“Esme, honey,” he says, and raises his face. “Neither one of us has any idea how rough, how raw, it is out there. No idea. But I like how you want the world to work.”
“It can work that way,” I say. “If we imagine it that way, it will be closer to happening.”
He smiles again. “Drink your tea,” he says.
I feel a flaring up inside me. “No,” I say. “You’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. You’re—” I cannot think of the right word to express the enormity of his error. He waits.
“You’re acquiescent.”
He stares at me. I stare at him. He has the most beautiful eyes.
“I don’t know if I mention this very often,” I say, “but I do like you, Luke.”
He gives me a wintry smile. “No, you don’t mention that too often,” he says.
I HAVE FINISHED my shift and am waiting for Mitchell to pick me up. It is just past six o’clock. George is sifting through the contents of a new pink cardboard folder. He fishes out a letter and a postcard.
“Hmm. Is this a treasure, I wonder? It’s a signed picture postcard from Percy Lubbock to—someone indecipherable.” He hands the card to me.
“Who is Percy Lubbock?” I ask.
“Oh. That makes me think we’re maybe not going to make our fortune on this one,” says George, plucking it back. “We might do better on our inscribed first of Three Guineas. Unfortunately, Virginia Woolf is a woman.”
“This just in,” I say. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a nebulous thing, but it is my belief—my experience, also—that women do not have that need to collect that men have. The number of women who have come in here over the years, thirsting for first editions, or things that are signed, or—speak of angels”—he nods a greeting to our resident Nabokov expert, Chester Mason, as he slides into the store—“or for the possessions of famous novelists, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.”
“Hello,” says Chester.
“Men seem to believe that there is some spirit imbued in these things, some extra sanctity from the fact that the writer touched them, as if there is a magic that will rub off on them, as if they can share the greatness.” He smiles crookedly. “I hold fast to the belief that you can share the greatness, but only through the words themselves. The material texts are important, of course, but in a historical sense, a cultural sense. I have never been too sure about the people who want signed books. Still, an inscribed first. It won’t do badly.”
I cast an anxious glance at Chester, worried that his world is about to fall apart. It is not. He isn’t listening.
I wonder whether to mention that in Cambridge I once held a small, hard leather-bound copy of Tristram Shandy, signed neatly by the author, and felt a shiver down my spine at the idea that this very book, this very object, had once been held and opened by Laurence Sterne, and that I am a woman, but I decide not to say anything. I didn’t buy it, it is true, but it wasn’t for sale.
“George, did you ever take peyote?” Chester says. “You did, right? In the old days?”
George says, “Violet ink,” and nods absently.
“Once you’ve had it,” he says, his eyes fixed on George, “you understand music differently, you understand color differently, you understand these things in relation to each other once you’ve had it. Don’t you think? I mean, you and I, George, we remember those days, those hazy crazy days, and we know, don’t we? With peyote, you become synesthetic. I wonder if Nabokov took it. He was synesthetic. I think he did, I think he took it.”
“I doubt it. You don’t get much peyote on the Russian steppes,” says George. This is both dampening and provocative—George must know well enough that Nabokov didn’t have anything to do with the Russian steppes. I think George finds Chester difficult. We all do. Luke asked him to stop telling a couple of girls about Balthus the other day, and he pleaded the First Amendment.
He begins to explain to George that Nabokov’s Russia was the Russia of St. Petersburg, but George holds his hand up to him and says he was just teasing. Chester looks delighted at being teased.
“Anyway, in my eclectic batch this morning, aside from Percy Lubbock and Virginia Woolf, and two books on Maimonides, I got this thing.” He pats a large, dirty, creased paperback Bible.
“Is it valuable?” I ask, with some misgivings. It is not a thing of beauty. He hands it to me as Mitchell comes in.
“Valuable?” says George. “Oh, hi there, Mitchell. Well, Esme—what is value? I am sure Mitchell could tell us.”
“Value? I could try,” says Mitchell.
