TEN

Nick couldn’t help it, but he always thought of the bookshops he visited as his own. He knew all the layouts; he knew the windows and how light struck the displays; he knew where the dust was most likely to settle. Every visit, he gave himself lots of time so he could prowl about the shop and see how things were doing. He made minihomes of each shop, relatives out of every buyer, and he felt this tremendous flush of pleasure every time he walked through a door, every time a buyer walked toward him with a hand out to grasp his.

Really, he considered the book buyers caretakers of his shops, and he enjoyed giving them advice. He didn’t like the way a new line of books was just junked onto the shelves. He hated a window cluttered with tiny Styrofoam men holding up the books. Some of the buyers listened. One girl was just as happy to have Nick climb into the greasy front window to set up a display the way he said would do the most good. She was just as content to have him be the one to pick out all the dead flies that had kamakazeed into the fluorescent lights. The truth was, she didn’t give a hoot what he put into the window as long as he was the one doing it.

Nick talked to the customers. He’d try to figure out what kind of book they needed to read and then go and find it, popping it into a pair of surprised hands. He found comic novels for depressed-looking women; he pulled out murder mysteries for bored-looking men; he suggested kids’ books to grandmothers. Once, he started telling a little girl one of the stories he had told Robin a long time ago, but halfway through it he began to feel guilty, as if he had somehow betrayed something, and he had to excuse himself, making up something about needing to see someone in the back.

But lately there were complaints. At one shop, he had seen a thin, anemic-looking blonde in a white coat hunching surreptitiously over books. Curious, he trailed her a little, until he got close enough to see her unfurling a long loop of pink stickers with JESUS SAVES printed on them. She was furtively pasting them into the pages.

It enraged Nick. He knew you couldn’t pull off a sticker without lifting up print, too. He saw the books she went after—books on abortion, books by Sartre, for Christ’s sake—and he grabbed the girl’s arm. “Hey, who you touching?” she said, jerking around, socking him squarely in the eye before she sprinted out of the shop.

The buyer, a new man, gave Nick a paper towel soaked in cold water for his eye, already blooming into blues. He was cross, though. He told Nick it was none of his business, that what he should have done was just call the manager. “It’s not your responsibility,” he said, miffed. “And we never touch customers. That’s how you get sued.” After that, he was never as friendly to Nick, never as glad to see him in the store.

There were other complaints. Nick’s boss told him buyers didn’t appreciate Nick homing in on their clients, fiddling around with their shops. They didn’t like the way he kept rescuing what he called the “orphan books,” the novels no one but him had ever heard of, the poetry volumes that were lucky to sell one or two copies, and then displaying them beside the best-sellers. People wanted to be left alone to browse; they wanted to pick out their own books. If they wanted to read nothing but trash, that was their business, wasn’t it? “The buyers say you bother people so much they don’t come into the store as often. Can’t you just do your job? You’re a wonderful sales rep. Isn’t that enough?”

It made Nick feel a little lost. He began bringing home pieces of his bookshops—fiction, mysteries, first novels, and travel books—packing the whole back seat of the car. He liked looking in the rearview mirror and seeing all those books as he drove home. He stacked them in the bathroom, tucked them into the kitchen cabinets, on top of the refrigerator, and by the napkin holder on the table. He never remembered where each book was, but it didn’t matter. He just liked being able to walk into any room in the house and be surrounded by books. He liked being able to pluck up any book and know it was worth reading.

Everyone in the house read. He never forbade Robin to read at the dinner table, and he set up a special stand so Leslie could read at her design table. The silence in the house didn’t matter so much if everyone was reading his books.

But even that began to change. If the bookshops were getting away from him, he felt as if his family was, too. Oh, they still read, but more and more when he called home there was no answer. Sometimes Robin picked up the phone, but she often told him that Leslie was out walking. “Walking?” Nick had said the last time he’d called. “But it’s eleven at night.” Pittsburgh streets emptied at eight. People were in robes watching TV, and Shadyside was wooded, it bred shadows.

“It’s okay,” Robin said. “She always does. The neighbors watch for her.”

