“Yes. Esme. Take off your coat.”
“Thank you, but I—I am on a very tight deadline. Mrs. van Leuven—Olivia—it is nice to see you . . .”
“Yes; I hope we will see you both in Sag Harbor again shortly? Beeky is going to be there in a couple of weeks, I think.”
Mitchell walks away towards the bathroom and comes back with a sizable pile of New Yorkers. I clasp them to my chest, and nod a good-bye to them both.
The lift comes. I expect Mitchell to engineer himself into coming down with me, but he doesn’t move.
“Good luck with the paper,” he says. His face is alight with unholy laughter.
I am in the lift again, and this time I am leaning against the mirror, not looking into it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I give the paper. For the few days before it I am wholly focused on it. When I finally stand up before the other art history graduates, as well as Mitchell, who is dutifully sitting at the front, I realize that I have written something that is too close to me, that is too raw, too felt—I am sending out each word laden with myself. Here I am. This is all of me. All they want is a competent academic paper—they are getting a self-absorbed essence that is both gift and obligation. It is too late to change it and give them something that doesn’t reveal anything. They’ll notice if I read Robert Hughes out and pretend it is me. The thing I have to remember is that I am the only person who will care that I am giving myself instead of a paper. Nobody else will pay any attention.
When it is happening, I manage to forget myself, and then, miraculously, it is finished. I have somehow got to the end of it, though I hardly remember saying any of it. If Bradley Brinkman comes to say he found it charming I’ll flay his wolfish visage.
It does not happen. The people who come over to me, including my two professors, including Bradley, are gracious, engaged, and inquisitive. I answer more questions, some that are asked provoke more questions, and more. I sink into the remembered and revived fascination of it as into plumped silk cushions—as soon as you look hard at almost anything, it becomes interesting. It is only when we skim along on the surface that things seem boring, in the same way that a train journey across farmlands can be dull, compared to the minute noticing we can do if we walk. We can do better, at any rate, than worry eternally about our personal relationships.
I go over to Mitchell. “Did you like it?”
“Of course I did, it was very good,” Mitchell says.
“Thank you. You don’t think it was too simplistic?”
“No, no, I said—it was very good. Do you think we’ll be much longer here? I thought we could go downtown to this new bar that’s opened on 1st and First. Red velvet and candles. Your sort of thing. Well, let me rephrase that. My sort of thing.”
Heady with success, heady with praise and good wishes, I want to stay in the midst of all the talk and energy. Praise has even come from Bradley Brinkman. But Mitchell doesn’t look comfortable. “All right,” I say, “let’s go.”
The bar—it’s called the Silk Route—is down some steps into a crepuscular cellar. The décor is dark red and the general mood uterine. Billowing silk is pinned to the ceiling and there are heavy velvet curtains everywhere. We choose a little booth and a waitress comes over. Mitchell orders a bottle of rioja. I wonder if they deliver it by placenta. I am still feeling irrepressibly sunny. I am allowing myself to contemplate the scarcely articulated desire that I could, in sober fact, become a respected scholar, giving papers at international conferences, chairing symposia, sauntering through galleries while being filmed by the BBC, arguing all day with eager students, dining every evening at high table. I say, pass the port, J.W., there’s a good chap. Dying in my nineties, slumping over my books in the small hours as the lamplight glows on.
“Mitchell. Do you think I could do it? Be a real academic?” I say it, and even speaking such a dream is to offer it up for taint. As long as it is secret, closed, full of blood, it is inviolable. Now I’ve presented it for piercing.
Mitchell shrugs. “It’s a tough field, very competitive. In part because it is so subjective, right? Nobody can be wrong in your field, which must be nice.”
I do not answer. He does not notice.
“And believe me, it’s not as glamorous as it looks from the outside. I don’t know what your definition of a real academic is, but if it has anything to do with Oxbridge, then, really? You’d be better off forgetting it.”
