“It was—enchanting—wasn’t it? For a while?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I was enchanted. But I woke up. From the spell.”
“Oh.”
“So that’s the end, I’m afraid.”
“Just like that.”
“Yes. Just like that.”
“No wedding.”
“No wedding.”
“You should tell James—”
Compunction flickers briefly across his face.
“I have.”
He does not make a move to go. I know, when he does, that we will never be together again, and I can’t bear it. When he gets up to go, I won’t be able to breathe.
“Is it because—is it because I said no to that thing—with the girl, in the coffee shop?”
“No.”
“Because if it is, I can . . . I can do that . . . ,” I say.
“Don’t. Don’t say it. Don’t embarrass yourself.”
“It is because of that. I can do it. I wanted to . . .”
He closes his eyes. “For God’s sake.”
“You think I don’t grab hold of life, that I am too scared to live life to the full, but I’m not, Mitchell, I can live life . . .”
This time he covers his ears. See no evil, hear no evil. But he doesn’t do the last one.
I say, slowly, “You’re frightened of getting hurt, so you are pushing me away. You push everyone away so that you won’t get hurt. If that’s what it is, you will do it again and again, and you’ll always think it is because it’s the wrong girl.”
He rears back from his fetal position and glares at me. There is no sea for these eyes; they’re like ice-blue fire.
“Can we just stop this? I am telling you that I don’t love you, Esme, that I don’t love you at all, and you are trying to—to help me. It’s like trying to piss off Florence Nightingale.”
“I don’t believe you. I think you love me.” I do think it. I am absolutely sure of it. It is a thing you are not supposed to say, but it feels too late to be holding back.
“You think I love you? What monumental confidence you have. And all of it misplaced, I’m afraid. Sorry about that, toots.”
“I love you,” I say.
He shrugs. “What can I do with that?”
I think that all the words he hurls at me are poisoned arrows and boiling oil and sharpened stones to protect the forlorn man inside. So that I won’t see he is there at all. There is a kind of blank agony in me, because I am losing him, and because I think he is in despair.
“I don’t even particularly like you,” he says now.
I say nothing.
“And if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t dream of going to that gallery opening.”
“Whereas I would,” I snap back, “because all of my time since meeting you has been such a treat.”
“I told you once before, being a bitch doesn’t suit you.”
“You said that I was your redemption, you said that I filled up all your gaps—”
“The past doesn’t interest me. I don’t feel like that now.”
“You asked me to marry you, you took me to the church . . .” I know it is pointless, but I have to say the words. I have to say them out loud, I have to say them to him. The wild sadness of it; I won’t get another chance.
“I told you, it was an enchantment. I’ve woken up.”
“The baby. You—what about the baby?”
“I will have children when I choose to have children. And I will choose who to have them with.”
“But there’s a child already, you care about that, don’t you—it will be your baby—”
“I know that. We’ll get lawyers. That’s what they’re for.”
“But I think you are rejecting me because—”
“Esme. For once in your life stop talking.”
“What have I done? What is different?”
“Nothing. I am different.”
“You’re pushing me away on purpose.”
“Finally, a breakthrough.”
“It is because you are so sad—what you said about being depressed, about there being no point to anything—I can help you, Mitchell, I can save—”
“No, you can’t,” he says, angry. “You can’t. Do you know how many women before you have tried?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t know. How many? You’re thirty-three years old. There can’t be that many.”
He smiles a wide parody of a smile at me. “Do you want to know? I can start counting . . .”
“No.”
“Sure? I can tell you how many I’ve fucked, or how many thought they could help me. It isn’t the same figure, because some of the women didn’t give a shit about me either. I preferred those, in fact. Less fuss.”
I do not react to this. He puts his face close to mine. “This is where you storm off in tears.”
“I am not going to storm off in tears. You have to walk away from me.”
“I have to walk away from you?” He laughs. “What, for the symbolism to work? Man walks away from his beloved and his baby?”
“If you like.”
He gets up.
“Fine by me,” he says. “Good-bye, Esme.”
“Good-bye, Mitchell,” I say. I look up at him. He turns uptown, and he walks away.
I leave Señor Swanky’s. I walk across to Amsterdam, and then to the park.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I thought that love was flowing through the cosmic strands of right and virtue in the universe, falling on us, making all things well. As if it were outside of us, that we just opened ourselves to it. But it can’t be like that, it must be that we made it, and now we are unmaking it.
I try to think of what I have done. Is it that the wedding is closer, is it that I hesitated about marrying him that day at St. Thomas’s? That was the day I told him I loved him. Is it that? The plain declaration that voided the game?
I don’t think he was playing a game. He was as serious as I was. If it was a game, it was Mitchell, afraid of losing, who tipped the board up, sent the pieces flying.
I have to try to pin that curtain back up, that is needfully drawn between all of us. I ripped it down, thinking there was no use for it, thinking we could discard all convention, all withholding, and say what we thought, say what was real, speak out the truth.
