Gina
It was a happy crowd. Friday night in a midtown restaurant in San Francisco is usually pretty lively. I was by myself, but there was a guy eyeing me from the other end of the bar. I’d seen him earlier, when he was chatting up the bartender. She hadn’t responded to his advances, so he’d turned his attention to me. I could see why she wasn’t impressed. He preened every time he moved his body. I’d picked up enough women’s intuition along the way to know that was a bad sign.
I did a quick assessment, trying to decide where he fit on my internal scale. Most women develop an alert system as they’re growing up—an instinctive gauge that measures the threat or benefit of every man who approaches them. My situation was more complicated. I wasn’t born with that skill, but I learned a version of it later on. Right now, the system was working, and I was pretty sure of one thing: This guy wasn’t in my green zone.
But where did he fit in? If he wasn’t at the top of the scale, was he all the way at the bottom where my fear gets tangled up in paranoia? I tried to visualize him in a warlike setting with hate in his eyes. That’s a quick judgment I find myself making with every man I meet. Could I imagine him with a gun in his hand or one bulging under his coat? If I sense anything, my body tenses up, and the old wounds come roaring to the surface. My fears have never really left me. I can be standing in the middle of the bookstore—thousands of miles away on another continent—and suddenly everything might drop out from underneath me. Then I’m back in a dark room staring down the barrel of a rifle.
But this guy hadn’t touched that hot wire. As I watched him swirl his drink at the end of that big, brass bar, I decided there wasn’t much to worry about. I climbed down from my fears and stuffed them back in their cage. He was still looking at me, but he really wasn’t much more than a nuisance. He’d turned his body so that he was facing me, probably trying to decide when he should slide down the bar and make his move. He wanted to be cool about it, but he was failing completely. At that point it was pretty easy to see that he was just some character out by himself on a Friday night, trying to get laid.
I should have been flattered—maybe even gratified—that my feminine charms were working so well, but instead I was just uncomfortable. I’m not that kind of woman. I know that sounds a bit prissy, but I mean it more literally than figuratively. There are things I don’t really talk about until I know you pretty well.
When Silvia texted me earlier saying that she’d be late, she said to meet her at the bar. But right then I was wishing I’d told her no and just sat at one of the tables near the door. I had an advance reader’s copy of a new novel that I planned to give her, and I would have enjoyed rereading a few pages while I waited. I could have sat with my legs demurely crossed, looking a bit bookish. And those twenty feet or so between me and the bar would have made all the difference. I would no longer be a pickup waiting to happen. Even in the most sexually sophisticated city in the world, when a man sees a woman standing alone at a bar, he thinks he owns her.
The bartender placed a rye Manhattan in front of me, and I took a slow taste, enjoying the quick, bracing effect of the first sip. I stared ahead, focusing on the array of gourmet wines and liquors that covered the long front window behind the bar. There are times when I’ve been bothered about the fragility of such a scene, worried that everything could come crashing down. But right then, I was enjoying the moment. The early-evening light from Market Street was filtering through the glass behind the bottles, twinkling through the browns, ambers, and yellows of the liquids, creating a soft, unexpected light show. It was one of the subtle touches that made the Zuni Café my favorite restaurant in the city.
That guy—I didn’t even bother to look at him anymore—was going nowhere because I could sense how clueless he was. He wasn’t the only one like that. My search for some sort of sensitivity in men had been utterly fruitless, and the selection seemed to be getting worse. I wasn’t sure what attracted me anymore. They all seemed to miss the stuff that’s important to a woman—important to me, anyway. I’d had my brown hair cut earlier in the day, and it curled softly around the collar of my slate-colored jacket. But ten minutes from now, this guy—and probably all the rest of them—couldn’t have told you the color of my hair or my jacket. I was wearing a pair of opal drop-earrings and a handcrafted necklace that I’d picked up at a vintage jewelry store on Hayes Street, and there was a trio of bracelets on my right wrist in a matching color. The skirt was something I’d found in a thrift shop on Fillmore Street, and it went with an old pair of shoes that I had. My ensemble wouldn’t have won any fashion awards, but it reflected who I was at the moment.
The thing I needed in a relationship was proving elusive. I longed for someone who would enjoy the subtleties of my feminine persona, but that kind of man wasn’t easy to find. The field, I knew, was very limited. I needed a person I could trust with a long, unpleasant list of things from my past. He had to be someone who wouldn’t be shocked by my wartime experiences or freaked out to learn there were people still trying to track me down. If my fears kicked in from time to time, he’d just have to accept them. And he’d have to put up with my dwindling hope of finding a lost child who by now was on her way to becoming a grown-up. And, of course, there was the big thing—the secret about me that wasn’t really much of a secret at all. He would have to do more than just accept that part of me—he would have to rejoice in it. My special someone had to be willing to get beyond the outer me and draw on my inner yearning for love.
But the guys I’d been meeting were nothing like that. They were like this one at the bar. I have big brown eyes that draw some attention, and I have long hands that I use to gesture a lot. But that’s not where most men stare. When they look at me, they only see a woman in her late thirties with somewhat angular features and a slightly skinny ass. I probably fit some vague idea of what an evening’s companion should look like. But guys like this, if they got that far, would be in for a surprise.
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Sylvia suddenly appeared, striding down the aisle toward me. She was dressed in her light gray, take-no-prisoners business suit that I remember her wearing when she had a crucial court appearance. She had one of those that afternoon. Even if she hadn’t sent me the text message, I would have known from the way she walked that she’d gotten her client acquitted.
The hostess was a few steps behind her holding a couple of menus. Silvia was all hugs and apologies, and within seconds she gathered me, my purse, my book, and my phone and pointed us toward the back of the restaurant. The hostess had been holding a table along the brick wall at the back of the dining area. Sylvia knew without asking that I wanted the seat with my back to the wall. She’d been around me long enough to know that I liked to see who was coming and going.
“Was that guy trying to pick you up?” Sylvia nodded back at the bar.
“He thought he was. It’s probably a good thing that you showed up when you did. You saved him a lot of embarrassment.”
Sylvia gave me one of her warm grins. It was a palette full of teeth, dimples, and flashing brown eyes. She used to wrap that smile around me and convince me that all was right in the world.
“Not your type?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You didn’t try to charm him with your Italian accent? That always worked with me.”