“Shakespeare could tell us also,” George adds. “ ‘What is aught, but as ’tis valued?’ ”
“What is your most valuable book,” says Mitchell, casually, “just as a matter of interest?”
“There is a copy of Pale Fire upstairs,” says Chester, with the air of someone who can’t help but disclose his precious secret and is taking a terrifying gamble on the chance that this man will walk away with it. “They have it priced at three thousand dollars.”
“Pale Fire by . . . ?” asks Mitchell pleasantly. The book is safe.
Chester looks pained. “Nabokov.”
“What would you give me for this?” asks George of Mitchell.
Mitchell looks dispassionately at the Bible. “I don’t want it,” he says, “but I would price it at three or four dollars.”
“No, you don’t want it, and we are all used now to being told what we do want by Amazon, which is busy protecting us from accident, precluding the serendipitous discovery. It belonged to Gregory Corso, who was one of the Beat poets—writers, I should say. Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and such.”
“Howl,” says Mitchell, like Lear. “Oh, and On the Road.”
George nods. “Yessir, On the Road. Although in my opinion, On the Road can’t hold a candle to some of the other material produced by the Beats, particularly Ginsberg, as you say. Corso’s poems outshine it too, at times—‘Marriage,’ and ‘Bomb.’ Esme, have you read ‘Marriage’?”
I shake my head.
“You maybe should, both of you. It casts a cold eye, et cetera.” George turns back to Mitchell, like the Ancient Mariner to the Wedding Guest, and says to him earnestly, “Corso was a New York street urchin. He showed up every day for school, he was even an altar boy on Sundays, and nobody knew he was sleeping in tunnels and such at night. And when he becomes a Beat he still manages, in the face of that showy, idealistic craziness, to hold on in some very real sense to his Catholic faith—I think that such a thing is oddly impressive; certainly it is moving.”
Mitchell is stopped in his tracks. He gets impatient when he has to keep still and listen to anyone, but George seems to be exerting some strange Coleridgean power.
“In my opinion, there are moments in Corso’s poetry that approach a kind of momentous lyricism that contains a kind of understanding of something both of the world and beyond it. There are moments, anyhow, when something divine happens in Corso’s work.”
“I’ll have to look him up,” says Mitchell.
“But to your question. You’re an economist, and you ask what the most valuable book in here is? Well, the truth is, I don’t know. Is it Hamlet, where every sentence is a mine, every word a gem, every thought a treasure house? What about the Old Testament, or the New, or the Qu’ran, or Nicomachean Ethics, or Plato’s Symposium . . . we have no shortage of magnificent books. But for all that value, I think we have a copy of Hamlet for three dollars, and there are many places in the city where you can get a Bible or a copy of the Qu’ran for nothing.”
“Sure.” Mitchell smiles. “I was thinking more of a few pages of the Gutenberg. Or something quintessentially New York.”
“We haven’t so much as a molecule of the Gutenberg Bible. But perhaps we should consider this unprepossessing thing.” He holds up the Bible. “It is, after all, linked even by our conversation right to New York City, right to where we
are right now, and to the modernist poetry of the twentieth century, to the tension between existentialism, where everything is held absurd, and faith, where everything is invested with meaning. So might it not be the case”—here, he leans forward towards Mitchell, his eyes and being intent upon him—“might it not be the case that this ragged Bible, with coffee cup stains on the front, is the summation of New York? This Bible—is it Corso’s? It’s likely not to be, it’s likely to be the line that some sharp New York dealer has spun—it hardly matters, Corso took a Bible like this through the streets of New York, from the church. When the city rejected him he stayed anyway, with a book like this in his pocket, and this book, with all its stains and all its creases, who knows how many subways and streets it has gone through, who knows how many times Solomon has built his temple, who knows how many times Jonah has been spewed forth from the whale, who knows what pyrotechnics of imagination it has wrought, whether it was in Corso or in some mute, inglorious Milton. I think, I really think, that this book is a symbol of the city, not because it is rare and strange but because it isn’t.”
