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Then I recognized his face, the eyes particularly because they still contained some of the same jollity they’d once had. But now there were other things in them too—lunacy, anger, and confusion like no other. You could not look for long.
And you didn’t want to look because everything there was wrong, off: his expression, the way his eyes wouldn’t stay on you for more than a second before sliding away then back, then away.…
“ Kevin?”
He smiled and twisted his head to the side, like a dog when it’s confused. Kevin Hamilton, Zoe’s beloved Kevin. Captain of the football team, Dartmouth College, the halest fellow you ever met. Now he was so bizarre that my mind flooded and all its circuits shorted out.
“Aha! I knewyou’d be here! I told Zoe when I saw her, I bet Miranda Romanac’s here. And I was right. I was right.”
I was speechless. I looked at Zoe. She stared at him horrified, fascinated.
“I came back to town just for the reunion. We live in Orange now. Know where that is? In New Jersey. We have ever since my dad died. But I forgot your telephone number, Zoe, so I couldn’t call to tell you I’d arrived. My sister said I shouldn’t call, but I said, ‘Look, we were going outfor years.
He went on and on like that in a high-pitched, weirdly sonorous, disconnected ramble about himself, the reunion, Zoe, his “research.” I was glad because it allowed me to absorb the shock and watch him closely without seeming rude.
Within seconds you knew he was mad, but what species of madness was hard to say. Although he spoke strangely, much of what he said was coherent, even intelligent. Seeing him this way, I had to keep reminding myself that Kevin Hamilton had been one of our class scholars. We were sure he would do great things. I had heard almost nothing about him except that he had graduated from Dartmouth and gone to Wharton School of Business, but that was expected. Even at eighteen, you knew you’d see him interviewed a decade later on TV or read about him in Timemagazine.
Apparently others at the reunion knew about Kevin, because no one got near us while we stood with him. A couple of times I saw others I recognized and smiled. They smiled back and started over, but on seeing him they quickly veered away. He kept talking.
Gradually what had happened came out. He was the oldest of four children. His father, with whom he was very close, died suddenly when Kevin was in graduate school. Kevin had had to quit and come home to take care of the others. Somewhere along the line, the pressure sent cracks up and down his psyche and he simply fell apart. He was institutionalized and since then had been on heavy medication. He spent his days in the library researching things, but when I asked what, he looked at me suspiciously and changed the subject.
I could not imagine how Zoe was feeling. Whatever she had brought with her to this night—dreams, expectations—had been met at the door by this human nightmare of everything gone wrong, all hope abandoned. Once again my poor friend had lost.
“Excuse me, Kevin, but we have to go.” I didn’t care if I hurt his feelings. I took her by the arm and we fled into the ladies’ room. He was still talking when the door whooshed shut behind us.
Luckily no one else was in there. Speechless, we stared at each other. It was as if a beautiful piece of crystal had dropped and shattered on the floor. Of course you sweep it up, but first you must accept the fact that it is gone forever.
Zoe went to the sink and turned on both spigots. She lowered her head and cupping handful after handful, threw water on her face. Then she squirted out a handful of bright green hand soap from the dispenser and thoroughly washed her face clean of all the makeup she’d so carefully applied an hour before.
I wanted to be so much smarter than I was, able to come up with something right to say that, even for a moment, might fill the black space I knew was in her heart and would be for a long time.
“Where did I learn my cliches?” She was looking in the mirror. Her face was blank and shone from water.
“What do you mean?”
“Love never dies. Hope springs eternal. The one thing we should have learned by now is to put a seat belt around our heart. The road is dangerous but we never put the damned seat belt on.”
“Zoe—”
“He said something to me once I’ll never forget. He said, ‘We’ll start to reminisce when we’re a hundred and four because till then we’ll be too busy.’ I was going to bring Hector tonight. He could have come. But I thought about Kevin, you know, and maybe there was a chance that something might happen… so I didn’t.”
Where was my wisdom? I kept licking my lips and scouring my brain but nothing came. She continued to look blankly in the mirror, as if seeing her face for the first time.
The door opened and Kathy Herlth sauntered in. She was as gorgeous as ever but still carried the icy wind of disdain for everything on earth that froze the rest of us humanity to death.
“God, did you see Kevin Hamilton? He’s got to change his lobotomist! He’s standing out there talking like a Klingon. Sort of looks like one too.”
It was so cruel and true that Zoe coughed out a huge laugh. I did too.
Kathy shrugged. “I knew I shouldn’t have come to this. It’s so depressing. Youtwo have sure come full circle tonight. Kevin’s mad and James is dead. That ends that chapter, huh?”
“What?” The word came out much slower than I wanted. My hand froze as I was about to wipe tears of laughter off my cheek. I looked at my hand when she spoke again. It had already made a fist. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything.
She looked surprised. “What do you mean? About what?”
“About James.”
“James? What about him? Oh God, Miranda, didn’t you know? He’s dead. He died three years ago. In a car crash.”
Everything was so clear, incredibly sharp and accentuated: Zoe’s gasp, the sound of water hissing in the sink, Kathy’s high-heel scrape across the tile floor. Their faces—Kathy’s cool but interested, Zoe shocked beyond her own new trauma. These things were clear, but some essential part of me had already left. Something left my body and floating high above the room looked down, taking one last glimpse before leaving forever.
The part that had loved James Stillman with the energy and abandon only beginners have. The part that had smoked twenty delicious cigarettes a day, laughed too loud, didn’t worry about dangerous things. The part that wondered what sex would be like and who would be the first. The part that looked too long in mirrors at the only flawless face I would ever see there.
Fearless teenage me, so sure one day I’d find a partner with whom my heart would rest happily ever after. A man I would put on like lotion. James taught me that, showed me great happiness was possible right from the beginning. He was dead.
“Jesus, Miranda, I thought you knew. It happened so long ago.”
“How—” I stopped to swallow. My throat was dry as cork. “Um, how did it happen?”
“I don’t know. Diana Wise told me. But she’s here tonight! You can ask. I saw her before.”
Without another word, I walked out of the room. Zoe said something but I kept going. I needed to find Diana Wise immediately. Without the facts, a precise description, James Stillman’s death would stay liquid in my brain and it had to be solid, real.
Hadn’t the ballroom been billiard-chalk blue before I’d gone into the bathroom? Blue with white borders? I could have sworn it was; yet now it was a weak ocher, the color of young carrots. Even the colors had changed with the terrible news.
People mulled around talking, laughing, and dancing. Tonight they could be eighteen andthirty-three at the same time. It was wonderful. Mouths were full of teeth and shiny tongues. Words surrounded me as I moved. I felt like a visitor from another planet.
“They moved to Dobbs Ferry—”
“I haven’t seen himsince, Jesus, I don’t know—”
“The whole house was carpeted with the most ugly brown shag—”
When we were eighteen, people still listened to records. There were three speeds on a record player: 33 1/3, 45, and 78. The only time you ever used 78 was when you wanted to laugh. You turned it up there and played 45s on it. Hearing familiar voices transformed to a high silly chirp was always good for a laugh. As I walked more and more quickly through the room searching for Diana, thinking about James, thinking about him dead, the world around me switched to 78. Voices became a speeded-up muddle. This whizzing chaos became so strong that I had to stop and close my eyes. I breathed deeply a few times, telling myself not to panic. When I opened my eyes, Zoe was standing in front of me.
“Are you okay?”
“No. Have you seen Diana? I can’t find her.”
“We will. Come on, she’s got to be here.” She took my hand and we walked together. Later, when my mind cleared, I thought, How kind of her. Zoe had had her own nightmare only minutes before. Yet here she was, holding my hand and helping when she could just as well have been shut off in her own pain from meeting Kevin Hamilton.
“There! Over there.”
Unlike so many others at the reunion, Diana Wise looked almost exactly as she had when we were in school. Interesting face, long black hair, the sexy smile of an Italian movie star. We had been almost-friends in high school, but she was so much maturer than we that we had always held her in awe.
“Diana?” She was talking to a man I didn’t recognize. Hearing her name, she turned and saw me. Touching the guy on the hand as a good-bye, she took me by the arm.
“Miranda. I’ve been looking for you.” Her voice was strong and assured. The expression on her face said she knew what I needed. I was grateful not to have to ask the question. Not to have to say the words out loud, into the world: Is it true? Is he really dead?
The three of us walked through the lobby back out into the summer evening. It was warm and beautiful, the air still heavy from the day and full of the voluptuous smell of honeysuckle. I was empty and scared. I knew what was coming. Even though answers were what I wanted, I knew that when I heard them there would be no way back to a part of my life that, until a few hours before, was still intact.
“Diana, what happened to James? How did it…” I couldn’t say any more.
She put a hand into her long black hair and drew it slowly away from her face. “I bumped into him a few years ago in Philadelphia. He was working for a company that had something to do with art—selling it, dealing it? I don’t really remember. Maybe it was an auction house, like Sotheby’s. Anyway, we ran into each other on the street. He loved what he was doing. He was so revved up. Remember how excited he could get about things?”