I guess I got a little exasperated. “Give it a rest, will you? The minute I saw him, I already knew a dozen reasons why I wouldn’t be interested.”
Sylvia brought her lips together with the hint of a kiss. She was wearing a beige blouse under her suit jacket, and I asked her where she bought it. But it made me sad that I had to ask. There was a time about a year earlier when I would have known everything about her clothing. If she wasn’t wearing one of the blouses I liked, I would have just walked into her closet and slipped it on myself—no questions asked. But those days were over.
She reached across the table, grabbing my hand, rubbing each finger with soft strokes from her own forefinger and thumb.
I tried to break the spell for the moment. “Shall we get the roast chicken from the brick oven? Two orders of that with the bread salad—you know, like we always do?”
She nodded, but she wasn’t letting up. “Gina, you worry me sometimes.”
I just shrugged. Even though our birthdays were only a few months apart, she’d taken to being maternal with me.
“What is your type?” She was all seriousness. “I don’t even know anymore, do you?”
“Maybe, it’s still you.”
Her smile eased up a bit as she pursed her lips and shook her head. “You know that’s not true.”
She stretched the thought a little further. “We had to end it. You know that, as well as I do. The only difference was that you didn’t want to talk about it. You were too kind—you didn’t want to say something that would hurt my feelings. But we had to make the change that we did.”
I knew. I even remembered what she said: “We really don’t fit together very well.” At the time I thought that was a very polite way—even a delicate way—to put it. But I couldn’t argue with her.
“I still love you.”
“And I still love you.” And I knew she meant it.
Sylvia’s eyes turned serious and her lips tightened. It was the look she got when she was lining up her facts, ready to make an argument to the jury.
“Gina, we need to talk about this. It’s easy for me to live my life the way I want to live it. It’s much easier for me than it is for you. I know that, sweetheart, I really do. My life is open. The person I appear to be is what I am. The two fit together—I don’t have to explain anything later on at some awkward moment.”
I must have acted like I was going to object, but she beat me to it.
“I know you’re going to say, ‘What about us? How did that happen?’ Well, that was just what it was at that time—it doesn’t go beyond that.
“My point is that I know how difficult it is for you to find the right relationship. What you are doesn’t fit with everything else. I know that guy at the bar didn’t appeal to you, but what if he did? What would you say to him? How would you…”
She was searching for the right word, but I interrupted. “Maybe I should just start wearing a name tag. It could say, ‘My name is Gina, and I’m…”
Sylvia stopped me short. There was a flash of anger on her face, and that was mixed with a few hurt feelings. She was trying to be helpful, and I was being sarcastic. And she knew it.
“I’m just trying to help out. Maybe it’s a mistake for me to do so. I know you don’t thrust yourself in front of people, and I respect that. I think that’s one of the things I love about you the most. But at times you seem so lonely and frustrated.”
True.
I don’t know if I was lonely or frustrated at that moment, but I knew what she was talking about. Sylvia was getting antsy—maybe worried that I might start complicating things with her. But I wasn’t going to do that. Our relationship was what it was. It wasn’t going to change, and I wasn’t going to push it. After we split up, she’d gone back to her old girl-friend—the one she’d lived with before we met. Sylvia knew I didn’t think Margo was good enough for her, but she didn’t want me reminding her of my opinion.
However, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was just reflecting on the fact I was Gina Perini—a bookseller who was lucky enough to have a very talented lawyer as a friend. Sylvia was the one person in my life who knew everything about me. When my life got lonely, she could sense it. When things from the past would dog me, she knew what I was facing. She was the only one I trusted, and every now and then I had to grab onto that thought and cling to it.
Sylvia gave up for the moment trying to follow my mood shifts.
“Maybe we should talk about something else.”
I nodded in agreement. The waitress came back in time to give us a needed break.
“Let’s order some wine and get started on it before the food gets here.”
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Hayes Street Books was only a few blocks away, and my apartment was in a flat above the bookstore. To get there, I walked up Gough Street, took a ninety-degree turn left, and then went a couple of blocks west on Hayes. It was one of the many things that surprised me about San Francisco—all the streets in the main part of town were at a very logical right angle to the other. Where I grew up, nothing was like that. The streets meandered around hills, following the whim of a country path, or they traced the edge of a fortification that some warlord had erected centuries ago to keep out the peasants. But San Francisco was part of the New World—in fact, it was as far west as you could go in the New World without falling into the ocean. Back when it was a fresh-faced American city, some very earnest pioneers, who had just marched all the way across the continent, probably thought they should create a nice, rectangular grid like all the other American cities. My guess is that it never occurred to them that superimposing right-angle streets on a city with steep hills would produce a collection of sheer cliffs and roller-coaster streets. It was something that would drive visitors slightly crazy over the next two centuries.
Sylvia offered to walk with me to my flat, but I told her no. She was probably worried about me. There’d been times in the not-so-distant past when I’d been known to panic without warning. The war that had chased me out of the Balkans had officially ended, but my own personal slice of that bloodletting was far from over. I knew I’d probably be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. Still, I’d grown calmer lately. Maybe enough time had gone by to ease things, or maybe it was just the distance—or maybe I was kidding myself. In any event, the streets of Hayes Valley were filled at that moment with a happy Friday night crowd. You had a better chance of being smothered by a restless group of twenty-somethings who were spread out across the sidewalk than being accosted by an attacker or a bad memory. Besides, I knew it was easier for Sylvia just to walk in the opposite direction from the restaurant and grab the BART train. She’d be back at her house in North Oakland in a half hour, and I wouldn’t be monopolizing any more of her time. She might even get there soon enough to keep Margo from quizzing her about me.
What was my type? I couldn’t get Sylvia’s question out of my head. I looked into the shop windows along Hayes Street, walking slowly as I pondered the question. There was a sale going on at Dish. They had some cute jackets on display, but they still looked like they were out of my price range. I loved the vintage skirt that I’d bought a week earlier at Ver Unica, but I didn’t see anything like that in the window. What was I looking for in a relationship? I seemed to revel more in discovering clothes than in finding a lover. Maybe I was fated to be a perennial window-shopper.