All three of us stare at the floppy Bible in George’s hands. Mitchell raises his eyes slowly and George does the same. Their gazes lock, and Mitchell grins.
“I’ll take that copy of Hamlet.”
George, sphinxlike, goes to get one. He comes back with it.
“Three dollars, please.”
THE WHOLE OF New York is becoming immersed in Christmas, although Thanksgiving kept it at bay for longer than at home. It is an all-out riot of commercialism, instead of the high-bred results of it displayed in cool understatement out at the coast. The windows of the big stores on Fifth Avenue are glittering fairy tales draped with diamonds, and the Rockefeller tree is lit, and the Cartier building is wrapped in a huge red bow, and a vast crystal star sparkles over Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, and Salvation Army Santas ring bells on every corner, and every tree is wrapped from its trunk to its smallest twig in tiny white lights, and entry into any shop means being forced to listen to “A Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Jingle Bell Rock.” The Owl is giving away little paper cups of mulled wine, heated up on a hot plate on the mezzanine. The wine is costing George a fortune, because he is insisting on organic ingredients. Organic wine is not so difficult, but organic nutmegs are a different story.
At the height of all this, when every New Yorker of any race or creed seems saturated in the yuletide spirit of bringing light and warmth to the darkest part of the year, I sell a book to a customer and wish her a merry Christmas. She stares back at me as if I have said, “Blessed be Odin.”
When she has gone, Luke says, “We don’t say ‘Christmas.’ ”
“We do say ‘Christmas,’ ” says George, “but we wish each other happy holidays.”
“It’s like saying ‘Oriental,’ ” says Bruce. “You can’t say ‘Oriental.’ ”
“But I don’t get that either,” I say. “You can say ‘Occidental.’ ”
“Only if you say it occidentally,” says David.
“Is this real?”
“It’s real,” says George, in a considering tone. “It’s just a courtesy that’s arisen from so many different faiths and nationalities living cheek by jowl. It’s more or less axiomatic that nobody should impose a belief system on anybody else, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” I say, although that doesn’t count for George and his evangelism for goji berries and maca roots. “When I’ve finished work, I’m going to buy a holiday tree.”
“You see, you pick things up real fast,” says Luke. “You’re gonna be fine.”
The Christmas trees are brought from Vermont by monosyllabic men in warm clothes; they seem alien, closer to the earth, silently contemptuous, like gypsies. They bring in their trees and stand them up on the pavements, so that swaths of Broadway are suddenly transformed into dark, pine-scented avenues.
The Koreans beneath my apartment import their own trees, and then trim them all into uniformity with a chain saw—all the buds, all the branches that stick out beyond a supposed Platonic ideal are shaved off without compunction. In December, I go to sleep at night lulled not by the swoosh of passing traffic, but by the buzz of Korean chain saws, sharpening each Christmas tree to a fine point.
That evening, I buy a little tree from the Vermont men, since they troubled to come all the way down here and this might be their only income for the year. They shoot it through a netting machine and at first I carry it, but it is too heavy, so I drag it the last two blocks down Broadway.
I put it up in the corner of my apartment and drape it with lights from Duane Reade. Mitchell has work to do and can’t come round, but he is amused that I have bought a tree, and says I should make it into a New York one, and that he will bring me baubles in the shapes of hamburgers, yellow taxis, New York pickles. It is a peculiar experience, to put a tree up by myself. It lends itself to loneliness, of course, but also to reverence. However little I involve myself with religion, I am still decorating a Christmas tree, unprompted, alone. It is not entirely empty of meaning.
Stella comes round, and tells me I need cranberries. She goes downstairs and comes back with a bag of them, and we spend a peaceful evening threading garlands of dark red berries. We wouldn’t do such a thing at home; we feel as if everything has to be bought, made of plastic or glass, to be all right on the tree. Is it because England is damper, and they will go moldy, or because we have lost that connection with the earth that Americans still have?
