Because the wind, rain, sleet, and cold tore into his bones like snake fangs, he slipped into a used bookstore rather than cross the boulevard. He didn’t realize how simple a decision based on the winter weather would change his life so drastically just because, rather than enjoy a large Parisian coffee in a warm coffee shop once frequented by Jean Paul Sartre, he entered a used bookstore.
The bookshop was old, cluttered, and disorganized. A cat slept on a stack of books closest to the small electric heater that failed to warm anything beyond a few feet. Dusty ceramic elephants lined the shelf behind the counter. A dozen paperbacks in Chinese littered the only available chair. The chair listed to port as one leg teetered to the sun. The leg rested on a Turkish carpet faded with age and decades of Parisian boots.
“Bonjour,” Hairball greeted the old man slouched behind the counter.
The old man looked up, looked behind Hairball, harrumphed a greeting, and closed his eyes.
“What’s the cat’s name?” Hairball asked in his rudimentary French.
The old man cracked his neck, let loose a long sigh, and opened his eyes. He put his hands on the counter cluttered with pencils, books, scraps of paper, croissant bags, and a ten-year-old calendar.
“You buy? You talk? Which?” he asked in his Turkish-accented English.
“Just looking,” Hairball agreed and wandered into the chaotic array of books. There were, he noticed, ugly and used copies of best-sellers from a decade ago or more. Other books were out-dated medical textbooks, well-weathered religious tracts, a gaggle of unread philosophy tomes, and, stacked well away from the heater in a darkened corner of the store were several shelves of old fiction from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. There was Flaubert, Richardson, Bell, McCorkle, Sterne, Fielding, Swift, a few Dickens, Wilkie, and a Murasaki in translation.
Buried atop a book by somebody named Sterne and another by an author Hairball couldn’t read, was a book he knew wason his reading list in junior high, but he didn’t have the patience for. He picked it up. Laced into wooden boards covered in leather, it felt and smelt old. It felt heavy. He opened it thinking of reading just enough to justify abandoning it earlier. The pages crinkled like paper left out in the sun to grow stale, stiff, and yellow.
He read the first line, a letter from one character to his never-seen sister:
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
And, as in junior high school, he skipped the letters to get to the meat of the book, the part of the book everyone remembered. He read the first line of the real book:
I am by birth a Genevese
He debated whether to continue reading. He flipped the book open to the colophon. Yes, he thought, this is an old book. He checked the date of publication and was surprised. 1818, it said. First edition, it said. He looked at the cover of the book: worn and scraped from being read, jostled on shelves, packed in boxes, shipped from who knows where to forgotten destinations. Used, as evidenced by a circular stain, for a shot of whiskey as the owner pursued other interests; perhaps another novel or conversation with a spouse, sibling, or client.
He checked the price.
He checked it again. He looked at the next book on the pile. He’d never heard of it, but he opened to the first page. First printing, it claimed, in 1760. The price was unbelievably low. He opened the first page to read the first sentence:
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing; —that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; –and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: — Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, —I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
‘Good G—,’ he thought, ‘that is one convoluted, serpentine, packed sentence. A first sentence, at that.’ He wondered how the writer thought people would continue reading, given the difficulty of the first sentence.
He flipped through the book until he stumbled to a page that intrigued him. On the verso was:
Alas, poor YORICK!
On the recto was:
A solid block of black ink like he had never seen in a novel or other book. It was, he decided, intriguing. It compelled him to read the book, to discover what it was about and why one page… He flipped through the book to find more typographical tricks, asides, and novelties: fingers pointing, pages in Latin, asterisks rampant, dashes galore, and pictures illustrating what, he assumed, were scenes from the book. The book, like the first, was leather-bound over wooden boards and was a first edition from over 250 years earlier.
At random, he picked a book off the shelf behind him. He recognized the author but not the book. He opened it to the colophon. A second printing, it claimed, of an edition of three hundred. And this one was, he looked at the bottom of the page: the 300th. The last book of the second edition. It was bound in such a way as bumps appeared on the spine. A leather cover. He guessed it to be expensive. He turned to the price.
