“Let me in, Esme.”
I draw back the bolt, turn the latch, open the door. Absurdly, we are looking at each other now with our phones to our ears. The corridor is all light, in here is all dark.
He is fully and formally dressed, and he looks impeccable. I’m in a nightshirt. We stand in silence, facing each other, the muted glow from the street our only light.
“Are you drunk?” I ask him.
He stretches his mouth in his smile that is not one. “What do you think?” he asks. I have never seen him even close to being drunk. I think he can’t loosen that cold grip on reality, on himself.
“How did you know I was at that restaurant?” he asks.
I don’t know what he means, for a second, and he adds, impatiently, “With Beeky. Today, Esme. How did you know I was there?”
“I didn’t.”
“Yeah, right. Sixty-third and Lexington is naturally where you would be.”
“I was just walking with the baby, so that she would sleep. Blame fate.”
His smile becomes even more wry. “I do.”
The seconds go by. I notice the multifarious dots of color in the blackness, the grain of the dark. I can’t read his silence. Is it regret, need, pain, love? To think of his walking forward, catching me in his arms, feeling his kiss, is almost to swoon with want. I think of moving to him instead, holding his face in my hands, trying to make him believe that it doesn’t constitute failure to admit need. But then he will despise my own. So I don’t move. We neither of us move.
After many minutes, I fold my arms, and look out to the lit windows on the opposite side of Broadway, and say, “Do you want to see Georgie? It must have been a shock, before.”
“No,” he says. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” I say, and although I know that nobody gets to be the tiniest bit cruel to Mitchell without an instant reprisal, I add, with a tiny spurt of venom, “Well, if that’s all, I really need to be getting back to bed.”
When he goes, when he is gone, I will be desolate. And here I am, pushing him to go. But there is only another kind of desolation in wait for me if he stays. With either choice, the high places will still come down to smoke and ash.
“Sure,” he says instantly. “Yes, you should go back to bed. Are you eating properly?”
“I think so,” I say.
“It’s just that I’ve never seen you look so—I don’t know. Swallowed up. That’s how you look. Swallowed up. Consumed.”
“Why did you come?” I ask him.
“I have no idea,” he says. “I’m going to go, I made a mistake.”
He opens the door and looks back at me quietly. “I guess I just followed my heart.”
“Your what?” I say.
He nods. “Nice, Esme. Very nice,” he says, and then he is gone.
THE NEXT DAY, I go into a card shop to buy a card for my mother’s birthday. A middle-aged woman is in there, chatting to the owner. Georgie starts to cry, that plaintive lamb-bleat of the baby animal for milk.
“That’s a newborn,” she says. “I can always tell.”
I smile a thin, tired smile. She comes over to me and grips my arm, her face all benevolence.
“It goes so fast,” she says, “and the first year with your new baby goes fastest of all. Everyone knows that. Blink and you miss it.”
There is the sound of a tiny snap in the universe. I am the only one to hear it. “Blink and I miss it?” I say. “Really? No. Blink and I open my eyes and I am half a second further on than I was half a second ago. Blink and I still have nobody to talk to, nobody to help me, nobody to take her for twenty seconds so that—”
The women are staring at me; I have broken the covenant. I rush out of the store and head home.
Now, it is just me and Georgie.
All the books say she will sleep a lot, but she hasn’t read any of them. She sleeps twenty minutes in the mornings, if I am lucky. If I tiptoe away her eyes flick open as if she’s a dozing jailer, and she cries for me to come back. I lie on the bed with my back to her, reading Shackleton’s Boat Journey. Shackleton’s men are cold and lost, and so am I. The book has nothing at all to do with babies. Reading it is a snub to Georgie that obscurely pleases me, and makes me feel obscurely guilty.
Often we play. I feel like someone in a picture book of good motherhood, acting a part. Peekaboo! How big is Georgie? So-o-o-o big! Round and round the garden. Round and round the apartment.
Then, on the news, on New York One, they say that a girl has thrown her baby out of a tenth-story window of an apartment on 112th Street. She is sixteen, Hispanic, Catholic, two hundred yards away from me. I weep for her baby, but I weep more for the mother, for all the years in front of her that will be saturated with regret. The weeping helps nobody.
