The Bookstore (47 page)

T
hese first days are like being underwater, as if the world has changed. Even the light seems different. It is very female. It is Stella, and my mother, who comes as fast as she can, and me, and Georgie. It is milk, and nappies, and macaroni and cheese for most meals. Much of the time, when she cries, a tiny, desperate cry, a breast of milk will quiet her.

We are in an enclosed world, a world of privilege and stillness, a charmed circle.

I decide that I will not abandon courtesy just because Mitchell has, and that I will tell him and his family that she is born. My mother sits on the sofa, with the baby in her arms, and I go outside. I stand near the flowers, near one of the Hispanic guys with his thousand-yard stare, and I call Mitchell’s number. It goes, of course, to voice mail. He will, of course, be ignoring it. I leave him a message to tell him that Georgie is born. I say her birthday, and I say her weight, and her name. I do not cry. I say nothing else.

My eyes are resting on the Hispanic man. He springs to life for a second when an old lady asks him to gather some flowers up for her, and smiles in answer to her thanks. When she has gone, he resumes his quiet waiting. Like Dennis, he has the air of a person who is never looked at.

I call Olivia and Cornelius. Again, there is no reply. Again, I leave a message. Nothing happens at all. There is a part of me that expects an extravagant gift from Bloomingdale’s, or at least a phone call, at least Olivia asking for a photograph of her granddaughter. But the time passes, and there is nothing.

After two weeks, my mother goes home. I emerge from the charmed circle the moment she is gone. Suddenly, it is just me and Georgie.
I and you now, alone.

Did they tell me it would be boring? My friends, my mother? I don’t think they did, but perhaps I wasn’t ready to listen to a promise of tedium.

The feeding becomes more rhythmic. We wake up at the same time, I grab her, we stay in bed. The nights are not so bad. And I have American Movie Classics if she needs changing, along with their restful introductions. “This is when Carole Lombard was at the top of her game. And if you look very closely, you’ll see a very young Cary Grant.”

It is the daytime that is hard. We are underwater still, but now it is like being underwater with a film of ice on top. I am trapped underneath. I can’t break through. We go for a careful walk and I am suddenly dreading that we will see DeeMo, or Tee, or one of the others, even though I like DeeMo and Tee and most of the others. They will touch my baby’s cheek with a dirty hand, breathe disease on her. I am newly and fully neurotic.

When she is six weeks old, I go to Herald Square with her on the subway, to buy us both some new clothes. She cries. She is hungry, so I hug her and play with her and give her my finger to suck, but it is no good. She wants feeding. If I breast-feed in public, there will be people who don’t like it; this isn’t England. They blur out people’s bottoms on TV here.

I go into a Starbucks and ask for a caramel macchiato, and then stick her under my shirt, to her relief and mine. I do not look at anyone. It makes no difference whether you look at people or not in New York; if you are a woman with a baby, in or out of utero, you are everyone’s business. A woman stops, touches
my shoulder, says congratulations. Another woman says, “Is that caffeinated?” nodding at my drink. “No,” I say, pleasantly. “It’s decaf.” And I think that will be all, but it isn’t. Two men are getting up to go, and one of them says, “I admire you, I admire what you’re doing.” I immediately want to confess to him that the drink is caffeinated, and he shouldn’t admire me all that much. Not one of them would have spoken to me if I had been with Mitchell, or even if I had been with Stella. Another person closes you off from the world, but without anyone else there you are like a grain of pollen, vulnerable to or open to all these fleeting relationships.

After Starbucks, I walk. If we walk, she sleeps, and I can stride and stride, as if to walk right out of this reality and into another one.

Georgie is fast asleep, and I am walking along 63rd Street, wondering where the Argosy Book Store is, when I see Mitchell. He is sitting outside at a restaurant, and opposite him is Uncle Beeky. I think of turning around, going away, but I do not, I keep putting one foot in front of the other. Georgie is here. His baby, whom he has never seen. I never come this way. It must be fate.

My blood is not blood but something electric, hurting in my veins. My veins are singing, too high-pitched, the wrong key, like pylon wires. I am getting closer.

He is looking out into the street but has not seen me. His face is in repose, not smiling in anticipation, not sharp as it was when I saw him last. But “repose” is the wrong word. If you drew his expression, then unless you were Rembrandt you wouldn’t be able to capture it, it would look merely blank. Rembrandt isn’t right. A self-portrait, a late one, by van Gogh. No, because even then, van Gogh is still in love enough with the world to squeeze out the chrome yellow and the vermilion, to be restored and comforted by the particularity of things. Mitchell looks as if there is nothing good, as if there was never anything good, in the world. He makes me think of black shapes falling.

