The Bookstore (14 page)

I look up to the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away. I will ask if I can put some outside for a dollar, free up some space. It is not going to help very much economically, and thinking about what to do
with old books is not enough to obscure unrequited love, but it is a start.

As I am staring at old Tom Clancy spines, the door opens and Mitchell comes in. He looks all around, indulgent and rather bewildered, as a stockbroker might look at a children’s birthday party.

“Cute,” he says. “I brought you a present.”

He puts my shoe on the counter. I swallow the impulse to ask where it was.

“Can I talk to you? We have to resolve this.”

We don’t. It’s resolved. I’m resolved. Do not talk to me, do not touch me, do not persuade me.

“I can’t really talk here,” I say in a low voice, to give the impression that there are hidden depths to the shop, where browsers lurk unseen.

Mitchell looks down the aisle, up at the mezzanine, and steps forward to check the right aisle.

“Not in front of the cockroaches?”

“There are no cockroaches,” I say. “There are customers. Not at this moment, but there were some, there will be some.”

As Mitchell smirks, Providence very obligingly sends me a customer, a woman who asks if we have any Helmut Newton. I have to ask who he is, which makes Mitchell shoot a glance of amusement at the woman, but she does not notice. I send her to the ordinary photography section while I check the expensive ones upstairs, searching especially diligently, to give me time to calm down. No Helmut Newton, but she has found other things she likes, so she might stay for a bit.

“Isn’t anyone else here, who can cover?”

“Only Dennis, outside, and he’s a homeless alcoholic,” I say. I think this sounds very funny, especially as I, his coworker, am illegal and pregnant, so I add, “We were both headhunted by the same company.”

Mitchell doesn’t laugh. He says slowly, “A homeless alcoholic?”
and looks around again, this time as if there is a bad smell. “I am not sure I like you working here.”

“In that case I’ll resign immediately.”

“I’m serious.”

I laugh up at him. “I know.”

“Let’s talk tonight. I’ll meet you at your apartment. Let’s figure this out.”

“I can talk, Mitchell—”

“That’s for sure.”

“—but I can’t do what you want me to do. I can’t.”

Mitchell makes a gesture of acquiescence to that. I agree to meet him later, after I’ve finished my studying for the night. He is clearly not pleased at taking third place to the bookshop and school, but I can’t see a way around it. He leaves looking stony; two seconds later he sticks his head back in.

“Your homeless guy?”

“Yes?”

“He just took ten dollars for a pile of books from some guy and walked off downtown.”

AFTER MY SHIFT
at the bookshop, I go to the Avery Library and settle down for some real work. It is difficult to get to at the moment, but once I am in it, it is almost like being in a bower. Because the critics say that Thiebaud is in the grand tradition that Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin exemplifies, I have a look at Chardin and for the first time, I wonder if I was right to settle so early on Thiebaud. I thought I was being directed towards some staid old pictures from three hundred years ago that it would be hard to find the merit of with modern eyes, but instead, I am moved to tears. To look at his water glass, or his strawberry basket, is like feeling the sun on your face; it is to be filled with rapture. I want to know if I can locate the rapture; why do these paintings make me happy, why do I want to cry?

Becoming enraptured makes me late, and when I finally get to my building it is quarter past nine, fifteen minutes after I said I would meet Mitchell. He is in the lobby, sitting in the only chair. There is that shock of pleasure, which all the rationalizing about how he is Bad for Me will not dispel. Then fear stirs and moves in me, like a cat woken from its sleep. Can he bewitch me into what he wants?

I start to apologize for being late. He holds up the palms of his hands. “I come in peace,” he says.

We go up the stairs to my apartment, and he stands in the center of the room. “Esme,” he says, “how did we get here?”

I can only think of flippant replies, so I keep quiet. He spreads his hands out.

“For me, it is about making the right decisions at the right time. This might be the right decision if we stay together, Esme, but now? If we go ahead with this now, we’ll never know whether we would have been together without this.”

I go over to the sink, reach for a glass, and fill it with water from the tap. He comes closer. I am not thirsty; I simply want to make something else happen in the room. I leave the water on and it surges, foaming, from the tap. As I watch it, I wonder if the fact that I have introduced a new thing into a closed room means all the other atoms are closer together now. Have I increased the pressure, when I wanted to release it? Only by the volume of a column of tap water. There is a Larkin poem:
If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water.
Cleanse me, wash away my sin, wash away my desire.

“Esme!”

I jump. I offer him the glass, the chalice; he shakes his head, impatient.

“Tap water. I want to have you in my life as a matter of choice, Esme. I don’t like being constrained to it.”

“You’re not being constrained to it.”

“You’re forcing a connection between us.”

“That connection is made whether we like it or not,” I say.

He whirls away from me, as if we are in a movie.

“You slept with me yesterday so that I would be easier to persuade,” I say.

“You’re wrong,” he says, looking out of the window.

“Then why?”

He shrugs. “I wanted to? I thought I wanted to? Why did you do it?”

