My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (33 page)

Her face does not exactly respond with equal delight. She looks as if she has been sitting on the floor for a long time and would prefer to go on doing just that.

“It’s hot in here,” she says. “Did you notice?” In her hands is a copy of
The Iliad
.

“I don’t think the air-conditioning is working. I’ll see if I can get someone to open a window. In the meantime, I don’t know if you want to come over to the part of the bookstore where you’ll be, uh … where you’ll be …”

Jamaica Kincaid is looking at me suspiciously. And who can blame her, given how demented I look? Then she starts taking off her shoes.

“Yes?” she says somewhat quizzically.

“You know, where you’ll be, uh …” I suddenly feel lightheaded. As if the heat in the bookstore and driving for four hours straight like a pizza deliveryman and not eating all day weren’t enough, I missed my afternoon coffee. Nevertheless, I manage to squeeze out that final word, “reading,” though more in the manner of a petrified rodent than the way I normally would.

“Reading?” says Jamaica Kincaid, causing a terrifying series of questions to flash across my mind:
Does she know she’s reading? Or did I just happen to find her here in the Harvard Bookstore? What if my message never got through?
Anything seems possible—anything but things turning out the way I had planned.

“Yes, well, I … You are going to read, right? That’s what all these people … the audience …” I look around: the store is practically rippling in the heat, like a desert mirage. Is it a dream, I wonder, and, if so, how much will I remember when I wake up? What does it all mean—The
Iliad
, the baby blue sneakers and Dwayne pulling out his own tooth?

“Yes, of course!” Kincaid suddenly says with the utmost good cheer, while putting her shoes back on. “Is the audience here? Where do you want me to go? Should I sign books afterward?”

Intense relief. I feel like kissing her toes. But then as we’re walking over to the podium, the readings coordinator hisses at me, “Where’s Robert Pinsky?”

“I don’t know!”

“We have to start without him.” She goes up to the podium to begin.

The audience is seated in a part of the store that fits about eighty chairs—not nearly enough. The aisles are packed. Scanning the crowd, I see, among several familiar faces, the people from the
Globe
I invited. Jamaica Kincaid and I are standing in an area just slightly out of everyone’s view. The readings coordinator gives a short speech, apologizing for the temperature, and then out comes Jamaica Kincaid—who casually takes off her shoes.

“Well,” she says, frowning at the microphone, which appears to be dead. Then she picks up a copy of the anthology, which I had carefully opened to the page where her story began, and, holding it as if it were something from another planet, she turns to me and says in a skeptical voice, “Is this the book?”

Offstage, where no one can see me, I nod frantically. Something doesn’t feel right.

“It has my piece? That’s what you want me to read?”

I nod again. I had assumed, of course, that she would read her own piece, a kind of fever dream called “What I Have Been Doing Lately.” And somewhat reluctantly she does. But then the story, being short and recited in a hurry, is over almost as soon as it began, and the bookstore is filled by awkward silence.

“Hmm … should I read something else?” Jamaica Kincaid says. She starts scanning the nearby bookshelves, while the crowd shifts uncomfortably. We’re in the atlas section, with cookbooks nearby. Through my sweat-soaked shirt you can almost see my heart jumping.

“Well?” Jamaica Kincaid says, looking directly at me.

No time to think. I come out onstage, take the anthology from her hands and open to “Nighthawks.”

Now, “Nighthawks” is perfect because it’s readable and fast, with almost no dialogue. She starts reading:

“The moon, still cooling off from last night, back in the sky—a bulb insects can’t circle.”

The crowd is spellbound. No one, including the reader, knows where this story is headed. And come to think of it, I’m a bit unsure myself. It’s been a few months since I read “Nighthawks.” However, there’s no time to stop. The story picks up momentum quickly, and we’re already flying along. Then Kincaid gets to a part where the narrator meets the “gay divorcée” and starts necking with her in the parking lot. She stops.

Panic!
I had forgotten that part of what gives “Nighthawks” its momentum is a good deal of sexual energy.
Oh my God
, I think,
have I asked Jamaica Kincaid to read a sex scene?