The local priest is on television, saying that the girl and her family live in an apartment right next to the church. “She could have left it on the steps,” he is saying, his face lined with other people’s pain. The cameras still roll as he says it over and over again, softly, racked by the girl’s wild despair. “She could have left the child on the steps.”
I can help neither the girl nor her baby. All I can do is get out of this, stop being the person still in a dressing gown at three in the afternoon, drowning in self-pity.
I choose a better journey out with Georgie. This one is to go down to Battery Park. I will hold Georgie up and show her the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of her nation.
I put Georgie in the pushchair, and take two Ezra Jack Keats board books with me, because nobody has a word to say against him, and as little as she is, she can see the colors or the shapes, and they seem to tire her out. Apparently being a newborn baby in New York City is as nothing compared to the exhausting qualities of Ezra Jack Keats. We get to Battery Park, and look out past the Victorian railings and the lamppost that Bruce would probably know the history of, to the sparkling Atlantic, and to Liberty herself, her arm holding her lamp aloft, to guide safely into harbor the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Or that was the idea.
Georgie has fallen asleep. I am almost alone now, for a few minutes.
Spaced out along the promenade are patient fishermen, their long poles at low angles out towards the sea. Behind them corporate America looms high in steel and glass, and they are turning their backs on it, looking out to the sea instead, knowing that the dreams that are built of sand and glass are not their dreams. They are quiet; some nod as I go by, and they seem—not radiant, not excited, but contented.
One old man, an old black man in a pale gray Gap sweatshirt and jeans, is working at a table, filleting a fish. I stop a moment with the stroller, so that I can watch and be near the contentment.
He notices me after a while.
“Ever eaten mackerel?” he asks.
I nod.
“Ever seen one fresh caught?”
I shake my head. He stoops down to a white plastic bin, and takes out another fish. He holds it out to me. I don’t really want to touch it, but I take it from him. It is shining in the morning sun, light rainbows over it. Its weight suits it; it is heavy with a sorrowful, peculiar beauty.
The man shows me the gills and the fins and the black pool of an eye.
“Ever seen one gutted?” He is taking it away from me, placing it with a kind of eager reverence on the plastic table.
The knife pierces the taut skin, into the flesh. He slices quickly, superbly. Two mackerel fillets are now lying on the table, and the carcass is folded in three, like a letter, then wrapped in newspaper. He offers me the knife.
“Want to try?”
Yes. Holding the knife, and the beautiful fish cold under my warm, sunlit hand. The old man shows me just where to cut, how to cut. “Just above the backbone, in and further . . . slice, don’t saw . . . you can feel the way the knife feels when you do it properly, so that you know it is right.”
When it is done, raggedly, he takes back the knife and slices some off the fillet. He holds ou
t the bit of raw fish to me.
“I couldn’t—it’s not cooked.”
“It’s fresh, it’s fine,” he says, and I take it and eat it. I look down at Georgie sleeping, at the perfect curve of her perfect cheek.
There must be a million, a trillion actions like this every hour, these little tiny acts of kindness that we don’t notice, that prove our altruism, the generosity that is in us all. We fetch our being from love, giving or receiving it. All else is beggarly.
After that, it feels different. When we get home after the visit to the fishermen, I lie down on the bed with her, and this time I turn my body to her and feed her until she is asleep. I sleep too.
I find over the next few days that acceptance is the way to go. You have to bend your mind around from the path it has always taken to a path where your own direction does not matter. You are there for someone else. It is easier if you don’t struggle against that, if you simply bow your head down to it, acquiesce, comply, love.
IT IS A warm afternoon in late August, so warm that I think of a summer afternoon in England, and wish I were in a garden, with glasses of wine and tinkling voices and flowers. Here there are rules about drinking alcohol outside, so even in the little green squares, even in Central Park, nobody drinks, unless they drink beer in paper bags, and that’s not the kind of party I am missing.
I decide to walk with Georgie down to the bookshop. Whoever is on the shift, the reception for us both is assured; even Bruce has tentatively taken it upon himself to hold Georgie in his arms.