Absinthe, at the corner of Gough and Hayes, had the usual crowd at the bar. It was another favorite of mine and my go-to restaurant if a publisher’s rep offered to take me to lunch or dinner. There didn’t seem to be anyone of interest in there at the moment. Sylvia thought I needed a more systematic approach for finding companionship, and she was probably right. The normal kind of minglings and mixers don’t work very well for me. She said I should set my sights on someone strong, masculine, and confident. But I knew she had it backward. Men like that scare me. But it wasn’t so much that they frightened me physically. It’s just that men who are that immersed in their own maleness usually wear me down. I can deal with a man’s emotional needs—but if his needs are packed away so deep that he doesn’t even know he has them, that blocks off any attempt at intimacy. I was slowing starting to realize something about myself that I wasn’t too happy to admit: I seem to do better with men who are on the brink of falling apart.
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The window of Hayes Street Books looked darker than I liked it to be. As I crossed the street and got closer to the store, I tried to think of ways to lighten it up. Maybe I could lighten up some of my apprehensions as well. As with most bookstores, our front window thrusts itself trustingly out toward the street hoping to draw attention. The books in the window are all proper enough–looking, but if you looked closely you could see ideas and provocations behind those covers that might drive some people over the edge. You can never be sure who will be offended by what they see. A few weeks earlier there were two men outside the window, grumbling about a display I had arranged of books portraying the impact of gun violence. They glared at me with a wordless hatred as I stepped past them and into the store.
My mood usually perks up when I’m inside and surrounded by books. Late in the evening, I usually don’t do much more than poke around, making sure that the most important books are face-out instead of spine-out. When you manage a bookstore, you can always convince yourself there’s something more to do—move some shelves, change the display on the tables—even if you spend the next day unconvincing yourself of the same thing. My apartment is upstairs from the store, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. The owners of the store also own the building, so when they retired they offered to let me live upstairs as part of the deal for managing the bookstore. There was a promise that they’d sell me the store someday, but it was left pretty vague. Still, the convenience of the deal appealed to me. There was no commute, and I could get downstairs whenever I was needed. I realize now that they probably knew me better than I knew myself. If they wanted someone so obsessed with the bookselling business that she’d be there looking out for things around the clock, then that’s what they got—me.
Miriam Brown, my assistant manager, was running the store that evening. She’s our unofficial ambassador to the African-American community a few blocks to the west of us—a group that seems to be growing smaller by the day under the pressures of gentrification. She’s also my right arm and, I have to admit, knows some of my bad habits. Miriam sometimes does an imitation of me selling books, mimicking me as I try to put a book into someone’s hand, letting him or her touch it, as I sing the praises of the author and give a little teaser about the plot. I suppose that’s true. I usually count on a book cozying up to the customer and saying, “You need me.” Miriam claims that I’m trying to put the idea in the heads of customers that if the book is perched on their bookshelf, people will see it as evidence of their good taste. Am I that bad? I’m not sure, but Miriam is usually right about me.
That evening, Miriam was arranging chairs in the back of the store for our children’s story time that was scheduled for the next morning. Morrie, who delighted in his role as storyteller-in-chief, had already placed the books around the wall before he’d gone home earlier. It was beautiful display, but I winced a little whenever I saw an array of children’s books like that. It made me think about things—things from the past. There was a little child…but now she’s no longer a child, if she’s alive at all. When I think about her, it saddens me that she may have missed all this. Did anyone give her a big picture book as she was growing up or watch her face as she traced her fingers around the outlines of the animals? Did anyone sit next to her and read her a story? Did anyone laugh with her as she went through the experience of learning how to read? If she was anywhere at all at that moment, she was now a teenager. I just hoped she was okay. I knew better than to dwell on any of that. Still, I sometimes had a hard time shaking those thoughts, as I trudged up the stairs to my apartment.
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Why did I become a bookseller? The idea planted itself in my mind years ago and then bubbled to the surface later on. At the time, I was a scared and desperate teenager. Looking back, I suppose you could glamorize what I went through by calling it some sort of odyssey. But if there was any poetry attached to that experience, it escaped me. I was running for my life—and from my life. The last thing on my mind was my future career.
I was hiding out in Dubrovnik, but for me that city had become a trap. Even though I’d snuck across the boundary from Bosnia and then into Croatia, I had no place else to go. I’d been evading capture for several months, hiding in the back streets, but I feared that my luck had run out. And it wasn’t just my own safety I was worried about. I knew that anyone who had been connected with me during those months was in danger. I had to leave Anja and the others, because if I stayed there, I would be putting them in more peril than they already were. Anja had taken Jelena and the others from the place in the mountains where they’d been hiding, and they had moved once again. I was hoping they’d found someplace safe. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if they were caught.
I hadn’t yet become Gina at that point in my life—that came many months later. For the moment, I was just a kid full of self-doubt. And as dangerous as it was for me to hide out in the back streets of Dubrovnik, I realize now I might have been in even more danger if I had made the change that was awaiting me in the future. As it was, I was just a lost-looking waif who was able to wander around without drawing too much attention. Still, I knew my time was short. If I stayed there much longer, I’d be found.
The Militia had agents up and down the Dalmatian coast, and they had eyes everywhere. At one point I was certain that someone was following me. I caught a glimpse of a man taking my picture, but he darted away before I could find out who he was. I was sure, however, he’d be back soon with his friends. The border with Bosnia was just a few kilometers away, and these people weren’t going to let an international boundary stop them. The Komandant and his friends were close to tracking me down, and I knew they had revenge on their minds. But in Dubrovnik, I had my back to the sea. If I stayed there, they’d find me. And if they found me, I’d be dead.
And while I was still trying to escape that shooting war, I realized I was fighting a mini-war within myself. During my months in hiding, some basic issues about my own identity were starting to force their way to the surface. These were questions that would dominate my life in future months, but for the time being I couldn’t focus on them. I was too confused and terrified. At that moment, there was certainly none of the promise—even joy—that would open up to me in later years. I was just grappling with the deep fear that I was running from something without any idea of where I was going.
