The Bookstore

by Deborah Meyler

  “Let’s walk for a bit then,” I say. “We can get a cab when we get tired.”

  “The subway,” says Luke. “It was a cab here because of the books. But sure, we can walk for a little while.”

  We walk down the unprepossessing bit of Riverside.

  “I wish we could do something about Dennis,” I say. “I am sure if we tried harder we could.”

  “But this isn’t the movies. We’ve got to let it go. You tried, we tried. And it will be too late now.”

  “I hate the thought of that cemetery.”

  “I know. But then, don’t just keep focusing on Dennis. It’s over for him. Join a campaign; if there isn’t one, start one. Make something happen.”

  “I’m one person.”

  Luke says, “Everyone is one person. Look at the history books. Rosa Parks was one person. The other people moved.”

  “What other people?”

  “On the bus, the other people moved. She didn’t. I’m just saying.”

  I say, “I don’t know if I can. I would hear so many awful stories, it would be so sad—and, Luke, it’s too near—it’s too close.”

  He nods. “I know, sweetheart. But nobody ever wants to go near those things. That’s how nothing happens.”

  I decide that I will go home and see if the Wikipedia assertions about the babies and the city hospitals is true, and if it is, I will see if there is a campaign, and I will help. I don’t say this out loud, because you can sometimes think you’ve done a thing when all you’ve done is declare it.

  “All the same,” I say, “I do believe that there ought to have been some sort of send-off for Dennis.”

  Luke looks down the street. I look in the same direction, and see a big New York church. He says, “You can go in there and say a prayer for him.”

  “I don’t think I believe in God.”

  “No, neither do I. Maybe God doesn’t care whether we believe in him or not.” He looks wryly at me. “Go on, go in. Say a prayer for Dennis from the both of us. Who knows what works and what doesn’t work? I’ll wait for you.”

  Luke hails a cab when I come out again, and we get in. I do not say anything about the subway.

  We are nearly back at The Owl when Luke says, “I’ve got a lot of rehearsals coming up, and they’ve got to be on Fridays. That was the only way we could work it. Bruce is doing my Friday shifts for me. And after that, I’ve going to the New York Folk Festival.”

  “Are you playing at the festival?”

  Luke shrugs. “Yeah, sure. I’ll take my guitar. It’s one of the few places left where you can just jam. It’s cool.”

  “I mean, are you playing? Performing?”

  “You mean on the main stage at nine P.M., looking out at ten thousand eager faces in Battery Park? No.” Luke shakes his head. “Oh, Esme,” he says.

  “Don’t you want to?” I ask.

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “I don’t believe you. You have something to say. So surely—you would want to say it?”

  “I don’t have anything to say, Esme. I have something to be. I am being it. I thought I should mention it,” Luke says.

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

  I want to say that I will miss him, because it will be true. But it is not as true as if I were saying it to Mitchell, for whom I am made of yearning. I have learned, in chastened-heroine style, that words are more important that I could possibly have imagined. You can’t flip them into the air like ping-pong balls, rain them down on someone like confetti, just throw them about so happily. Saying what is true is difficult. So I don’t say anything.

  “You’re quiet these days, sometimes, you know. Since—you know, I guess since Mitchell.”

  I smile at him. “Fridays won’t be so good with Bruce instead of you,” I say. “What are you practicing for?”

  “We’re going on tour after the festival. I will most likely miss the—the birth.”

  “You’ll see us when you get back.”

  “Yep,” says Luke. We pull up at The Owl.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It is my first Friday with Bruce instead of Luke. According to Bruce, Luke has exchanged the next eight Fridays with him. As he breaks this news, a customer comes in, and as I am in the main chair, he says, “Oh, hello, miss. Do you happen to have a biography of Lorenzo da Ponte?”

  I have not even had a chance to look mystified when Bruce surges forward.

  “No, sir, we don’t, but interestingly enough, we just sold a biography of Emanuel Schikaneder.”

