The Bookstore

by Deborah Meyler

  “When I was with the doctor at Columbia, he said that it was possible that I would experience fetal demise.”

  Luke says nothing.

  “Don’t you think that’s shocking? That he uses words like that?”

  “I guess he’s trying to save your feelings.”

  “Yes, but if he is, it’s not working, because it turns round on itself, so that you think they are not according the tragedy of it enough dignity. It’s—it’s warding off the moral imagination. You know they say ‘miscarriage’—I’ve been thinking about that too. ‘Miscarriage’? Like ‘miscarriage of justice’? Or like you are not carrying it right, like it’s the woman’s fault that she hasn’t carried the child right. But, Luke, fetal demise—it’s horrible, it’s shocking—shocking, because it isn’t honest, it’s so cruel and clinical, ‘you may experience fetal demise’—if they say ‘demise,’ then you are not meant to think of a baby who will—never be born, a child that has died; you are meant to think of some process that you can’t quite understand—that isn’t to do with you. Why can’t they say, ‘Miss Garland, your baby might die’? That’s plain and honest. There’s a goodness in saying it like that, a kindness. The other way doesn’t allow you to feel; there’s a kind of command in it to see it as something that doesn’t touch you—oh, but if it dies, Luke, if it dies, it won’t ever be held by its mother and I won’t ever see it, and it won’t ever smell what wood smells like burning, or ever see the sky, or a flower, and I won’t ever see it, Luke—I won’t—see—”

  He has his arm around me. I am crying into my hands, like a ridiculous nineteenth-century heroine. I’ve still got a bit of bagel in my mouth that I can’t swallow. And I was trying to keep calm.

  Luke says, “We’ll all help you the best we can, Esme. If we can save your baby by keeping you still, we’ll all keep you very, very still.”

  WHEN HE HAS gone, I lie still again and focus on flowing love at the baby. I wonder if this is a kind of prayer. It feels a bit like praying. I haven’t done any of that for a long time, though, ever since the evangelical Christians tried to ambush me when I was at college at home. And if you don’t believe particularly in God when you aren’t in trouble, it seems a bit fair-weather to me to decide to believe in him when you need some help. So I don’t pray, I do this. I lie in the quiet, while the Broadway traffic outside murmurs on.

  With nobody here, it is easier to think that something powerful is sustaining the baby, something I can’t begin to understand, as if this focus is a real force, one that you could measure with machines. I don’t want any music, or the laptop, or the radio, obtruding into our silence. If I stay quiet, I will be able to reach it, and it will know, and stay alive.

  Stella comes after her classes and offers to get me some dinner, but I want to wait for Mitchell. She has even offered to cook for me, which I hope we don’t have time for, because she would have to learn first. When she goes out to get my key copied so that I don’t need to get in and out of bed for her, she comes back carrying two bright green smoothies from Whole Foods. I sip one. It’s like drinking someone’s garden.

  She perches on the end of the bed, texting people and talking to me between texts or tweets or whatever she’s doing. She does it all with a kind of blithe grace that wards away my attempting to express gratitude.

  “I thought Mitchell would be here by now,” I say to her. “Do you think anything has happened to him?”

  “When people are late, it’s never because they’re dead.”

  “It must be sometimes,” I say.

  She says, “Mitchell’s not dead, and he’s not lying unconscious somewhere either. He will definitely come. He just won’t come quickly.”

  As she says it, the buzzer goes. Stella smiles blandly and goes to answer it.

  Mitchell appears holding a huge bunch of flowers. I don’t recognize them as being part of the Koreans’ repertoire, or from any of the other delis around here. He might have bought them from a real florist.

  “Are you okay, Miss Esme Garland?” he says. He holds the flowers aloft and says, “I thought you might prefer these to grapes.” There is the predictable sound of a shutter clicking, and Stella lowers her camera. “Thanks,” she says.

  He bends to kiss me. Stella takes the flowers with the air of a disapproving servant. She says, “I’ll do these in my apartment. Text me when you need me.”