Dubrovnik was a strange place to be hiding at that moment. As one of the world’s great cultural treasures, it was awash in a sea of tourists. Each day brought a new group of happy, camera-laden people wandering through the streets, soaking up the historic riches. Many of them may have been dimly aware of the war that was going on less than a hundred kilometers away, but it didn’t seem to affect their enjoyment of the city. Dubrovnik had been bombarded for three months in 1991 during the early part of the war, but it had recovered to the point where it could present its rich, historic face to visitors once again. But I didn’t belong there. It was probably obvious to everyone that there was something about me that was out of place. The city was at peace, but I was still at war. I knew I had to get out of there, and at times it felt like the means of escape were tantalizingly close. When I wandered down near the port, I looked out across the Adriatic Sea and wondered if I could ever to get across the water to safety.
I’d been there a few days when I decided to follow an English-language tour group that was walking around the city, stopping at the various landmarks on Stradun, the main street. As I worked my way around the fringes of the group, I tried to be inconspicuous. Since I was dressed like a universal teenager—hooded sweatshirt, dirty jeans, and sneakers—I suppose I looked like any of the young stragglers from around the world who wandered through the city. But it was all an illusion. If anyone talked to me for a few minutes, they would probably figure out I was on the run from something. The group I had attached myself to was made up mostly of older people, walking at their own pace, focusing on the words of the English-speaking guide. I was listening too, because I was trying to soak up as much English as I could. Somewhere in my mind I knew it would come in handy. I was standing at the edge of that tour group, but suddenly my skin started to bristle. Someone was talking to me.
My fear blocked out everything. I was sure I had been found out, and I started looking around for a way to escape. It took me a few seconds to realize that the man was speaking to me in English. Then I finally realized that he was introducing himself and his wife, who was walking next to him. At that moment, I was so frozen that I didn’t hear much of what he said. To this day, I still don’t know his name. I must have nodded something in response, because he kept talking pleasantly. After a minute or so, I realized he wasn’t any kind of a threat. He was tall with a thick gray beard, and he had on a broad-brimmed khaki hat with a chin strap. He was wearing a gray shirt and khaki pants that had lots of pockets up and down the legs. His wife had on a sundress and a large floppy hat, and there was a camera hanging on a strap around her neck. They both appeared to be in their early sixties, maybe older. They were American tourists, and they just wanted to be friendly.
I finally realized what had caught their attention. There was a book sticking out of the pouch on my sweatshirt, and he recognized the title. It was a dog-eared paperback copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses that I had picked up earlier that day for next to nothing at a local bookstall.
“Are you enjoying that book?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had just started it and that my English was not good enough to catch the subtleties of Rushdie’s writing. I nodded yes, and he nodded back in satisfaction. We continued to talk while the group was moving on to the next stop, and I fell into a comfortable pace walking between the two of them. He asked me about myself, and I answered with only the vaguest generalities. At one point, he wanted to know if I knew about the controversy surrounding that particular book. I told him that I’d heard about it, but the truth is that I knew only the sketchiest details.
“There were death threats made against anyone who sold the book. Some of the big outfits wouldn’t touch it, but we decided to carry it.”
I must have looked surprised.
“My wife and I are booksellers in Massachusetts.”
He told me where the store was located, but I don’t remember what he said. I only knew Massachusetts as a blob on a map somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean. At the time, the only thing I could think to ask was whether anyone had attacked them for selling the book.
“We had a couple of threatening phone calls, and one night someone shot a bullet through the plate-glass window at the front of the store.”
The alarm must have showed on my face.
“It happened at night, so no one was hurt.”
My anxiety was still showing.
“I know. Maybe we should have been more cautious.” He nodded toward his wife who was walking slightly ahead of us.
“But we talked about it and decided there are times when you just have to do the right thing. We boarded up the hole in the glass and then put a big stack of The Satanic Verses in the window next to it.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think I could say anything without giving away too much about myself. The two of them just kept walking, and I kept walking with them.
What did they sense about me? Did my hunger show through on my face? Did they see the fear in my eyes and guess what it was? I didn’t say anything about how desperate I was to get out of there, but I probably didn’t have to. Whatever the two of them may have thought remained unspoken between them. We all just continued to walk, talking only occasionally, as the tour group got closer and closer to the water and their chartered boat. We reached the gangplank, and several of the others in their group started boarding the ship. We were in the middle, and my two companions stood patiently, waiting their turn. I waited with them. I felt something, and when I looked up I realized she had placed her hand on my shoulder.
If I was going to leave, that would have been the moment. And if they expected me to leave, they would have begun their goodbyes and starting giving me their good wishes. I expected at any minute they would start saying, “If you’re ever in America…” But they didn’t. They just stood there, waiting to get on the boat, not showing the slightest concern that I was still standing there between them. If I’d been in that line alone, I would have been spotted by the dock officials immediately and pulled aside. But standing between them, I looked like a slightly bewildered teenager who was in the middle of a pleasant European vacation with his grandparents.
Once on board, I moved away from them as soon as I could. There was a brief nod between us. They seemed to know that I needed to get out of sight, and they were probably just as happy that I was moving away from them and keeping them out of any trouble. The trip lasted only a couple of hours. At one point, I wanted to walk over and thank them, but I knew that might be a bad idea. The boat’s next stop was Bari on the Italian side of the Adriatic Sea, and I slipped off as quietly as I could.
I never saw them again. I’ve looked for them at book conventions and trade shows but with no success. They may have retired or gotten out of the business. They wouldn’t recognize me now, because everything about me has changed. But I’d know them. I just wish I could thank them.
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There are days when I hate what I’m doing. This was one of those days.
We received notice that our worker’s compensation premium would be increased by 6 percent in the coming year. That news came in a nasty-looking white envelope that was lodged under an even uglier envelope from our credit card processor. That one said that our transaction fee was going up, and we would need to purchase new equipment. Both of those bombs landed on my desk in the same week that San Francisco announced an increased fee for the city health plan. The week before that our bank had raised the interest on our line of credit, and PG&E put another service charge on our utility bill. And that list of horrors didn’t even include the new credit manager at a major publisher who said she was “reviewing our payment terms.” Where were we going to find the extra money to pay all this? It wouldn’t be from our customers. The price of each book is printed on the cover, so there’s no wiggle room there. We’d just have to eat it.
We needed more sales. That was the answer to everything—we always needed more sales. There’d been five browsers so far that morning, and only one of them had purchased anything. I wasn’t happy with that ratio. One customer in particular was really starting to annoy me. He was thumbing through a biography on the “new arrivals” table, and he’d been standing there long enough to arouse my suspicions. A lifter, maybe? He didn’t have a booster bag or a jacket with big pockets, so I decided I was wrong about him. But then he pulled a smartphone out of his pocket and aimed it at the book.