“I don’t think academia and Oxbridge are the same. I could make do with Harvard,” I say. He doesn’t smile. “Professor Hamer said I should send my paper to n.paradoxa and to one of the editors of Aesthetics in America, who would definitely like it. She says she knows her. That would be a start, wouldn’t it? I’d be so proud I think I’d die. Even that she thinks I should send it makes me feel that there’s a chance.”
“I’m low today, Esme.”
He leans back. I feel rebuked that I have been so self-involved.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I feel—as if I am waiting for something perfect. But I am waiting for it in the abyss.”
He closes his eyes. Then he opens them.
“You’re getting the real me, for once. You might get some intimate revelations.”
“I don’t want intimate revelations. They will all be about the disgusting sex you’ve enjoyed in the past.”
He shakes his head, reaches for my hand, strokes it. “Sometimes, I think it would be good to die. Do you ever feel like that?”
“No,” I say. “Or only like Othello, when he thinks he should die now because he is so happy. I always think that part—”
“Because I do,” continues Mitchell. “I do sometimes feel that it would be good to give up the heart’s beating in exchange for a relinquishment of pain.”
“Is ‘relinquishment’ a word?” I say.
“Esme. You don’t know what it is like to feel so deeply, to care so deeply about things. You’re so bucked up by the reaction to your paper—it’s great, it’s really great to see. But you live your life on the surface, in large part. Some of us have subterranean caverns we don’t want to visit, that we are fearful of.”
“Is the isle full of noises?”
“No. It’s full of pain. Or no, it’s full of silence. That’s the problem, Esme.”
“But, Mitchell, I didn’t know you felt like this. Has something happened to you?”
“Nothing has ever happened to me,” he says simply. “It’s exactly that—nothing. A feeling that nothing matters. About the dying. You really don’t ever think of suicide? Interesting.”
He is implying a sort of lack. I am not deep enough to see the drear nature of existence. I can’t pretend that I dream of razors or rivers or acids or gas, but I think of something to palliate matters.
“I sometimes do when I see one of those films where the secret agent is given a cyanide pill for use in emergencies. I think, What if I were a secret agent, and they were going to torture me—would I ever be able to reach a point where I would think, Okay, now would be a good time to take my pill. I’m sure I would let the moment pass and be tortured to death.”
Mitchell doesn’t respond. He sits in despondent silence.
I say, “Do you think of it? I would never have imagined you to think like that.”
He laughs a hollow laugh. “I told you—today you are getting the real me. I think of it because it is a comfort. There’s comfort in the sharp blade waiting in the drawer, the white pills in the cupboard, the belt from my bathrobe.”
“But, Mitchell—that’s awful.”
“I know,” he says sadly. “The only real pain I have is—is in loving you.”
“Pain in loving me!” I say, too surprised to do more than echo him.
“Yes. You’re wonderful, captivating, an elixir. But this won’t last. Nothing lasts. You will leave. This might even be the beginning.” He smiles wistfully at me. “Your paper did go down very well.”
My heart constri
cts. I say, “I won’t leave, Mitchell. I am in it. I am—completely in it.”
He releases my hand. It is an abrupt release. “Great,” he says.
GEORGE IS ABSORBED in a book. He is sitting at the front, at the counter, and so should have one eye, or one ear, out for customers. I am upstairs, and I have watched two or three people come in and look at him, expecting a greeting, to be rewarded with nothing at all. The book must be very good.
A boy comes in, a preppy boy, about seventeen or eighteen, in a blue shirt and beige chinos. He is clearly glad to be here, part of it even for a short while. He might soon volunteer the information that he loves books.
He looks over eagerly at George, who is buried even deeper in the thick old book. George is dressed perfectly for the part, with his creased and slightly woebegone clothes, his glasses perched on his nose, his whole being focused on the printed word, clearly oblivious to the lure of making a dime.
“This is an amazing place,” says the boy. There is no response at all from George.