  “Oh, yes, Stella—thanks so much for helping out here,” says Mitchell. “Esme will be all right now.” He turns to me. “So, okay, let’s sort you out. What do you need?”

  Stella turns, and says to Mitchell’s back, “She doesn’t need anything, because other people have helped her out all day. The store knows, her professors know, I’ve been shopping for her, and she’s fine.”

  “Great. That’s great,” says Mitchell. He rolls his eyes at me comically.

  “Esme, I’ll bring the flowers back in the morning. You shouldn’t have them at night because they give out more carbon dioxide then.” She slides her eyes towards Mitchell. “Grapes would have been better.”

  “Thank you,” I say, “and thanks for all you’ve done today.” She waves a careless hand. When she has gone, Mitchell says, “Grapes? That lesbian friend of yours takes photographs of me all the time. I’m just saying.”

  “She takes photographs of everyone.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She’s irresistibly drawn to my animal magnetism.”

  “I think she’s immune to your animal magnetism.”

  He shakes his head. “There’s not a woman born. Hey, I’m starving. You can eat regular food, I take it? I don’t have to get you broth or something like that?”

  “You don’t have to get me broth. I can eat.”

  “That is excellent news. I am famished. Should I order Mexican?”

  “Yes,” I say, feeling exasperated and fond at the same time.

  He gets the menus out, sits down at the table, and says, “You look hot in those pajamas. I haven’t seen them before.”

  I look down at the pajamas. The brushed cotton, the pale blue shade, the cupcakes. I am ashamed of them.

  “You’re kidding,” I say.

  “No, you look innocent. Deflowerable.” He taps the number into the phone and says in an aside as he’s waiting for them to answer, “Don’t let any men in here.”

  When he’s ordered, he says, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “How are you feeling?” As he asks me, he doesn’t look at me, but he fishes out his iPad instead and frowns at it. I don’t say anything, because it doesn’t seem to me to be a real question. He produces a handkerchief and rubs the glass with it, painstakingly.

  “Ah,” he says, sitting back and regarding the screen. “That’s better. I feel like a new man.”

  “So do I,” I say. I grin at him, because I think that’s funny.

  He looks speculatively at me over the top of his iPad. After a moment, he comes over, sits down on the bed, stretches one arm to the other side of my body.

  “You do see,” he says, “that I am trying to keep things as normal as possible? You see that, right? It is important not to panic. You will be fine. We will all be fine.”

  He leaves me after the food, so that I can rest. I pass the night in an anticipation of the sudden and desperate pain that will herald loss, but it does not come. The morning comes instead, and I decide that after all bed rest does not mean the blinds have to be kept down, but when I pull them up a blanket of dull white cloud is revealed, which makes me think of home. I pull them down again.

  I think that the bed rest is working. I am sure the baby is still alive. And perhaps the longer it stays alive, the more likely it is to keep on going. I can’t feel any bleeding either.

  I will be all the sadder, thinking like this, if it doesn’t work. I have such a conviction that my own will, my own love, my own body, can save it. As if love is the only fortress strong enough to trust to. As if that ever works. Where would the tragedy be if l
ove could save us? Love can’t save all those soldiers killed in battles. It didn’t save them at Agincourt, it doesn’t save them in Afghanistan; instead the immense love of the mothers for their sons flows on, with no recipient, like light flowing into space, never ending and never coming back. “The family has been informed,” they say on the news, when you hear of another twenty-year-old pointlessly dead. “Relatives,” they often say instead, because “family” hurts more. There is a solemn face from a government person, as permanent as a leaf, and a photograph of a grinning guy my age or younger, with short hair, in an army shirt. Sometimes they’re not smiling, but look grave, as if to show they have undertaken a serious business. First battalion, second battalion. Royal Fusiliers. Wootton Bassett. He was nineteen, he was eighteen, he was twenty-one. His commander described him as. It is with deep sadness. He will be greatly missed. Dulce et decorum est. When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

  Love doesn’t work, love doesn’t save anyone, love can’t save anyone.

