The rest is just slow diminution and loss. A waning of the full and effulgent moon of my youth. Not that the bright light of my youth was anything to be proud of. I was a terrible person. I did unkind and sometimes illegal things. I treated women abominably. The remembrance of it causes me to flush with shame and to feel a tightening in my groin.
It was a radiance without warmth, and I thought of nothing but myself in the brightness of the light. Now I try never to think of myself. I try not to think at all, not to dwell, but, sometimes, late at night, it all comes back to me, and I lose myself in the life that might have been, the wife of twenty years, her comforts and distractions. The fractious children, raucous at the holidays, with their tattoos you asked them not to get and their lacrosse sticks they play with in the house, stringing and restringing them, the trips to Paris to stay at the Lutetia. Photograph albums of a life that never quite came to be. It doesn’t last long when it comes, but it is vivid, and I am there, not here, not here where I belong. When you lose everything, you don’t die. You just continue in ordinary pants with nothing in your pockets.
I gave up sending out résumés, tossed them in the trash. I no longer called the people I had known for years who placed brokers in jobs. There was no point. They never took my calls. I had blotted my copybook in perpetuity, one night of gracelessness in the Russian Tea Room, and everything was gone from my résumé, the loft and arc of it, the elevation and grandeur. My name was up, as my grandmother used to say. What I did at thirty-two, how bright, how aggressively promising, had no relevance at thirty-seven. Washed up at the moment I had barely set sail.
I looked through the paper and applied for jobs from the want ads. There was always something wrong, with the job, with me. Sitting with these smug hiring people and answering their ridiculous questions.
“You’ve been out of work for five years. What were you doing?”
“I was living in Europe.”
“How exciting! What did you do?”
“I tried to write a novel. It wasn’t any good.”
“Do you have retail experience?”
I used to buy and sell the world every day before lunch.
“No.”
“Would you think you’d be good at sales?”
“I can sell ice cream to the Eskimos.”
“But you’ve never actually done it.”
“No.”
“Well, very interesting. We’ll be in touch if a position opens up. At the moment there’s nothing.”
“Then why did you advertise? Why did you call me in?”
“We like to keep abreast of who’s out there. Can you use a cash register?”
“A moron could learn to use a cash register in ten minutes.”
“You’d be surprised. Well, we’ll call.”
“No. You won’t.”
Long pause. “Not with that attitude, we won’t. I suggest you take a course in people skills. Or look for a job where you don’t have to deal with the public. Like writing bad novels. Good day.”
Eventually, I learned to smile and lie my way into a series of temporary jobs. You don’t die of embarrassment. Not right away.
I demonstrated food processors, and I was astonishingly good at it after only a few days. I could make perfect bread dough in seconds. I wore a white chef’s apron and a paper toque, and I survived by pretending to be somebody else. I sprayed elegant women with overly strong perfume from vaguely erotically shaped bottles. I showed people who had little chance of ever going anywhere how to pack two suits flawlessly in a suitcase. I survived.
But I kept seeing people I knew. They looked at me as though I were in some sort of Halloween costume, or, perhaps, one of the comic interludes in a Christmas pantomime, and sometimes, purely out of pity, they would buy a Cuisinart or a tiny bottle of ridiculously overpriced fragrance. It was an act of kindness that mortified me to the center of my being.
Things fell away from me. My parents died, first my mother, then my father, in quick succession, cancer, mortified at my circumstances, leaving me just enough to shut up Mr. McDermott and Ms. Willoughby. Our parting was quite cordial, actually. I would miss our daily chats. After they stopped calling, days would pass between phone calls.
I miss the rustle and hustle and bang of the floor, the deals happening every half-second, the high fives, the bonus days and the dinners at Frank’s. I miss the clothes, the deference of salespeople, the winter in Harbour Island before all the people who go there now knew it was there. I miss my cufflinks—lapis lazuli, hematite, ruby, sapphire—all gone to the Orthodox jewelry dealers on Forty-Fifth Street, one pair at a time. And my watches. I miss invitations to parties. Parties of beautiful people who say witty and aggressive things. Everything, everything in that old life is gone. A young man’s life, sold for pennies on the dollar.