I wanted to tell her how I’d seen that excitement, seen his whole being glow about something that had grabbed his attention.
“We were both in a rush and only able to have a quick cup of coffee together. He sounded wonderful, Miranda. Said for the first time in his life he felt like he was on the right track. Things were where he wanted them. He had a girlfriend. He was absolutely up, you know?”
“How did he look?” I wanted a picture, an image of him grown up I could hold on to.
“Older of course, thinner than he was in school, but still those great eyes and smile.” She paused. “He looked like James.”
I began to weep. Those words held everything I did and did not want to hear. Zoe put her arms around me. The three of us stood on the lawn, a few feet—and light-years away from all the happiness and goodwill inside the building.
When my storm had mostly passed, I asked Diana to go on.
“We exchanged numbers and promised to stay in touch. We called a couple of times but I didn’t go back to Philadelphia, and who ever comes to Kalamazoo?
“One night three years ago, very late, I got a call. A woman asked for me two times. She was so upset that I had to convinceher who I was. She said she knew I was a good friend of James’s and wanted me to know he’d been killed in a car accident.
“He’d been in New York and gotten a call from his girlfriend in Philadelphia. She wanted to break up with him because she’d met someone else. Apparently she was that cold—wanted out and there was nothing more to talk about.
“As soon as he got off the phone, James jumped in his car and drove straight down there. It was very icy and the roads were bad. He made it to Philadelphia but was driving too fast. When he tried to get off the turnpike, the car skidded and went off the road. She said he died instantly.”
“Instantly?”
“That’s what the woman said.”
“Who was she?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t give a name, even when I asked. I bet it was the girlfriend.
“He asked about you, Miranda. When we had coffee, he asked if I had heard anything about you.”
My heart lurched. “Really?”
“Yes. He was disappointed when I didn’t know.”
We were silent while music from the reunion filled the air around us.
“Is there anything else?”
“No. I told you I asked the woman for her name but she wouldn’t say. She hung up right after that.”
Zoe sighed and looked at the ground. It was such a final, nothing-left sigh.
“Thank you, Diana. It makes it clearer.”
We hugged. She stepped back, hands on my elbows, and looked at me a moment more. Then she turned and started for the building.
“Diana?”
“Yes?”
“Really, he was happy?”
She only nodded. Which was better than any words. It allowed me my own vocabulary for his happiness.
“Thank you.”
She reached into her handbag, took out a card, and handed it to me. “Call if you want to talk, or if you’re ever in Kalamazoo, Michigan.”
Zoe and I stood in silence in the middle of the lawn. After time had passed I said, “I don’t want to go back in there. I’ll call a cab. Could you give me a key to your house?”
“Let’s go someplace and drink a lot.”
Instead we ended up driving around again. Past the same places we’d seen that afternoon, which now felt like a million years ago. I turned on the radio and, as if they knew our mood, all the stations seemed to be playing only songs we’d loved when we were young. Which was all right because we finished being young that night and it was right to be immersed in it one last time.
I hadn’t been paying attention to where she was going, and realized where we were only when she slowed and turned into the parking lot of the Carvel ice cream stand.
“Good idea!”
“If we’re not going to get drunk, we’ll get fat.”
We ordered the old usual—vanilla cones dipped in heated chocolate—and went back to her car. In our party dresses we sat on the hood and ate.
“They’re still delicious.”
“I haven’t had one in years. I used to bring the kids when they were young, but they wouldn’t be caught dead with me in public these days.”
We watched people come and go. Back at the country club, our classmates were dancing and reliving happy times. But Kevin was back there too and so was James.
“Zoe, what do we do now?”
“Hope, honey. Same thing as I said before.”
“Not much hope in Mudville tonight.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I found Andy’s gun?”
That stopped me. “You’re kidding! Andy, your slimy ex-husband?”
“Yup. It was the first year we were married. I was putting away clean underwear in his drawer. Sitting on top of his Fruit Of The Looms was a gun.”
“Why’d he have it?”
“The most interesting thing was, the moment I found it, the only thing that went through my mind wasn’t‘He’s got a gun!’ What hit me was, ‘The world is an amazing place.’ You know how it is when you’re first with someone and love him: you think you know everything about him. Then you open a drawer one day and there’s something—an old love letter, a diary, a gun. It’s impossible to connect with the person you thought you knew.
“It was kind of wonderful, Miranda. I knew no matter what happened, life was always going to be interesting.”
“Because you found a gun?”
“No! Because it was part of Andy too. I really didn’t know him and that excited me. There were all these new things to discover. In the end we divorced, but back then, life was still opening up. It excited me. It still excites me. You should let it do that. You should let that happen.”
3. A YOGURT TRILOGY
And you didn’t want to look because everything there was wrong, off: his expression, the way his eyes wouldn’t stay on you for more than a second before sliding away then back, then away.…
“ Kevin?”
He smiled and twisted his head to the side, like a dog when it’s confused. Kevin Hamilton, Zoe’s beloved Kevin. Captain of the football team, Dartmouth College, the halest fellow you ever met. Now he was so bizarre that my mind flooded and all its circuits shorted out.
“Aha! I knewyou’d be here! I told Zoe when I saw her, I bet Miranda Romanac’s here. And I was right. I was right.”
I was speechless. I looked at Zoe. She stared at him horrified, fascinated.
“I came back to town just for the reunion. We live in Orange now. Know where that is? In New Jersey. We have ever since my dad died. But I forgot your telephone number, Zoe, so I couldn’t call to tell you I’d arrived. My sister said I shouldn’t call, but I said, ‘Look, we were going outfor years.
He went on and on like that in a high-pitched, weirdly sonorous, disconnected ramble about himself, the reunion, Zoe, his “research.” I was glad because it allowed me to absorb the shock and watch him closely without seeming rude.
Within seconds you knew he was mad, but what species of madness was hard to say. Although he spoke strangely, much of what he said was coherent, even intelligent. Seeing him this way, I had to keep reminding myself that Kevin Hamilton had been one of our class scholars. We were sure he would do great things. I had heard almost nothing about him except that he had graduated from Dartmouth and gone to Wharton School of Business, but that was expected. Even at eighteen, you knew you’d see him interviewed a decade later on TV or read about him in Timemagazine.
Apparently others at the reunion knew about Kevin, because no one got near us while we stood with him. A couple of times I saw others I recognized and smiled. They smiled back and started over, but on seeing him they quickly veered away. He kept talking.
Gradually what had happened came out. He was the oldest of four children. His father, with whom he was very close, died suddenly when Kevin was in graduate school. Kevin had had to quit and come home to take care of the others. Somewhere along the line, the pressure sent cracks up and down his psyche and he simply fell apart. He was institutionalized and since then had been on heavy medication. He spent his days in the library researching things, but when I asked what, he looked at me suspiciously and changed the subject.
I could not imagine how Zoe was feeling. Whatever she had brought with her to this night—dreams, expectations—had been met at the door by this human nightmare of everything gone wrong, all hope abandoned. Once again my poor friend had lost.
“Excuse me, Kevin, but we have to go.” I didn’t care if I hurt his feelings. I took her by the arm and we fled into the ladies’ room. He was still talking when the door whooshed shut behind us.
Luckily no one else was in there. Speechless, we stared at each other. It was as if a beautiful piece of crystal had dropped and shattered on the floor. Of course you sweep it up, but first you must accept the fact that it is gone forever.
Zoe went to the sink and turned on both spigots. She lowered her head and cupping handful after handful, threw water on her face. Then she squirted out a handful of bright green hand soap from the dispenser and thoroughly washed her face clean of all the makeup she’d so carefully applied an hour before.
I wanted to be so much smarter than I was, able to come up with something right to say that, even for a moment, might fill the black space I knew was in her heart and would be for a long time.
“Where did I learn my cliches?” She was looking in the mirror. Her face was blank and shone from water.
“What do you mean?”
“Love never dies. Hope springs eternal. The one thing we should have learned by now is to put a seat belt around our heart. The road is dangerous but we never put the damned seat belt on.”
“Zoe—”
“He said something to me once I’ll never forget. He said, ‘We’ll start to reminisce when we’re a hundred and four because till then we’ll be too busy.’ I was going to bring Hector tonight. He could have come. But I thought about Kevin, you know, and maybe there was a chance that something might happen… so I didn’t.”
Where was my wisdom? I kept licking my lips and scouring my brain but nothing came. She continued to look blankly in the mirror, as if seeing her face for the first time.
The door opened and Kathy Herlth sauntered in. She was as gorgeous as ever but still carried the icy wind of disdain for everything on earth that froze the rest of us humanity to death.
“God, did you see Kevin Hamilton? He’s got to change his lobotomist! He’s standing out there talking like a Klingon. Sort of looks like one too.”
It was so cruel and true that Zoe coughed out a huge laugh. I did too.