When she has gone, I sit in the dark contemplating my bright tree for a long time before I click the switch and take myself off to bed.
IT IS FRIDAY morning, sparklingly icy and cold, and I am working at The Owl with Bruce and George. Luke isn’t here yet. I am tidying up and taking down the Christmas decorations. They are discussing a film about a woodcutter who is a ski-jumper in his spare time. New Yorkers talk about films all the time, in the same way that the British are supposed to talk about the weather. They talk about old ones, new ones, big ones, obscure ones, the peculiar Polish one they just saw at the Angelika from 1937, the Matt Damon one they just saw at the big Sony on 64th, the English one they just saw at the Paris, and The Godfather, The Godfather, The Godfather. Reviewers come into the store, talking about movies, and then street guys come into the store and talk about movies with the reviewers. The street guys get to see all the new ones at the huge Sonys, because they pay admission for one, and then they just go from screen to screen all day long. DeeMo can keep up with any film reviewer who crosses his path, as long as the film has been shown at the Sony.
Sometimes people come into the store in midsentence, and the sentence can be about the sustained brilliance of Jacques Audiard, or that How Starbucks Saved My Life is still in development, or about how in the end you can’t beat George Cukor, and didn’t that lame remake of The Women a few years back prove it (that one was Bruce), about how an actor can go to either one of the Coen brothers and ask a question about the movie they’re shooting, and the brothers are so in sync with each other that you will get the same answer no matter what, and isn’t that something?
It could be a way of not talking about politics, religion, or sex, but I suspect they all care more about movies than any of those other three. I can’t join in very well, and they don’t like it when I do, so for a while, I just listen.
I am up a ladder when Luke comes in—I’m trying to dust the edges of the shelves with a feather duster. All I am really doing is rearranging the dust. They’ve moved on from the woodcutter movie. Now they’re talking about the exceptional acting ability of someone called Petula Maybelle. I don’t know who that is, but the name makes me think she isn’t about to give Judi Dench a run for her money. I’m getting primmer by the minute. Luke is immediately in it with them, and now they’re on to a discussion of Natalie Portman.
“Her looks, I can take or leave, you know? I just like her because she’s so smart,” says Bruce. I dust more vigorously.
“You okay up there, Esme?” asks George.
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t like you going up that ladder in your condition,” says Bruce.
“I’m fine.”
“What do you think of Natalie Portman, Esme?” asks Luke.
“I’ve heard her interviewed, and she’s very, very smart,” I say.
“And beautiful,” says Luke.
“Very beautiful,” I say. I look down at the three of them. “You must have a high bar, Bruce.”
Bruce looks pained. “It isn’t that . . .”
“Why aren’t there any female directors?” I say.
“Any?” says George, his eyebrows raised. “Esme, I’m shocked. There’s Jane Campion and many others.”
“Amy Heckerling, Sofia Coppola, Nora Ephron . . . ,” says Bruce, and saddens suddenly. “I’ll sure miss her.”
“You see?” says Luke. “You’re trying to suggest these women don’t matter? Are you an antifeminist, Esme? Is that a new movement?”
I don’t answer. I feel very upset—in proportion, out of proportion? I stay up on the ladder so that nobody can see my face. They disperse to various occupations. Luke stays behind the counter.
“We were just teasing, you know,” he says quietly. “You seem kind of prickly today.”
I manage a tiny smile of acknowledgment, but the upset won’t die down.
When a customer comes to the counter and claims Luke’s attention, I go down to the bathroom in the basement. I decide, in the wake of the conversation upstairs, that I am not going to put up with the lipstick-mouth toilet seat any longer. I am going to speak to George.
Then I notice that there is blood on my underwear.
Dizzy with fear, I check. I am bleeding.
I make a bit of a pad out of toilet paper, and go back up. They are all still chatting.
I go upstairs to the dark green chair at the back and call Dr. Sokolowski’s secretary. She puts me through immediately when I explain.
“Miss Esme Garland? You are bleeding?”
The Bookstore Page 23