All the wild words in the universe, spoken or written or sent, that the speakers ought to wish sucked back in and obliterated forever in the minds of everyone, the ones that cause wars, the ones that cause death and hatred and the suffering of thousands, all those; should we repent of “I love you” as well? Is it just a weakness, to love? I can’t see it, I can’t see how there is any point to life without it. Isn’t relationship all in all?
All the errant “I love you”s don’t have such an effect, they don’t spark bonfires, either of tragic or magnificent dimensions. The spark they send out into the world whistles on a brick and dies.
I go home, and look in the mirror. In the same way that a person might draw a sharp blade across their flesh in order to have a physical pain to meet the pain in the mind, so I take my clothes off and stand naked there; naked, big bellied, alone, and sad. I smile at myself, because the haunted face does not improve the general impression. I look like a sad girl smiling.
The next morning, I wake up and remember, and the feeling is instantly there—the emptiness, the sense that there is no point doing anything, that all joy has drained out of the world.
I try to study to push it all away, but I can’t. I decide to clean.
The apartment does not need to be cleaned, but I clean it anyway. I sweep the floor with my floral-handled broom (bought from University Student Supply), and I vacuum my little rugs. The vacuum has the suction power of a giant limpet, and my rugs are like postage stamps. I stand on both sides of the rug and try to push the vacuum over it, but it still chews it up like some sort of deranged Muppet.
I take a damp cloth and put a dab of Ecover clean
ing fluid on it, and wipe all the light switches and the doorways and skirting boards. I clean the entire bathroom, although I cleaned it a couple of days ago. I get an old toothbrush and scrub the grout between the tiles around the bath. In the kitchen, the iron things that surround the gas hobs so that your pan isn’t balancing on the hob itself—who knows what they are called—they actually do need cleaning. With great thankfulness I seize upon them and plunge them into hot soapy water. I get a pan scrub and set to work. I concentrate on the black bits that are cooked on. I work on them until they are gleaming.
This time, it really is an ending. This time, he has decided to cut me out of his life with surgical precision.
I used to be bemused by the heroines in Shakespeare’s comedies, who suffer any amount of injustice from their silly suitors and are still happy to accept them at the end. Why would you? I thought. Shakespeare got that wrong. He didn’t, of course. I am not sure he got anything wrong.
I look ahead down all the days that will not have Mitchell in them, and I think that in time, I will get over him. And part of me doesn’t want to, because that’s just another way of saying I will forget what delight feels like. Let darkness keep her raven gloss.
Despite the grayness and pointlessness that has covered me like a blanket, I carry on doing all the things I am supposed to do. Depressed people don’t get out of bed. I get out of bed. Depressed people can’t make decisions. I make lots of decisions. I carry on writing, carry on studying, carry on attending childbirth classes, carry on working at The Owl. I do not mope about, I do not look glumly on as people laugh about something. I pretend I am as merry as the next person, and hope that they’re not pretending too.
I tell George, and I tell Stella. George says he is sorry; he looks grave, but not sorry. Stella says that he is not worth five minutes of my time, five atoms of my tears, and that he never was. I don’t agree. He is still radiant to me, and without him everything is dark.
I send him a text. I say that I hope it wasn’t something that I did that I don’t know about, I say that I am not ashamed of loving him. I ask him if he would like to know when the baby is born.
The act of communicating with him, even one-way, just knowing that he will read it, or at least see my name on his phone, is a bitter pleasure.
I wait for hours expecting a reply, and then days hoping for one. Then the hope fades altogether. There is nothing.
GEORGE HAS ASKED me to come in, on Sunday. I have been reserving Sunday morning for staying in bed, hugging myself close, letting myself cry where nobody can see or judge. George says, “If you can’t manage it, Esme, just tell me. I can ask Mary. I don’t want to pass you over just because of the pregnancy.” I say yes, then, of course. I should have said yes immediately, for the money.
At The Owl, George is sitting at the front desk, leaning back in the chair, his arms behind his head. He is grinning because someone, a customer, is leaning on the Southeast Asia section, telling him a funny story. He looks relaxed and happy, with his spirulina shake and his packet of triple-milled flaxseed. He is wearing a T-shirt too, instead of his usual shirt and leather waistcoat. His demeanor suggests a holiday.
When he sees me, he greets me, still laughing, and introduces me to Bob, who he says is a book scout.
“I don’t imagine your young friend here would know what a book scout is,” says Bob.
“I guess that’s true,” says George. “You’re like a black rhino, Bob. Esme, a book scout is someone who—”
“Scouts for books?” I ask.
“She was at Cambridge,” George explains. Bob nods thoughtfully.
“What can I do for you, Esme?” asks George.
“You asked me to come in.”
“I . . . did. Indeed I did. I asked you to come in because I have an important job for you. I hope you won’t find it too onerous.”
Half an hour later Luke and I are in a cab on our way to Manhattan Mini Storage on Riverside and 134th. We are surrounded by bags of books; there are more in the boot, and more piled onto the passenger seat in the front. I am under a paternal-care order from George not to do any lifting; my job is to take an inventory of the books as they get packed away.
“I don’t quite see the urgency of this,” I say.