  “Ah,” says the customer, knowingly. “But no da Ponte.”

  Bruce shakes his head, and the customer departs.

  “You don’t know who Schikaneder is, do you?” Bruce says.

  “No,” I say.

  “I’m disappointed, but—honestly?—I am not surprised. Groucho Marx often used Schikaneder as an example of a man who was lost in history. He was the librettist on The Magic Flute.”

  I nod.

  “I bet,” says Bruce suddenly, “that he is forgotten because he was Jewish. Hold on.”

  He stomps up the stairs and goes to the computer.

  “Oh, he wasn’t Jewish. He was just German.”

  “Right. Bruce? The next eight Fridays?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “But don’t worry—I don’t mind—Luke would do the same for me. In fact he did, when I was helping to make the set for I’m Not Rappaport. We had to cover every leaf with fire-resistant spray, did I tell you?”

  “Yes,” I say, listlessly and dishonestly.

  I am sorry about the Fridays. Fridays are my favorite night at The Owl; there is so often a lock-in. Even George sometimes comes, and Barney is a regular. I think of those lamp-lit nights, with the bottles of beer and the quiet friendliness, and my breath catches. I didn’t know they were going to be part of the past so soon. I thought the first couple of times that Luke would play his guitar, but he never does. We talk, or we’re quiet. It feels when we do this as if we are in a different era. But that won’t be happening if it is Bruce and not Luke who is in charge: Bruce locks up and goes home.

  “Oh.” Bruce frowns. “I didn’t know I’d told you about I’m Not Rappaport. The set got a special mention. We were trying to recreate Central Park in the autumn, so we had quite a job with the leaves. And we got the lamppost from the 1975 Broadway production of The Third Man. We needed to change the style, because postwar Vienna lampposts and Central Park lampposts are not quite the same.”

  “No. I don’t suppose they would be.”

  “Although they are not as different as you might expect.”

  “Both black poles with lights on top?”

  “The man who designed the 1930s poles in Vienna was a Swede, Gustav Benriksson, who had died in 1890. The poles were still there because of course, lampposts can far outlive the person who invented them.”

  “Yes.” This is what life will always be like now.

  “But anyway, Olmsted had seen the poles in Vienna and wanted similar ones for Central Park. Of course, a lot of the ones that are in the park wouldn’t do at all for I’m Not Rappaport—we needed the bishop’s-crook-style ones, not the French cherub ones. Some have been saved, you know, by the special effort of the Friends of Cast-Iron Architecture in New York.”

  “Bruce,” says George, appearing from the back. “It is, as ever, a treat to have you here, but you’ve been working all day. Isn’t Luke taking over?”

  “Oh, no. Luke’s got a rehearsal, so he’s working here tomorrow on the day shift, but I am pulling a double shift tonight. It’s fine. I have Esme to keep me company.”

  George looks expressionlessly at me. “That’s good,” he says. “But, Bruce, make sure Esme gets all her book entries done. She has a tendency to hang around and listen to anecdotes instead of working.”

  I HAVE TO go to the midwives to see how I am doing. I have drunk several pints of raspberry-leaf tea since they recommended it for ease of delivery, so I am hoping I am doing fine. Miser
y can’t make any difference now to the baby; it is nearly ready.

  I go into the waiting room, and smile plastically at a pregnant woman who already has a child she has to occupy and entertain. How do you do that when you’re feeling selfish and sad? I won’t be able to do it.

  The child is of course chocolatey and sticky, and comes over to lay a grubby hand on my pristine dove-gray trousers. The woman’s faux-apologetic smile means I know you now have a dirty mark on your trousers but my child is the cutest ever and toddlers will be toddlers and in a way this physical contact with him is putting you in touch with your motherly side, so soon to manifest itself, and in fact by my total lack of discipline, because I will start that when I find him doing cocaine in his room when he’s fourteen, I have enhanced your day.

  I pick up a magazine. It is a baby magazine, naturally, because what else would you care about if you’re in the midwifery center? Famine? The economy? It has more pictures of loving fathers in it. The big beehived air-bound candyfloss lie.

