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He didn’t return their deference. Pike referred to reviewers as “spivs” and directed Geist to handle the entire enterprise involving new books.
The basement was Walter Geist’s domain; Mr. Mitchell’s, the fifth floor. Heaven and hell, we used to joke. All of us on the main floor floating in a kind of limbo, Pike watching, raised omnipotently overhead.
Competing for my favorite task of a trip to the Rare Book Room was Bruno (who often had the distinct advantage of being near Pearl at the register, tending to the paperback tables) as well as his ragged-faced colleague, Jack. Pike had designated these two paperback people, and their proximity to Pearl’s bellowed calls meant they were more often than not in either the basement or with Mr. Mitchell upstairs.
Jack Conway, an immigrant like me, was a musician, a traditional fiddler, and Irish. He’d had the end of his nose bitten off in a pub brawl and it was now an abrupt silvery edge. The scarred skin was shiny and pale, giving the impression of a punctuation mark in the center of his face that quickened the rest of his ruddy features. Jack seemed not to care how he looked, and his abbreviated nose had little affect on his attractiveness to women. He had a French girlfriend, Rowena, a sullen poet who often stopped in, but several women visited him during the course of a day.
I saw him, more than once, enter the single public toilet with various women. While they both remained inside for a good twenty minutes, customers in need jostled desperately with the locked doorknob.
Jack’s hatchet look matched his manner. He was tough, and his thick accent often made him unintelligible to other staff members, including Geist (for all his facility with languages). I understood him perfectly, his Irish brogue not so thick to my Tasmanian ear. But I couldn’t translate the filthy fliratious remarks Jack directed at Pearl, who told me she found his inarticulate muttering exciting. Some I simply couldn’t comprehend, but it wasn’t a question of diction. It was a harmless attraction that upset Rowena, not because Jack was really interested in Pearl but because Pearl’s fleshy laughter made a kind of triangle that included me. As the go-between, I was the one Rowena disliked, suspecting, as I came to, that Jack’s mumbled obscenities were intended for my delight as much as for Pearl’s.
I stayed clear of him. Mother had been overprotective to the point of mania about sex. Of course, I had my bookish fantasies, my adolescent ardors. But by then, Sidney Carton had been happily traded for Oscar Jarno, for an infatuation I mistook to be other than fictional. I was nervous around men, around all the displaced desire that ran beneath the surface of the Arcade. It wasn’t that I ever thought they wanted me; simply that they wanted. I’d had no experience with men, and chose to deposit all ideas of romantic promise with the unattainable—with Oscar.
Every morning but Sunday, mail was delivered to the Arcade by a mailman named Mercer. A rather elegant Trinidadian, he’d lived in New York for many years, and despite his uniform he looked more like a diplomat than a representative of the postal service. Chaps would have cast him as Othello in a minute. Mercer and Peal were friends, and it was her custom to bellow to Pike across the huge store that the mail had arrived.
At the Arcade, mail was almost as coveted as books.
Letters brought requests for rare titles, offers from estate libraries, queries and contacts from all over the world. Mr. Mitchell would frequently appear right around the time Mercer showed up, and try to charm him into a quick glance through the day’s mail. It was a slightly silly exercise, unworthy of him. Mercer wouldn’t part with the letters until they were in George Pike’s hand, as if he were more courier than postman. And Pike actually ceased his pricing to greet Mercer at his platform and formally receive the clutch of epistles.
Mr. Mitchell would follow, calling Mercer his “man of letters” and hovering about until Pike told him to go away, that any letters for him would be dispatched upstairs once Pike looked them over. It was a pantomime that made Mr. Mitchell appear childish, as if he had been waiting for a letter to drop from Mercer’s hands so that he might snatch it up and read it before his magisterial employer.
Shoplifting was a regular pastime for some, and I became familiar with one of the Arcade’s more notorious thieves one morning after I answered Pearl’s call of “Review books!” a couple of months after I’d started. Tall, about twenty-five, the shoplifter had hair was as vivid as my own. He was waiting for me at the front register, leaning against the counter, his long legs crossed in jeans spattered with colored paint. Mr. Mitchell had christened this particular thief Red-burn, although I didn’t know that at the time.
“I was wondering when you’d accompany me to hell,” the man said flirtatiously.
“I don’t know you, do I?” I asked, taking several hardcover books from him, part of my job as escort.
“We haven’t met before, but it’s apparent what we have in common. They call me Redburn here because of it.”
“Lot’s of people have red hair,” I replied, ahead of him on the steep stairs. Pike’s capitals fairly shouted in my face as I descended: GEORGE PIKE WILL NOT TOLERATE THE THEFT OF MONEY OR BOOKS!