“What is this …” she starts to say in my direction, looking more puzzled than annoyed. I have the urge to run out and take the book
away, but it’s too late: I can’t breathe, can’t swallow, can’t move. My fists are two hand grenades. Is the piece lewd? Does it have any nudity? Why can’t I remember anything? It’s only two and half pages long, for God’s sake!

“You intend to sit out here all night like teenagers,” the gay divorcée says, when the narrator starts trying to get under her shirt, “or do you want to follow me home?”

This is going to be the worst day of my life. The car chase through the wheat fields is obvious. Everyone knows what it means. But does the piece ever cross the line? Jamaica Kincaid is now coming to the end, where the piece gets really frantic, and I swear to God if she doesn’t finish soon I’m going to run out of oxygen and pass out at those feet I wanted to kiss. Please finish, please …

“She kept driving faster, and I could imagine the toe of her high heel pressing down on the workboot-sized gas pedal of her truck … By the time we hit the dirt roads she was driving like a maniac, bouncing over railroad crossings and the humps of drainage pipes, dust swirling behind her so that her taillights were only red pinpoints, and I wondered what radio station she must be listening to, wondered if she was drunker than I’d realized and she thought we were racing, or if she’d had a sudden change of heart and was trying to lose me on those back-roads, and I wondered if I ought to let her.”

And then it’s over. We made it. The piece is done. The audience is clapping and Jamaica Kincaid is wearing a somewhat dazed expression.

“Now that,” she says, “is writing.”

Which means I can breathe again. And then as I peek around the corner I see the handsomest man in poetry, Robert Pinsky, striding into the bookstore just in time.

“YOU MUST ALWAYS KNOW WHEN TO PULL OUT,” SAYS THE
merchant Nazruddin in V. S. Naipaul’s A
Bend in the River
, one of the many excellent novels about running a store. “A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty.” Shopkeepers make good narrators because they’re passive and steady, and they tend to want relatively small things, while the world keeps taking more from them than it gives back. Plus, in the end something awful always happens to them, whether it’s the anarchic revolution that sweeps away the postcolonial African nation that Naipaul’s shopkeeper
has patiently worked to build up, or the equally pointless churn-and-burn of New York commerce that ruins Morris Bober, the Jewish shopkeeper hero of Bernard Malamud’s
The Assistant
.

How do you know when to get out? For Bober, one of the signals he hears but is too stubborn to act upon is the arrival of energetic and ruthless competitors. (Malamud’s parents were in fact Brooklyn deli owners, part of the last generation of Jewish immigrants to ply the trade.) “The chain store kills the small man,” he remarks abstractly. The world changes on him, and he does nothing to protect himself. Like a lot of shopkeepers, he lives in Plato’s cave, a hermetically sealed world where the only evidence of a reality outside are the shadows dancing on a cold wall. “Everything will be fine as long as I manage my affairs
in here,”
he thinks, while outside, beyond his awareness, things change and contingencies grow, nowhere as fast as they do in New York.

Brooklyn is changing. Just down the street from where I had my Sesame Street epiphany a few years ago, developers from Cleveland have signed an agreement with the government to build one of the largest properties to come to New York in a generation. Skyscrapers, a hotel, a sports stadium and, amid it all, many different “cultural spaces”—this new development, called Atlantic Yards, is going to be so big that its impact will be felt for miles in every direction. Traffic will have to be rerouted, buildings demolished, their tenants relocated. Purely in terms of size and ambition, it seems like the antithesis of the people’s borough. It seems more like … Manhattan.

Maybe, though, Atlantic Yards will turn out to be a good thing for us, by raising the value of our lease. Maybe it will provide the sort of foot traffic, tourism and round-the-clock sales that shopkeepers dream about. Maybe we’ll get that Manhattan-style store we once thought of going for after all. But we won’t have to wait the five or six years that the construction will likely take to find out, for
even closer than where Atlantic Yards will be, the landscape is already erupting in a most un-Brooklyn way, sprouting sunlight-hogging apartment complexes with cubicle-sized dwellings wrapped in unfriendly mirrored glass.

