by Amy Meyerson
“My dear friends and humble companions, I bid you adieu.” Dr. Howard bowed and sauntered out, leaving Malcolm and me alone.
“Never a dull day when Dr. Howard is around,” Malcolm said.
“Have you read it?” I flashed the cover in Malcolm’s direction.
Malcolm shuddered. “It was my mom’s favorite book. Imagine my horror as a teenager when I realized what it was about.”
“Your mom must have been a liberated woman.”
Malcolm shuddered again. “Please don’t use the words liberated and my mom in the same sentence again.”
Malcolm put down the duster and gestured he’d be right back as he disappeared into the kitchen. I took advantage of my time alone and searched the literary and feminist fiction sections. There weren’t any used copies of the novel there.
“Looking for something?” Malcolm asked, returning with two mugs.
“Just browsing,” I said. He handed me a mug. It was filled with a few fingers of amber liquid.
“I need a drink if we’re going to talk about my mother.” He sat down at one of the empty tables in the café. “Billy always kept a bottle of Scotch in the kitchen for slow afternoons.”
I held my mug up to him. “‘Hugo, I don’t much care for your law, but, by golly, this bourbon is good.’” Malcolm stared blankly at me. “It’s a Truman quote, something he said to Hugo Black.” He continued to appear as dumbfounded as one of my students, like history was as abstract as calculus, as dull as grammar, as irrelevant as Latin. “The Supreme Court Justice? Of the United States?” I buried my face in my hands, dismayed.
“You’re a little strange, aren’t you?” Malcolm teased.
“Have to be to teach middle school.”
“To be a bookseller, too.” Malcolm put down his mug and laid his hands flat on the table. “I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here. That’s my fault. It’s just...when you showed up at the store, it all became real. Realer, anyway.” He sounded sincere, like he really believed that the first time he saw me was when I arrived at the store, like he really didn’t remember locking eyes with me at Billy’s funeral. But his mouth twitched nervously; his shoulders tensed as he retreated inside himself. There was still this wall around him. And if it wasn’t secrecy, I didn’t know what else it could be.
My phone buzzed, and Malcolm and I watched Jay’s name flash across the screen. I quickly silenced it. The Scotch was strong, and I stifled a cough. Malcolm held the Scotch in his mouth before swallowing. “I bet your boyfriend’s eager to have you back?”
“He’s happy for a little time to himself.” I wasn’t sure why I said that, why I didn’t want Malcolm to know how serious Jay and I were. “How’d you get out of talking about your mother?”
“I’d hoped you forgot.”
“I don’t forget anything,” I said, not quite sure what I meant. Malcolm turned away, understanding nonetheless. “Your mom’s in LA?”
“No, the Bay Area, where I grew up. My dad works at Berkeley. They split up when I was little, but we stayed nearby. She wanted me to have a relationship with him. She tried, anyway.” There was a longer story there, one Malcolm wasn’t about to tell. Still, it was more than he’d said to me before. Maybe what I saw as secrecy was merely the fact that we didn’t know each other.
“How’d you end up down here? I thought everyone from Northern California hated LA,” I said.
“I like the east side. I could take or leave the rest of LA.”
“And Prospero Books?”
“Started in college. Going on ten years, next month.” Malcolm drank steadily from his mug. “It’s surreal to think we could close, but it’s happened with a lot of neighborhood staples.” Malcolm listed the old hamburger stand that was now a brick oven pizzeria, the donut shop famous for its chess matches now a derelict storefront, the gay bar once the site of protests now a fine foods and mixology bar. “But you can’t fight change.”
“Sure we can,” I said, and Malcolm glanced over at me, his incandescent eyes somewhere between dubious and hopeful. “I meant what I said. Even if I can’t keep the store, I don’t want it to close. We don’t owe anything until the end of September. That gives us a little time.” I’d already be a month into school by then, but with the help of Malcolm and Elijah, I could finalize a sale from the other side of the country.
“If we can get the sales up, there’re a few people I can approach. A few people Billy may have been okay with...” His voice trailed off. He bit his lower lip, focusing all of his attention on his now-empty glass. “He was my best friend. Pretty pathetic, I know.” He steadied his breath. I wondered what his eyes would look like with tears in them, if they would become vast pools of blue, warm lakes you could swim in. “I knew he was sick. He never talked about it, but when you spend every day with someone, you know when something’s wrong.”
When you spend every day with someone, you know when they’re carrying the past with them, too.
“Billy really never mentioned me?” I grew completely still in anticipation of what he might say.
He shook his head subtly and my stomach sank. We’d spoken about his mother, his parents’ separation. Still, Malcolm wasn’t ready to open up to me about Billy. Then again, I’d lied about Jay. I hadn’t told Malcolm about the scavenger hunt, either. Maybe I didn’t tell Malcolm because he would have seen it as an ulterior motive, one that made my desire to save the store less sincere. Or maybe he would have wanted to help me solve the clues, to take some part of the quest away from me. Or maybe it was that he had a whole relationship with Billy, filled with details of Billy’s life I could never know. Maybe I wanted to know Billy in a way he never could, too.
I reached out and poured Malcolm another mug of whiskey.