Nick didn’t like it—Leslie loping fearlessly through Shadyside’s deserted streets, Robin thinking her mother was under the protection of neighbors they didn’t even know. He pressed her for details. What did Leslie wear on these walks? Who did Robin actually think watched her, and how did she know? He imagined people watching Leslie, but instead of comfort, he felt a sudden new chill.

“Do you miss me?” Robin suddenly blurted.

Nick felt something cramp inside of him. “What kind of a question is that?” he said. There was another moment of silence, a noise, and then Leslie’s voice, out of breath, came on the line.

“Please don’t go walking,” he said.

“Please don’t go away,” she said.

“That’s no kind of deal.”

“We’ll talk when you get home,” she said.

They never did talk, not really. Leslie, in her habit of walking, couldn’t seem to stop, not even when Nick was home. He offered to go with her, but she let him come along only once, and then he felt as if he were trailing after her, rather than walking with her. She walked too fast for conversation, staring dreamy-eyed in front of her, and he had this feeling that because of his presence, neighbors who might have been looking after her, watching her through the film of their curtains, had just turned away.

He began to tell her when he might call, so she could get her walks out of the way, or save them until afterward. Still, she was difficult to reach.

He was in Boston one night, dialing her. He wished she would answer. He wished he had someone else to call. When he was a kid at the home, he’d had a little red notebook into which he had copied the numbers of half the pay phones in Pittsburgh. People who were lonely always answered ringing pay phones and almost always would talk to you. He had never admitted he was an orphan, had never admitted he was lonely, and he’d had some good conversations until he’d run out of dimes. Things had changed, though. He didn’t feel comfortable anymore calling pay phone numbers, and the one time he himself had answered a ringing pay phone, a raspy male voice had asked him if he wanted a blowjob.

Idly, he dialed his boss’s number, then dialed a book buyer he liked, but no one answered. He didn’t know why, but he suddenly began dialing his old number, the one he had shared with Dore. He knew she wasn’t there, but it made him think about her again, it made him remember, and he called information to see if she was still in Boston. To his surprise, she was listed in Chelsea.

He dialed the number, and when he heard her voice, he hung up. He felt dizzy, felt the present crazily starting to recede. Leslie, he thought, but Leslie wasn’t there beside him, Leslie wasn’t on the other end of a phone whispering all the things she wanted to do to him. Leslie was out walking in the night, striding alone under the eyes of his neighbors. He called Dore again, nerved up, and this time her sturdy voice belled out that one more crank call and she was going to get her gun and shoot the phone out. She hung up.

He found himself dialing her number all the next day, never with any luck. He tried as soon as he woke up, right before an appointment; he even excused himself during a business lunch, leaving his catalog with the buyer while he dashed outside to make a quick call. He couldn’t help himself. He just felt the need to know if a man would answer, calling out, “Honey, I’ve got it,” if a child would pick up and plaintively call for mommy. No one picked up, though, until the evening, and then it was a young voice. He froze until he heard the voice call politely, “Miss…” and then he relaxed. Dore must still be teaching.

He wrote her address on a piece of paper, his hand trembling. He wondered what she looked like, if she had let her hair grow, if she still wore those glass earrings that trapped the light in small halos. He didn’t go visit her, not then. He didn’t even call her again until another month had passed and he was back in Boston. He drove by her apartment. He told himself he just wanted to see how she was living, what kind of a neighborhood it was. It was perfectly all right to still be concerned about someone you had once loved, wasn’t it? He strained to see the numbers on the buildings.

Her place was brick, small, well kept, and he drove right past it. He didn’t want her to see him. He remembered when he had first fallen in love with her, how the impossible fact of someone loving him that way had transformed everything. The air had smelled different—he used to swear he could feel it around him. Colors had shimmered. He had walked around the city wanting to stop people and tell them about her. He had felt that he was two people—himself and her—and that no matter what he did, no matter what happened in his whole life, he could never lose her.

He drove to Cambridge, parking, walking over to a burger joint. He’d eat some lunch; he’d think about what it was he really wanted to do. And then, no matter what it turned out to be, he would leave. He would go home to his wife and his daughter.

Dore was teaching English as a second language the day Nick came back into her life. It was a fairly new job for her, and she was still dumbfounded that they had hired her. She knew no Spanish, no Japanese, but the administrator had told her it didn’t matter, that ignorance was a plus because it would force her to be a better teacher, and force the class to be better students. She nodded, then went out and bought herself some elementary language texts and began teaching herself.

