Kitabı oku: «The Secret of Lost Things», sayfa 2

CHAPTER THREE

I arrived in New York late at night, unprepared for a life I only dimly suspected might be found there. A storm caused the plane to land roughly. I never saw my destination; clouds covered the city, the ground visible only moments before the plane’s wheels struck it. I felt myself land hard, as if thrown to earth.

I had three hundred dollars. In my suitcase, underneath my clothes, lay my scrapbook and Mother’s photograph. At the airport, with tears on her cheeks, Chaps had pressed upon me two presents: a green stone necklace (the color of my eyes) which she assured me was an amulet against further heartbreak, and a small book—her very favorite, she claimed—wrapped in her store’s bluish paper. I couldn’t bear to open the package, the Chapman’s Bookshop paper as dear and familiar to me as the wallpaper in my childhood bedroom, in fact, its surrogate. I told Chaps that I would keep her parcel intact, waiting for the day that I desperately needed a present. I didn’t doubt it would come, and for the moment, travel was gift enough. The necklace, though, I put on immediately. A guard against heartbreak couldn’t wait.

Mother’s ashes were covered in an orange scarf at the bottom of a carry-on I was reluctant to put down.

My arrival was not auspicious. The rain continued, veiling the city, and when the taxi I took from the airport tried to deposit me in front of the residential hotel Chaps had booked, it appeared to no longer be in business. I couldn’t have known it, but I had arrived in the final year of a difficult decade for the city. New York itself was stirring from years of financial hardship, and many inexpensive hotels then housed residents permanently courtesy of the state.

Terrified, I agreed to an additional fare and the driver took me further downtown to a hotel he knew was cheap and, he said, safe. The Martha Washington Hotel for Women had a dingier address (29 East Twenty-ninth Street or 30 East Thirtieth street, depending on the entrance), but it was open, with a room vacant at the right price. There was little evidence that it had once been an impressive establishment, even prosperous, with many rooms. Built in 1902, the hotel was now dilapidated. More than seven decades after it opened, the upper floors were closed off for repairs that would never eventuate. The restaurant had been shuttered for thirty years.

A woman sat behind the battered reception counter watching a tiny black-and-white television, connected by twin earplugs. She was striking and dark, about sixty, with aristocratic features. After I had her attention, she explained the hotel requirements in heavily accented English: payment a week in advance, linens changed once a week, no guests in the rooms, no smoking, no cooking, no noise.

I had no intention of breaking any rules. I was barely eighteen years old, absent Mother and country, soaking wet, and so bereft that I sagged inside my damp clothes, shrunken and childlike.

I paid the taxi driver, handed over one week’s rent and staggered to my room at the end of a shadowy corridor. I took the Huon box from my bag and placed it beside my pillow.

“Come back,” I said aloud to Mother, my voice thin and trembling. “Come to me here.”

It was hours before I slept, kept awake by sadness, by anxiety, and by cars passing on the avenue, their headlights flashing in the room like counterfeit lightning, tires plashing into potholes where rainwater pooled.

A hot June sun appeared the following day, the weather surprisingly steamy. I spent that early summer week trying to stay out of the dun-colored room as much as possible. The room was fetid by early afternoon. A single, clouded window, with bars across it, faced the bed. I had to keep the window closed against the street noise and also because this wing of the Martha Washington was downwind from an Indian restaurant on the next block.

At first, I shared a grubby bathroom with two women along the same corridor, although they might as well have been phantoms. They banged around slamming doors and drawers, but I never once saw either of them except from behind—in retreat. They soon disappeared altogether, a fate I feared awaited every fresh arrival to the city. If I sat in the room during hot daylight hours I felt I had been sealed into my predicament, held inside a shrinking box, with no escape but sleep. I woke early, claimed the bathroom first, and promptly ventured out. My life depended on it.

The dark lady of the reception desk appeared to live at the Martha Washington. I heard her speak Spanish to a stern man I gathered was the owner, and I called hello to her each day as I left to investigate the city, as much to speak aloud as politeness. But after several days without acknowledgment, I stopped. She was either too intent on the television or hard of hearing. Or perhaps she simply didn’t care to answer.