“Pike overdoes that warning, don’t you think?” he said, indicating the sign. “It’s very threatening.”
“Only if you’re thinking of stealing,” I returned.
We reached the bottom of the staircase.
“Some would say that buying review copies is stealing,” Red-burn developed. “New books may well have been shoplifted from a regular bookstore.”
He challenged me with auburn eyebrows raised, conventionally attractive and confident of the fact.
“Are these stolen?” I asked him, stopping in the maze of stacks that wove through the basement. The low ceiling met the tall shelves, creating an oppressive tunnel through to Geist’s lair in the rear.
“Why would you care?” he asked.
It was a question I didn’t exactly know how to answer, so I ignored it. I resolved then to generally ignore Redburn as well.
“My guess is you don’t approve of stealing, is that right?” he persisted, as we reached Geist’s counter, starkly vacant beneath the blinding bulb.
“I don’t approve of stealing, no,” I replied, stacking the books on the counter. Geist stood some feet away, examining a book held close to his face, his back to us.
“Then give me my heart back,” Redburn whispered, leaning toward me, his hands over his chest, feigning pain.
I couldn’t help laughing out loud. Geist turned around abruptly, and I wondered if he’d overheard the man’s request.
“Check the copyright, Rosemary, then read the list prices to me,” he said, coming forward, all business, his glasses firmly in place.
“I wouldn’t dream of cheating you, Geist,” Redburn said slyly. “Not today at least.”
I opened the covers of each book, confirming that they had been recently published, and read out the printed prices to Geist, who reduced them to quarters in his head, calculating what Redburn would receive. He scribbled the total on a yellow square of paper, sliding it across the counter.
“Want to tell me where you got these books?” Geist asked, his finger securing the note.
“Nope,” the shoplifter answered, snatching it up.
“I didn’t think so,” said Geist. “Rosemary, in future you’re not to escort this man anywhere in the Arcade. He is banned from the store.”
Redburn smiled at me mischievously and headed back upstairs to redeem his yellow slip with Pearl.
I had begun to understand that a significant part of the Arcade’s operation was based on deception; few questions were asked about the provenance of books. Whole libraries were bought in bulk sight unseen, and once priced individually by Pike, a few items often earned back what had been spent on the sum. It wasn’t cheating exactly, or stealing; it was the canny leveraging of desire. Manipulating the lust for things that retained or lost value depended in whose hands they were held.
“Mr. Geist,” I asked, before returning upstairs. “Did that man steal the books you just bought?”
“Most likely,” he said. “No concern of yours, of course. Just tell Jack or Bruno to throw him out if you see him in here again.”
Oscar told me later that Mr. Mitchell had coined Redburn’s name for him, and not only because his red hair was vivid enough to be ablaze. Wellingborough Redburn was the protagonist in a novel by Herman Meville, a first edition of which Mr. Mitchell had discovered beneath the thief’s tatty shirt, tucked into the waistband of his trousers.
The valuable copy of Redburn had been set aside for the Arcade’s most prodigious collector, a man who’d never set foot inside the store. Julian Peabody owned the largest private library in the country, and Mr. Mitchell was expecting his librarian, Samuel Metcalf, to pick up the volume from Pike’s stage. He had been awaiting that gentleman, along with Walter Geist, an old friend of Metcalf’s, when both were distracted by Pike, who chose that moment to argue for an increase in the book’s price. While they bickered, Red-burn audaciously pilfered it right off Pike’s desk. The volume was dislodged accidentally when Bruno slammed into the thief as he hurried from the store.
Peabody acquired the book, and added it to his large collection of nineteenth-century American authors, the most significant outside any private institution. Herman Melville was a Peabody favorite and, shortly after I knew of this incident, Melville would become my favorite as well.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_b147bf48-c501-5f47-a2ce-bb7b76c01860)
I returned in the evenings to the Martha Washington, to Lillian and to the closet of my rented room. After two months, the Arcade had become my home, and the city that housed it the larger world Chaps had wished for me and, I realized, that I’d wanted for myself. Tasmania was remote indeed, an ideal of home that merged over time with Mother, with her absence, and with the contradiction of her occasionally overwhelming presence. In the framed photograph, her face at my age returned my own green gaze with dark eyes, projecting a confidence I still hadn’t found.
I dreamed she lived often enough to wake with the kind of longing that makes memory eloquent. While I slept she had lived, and the pain upon waking was as much a fleeting uncertainly of her state as anguish over the clear fact of my own life continuing without her. We are never so aware of those we have lost, and dreamt of, than in that waking moment.