  And yet do I get up, go to the library, abandon the chance? I do not.

  I go, with extreme care, to the bathroom. There is still bleeding. Perhaps quite not as much, but I don’t know if hope is skewing my judgment.

  As I am prudently getting back into bed, Stella comes in with a box of herbal tea called Bedtime.

  “You know I swear by pharmaceuticals normally, rather than granola-head stuff, but this tea is great. It helps me sleep. It doesn’t have any health warnings on it, even for Californians, so I figured it was safe. It will help you to rest.”

  “What’s in it?” I ask.

  She reads. “Valerian root. And it’s got St. John’s wort in it. I think that cures the blues.”

  “It doesn’t cure the blues, it cures insurrections,” I say. I was trying to say “impotence” and something about erections at the same time. I start laughing. For some reason everything is funny. “What’s the word I want?”

  She says, “ ‘Erectile dysfunction,’ though it’s not a phrase I have to worry about too often. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  Once she has made me the drink that will cheer me up/make me sleep/cure my erectile dysfunction, she has to go out to a lecture. I am left to silence again, and so I do the same as I did yesterday, because there is nothing else to do except be still and hope.

  It is late afternoon when Luke phones up to see if I am all right. I say I am, and he says in that case he will not come up. I ask him where he is, and he says he is on 116th and Broadway. About three minutes from me.

  “Then come up,” I say.

  “Oh, no, not if you don’t need anything . . .”

  “I need . . . I need . . .”

  I want to say apples, but I think it is bad to say apples. I think of different fruit.

  “. . . some sliced watermelon,” I say. “They sell it, ready sliced, at all the corner delis.”

  “You don’t need any watermelon. And it will be frozen. It’s freezing out here.”

  “I do need it! It has special vitamins in it. And I like the juxtaposition of the colors.”

  Luke sighs.

  “Okay. I’ll buzz when I’ve found some sliced watermelon.”

  Before I arrived in New York, one of my Cambridge tutors told me that one of the many bonuses of living here was that you could buy turnips at three in the morning. This wasn’t a draw for me, but the tutor was East Anglian born and bred, and so had a particular fondness for root vegetables. But the fact that I can pluck the idea of watermelon out of the blue, and a few minutes later there will be watermelon, is very pleasurable. Perhaps it is corrupting, too. We start to believe we can have whatever we want.

  When Luke comes in, he has his guitar and half of an enormous watermelon.

  “They had no sliced,” he says. “Get back in bed. I’ll cut some for you.”

  “Why have you got your guitar?” I ask him, when he comes in with a white plate and a huge red slice. “Are you going to play to me, like a minstrel?”

  “No. I have a gig.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah—I play with a couple bands—we have a gig tonight.”

  “That’s good. Where?”

  Luke looks uncomfortable. He looks around the room and then says, “Brooklyn.”

  He lives somewhere in midtown. I am about to say how nice it is of him to come so far out of his way, when I realize that that’s why he looks so uncomfortable. He is not the sort of person who wants a kind deed praised.

  I eat some of the giant slice of watermelon. I don’t want to spit out the seeds in front of Luke, so I hope that they are nutritious, and I swallow them. Why didn’t I say apples?

  “How you doing today, anyway?” he says. “Is it—better?”

  “It is,” I say. “It hasn’t stopped completely, but I think it is better. I might call the doctor.”

  “Don’t take it too fast. You want to be sure.”

  He looks nice again. He has a white linen shirt on with his jeans—it makes him look browner. I must remember about the hormones—they make me find almost everyone attractive. I had an interesting dream about Richard Nixon the other night, for instance, that is probably best forgotten.

  “Luke—you never get hormones dancing around inside you, messing with your mind, do you?”

  He shrugs. “How would I know?”