“Prospero Books won’t close,” I promised him. “We won’t let it.” We sat like that, drinking and making vows to each other that we couldn’t keep, hiding the truths we should have told each other.
* * *
It was dark outside by the time Malcolm left, making the bright interior of Prospero Books almost Technicolor. At night, when the store was no longer a place of business, no longer failing, it became what it had been to me as a child. A library. A collection of stories, with endless possibilities that belonged exclusively to me.
There weren’t any used copies of Fear of Flying in feminist fiction or literary, so I checked poetry, in case someone assumed that since Isadora Wing and Erica Jong were both poets, the novel belonged with other writers who labored over the rhythm of a line. No Jong there; I searched banned fiction instead. Despite the controversy the novel had stirred, it wasn’t stacked with Tropic of Cancer and Lolita. I checked nonfiction, in case someone had forgotten that, as human as Isadora Wing was, she wasn’t real. The only two copies of the novel were the ones I’d already found—one in literature, one in feminist fiction—but the shelves weren’t the only place we stored books.
The windowless storage room smelled intensely musty, an intoxicating smell I would associate with Prospero Books long after I left. Feminist fiction was located in the back of the closet. Sure enough, there was one used copy of Fear of Flying sandwiched between The Second Sex and The Golden Notebook.
The novel’s cover captured a slice of a woman’s naked body, the bottom of her voluminous breast, suggestive without being explicit. I peeked down at my own chest deflated beneath my T-shirt. I’d never be sexy in that lush feminine way.
Tucked inside the back cover, an envelope harbored page after page of faded blue ink.
June 6, 1986
Billy,
I drove to your house yesterday to apologize. You were home. Through the kitchen window, I could see you at the stove, leaning over a frying pan as you cooked eggs. You always worried you would burn them. If anything, your eggs were always undercooked. I suppose that’s symbolic of our time together, but I’ll resist my writer
ly urge to make your cooking failures poetic. I watched you for twenty-two minutes. I timed it on my clock. Each time the minutes rolled over I said to myself, When it rolls over again, you will go, you will knock on the door, you will apologize. I never made it out of the car.
I suppose I should apologize for everything. What we did was wrong. I knew that from the first time we fucked on your living room floor, perhaps even earlier when I felt the first trace of lust for you. The lust was real, but it was just that. Desire. Desire for you, desire for Daniel, desire for us to share our pain. Our grief is separate. It will never unite us.
Although we were wrong, there was something fundamentally right about what we did. You helped me take the necessary steps not only in my memoir but in coming to terms with Daniel’s death. Did I tell you Daniel committed suicide? We came together because of our beloveds’ deaths, yet we never told each other what happened to them, why we blamed ourselves. I was the one to find Daniel. I didn’t know he owned a gun. We’d lived together for ten years, and somewhere, beneath the bed, in a box in the closet, in his desk, somewhere the bullets had lived with us. His death wasn’t my fault. I understand this now. I believe it. Evelyn’s death wasn’t your fault, either. You have to believe this, if you ever want to move on.
Knowing you has been a great kindness in my life. You will survive this. We both will. And once we have, I’m certain we will see each other again.
Your friend,
Sheila
Or more precisely, your friend you used to fuck, Sheila. It shouldn’t have surprised me that there were women after Evelyn. Billy was still young when Evelyn died, good-looking and strong. Of course there were other women. He was grieving but still alive. Despite the other women, despite Sheila and their affair, his grief persisted and morphed into guilt. Evelyn’s death wasn’t your fault. Even if it was common to blame yourself after your partner died, Sheila’s words struck me as extreme. You have to believe this, as if Billy couldn’t see a way around his culpability, as if he was certain he was responsible for Evelyn’s death.
The letter said “writerly,” so I dashed downstairs, hoping to find Sheila amid the other writers of Prospero Books. My phone rang as I barreled down the stairs, hitting me with a wave of guilt when I saw who it was.
“I’m right in the middle of something,” I said, picking up.
“Well, hello to you, too,” Jay slurred.
“Isn’t it, like, two in the morning there?” I skipped across the store to the desk area and clicked the mouse, waking the computer from its coma.
“What, you’re suddenly my mother?” It was a tone I hadn’t heard him use before. It was a tone I didn’t want to hear him use again.
“Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ll call you when I get up.” I opened Booklog and typed “Sheila” into the author slot, waiting as the system searched for the right name.
“I want to talk now. Not everything gets to be on your terms,” Jay spat.
“Jay, you’re drunk.” The computer made a soft grunting noise, as if it was annoyed with me for putting it to work.
“So?”
“So let’s talk tomorrow when you’re not drunk.” I clicked the mouse multiple times to get it to go faster.
“Did you buy your ticket home yet?”
“In the seven hours since we last spoke?” Fortunately, Sheila wasn’t a common name, at least not for writers. Booklog listed a handful of writers named Sheila. I started to scroll through them.
“Why don’t you want to come home?”
“Why are being so intense about me coming back? It’s not like you aren’t going out with the fellas every night.” I scrolled through the list of names.
“I have to stay home in order for you to know I miss you?”
“Jay, I’m right in the middle of—”
“Are you fucking him?”