He was showcasing us! I’ll be damned if he wasn’t photographing the barcode and ordering the book from some online company. And he was standing right in front of me while he was doing it. What the hell? Was he planning to pay for the lights, the rent, the staff, and all the things we provided him, just so he could stand there and buy it from somebody else? Of course not. He was hovering over my carefully arranged display and running the purchase through some soulless computer somewhere off on the cloud. I would have liked him better if he were a thief.
My evil instincts took over. I moved in next to him and dropped a box—quite by accident—that knocked the phone out of his hands. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I told him. “Let me hold that for you up at the counter while you browse…” He tried to object, but I cut him off. “No, no, it’s no problem. I’m happy to keep it for you.” Fortunately, I’d picked on a guy who was so sheepish about the whole thing that he was willing to wait and retrieve his phone at the counter a few minutes later—along with his book and his change. I was lucky. When I pulled a stunt like that once before, Sylvia pointed out that the customer could just as easily have reported it to the police, claiming that I’d stolen his phone. For a few days, I waited for that guy to come back with a cop.
“How do stores make any money selling books?” Sylvia once asked me.
“I’m not sure any of them do.”
Given what I’d been through in my life, you’d think that I would be more detached about these sorts of things. But I love the book business, and it pisses me off when everything seems to be conspiring to make it fail. I walked around the store trying to cool off. I finally settled down and watched Morrie Richards as he sat in the middle of a group of children reading books to them during story time. He’d been coming in on his own for weeks, reading stories to the littlest children, until I finally asked him if he wanted a second career managing our children’s events. He’d been bored with his retirement, and the idea of being a kind of troubadour for little kids appealed to him. The look in their eyes as he was reading got to me. I wanted to call Sylvia right then and say, “We’re not just selling books. We’re spinning dreams.”
There were a couple of packages on my desk with advance copies of new books. That always perked me up. One of life’s great pleasures is to open a new book and let yourself be mesmerized by the smell and the feel of it. There was also a message from our local booksellers association, wanting to know if I’d be on a marketing panel at the fall trade show. I’d probably say yes, since a couple of my friends from other Bay Area stores would be on the same panel. I was happy to talk at gatherings of booksellers, but that was about as public as I was willing to get. I had good reasons to stay out of view—lots of them. And the next message made me realize I was getting careless. A woman from the Italian Cultural Institute had called. She had heard about Gina Perini and wondered if she would come speak to a business group of Italian American women.
No—she would not. This “Gina Perini” would be doing no such thing.
The Italian American woman that the public saw was something I’d created for myself. Gina Perini came into being at a time when my life had bottomed out and I had to start over again. The original version of me was gone—long vanished, I hoped, from the mind of anyone who used to know me. All of this happened when I was a teenager living in Italy, and it seemed simpler to adopt an Italian name to go with my new personality. The persona I created at that time worked well enough in most places, but I wasn’t about to try it on Italians. They’d want to know what part of Italy I was from. Which province? Which commune? “Perini’—what sort of a name is that? Are you related to the Perinis in…” After an hour or so of that kind of friendly banter, the whole story would come unraveled.
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When I snuck off the boat in Bari, I had no idea what I would do next. I’d gotten as far as Italy, putting the Adriatic Sea between me and my pursuers, but I hadn’t thought beyond that. I had a vague hope that things would get better, and I suppose they eventually did. But before that, they got worse.
A few days after I arrived, I made contact with someone I knew living in Bosnia. But after I did, I almost wished I hadn’t. The news he gave me hit me hard. My fears about Anja and the family had come true. They had been taken captive by the Militia, and no one had seen them since. It was all secondhand information, and for a moment or two I tried to deny it as just a rumor. The man I talked to said he hadn’t actually seen it himself but had only talked to some people who witnessed it. Maybe they were wrong, I said. But the more he talked, the more I realized that the little details of the story were too accurate for it to be anything but true. A group from the Militia had surrounded the house where the family was hiding. They’d marched them out at gunpoint and manhandled them as they were tossed into the back of the truck. According to the witness, the Komandant himself was there, puffing on a cigarette as his soldiers roughed up the prisoners, finally grinding out the butt with a satisfied grunt as the padlock on the truck was snapped into place. No one had seen or heard anything of them after that. What more was there to say? We both knew what that meant. They would probably never be seen again.
“What about the baby? Did they take Jelena, too?”
No one had seen the baby, he said.
“How can that be?” I kept asking. “Are you certain? A child that young doesn’t get up and walk off. Maybe she was being carried by someone, and no one noticed her.”
“The baby wasn’t there.”
The people who saw the incident knew there’d been a small child in the house. They would have noticed. No one saw her then or after that.
I hit rock bottom. During the next few days I sensed that the tentacles of war had somehow reached across the Adriatic Sea and were smothering me. I was in a strange country with no papers, no friends, and very little money. The closest thing I’d ever had to a family had now been lost, and what happened to them was partly my fault. My despair had opened up such a big hole that I didn’t dare think about who or what I was. There was something going on inside me that I couldn’t articulate, but at that point I couldn’t do much more than let it rumble around on its own. For several days, all I could do was hold myself and shiver.
I finally headed north for Rome, because it seemed like the easiest thing to do. I had a sense that Rome was a place where you could find yourself—or get completely lost. I still think all of the world’s abandoned people must wander through there at one time or another. Later on, I learned to love Rome, but that wasn’t true at first. I arrived there on the run and felt totally helpless. I eventually learned how to survive. I hung around the buildings of the Comunità di Sant’egidio in the Trastevere area, living off the generosity of that group. They were focused on helping refugees, and they must have realized that the sad-looking kid sitting in their doorway had escaped from something awful. They kept me alive.
After a few months, I found work with a printer who needed an assistant for odd jobs and errands. Paolo worked by himself, but he took me on—no questions asked. There was nothing official about my relationship with him. It was all lavoro in nero, as the Italians would put it, “working in the black.” Everything about me was off the books. I had no visa or work permit. As far as the authorities were concerned, I wasn’t working at all—in fact, they didn’t even know I existed. Given the nature of his business, Paolo had a good reason to keep everything in nero. Publicity was the last thing he wanted. He called himself a printer, but he was really a forger. Birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, work permits, visas—he could do them all, and he did them well. There’s still some paperwork sitting in an office in Rome that was convincing enough to get me an EU passport many months later and a work visa for the United States.