“I bet you guys have been here, like, forever,” he says, gazing appreciatively at the books that touch the ceiling, the books that are overflowing into the aisles, wobbling on piles, jammed into gaps. He takes in the pictures and oddments too: the changeless owl, a map, a Lichtenstein print, and very high up, a tin hunting horn with a graceful sweep to it. Next to that is the great, huge photograph of the old Penn Station.
“That’s Penn Station!” says the boy. George must have a filter for potentially interesting conversations, because this penetrates. Without looking up he says, “Yes it is.”
“That’s a beautiful picture,” the boy says feelingly. “Robert Moses, huh?” He stares at George, who turns with assiduous attention to the last words on his page and then lifts his chin to begin at the top lines on the verso. “Do you have any other things like it?” he asks.
“Oh, yes, sir, we do,” answers George.
“Can I see them? Where are they?”
“Tucked away, tucked away,” says George, almost drowsily. The boy looks quite desperately at George now, who hasn’t ever raised his head to look at him. He pushes the door open, and leaves the shop.
I think of running after him, but the moment has passed, and the moment, which could have been a bright gem in his memory, and not from want of trying, will now be like a bit of grit in his shoe. I come down the stairs.
“What are you reading, George?” I ask him. The minatory tone pierces his cocoon. He turns obediently to the title page, and says, “A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783: With Notes and Other Illustrations, volume four: Charles 1st to Charles 2nd, 1640–1649. It’s a little on the gripping side. You don’t know if they are going to get their heads stuck on pikes until the end of each trial, and nobody else does either. There isn’t any authorial power behind these things, no willed teleology. You’re not following another’s mind, but what actually unfurled. Fascinating.”
“That boy wanted to talk to you. He liked the shop. He went away unhappy.”
“What boy?” says George, puzzled. “Oh, the customer. I didn’t think he was serious. But I didn’t really notice.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Well, you did. Why didn’t you talk to him?”
“I think he wanted to talk to you, you were sitting there all scholarly and avuncular—there was romance in it for him. I’m too perky for it to have worked. He wanted some bond with you. He even mentioned Robert Moses, because of the Penn Station photograph.”
“Robert Moses? He did?”
“Yes. He was the man who had it knocked down?”
“Ah, yeah, he was, but you know, in the end, as the famous Times editorial had it, we got what we deserved. If we couldn’t manage to keep it, we didn’t deserve to have it.”
I stare at him. He looks back at me, questioning. “What?”
“But that’s what you are doing! You are going to blame Robert Moses when your bookshop closes, and really it will have been you, and me, and all of us.”
“I’m going to blame Robert Moses when the bookstore closes? Esme, do you need a little rest? And—when the bookstore closes?”
“Kindle, then, or Apple. It makes no difference, it won’t really be their fault. That’s a different need—that boy needed this shop to be here, lots of people need it to be here. There have to be old things as well as new things. There has to be—there has to be old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, old books to new minds.”
George looks stricken. “You’re right. Was that you, the timber to the fires and such?”
“No. T. S. Eliot. But he’s right—T. S. Eliot and I, we’re both right. And it only takes the tiniest discouragement—”
He holds his hands up. “I know, I know. I said, you’re right. I was wrong.” He peers out into the street. “I wish we could get him back.”
“I don’t think he will come back.”
George says, “You know, a woman came in the other day with two outside books, and she said, ‘Hey, this one is thin, and this one is fat, and they are both a dollar.’ Luke was at the desk. He took them both, and he weighed them on the scales. And he said, ‘Oh, yes, ma’am, you’re right. This thin one should only be seventy-five cents.’ ”
“ ‘And this one has no adjectives, so that’s another quarter off . . . ,’ ” I say.
“My point is, that this is your point. We are getting it wrong. We mustn’t become bitter, or forget our purpose.” He closes the lovely old book and puts it, with his usual reverence, on the countertop. “Do you think we have to change things?”
“We could have poetry readings upstairs.”