Kathy shrugged. “I knew I shouldn’t have come to this. It’s so depressing. Youtwo have sure come full circle tonight. Kevin’s mad and James is dead. That ends that chapter, huh?”
“What?” The word came out much slower than I wanted. My hand froze as I was about to wipe tears of laughter off my cheek. I looked at my hand when she spoke again. It had already made a fist. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything.
She looked surprised. “What do you mean? About what?”
“About James.”
“James? What about him? Oh God, Miranda, didn’t you know? He’s dead. He died three years ago. In a car crash.”
Everything was so clear, incredibly sharp and accentuated: Zoe’s gasp, the sound of water hissing in the sink, Kathy’s high-heel scrape across the tile floor. Their faces—Kathy’s cool but interested, Zoe shocked beyond her own new trauma. These things were clear, but some essential part of me had already left. Something left my body and floating high above the room looked down, taking one last glimpse before leaving forever.
The part that had loved James Stillman with the energy and abandon only beginners have. The part that had smoked twenty delicious cigarettes a day, laughed too loud, didn’t worry about dangerous things. The part that wondered what sex would be like and who would be the first. The part that looked too long in mirrors at the only flawless face I would ever see there.
Fearless teenage me, so sure one day I’d find a partner with whom my heart would rest happily ever after. A man I would put on like lotion. James taught me that, showed me great happiness was possible right from the beginning. He was dead.
“Jesus, Miranda, I thought you knew. It happened so long ago.”
“How—” I stopped to swallow. My throat was dry as cork. “Um, how did it happen?”
“I don’t know. Diana Wise told me. But she’s here tonight! You can ask. I saw her before.”
Without another word, I walked out of the room. Zoe said something but I kept going. I needed to find Diana Wise immediately. Without the facts, a precise description, James Stillman’s death would stay liquid in my brain and it had to be solid, real.
Hadn’t the ballroom been billiard-chalk blue before I’d gone into the bathroom? Blue with white borders? I could have sworn it was; yet now it was a weak ocher, the color of young carrots. Even the colors had changed with the terrible news.
People mulled around talking, laughing, and dancing. Tonight they could be eighteen andthirty-three at the same time. It was wonderful. Mouths were full of teeth and shiny tongues. Words surrounded me as I moved. I felt like a visitor from another planet.
“They moved to Dobbs Ferry—”
“I haven’t seen himsince, Jesus, I don’t know—”
“The whole house was carpeted with the most ugly brown shag—”
When we were eighteen, people still listened to records. There were three speeds on a record player: 33 1/3, 45, and 78. The only time you ever used 78 was when you wanted to laugh. You turned it up there and played 45s on it. Hearing familiar voices transformed to a high silly chirp was always good for a laugh. As I walked more and more quickly through the room searching for Diana, thinking about James, thinking about him dead, the world around me switched to 78. Voices became a speeded-up muddle. This whizzing chaos became so strong that I had to stop and close my eyes. I breathed deeply a few times, telling myself not to panic. When I opened my eyes, Zoe was standing in front of me.
“Are you okay?”
“No. Have you seen Diana? I can’t find her.”
“We will. Come on, she’s got to be here.” She took my hand and we walked together. Later, when my mind cleared, I thought, How kind of her. Zoe had had her own nightmare only minutes before. Yet here she was, holding my hand and helping when she could just as well have been shut off in her own pain from meeting Kevin Hamilton.
“There! Over there.”
Unlike so many others at the reunion, Diana Wise looked almost exactly as she had when we were in school. Interesting face, long black hair, the sexy smile of an Italian movie star. We had been almost-friends in high school, but she was so much maturer than we that we had always held her in awe.
“Diana?” She was talking to a man I didn’t recognize. Hearing her name, she turned and saw me. Touching the guy on the hand as a good-bye, she took me by the arm.
“Miranda. I’ve been looking for you.” Her voice was strong and assured. The expression on her face said she knew what I needed. I was grateful not to have to ask the question. Not to have to say the words out loud, into the world: Is it true? Is he really dead?
The three of us walked through the lobby back out into the summer evening. It was warm and beautiful, the air still heavy from the day and full of the voluptuous smell of honeysuckle. I was empty and scared. I knew what was coming. Even though answers were what I wanted, I knew that when I heard them there would be no way back to a part of my life that, until a few hours before, was still intact.
“Diana, what happened to James? How did it…” I couldn’t say any more.
She put a hand into her long black hair and drew it slowly away from her face. “I bumped into him a few years ago in Philadelphia. He was working for a company that had something to do with art—selling it, dealing it? I don’t really remember. Maybe it was an auction house, like Sotheby’s. Anyway, we ran into each other on the street. He loved what he was doing. He was so revved up. Remember how excited he could get about things?”
I wanted to tell her how I’d seen that excitement, seen his whole being glow about something that had grabbed his attention.
“We were both in a rush and only able to have a quick cup of coffee together. He sounded wonderful, Miranda. Said for the first time in his life he felt like he was on the right track. Things were where he wanted them. He had a girlfriend. He was absolutely up, you know?”
“How did he look?” I wanted a picture, an image of him grown up I could hold on to.
“Older of course, thinner than he was in school, but still those great eyes and smile.” She paused. “He looked like James.”
I began to weep. Those words held everything I did and did not want to hear. Zoe put her arms around me. The three of us stood on the lawn, a few feet—and light-years away from all the happiness and goodwill inside the building.
When my storm had mostly passed, I asked Diana to go on.
“We exchanged numbers and promised to stay in touch. We called a couple of times but I didn’t go back to Philadelphia, and who ever comes to Kalamazoo?
“One night three years ago, very late, I got a call. A woman asked for me two times. She was so upset that I had to convinceher who I was. She said she knew I was a good friend of James’s and wanted me to know he’d been killed in a car accident.
“He’d been in New York and gotten a call from his girlfriend in Philadelphia. She wanted to break up with him because she’d met someone else. Apparently she was that cold—wanted out and there was nothing more to talk about.
“As soon as he got off the phone, James jumped in his car and drove straight down there. It was very icy and the roads were bad. He made it to Philadelphia but was driving too fast. When he tried to get off the turnpike, the car skidded and went off the road. She said he died instantly.”
“Instantly?”
“That’s what the woman said.”
“Who was she?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t give a name, even when I asked. I bet it was the girlfriend.
“He asked about you, Miranda. When we had coffee, he asked if I had heard anything about you.”
My heart lurched. “Really?”
“Yes. He was disappointed when I didn’t know.”
We were silent while music from the reunion filled the air around us.
“Is there anything else?”
“No. I told you I asked the woman for her name but she wouldn’t say. She hung up right after that.”
Zoe sighed and looked at the ground. It was such a final, nothing-left sigh.
“Thank you, Diana. It makes it clearer.”
We hugged. She stepped back, hands on my elbows, and looked at me a moment more. Then she turned and started for the building.
“Diana?”
“Yes?”
“Really, he was happy?”
She only nodded. Which was better than any words. It allowed me my own vocabulary for his happiness.
“Thank you.”
She reached into her handbag, took out a card, and handed it to me. “Call if you want to talk, or if you’re ever in Kalamazoo, Michigan.”
Zoe and I stood in silence in the middle of the lawn. After time had passed I said, “I don’t want to go back in there. I’ll call a cab. Could you give me a key to your house?”
“Let’s go someplace and drink a lot.”
Instead we ended up driving around again. Past the same places we’d seen that afternoon, which now felt like a million years ago. I turned on the radio and, as if they knew our mood, all the stations seemed to be playing only songs we’d loved when we were young. Which was all right because we finished being young that night and it was right to be immersed in it one last time.
I hadn’t been paying attention to where she was going, and realized where we were only when she slowed and turned into the parking lot of the Carvel ice cream stand.
“Good idea!”
“If we’re not going to get drunk, we’ll get fat.”
We ordered the old usual—vanilla cones dipped in heated chocolate—and went back to her car. In our party dresses we sat on the hood and ate.
“They’re still delicious.”
“I haven’t had one in years. I used to bring the kids when they were young, but they wouldn’t be caught dead with me in public these days.”
We watched people come and go. Back at the country club, our classmates were dancing and reliving happy times. But Kevin was back there too and so was James.
“Zoe, what do we do now?”
“Hope, honey. Same thing as I said before.”
“Not much hope in Mudville tonight.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I found Andy’s gun?”
That stopped me. “You’re kidding! Andy, your slimy ex-husband?”
“Yup. It was the first year we were married. I was putting away clean underwear in his drawer. Sitting on top of his Fruit Of The Looms was a gun.”
“Why’d he have it?”
“The most interesting thing was, the moment I found it, the only thing that went through my mind wasn’t‘He’s got a gun!’ What hit me was, ‘The world is an amazing place.’ You know how it is when you’re first with someone and love him: you think you know everything about him. Then you open a drawer one day and there’s something—an old love letter, a diary, a gun. It’s impossible to connect with the person you thought you knew.
