like that. It can’t be like that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He stalks away to the bathroom. I lie there on my own for a minute, but I don’t want to look as if I am waiting for him.

  I go down to the huge and icy kitchen; sunlight stripes the great oak table. The cold of the stone floor seeps into my feet. I wander around—it is as lovely as everything else; if I could paint, I would paint an ink wash of it. There’s a sketch by Diebenkorn that looks just like it. The sink is one of those heavy square ones; there are pans hung up all around, and bunches of lavender. I have never seen anywhere as unrelentingly beautiful as this place; everywhere the eye falls is a delight. Why didn’t Mitchell want to make love to me? Because he wants Anastasia. I look in the fridge—there is a huge bowl of blueberries in there, and a jug of cream. It wasn’t there last time I opened the fridge, and yet I have never seen anyone here. It is like living in The Elves and the Shoemaker. I help myself to a smaller bowl of blueberries, and pour the cream on. The cream delineates those little stars that blueberries have where the flowers were.

  There is a newspaper too, on the table. I didn’t see it before. The Green Light. I look through it while I eat the blueberries. There are articles about mooring rights, and about someone who is retiring from the post office after forty years of dedicated service. In the classifieds, there are lobster boats for sale—some are scallopers too. I try to be interested in what kind of extra machinery you might need for your lobster boat to qualify as a scalloper.

  Mitchell walks into the kitchen. He goes over to the stove without looking at me, gets out the hexagonal coffeepot, asks me if I would like some. I say I would.

  His eyes are on the coffeepot when he says, “Esme—I know that maybe I should be more modern, not so stuck in my ideas of how women—but really, I think of you as pure. When I think of you, I think of you in your cotton nightdress, or your pajamas, or, or in calico. You don’t have to change for me. You don’t have to do that.”

  “It isn’t really like that,” I say. “I do find you very—”

  He kneels down next to my chair.

  “Purity means a lot to me,” he says. “I don’t mean virginity. I mean something more abstract; something clean, white, clear. You are purity to me, Esme.”

  I look at him.

  “Shall we go for a walk?” I say. “After the coffee?”

  “No,” he says. “After the coffee, we’re going back upstairs.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  We are at Olivia’s Christmas party. Apparently the necessity to fill your house with poinsettias at Christmas stretches across the Atlantic. The regulated bustle that was happening right up until the first guest appeared has been replaced by a cool urbanity. Olivia is in a green dress threaded with gold. There are waiters.

  As Mitchell goes to get a soft drink for me, I see Anastasia with a group of other women; she is telling a story and the others are laughing. She catches sight of me at the end and comes up.

  “Hi,” she says. “That’s a beautiful dress. I was thinking—do you think it would be a good idea to talk?”

  I am not sure I want to. I don’t want to know about her past with Mitchell. And I am fearful that she has a present.

&nbs
p; “Making friends?” says Mitchell, coming up with a glass.

  “Is that a problem?” says Anastasia, with a speaking look at him.

  “Not at all. But don’t go giving away all my childhood secrets, Ana.”

  “We give those away all on our own, I think,” she says in swift return.

  He nods towards a man who is just collecting a glass of wine from a waiter and is standing alone. He looks like a hawk.

  “That is Tony van Ghent.”

  “You mean Anthony van Ghent? The literary critic?”

  “Yes!” Mitchell looks at me approvingly. “Have you read him?”

  “Yes—his essays helped me a lot.”

  “Go and tell him.”

  I think how great those essays were—there was a whole book on rhetoric, too, that I started but didn’t finish, and I hang back. Besides, that leaves Anastasia and Mitchell by themselves. Mitchell gives me a little push.

  “Go on.”

  I go over to Anthony van Ghent and introduce myself. I say that his essays on modernism helped me through my final exams.

  “Which were at . . . ?”

  “Cambridge.”

  He gives a little nod. The right answer.

  “And the college?”

  “Corpus.”

  “Ah. Yes, I know Mariella quite well . . . ,” he says. “You must give her my regards when you next see her.”

  Mariella is the first name of the master’s wife, a woman whose taste in dresses and shoes I spent three years admiring from afar. We’re not quite on the terms he is imagining; I was just one of the many.

  “I’m not there anymore,” I say. “I’m at Columbia.” He looks blankly at me. “Are you working on anything at the moment?” I say.

  “Woolf,” he says. He glances around, plainly looking to see if there is someone more interesting to talk to. Last night’s dinner conversation with Mitchell’s family was mostly about mooring rights, so I doubt it.

  I plow on, because I don’t want to fail under Mitchell’s eye. “I read somewhere that Virginia Woolf didn’t understand ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ She didn’t get it.” I am rewarded with a bit more of a spark.

  “Do you think his phallocentrism got in the way of Woolf’s appreciation of his finesse?” he asks.

  “You mean she couldn’t see the mind for the penis?”

  Van Ghent smiles slightly, and I begin to feel the cringe-back on that one instantaneously. He looks around as Mitchell’s father puts a light hand on his shoulder. He says, “Tony,” by way of greeting, and then says, “Esme, could you spare me a few moments? Tony, could you excuse us?”

  He leads the way through the crowd to his study. It is wood-paneled; wood paneling seems to be a feature around here. The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books are on the little coffee table next to where I sit down. Cornelius is standing by the white mantelpiece.

  “The London Review of Books is terrifying,” I say. “The articles don’t end, you know, but nobody has ever got far enough into one to notice.” I pick it up.

  “Very amusing,” he says. Then, “Miss Garland.” Not Esme. “Miss Garland, I overheard your remark to Tony van Ghent, and it corroborated what I feared might be the case before I met you.”

  I put down the LRB. My heart is racing again.