Paolo wasn’t the only fraud. I called myself his assistant, but that was just to make me feel better. The exchange rate between us was never spoken, but we both knew what it was. There was sex for food, sex for shelter, sex for medication—sex for whatever I had to have. He had his needs, and I had mine. There wasn’t any serious affection between us. When he needed me, he took me—not roughly or without a bit of kindness, but not with any real love either. At that point, love was just a distant abstraction for me—I doubt if I was even capable of it. I wasn’t proud of my arrangement with Paolo, but it was better than walking the streets. I knew that firsthand. During my first, desperate days in Rome, I went out one night on a stroll, walking slowly along the Via Salaria, getting set to offer my body to the first taker with a pocketful of lire. But within minutes I got violently sick to my stomach and started to shake. I spent the rest of the night huddled behind a tree.
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One afternoon, I delivered a packet of some of Paolo’s specially made documents to a bank manager in the Campo de’ Fiori. He looked surprised to see someone like me at the front entrance to the bank. I was wearing jeans and a zippered sweatshirt that hung loosely over my shoulders. I didn’t look much like a business courier. It took him a second to realize why I was there, and then he got a stricken look on his face. He motioned sharply for me to go around and meet him at the back entrance, where I slipped him the paperwork. I knew why he was nervous. I’d read the documents as I walked across the Ponte Garibaldi on my way to deliver them. One of them was a woman’s birth certificate with a German seal on it. I was certain it was a forgery. There were other dubious but official-looking papers in the envelope along with it. He was probably planning to use the paperwork to keep his mistress in the country. By the look on his face, I seemed to have guessed right.
After he unceremoniously slammed the door in my face, I walked away, feeling as insignificant as I was at that moment. I headed past the cafes on Via dei Baullari, ending up at the Piazza Farnese, plopping myself down against the Vasca—the big bathtub-looking fountain in the middle of the piazza. I found a spot between the bicycles and the Vespas, trying to lose myself among the scruffy, lost kids who liked to hang out there during the day. Scruffy and lost—that’s how I felt most of the time, but that afternoon my confusion had built to a crescendo. I was unhappy with my life, with my body, with my soul, and with everything around me. I stared at the Palazzo Farnese. According to Puccini, that was the place where Tosca had shoved a knife in Scarpia’s ribs when he tried to rape her. I knew how she felt.
Looking back, it seems clear that the moment in the Piazza Farnese was a turning point. Something inside me had opened a door, and a new revelation was waiting to enter. As my eyes wandered around the piazza, I looked over at a café and saw something that changed my life.
Two young women were sitting at a table, talking animatedly. The one on the left—the one who caught my attention—had mid-length brown hair that curled luxuriously over the back of her neck. As she leaned over her espresso cup to say something, she brushed back her hair—not continually, but often enough to appear that she was following some inner rhythm. I realized at that moment that I was running a hand through my own scraggly hair, trying in some pitiful, subconscious way to imitate her.
The young woman raised her head slightly when she made a point, following the rising timbre of her voice. When her friend spoke, she inclined her head to one side, waiting in that suspended state while the other woman talked. Then she would tilt her head back and break out in laughter. There was nothing forced about her gestures, nothing unnatural. There was an easy fluidity that had me mesmerized. She moved her hand forward until it came to rest on the forearm of her friend. She let it sit there lightly for a few seconds, giving a small, knowing tap or occasionally lifting a finger to wag when she wanted to say something. It was an easy intimacy that plucked at a chord somewhere inside of me.
I moved in closer to hear her speak. She had one leg crossed over the other, and she moved it rhythmically as she talked. It was an unstudied motion that seemed as perfect as all the others. She had a white blouse that was opened down to the third button, and with it was an elegant, understated silk scarf tied around her neck in a kind of casual knot that Italian women seemed to have invented. Her eyes and skin sparkled. She must have taken great care to make everything look so simple. There were probably lotions, hormones, and dozens of other things that she needed to bring herself to that point, but none of that was noticeable in this, her moment of everyday glory. I listened to her voice—a rich contralto that modulated itself into a variety of tones and textures. I tried to imitate the sound in my mind. If I’d gotten close enough to detect the scent of her, I probably would have been overwhelmed.
I was smitten. Later that afternoon, I found some sheer hose in a street market that matched what she had been wearing. I was almost afraid to pick up the package, and by the time I gave the handful of lire to the proprietor, my palms were covered with sweat. She didn’t seem to notice how nervous I was as she handed me my change. I went back to my tiny bedroom and made sure the door was closed. I unrolled the stockings slowly up my legs and became immersed in that new sensation, wondering if that was how the stockings felt when they were on her. It was a feeling of enchantment. For a moment I imagined myself back at that table with the two women, becoming part of their world.
You could call it love at first sight, I suppose, but that didn’t quite describe the feeling. I didn’t want to be with her. I wanted to be her. And from that moment on, I was. Since then, I’ve often wondered if I had always been like that and just didn’t know it. I’m not sure. I only know that on that warm afternoon in the presence of that signorina—my unaware mentor—I became Gina.
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I had just finished breakfast and was on my way downstairs to the bookstore, when I got a phone call from Rome. It was Paolo. I hadn’t talked to him in over a year, and I didn’t know what he wanted. It took me a second to get back into the rhythm of speaking Italian. But I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to talk to him. I could feel immediately the edge to his voice.
After a bit of friendly conversation, Paolo finally got around to the point of his call. He said he’d had “dei visitatori.” It wasn’t so much the words but the way he said them.
“What kind of visitors?”
“Well, you know, investigators.”
“No, I don’t know!” I would have to have to pry it out of him. “What kind of investigators?”
“I don’t know, for sure. They wanted to know about you. They had badges that they flashed in front of me.”
“Were the badges real?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” I was getting exasperated with him. “For God’s sake, you’ve made a whole career out of forging documents, and you don’t know a phony badge when you see one?”
“Cara mia! What was I supposed to do? Grab the card out of his hand and examine it under a microscope? I just wanted them out of there!”
I wasn’t going to get anywhere if I got angry with him.