“It was kind of wonderful, Miranda. I knew no matter what happened, life was always going to be interesting.”
“Because you found a gun?”
“No! Because it was part of Andy too. I really didn’t know him and that excited me. There were all these new things to discover. In the end we divorced, but back then, life was still opening up. It excited me. It still excites me. You should let it do that. You should let that happen.”
3. A YOGURT TRILOGY
“YOU’RE A THIEF, Miranda.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Jaco.”
Sniffing the air as if something stunk in the room, he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Perhaps the most unscrupulous I have ever done business with.”
I tapped my front tooth with a fingernail. “Jaco, we’ve had this conversation before. You always say the same thing: I’m a crook, a bitch… always the same spring rolls. But I find the books you want. You wanted a signed first edition of The Gallery; I got it for you. You wanted a letter from Eliot, I found it for you—”
“True, but then you charge so much that I have no money left!”
“You’d have to live another four hundred years before you ran out of money. Don’t buy it! You know Dagmar will if you don’t.” It was a rotten thing to say, but I was so disgusted with him at the moment I couldn’t resist.
As usual, her detested name straightened his back and narrowed his greedy eyes.
Dagmar Breece. Jaco Breece’s nemesis. All I had to do was wave her name in front of him and the mean old man started snorting like Ferdinand the Bull.
Dagmar and Jaco Breece had two passions: cashmere and twentieth-century authors. That was great when they were married and ran a sweater company together for four decades. The business was successful, they had a couple of nice children who grew up and away, they shared a passion for collecting. Then when she was sixty years old, Dagmar fell in love with another man and promptly moved out on her husband. Good riddance.
What galled Jaco more than losing her, however, was her saying he could keep the rare book and manuscript collection they’d spent years amassing. She would start another with the help of her rich new boyfriend.
That’s how I came to know them. Several years before, when they were still together, Dagmar came into the store and bought an Edward Dahlberg manuscript I had listed in a catalog. After that, I found a number of things for them, both when they were married and after she left. I liked Dagmar but not Jaco. Not one bit.
Standing there watching him fume, I wondered how he would have reacted if he’d known I was going to a dinner party at her apartment that night.
“What else do you have that’s new?”
“Some Rilke letters—”
“Everyone has Rilke letters. He wrote too many.”
“Jaco, you asked what’s new. I have some letters—Noooo, wait! I have something else that’ll interest you!”
My store is small, so it was only three steps to the sideboard. I disliked the whole pompous leather-and-dark-oak look of most rare book dealers’ stores, so mine was furnished with 1950s Heywood Wakefield blond wood furniture and a very warm red-and-white Chinese rug. Together they made the room light, slightly odd, and, I hoped, welcoming. I loved books and everything about them. I wanted customers to know that when they walked in.
The difference between my business and the business of other book and manuscript dealers was that I sold anything else I fancied too.
Opening a drawer, I took out the long thin case made of crocodile skin. It looked like the kind Victorian gentlemen used for carrying cigars. What I had inside was much better than that. Opening it, I put it down on the counter in front of Jaco, knowing he would go into cardiac arrest when he realized what it was.
“I don’t collect fountain pens, Miranda.”
“It’s not a pen. It’s a Mabie Todd.”
“Then maybe Todd would like it.”
“Very funny. Look at the barrel.”
He looked at me like I was trying to pull a fast one but in the end he picked up the largest fountain pen I’d ever seen.
“So? It’s a pen.”
“Jaco, turn it around. Look closely.”
He turned till he saw the name engraved in gold lettering on the black barrel. When he spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper, as if his tongue had grown too big for his throat. “No! Is it?”
I nodded. “I have authentication.”
“How did you—”
“At a Sotheby’s auction last week. I saw it in their catalog. I think it came from Lord Esher’s estate.”
“Rolfe.” He read the name reverently. “I remember from the Symons biography, he was supposed to have always written with a huge fountain pen.”
“That’s right.”
Exasperated and smiling for the first time, he shook his head. “Miranda, how do you find these things? How did you find Frederick Rolfe’s fountain pen?”
“Because I love what I’m doing. Hunting for things, having them in my hand for a while. I love selling them to people like you who care.”
“But you never keep anything for yourself?”
“Never. You have to decide whether you’re going to collect or sell. Collecting would exhaust me. I’d never be happy with what I owned. I would always want more. This way, I can enjoy things for a while and then sell them to the right people.”
“Like Dagmar?”
“Like Dagmar, andyou. Do you want this?”
“Of course I want it!”
I WAITED A good half hour after he left before I made the call. Jaco had the disconcerting habit of returning in a rage to demand a better price for something he had just bought. In the beginning I’d been cowed by his fury, but not anymore.
“Hello?” Her voice was soft and elegant, as sexy a woman’s voice as I knew.
“Dagmar? It’s Miranda. Jaco was just here. He bought the pen.”
“Of course he did, darling. It’s exactly what he would want. That’s why I bought it. It’s a fabulous piece.”
“But why sell it to him? Didn’t you want it for your collection?”
“Yes, but he would love it more. Baron Corvo is one of his few heroes.”
“I don’t understand. You finally left him after all those years of unhappiness, but you’re still giving him things?”
“Not giving, selling. Loving Jaco was like sitting on a cold stone: you give it all your heat but it gives none back. You end up with a chill in your behind. I couldn’t take it anymore. But leaving doesn’t erase most of my adult life. I still love him for a few things and always will. Not that I necessarily want to. Sometimes you can’t control who you love.”
“But you’re happy you left?”
“Blissfully. The only time I look back is to check to make sure I locked the door. Tell me how Jaco reacted when he saw the pen.” I could almost hear her smile through the telephone.
“He nipped. He was in heaven.”
“No doubt. Hadrian the Seventhis his favorite book. No wonder—the story of a miserable, undeserving person who’s chosen to be pope. Jaco identifies totally.”
“I’ll bring you a check tonight.”
“No hurry. Today I’m beyond madness anyway. The caterer called and said he won’t be able to make the yogurt trilogy for dessert, which essentially ruins the dinner. But we have to be strong.”
“Yogurt trilogy?”
“Don’t be cynical, Miranda. One taste and you’d be a believer. Plus our apartment smells like a wet washcloth, andI have to go have my hair done. Sometimes it would be nice being a man. For them, a haircut is nine dollars. For a woman it’s a religious experience. So I have to go, sweetie. If I live through today, I’ll be immortal. Be here at seven. I’ve invited three Scud missiles for dinner and told each you’re the catch of the century.”
“That’s tough to live up to.”
“But you are!”
FEW PEOPLE CAME into my store to browse. For the most part, the clientele knew exactly what they wanted. I lived a good deal of the time on the road, tracking down their specific and often expensive desires. You could page me on my wristwatch or call me on the smallest portable telephone I could find. I was happy when I could spend even a few weeks at a time in the store straightening things up paying bills, reading catalogs and faxes. Yet I was also happy in airports, hotel rooms, restaurants that served regional dishes I had never heard of. There was no man in my life. I was free to come and go as I pleased.
In college I had majored in sociology, but realized junior year how unsatisfying demographic charts and terms like gemeinschaftand gesellschaftwere. For extra money I found a job at a used book store and was lucky enough to be there the day a man came in with two cardboard boxes of books to sell. Among them was a signed limited edition of Faulkner’s The Hamlet, which happened to be on the reading list of a course I was taking. Knowing it was valuable, I showed it to the owner of the store. He said I could keep it because I’d been honest and was a good worker. I took the book to class to show the professor. His eyes widened and he asked if I would sell it to him for a hundred dollars. There was something in his tone that made me suspicious. I looked up the telephone numbers of several rare book dealers and called to ask what the book was worth.
Nothing is permanent, but books are one of the few things that come close. Hearing how valuable the Faulkner was, I realized I had been made privy to one of life’s small secrets, which was that there are objects that mean nothing to most people, but everything to some. What’s more, if you knew anything about the subject, you quickly discovered collecting books was one of the last real treasure hunts possible in this age. There are old books everywhere and most people don’t care about them. The few who do will go to remarkable lengths to possess them.
As I continued, I realized I was good at the job—this in itself is a great reward. I loved my customers’ excitement and delight with what I found. I loved the serendipity of the hunt. My heart still pounded on seeing something unique or important in a junk store, second-hand shop, a Salvation Army bin in the bad section of some downtown. Slowly reaching out, I would take it in my hand, knowing one of the greatest pleasures of all was here. Opening the book, I would check the first pages to make sure it was what I thought. Yes, there was the proof if you knew what to look for—the letter A, or the even more obvious first edition. Other indications, emblems, marks… the secret alphabet and language of book collectors. On the inside front cover someone would have carelessly written in pencil, $1or 50ў. I paid ten cents in Louisville for the most beautiful first edition of The Great GatsbyI’ve ever seen. Five dollars for The Enormous Room. I couldn’t understand why more people weren’t doing this. Even if you knew only a little about the subject, it was like looking for gold everywhere you went.