You have to try not to be sentimental about it. It makes as little sense to argue against progress and change when it comes to cities as it does with literary magazines. And so one day in 2004, when I open the newspaper and read that a Manhattan real estate developer has bought a parking lot a block away from us and plans to build two hundred apartments and twenty-seven single-family homes there in the coming year, I look on the bright side.

“Think of all the potential customers!,” I exclaim to Gab. “When it’s finished, we’ll be their closest convenience store.”

Gab takes the newspaper from me and reads to the part where I left off. Then she says, “But did you see this?” Right after the part about the two hundred apartments it says that the developer intends to line the block with retail space, “perhaps including a supermarket.”

We look at each and wait for the other to say what we’re both thinking.
Is it time?
After failing to close the store when Kay got out of the hospital, Gab and her mother have been uncharacteristically indecisive. Given that the store was open, we decided we might as well not tie our hands behind our backs and brought back the cigarettes. Sales then quickly returned to a somewhat normal level, first for wintertime and now by the standards of the spring. The problem is that when you’re not fighting for survival, it’s easy to stop making decisions and fall into the trap of thinking you don’t have to. Ambivalence is a luxury; thinking you can have it both ways is virtually synonymous with being spoiled. That’s why the do-or-die condition that new immigrants find themselves in is a good one for shopkeepers, because it forces you to be a ruthless decision maker, like Kay and Gab are. Or used to be.

Given the need for clarity and decisiveness, we’re again seeing the danger of a family-owned business. On some days Kay will feel depressed and want to close the store, but then she’ll get embarrassed for not being stronger and resolve to tough it out. She vacillates, Gab vacillates, and I vacillate, and as a result nothing happens. What it means is that closing down will take as much will and effort as opening did.

AT THE END
of the spring, five months after we bring back tobacco, we get caught in another sting. This time it’s a Dutch Master cigar sold to a minor while Emo is running the store, and we face the maximum penalties just in time for what should be the busiest part of the year, summer. We should take this as our cue to surrender, but there’s no way we’re going out on someone else’s terms—especially not the city’s. Shopkeeping may be a passive trade, but shopkeepers are hardheaded masochists and always try to do things their own way.

Unfortunately, our best hope depends on us persuading the city to give us leniency, which means swallowing our pride and losing some of the adversarial fervor. There’s a stipulation in the city’s administrative code that says that a tobacco vendor can be absolved of an employee’s mistake if he or she can convince a magistrate that the vendor did everything possible to prevent such errors. It’s a long shot, but occasionally plaintiffs do find sympathy, and so after scheduling a hearing, Gab and I march in to John Street in lower Manhattan, where the Adjudication Division of Consumer Affairs occupies a Kafkaesque warren of dim, windowless courtrooms on the eleventh floor of a black marble building.

It is the DMV from hell. Twenty or so grown men—schlubs in their puffy vests and hooded sweatshirts—rock in their chairs neurotically, mumbling to themselves in Urdu, Spanish or Korean while waiting to be summoned to a doughnut-sized hole in a Plexiglas
window. We sit like a herd of frightened animals in the center of the room, bunched tightly, surrounded on all sides but one by that humiliating Plexiglas wall. A potbellied security guard with a walkie-talkie the size of a nightstick circles us like a starved cat, looking for new reasons to punish us. “NO TALKING!” he screams when someone’s cell phone goes off, and “NO EATING!” when someone takes half a bagel out of his pocket. Meanwhile, the clerks behind the Plexiglas gorge themselves on enormous foil-wrapped breakfasts obtained from delis down on Wall Street.

I try to maintain an upright pose in my chair, but the seat is made of the same kind of hard slippery plastic as bus-station chairs. After a few hours I give up and slouch like a pouty teenager. Soon half the day is gone, and it takes constant effort not to slide into sleep. As lunchtime ends I approach the doughnut hole in the Plexiglas and ask, “We were supposed to be seen at nine
A.M
. Why is this taking so long?”

“Some of our judges are
very
busy,” says a voice behind the glass. “Now go back and sit down.”

We wait another hour, until finally an unsmiling man with a Haitian-sounding name (Patrice or something like that) and the smell of someone who just emerged from a steamy locker room and daubed himself with talcum powder calls us into a windowless office.