But every time I let something go, I felt, yes, a sadness, but I also felt lighter, more free, less tethered to a past I would never get back to. Let them have it.
Life was once only about day and night. Now it’s about the number of seconds it takes to get from one end to another.
I finished Proust. It gave me an overriding sense of superiority over the vast majority of mankind. I couldn’t read anything else for a year after. Compared to the rich broth of Proust, every other book seemed like lukewarm water in my mouth.
I finally found a real job, thanks to Proust. I got a job as a clerk in one of the big chain bookstores, in part, I think, because the woman who was doing the hiring asked me what my favorite book was, and I said, “There’s only one real book ever written, besides the Bible. And that is Remembrance of Things Past.”
She smiled. “We call it In Search of Lost Time now.”
“I prefer the old title. Less accurate, but more poetic.”
“What are the current top-ten best-sellers in fiction?”
I named them, in order. “You want to know the number of weeks they’ve been on the list?”
“I trust you. Nonfiction?”
I named them, although not in order.
“Have you ever sold anything? Anything at all?”
And I told her the long list of embarrassing jobs I had endured in the last year. I told her how to pack two suits in your suitcase so they emerge wrinkle-free at the end of your journey.
“When can you start?
“This or any other moment.”
“Next Monday?”
“How about tomorrow at nine?”
She smiled the smile I was coming to adore. “We don’t open ’til ten. You’d be locked out and lonely, Monsieur Proust.”
“Then I’ll be here at ten.”
And I have been there ever since. At first, I was just a clerk, ringing up books. It was like being in hiding. I was relatively safe from running into people I used to work with, since none of them read anything but the Wall Street Journal. You could spot me in the T-shirted masses of other clerks because I always wore a tie. I considered being a bookseller not just a job. I looked on it as an honorable profession.
Now I’m the fiction manager, in charge of picking and choosing, all the ordering, and deciding which books get featured spots in the department. It’s a job that requires both caution and bravado, and I like doing it. And I’m good at it.
Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it’s my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o’clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world.
I recommend books to people, and they read them, and then they come back and tell me what they thought. Most people in the neighborhood know me by name by now, so it’s a personal thing. Even with the onslaught of digital books, and all the threats to the book-selling business, there are people who still like the heft and feel of a real book, who like having a stack of books by their bedside tables, waiting to be read. Our store is under siege, now, but I think we’ll be OK, at least for long enough for me to finish out my working life.
I finally moved out of Hovel Hall and into a small apartment in the Village. I was lucky to get it. My rent is stable, even though prices in the Village have gone through the roof. Every week, when I change the sheets, I look at the half of the bed that has not been slept in, as pristine as the day the sheets were changed, and I wonder what happened to the possibilities of my youth. No one has ever slept in that bed but me, and I have only slept on one side of it. In the same chaste, deathlike position every night. All those years. All those years that have passed, in the utter silence of that apartment—silent except for the clink of a knife against a fork, the shutting of a cabinet door, the opening of an envelope.
My one extravagance is sheets. They are fine percale cotton, simple but exquisite, and I have them washed and pressed by a Chinese lady in the neighborhood. It doesn’t cost that much, and it is a dying art, pressing a sheet perfectly. Jackie Onassis, they say, had her sheets changed twice a day; once when she got up in the morning, and again after her nap. Imagine.
I am not that extravagant, but ironed sheets is one thing I insist on. My last, my only extravagance. At night, on Mondays when I change the sheets, when I get into my freshly made bed, when I feel and smell the crisp percale, I think of it all, and I am perfectly happy.
And I am still loved. I always will be loved. On the street. In a roomful of strangers. Walking up the stairs at the opera, which I attend twice a year, unnoticeable in the jeweled crowd. When I go on a cruise every five years, a single face in that happy crowd of couples, I know something they don’t know. I am loved. Holly gave me that, and it cannot be taken away. I have never forgotten. I amloved.