She had two classes—a beginning class that stared at her, and an advanced class that didn’t. Her students ranged from a sixty-year-old doorman at the Ritz to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a South American dictator. She liked the doorman, but the girl gave her haughty looks and finally left the school abruptly because of a military coup at home.

Dore took her classes on field trips. She made them go into McDonald’s and order; she made them stop people on the street and ask for the time. Her students never called her anything but “Teacher,” and although some told her their problems, none came to her house or even phoned her. She told herself it was progress.

The day before she saw Nick again, one of her students gave her a present. She was a sad, soft-eyed girl named Ria, just sixteen, but married. She and her husband had been living in her mother’s house in Puerto Rico. She had once told Dore that she married him because her mother said he was a good choice, and they had moved into the house because her mother said Ria couldn’t do laundry or cook well enough to please a man, so she would do it for her. Ria also told Dore that when she was little, she had had epileptic fits, but her mother, shamed, had never told the school. Ria had nearly died because no one knew what to do with her. She had come to the United States for just six months, on her mother’s savings, staying long enough to learn English because companies in Puerto Rico paid more money for that kind of skill. “Go,” her mother had told her. “I can take care of your husband.”

Ria had told Dore this her first day, waiting until the other students had left. She whispered her life to Dore, dredging in her dictionary to find the words, but she never spoke in class, and when Dore called on her, Ria looked at her in reproach.

Now Ria handed Dore a brown bag and dipped her head. She said she had to go back to Puerto Rico; her mother was ill and could no longer tend Ria’s husband. Her eyes were terrified, dazed. “Open the bag, Teacher,” she said.

Dore did, pulling out a flimsy pale green blouse with short, puffy sleeves, a riot of green and orange embroidery on the bodice. Dore thought she had never in her life seen anything so hideous, but she held it up against her and exclaimed how lovely it was, until she was almost crying. Ria, pleased, blushed.

Dore spent half the night trying to figure out something to wear with the blouse the next day. She looked terrible in it. The sleeves were ridiculously girlish, and the material pulled across her breasts no matter how she plucked at it.

She ended up wearing a black jacket over the blouse, keeping it close around her until Ria came into the class; then Dore took it off. She taught in the horrible blouse, sweating half-moons under the arms, smiling over at Ria, who looked around, pleased. As soon as class was over, she struggled into her jacket again.

She dashed out to her car, sped home so she could change. She parked, and then she saw Nick, standing there, shimmering in her poor vision like a mirage.

They went to a coffee shop, Dore wrapping her jacket over the blouse, trying to hide the dizzy colors of the embroidery. She didn’t feel comfortable being with Nick, and she didn’t want him coming to her place. She knew how it would be. His scent would get into the folds of her drapes so it could never come out. His sound would move in and out of the creaks the apartment sometimes made at night. She’d see him in the corners; she wouldn’t be able to turn on the lights without feeling him there, just out of reach.

Nick told her he was in Boston on business. “Business right in front of my apartment?” Dore said. She watched him skim off the milky layer of his cappuccino. “You haven’t by any chance been calling me, have you? Calling and hanging up?”

“Someone’s been doing that?” Nick said.

They didn’t really talk about themselves at first. Nick felt the same way he had when he was at the home and prowling the teashops for company, making up a history for himself, a past that might unlock the kind of present he wanted. He told Dore he lived in Philadelphia now, that he still sold books, and then he noticed Dore’s face changing, and he stopped. “Hey,” he said, and abruptly she started to cry.

She wouldn’t let him touch her. She lowered her head and covered her face with her two hands. The waitress waltzed by, raising one eyebrow at Nick, lifting the coffeepot toward him, but he shook his head at her. He wanted to touch Dore, but he was afraid. He kept edging his hand across the table toward her. He was halfway there when she opened her eyes. She smiled weakly at him. “Hard day at work,” she said.

“Sure, I know,” he said.

She fiddled with the saltshaker, and then she started telling him how it was for her after he had left. After Mexico, she had gone to live in France for a year, because in France it hadn’t bothered her so much seeing all those mothers and babies—after all, they were French babies, French mothers. Besides, everything was in a language she didn’t understand, so she couldn’t possibly imagine they were blaming her. Nick grabbed one of her fingers. “Let’s just drive,” he said.