After reading the journals of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, I became interested in photography. That opened up an altogether new world, not to mention business opportunity. On a trip to Los Angeles, I discovered a large box of photographs at a yard sale. Most were of strangers, but some subjects were famous movie stars of the 1930s and ‘40s. What struck me was how beautifully the pictures were lit and how naturally the people had been posed. On the back of each was a stamp with the photographer’s name, Hurrell, and address. I bought them and never forgot the look on the woman’s face as I handed her money: it said I was a sucker and she was the winner. But even then, without ever having heard of the great photographer George Hurrell, I knew she was wrong.
“Miranda?”
I came out of a daze to see one of my favorite people in the world standing at the door.
“Clayton! I’m sorry, I was daydreaming.”
“The sign of all great minds. Give your old boss a hug.”
We embraced and, as usual, he had on another mysteriously beautiful cologne that made me swoon.
“What are you wearing today?”
“Something French. Called Diptyque, which I think is appropriate for a bookseller, wouldn’t you say?”
“Absolutely. Where have you been, Clayton? I haven’t heard a word from you in months.” I took his hand and led him to a chair. He sat down and looked slowly around before speaking. He must have been sixty, but looked years younger. A full head of hair—and the wrinkles on his face came mostly from smiling. I had gone to work for him in New York after college. He had shown me everything he knew about the rare book business. Enthusiasm and generosity were at the heart of his personality. When I left to open my own store, he lent me ten thousand dollars to get started.
“Do you still have that nice Stevens? I have a buyer. A Scientologist from Utah.”
“A Scientologist who reads Wallace Stevens?”
“Exactly. I’ve been out west, drumming up business. Bumped into some very interesting people. One man lived on a strict carrot diet and collected nothing but Wyndham Lewis. That’s why I haven’t been around. I don’t know about you, but books haven’t been flying off my shelves recently. That’s why I’ve been traveling. How are things for you?”
“So-so. They go in waves. I sold a bunch of Robert Duncan in L.A. a couple of months ago. That put me back on track. Do you know who I saw when I was out there? Doug Auerbach.”
“Ah, the Dog. What’s he been doing?”
“Making commercials. He makes a load of money.”
“But you said he wanted to be Ingmar Bergman. I can’t imagine making dog food ads satisfies that desire. Does he still miss you?”
“I guess. I think he misses the time when his life had more possibilities.”
“Don’t we all? Well, Miranda, I’ve come to see you, but I’ve also come on a mission. Have you heard of Frances Hatch?”
“Am I going to be embarrassed saying no?”
“Not really. She’s a well-kept secret to all but a few. Frances Hatch was a kind of Jill of all trades, mistress of none, in the twenties and thirties. Although she wasmistress to an amazing number of famous people. She was a sort of lunatic combination of Alma Mahler, Caresse Crosby, and Lee Miller.
“She came from big money in St. Louis but rebelled and ran away to Prague. She went at the right time to the wrong city. Things weregoing on there, as in the rest of Europe in the twenties, but it was nowhere near as interesting as Berlin or Paris. She stayed a year studying photography, then moved to Bucharest with a Romanian ventriloquist. His stage name was ‘The Enormous Shumda.’”
“To Bucharest with The Enormous Shumda? I love her already.”
“I know—a strange choice of geography. But she was always being towed somewhere by one man or another and willingly went along for the ride. Anyway, she left after a short time and ended up in Paris, alone.”
“Not for long, right?”
“Right. Women like Frances never stay alone long.” He opened his briefcase and took out a photograph. “Here’s a self-portrait she took around that time.”
I looked at the picture. It was a beautiful black-and-white shot, reminiscent of the work of Walter Peterhans or Lyonel Feininger: angular, stark, very Germanic. I laughed. “This is a joke. You’re joking, right, Clayton?” I looked again. I didn’t know what to say. “It’s a self-portrait? It’s wonderful. From the way you described her, I thought she’d just be a ditz. I’d never have imagined she was so talented.”
“And?” He pointed to the picture and, eyes twinkling, started to smile.
“And, she looks like a schnauzer.”
“My first thought was an emu.”
“What’s that?”
“They look like ostriches.”
“You’re telling me this emu was the lover to famous people? She is ugly, Clayton. Look at that nose!”
“Have you heard the French phrase belle laide?”
“No.”
“It means ugly enough to be desirable. The ugliness adds to the sexiness.”
“This woman is not belleanything.”
“Maybe she was great in bed.”
“She’d have to be. I can’t believe it, Clayton. Part of me thinks you’re bullshitting. Who was she with?”
“Kazantzakis, Giacometti. Her best friend was Charlotte Perriand. Others. She lived a fascinating life.” He took the photo from me. After glancing at it once more, he put it back in his briefcase. “And she’s still alive! Lives on 112 thStreet.”
“How old is she?”
“Got to be way up in the nineties.”
“How do you know her?”
“Frances Hatch is rumored to have letters, drawings, and books from these people and others, the likes of which would make any dealer weep. Very important stuff, Miranda, just sitting there growing yellow. For years she made noise about wanting to sell, but never did till now. Her companion died a few months ago and she’s afraid of being alone. Wants to move into an expensive nursing home in Briarcliff but doesn’t have the money.”
“It sounds great if you can get her to sell you the stuff. But why tell me?”
“Because at age ninety-whatever, Frances no longer likes men. She had some kind of late-life revelation and became a lesbian. With the exception of her lawyer, she deals only with women. I’ve known her for years and she says she’s really willing to sell now, but only if it’s done through a woman dealer. If she’ll sell, I’ll go fifty-fifty with you.” He made no attempt to hide the desperation in his voice.
“That’s not necessary, Clayton. I’m glad to help if I can. Besides, I’ve always wanted to meet an emu. When would we go?”
He looked at his watch. “Now, this morning, if you’d like.”
“Let’s go.”
BEFORE CATCHING A cab, Clayton said he needed to find a market, but not why. I waited outside. In a few minutes he reemerged with a bag full of serious junk food. Things like pink Hostess Snowballs, fluorescent orange Cheetos, Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles.…
“Those aren’t for you?”
“It’s the only food Frances eats. Anyone who visits her is expected to bring a bag full of this merde.”
“No wonder she’s ninety! If she ate those all her life she’s probably eighty percent chemically preserved. When she dies, her body will have the half-life of plutonium.”
He took out a package and looked at it. “When was the last time you ate a Ding Dong? They all sound obscene—Devil Dogs, Ding Dongs.…” He tore open the wrapper and we contentedly ate them as we rode uptown.
Ms. Hatch lived in one of those beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings that looked like fortresses. It had outlived its neighborhood but was falling to ruin. There were gargoyles on the front facade and a long courtyard with a fountain in the center that no longer worked. It was the kind of building that deserved quiet and reserve, but as we walked across the courtyard, salsa and rap music swept down from open windows and crashed on top of us. Somewhere a man and woman yelled at each other. The things they said were embarrassing. As often happened in situations like that, it struck me how people feel no shame anymore talking publicly about anything. While riding the subway recently, I’d sat next to two women talking loudly about their periods. Not once did either of them look around to see if people were listening, which they were.
When I mentioned this to Clayton, he said, “No one’s concerned with dignity today. People want either to win or to be comfortable.” He gestured toward the windows above us. “They don’t care if you hear. It’s like the TV talk shows: those idiots don’t mind your knowing they slept with their mother, or the dog. They think it makes them interesting. Here we are. This is it.”
The hallway smelled of old food and wet paper. Illegible graffiti had been spray-painted big and black across the mailboxes. A yellow baby carriage without wheels was pushed against a wall. The elevator didn’t work.
“What floor does she live on?”
“Third, but she never goes out. Sometimes I wonder how many old people are prisoners in their apartments in this city. Too scared, or they can’t climb the stairs. There’s got to be a lot of them.”
We climbed in silence. I noticed here and there signs of the onetime beauty of the building. The banister was bird’s-eye maple, the ironwork beneath it intricate and pretty. The stairs were made of dark green stone with swirls of black inside, like a frozen cyclone.
There was lots of noise everywhere. Music, people talking, the general white noise from many television sets going full blast. It made me appreciate my own building, where the neighbors were unfriendly but quiet.
On reaching the third floor, we walked down a long hall to the end. Unlike the others, which looked like the police had periodically beaten them in, Frances Hatch’s oak door was immaculately preserved. There was a small brass plaque with her name engraved on it. It had recently been polished. Clayton rang the bell. We waited quite a while.
The door opened and I think both of us took a step back in surprise. A short bald man with a moon-round face and no chin, dressed in a dark suit, black tie, and white shirt stood there. His face said seventy or eighty, but he stood so straight that he could have been younger.
“Yes?”
“I’m Clayton Blanchard. Ms. Hatch is expecting me?”
“Come along.”
The man turned and walked stiffly back into the apartment, as if rehearsing for the march of the tin soldiers. I looked at Clayton. “I thought you said she only spoke to women?”