I lean my hands lightly on the little fence constructed round the café. I nod at Uncle Beeky, in whose eyes I see amiable recognition dawn.

I say, “Hello, Mitchell.” He hates surprises, even nice ones, so this surprise makes for instant anger. He turns his face away from me.

“Mitchell?” I say, more disbelieving than imploring. He is keeping his jaw turned from me, as if he is a child, refusing to see, refusing to acknowledge. I feel a constriction around my heart; not a metaphorical one, a real one, as if it will just stop beating for sorrow and shock. And because I am in it now, I jut my own chin outward and I say, “This is Georgie.”

“Esme, please,” he says then. He flicks his hand at us to go away and keeps it there, frozen in air.

I feel, or imagine, dismay emanating from Beeky, but my own humiliation is too great to lift my eyes now.

“A beautiful child,” I hear Beeky say. “Isn’t that so, Mitchell?”

Mitchell’s hand is still there. It is quivering. I meet Beeky’s troubled eyes.

“Mitchell,” says Beeky, in a tone that is both gentle and full of consternation. “Mitchell—the baby.”

Mitchell returns his look with icy vacancy, and then turns his head. The beam of his gaze arcs like a searchlight, over the street, upon the crosstown traffic, sweeping for a fraction of a second over the sleeping baby before moving on to complete the curve.

“Oh yes, I see,” he says to Beeky, with furious, brittle celerity.

I put my hands back on the pushchair, and push Georgie away from him.

When I get home I have her on my knee, and we gaze into each other’s eyes. I say to her, “That was your father.”

I change her, and lay her in her cot and flick her octopus with his checkered chef-trouser legs at her. She bats him with one accidental flailing arm, and sees that he moves, and bats him again. Evolution in front of my eyes, I suppose. I smile at her. I walk away, back to the window. It is beautiful, the blue of the river glimpsed through the green leaves, and yet there is no real solace. I turn away
from the window; the baby is all right, there is not even that to do. I should study. I should clean. I do not want to. There is no remedy.

I don’t want to be like this. I have done the right thing, in having her, my beloved baby, but I have ended up good, not happy. If you are good but not happy, are you any kind of role model for your child? I want mine to see me, blue skirts a-twirling, joyful at being alive. I want mine to see me laughing.

Mitchell will not come back, he will not think better of it, he will not give me a thought. There will be another girl, and perhaps another, or perhaps there will be one he stops at, perhaps a happy ever after. But he will not look back. Simply the thing he is shall make him live. He will eat and drink and sleep as soft as he always has, and each second he lives, each step he takes, will be another one away from me or any memory of me. There will be no stumble, no fall, no farthings to be paid in reckoning, no nothing. And I will see him every day in my baby, in expressions that race over her face as she sleeps, that are as fleeting as English sunlight, and are Mitchell, and are Mitchell, and are Mitchell.

Loving him will never make any difference. Like those mothers who love their dead sons, my love will flow towards him, unwanted, unregarded, as useless to him as if he were dead.

I want to cry out to him that he won’t be loved like this again, but he doesn’t want to be loved. Love is a binding.

IN THE NIGHT,
after seeing Mitchell and Beeky, I awaken sharply and I don’t know why. Something feels wrong. I lie still for a second, and then realize that someone is knocking on the door. It is three forty in the morning.

I leap up and into the other room, crossing to the door as stealthily as I can. I didn’t draw the bolt before I went to sleep. The knock happens again, louder, imperative. I try to slide the bolt across the door but it needs a slight push to make it true, and I am scared that whoever it is will notice, and feed on my fear.

When my phone rings out into the darkness I nearly scream. I use the noise of the ring to push the door and slide the bolt home. Mitchell is on the phone, and, apparently, outside my door.

“Esme. Let me in.”

“What do you want?”

“Just let me in. I come in peace.”

I stop still. It is the very middle of the night, the deepest watches. Before Georgie, I would have opened the door, given him a reproachful look, let him walk in. Is there any possible way he would want to hurt Georgie? He is not a psychopath. But might even hearing us now hurt her somehow, hard-wire a pattern of dissonance and distress into her new mind?

I want Mitchell all the time. Most of my body, most of myself, is spent in a mute wanting of him. Even when I am not thinking about it, it is still there, as if I am composed of iron filings and he is the magnet that they all point to. But here he is, and I have not opened the door.

“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.”