He had no idea where he was going to take her; he just liked having her in the car with him. For a moment he could think he was driving her back home to the trailer, back across a bridge of memory into the past.

“What is it?” she asked. “You look so funny.”

“You look the same,” he said, “like time just stopped.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t.” She put her hands in her lap and then looked over at him. “I had a banker for a while,” she said. “He was perfectly nice—he brought me flowers and took me out to dinner. I thought he liked me. But then he said something about my being the best friend he could ever have, and then he never called me again. The last I heard, he had gotten married.” She looked over at Nick. “Did you find anyone as good as me?” she blurted.

“No one like you,” Nick said. He didn’t know what to say to her. If he could just shut his eyes, if he could just think, maybe all the answers he needed would come to him. He couldn’t stop looking over at her. He didn’t want to make her uneasy, so he kept pretending to glance over at the traffic, when actually he was looking at her eyes, her face, her hands balled into her lap.

He felt that without even trying, he was in love with her all over again, or maybe it was just that he had never quite stopped.

He knew he didn’t want Dore to have anybody, that he was glad the banker had disappeared. And being with her, he didn’t feel like he had anybody but her either.

“You’re so lovely,” he said.

“Don’t, please,” said Dore. “Talk to who I am now. Not to who I was.”

“I am,” said Nick. “I am talking to who you are now.”

“Whom you remember,” she said.

“Whom I never forgot,” he said, and as soon as he said it, he felt it was true. “You told me to leave you,” he said. “Remember? You said you couldn’t do it yourself, that I had to do it for you.”

“Oh, I don’t want to remember this,” Dore said. “I don’t want to think about it.” She sat up straighter. “Nick, this is too confusing for me. Please, I can’t be with you anymore tonight. Would you drive me home?”

Home, he thought. The trailer and Flora and a baby burbling in a crib. A woman with eyes so black you couldn’t see the pupils, you could never be sure what she was thinking; a daughter who grew and survived only as long as she was a mystery to you, a girl almost old enough to leave. He shut his eyes.

“All right?” Dore said.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” he said, and turned down toward her street.

He stood outside her apartment after she went in, trying to imagine just what sorts of things she’d do inside. He hadn’t kissed her. He’d told her he’d be back in town, implying that he’d call her, but clamping his voice down so it sounded casual, as if they were nothing more than old friends, as if their lives hadn’t once unraveled together.

It was easy enough to persuade his boss to send him to Boston more often. There were new bookshops sprouting up all along Commonwealth Avenue, all along Harvard Square. There were new “alternative schools.” He had a whole list of them he had culled from Dore, who knew about such things. His boss thought Nick was finally becoming a go-getter, and he was delighted. He gave Nick bonuses, which Nick promptly spent on dinners for Dore, on white tulips.

He didn’t know what he was doing, except he couldn’t stop. As soon as he drove into Boston, his mood buoyed. Anything was possible. He could stride into strange shops and sell them half his stock before they realized they didn’t need it. He felt that Boston had a frantic new pace, and it was only later that he realized it wasn’t Boston doing the speeding, it was he. Dore made everything seem dizzy, like some obstacle course he had to get through as fast as possible to make his way to her. Everything began reminding him of her. He’d eat a muffin at the Pewter Pot and he’d remember the cookies Ruby had brought over on a blue plate; he’d see women with short, athletic haircuts and he’d see the nape of Dore’s neck. He couldn’t walk past an optician’s office without thinking of her.

He fetched her at school, selling the headmaster a few basic grammars, leaving his catalogs and his card, and although he talked about books, he talked mostly about Dore. The headmaster told Nick how pleased everyone was with her, that he practically had to threaten students into the next level because they hated to leave her. “I know how they feel,” Nick said.

He watched Dore coming out. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt as if he had been waiting and waiting for her, that every breath of air he had ever taken had been thick with all those nights with her, and he hadn’t even realized it until he had seen her again. Loving her again made him feel safe, buttressed against loss. It made things possible.