  I am not in a good place.

  The midwife this time is a comforting woman named Melanie who combines competence with warmth. I haven’t met her before.

  “Okay. You’re two centimeters,” she says as she examines me.

  “I’m what?”

  “You’re two centimeters. Your cervix is dilated two centimeters.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re in labor.”

  I take a breath. And another one.

  She smiles. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen right away. You can be a couple of centimeters for a day or so, longer, before labor starts for real.”

  “But soon.”

  “Yeah. Soon.”

  Melanie is taking off her gloves, moving around the little room. I do not move. She looks back and says I can get dressed, so I do.

  “You don’t feel any pain? Around your pelvis or belly or back?”

  I shake my head.

  “Maybe you’re gonna have an easy delivery,” she says. “It might be this weekend. I’m on call Friday, and then it’s Anouska.”

  Anouska is the one who looks like a supermodel. I hope I get Melanie.

  I ARRIVE AT Lamaze class a few minutes early the next day. It is likely to be my last if I am in labor. I should have a partner, because you need one for the breathing and the smiling, but I haven’t got one this week.

  The instructor, even older and cooler than she was the last time, asks me how I am. I decide to tell her, since she is a person who has involved herself in such things all her life, what the midwife has just said. She is nice enough to look excited for me.

  “And now I am just waiting for the pain,” I say.

  When the others come, we get the chairs and sit in a circle as we have done the other times. I am hoping that she will get out the knitted breast I have heard tell of, because I have fairly vague notions of what breastfeeding is all about.

  “Everyone, Esme has some very exciting news,” the instructor says as her opening gambit. She turns to me. “Esme, please share your news with the class.”

  “Er . . . yes . . . er . . .” Doesn’t she understand that I am English, and we don’t do this sort of thing? I feel a deep flush rise up.

  “Go on,” she says, gently prompting.

  Ten faces look expectantly at me. Five men, five women.

  “Apparently I am in labor,” I say. “My clitoris is two centimeters engorged.”

  One of the men puts his face in his hands. His shoulders are shaking. His wife looks incredulously at me. I wonder if I misjudged my American audience, and that they are more squeamish or more easily amused than I thought. The instructor is a study in barely repressed mirth.

  “I think you mean,” she says, “that your cervix is two centimeters dilated.” Alan hiccups into his hands.

  “Yes,” I say, as evenly as I can. “That’s what I mean.”

  I wonder if I have everything for the baby. I have nappies. I have wipes. I have a Moses basket and bedding and a pretty blanket, a car seat but no car. I have little baby outfits that are called onesies, with snaps under the crotch. I have baby socks from the Gap. They are heartbreakingly small. I have a little hat made of turquoise and yellow stripes in stretchy material. I have cardigans, and two pairs of little trousers and two T-shirts. I have black and white and red toys, because babies can’t see colors when they are born, except for red. How does anyone know that? Stella has bought a “flowing rhythm” mobile for it from the Guggenheim, in the prescribed black and red. I have a cheap stroller that is not the pale gray one of my Madison Avenue dreams. Have I missed anything? I do not know. What if something is wrong? What if it all gets messed up and something happens to my baby? What if I can’t bear the pain? What if I die in childbirth? People still do. Does my mother get the baby? Will she be allowed to take an American baby home? I should write a letter saying what I want. A death coda for my birth plan. If I die, perhaps Mitchell will want it, as long as I am not there to be despised. And then Olivia would look after it a lot. What cool attendance that would be.

  MY NEXT SHIFT at The Owl is with Bruce and George again. Luke has already left on his tour. He won’t see the baby for weeks, if it comes on time. The world is even grayer without Luke.

  George still seems to be deep in sorrow at the unappreciative nature of his customers.