George’s initial conviction that I could work at the store while Ideal Baby slept on a blanket behind the transport section has been busted by the arrival of Real Baby, who proves resistant to sleeping bouts of longer than eight minutes when she is out anywhere, and whom I could not possibly leave in a public place, despite the fact that there are tumbleweeds blowing through The Owl’s transport section.
I put Georgie in her stroller and walk all the way. The sun is still warm; it feels wonderful out here. And I don’t move like an old bag lady anymore. I fairly spring along.
When we get there Mary is on a shift, which means Bridget the German shepherd is here, which means it is even less likely that Georgie will sleep. George is on the computer upstairs entering books into the system. He comes down to say hello to his namesake.
I put her in Mary’s arms. I want to go and get some tea. I get a sense of weightlessness from giving her up, and a sense of both freedom and immediate yearning.
George looks down at her.
“I’ve never held a baby,” he remarks.
“If you sit down, you can hold one now,” says Mary. He sits down and Mary teaches him how to hold her, how to support her head. George holds her awkwardly and reverently, like an offering to the gods.
I slip outside to buy the tea. It is the first time I have not been the person solely responsible for her since my mother left, an eternity ago. I have about five minutes. It is five minutes of freedom.
When I come back, after three minutes instead of five, because the freedom is shot through with anxiety, Luke is standing outside the store. He is looking through the window at George holding my daughter.
He looks for a long time. He senses that I am there after a while, and turns around.
“Hey.” He looks back through the window. “That’s her?”
“Yes. Georgie.”
He nods. Then he steps forward and opens the door for me. She is placid in George’s arms. Luke comes in too and sits on the counter. He bends down to her.
“Hi, Georgie,” he says. She stares at him for a long moment with her big round eyes, and suddenly answers his smile with her own. I think her smile is like the sun coming out, but then I would. Luke laughs.
“The birth was okay?” he says to me.
“Yes. Do you want the details?”
“Nope.” He waves an airy hand. “I can see it all worked out fine.”
“Yes. It was easy peasy.”
“Oh, yeah,” says George, “it was easy peasy all right. I was down the hall, and she was in a soundproofed room, and I could still hear the screams.”
“You poor thing,” I say. “That you had to endure my pain.”
“It was extremely difficult,” says George. “Mary, would you like to go with me to Big Nick’s for a vegetarian pizza?”
Mary says yes, on the condition that Bridget gets to go too.
“That means we will have to sit outside,” he says.
“It’s a nice evening,” says Mary.
“It’s going to rain,” says George.
“It’s not going to rain,” Mary and I say in unison.
Once they have gone, we have a run of customers. Some of the customers are regulars and so want to see Georgie. She behaves with great equanimity to all of them, including Barney, who seems delighted with her, and asks if he can hold her.
“She’s a beautiful child,” he says, when she is in his arms. “Like her mother. Seriously, you look great. You won’t be without a guy for long. She’s radiant, right, Luke?”
He looks down at Georgie.
“So, has this guy seen his daughter?”
Luke shakes his head at him, less in reply than to make him stop.
“He is missing out on the pinnacle of life, Luke, that’s all I mean. That’s all. I’m not about to go after him for child support.”
“Let it go, Barney.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “He hasn’t really seen her, Barney. I did bump into him, but he barely glanced at her.”
“Poor guy,” says Barney. “Poor guy. Daddy is fucked up, isn’t he, baby?”
Luke puts his face in his hands, laughing.
“What is it now?” says Barney.
When I feel the milk come in, I scoop her up and take her upstairs to the old, taut leather chair. I feed her up there, where once upon a time I listened to Luke’s Negro Folk Music of Alabama volume 5, where once I rang up the doctor because I thought I was losing her, where a few weeks ago she was still inside me.
I don’t know if it is possible to feed your baby with your own milk and not find out something new about love. Love is a giving, an outpouring—an outpouring that refills itself by the fact of its own emptying.
Barney sprints up the stairs to say good-bye. When he has gone, Luke calls up to ask if I want a beer.
I bring Georgie to the top of the stairs, and say that I can’t.
“Esme. You’ve had the baby.”
“I know—it’s the breast-feeding. But I’d have a ginger beer with you.”
“Yeah. Can you come down and look after the front? I will go over and get something.”
I come downstairs with Georgie as he leaves. It is dark now outside, and it is raining.