The price…? That couldn’t be right. A zero or two must be missing.
He walked back to the counter with the three books. The old man was catnapping behind it, the cat was no longer on the heater, but the counter was still crammed with chewed pencils, used wrappers, and cat hair.
“Excuse me,” he mangled in French. “Are these the right prices?”
The old man aborted a snore. He opened his mouth but closed it before speaking. He cracked his neck again. His eyes remained closed as he said, “The prices, they are written on the inside cover, no?” The man only wanted to get rid of him and sleep.
“Yes,” Hairball answered.
“This price is confusing?”
“No.”
“Then that is the price, no?”
“But…?”
The old man’s gnarled hand reached out to pet the cat that wasn’t there. He opened his eyes. He looked at the counter, the heater, the floor behind the counter, at several bookshelves.
“Ah, te voilà,” he mumbled.
Hairball thought he heard the cat answer, “Où serais-je?” but, knowing cats were incapable of speaking, let alone speak French, he determined the cat’s meow only sounded like a ‘Where else would I be?’
He looked at the price of the book. He tried to translate the price into dollars but kept confusing himself.
“US dollars, no?” the old man said; his eyes were still closed. “Ten.” He held up both hands. He was missing a finger. “Each.”
“Sure. Okay, yeah. I’d like to buy…”
“You do not buy books,” the old man corrected, his voice rumbling like distant thunder reaching in to grab Hairball’s soul. “They own you. They force you to change. They open chambers of your heart you did not know you had. They take the darkness in your heart and expose it to light. They take your abandoned emotions and renovate them as if the spirit of the gods descended upon you. Then, when it is too late, after you change, they move on to the next person. Yes?”
“I, I guess.”
“Thirty.”
As Hairball left the bookstore he thought he heard the old man having a conversation with a woman. But there had been no woman in the store. Only the cat.
««« 2 »»»
The job didn’t pay as much as he hoped, but he didn’t mind. It was a start and he only had the future. They could live nicely. Perhaps comfortably. If they didn’t splurge on dinners in medium-priced restaurants or galavant around the country on extravagant vacations. With her salary, perhaps they could fly tourist to England.
“We can worry about the pay later. Tonight, I think we should celebrate.”
“With wine! And no deciding dinner based on the price!”
“Exactly!”
They drove around town on their adventure: a new job, a new town, and new apartment near the campus. They looked for a place to eat that met their criteria: not too fancy, by which they both meant not too expensive; but good.
As they settled into their seats and he surveyed the menu, she pulled a package from her purse.
“For you,” she said, smiling.
He ripped the wrapping paper off to find a brand new hardback book, shiny and un-opened. The newest edition of an old novel.
“It’s…” he stuttered. “It’s great! I’ll use it…”
“Your favorite, right?”
A tear abandoned the ship of his right eye and raced down his cheek. “It’s great!” he gushed. He opened the first page and read the first sentence that snaked across the page:
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally…
when her hand covered the rest of the page and she stated, correctly, “You can read it later. Besides,” she opened her menu, “You’ve already read it, what? a gazillion times?”
“Only three times, Miss Smarty-pants.”
««« 3 »»»
As they sat in the common room of the youth hostel in London waiting for the bus to the airport to arrive, he tried to absorb all they had seen and done: the tour of Dickens’ house, the daytrip to The Cavern, the hike in Hardy country interrupted by a sudden squall that sent them, soaked to the skin, into a local pub adorned with portraits of Hardy, Fielding, and Gunter Grass; a photo taken at Mary Shelley’s home, a glimpse of the Bringhurst estate as the tour bus sped by. He wished they had time to wander through the Bringhurst library, but they didn’t and the dour tour guide said it wasn’t open to the public.
She ruffled through a magazine. It was three years old and contained photos of cheap cafés in expensive parts of London.
“I don’t understand why he gets the money and you don’t,” she said.
“I told you,” he answered, his mind reliving their visit to Fielding’s grave.
“You both do the work. At least, you do.”
“He’s doing good work now, too.”