The labyrinthine city waited. It anticipated me. I was swallowed whole, surrounded by a populace buzzing and purposeful, a remedy for grief and a goad to it. I was utterly alone, and lived at first without the imposition of order, too scattered and overwhelmed to effect any. I recognized no vista. No building was familiar, apart from the iconic Empire State and the Chrysler (motifs of my scrapbook), but even those were unrecognizable from my altered perspective on the ground. I forgot to eat, and an entire day would pass before I spoke out loud. Even then it might just be an acknowledgment of thanks, or a plain request: “Could I have milk in my tea, please?” My own voice was alien and took my ear strangely. No one addressed me, no one knew my name, and my anonymity was at times a raw joy in my chest, freedom at its most literal, while at others, a source of paralyzing fear. I didn’t know then that this was how deep emotion most often comes, from opposite directions and at once, when you are least aware and farthest from yourself.

I did know profound dislocation, and had to remind myself that the young woman I caught sight of in store windows was me. She had no family. No one expected her home. Yet she existed. There she was reflected in the glass, her wild red hair on end as if with fright.

I needed money and I needed work. I had to know who I might become. I walked and walked around the immediate neighborhood, tracing a large circle, the Martha Washington and Twenty-ninth Street the fixed foot of my compass. I was searching for something I recognized, apart from what I found in my own face, for a sense of the familiar in the unaccustomed.

By odd happenstance I had landed at the eastern edge of New York’s garment district. The streets surrounding the Martha Washington were known for their small accessory suppliers, and tiny storefronts displayed crowded windows full of hats and caps, wigs and handbags, sparkling appliqués and notions of all kinds. It was as if Mother had herself selected the location of my first residence without her. There was a looking-glass quality, almost antipodean, to my immediate location. Mother and Remarkable Hats, the Foys workroom, were far away on the other side of all things, and yet in New York I was surrounded by their emblems.

I ventured farther downtown and actually walked passed the Arcade on several occasions without realizing what it was—the largest used-book store in the city. I hadn’t heard of its reputation for housing lost things: books once possessed and missed or never possessed and longed for. I hadn’t read Herman Melville; only his famous name was familiar (just another on the rather limited stock list at Chapman’s Bookshop). And I knew nothing whatsoever of the value of rare manuscripts. I fancied bookstores were generally similar to each other, in their way. But the Arcade was of an altogether different order; and because then I was in every sense lost, once I was inside, it proved irresistible.

The Arcade’s charm is oddly absolute, but that day it was also intensely personal. Walking into the store, I had walked into an image from my postcard collection, into a picture pasted in my scrapbook. I was inhabiting space I thought imaginary. In this way, I had the distinct impression that I had conjured the Arcade up, had made it appear, a whole cloth woven from unexpressed need.

From the unimpressive entrance, the ceiling rises in an enormous curve toward the rear of the store, a sweep of space that lifts one’s eyes upward in search of another firmament. Of course, there isn’t one; the ceiling is just a deep, dusty dome, like the inside of a skull. (Both are vaults, both repositories of knowledge). How could so slight a portal reveal so impressive a space? It occurred to me that I had been tricked into entering.

Understand, the Arcade is itself a city; itself an island. That bookstores are such places is always hoped for, but the Arcade is like the original wish behind such hopes. In that first visit New York was made actual. The Arcade was population, mass, was the accomplishment of a city. Books were stacked like the teeming New Yorkers, invisible inside their buildings, but sensed as bees in a hive. The hum of life issuing from the crowds that filled the city I had begun to experience, but in the Arcade that buzzing life was made calculable in things. Chaps always told Mother and me books were minds on the shelf. Here it was true: books didn’t seem inanimate; a kind of life rose from the piles heaped on tables before me.

I moved toward a laden table and placed my hand upon the closest stack, listening, waiting. I recall it exactly. An opening, a beginning. I must work here, I thought. I will. Less an act of confidence than of will. I surprised myself.

I looked around in the soft, faded light. I wasn’t startled by the Arcade’s shabby randomness, by the small areas of order within a more general chaos; by its filth, its quiet, and its occasional bursts of jarring sound. Or by the precariousness of book stacks which seemed to lean, without regard to gravity, toward some apprehended but unseen center. I was at home. Dust filtered what sunlight made its way through two dirty windows. Huge, dim lights hung by heavy chains above customers’ heads, bent in concentration.

Turning to the entrance, I checked that outside on the avenue it was actually a sunny, ordinary day in late June. Inside, it was cool and obscurely timeless.