I developed the habit of walking for hours in the early evening after leaving work at six, and invented a zigzagging pattern of one block up, one across, to vary my route, reversing the pattern to return downtown. Something soothing in the process reminded me of picking up a practical skill, like learning letters so as to read, or learning steps so as to dance. It was light for hours then, and hot. The city’s grid ordered my mind. I walked as a way of thinking and, walking, I felt as sturdy and sensible as the shoes I’d change into before setting off.
Following a pattern gave me an assurance I often hadn’t felt during the working day. My lack of knowledge of the Arcade’s vast contents nagged at me, but through my walks I remembered, took note, and played out the day’s events. I was determined not to be lost in the city, and through my walks I mapped more than locations and points of reference. I found a way to manage. I let the city work on me, into me, and I learned that I wanted the freedom it held out.
In the evenings, when the city cleared out, there was room for me in the geometry of emptiness that took over certain neighborhoods. The varied architecture taught me a sense of proportion, a contradictory sense even of scale. As I’d learned in Sydney, there was room in cities. Yes, I was a mote inside New York’s great, swirling energy, but I was there. At twilight, I was even outlined against buildings, my shadow tall and attenuated upon century-old facades. Using zigzagging increments, I measured myself against blocks, buildings, streetlights. Of course, I was overwhelmed by New York, but was at once oddly freed of any requirement to agency. Although my shadow quickly disappeared as night fell, I carried a memory of its shape long against the great buildings: animated and free.
One hot July evening, I ran down an empty street as the peppery smell of city rain rose up from where the rain fell, spotting the pavement. The sharp scent set me sneezing. Seconds later huge heavy drops began to pelt my head and back. I took shelter beneath an awning and watched the storm through an amnion of water. Ten minutes later the rain ceased, as abruptly as it had started. The temperature dropped a few degrees, and I felt the materiality of weather, impervious to the great constructed landscape. Manhattan was at once sealed and, as I watched filthy rainwater disappear into subway grates and down street drains, as permeable as any thing in nature. It absorbed everything, as I was learning.
Summer kept me out quite late into August. I worked at the Arcade every day of the week but one. Evenings I walked. I waited the delicacy of the approaching fall as a seasonal shift I’d never before experienced. Toward September I felt a kind of unfamiliar anticipation. A dirty park on my way to the Arcade, around Twenty-third Street, became my bellwether, its trees gushed out greenly amid the traffic and surrounding buildings. Several people were permanent residents of the park and sat beside their possessions. I just visited.
Beneath the trees, inside their shallow shade, was my only constant reminder that nature was marking time, that trees at least were routine and predictable. Even though, for me, the cycle was reversed and more defined than it ever was at home, the trees in my park were committed to seasons, as I must become as well.
When I returned from walking, Lillian would ask what I’d been looking at, what I had found. Our tentative friendship grew as she used me as her emissary to the larger city. She did not want to go anywhere, except (on certain days) back to Argentina.
“Where my Spanish books, Rosemary? You said you’d find.”
“I’m sorry, Lillian, I’m still looking.”
“Pah, my brother say you can’t find nothing there in that place where you work.”
“I’m sure there’s something there for you, Lillian, I just have to find it. What did you read when you lived in Argentina?”
“I read Borges. Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him,” she said. “He was a blind man who see better than anyone.”
“I’ll look,” I promised. “Write his name down for me.”
“You never heard of him?” she scoffed. “What do they read there in Tasmania?”
“They read lots of things, Lillian. But everyone has gaps.”
She laughed out loud. Lillian had a warm, deep laugh, velvety with intimacy, with experience.
“Then you find Borges for me, but mostly for yourself. For your gaps. He will fill them, I promise!”
That Walter Geist was an albino was a distinction he could neither hide nor help. And he could be difficult. He was consistently unpleasant to both staff and all but a few select customers. He was even unpleasantly obsequious on the few occasions that called for mild pleasantness, mostly in his dealings with collectors whose large libraries Pike was trying to acquire.
But toward me he behaved differently.
I am ashamed now, when I remember how I shrank from him, and from his whiteness. Ashamed, too, of my fascination. Or perhaps just guilty that I longed to stare at him.
At first, Geist would not meet my eyes and spoke to me with such particularity that I became fixed upon his strange speech patterns and upon his lips with their sibilant consonants. He spoke to me very little in the beginning, addressing me only when he was called upon to give directions for the removal of Pike’s priced pile, to instruct me to wait at the rear door to help unload a delivery, or to tell me where to place the “new” books I’d brought down to him in the basement. I suppose a fascination with his appearance was not unusual; he seemed to almost have a dry expectation of it. He was sadly practiced at subjection to close inspection.