“Still…”
She tossed the magazine on the coffee table and looked out the glass door at the drizzle and wind. It was, for her, the perfect metaphor for their first vacation in three years: to England, to his England with visits to his places: dead authors’ homes and graves, spots where their fictional characters lived their make-believe lives. It wasn’t so much a vacation as a pilgrimage to his literary England. His pilgrimage, his haji.
“It’s here,” she stated, stood, and rolled her suitcase away.
As she walked away, he admired her new coat and how it draped over her body. She, he believed, had good taste and the coat, grey with a hint of red threaded through it, reflected that. It was business-oriented with a hint of creativity embedded in it. It was what attracted him to her all those years ago: her no-nonsense approach to the important things in life, but her joy and openness about everything else.
“I like your coat,” he called to her as she touched the door handle.
“My lover bought it for me.”
He got close to her. She kissed him on the cheek and held her face out for him to kiss.“He has good taste,” he said, kissing and hugging her.
««« 4 »»»
The clock tripped over to 5:00 pm. The students bolted from the room. He smiled. As a student, he, too, was prepared and ready to leave the second the clock said it was time. It didn’t really matter if the teacher was in the middle of a sentence. Everyone knew he would shout the remainder of his thoughts as everyone streamed for the door.
There were no tedious committee meetings. His scholarly work could wait. He had no papers to grade. He was free, in other words, to go home. Home. To face her. To listen to her complain about him. Or worse, be silently tolerant of his existence. To retreat into his mind in order to blot the waterfall of her whining from his ears until she had run down like a clock that had used up its battery, the silence. She would hunker down in her section of the living room reading a magazine or watching TV while surfing the internet on her iPad. He would be doing the same in his cordoned off area. Near his books. They would sit and do whatever it was they were doing, sipping wine until one of them would offer up, “I’m going to bed”
“Okay,” the other would say, smile, maybe look up, then return to their activity.
Did he, he thought, want to go home to that? Again?
He thought of her laughter in London. He thought of her angry, pouting face in junior high. Their first kiss in high school on the football field in full view of the football team, but they didn’t care. They were in love; and probably drunk. It was a Friday night after he came back from… his little adventure, she called it. He thought of the time they ran under the deluge in the Thomas Hardy landscape, got soaked to the skin, and sat by a weak fire laughing, drinking, and telling stupid jokes with the old man who ran the pub while sipping warm beer.
He wondered how he could trick her into laughing again. Of feeling happy to be with him. He considered how he could be a better husband; perhaps being less concerned with his scholary work and more interested in her loves, fears, hobbies, and, yes, her life.
But what was her life? Work. Cooking. Wine. Much too much wine recently. Recently? They started with one glass with dinner, then escalated into one white while cooking, one red with dinner. This morphed into one bottle at dinner. Now, a glass after work, a glass while cooking, a glass while reading, and a glass after dinner was added to the bottle at dinner. Recently? he complained. Was she becoming an alcoholic? Was he? Were they? They still went to work. They still met their obligations: family, friends, co-workers, bosses. Maybe not. It wasn’t that much wine. Their fathers drank much more. He realized that was the first justification of most alcoholics: that person — —be it my boss, husband, uncle, wife — — drinks more.
««« 5 »»»
Books protected both walls like mute bodyguards. Hairball walked down the hallway, stopping to examine the covers of books he suspected. When he saw one that might be The One, he pulled it from the shelf. He angled it to catch the light from the well-lit room at the end of the hallway. He read the colophon; he read the frontis piece; he glanced at the text block; he ran his finger across the spine. It was never The One. He was always disappointed. But, he thought and believed, for each book he eliminated, he was closer to The One. The One his client was willing to pay good money for. The One he was banking on to secure his reputation as a Reliable and Resourceful Agent: The One that would catapult him into the higher ranks of Fine Book Agents and into, simultaneously and fortuitously, a higher income bracket; reducing the number of faults of his she could be angry about by one. The One.
He ran his finger across row after row of books, making sure he saw each and every one. As he approached yet another shelf of leather-bound books, all sans titles on their elegant spines, he heard a noise. It sounded like a drawer slowly opening and closing. As if someone were trying to muffle the sound.