I edged along goat-track passages winding between stacks, only navigable foot in front of foot, a few inches at a time, trying to avoid piles of titles stacked and leaning against spine-out-only shelves. I stopped before a raised platform, an oasis of space amid the clutter. A small man stood behind its oak railing, elevated higher than even the tallest customer. He was pricing old books, but his compelling gestures suggested a priest at a lectern. The brass name plate that faced the store from his oak desk shone: GEORGE PIKE, PROPRIETOR.

His gestures were practiced and repetitive. A stack of volumes sat to Pike’s left. He took a book from the top of that pile, frowned, ran his eyes over the binding, checking for rips or nicks. Then, quickly and elegantly, he flipped to the title page, his eyes scanned the copyright, his thumb fanned rapidly along the edges of the entire book. Reaching the end, he closed the volume, only to reopen it at the first page. He took a pencil from behind his ear and lightly scribbled in the upper-right-hand corner, tracing a looping filigree. He returned the pencil above his ear and rubbed his index finger beneath his nose. He then unfrowned his forehead, set the volume to his right and, having priced the book, immediately reached for another at his left.

He repeated these actions as a single gesture, without variation. It was unconscious; a rough magic. There seemed no moment for contemplation, for the weighing of competing possibilities. Pike alone appeared the arbiter, the heart of the enterprise.

I had made my pledge to work in the Arcade, Pike was evidently its captain. I wanted proximity to such mastery, such certainty. I seized upon the existence of the place like a buoy floating in the middle of the sea.

“Excuse me, sir. My name is Rosemary Savage,” I said to Pike, my own accent peculiar, nasal in my ears.

He was unaccustomed to interruption. I went on hurriedly, shocked at my own boldness, at how sharp was the desperation that prodded me forward.

“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Pike. And I must work here.”

He looked up from his task to register my temerity. Raised eyebrows were the only indication of affront on his rather unremarkable face. He was an anachronistic figure. His striped waistcoat, his shirt bunched above the elbows by arm bands, suggested a man that hadn’t altered his style of dress in decades. He wore a waxy-looking mustache, a darker shade than his whitish-gray hair, and he ran his finger over it before lowering his eyebrows to return his gaze to the book in his hand.

“You must work here?” he said in an odd, thin voice. He appeared to address the book in his hand rather than me, asking the cheeky thing if it really had the gall. “Do you imagine this an infrequent request?” he asked the book.

I didn’t know what to say. Too much was already at stake. I looked up at him and calculated that his platform was a good twenty-four inches higher than where I stood. It was designed to meet the floor at an angle, masking its height and disguising its purpose. It was a stage. I guessed Pike a full head shorter than my own five feet ten, but recognizing this didn’t reduce his stature. He loomed, flanked by books.

But I had given Pike my future, and I wonder now if he saw this himself. There was a long pause as he made his way through his litany of gestures. His movements seemed the process by which he could figure the book’s price, winding himself up to calculating its value.

He set the volume to his left.

I waited. He drew a long breath.

“What we want here is the mild boredom of order. Don’t try to be too interesting, girl.” He read me as easily as the book he had put down.

“Find the Poetry section and begin to shelve what remains on the floor.” He waved his hand in a shooing gesture. “You’re probably ripe for poetry,” he added, in a lower voice.

Was he hiring me on the spot?

“Order by poet, mind you. Only by poet. Don’t give a damn about editors and translators—that’s all a charade. You will shelve by poet or you will not be employed by George Pike. Remove all anthologies! Alphabetical, that is all. There are a few things that should be predictable.”

I had followed this breathlessly, even while it didn’t appear to be directed at me. Had he said “ripe”?

“Ah, yes, sir. Mr. Pike…ah, alphabetical, of course.”

“Find Poetry and my manager will assess your competency shortly.”

He picked up the next unvalued volume to his right.

I hurried deeper into the Arcade and found the Poetry section halfway down a tower that leaned dangerously toward the public toilet, in a far corner. Quickly I began the task of rearranging books that had apparently never been shelved in any order. The section began at eye level. Above it appeared to be books on Occult Practices. The juxtaposition of subjects struck me as deliberate, only accidentally alphabetical. To reach the shelf I had to lean across a tall pile of books on the floor, awkwardly moving volumes around, my arms stiffly extended. I decided to take handfuls off the shelf and sort them while sitting on the floor. This too proved pointless, as I had to constantly reorder each section, accomplishing only what amounted to tidying up. Was this a test of my patience, of my real interest, a practical lesson in the overwhelming nature of bringing even the slightest amount of order to the Arcade?