While Leslie never asked much, Dore wanted to know about everything, and sometimes, rather than lie, he told her he couldn’t seem to think about anything but her. “Oh, phooey on that,” she said, but he could tell she was pleased. She pressed him, though. She wanted to know why it was so difficult to get him at home (he had given her the phone number of a friend who was in Europe for the year), why she always had to call the main office. And she wanted to know, over and over, just what they thought they were doing, just how he expected things to end.

“Who said anything about ending?” Nick said. “We’re just going slow, getting surprised.”

She gave him a long, even look. “Surprised?” she said.

“I love you,” he said, but she wouldn’t say it back; she kept telling him that when she knew how things were going, then she would tell him how she felt, and not before. He tried to trick her into it. He asked her when they were tumbling entwined across her floor; he whispered to her just as she was drowsing off to sleep and defenseless; but then the look of terror that flickered into her face made him feel suddenly scared.

He told himself anything was possible, that the best thing was not to focus on any outcome at all, just let things happen. He thought of Flora in the trailer park, with her threads and her cards; he remembered her telling him he’d have a whole family of girls.

He never really thought of himself as having an affair. It was an ugly, unromantic word; and besides, how did you have an affair with someone you had once lived for and had a child with and shared a whole life with? An affair was cheating, leaving less for one person so you might have more for another, and he didn’t think he was doing that. If anything, being so happy made him generous, made him feel closer in a way to Leslie. He brought her baby roses and tulips; he walked with her at night, and found her silences didn’t eat away at him the way they used to. He waited them out now, or teased her from them until she smiled and draped her hands about his face.

He felt so protected that he began taking new note of Robin. He kept remembering her as a little girl, how she used to feel inside his coat pockets looking for toys, always taking instead the things he carried for himself—his pen, a small notebook, an inky itinerary sheet. He never knew what she did with those things, why she even wanted them. He only remembered her screaming in fury when Leslie tried to take them away. He remembered how she used to watch him, how he’d sometimes feel her eyes on him when he was in another room, another city.

Robin didn’t ask him for anything anymore. She didn’t meet him at the door. When he came home, she was in her room, the stereo on, but her headphones keeping her room so quiet that you wouldn’t even know she existed. Sometimes she was out at the “Y” swimming; she’d come home sulky, her hair smelling of chlorine.

Little girls you could cart to the zoo or the museum; you could prop them up beside you in the bleachers while a baseball game droned on in front of you. He had no idea what you did with teenagers, how you spoke with them. He ended up asking her to meet him for dinner one night when Leslie had a wedding-gown fitting to attend to and was going to be gone a long while. He told Robin he’d take her to the Pasta Palace, a new Italian place in Shadyside.

She showed up for dinner in a black dress and metallic blue shoes, a silver clip in the wilds of her hair. The dinner was supposed to be special, but it really didn’t go very well. He was nervous with his own daughter, and she kept looking at him as if she expected something to happen.

They were leaving the restaurant when he ran into a client. Bill Glassman, who owned the Squirrel Hill Bookmart. He took one look at Robin and started making a fuss. He knew her name, which startled Robin because she had no idea who he was at all. He started out with the usual pleasantries—how pretty she was, how he had always assumed Nick was doing the usual fatherly bragging, but really, she was a breathtaker. And then, while Robin stood rooted there, amazed, he began to tell her about her life. He knew what grade she was in, he knew she swam, and he knew that she loved Jane Austen. He knew things she never thought to tell anyone about, like how she drew pictures on the backs of envelopes and liked to make shadow drawings on the misty windows. He knew almost all the outside details of her life because Nick had never stopped collecting them, because he had memorized the facts of her existence and then happily spilled them out in conversation, almost as if he were convincing himself that he played a part in all of it.

Robin swayed on the heels of her shoes, shocked, glancing from Bill to Nick and back again, all the while listening to her past being played back to her by a total stranger. Before he left, Bill shook her hand and then Nick’s. “You come by the store,” he told Robin. “I’ll fix you up with all the Jane Austen you want.” A little dazed, Robin moved closer to Nick.

While they walked, she kept glancing over at him, waiting for him to say something, but all he said was, wasn’t Bill a damned nice guy, and that Robin ought to stop by the shop, he had a good selection. He looked at her, beaming, but she stayed silent. At one point she stumbled, and he wrapped his arm about her for a moment. “I’ve got you,” he said.