Blue
IN SPITE OF the fact that I'd buried the book, Flora continued to visit. We were starting to get holiday busy, but there was usually a pre-lunch lull. Flora was still punctual. Eleven a.m. sharp and I'd hear the slide of bracelets on her wrist in the Fiction corner. Now it seemed she was wearing her long slippery down coat, for it rasped faintly along the sailboat table. An old Mexican blanket draped over a chair in Memoirs often ended up on the floor. Flora had always said we should get that chair reupholstered. She rustled in the bathroom but rarely managed to dislodge the paper towels, and then as always she seemed to slip into the confessional without opening its low gate.
WHEN THIS space was renovated, the friends of the bookstore put sacred tobacco, sweetgrass, cedar, and sage in the walls. Then they painted the front and back doors blue to keep out malignant energies. All over the world—in Greek villages, in the American Southwest, among the Tuareg—blueness repels evil. Blue glass bottles on windowsills keep devils out, and so on. Thus the front door, painted spirit blue, and the vibrant blue canopies above the windows.
Which blue? There are thousands of blues.
I had come to know the bookstore as a place where, in addition to droves of readers, annoyance did occasionally wander in. But no evil, as far as I could tell, had ever made it past the blue door. Flora was a busybody of a spirit, restless and irritable. Still, the blue door should have kept her out. Perhaps she'd squeezed in through a floor crack. With the exception of the one instance I'd told her to leave, and received a zinging sense of her resentment, I told myself again and again that she was harmless enough.
Not so, of course, the book.
The book lay beneath my thoughts, submerged like an old grief or an anger unresolved. It was down there, like something terrible that was done to you in childhood. Sometimes the thought of the book came again and again, like an annoying tune you can't shut off in your head. I longed for snow to fall, hoping that the cold white shield would help me. For I had the uneasy sense, ever since I'd sat in the tree, ever since I'd watched Asema go straight to its grave, that the book itself was not an inanimate thing. I had buried something alive.
ONE MORNING when the store was empty but for the slide of Flora's skirt along the edge of the sailboat table, I asked, out loud, if it was the book that had killed her.
'Flora?'
I could feel her listening.
'Did you read the sentence through the end? Was that what happened?'
I sensed an immediate focus. Earlier, when the book had actually been in the store, I thought I'd heard Flora's voice. Although the possibility that she might speak was unnerving, my distress about the book was worse. I needed an answer. And I could feel Flora's need to answer. I could feel the attempt right there, the sensation of Flora's will pushing at the thin divide between us. Living and dead, what was that? We seemed so close. I could hardly breathe. I threw from my body some assisting force toward Flora. We were locked in the effort to communicate across the charged air above the featured books. Waves of force between us pushed and receded and began again. Then a customer walked in.
Dissatisfaction
DISSATISFACTION IS A hunched, sinewy, doggedly athletic Black man in his seventies. We see him running slowly around the lake and yet when he enters the store his tracksuit is immaculate. Today he wore the navy blue one with orange stripes, plus a black parka over the thin jacket. These were casual clothes, but he wore them well. As always, he presented an air of elegant outrage.
'What's new?'
He stood in the entryway, glaring, belligerent. I glared back at him, furious that he'd interrupted my communication with Flora. Beat it! I'm talking to a dead customer!
But I didn't say that. I relented. By way of the fact he was impossible to please, Dissatisfaction was one of my favorite customers. Also, I didn't want him to tell me again that he had only a decade or so left to read. He was always in a hurry and wanted me to drop everything. He is one of the cursed, a Tantalus, whose literary hunger perpetually gnaws but can never be satiated. He has read everything at least once. As he began reading capaciously at the age of six, he is now running out of fiction. I love the challenge of selling books to him and tried first, as usual, to interest him in history, politics, biography. I knew he would not accept anything but fiction, but this was a chance for him to vent anxiety over what he might read next. He snarled and swatted aside my factual offerings.
Asema walked in and tried to help.
'All right,' she said to him firmly, 'you should really read this.' Before I could stop her, she handed him The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan. An anguishing read about prisoners of war worked to death in order to build a highway through impassable jungle. He didn't just wave it off; he lifted his hands and fended it off.
'Too much,' he said.
'Well, what about this?' She held up Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada.
'It's more World War Two history,' he said, thrusting it back at her.
'Yes,' said Asema, 'but it's something we should all know about, right?'
He peered at Asema, then spoke with incredulous contempt.
'Are you kidding me? Honey, I was there.'
Asema looked at him with a burst of intensity.
He nodded back at her and flared his eyes.
She returned the flare.
'There how?'
'My dad was a G.I. My mama was German. They fell in love. I was born, rode her back as she picked through rubble after the war. Eventually he married my mom and we moved here. Happy now?'