Before he had a chance to reply, the soldier called out, “Are you coming?” We scurried in.
I didn’t have a chance to look at anything, but my nose noticed how good it smelled in there. “What’s that smell?”
“Apples?”
“In here, please.”
The man’s voice was so commanding that I felt I was back in high school, being summoned to the principal’s office.
I saw the light before entering the living room. It was blinding and came through the door in a white flood. We walked in and I was in love before I knew it. Frances Hatch’s living room was full of Persian rugs, rare Bauhaus furniture, and the largest cat I had ever seen. The rugs were all varying shades of red—russet, cerise, ruby. Which mixed brilliantly with the stark chrome furniture. It softened the starkness but also made individual pieces stand out in their pure simplicity, almost as if they hovered over the varied redness below. High windows went all the way down the room, taking in as much light as the day had. On the walls were a large number of photographs and paintings. I didn’t have a chance to look at them before another imperious voice called out, “Over here, I’m here.”
As if it knew what she had said, the cat stood up, stretched languorously, and walked over to where Frances Hatch was sitting.
It stood looking up at her, tail swishing.
“How are you, Clayton? Come over here so I can see you.” He walked to her chair and took the large bony hand she held out.
“Cold. Your hands are always cold, Clayton.”
“It runs in my family.”
“Well, cold hands, warm heart. Who have you brought with you?”
He gestured for me to come over. “Frances, this is my friend Miranda Romanac.”
“Hello Miranda. You’ll have to come close because I can barely see. Are you pretty?”
“Hello. I’m passable.”
“I was always ugly, so there was never any question about that. Ugly people have to work harder to get the world’s attention. You have to prove you’re worth listening to. Did you meet Irvin?”
I looked at the man with the big voice.
“Irvin Edelstein, these are my friends Clayton and Miranda. Sit down. I can see you better now. Yes. You dohave red hair! I thought so. Very nice. I love red. Have you noticed my rugs?”
“I did. I love the way you’ve done this room.”
“Thank you. It’s my magic carpet. When I’m in here I feel just a little bit above the earth. So you’re a friend of Clayton. That’s a good sign. What else do you do?”
“I’m a bookseller too.”
“Perfect! Because that’s what I want to talk about today. Irvin is here to advise me on what I should do. I have very valuable things, Miranda. Do you know why I’ve decided to sell them? Because all my life I’ve wanted to be rich. In one month I’ll be a hundred. I think it would be very nice to be rich at a hundred.”
“What will you do with the money?” It was a rude question to ask, especially after having just been introduced, but I liked Frances already and sensed she had a good sense of humor.
“What will I do? Buy a red Cadillac convertible and drive around, picking up men. God, how long has it been since I was with a man? You know, when you’re my age, you think about who you were all those years. If you’re lucky, you grow very fond of that person. The men I knew were silly most of the time, but they had nerve. Sometimes they even had the kind of guts you usually only dream of. Guts are what matters, Miranda. That’s what Kazantzakis told me. God gave us courage but it is dangerous music to listen to. That man had no fear. Do you know who his hero was? Blondin. The greatest tightrope walker who ever lived. He walked across a rope over Niagara Falls and halfway there stopped to cook and eat an omelette.”
“Clayton said you lived enough for three normal lives.”
“I did, but that was because I was ugly and had something to prove. I was a great lover and sometimes I had courage. I tried to tell the truth when it was important. Those are the things I’m proud of. Someone wanted me to write my autobiography, but it’s my life. I don’t want to share it with people who care less about it than I do. Anyway, by then I was too old to remember if I was telling the truth about everything, and that’s very important. But Irvin gave me this little gizmo and it’s a great comfort.” She reached into her lap and held up a small tape recorder. “I sit here and feel the magic carpets under my feet and the light through the window is warm and when an especially nice memory comes, all I have to do is press this button. I tell the machine something I haven’t remembered for a long time.
“Just this morning, right before you arrived, I was thinking about a picnic I had with the Hemingways at Auteuil. Lewis Gallantiere, Hemingway, and mad Harry Crosby. Why those two men ever got along was beyond me, but it was a lovely day. We ate Westphalian ham and Harry lost three thousand francs on the horses.”
Amazed, I looked at Clayton and silently mouthed, “Hemingway?”
“I think of Hemingway a lot. You know, people never stop talking about him and Giacometti, but they always describe them in such distorted, frenzied ways. People want to believe they were wild and dissolute because it fits a romantic image. But Gallantiere said something before he died that must be remembered: All the great artists put in a good day’s work every day of their lives when we were all living in Paris. People want to think those books and paintings arrived out of the ether, whole cloth. But what I remember most is how hard they worked. Giacometti? He would have murdered you if you came to his studio while he was working.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Jaco.”
Sniffing the air as if something stunk in the room, he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Perhaps the most unscrupulous I have ever done business with.”
I tapped my front tooth with a fingernail. “Jaco, we’ve had this conversation before. You always say the same thing: I’m a crook, a bitch… always the same spring rolls. But I find the books you want. You wanted a signed first edition of The Gallery; I got it for you. You wanted a letter from Eliot, I found it for you—”
“True, but then you charge so much that I have no money left!”
“You’d have to live another four hundred years before you ran out of money. Don’t buy it! You know Dagmar will if you don’t.” It was a rotten thing to say, but I was so disgusted with him at the moment I couldn’t resist.
As usual, her detested name straightened his back and narrowed his greedy eyes.
Dagmar Breece. Jaco Breece’s nemesis. All I had to do was wave her name in front of him and the mean old man started snorting like Ferdinand the Bull.
Dagmar and Jaco Breece had two passions: cashmere and twentieth-century authors. That was great when they were married and ran a sweater company together for four decades. The business was successful, they had a couple of nice children who grew up and away, they shared a passion for collecting. Then when she was sixty years old, Dagmar fell in love with another man and promptly moved out on her husband. Good riddance.
What galled Jaco more than losing her, however, was her saying he could keep the rare book and manuscript collection they’d spent years amassing. She would start another with the help of her rich new boyfriend.
That’s how I came to know them. Several years before, when they were still together, Dagmar came into the store and bought an Edward Dahlberg manuscript I had listed in a catalog. After that, I found a number of things for them, both when they were married and after she left. I liked Dagmar but not Jaco. Not one bit.
Standing there watching him fume, I wondered how he would have reacted if he’d known I was going to a dinner party at her apartment that night.
“What else do you have that’s new?”
“Some Rilke letters—”
“Everyone has Rilke letters. He wrote too many.”
“Jaco, you asked what’s new. I have some letters—Noooo, wait! I have something else that’ll interest you!”
My store is small, so it was only three steps to the sideboard. I disliked the whole pompous leather-and-dark-oak look of most rare book dealers’ stores, so mine was furnished with 1950s Heywood Wakefield blond wood furniture and a very warm red-and-white Chinese rug. Together they made the room light, slightly odd, and, I hoped, welcoming. I loved books and everything about them. I wanted customers to know that when they walked in.
The difference between my business and the business of other book and manuscript dealers was that I sold anything else I fancied too.
Opening a drawer, I took out the long thin case made of crocodile skin. It looked like the kind Victorian gentlemen used for carrying cigars. What I had inside was much better than that. Opening it, I put it down on the counter in front of Jaco, knowing he would go into cardiac arrest when he realized what it was.
“I don’t collect fountain pens, Miranda.”
“It’s not a pen. It’s a Mabie Todd.”
“Then maybe Todd would like it.”
“Very funny. Look at the barrel.”
He looked at me like I was trying to pull a fast one but in the end he picked up the largest fountain pen I’d ever seen.
“So? It’s a pen.”
“Jaco, turn it around. Look closely.”
He turned till he saw the name engraved in gold lettering on the black barrel. When he spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper, as if his tongue had grown too big for his throat. “No! Is it?”
I nodded. “I have authentication.”
“How did you—”
“At a Sotheby’s auction last week. I saw it in their catalog. I think it came from Lord Esher’s estate.”
“Rolfe.” He read the name reverently. “I remember from the Symons biography, he was supposed to have always written with a huge fountain pen.”
“That’s right.”
Exasperated and smiling for the first time, he shook his head. “Miranda, how do you find these things? How did you find Frederick Rolfe’s fountain pen?”
“Because I love what I’m doing. Hunting for things, having them in my hand for a while. I love selling them to people like you who care.”
“But you never keep anything for yourself?”
“Never. You have to decide whether you’re going to collect or sell. Collecting would exhaust me. I’d never be happy with what I owned. I would always want more. This way, I can enjoy things for a while and then sell them to the right people.”
“Like Dagmar?”
“Like Dagmar, andyou. Do you want this?”
“Of course I want it!”
I WAITED A good half hour after he left before I made the call. Jaco had the disconcerting habit of returning in a rage to demand a better price for something he had just bought. In the beginning I’d been cowed by his fury, but not anymore.
“Hello?” Her voice was soft and elegant, as sexy a woman’s voice as I knew.
