The next morning, at
ten o’clock, May opened the bookstore herself. Barbara was coming in later,
closer to noon—probably weighed down with pastries for their tea-break. May sighed. She’d had enough pastry for a lifetime.
A couple of hours before
May opened up, Michael was sitting in the living-room he used as a studio and
finishing a cup of instant coffee, now grown tepid and, oddly enough, rather
waxy. After pushing back four or
five books from the edge of a shelf, he then put the empty mug on the free
space, making a mental note about where he’d left it—which, as it turned it,
was right in front of two books by Rebecca Solnit: River of Shadows, about 19th century photographer
Eadweard Muybridge, and Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
Careful not to dislodge his cup, he wiggled Wanderlust from its place and riffled through
it. “I like walking because it is
slow,” Solnit proclaimed on page ten, “and I suspect that the mind, like the
feet, works at about three miles an hour.”
“I’ll go for a walk,”
Michael said to himself.
”At about three miles an hour.”
”At about three miles an hour.”
Michael smiled to
himself at how associative he was, about how easily he was led about, from
interest to interest from idea to idea.
He was Toad of Toad Hall, he thought, and then laughed at how even this
brief thought about Mr. Toad was enough to send him back to reread The Wind
in the Willows. It would be all too easy, Michael felt, to head into
an endlessly burgeoning, blossoming retroactive life, his sensibility borne
backwards, association by association, until had lost track of the present
entirely.
“I need an anchor,”
he told himself, not entirely understanding what he meant. He knew that one of the things he meant
was that he really didn’t find the present all that hot a place to spend his
time. He also felt, sometimes,
that he needed to know somebody else exceedingly well.
He took his glance at
Solnit seriously and began to get ready to go out. For some reason he was more depressed these last few days than
he usually was. Well, actually, he
knew some of the
reasons: a brief—but not nearly brief enough—acquaintance with Bliss Carmen and her
silly dog Fish, meeting and putting up with her strange pal, the surly Homer
Rubik and his new Old Master drawings and watercolours, and even the stale
brownie clerk at the convenience store.
It wasn’t all that much, he thought, it wasn’t anything, but it was enough to keep him disconsolate
for several days now. He can
scarcely believe that he had offered to write an article about Homer and his
outlandish facility. And the thing
of it was, he’d probably go right ahead and do it too.
Anyhow, walking had
always helped to restore his good spirits in the past, and this morning he
would walk. He would walk and walk
and walk and would begin to feel better, he felt sure, with every step.
Where should he walk
to? For Michael always found that
while aimless, goal-less walking had a certain beauty—a metaphysical,
for-itself meaning—any walk-off-your-depression walk pretty much required a
destination.
And what
invariably made Michael feel better when he was feeling down, anxious or angry,
was to browse for awhile in a used bookstore.
The used bookstores
had been disappearing steadily over the past few years, falling dark and silent
to the easy inrush of stay-at-home bookbuyers, clicking their purchases through
on Abebooks, Amazon, Alibris, or just settling into the little lighted lozenges
of Kindle and other ebook readers.
And of course a lot of people had just stopped reading entirely. Books, which had once been seen as
sites of ideas, wisdom, eloquence and the necessary truth, books which had once
been regarded as the agencies of ascension, were now looked upon as merely oppressive. Books, Michael supposed, just took up
entirely too much space in this weightless, speed-of-light world. Michael understood this, but he didn’t
want to.
And so, for
him, the used bookstore had become a haven. A place of sanctuary.
A soft, quiet way-station on the superhighway of a proliferating
pseudo-culture that amounted to little, as far as Michael could tell, but the
bureaucratic onrush of me-first practicalities. It was a world he had to live in—as everybody else did too—but
when it got too abrasive and therefore too silly, he could at least repair to a
used bookstore.
Which was where
he was headed this morning.
Michael left his
apartment, in an old house out near High Park, walked up to Bloor Street and
turned east.
He strode along steadily
for a couple of hours, pausing now and then at two different Book City stores,
to flip through their glossy remainders, stopped once at a Second Cup for an
unnecessary and unsatisfying cup of coffee, browsed quickly through a couple of
video stores, and, finally getting as far east as Spadina Avenue (all the while
trying not to think about the always looming Bliss Carmen, who lived in the
subway station), turned south and walked three blocks to one of his favourite
remaining book stores—a dusty, fecund place called Books At Large. He hadn’t been there for six months.
He glanced at his
watch. It was ten fifteen. He gazed for a minute of two at the
books in the front window (some Sherlock Holmes, Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender
is the Night,
a handsome
pocket-sized edition of Don Quixote, Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card, Roland Barthes’ The Eiffel Tower, Alan Mooreheads’s The White Nile…Studs
Lonigan...Alfred Kazin’s A
Walker in the City….). And then opened the door and went in.
May was sitting at
the desk at the back of the store.
She looked up when she heard the door open and, for some reason that was
not yet clear to her, smiled warmly at Michael. He smiled back, and made his way carefully down the aisle
towards her.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” she replied,
wondering if she could help with the strange purposefulness that seemed, at the
moment, to animate him. “Is there
anything in particular you’re looking for?”
“You know, “
Michael told her, “the fact is
that when I started out for a walk early this morning, and decided to end up
you here, I just wanted to walk for a long time and then…well, you know…browse
for a bit.”
“Yes?” said May.
“Yes, but now,
suddenly, I have this sudden desire for a particular book by a beautiful, not-very-well-known
Welsh writer named John Cowper Powys.
The novel is called Wolf Solent. It’s
pretty hard to find, I think, and you probably don’t have any of his
books…really, I’d be surprised if you had!”
May looked at him in
some amazement.
“But we do!” she told him, rather taken aback herself
that they actually did. Indeed
she’d been looking at it just a few days ago, wondering about its odd title,
not entirely certain how to pronounce the author’s name. “Come, I’ll show it to you.”
She got up and
wandered along the far wall of shelves until she got to the “P” section. Michael followed her, all the while
admiring, more than he had intended to, her grace, the litheness of her
moments, even the swing of her long, shiny black hair.
“Look!” said, pulling
from the shelf a superb, two-volume boxed set of the novel. The slipcase carried a noble photograph
of the theatrically handsome John Cowper Powys. May loved the book already, though she hadn’t read a single
sentence of it. She glanced again
at the slipcase.
“I’m afraid it’s
rather expensive,” she told him.
“How much is it?”
“It’s sixty
dollars—for the two volumes.”
Michael was suddenly
flooded with happiness. He didn’t
have a lot of money, and he knew he ought not to be so extravagant. But he wanted the book with a deep,
ecstatic kind of hunger, not because it was a beautiful edition of a truly
great book, and not because of the bravado of its price but….it was hard to
explain it to himself…because he had already—albeit inadvertently-- made the
book into a sort of connection between him and May. He smiled at her.
“I’ll take it,” he
told her.
“I want to read it now too,” she said, with
the beginnings of a sudden new passionate shyness in her voice.
Michael looked again
at the book. Then he looked again
at May.
“I don’t mean to be forward
or anything but…look, will
you come and have a cup of coffee with me, after you’ve finished here today?”
“Yes,” she told him.