He looked at the door at the end of the hallway. He waited. He didn’t see any shadows or hear any footsteps or voices. He put the book back on the shelf and continued shuffling forward. He passed volumes by Richardson, Dickens, Smollett, and several of Shelley, but nothing by his man Fielding.
‘That’s strange,’ he mumbled. Why would a famous collector of 18th and 19th century English literature — first editions, fine editions, limited editions, working first drafts, and extremely rare autographed editions — not have any Fielding? Of either Fielding, but especially not of Henry? He was arguably the most influential or inspiring author of those two centuries. This collector managed to avoid buying even a train station kiosk paperback slapped together by a fly-by-night publisher looking to make a quick pound or pence.
Another noise ripped his thoughts asunder. This time he thought a chair was pulled across a wooden floor. He looked at the floor of the room the light was streaming from: wood. He tiptoed forward one step. He pulled one of his pens from his front pocket and jammed it between two books; a bookmark signaling his advance.
He gave up checking all the books in the hallway, but felt The One was not here. It had been secreted away to a place he would never find it. By someone. Not Sir Clive? Perhaps. Perhaps Sir Clive loved that particular edition of that particular book and didn’t want anyone else to have it. He hid it from Hairball. When he left England, Sir Clive would pull it from its hiding place and display it along with his great-grandfather’s Diary. Perhaps not.
Did Lord Bringhurst steal it away? Why? He needed the money. Maybe, Hairball thought, he knew he had a buyer and was going to contact her and sell it at a higher price than she was willing to pay. Why? Why would Lord Bringhurst accrue the added expense of flying to the US just to sell one Henry Fielding novel? Unless he — Lord Bringhurst — had a buyer willing to pay even more than his — Hairball’s — client was able to. Why go to such great lengths just to…
Hairball heard a cough. Coming from the room. Off to the right. Near the light source. But, he thought, mustn’t rule out an echo.
He took quiet steps forward, keeping his eyes on the door frame. Once or twice he looked behind himself. Half to check if anyone was sneaking up to attack him and half to look for a convenient escape route; an open door to run through, a pillar to hide behind, a bookshelf to crawl under.
When he arrived at the door, he was unsure of what to do. He was unsure why he came this far. Should he run back down the hall, into the foyer, out the massive front doors, and into his rental car; drive like a dervish to the nearest airport, and fly back to Seattle empty handed? He might even be able to get his teaching job back. Or another teaching job.
A cough. A definite cough. He steeled his nerve. He formed a quick plan. First, he’d look right. At the light. But as quickly as he could, he’d glance to the left in case the cough echoed off the walls. The walls. Lined with books and tapestries. Not an unprotected flat surface in the room; not a chance anything would echo off these walls, he thought. He took a deep breath.
He leaned forward. Slowly, so as not to attract attention, he stuck his head into the room. He didn’t need to look left. The source of the cough, of the drawer opening and closing, of the chair dragged across wood was there. Behind a desk anchored by books and papers, and staring at an Apple Airbook.
“You!” Hairball shouted.
“Wha…!¡” the man shouted back.
Hairball marched into the room. “You!” he repeated.
“Man, you gotta stop that!” the man argued.
“What’re you doing here?”
“Gave me a heart attack,” the man explained, his right hand pressing against his heart. He sat up.
“Well? Why’re you here?”
“Thought I was alone.”
Hairball stood in front of the desk. He felt as if a soccer field separated him from the man seated behind it. He also felt like a schoolboy being admonished for forgetting, again, his homework.
“Jesus, man, don’t sneak up on people like that. Have a seat,” the man gestured at a plush Edwardian chair in deep royal purple as if it were no more than a bus station bench.
“Well?” Hairball demanded. He didn’t move.
“You sit, we talk, awright? I mean, looking up at you like this is hurting my neck. Care for a sherry? Scotch? I think there’s some red wine in there.” He focused his attention on a cupboard with lead-lined glass.
Hairball sighed. He thought about the situation, then sat. “A Scotch. Straight.”
“The only way, my man, the only way to drink good Scotch. Ah, King Alexander,” the man said, opening the cupboard to examine the alcohol.