“Anyway, I don’t think they were legitimate—they spoke Italian like you do. In America they probably think you sound like an Italian, but an Italian can tell the difference. These guys were from over there—you know, that place where you came from.”
“What did they want?”
“They had a picture of you. They wanted to know if I knew you.”
“A picture? When was it taken?” Fear was erupting in my head.
“It was an old one. You looked the way you did when you showed up on my doorstep all those years ago. You were kind of cute, really.”
I wasn’t going to get into that. “Could you tell where it was taken?”
“They didn’t say. But it wasn’t Italy—I know that. You could see the waterfront down at the end of the street, and there was some foreign writing on the shop signs.”
It was the photo—the one I remembered from Dubrovnik.
“What else did they say?”
“Nothing. After telling them that I’d never seen you before, they just left.”
“How long ago was this?”
“About three weeks ago.”
“And you’re just calling me now?”
I could hear the hesitation in his voice. “I didn’t think it was important. The picture was taken so long ago. No one looking at that picture would connect it with who you are now. You’ve gone through such a big change since then.”
The dead air hung between us for a moment. I knew he was waiting for me to talk. He wanted me to ask him why he changed his mind and decided to call me.
“Paolo, what happened?”
He seemed reluctant to answer, and then he switched over to English. I knew what that meant. It would be easier for him to play dumb. “Luca got a call yesterday.”
That was not good news. Luca Martinelli was my physician during the time I was in Italy. He knew a lot more about me than someone could glean from an old photo taken in Dubrovnik.
“Was it the same people?”
“I don’t know. It was just a phone call. He said he didn’t ask them any questions. I don’t know—it’s probably better that he didn’t.”
“Did he say what they were calling about?”
“They were asking about someone named ‘Bertani.’”
That hit like a thud. “Gina Bertani” was the name I used when I first changed my name. It was the name on my entry papers for the US. The “Perini” part came later. The fear that had been gathering in my head threatened to explode.
“What did Luca tell them?”
“He said he told them nothing at all. He told me that he acted like he didn’t even know what they were talking about. He said they hung up after that.”
“Were they looking for a man or a woman?”
“I don’t know—he didn’t say. He didn’t say much at all.”
“Paolo, that could be important. They weren’t just looking for ‘someone.’ They were talking Italian, for God’s sake—it was either qualcuno, a man, or qualcuna, a woman.”
“I don’t know.” He was squirming to get off the phone.
“Could you find out and let me know?”
I could hear his face drop. “I’ll try.”
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Sylvia had called me the day before to set up an appointment. She offered to buy lunch, but she didn’t say what she wanted to talk about. As I headed downtown, I wondered if it had anything to do with what Paolo told me in his phone call. It probably didn’t—and even if it did, there wasn’t much she could do about it. Sylvia was the person you wanted on your side if someone served you with a subpoena. But if someone wanted your head served on a platter, she wasn’t any more help than anyone else.
Her office was in a converted Barbary Coast building just off Montgomery Street. The entrance opened on to a well-manicured alley that sat a comfortable distance between Jackson and Pacific. The whole area oozed a look-at-me Victorian charm that San Franciscans love to display. The bare-brick interior of the waiting room was home to a number of spectacular tinted photos of San Francisco Bay that hovered over the walls with no visible means of support. The nineteenth-century ambiance of the building was interrupted only by a series of modern, crisscrossed metal beams that were firmly anchored to both the ceiling and the floor. Victorian charm was one thing, but everyone in San Francisco knew that the 1906 fire and earthquake had once leveled buildings like this into rubble. The law firm’s name was in brass letters on the wall outside their door: “Crichton, Moss, Harris, & Kaplan”—as in “Sylvia Kaplan,” my old girlfriend.
Sylvia had come a long way since the days when we shacked up over the bookstore, and she had her files stashed in banker’s boxes in our spare bedroom. It was a good spot for her at the time, because she loved books. She’d sometimes sneak downstairs to grab advance reading copies off the receiving desk to get the jump on other readers. For old time’s sake, I brought along an ARC of a new book that I knew she’d want to read. It was the least I could do, since she offered to buy me lunch around the corner at Cotogna restaurant, where we both lusted after their agnolotti. Still, dining with her made me a little sad. I realized that the passion between us had migrated from the other parts of our bodies and had settled into our digestive tracks.
Sylvia learned her legal skills in the San Francisco District Attorney’s office. And after watching her in action, I realized no one was better at getting a defendant acquitted than a former prosecutor. After a couple of her questionable clients walked out of the courtroom as free men—none too deservedly, in my opinion—she caught the eye of Richard Crichton, who was the go-to guy for every white-collar criminal in town. If you hired Crichton, Moss, Harris, & Kaplan, just about everyone assumed you were guilty—everyone, that is, except the juries. He managed to get most of his well-heeled clients acquitted. Crichton was the face of the firm, but someone else had to do the day-to-day courtroom grind. That job had been passed down from Crichton to Moss to Harris and, now, to my best friend.
Life was good for Sylvia, and I was pleased for her. When I was in a generous mood, I had to give credit to Margo. Sylvia had become more focused in her work since the two of them had gotten back together. They were now starting a family. That was a boundary I had to respect. Their plan, apparently, was for Margo to get pregnant first and then Sylvia would do the same the year after. They wanted their two children to be just a year apart. Margo—ever the child psychologist—thought that would be the best age gap. I had a wonderful vision of Sylvia, when it was her turn to conceive, standing in full-bellied pregnancy in front of a jury, spieling out a heartfelt plea. Margo and Sylvia had worked out an arrangement with a couple of gay men they knew so that each man would end up being either a father or an uncle to the two children. The day when Sylvia told me about their plan, Margo hovered in the kitchen, probably thinking I was going to say something insensitive. But that wasn’t at all how I felt. I admired them for doing what they were doing. I almost offered to contribute to the process, but I knew that wouldn’t have gone over very well.
When I got to her office, Sylvia had a large file sitting on her desk. She seemed anxious to get to it. Normally, we would spend a little time chitchatting with Cristina Brown, Sylvia’s legal intern. Cristina was Miriam’s niece, and she had spent time working at Hayes Street Books when she was going to college. She usually wanted to know the latest tales from the bookstore. For my part, I often asked her why she wanted to be a famous lawyer and pass up the fabulous wealth she could make as a bookseller, but frankly we’d both gotten tired of my attempts at humor. But there was no time for any of that today. Whatever she had on her mind, Sylvia wanted to get to it immediately.