“You have to make a record of the books when you are about to lock them away from sight. Otherwise you might as well throw them into the Hudson. We’re here.”
It is one of those parts of New York that is not on anyone’s mental map, just bleak streets and warehouses and no trees. The place itself, apart from its perky blue styling, is depressing, because it is a square box with the ghost outlines of windows that are now bricked up. I help Luke put the bags of books onto a trolley.
“We’re on the third floor,” he says.
The lift is cavernous, big enough for a stash of grand pianos. When we get out, we stare down the corridor. It looks like a morgue—or what I imagine a morgue looks like. Doors, just doors, sealed, clinical, receding.
“This is creepy,” I say, as Luke pushes the trolley along. “Don’t you think? I mean, you could kill someone and stash them here, and if you put them in a Ziploc bag, perhaps nobody would ever know.”
“You can’t get Ziplocs that big,” says Luke. “And it would burst. It would burst because the body would rot.”
“All right, then—what if you got one of those bags that you use to store fur coats and special dresses, the kind that has a fitting so that you can vacuum the air out? You could put the body in one of those, and then suck the air out, and then it wouldn’t rot, and then nobody would ever know. It could be that there are hundreds of dead bodies in here.”
“People are not using Manhattan Mini Storage to store dead people. They are using it to house textbooks that nobody’s ever gonna open again, and old computers with stuff on them that one day someone is going to figure out a way to extract, and clothes that people are paying to store for a lifetime, so the bargain sweatshirt ends up costing them five hundred bucks . . . this one is ours.”
He opens up a door and switches on a light. There are lots of boxes of books, labeled by subject, on metal shelving. There is a chair right in the middle of the room. It looks like an art installation.
“Sit down,” he says. “I’ll make up a couple new boxes, and then we’ll get going. I’ll read out the author and title to you, and you write it down. Real quick, or we’ll be here until dark.”
I open my notebook and wait to begin. Why does nothing seem to have any savor? Luke is crouched on the floor, sorting the books into sizes.
“Hardcover, Pools, Kelly Klein—”
“Oh!” I say. “Let me see that! That’s got photos by great people in it—Bruce Weber and Mapplethorpe and people like that . . .”
“First edition, one hundred seventy-five dollars. You can’t look at it. We’ll be here all day. Write it down.”
“I’ve always wanted to see that book . . .”
“Then go to Barnes and Noble and take a look in the photography section. Helen Levitt, Here and There. Seventy dollars. What?”
“Nothing. Nothing. I just like Helen Levitt. She took photographs of street children in New York—she died not that long ago. Why are these books getting packed up? It’s silly, they’re great.”
“I dunno. Maybe they’ll get more valuable, maybe they’re dupes. Just make the note. Next, hardcover, Josef Sudek, first edition, The Window of My Studio.”
“Oh!” I say. “Oh, Luke, I don’t care about the pools one, but I love Sudek, I really do, and particularly the ones he took through his window in the rain, that kind, so please let me see it—please, just that one . . .”
He passes it to me, bemused. “The Owl must be like a candy store to you,” he says.
I look through it. George has it marked at forty dollars.
“Forty dollars,” I say, “that’s not much. If I am here with you for four hours . . .”
“Give it back to me,” says Luke. “You’re going to need your mo
ney, Esme.” His tone is gentle.
I pass it back, wordless. I had been keeping it all at bay.
“You know you’ll be okay?” he says, keeping his eyes on the books. I watch him. He is rearranging them in the box, and they were already fine.
“No,” I say. “I don’t know that.”
“You’re interested in stuff. You’re hurting, and you’re still interested in stuff. That’s the sign. The sign you’ll be okay. Maybe”—he hesitates—“maybe you didn’t even really love him.”
I start to nod my head, not in agreement, but in politeness, to acknowledge his kindness. But even the shallowest acquiescence to that idea is such a monumental untruth that revolt sweeps through me. I have to bolt for my bag, wrench it open. In front of Luke, because there is no alternative, I am sick into it. I am vomiting and crying at the same time, all for loss, and all under the male gaze.
“Or maybe you did,” says Luke.
This makes me laugh, to add to the sickness and the tears.
“You vomited into your purse. There’s a concrete floor in here.”
“I know. I thought it was better to be sick into a receptacle.”
“Your purse. I’ll go and get some water.”
“No, I will go downstairs to the toilets.”
In the little gray bathroom of Manhattan Mini Storage, I try to rinse my vomit-covered possessions. I stuck a copy of All the Pretty Horses that I borrowed from The Owl into my bag before I left; I keep dutifully starting to read it. I wash it a little but then give up and drop it into the waste bin. My phone is not happy, either, but I have to clean that up. My phone. It used to connect me to Mitchell. Since Señor Swanky’s, it has felt like a dead thing.
I do not believe that I will be okay. I believe that I can look at a photograph by Ansel Adams or Josef Sudek and think it is good without my heart being mended. I will not say so to Luke.
I go back up and help him finish the rest of the books. When we get back outside, Luke says, “In a few minutes I’ll be back down in the basement at The Owl.”
The Bookstore Page 30