Walter Geist’s parents had been refugees from Germany; this much Oscar had told me, but he hadn’t gathered much more of Geist’s personal details, at least that he ever shared. Geist had not, as my imagination initially proposed, been born in the basement of the Arcade, but in Berlin, in the old Kreuzberg section of the city. He’d grown up in Pennsylvania after immigrating with his parents when very young. Walter Geist had never married, and lived a largely solitary life outside of the Arcade.
Geist’s slight lisp was not the result of any actual speech impediment but suggested the palimpsest of languages he had mastered, a hint of them all compressed and vaguely present in his whispered English. It wasn’t an accent like mine, broad and flat and, I feared, ignorant. His diction was subtle, exquisite in its way. According to Oscar, Geist spoke five languages fluently, his father having been a linguist at the university. What Oscar didn’t know of Walter Geist’s personal history, he supplemented with research on albinism. Oscar had his preoccupations and, briefly, Geist had been one, as he would become mine.
Inside the Arcade, Geist affected the use of a thick pair of pince-nez glasses that sat in his shirtfront pocket, attached to a silver chain around his neck. More often, though, they were miraculously affixed to the bridge of his nose, held in place by the folds of skin that his squint made about his eyes and forehead. Geist’s eyes were of an undetermined color, but in some lights, particularly bright sunlight, they appeared violet.
“Actually, Rosemary,” Oscar told me when I mentioned this odd fact to him, “Walter’s eyes are colorless. I looked it up. The violet color is caused by blood vessels in the retina. You can see the blood because his retina is without the color of an iris. I suppose you could say Walter’s eyes are transparent.”
“Transparent,” I repeated, fascinated. Oscar’s golden eyes were beautiful but opaque; the idea that Geist’s eyes were transparent was too whimsical, too curious, not to captivate me.
And yet, the wobbling movement of his eyes confused me as to where exactly to look—how to meet him. His eyes swam. Weak muscles caused this vacillation, and the constant motion gave the impression that his eyes were perpetually averted in a kind of deflection. I wanted to follow his shifting gaze into some other, quieter space—to see what he saw. He appeared particularly sensitive to light and shadow, and to scent.
“Yes, transparent. Interesting, isn’t it?” Oscar smiled, and took out his notebook to write down something that had occurred to him. “I have quite a bit of information about Walter’s condition.”
“Do you?” I asked, curious. “It seems as if Mr. Geist doesn’t want me to look at his eyes. They always move away. I want to look, though. It’s as if I’ll be able to stare right into his brain.”
“Really? How odd,” Oscar said, momentarily considering me.
“I imagine his thoughts might have color, even if his eyes don’t.” I could have added that he was entirely without color, but that would have sounded cruel. I did picture Geist’s thoughts, however, as bright and secret things, moving just behind the transparent plane of his retina like exotic fish.
“I saw him looking at my hair outside yesterday,” I told Oscar. “While we were waiting for that library. When I asked him if something was wrong, he cleared his throat and pretended he hadn’t been looking.”
“Well, Rosemary,” Oscar said matter-of-factly, “perhaps Walter thinks your hair is beautiful.”
Then, seeming to lose interest as quickly as he had found it, he continued to write in his notebook.
“Oscar,” I ventured, my heart hot in my chest. “Do you think so?”
But he didn’t answer or even acknowledge my question, absorbed as he was in his own note taking. I watched him, writing away, and felt ill with longing. His sculpted head bent over his task, his face expressionless.
Occasionally, I would come upon Geist in the stacks of Oscar’s section, holding books close to his face, his white fingers splayed against their covers like spread wings. The volumes he held at the tip of his nose had the compressed heft of textbooks, and their weight made him stoop with effort. Walter Geist was a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade, and as Pike’s designated other, he remained on the fringes of staff camaraderie. He was management, after all: George Pike’s pale avatar, some variation of a shadow. But he also held himself separate, certain that he would always be distinct and removed from that which defined the lives of others. In this respect, he knew better than any of us the condition of his life, and I suppose, like everyone else, I assumed he was reconciled to that condition. It wasn’t compassion on my part that made him so interesting to me. It was curiosity. My imagination was always overactive, and I made him a figure of significance in the fairy tale I was inventing, in the one I was living. Perhaps, as well, I just couldn’t reckon with his humanity.
The staff at the Arcade played a game to pass the time, a game prompted unwittingly when customers asked a question that was exceedingly difficult to answer. The game was called Who Knows? and it did make a long day pass more quickly, but it also served the practical purpose of sharpening the skills required to work in the Arcade. A sense of humor was necessary as well, particularly about the demands placed on one’s memory.