It suddenly occurred to Hairball that the man could have a gun stashed behind the sherry. He looked for a weapon. And an escape route. He saw the letter opener and smiled. A cliché, but he was in no position to argue the finer points of fiction.
The man smiled at him as he handed him his Scotch. “What brings you here?” he asked.
“That was my question,” Hairball complained.
“Then you know the answer. Same as yours.”
“Kravick,” Hairball argued, “You got your books at the auction.”
Kravick held his glass of Scotch up in a silent toast. “This,” he touched the Mac Airbook, “is a useful device. Did you know he has all his books listed here?”
“And in his library,” Hairball refuted.
“No. No, I don’t think so. You see, buddy-boy, in this Excel file here he has eight columns ya know? Title, author, year of edition, year acquired, priced acquired, priced sold, location, and a blank heading.”
“So?”
“Only about half his books have a location we know about: manor library, manor hallway upstairs, manor hallway downstairs left, bedroom one, two, etc. The other half have cryptic notes like CL or V2 or even, like this one,” he pointed at the laptop screen Hairball couldn’t see, “a star.”
“I guess he didn’t like people snooping around his house.”
“Perhaps. How’s the Scotch?”
“Fine.”
“You haven’t had any.”
“Find my Fielding on that list?” Kravick shook his head, but Hairball knew he could easily lie to him. “Find any Smollett and Gay?”
Kravick shook his head, sipped his Scotch, and frowned. “I’m thinking he has a second set of books, you know what I mean? Not computerized, either.” He looked at the shelves of the great room, knowing a needle in a haystack would probably be easier to find. “Or maybe everything is in his head.”
“It probably is. He’s no dummy when it comes to his books.”
“But he is broke.”
Hairball stared at him.
Kravick tapped the screen. “All here.”
“CL could be Sir Clive. I met him…”
“And had dinner together,” Kravick interrupted. Seeing Hairball’s confusion, he tapped the computer screen. “All here.”
“He kept Sir Clive’s appointment book?”
“Diary,” Kravick answered as he sipped his drink. “I felt a bit like I was snooping in my daughter’s bedroom, if I had, you know, a daughter.” He sipped his Scotch. “And she had a diary. He mentions Sir Clive inviting you to dinner and you accepting. Along with the number twelve. Mean anything to you?”
Hairball held his Scotch to his lips as if he were drinking. He knew Kravick could easily lie to him; as he to Kravick. “No,” he said quietly, although he wondered how Sir Clive’s auction number 12 tied into everything else on Lord Bringhurst’s laptop. “Why’d you decide to come here? Does he have a large Gay & Smollett collection?”
“Come look,” Kravick said, pointing at the screen.
Hairball weighed his options. He wanted to see Lord Bringhurst’s list of books; perhaps he could find his lost Fielding. But he also didn’t want to invade his privacy, although he was snooping in his hallways.
“I saw a Smollett back there,” he said and waved his Scotch at the hallway. “Couldn’t tell you which one, though. Just saw Smollett and, well, you know.”
“It wasn’t Fielding, so you ignored it,” Kravick acknowledged. “But look, this might bring a smile to that worried face of yours.”
Hairball stood up, he took a sip, he walked behind Lord Bringhurst’s wide table and stared at the laptop’s screen. There were, as Kravick said, eight columns appropriately titled, two mysteriously. He studied the ‘author’ column in search of a Fielding novel, any Fielding novel. He zipped down the list and saw Richardson, Wollstonecraft, Austen, Pope, and Dafoe but neither Henry nor Sarah Fielding.
He wondered why only these two authors were not included. While contemplating the reason, he also wondered why the computer monitor was fading slowly to black like an old-time movie. He realized the desk was growing, raising itself up toward his face; quickly. He groaned knowing what was about to happen and he hoped, he prayed, he wished he would wake up and not be dead; he would miss her so. Would she miss him? Or feel relief?
The desk hit his face. Silence and darkness reigned o’er him.
If you have any comments, please drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you. Even if it’s to complain about my obvious inability to translate words into French. See you soon!