“I wanted to.”

“Okay. So no harm done.”

Being pregnant tires you out as much as jet lag does. Sleep becomes a craving; if you could buy it, pregnant women would steal money to get it. I am desperate to lie down. I can see my bed through the doorway, and I want to lie on it. I want Mitchell to go away. I sit down on the sofa and then, because it is too tempting despite the big drama, I curl up on it, with a cushion under my head. If I am tired, then the baby might be tired. I must rest myself to rest it.

When he turns back to me, his chin is up and his eyes are closed, as if he is trying to work out the irrationality of the person he is dealing with.

“I had no idea that you were pro-life. Are you religious?”

“No,” I say, “I am just sleepy.” I don’t feel like fighting my corner, explaining that pro-choice doesn’t mean pro-abortion, pleading that I just can’t do it, apologizing to him for keeping the baby.

“I know you’re tired,” he says. “But we need to get this figured out. I don’t
want
a baby, Esme.”

I say, to his trousers, because he is still standing, “You needn’t worry about it, you don’t have to have a baby. You needn’t see it as anything to do with you. The connection doesn’t have to be a big deal. You needn’t worry about either of us—me or the baby. I am not planning to turn up on your doorstep wearing a shawl, with a babe in arms.”

He crouches down, puts a hand on my shoulder. His hand is big and warm and heavy. I wish it were there to protect me and the baby, instead of to sever us. “My family,” he says, “my family
cares an awful lot about doing the right thing. Having an illegitimate child isn’t doing the right thing. I would be letting them down. And when you let my family down—you’re letting down generation upon generation who have striven, Esme,
striven
to do the right thing at every step.”

“Your family? You definitely don’t need to worry about them. How would they ever know?”

“How would they ever know? Are you insane?”

“No, why would they? We’re not together . . .”

“Not together?” says Mitchell. He looks incredulous. Then he gives me a self-deprecating grin. His grin is very charming. “Aren’t we?” he says. “I didn’t get the memo.”

I sit up. “Of course we’re not. Of
course
we’re not. We never ever were. I thought we were, and we weren’t. We weren’t. You had all those other ones . . .” I hate crying. I will not cry. What possible use can tears have been, in early cultures? They just show our weakness; that can’t be good.

There is a silence. Then he says, “Oh, Esme. I see now. That’s what this is. I see. This is Esme and her baby
contra mundum.
”

“I don’t speak Latin.”

“You know that much Latin. You are pissed that I was dating other women, and so you’ve got some Harlequin-romance idea in your head that you are going to go off and bring up the baby alone—”

“Sleeping with other women,” I say, correcting him. This is an arrow shot into the dark—he didn’t actually say he had slept with anyone, the day that he dumped me in the park.

He stops. He is suddenly glittering.

“I didn’t sleep with all of them,” he says.

I turn away from him, so he cannot see that my own arrow has curved around and pierced me, but turning away makes no difference. The hurt isn’t something seen but something known, communicated along the atoms that make up the quivering air.

“Esme, I’m joking. About sleeping with them all?”

As he hasn’t succeeded yet, he is still talking. “This was just an
accident!” he is saying. “It was just a mistake. We don’t need to pay for that mistake for the rest of our lives! You are punishing me.”

“I am doing nothing to you.”

He looks at me as you would look at a recalcitrant child. He changes tack: “Babies should be brought into a stable environment. They should be—planned. They should be wanted. They shouldn’t be forced into the world come what may. This—it isn’t even a baby yet, Esme.”

“It is a baby.”

“For God’s
sake
!” He slaps both hands down on the table. His hands are pale; his face is pale too, and his eyes are once more like the eyes of a bird. He continues more quietly. “If you have a termination now, it wouldn’t
know,
it wouldn’t
suffer,
and it would be getting rid of something that is smaller than—a—a . . .”

“A what? A cockroach? A rat?” I say. No, I shout. I am shaking. I think he is right—it wouldn’t know, it wouldn’t suffer—and yet I can’t do it. Regret that it has happened consumes me.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

I stare up at him. He is quivering with fury, with passion. It seems as if the sheer force of his will could annihilate the small thing inside me. He stands there like a pale white god in the center of the room. If I turned out the light, I have the uncomfortable feeling that he would shine.

“Choose,” he says. The one word.

“Choose?”

“Choose.”

“Between you and the baby?”

He assents with a tiniest motion of his head, a Bond villain. I stand up too. I am frightened of him, of his power, of his will, I am even frightened of him physically. And I am liquid with rage.

“I do choose,” I say. “I had already chosen when you met me in the street. And so, if you remember, had you.”

He does not move at all. He says, with the same repressed violence, “Then that’s the end. I am sorry you have brought it to
this. It could have been a wonderful relationship. We were special, Esme. I am sorry that you didn’t realize that.”

I walk over to the heavy brass bolt on the door and yank it open.

He gets his bag, and walks past me and out.

On the table is the untouched glass of water.

CHAPTER NINE