“Dagmar? It’s Miranda. Jaco was just here. He bought the pen.”
“Of course he did, darling. It’s exactly what he would want. That’s why I bought it. It’s a fabulous piece.”
“But why sell it to him? Didn’t you want it for your collection?”
“Yes, but he would love it more. Baron Corvo is one of his few heroes.”
“I don’t understand. You finally left him after all those years of unhappiness, but you’re still giving him things?”
“Not giving, selling. Loving Jaco was like sitting on a cold stone: you give it all your heat but it gives none back. You end up with a chill in your behind. I couldn’t take it anymore. But leaving doesn’t erase most of my adult life. I still love him for a few things and always will. Not that I necessarily want to. Sometimes you can’t control who you love.”
“But you’re happy you left?”
“Blissfully. The only time I look back is to check to make sure I locked the door. Tell me how Jaco reacted when he saw the pen.” I could almost hear her smile through the telephone.
“He nipped. He was in heaven.”
“No doubt. Hadrian the Seventhis his favorite book. No wonder—the story of a miserable, undeserving person who’s chosen to be pope. Jaco identifies totally.”
“I’ll bring you a check tonight.”
“No hurry. Today I’m beyond madness anyway. The caterer called and said he won’t be able to make the yogurt trilogy for dessert, which essentially ruins the dinner. But we have to be strong.”
“Yogurt trilogy?”
“Don’t be cynical, Miranda. One taste and you’d be a believer. Plus our apartment smells like a wet washcloth, andI have to go have my hair done. Sometimes it would be nice being a man. For them, a haircut is nine dollars. For a woman it’s a religious experience. So I have to go, sweetie. If I live through today, I’ll be immortal. Be here at seven. I’ve invited three Scud missiles for dinner and told each you’re the catch of the century.”
“That’s tough to live up to.”
“But you are!”
FEW PEOPLE CAME into my store to browse. For the most part, the clientele knew exactly what they wanted. I lived a good deal of the time on the road, tracking down their specific and often expensive desires. You could page me on my wristwatch or call me on the smallest portable telephone I could find. I was happy when I could spend even a few weeks at a time in the store straightening things up paying bills, reading catalogs and faxes. Yet I was also happy in airports, hotel rooms, restaurants that served regional dishes I had never heard of. There was no man in my life. I was free to come and go as I pleased.
In college I had majored in sociology, but realized junior year how unsatisfying demographic charts and terms like gemeinschaftand gesellschaftwere. For extra money I found a job at a used book store and was lucky enough to be there the day a man came in with two cardboard boxes of books to sell. Among them was a signed limited edition of Faulkner’s The Hamlet, which happened to be on the reading list of a course I was taking. Knowing it was valuable, I showed it to the owner of the store. He said I could keep it because I’d been honest and was a good worker. I took the book to class to show the professor. His eyes widened and he asked if I would sell it to him for a hundred dollars. There was something in his tone that made me suspicious. I looked up the telephone numbers of several rare book dealers and called to ask what the book was worth.
Nothing is permanent, but books are one of the few things that come close. Hearing how valuable the Faulkner was, I realized I had been made privy to one of life’s small secrets, which was that there are objects that mean nothing to most people, but everything to some. What’s more, if you knew anything about the subject, you quickly discovered collecting books was one of the last real treasure hunts possible in this age. There are old books everywhere and most people don’t care about them. The few who do will go to remarkable lengths to possess them.
As I continued, I realized I was good at the job—this in itself is a great reward. I loved my customers’ excitement and delight with what I found. I loved the serendipity of the hunt. My heart still pounded on seeing something unique or important in a junk store, second-hand shop, a Salvation Army bin in the bad section of some downtown. Slowly reaching out, I would take it in my hand, knowing one of the greatest pleasures of all was here. Opening the book, I would check the first pages to make sure it was what I thought. Yes, there was the proof if you knew what to look for—the letter A, or the even more obvious first edition. Other indications, emblems, marks… the secret alphabet and language of book collectors. On the inside front cover someone would have carelessly written in pencil, $1or 50ў. I paid ten cents in Louisville for the most beautiful first edition of The Great GatsbyI’ve ever seen. Five dollars for The Enormous Room. I couldn’t understand why more people weren’t doing this. Even if you knew only a little about the subject, it was like looking for gold everywhere you went.
After reading the journals of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, I became interested in photography. That opened up an altogether new world, not to mention business opportunity. On a trip to Los Angeles, I discovered a large box of photographs at a yard sale. Most were of strangers, but some subjects were famous movie stars of the 1930s and ‘40s. What struck me was how beautifully the pictures were lit and how naturally the people had been posed. On the back of each was a stamp with the photographer’s name, Hurrell, and address. I bought them and never forgot the look on the woman’s face as I handed her money: it said I was a sucker and she was the winner. But even then, without ever having heard of the great photographer George Hurrell, I knew she was wrong.
“Miranda?”
I came out of a daze to see one of my favorite people in the world standing at the door.
“Clayton! I’m sorry, I was daydreaming.”
“The sign of all great minds. Give your old boss a hug.”
We embraced and, as usual, he had on another mysteriously beautiful cologne that made me swoon.
“What are you wearing today?”
“Something French. Called Diptyque, which I think is appropriate for a bookseller, wouldn’t you say?”
“Absolutely. Where have you been, Clayton? I haven’t heard a word from you in months.” I took his hand and led him to a chair. He sat down and looked slowly around before speaking. He must have been sixty, but looked years younger. A full head of hair—and the wrinkles on his face came mostly from smiling. I had gone to work for him in New York after college. He had shown me everything he knew about the rare book business. Enthusiasm and generosity were at the heart of his personality. When I left to open my own store, he lent me ten thousand dollars to get started.
“Do you still have that nice Stevens? I have a buyer. A Scientologist from Utah.”
“A Scientologist who reads Wallace Stevens?”
“Exactly. I’ve been out west, drumming up business. Bumped into some very interesting people. One man lived on a strict carrot diet and collected nothing but Wyndham Lewis. That’s why I haven’t been around. I don’t know about you, but books haven’t been flying off my shelves recently. That’s why I’ve been traveling. How are things for you?”
“So-so. They go in waves. I sold a bunch of Robert Duncan in L.A. a couple of months ago. That put me back on track. Do you know who I saw when I was out there? Doug Auerbach.”
“Ah, the Dog. What’s he been doing?”
“Making commercials. He makes a load of money.”
“But you said he wanted to be Ingmar Bergman. I can’t imagine making dog food ads satisfies that desire. Does he still miss you?”
“I guess. I think he misses the time when his life had more possibilities.”
“Don’t we all? Well, Miranda, I’ve come to see you, but I’ve also come on a mission. Have you heard of Frances Hatch?”
“Am I going to be embarrassed saying no?”
“Not really. She’s a well-kept secret to all but a few. Frances Hatch was a kind of Jill of all trades, mistress of none, in the twenties and thirties. Although she wasmistress to an amazing number of famous people. She was a sort of lunatic combination of Alma Mahler, Caresse Crosby, and Lee Miller.
“She came from big money in St. Louis but rebelled and ran away to Prague. She went at the right time to the wrong city. Things weregoing on there, as in the rest of Europe in the twenties, but it was nowhere near as interesting as Berlin or Paris. She stayed a year studying photography, then moved to Bucharest with a Romanian ventriloquist. His stage name was ‘The Enormous Shumda.’”
“To Bucharest with The Enormous Shumda? I love her already.”
“I know—a strange choice of geography. But she was always being towed somewhere by one man or another and willingly went along for the ride. Anyway, she left after a short time and ended up in Paris, alone.”
“Not for long, right?”
“Right. Women like Frances never stay alone long.” He opened his briefcase and took out a photograph. “Here’s a self-portrait she took around that time.”
I looked at the picture. It was a beautiful black-and-white shot, reminiscent of the work of Walter Peterhans or Lyonel Feininger: angular, stark, very Germanic. I laughed. “This is a joke. You’re joking, right, Clayton?” I looked again. I didn’t know what to say. “It’s a self-portrait? It’s wonderful. From the way you described her, I thought she’d just be a ditz. I’d never have imagined she was so talented.”
“And?” He pointed to the picture and, eyes twinkling, started to smile.
“And, she looks like a schnauzer.”
“My first thought was an emu.”
“What’s that?”
“They look like ostriches.”
“You’re telling me this emu was the lover to famous people? She is ugly, Clayton. Look at that nose!”
“Have you heard the French phrase belle laide?”
“No.”
“It means ugly enough to be desirable. The ugliness adds to the sexiness.”
“This woman is not belleanything.”
“Maybe she was great in bed.”
“She’d have to be. I can’t believe it, Clayton. Part of me thinks you’re bullshitting. Who was she with?”
“Kazantzakis, Giacometti. Her best friend was Charlotte Perriand. Others. She lived a fascinating life.” He took the photo from me. After glancing at it once more, he put it back in his briefcase. “And she’s still alive! Lives on 112 thStreet.”