After half an hour I’d barely managed to complete a single shelf, and was standing with my back to the aisle, wresting another few volumes off the shelf, when I had the sensation of being watched. I heard a sibilant whisper and turned, promptly dropping the books in my hand.

An albino man of uncertain age was no more than two feet from me, his pale eyes moving involuntarily behind pince-nez glasses. From the first it was his eyes. His eyes could not be caught. He stepped back and knocked over several books I had set aside. Ignoring his clumsiness, he took in my surprise with practiced unsurprise. I had never seen anyone like him, nor any face more marked with defensive disdain.

“Walter Geist, the Arcade’s manager,” he whispered, turning. “Follow me, girl.”

I picked up the books I’d dropped, forced them onto the shelf, and caught up with him as his stooped shoulder disappeared around a corner stack.

As I trailed behind his quaint figure, I had the fleeting fantasy that this man was what someone would look like if he’d been born inside the Arcade, never having left its dim confines. Pigment would disappear and eyesight would be ruined beneath weak light, until one lay passively, like a flounder on the ocean floor.

In fact, as I walked behind him, Geist’s white ears reminded me of delicate sea creatures suddenly exposed to light, vulnerable and nude. There was a shrinking quality to him, a retraction from attention like an instinctual retreat from exposure. I was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure, a contradiction that was never to leave me. As I follow him there in my memory, I feel again that charge to his strangeness, a shock that compelled.

He led me to a small office in the very rear of the store, built high into the corner of the vast ceiling like a reef. I followed him up a narrow flight of wooden stairs, the handrail loose and broken.

“Wait here, girl.”

He indicated the patch of landing at the entrance to the office.

“My name is Rosemary, Mr. Geist. Rosemary Savage,” I said, tired of his anonymous address. I extended my hand then, thinking it appropriate, brave even, as I had seen Americans do. His hands remained clasped behind his back. He entered the office and reemerged holding several forms.

“Please fill these out. Print only.”

He handed me a pen and stood examining the activity on the floor below. From that high landing the chaos of the Arcade was fully evident, with the exception of Pike’s platform, where he moved as if choreographed, a small flicker of concentrated activity. I leaned over the rail, following the inclination of Geist’s head, to see what drew his attention. An obese man sat on the floor in a cul-de-sac made by piles of books, his legs splayed out like a toddler’s. He was turning the pages of a large photography book with one hand, his other hidden beneath the heavy covers opened across his lap. Even from the landing I could tell the images in the book were nudes.

“What are you looking at?” Geist asked me.

“Ah, just looking down where you were,” I said nervously.

“I don’t mean that,” he said. “What do you see?”

I described the fat man studying the photographs.

“Arthur!” Geist called down from the landing. “You should be shelving.”

“Just familiarizing myself with my inventory, Walter,” Arthur returned sardonically, his accent British and articulate.

He looked up at me and put a thick finger to his lips, indicating silence. Had I informed on him? Couldn’t Geist see what I had seen? Arthur returned to his nudes, his hand beneath the book’s cover moved rhythmically.

Geist stomped his small foot with impatience, and I noticed he was wearing elegant, polished boots, their smooth black shape nosing from his pant legs like the shiny heads of tiny seals.

“Mr. Geist, could I have something to lean on?” I asked, finding it difficult to write legibly without the support of a desk, and wishing to distract him, and myself, from Arthur.

“No,” he replied, his shifting eyes still directed over the rickety railing. He removed his glasses, placed them in his breast pocket, and continued to wait for me to complete the forms, his manner uncanny as his appearance.

Now that I was closer to him I could see Geist was younger than I at first thought, perhaps twenty years Pike’s junior, in his late forties. He was an unfinished version, a poor copy, of the masterful Pike, yet equally a creature from another time. Every feature was pallid. His hair was white and fleecy, the sheepish outcome of his soft face. His clothes were not as fastidiously kept as his boots, his trousers slightly frayed along the pockets. I completed the forms and handed them back to him.

“You will begin work tomorrow morning at nine,” he instructed without seeming to actually address me, a tactic he perhaps learned from Pike.