George grins. “And a coffee machine? And loyalty cards?”
“I mean it. Poetry readings, prose readings—why is it that only new bookshops do that stuff? We show people what a good place it is to be, and they will buy, and it will flourish, whatever the future brings.”
“It might flourish with this kind of enthusiasm. But, Esme, you’re going to be wrapped up in motherhood soon.”
“It isn’t about just one person.”
“I guess.” George sits, pensive, for a long time. In the end he looks up at me. “No. I don’t think I agree with you after all. That boy wanted to talk to me because he saw that I was reading a book, precisely because I wasn’t at the door offering him a latte and an invitation to a poetry reading. He wanted to win my attention, by trying. Bookshops have got to survive because people want them, Esme. You’ve got to trust people to want them, not try to trick people into wanting them.”
“I think we should try to connect to people,” I say. “Not in a commercial way, but in a real way. You ignored him.”
“Yes, I did. I should have paid attention, but he at least tried to get it. This time he failed. Next time he won’t. We’re not going to serve lattes. We’re going to sell books.”
I AM REWRITING my male-gaze essay for a feminist art journal when I get a text from Mitchell, asking me if I have time to meet him at Señor Swanky’s for a coffee. Coffee is now code for “hot drink that won’t contain anything interesting for Esme.”
“I wouldn’t have had you down as a Señor Swanky’s fan,” I say, as I sit down on the yellow chair at the yellow table outside the yellow restaurant. “I suppose I still don’t get you . . .”
Mitchell takes my hand, sandwiches it between both of his. The gesture is tender.
“That’s where you make your mistake,” he says, in a voice to match the gesture, as soft as rainfall. “Don’t you understand yet, my poor Esme, that there is no me to get?”
This demeanor does not match the choice of restaurant. Mitchell is meticulous about this sort of thing—as he showed when he picked the Modern for his proposal. So if it seems like it doesn’t match, I am just not getting it. Again.
“There is a you to get,” I say. “You notice people, when there is something wro
ng, when there is something sad about them—you have a sort of quick sympathy. Unless it’s fake.”
He shrugs, laughs. “It’s mostly fake.”
“Why?”
“Because I know how to behave. Because I know that’s what you do.”
“I don’t believe you. I see you do it. I see that you mean it.”
He looks weary. “That’s part of it.”
I sit without speaking, and so does he. Mitchell has switched off whatever it was that always glowed at me before. When I was walking here from Columbia, I thought I was coming to an ordinary lunch date.
This is something he has to get through, this uncomfortable scene. He has to get through it in order to get to the clear blue air beyond me. That’s how he feels. I am sure.
He leans forward, his face in his hands. He is curled up, resistant. There is a flush of speckled red under his cheekbone; I can’t tell what it means. Is he upset or angry? It might be a shaving rash. I have never seen him shave, or thought of him shaving. It would be an intimate thing to be there for; more intimate than sex, since it is a thing he keeps entirely private, the door always firmly shut. Imagining him with the soap on his face, the razor poised, brings a sudden rush of fondness. Mitchell always has the door shut.
Still shielding his eyes from me with his hands, he says, “I used to be very good friends with a couple of guys from Yale, Tam and Greg. We went everywhere together; we went to Rome together, Paris. In the summers when we all started working in New York, we always went to Long Island together. I thought the world of them.
“One day when we were all staying at someone’s house in Cape Cod, I woke up and I thought, This relationship with these guys is hollow, there is nothing to it. They don’t matter at all to me. And I got up and I drove back to New York, and I never saw them again.”
He emerges from his hands, and stares down Columbus Avenue. “And that’s how I feel about you now,” he says.
I do not move or speak.
Can you love someone because you see through all the barbed defenses to the center of a person, to his wounded heart? But what if it is a mistake? What if you peel back all those layers of cruelty to find a kernel, not of kindness that can’t risk itself, but of more cruelty?
The Bookstore Page 29