There were no reference guides, save Books in Print (the place most likely not to list a book sought by a customer at the Arcade), so the only reliable source of reference was the staff and their collective memory. Memory was the yardstick of achievement at the Arcade, the measure of one’s value to Pike. Memory housed the bookstore’s contents like a constantly expanding index, an interior, private library organized by some internal, fleshy variation on the Dewey decimal system.
There were customers who knew only the title but not the author, or only the author but not the title, or even only the color and size of the volume but neither its author’s name nor its title. A customer’s hands might move apart as if to say “It’s about this thick.” The game became a way to address how difficult it could be to find anything in the Arcade. For the staff, each obscure question seemed like another bead in a string of non sequiturs. These inquiries demanded an equally nonsensical response, the standard Arcade response. Hence the name of the game: Who Knows?
Jack Conway, his friend Bruno, along with the huge Arthur (Pike seemed to think it amusing to have hired an Art for the Art section), liked to shout out, sometimes with real belligerence, the name of the game. At first I thought they were really serious, and angry, but I caught on eventually.
“Who knows?” they would call out to each other across the heads of inquiring customers, and then, if no echo returned, call with greater rancor, with a full, open throat: “Who the FUCK knows?”
I learned that this was actually a challenge, a call for others to help, and could even draw Oscar from his stacks if he wasn’t already occupied. Oscar’s recall of his section was practically infallible, but if the book didn’t fall into the shapeless category of nonfiction, those with a slightly less remarkable memory needed to be found and consulted. Even Pike would participate, particularly as it often meant the certain sale of a book.
Where is the book I saw here once on the history and design of Russian nesting dolls? Can you tell me where I might begin to look for a monograph on Franz Boaz’s dissertation entitled “Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water”? Do you have the classic gay novel Der Puppenjunge by Sagitta in English? I must have William D’Avenant’s Gondibert—you know, it has fifteen hundred stanzas? Do you have a book of patterns for Redwork? Where are the decorative planispheres based on Mercator’s projection? Listen, I know you have Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns, but where is it?
Customer inquiries were like cartoon thought balloons making visible what was on the mind of the city. They were as random, as subjective, as experience itself, and our only defense against the arbitrariness of the questions was our game.
Who Knows? helped find the most obscure books, and after several months even I became blasé about the astonishing capacity of longtime employees to place their hand on a slim volume, seven shelves down, nine books in—miraculously pulling out just the book a confounded customer had been seeking. Occasionally, I had seen Chaps performing in this way in her tiny, tidy shop in Tasmania, but the scale of this game was entirely different, as was the range and variety of interest. At the Arcade, finding the improbable was an act best accomplished with an impassive air, a bland repudiation of the feat of memory it displayed. The magical act of finding anything, let alone a specifically requested book, within the Arcade’s repository was actually a point of pride. This rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick was the single exhibition the Arcade staff could perform that rivaled Pike’s mysterious pricing.
“I found this for you, Lillian. But it’s in English.”
I handed her a small paperback by Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, uncovered inadvertently while I waited at the paperback tables.
“Ah, I like this one. I read it a long time ago. You and me, Rosemary, we are like this, no? Imaginary beings, here, no?”
“What do you mean?”
“It is like we are made up, like these creatures in here. See?” She opened the paperback at random. “The Lunar Hare—this is the man in the moon, you see? The Mandrake, the Manticore…” She smiled. “We are like these things. No one knows we exist, except a few people. And if we disappear, there is no Borges to make a little story of us, to remember us. Who knows you are here? No mother, no father. And look at you, already so different. You do not look like the girl that came here weeks ago. A girl from Tasmania.” She screwed up her eyes, assessing me. “You look like a lion. Where is that other girl now, eh? Now she is imaginary being!”
I had changed. Tall, and long-boned, I’d become physically strong working at the Arcade, developing muscles in my arms and back for the first time in my largely sedentary life. Helping out in Remarkable Hats hadn’t required much physical effort. But the carting of boxes of books, mostly overpacked, strengthened me, as did my walking and the strictures of a diet confined to what could be bought cheaply, and eaten uncooked in my room at the Martha Washington.
“But we are real to each other, Lillian,” I told her. “We aren’t imaginary.”
“You not know anything about me,” Lillian said frankly, thumbing through the paperback.
“Nothing,” she added, with a finality that hurt me. “I might not even exist.”
“Well, it takes a while to know someone, Lillian, but I hope we will be friends.”