  “I am afraid this might sting a little bit. There is no easy way to say it. You—simply—do not fit—would never, I think, fit or find yourself happy, amongst us.”

  Adrenaline, or something, is surging through me, so that I feel my blood hot in my veins.

  “I am not usually a plainspoken man,” he says. “It’s always more pleasing to me to attempt nuance.” He is resting a tapered hand on the mantelpiece.

  I am in full agreement with him that he is not plainspoken; everything I have heard him say up to now has shown him to be a man of the most intricate circumlocutions.

  “But in this case,” he continues, tracing the line of the plasterwork with one finger, “I feel that there is one cliché that sums up my position so admirably that it would be pure egotism to attempt a more interesting periphrasis. Plain speaking, therefore, there is to be.

  “There is undoubtedly a strong possibility, notwithstanding the vagaries of contingency and misfortune, that my son might have fallen—or might, we could say, have voluntarily jumped, in accordance with the ethical codes with which he has been brought up—for a play you have made with some success, although, as I am persuaded you would concede, very little originality.”

  Plain speaking if you’re Henry James, perhaps.

  “The cliché, of course, concerns the book, and the oldest tricks therein. I am very sure that you know what I am talking about. Has my son been the victim of a play that has been used by women throughout history?”

  “I didn’t—” I say, but I stop. I cannot speak. If I speak, I will certainly cry, and I will not let this man make me cry. I want to say that as well as being the oldest trick, it is also the oldest accident in the book.

  I have to turn my mind off from what is happening. I look at a brocaded cushion on a brocaded chair, and I think of a poem I learned at school and try to recite it in my head. Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . . Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . . Worried by silence . . . what are we doing here?

  “Miss Garland!” He is standing there still. He has the same glinting invincibility as his son.

  Then a fatal feeling of obstinacy and petulance comes over me. It is probably time for an explanation of what happened, however little it is his business, however unpleasant such an explanation would be to give. But I decide not to. If he thinks that’s what I am, then that’s what I’ll give him.

  I look straight at Mr. van Leuven, and I smile. My smile is meant to convey my Machiavellian soul.

  A flicker of surprise passes over his face, and then it settles back into the hard lines that Mitchell will inherit.

  He says softly, “Please do not think that I am someone who is unable to deal—summarily, let me assure you—with persons of your stamp.”

  I laugh, equally softly, a susurration of the breath. “A person of my stamp?”

  “Oh, yes, it is very evident what sort of person you are.”

  The feeling that I am going to cry is replaced by a hysterical urge to giggle.

  I do giggle. It reinforces my Machiavellian persona. He frowns. “Shall we get down to it?” he says.

  My smile is one of acknowledgment this time, except I don’t know what he means.

  He looks above my head. “What sort of amount were you looking for?”

  I should have expected that, but instead it is a shock. This really is how people in these circles behave.

  I lean back in my chair and look directly at him.

  “Oh, surely, Mr. van Leuven,” I say, smiling, “you don’t expect me to name the first figure?”

  I am practically gleeful that I manage that. It represents the entire extent of my bargaining knowledge.

  Mr. van Leuven is nodding—because he expected as much, or because it looks like we might be able to strike a bargain.

  “Let us be clear. It is not too late to terminate,” he says.

  I say that it is not, and decide that I hate him.

  “But as I understand it, there is not much time left?”

  I shake my head.

  “The money, were we to agree on a sum, would be paid only when the pregnancy had been terminated.”

  Do not cry do not cry do not cry be angry be angry be angry.

  “Isn’t this at all painful for you?” he says, a note of incredulity in his voice.

  “Does Mitchell know?” I ask. My voice is a whisper, so that it won’t break.

  “Mitchell told me that he had asked you to terminate.”

  “Yes. He did.” I forget to whisper, and my voice does break. “Does he know you’re asking me this? Does he know? Does he know?”

  He looks at me, measuring me. He
doesn’t believe in Wicked Esme any longer. He says, “Oh, my dear girl.”

  The tears spill out. I ignore them. If the light is right, he won’t see them. If I wipe them away, he will.

  Now his words seem to come from his chest instead of his head. “No. He doesn’t know. But, my dear, you cannot possibly want to be in an impetuous marriage, saddled with a baby at your age and with your prospects—believe me, it changes everything. My wife—” He stops. Then he says, “And it is irrevocable. Mitchell told me that he was desperate for you to have a termination, and that you refused point-blank. That you are not religious, that you hold no particular ethical stand against . . . against terminating an unwanted pregnancy . . . I made a mistake, in my somewhat unfortunate phraseology about the money, but I am very happy to help you financially—”

  I say, in a voice so small, so small, “It isn’t unwanted, and the marriage—just because it might seem impetuous—”

  “Might seem impetuous? You think that Mitchell—” He stops again. I remember how he got up abruptly at the mention of Anastasia. They all know something else.

  He looks down at his green leather blotter. He does not raise his head for a long time. When he does, he says, with a slight shrug of his shoulders, “Your route is going to be the route of heartache.”

  What other way is there? I want to say. What other way is there that matters at all? To love is to be vulnerable; to love is to experience the heartache even in the very center of love.

  “I have to go now,” I say. I stand up, turn, and walk across the room to the door. I can’t turn the doorknob. All the pent-up tension releases itself in a frantic conviction that Cornelius has locked me in.

  “Let me out!” I cry out. “Let me out!” I rattle the handle manically, beat my palm against the panel of the door. Maybe there is a special dungeon, a Sag Harbor oubliette, where people who don’t comply with the code are kept.

  Mr. van Leuven walks over to the door as I carry on tugging it.

  “Allow me,” he says, and pushes the door slightly before turning the handle. It opens easily.

  “Thank you,” I say. Thank you. Politeness above all.