  “Were you here for the Anatole France guy? Luke thinks I was an idiot. He wanted leather spines . . . I don’t know. And I had a girl in here before you came in. She wanted some mystery books. ‘What sort of mystery books?’ Any mystery books. Did she have any favorites? No, but she was decorating her apartment, and she thought that mystery books might look cooler than regular novels. I thought of our new directive, and I wasn’t rude to her—I took her to the mystery section. She said she didn’t have time to look for herself—could I just pick some out for her while she went to get her nails done?”

  “And so you said no.”

  “Oh, no,” says George, glimmering a smile. “I picked out all the B’s and all the S’s.”

  Bruce and I start to laugh, and after a minute, so does George. And then the pain comes.

  I lean over onto the counter. It is all over me. I thought it would be focused on my pelvis. Nope. After a couple of minutes, the pain flows away completely, like waves rolling back on a beach.

  George says, “These are contractions? You’re in labor?”

  “I think so.”

  Bruce is standing glued to the spot, his face in a rictus of a smile, his attitude that of a man about to offer to find boiled towels.

  “Have you someone you call?”

  “Stella.”

  “Yes. Give me your phone, I’ll call her.”

  “She’s in the Hamptons for the weekend. I just remembered.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’m not going to make her come back. She was so happy to be going—”

  “She made a commitment—”

  “Which she will keep if I call her. I am not going to. I’ll be all right.”

  “You don’t have a backup?”

  I pause.

  “Stella was my backup. Mitchell was—”

  “Okay. Who else?”

  “I am fine.”

  The pain comes back, another high wave, and again peaks and flows away.

  Another one is going to come, so instead of performing it in the middle of The Owl, I go to the back again, to endure it in private amid the first editions.

  I want to get an awful lot nearer to the hospital than I am now.

  George anticipates me. “Was that another one? Shouldn’t they be more spaced out than this? I think we should get you to the hospital right away. I will come with you.”

  “You said you were allergic to hospitals,” I say.

  “I get a reaction to industrial cleaning agents. I can take it.”

  George stands to hail a cab. I am next to him, my hands on my belly. The cabs fly by.

  “Hide,
” he says. I do, stepping back and blending in with the surge of people. The next cab swerves in to pick him up. George opens the door and I get in first. George gives the address to him instead of naming the hospital. The driver is wise to it, though, and casts a sharp eye on me from his mirror. “Miss, ma’am—are you—?”

  “No, no,” I say, beaming manically at him, “I have weeks and weeks to go. I am going to have triplets. It’s a checkup.”

  We pull back into the traffic and I lie back and have another contraction. I duck below the mirror.

  When there is no contraction, there is no pain. When there is no pain, I feel quite chatty.

  “I’ve got a book called Painless Childbirth. I found it in The Owl,” I say to George.

  “Maybe you should’ve read it.”

  “I did. It’s by Grantly Dick-Read. Isn’t that a great name? It sounds like an adverb. ‘The old man was very courteous and grantly.’ ”

  “You nevertheless seem to be experiencing some pain.”

  “It says painless childbirth is all about relaxing, about not believing there’s any pain involved. Oh . . .” The new wave of pain is much worse. The wave is like one of those impossible breakers you see in films, and I feel like the tiny dinghy out there by mistake. When it goes, there is scarcely any relief before the next one. I start to believe I am going to have the baby in the cab.

  I have learned how to breathe, I have learned how to concentrate. I should be able to do this.

  We pull up at the hospital, and George helps me, and in what seems like two seconds I am in a birthing room that looks like a hotel suite. I have refused to let George come in with me, to his intense and evident relief.

  The midwife comes in. She is wearing high leopard-skin-print boots and a short skirt. She looks exactly like Michelle Pfeiffer.

  “Hi, Esme, we met, didn’t we? I’m Anouska. I will just go to change and then we will deliver your baby. This is Hilda. She will stay with you.”

  “I want the drugs,” I say. “I want the drugs.”

  But she has gone, and Hilda does not react.

  Anouska comes back in. She’s changed the slinky clothes and leopard-print boots for a green gown and white rubber clogs. She still looks gorgeous.