“You will finish for the day at six. Your responsibilities at the Arcade will, for the time being, be that of a floater. This means you do not belong in a specific section, as you have no expertise, but will float between tasks that are assigned to you. Do not concern yourself with assisting customers, you will only frustrate them with your ignorance.”

“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Geist,” I said, defensively.

He replaced his glasses, lodging them in the wrinkles of his forehead and frowning to keep them in place—or frowning because he thought me impudent. He leaned in toward my face, and his nostrils twitched as he appeared to take in my scent.

“Not in this one, Miss Savage,” he said. “Please do not interrupt. You will receive a salary of seventy dollars per week. There are no advances on wages. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” I said, afraid to lose the opportunity.

“Good. There is one more condition of employment you must understand.” Geist’s pink ears shifted back delicately. “George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books. Immediate termination of employment will result if theft is suspected.” This last admonition was said in an emphatic whisper.

Later, I saw the statement printed in placard capitals on a sign in the women’s bathroom, and again over the clock all employees punched when the day began and ended. Another sign was located directly in the line of vision on the wall in front of the staircase that descended to the cavernous basement. Reading these signs was like being regularly rebuked, and so they paradoxically served to remind patrons and staff alike that theft was in some sense assumed.

George Pike himself called to me as, newly hired, I passed his platform on my way out.

“George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books!” he cried, characteristically speaking of himself in the third person.

Theft was a problem, as I would discover. The Arcade was regularly scouted by shoplifters; but more seriously, there had been several scandals involving ludicrously overpriced volumes whose provenance had been fictitiously embellished, resulting in what Pike defended as imaginative pricing. Scandals only increased the number of customers, both sellers and buyers. In other words, theft ran both ways at the Arcade.

“Why you stopped saying hello to me?” the dark lady of the front desk asked loudly when I returned to the Martha Washington. She had taken the wires attached to the television from her ears, and I could hear a tinny whining, the sound of cartoons speaking cartoon language.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to be pleasant. “But I stopped saying hello to you because you didn’t respond. I just gave up.”

“Don’t give up!” she said, enigmatically. “You just got here. That’s what can happen in New York. You give up. I know. I come to this country from Argentina. My brother, he own this hotel. My name is Lillian. Lillian La Paco. Still say hello, miss. You the only one who does.”

“All right, Lillian,” I promised. “I’m Rosemary,” and for the second time that day I stuck out my hand, only this time it was taken.

“Rosemary Savage,” I told her as we shook hands. “Nice to meet you, Lillian, and I’ll still say hello. I’m certainly not about to give up. I just got a job. My first proper job ever.”

“Ah,” Lillian said wisely. “Then you begin!”

“Yes,” I nodded, pleased with her pronouncement. “Yes, now it all begins.”

I went to my room at the end of the corridor and locked the door. I’d bought a pound of cherries from a street vendor to celebrate my employment, and I sat on the single bed savoring them. I felt optimistic; felt breath coming back into my flattened-out self.

Now that I had work, surely someone would notice if I died tragically at eighteen, having, say, choked to death on a cherrystone I might have neglected to spit out. I could stop fantasizing about what terrible things might befall me and write home to Chaps, reassuring her and myself. I could stop searching the streets for a sign. I had already found more than I could have imagined.

I pulled the Huon box from its silk scarf and recounted what had happened that day: how strange Pike was but how commanding; how bizarre Geist, and how I was already sure he disliked me; Arthur sitting with his nudes in the art section like a great obscene baby.

I missed Mother with an ache that could only be managed by a sort of separation from ache. A pain so deep that I came to observe its presence at a slant, sensing it crouched, and off to one side. If I could contain the pain in something like a transparent globe, it wouldn’t overwhelm me. If I didn’t look at it in its dark entirety, I could manage. Speaking to her helped. Chaps had told me I must give sorrow words.

I kissed the smooth Tasmanian heartwood, set it aside, and sat back against the pillows to relish more cherries. I spat a stone across the room, aiming at the metal bucket that served as a garbage bin, and heard a satisfying ping as it hit home.

“This is the beginning,” I told Mother. “Don’t you worry and I won’t either.”

I had a job to go to, and was expected at nine. They would know Rosemary Savage there, and notice me gone if I happened to disappear. I was an inhabitant of a great, perhaps the greatest, city. And what was more, I would always have books to read.