She pushed the file halfway across the desk, but then she stopped, apparently unsure that she really wanted to give it to me. As I sat there with an empty, outstretched hand, I suddenly realized what it must be—it was something I had asked her to help me with months ago. She hadn’t said anything up until now, but she must have found out something important.
“Gina, I’m going to give you this, but you have to promise you won’t do anything impulsive once you see what we’ve found.”
I promised—and I think I even believed my promise when I said it. But I would have stood on my head at that point to see what was in that file.
“You’ve found Jelena?” It came out as a question, but I was already sure of the answer.
“We’re pretty sure the information we have is correct.”
“Only pretty sure?”
Sylvia frowned. She was starting to realize that she couldn’t get by with ambiguous phrasing—not on this subject.
“Okay, we’re as sure as we can be without DNA evidence, and there’s no practical way to get that.”
“Where is she?”
Sylvia gave a little hand motion that meant that I should slow down for a moment.
“Let’s get something straight. I know how emotional this for you. In all the months I lived with you, I learned that much, okay?”
I couldn’t argue with her.
“We’ve found her, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything we can do about it.” She looked at me, waiting to see if that would sink in. “We need to decide right now what we can—and cannot—do with this information. Sweetheart, do you understand what I trying to say?”
I didn’t, but I said I did.
“We paid an investigative firm a lot of money to put together this report, and I think they did a hell of a job. There’s a lot of stuff in here that makes unpleasant reading, and I’m not sure you’ll want to read all of it. They didn’t have much to work with at first. They took the information you gave us about her disappearance—the date, the place, and everything else—and they worked it from there. They checked the records of every international adoption agency until they had a match. But it wasn’t easy. They knew she was only a few months old at the time, and they only had some general idea of her likely features based on her genetics and the description you gave them. That wasn’t much to go on.
“And let me say one other thing. They pulled in a lot favors—and we pulled in a lot favors—while they were getting this together. We have to be careful not to cause any problems for that firm with their informants or with their other clients. There are some things we can use and other things we have to keep in the background. Also, our firm picked up the tab for this, so I think we need to be cognizant of that fact.”
Sylvia could see the look on my face as she went through that explanation, and she knew it wasn’t having much impact. Finally, she leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling.
“Why did I even bother with that? I knew it wouldn’t make any difference to you.”
“Can I just see what’s in the file?
Sylvia shrugged and handed it to me.
I thumbed through the pages, skimming a lot of the background information, until a line on page twelve jumped out at me.
“It’s says that she was ‘found abandoned outside the village.’ That’s not true. She was kidnapped.”
“I knew that phrase would probably upset you. But if you look at the end of the report and read what they say about their sources, you’ll see that they weren’t trying to investigate the details of what happened. They were focused on finding the right child. They just used the language of what their informants gave them without arguing about it. You’ll find that in a few places.”
“So what do we know about this…” I flipped back a few pages to make sure I had the right name, “…this ‘God’s Family Foundation’?”
“That’s the organization that handled the adoption and placed her with a US family.”
“How do we know they weren’t involved in her kidnapping?”
“We can’t be absolutely sure of anything, but this is a pretty large organization that handles a lot of international adoptions. In many cases—particularly in a war zone—a lot of things can happen before an agency like that gets involved… Gina, this was Bosnia, for God’s sake. You told me over and over again what things were like there at the time.”
I thought Sylvia might be trying to convince herself as much as me.
“Look, read the report, you’ll see that were several people that apparently had her in their custody for a short time before the foundation stepped in. As far as we can tell, there was nothing improper about the adoption itself.”
The skepticism must have still shown on my face. Her voice dropped a couple of notches.
“When I read this, I knew you’d have that concern. So I asked our investigators if they would do a little more checking on the foundation. I’ll let you know what they find out, okay?”
I nodded my thanks.
“Where is she now?”
“She was adopted by a married couple who were living in South Carolina at the time. They’ve since moved to Indianapolis. Her family life looks stable. The investigators haven’t done an in-depth examination of her adoptive parents, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem. The father’s name is Allen Wilder, and he’s the pastor at the Church of the Kindly Shepherd. It’s a prominent church in the community.”
I shrugged, and Sylvia picked up on it.
“I know, it’s definitely not what you expected, but there it is. Her mother’s name is Susan Wilder. As near as we can tell, she doesn’t have a career of her own but does a lot of work within the church organization. There are apparently no brothers or sisters.
“And she has a new name, Gina. It’s Alexi—Alexi Wilder.”
I ran the name through my mind, fighting the feeling that it was somehow intruding upon my memory of Jelena. But as I silently mouthed it a few times, I started to get used to it.
Neither of us said anything for a few moments, but I could sense Sylvia eyeing me, wondering how I was going to respond to all this.
“Gina, I got this information for you because I know how much it means to you—how important it was for you to find out what happened.”
I nodded, quietly mouthing the words, “Thank you.”
“But I know you, and I know how impulsive you can be.” She waited for me to deny it, but I couldn’t. “Please, promise me you won’t do anything rash.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sitting here, watching the wheels turn in your head, and I don’t know what I can say that you don’t already know. Alexi is now a teenager—or maybe you still want to call her Jelena, that’s fine. But either way, she’s living in a stable family that adopted her years ago in a proper court proceeding. Her life up to now can’t be undone. We can’t go back and reverse anything, and it would be cruel to try.
“And even if you could, there’s the problem of you.”
Sylvia caught my attention with that.
“Gina, I love you, but that will only carry you so far. You’ve got some things to think about. I’m not just talking about your lifestyle. That’s never been an issue in my mind—not in this case or in anything else. But you know as well as I do that you can never know what a judge somewhere might say about that.
“No, what really worries me is that you’re in the country illegally. Not only that, you’ve told me many times that there are people who would gladly rip you limb from limb if they could find you. Think about that for a minute. I don’t know of anything that you can do that wouldn’t run the risk of some harm coming to you or to Alexi.”
I nodded. I wasn’t going to argue. If I told her about my recent phone call from Paolo, I knew that she’d probably be even more worried.
“Just promise me you’ll be careful.”