“How old is she?”
“Got to be way up in the nineties.”
“How do you know her?”
“Frances Hatch is rumored to have letters, drawings, and books from these people and others, the likes of which would make any dealer weep. Very important stuff, Miranda, just sitting there growing yellow. For years she made noise about wanting to sell, but never did till now. Her companion died a few months ago and she’s afraid of being alone. Wants to move into an expensive nursing home in Briarcliff but doesn’t have the money.”
“It sounds great if you can get her to sell you the stuff. But why tell me?”
“Because at age ninety-whatever, Frances no longer likes men. She had some kind of late-life revelation and became a lesbian. With the exception of her lawyer, she deals only with women. I’ve known her for years and she says she’s really willing to sell now, but only if it’s done through a woman dealer. If she’ll sell, I’ll go fifty-fifty with you.” He made no attempt to hide the desperation in his voice.
“That’s not necessary, Clayton. I’m glad to help if I can. Besides, I’ve always wanted to meet an emu. When would we go?”
He looked at his watch. “Now, this morning, if you’d like.”
“Let’s go.”
BEFORE CATCHING A cab, Clayton said he needed to find a market, but not why. I waited outside. In a few minutes he reemerged with a bag full of serious junk food. Things like pink Hostess Snowballs, fluorescent orange Cheetos, Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles.…
“Those aren’t for you?”
“It’s the only food Frances eats. Anyone who visits her is expected to bring a bag full of this merde.”
“No wonder she’s ninety! If she ate those all her life she’s probably eighty percent chemically preserved. When she dies, her body will have the half-life of plutonium.”
He took out a package and looked at it. “When was the last time you ate a Ding Dong? They all sound obscene—Devil Dogs, Ding Dongs.…” He tore open the wrapper and we contentedly ate them as we rode uptown.
Ms. Hatch lived in one of those beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings that looked like fortresses. It had outlived its neighborhood but was falling to ruin. There were gargoyles on the front facade and a long courtyard with a fountain in the center that no longer worked. It was the kind of building that deserved quiet and reserve, but as we walked across the courtyard, salsa and rap music swept down from open windows and crashed on top of us. Somewhere a man and woman yelled at each other. The things they said were embarrassing. As often happened in situations like that, it struck me how people feel no shame anymore talking publicly about anything. While riding the subway recently, I’d sat next to two women talking loudly about their periods. Not once did either of them look around to see if people were listening, which they were.
When I mentioned this to Clayton, he said, “No one’s concerned with dignity today. People want either to win or to be comfortable.” He gestured toward the windows above us. “They don’t care if you hear. It’s like the TV talk shows: those idiots don’t mind your knowing they slept with their mother, or the dog. They think it makes them interesting. Here we are. This is it.”
The hallway smelled of old food and wet paper. Illegible graffiti had been spray-painted big and black across the mailboxes. A yellow baby carriage without wheels was pushed against a wall. The elevator didn’t work.
“What floor does she live on?”
“Third, but she never goes out. Sometimes I wonder how many old people are prisoners in their apartments in this city. Too scared, or they can’t climb the stairs. There’s got to be a lot of them.”
We climbed in silence. I noticed here and there signs of the onetime beauty of the building. The banister was bird’s-eye maple, the ironwork beneath it intricate and pretty. The stairs were made of dark green stone with swirls of black inside, like a frozen cyclone.
There was lots of noise everywhere. Music, people talking, the general white noise from many television sets going full blast. It made me appreciate my own building, where the neighbors were unfriendly but quiet.
On reaching the third floor, we walked down a long hall to the end. Unlike the others, which looked like the police had periodically beaten them in, Frances Hatch’s oak door was immaculately preserved. There was a small brass plaque with her name engraved on it. It had recently been polished. Clayton rang the bell. We waited quite a while.
The door opened and I think both of us took a step back in surprise. A short bald man with a moon-round face and no chin, dressed in a dark suit, black tie, and white shirt stood there. His face said seventy or eighty, but he stood so straight that he could have been younger.
“Yes?”
“I’m Clayton Blanchard. Ms. Hatch is expecting me?”
“Come along.”
The man turned and walked stiffly back into the apartment, as if rehearsing for the march of the tin soldiers. I looked at Clayton. “I thought you said she only spoke to women?”
Before he had a chance to reply, the soldier called out, “Are you coming?” We scurried in.
I didn’t have a chance to look at anything, but my nose noticed how good it smelled in there. “What’s that smell?”
“Apples?”
“In here, please.”
The man’s voice was so commanding that I felt I was back in high school, being summoned to the principal’s office.
I saw the light before entering the living room. It was blinding and came through the door in a white flood. We walked in and I was in love before I knew it. Frances Hatch’s living room was full of Persian rugs, rare Bauhaus furniture, and the largest cat I had ever seen. The rugs were all varying shades of red—russet, cerise, ruby. Which mixed brilliantly with the stark chrome furniture. It softened the starkness but also made individual pieces stand out in their pure simplicity, almost as if they hovered over the varied redness below. High windows went all the way down the room, taking in as much light as the day had. On the walls were a large number of photographs and paintings. I didn’t have a chance to look at them before another imperious voice called out, “Over here, I’m here.”
As if it knew what she had said, the cat stood up, stretched languorously, and walked over to where Frances Hatch was sitting.
It stood looking up at her, tail swishing.
“How are you, Clayton? Come over here so I can see you.” He walked to her chair and took the large bony hand she held out.
“Cold. Your hands are always cold, Clayton.”
“It runs in my family.”
“Well, cold hands, warm heart. Who have you brought with you?”
He gestured for me to come over. “Frances, this is my friend Miranda Romanac.”
“Hello Miranda. You’ll have to come close because I can barely see. Are you pretty?”
“Hello. I’m passable.”
“I was always ugly, so there was never any question about that. Ugly people have to work harder to get the world’s attention. You have to prove you’re worth listening to. Did you meet Irvin?”
I looked at the man with the big voice.
“Irvin Edelstein, these are my friends Clayton and Miranda. Sit down. I can see you better now. Yes. You dohave red hair! I thought so. Very nice. I love red. Have you noticed my rugs?”
“I did. I love the way you’ve done this room.”
“Thank you. It’s my magic carpet. When I’m in here I feel just a little bit above the earth. So you’re a friend of Clayton. That’s a good sign. What else do you do?”
“I’m a bookseller too.”
“Perfect! Because that’s what I want to talk about today. Irvin is here to advise me on what I should do. I have very valuable things, Miranda. Do you know why I’ve decided to sell them? Because all my life I’ve wanted to be rich. In one month I’ll be a hundred. I think it would be very nice to be rich at a hundred.”
“What will you do with the money?” It was a rude question to ask, especially after having just been introduced, but I liked Frances already and sensed she had a good sense of humor.
“What will I do? Buy a red Cadillac convertible and drive around, picking up men. God, how long has it been since I was with a man? You know, when you’re my age, you think about who you were all those years. If you’re lucky, you grow very fond of that person. The men I knew were silly most of the time, but they had nerve. Sometimes they even had the kind of guts you usually only dream of. Guts are what matters, Miranda. That’s what Kazantzakis told me. God gave us courage but it is dangerous music to listen to. That man had no fear. Do you know who his hero was? Blondin. The greatest tightrope walker who ever lived. He walked across a rope over Niagara Falls and halfway there stopped to cook and eat an omelette.”
“Clayton said you lived enough for three normal lives.”
“I did, but that was because I was ugly and had something to prove. I was a great lover and sometimes I had courage. I tried to tell the truth when it was important. Those are the things I’m proud of. Someone wanted me to write my autobiography, but it’s my life. I don’t want to share it with people who care less about it than I do. Anyway, by then I was too old to remember if I was telling the truth about everything, and that’s very important. But Irvin gave me this little gizmo and it’s a great comfort.” She reached into her lap and held up a small tape recorder. “I sit here and feel the magic carpets under my feet and the light through the window is warm and when an especially nice memory comes, all I have to do is press this button. I tell the machine something I haven’t remembered for a long time.
“Just this morning, right before you arrived, I was thinking about a picnic I had with the Hemingways at Auteuil. Lewis Gallantiere, Hemingway, and mad Harry Crosby. Why those two men ever got along was beyond me, but it was a lovely day. We ate Westphalian ham and Harry lost three thousand francs on the horses.”
Amazed, I looked at Clayton and silently mouthed, “Hemingway?”
“I think of Hemingway a lot. You know, people never stop talking about him and Giacometti, but they always describe them in such distorted, frenzied ways. People want to believe they were wild and dissolute because it fits a romantic image. But Gallantiere said something before he died that must be remembered: All the great artists put in a good day’s work every day of their lives when we were all living in Paris. People want to think those books and paintings arrived out of the ether, whole cloth. But what I remember most is how hard they worked. Giacometti? He would have murdered you if you came to his studio while he was working.”