'Pretty much,' said Asema, subdued.
It isn't that he wants fiction with happy endings. He hates happy endings. He turned back to me, dismissing Asema with a flick of his fingers. Dissatisfaction wears thick glasses, has brilliant young brown-gold eyes, a long angular face with a broad jaw, grim line of mouth. His hair is thick, gray, cut close to his skull. His hands are singular—long and narrow with tenuous wrists. When he picks through books with avid purpose, his fingers are nimble and hungry. He holds his breath and either lets it out explosively after reading the first page, a signal of disgust, or with no sound at all turns the page. Generally, if the first pages satisfy, he will read the entire book. He will not quit even though he may come to hate it.
Now, I stood beside him ticking through the past few months of success and failure. Toni Cade Bambara and Ishiguro, yes, all of Murakami, yes, Philip Roth, James Baldwin and Colson Whitehead (Get out. Read these a hundred times). Yaa Gyasi, yes, Rachel Kushner, yes, and W. G. Sebald, but no more mysteries because he complains that he becomes compulsive. A month ago, I gave him Denis Johnson's Angels, which he liked well enough. He tried Tree of Smoke and excoriated Johnson for enervating him with the evidence of hard research, although, he said, he could see where in fact the book was pretty good. I had then pressed Train Dreams into his hands. He came back and faced me, teeth gritted.
'What else you got by this guy?'
Which told me he'd been extremely moved. This lasted a week. He has now finished all of Johnson. We are in trouble. If I sell him a book he dislikes, my favorite customer will return with an injured air, his voice cheated and tattered.
What shall it be?
I pull The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald, off the shelf. He grumpily buys it. Much later that day, just before the store closes, Dissatisfaction returns. The Beginning of Spring is a short book, after all. He shuts his hands violently on a copy of Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Blue Flower, and bears it away.
The Mix-up
KATERI CALLED ME at home, on my day off. Our landline is unlisted, but that was the number she called. She probably found the number in her mother's telephone list. As I was learning, there is no small talk with Kateri. But her immediate urgent intimacy was a surprise.
'Something's up,' she said.
'You must have the wrong number.'
'No, this is Kateri. Something's up.'
'Hello to you too,' I said.
'Hello. Something's up.'
I was silent.
'It's Mom.'
'What about her?'
'I'm not sure yet. I'll tell you when you get down here.'
'This is my day off and I am busy. Here at home. Which you know because you called my unlisted number.'
Kateri paused, readjusting her attack.
'Look,' I said, 'I'm gonna help you out. When a person who works retail is off duty, we don't do nothing for nobody—unless that person asks nice.'
'Wow. You could never be a high school teacher. I'm sorry to be so abrupt,' said Kateri. 'It's not like me to be upset, but I am very upset by something. It has to do with Mom. And I know you and she were best friends.'
'What do you mean "best friends"?'
Silence from both of us. The notion filled me with alarm, and was simply not true. For me, anyway. I only connected with Flora over books.
'She said …'
Kateri stopped. Her voice registered distress.
The worm of guilt twitched. What if Flora really had thought of me as an intimate? What if she was still trying, as an awkward ghost, to stay friends?
'Look,' Kateri said. 'Books meant everything to my mother. She lived in her books! And you have that same …'
'It's not that bad,' I said. 'But it is pretty bad. We were immersed in Swann's Way when …'
Kateri didn't answer.
'You still there?' I asked.
'Yeah. You sounded like her. I miss her so much. Please, can you come?'
I didn't want to, but I couldn't say no, not when she talked about the books, not when she asked that way. There was a note of pleading in her voice that was utterly unlike the person I had first met and the woman who had first called me.
'All right, I'll be there. But where are you?'
'Fifth Precinct Headquarters.'
'For godsakes, no.'
'I had to talk to the police. Now I'm too upset to drive home. You'll see me right when you walk in the door.'
While she was giving me the address, which I already knew, and where I did not want to go, I looked out the window. My dying tree reached toward the sky from its back down on earth. Its branches were like beseeching arms. It takes a while for life to leave green wood. I felt the helplessness, the lack of agency, the frustration of the tree. Severed from its roots, unable to taste the starlight.
THE BUILDING was an innocuous brick and glass box, the strip-mall-type doorway strung with all-faith white holiday lights. Kateri came forward to greet me. I was extremely unhappy to be at a precinct house, but she didn't seem to notice. She took my arm. I noticed the desk behind her. Its surface was neat, the decoration spare, one framed photo of a dog and a cheap clear glass vase, stained at the base and still bearing a brittle brown rose. I am superstitious about keeping dead flowers.