I turned away from the screen. “What? Who?”
“Malcolm.” Jay was too drunk to remember Malcolm’s name, yet there it was, the clearest thing he’d said during our short, muddled conversation.
“Don’t be a child.”
“There must be some reason you aren’t rushing home.”
“What’s wrong with you? I’m not rushing home because of my uncle. What don’t you get about that?” I hung up before he could respond. Part of me wanted him to call back, so we could fight about Billy, about Malcolm, but Jay was probably already passed out across the bed, jeans bunched around his ankles. Maybe all guys were like that when they were drunk and spurned, but I couldn’t imagine Malcolm with his jeans around his ankles. At least not because he was passed out drunk.
Outside, night had settled into the evening hours where the otherwise sleepy store filled with random chatter of merrymakers walking between bars on Sunset. I kept hearing the way Jay said Malcolm, enunciating each syllable like he’d practiced the name many times, and it made me want to scream, drowning out the voices that had drifted into the quiet store. I willed myself to stop thinking about Jay, about Malcolm, refocusing my energy on the task at hand. I swiftly cross-checked the list of nine Sheilas, checking ages and biographies, isolating two Sheilas who were the right age to have had an affair with Billy in 1986. The letter was written a few months after John Cook’s convention, so Evelyn had been dead at least three months, possibly over two years. How long had Billy been mourning at that point? There were two Sheilas who might have known. Only one had a memoir titled Daniel.
Sheila Crowley had books in literature and in memoir. Daniel was about her husband, his bipolar depression. Her writing was evocative, hypnotic. I didn’t want to witness Sheila’s optimism when Daniel started taking medication, nor the inevitable day when he abandoned the pills. But I couldn’t stop reading. I read until the sidewalks emptied and the darkness dissipated, softening to dawn. The diners and coffee shops hadn’t opened yet. Outside, everything was still.
Sheila found Daniel on their bathroom floor, gun in hand.
The gates rolled up across the street at Sunset Junction. Baristas wiped down the tables lining the sidewalk.
Sheila stood at Daniel’s graveside, withdrawn from a crowd of friends who otherwise hadn’t made it into her memoir. She imagined that her isolation felt similar to the loneliness Daniel always experienced, even with her.
On the back of the memoir, Sheila’s long hair framed her narrow face in a black-and-white photograph. She stared unapologetically at the camera, her frankness saying, This is me. I’m not going to try to make you like me. It made me like her. It made her seem familiar somehow.
I carried the memoir to the desk and found Sheila’s website. It listed seven novels she had written, three memoirs including one that had just been published. Her headshot had been updated. Sheila was plumper now and older, better preserved in the portrait than in life, but I recognized her from the funeral with her arm around Dr. Howard, swaying as they belted an Irish hymn.
I reread the passage John Cook had given me, the words that had led me to Sheila. Whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. At some point, Billy had learned to survive his grief, his guilt. And Sheila must have known how. She must have known what happened to Evelyn, too.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Do you know Sheila Crowley?” I asked Malcolm the next morning while he was filing books from a shipment that had recently been delivered.
“Sure.” He wiped his hands together, casting off the dust that had collected from the cardboard box. When he looked up at me, I self-consciously brushed my hair, embarrassed as though he knew Jay and I had been fighting about him, as though he knew I’d imagined him with his pants around his ankles.
“Do you know how I could get in touch with her?”
“She’s in New York.” Malcolm reached into his back pocket for an X-Acto knife, flipped over the box and cut the tape that held the bottom together. “Or San Francisco, I’m not sure. She’s on a
book tour. She’ll be back by the fourteenth. We’re hosting a book launch party for her.”
“The fourteenth of July?” That was two and a half weeks away. “She won’t be back until then?”
“It’s the middle of the summer. People are in and out.”
And they were. Ray the screenwriter hadn’t been in in over a week. Even Dr. Howard hadn’t turned up that morning. His books still covered his table, but he wasn’t around for me to quiz him on Sheila Crowley.
“Why do you need to talk to her so badly?” Malcolm asked.
I fidgeted with the seam of my shirt. “No reason.”
Malcolm continued to break down the box, unfazed by my evasiveness. It was an uneven matchup, my desire to know his secrets versus his disinterest in mine. My phone buzzed, and I snuck outside to answer it.
I said hello like I was answering a telemarketer’s call. The morning was still cool, the sidewalks littered with parents and infants, too early for anyone childless to be out.
“It must have been pretty bad if you’re answering like that,” Jay said.
“Is that an apology?” I was angrier than I’d realized.
“Come on, I wasn’t that bad.”
“I thought you didn’t remember.” I skirted out of the way of two women powerwalking with their strollers.
“Of course I remember. You hung up on me.”
“Because you were being an asshole.” One of the women turned toward me, rebuking me with her eyes as though her child could hear me. I glared back. I’m sure the child had heard worse.
“I was being an asshole, wasn’t I?” Jay had his cute voice on. I wasn’t falling victim to it.
“You accused me of sleeping with the manager.” I wasn’t sure how Malcolm’s name would sound if I said it aloud, what Jay would interpret in my tone.