  “When you’re pregnant, they do all sorts of things to you. This morning, I got so upset about the soldiers in Afghanistan—you know, the British and American ones that die? It came out of nowhere. It must be hormones.”

  “Or empathy.”

  “It hit me, as well, about how scary it will be”—the gods force me to correct myself—“how scary it might be, to be a mother.”

  “That doesn’t sound like hormones. It’s gotta be real scary to be a mother.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  I want him to stay, but—fairly unusually—I don’t want to talk at all. He doesn’t seem to mind too much. We are there for quite a while, in silence. Then he says, “Maybe I should get going . . .”

  I say, “If you’ve got time, would you play something? Like when you played ‘You’ve Got a Friend’?”

  He puts his head back, turns his face to the side a little, uncomfortable again.

  “I would really like you to,” I say, to persuade him out of what looks like shyness.

  “Esme, something happened. We didn’t know whether to tell you.”

  I wait, frightened, because he is so grave.

  “It’s Dennis.” He stops. I put my hands to my mouth.

  “He’s dead, honey. They found him in a basement on Amsterdam.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know—other street guys. Tee told DeeMo. He was taken to the morgue early this morning.”

  “What was it?” I ask. “When do they think he died? What did he die of?”

  None of the questions I am asking matters, but we have to ask them. I want Luke not to know the answers, or I want to be able to say, Aha! You’re wrong, that’s the wrong answer to that tiny question. Therefore he can’t possibly be dead.

  He says, “The medical examiner figured it was an overdose, but he didn’t know for sure on the spot. There was a needle near him.”

  “But that can’t be right—he was an alcoholic.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think you have to specialize.”

  I look down at the covers, thinking of Dennis, of his laughing at DeeMo’s prison meadows, of how he ate his bagel.

  “Could it have been something else? Hunger?”

  Luke clasps his hands together and leans on them. “Hunger, exposure, drugs, drink—it could have been any of them, all of them. I’m sorry. We all liked him.”

  “Yes—yes—oh, Luke, have you known him a long time?”

  “Yep. Years now. Strange but true.”

  “So it’s hard for you. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I must be better in time for the funeral.”


  He looks startled. “Esme, there isn’t likely to be one. He’ll probably get buried in a potter’s field—Hart Island, most likely. They don’t have services.”

  I don’t understand what he’s talking about, with potter’s fields and islands.

  “How can they bury someone without a service?”

  “That’s what they do with the homeless, with unknowns, with people who don’t have family. And nobody knows Dennis’s last name.”

  “But he had a daughter. And why should the unknowns not have prayers?”

  He looks surprised again. “I never knew that, about a daughter. He’s never said anything about a daughter to me. He—you know, he might have made her up. He did tell lies all the damn time. Do you know her name?”

  “It was Josie.”

  “Josie . . . ?”

  “I—I don’t remember her last name. How much is it to have a proper burial?” I ask.

  He sighs. “Esme, I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “Yes, you should. You should. How much is it?”

  “Honey, we can’t do it. It’s, I dunno, it’s got to be thousands. And don’t ask George. He’s really stretched, and he would try.”

  “I can ask Mitchell,” I say. He doesn’t reply.

  “I will ask Mitchell,” I say. I say it because it seemed wrong when I said it the first time. Luke is still silent.

  “Aren’t there Rights of Man?” I ask. “I mean, this is America, where all men were created equal; don’t you get to at least have a funeral when you die, no matter where you lived, or how—?” Stupid tears are coming again.

  “Don’t cry,” he says. “Honey, don’t cry. Dennis as much as any of us wanted you to keep that baby safe.”

  “I’m not, I don’t,” I say, wiping them away.

  “You cry a hell of a lot for someone who doesn’t cry.”

  “I know. I liked Dennis, that’s all.”

  “I liked him too.”

  We are both quiet. I say, “Luke, can you play something in memory of Dennis? That would be a way of doing it.”

  Luke looks extremely uncomfortable.

  “I dunno. It seems—no, I can’t.”