DeeMo bursts in. “Fuck that weather, man,” he says, to whoever is here. “It’s like, the sun’s shining, sky’s blue, then it’s dark and there’s a fucking thunderstorm. Fucking August.” He rubs his hair to dry it.
“Hi, DeeMo.”
He stops dead. A customer comes up from the back with a pile of plays, and I try to look in the flyleaf of each one with one hand. DeeMo sits down in the second chair, wipes his hands on his T-shirt.
“Give that little one to me,” he says.
I do. While I finish serving the customer, he gives her a finger to hold, and she clutches it. Her fingers are tiny, an apricot blush against his dark brown skin.
“You need moisturizer,” I say. “Your skin is cracking.”
“That’s not all I need, sugar.”
I tell DeeMo her name. He nods.
“Yeah. You call her after George because of what he did for Dennis?”
“Yes, after George, and after Georgia O’Keeffe, the painter,” I say. Then I say, “What he did for Dennis? What do you mean?”
“He paid for his funeral. I mean, cremation. The basic kind. So that there are ashes.”
Luke comes back in in a hurry, all wet as well.
“It’s raining like cr
azy out there,” he says. “I hope Mary and George abandoned Bridget.”
“George paid for a funeral for Dennis?”
Luke looks completely blank. “News to me.”
“He did,” DeeMo says. “Well, he said Dennis paid for it hisself. Said Dennis brought in a book, a first edition, that was worth like eight hundred bucks, and so that paid for a cremation. George has the ashes. He told me.”
Luke says, “Dennis did bring in a first of A Moveable Feast. It hasn’t sold, though, it’s still upstairs.”
“George gave him a hundred dollars for that book,” I say. Luke shrugs.
“George is a good man,” says DeeMo.
We are all quiet. Georgie is struggling against sleep in DeeMo’s arms. She is milk-drunk. A milk-drunk baby is a sight to see. We all watch her as she struggles to stay awake, and her eyelids fall, flutter open, fall again. I wonder if she can tell it is not me, that the arms around her are not my arms.
“I’ll have her back, if you’re not comfortable?”
DeeMo looks back at me. He must be remembering the hand sanitizer, my anxiety.
“I’m comfortable,” he says. “You okay?”
I am. I look out again at the street. The rain is falling. This is the way to go, through the good people, through George, and Luke, Stella, Barney, the mackerel man, DeeMo.
I watch Luke as he shifts a little in his chair to get more comfortable, until it fits his back. I’ve seen him do it a thousand times, now, settling down into a space and getting comfortable in it. He catches me looking as he does it, and gives me a funny little frown at my recognition. This moment feels like an abiding one; the past and the future are contained inside it, and it feels like a homecoming. As if all comes to this and the future unfurls from this.
Georgie is asleep, and we sit without speaking. We did this in the winter, Luke and I, drinking beers at night when it was raining. Before Georgie, before anything. We are listening to the music, as we did then, and looking out again from our glowing little jewel of a shop to the drenching summer rain, which washes all things new.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish first to thank Phil Meyler, who gave to this book countless days of kind scrutiny, and next to thank Isobel, Katie and Hero Meyler, who have graciously put up with many an hour of benevolent neglect. I am very grateful to Linda Yeatman, for her discerning rigor and warm encouragement. Many thanks to Siobhan Garrigan, whose good offices helped me to an agent, and to those who have read this book and/or helped to make writing a less lonely occupation: Anna King, Allen Michie, Dan Pool, Sinead Garrigan-Mattar, Angela Tilby, Charlie Mattar, Chris Scanlan, Ian Patterson, Anne Malcolm, Martin Bond, Harry Percival, Ray Franks, Debbie Ford, Phillip Mallett, Christine McCrum, Meg Tait, Dorian Thornley, Simone Brenneis, Mary Steel, Tara O’Connor, Miranda Landgraf, David Theaker, Bruce Eder, Jo Wroe, Graham Pechey, Charlotte Tarrant, Leila Vignal, Alexis Tadié and Anthony Mellors. Thanks too to Dorian and Bryan of Westsider Books, whose bookshop on Broadway and 80th Street bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to The Owl, living or dead. . . .
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