What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (17 page)

“No reading,” she says. “Canceled.”

“Canceled why?” the old man says. “Canceled how?”

She looks at him, quizzical. “No one came.”

“Someone came,” he says. But he’s not referring to himself. “The author came. Look right there. Can you see? He holds the door open, letting in the cold.”

“Not worth it,” the lady says. “No offense, but the time for the reading has come and gone.”

“Yes, offense,” the old man says. And then he’s off rhapsodizing, singing Author’s praises. Author does not take it personally. That is, he does not hear the kindnesses as in reference to him. What he hears from this ancient man is a passion for books themselves, from someone bitten by the written word. Author hears what he hears as a fellow reader, and Author remembers.

It was “The Story of My Dovecot.” It was Babel, read to him by his mother. She’d sat by the side of his childhood bed and read that story to Author in Russian. This was back in the days when the language whispered at his bedside still held meaning in Author’s ears. And look at him now, a lifetime later and he can still see the whole story as if he himself had lived it. For Author, it has remained as vivid as it was upon its first telling, while the Russian was—all of it—gone.

When his mother had finished reading, Author had asked
her if the story was for him. He didn’t mean it as metaphor, or exaggeration; he was asking sincerely—a little boy’s question—had Mr. Babel composed the story for Author to hear?

His mother, having read him a tale too sad, too dark for a boy so young, had tousled his hair and kissed his head and said, “Of course. Written for you alone, my son.” Author, as a child, was amazed and overjoyed and filled with wonder. Somewhere a writer had put something out into the world, and put it out there for Author alone to find. It was an intimacy as real as a friendship.

Author looks over at his reader talking to the bangle-armed woman, cajoling. Here was Author’s crackpot. Author’s nutcase. And also Author’s audience—this ancient, ancient man with his shoe-polish hair and cataracts thick as nails through which he reads. Reads and somehow drives.

The bookstore lady relents, and Author doesn’t fight it. He is now truly touched by this man’s dedication, here to see him a second night. Author reads his heart out for the old man. And when Author is done, a chastened bookstore lady approaches with a novel that Author humbly signs. It is not for the shop. It’s an inscription requested, a book personalized and then returned to its owner. She clasps it to her chest, shielding it behind those bangled arms.

· · ·

Author is truly thankful for his champion, his upholder. This is what he tells himself when he finds his one loyal reader wearing a yarmulke and sitting front row at the JCC in St. Paul.

In a yarmulke himself, Author is so grateful for this man who sustains him, who preserves him, who does not turn his back in hard times against him, that the mantra turns into a little prayer. Author recites this from his dais—it comes out of
his mouth, a poem. The old man looks thrilled, teeth and hair shining, as he listens to a private devotion that’s nearly drowned out by the din of evening-league basketball blowing through a retractable wall. Afterward, he produces a crumpled handwritten schedule with the author’s next dates. “Yes, a lovely night, this,” the old man says, carefree, perusing.

But every gift and every blessing have a place where they curdle and turn. The man comes to see him at an empty Brookline Booksmith, an empty Three Lives, and an empty Politics and Prose. In Kansas City, when a pair of drunks stumbles in mid-reading to suck up the free wine, Author slams his book shut, only to hear the cry from his audience of one, “Author, read on!”

“Read on,” yes, but for how long? Author is a man surviving on memory and the fumes of prestige. He addresses this to his reader—forever at his heels—in a quaint pueblo-inspired bookshop in Alamosa. “This book,” Author says, “it’s not a novel, it’s a tombstone. Why not just hammer it in the ground above my head? My name’s already on the front.”

“A mistake to make such a request,” the reader says. “Never die too soon.”

“Too soon? Look at me. I’m the duck hanging too long on its hook in the window—past eating. The only difference?”

“Yes,” the reader says. “What is the difference between you and the duck on the hook?”

“The duck,” Author says, “at least knows when it’s time to be dead.”

The old man stares at Author, considering.

“My father,” he says, “hung himself at ninety-seven years old. He couldn’t take it any longer. That’s what he said in his note. He didn’t want to face living anymore.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I wish he’d spoken to me,” the old man says. “I’d have
told him. Ninety-seven? No need for such drastic action, Father. Patience. Just give it a little time.”

· · ·

Forgive the author his relentless commitment. Forgive him his belief that even if the next city promises nothing more than this one old man, still it’s his obligation to drive on. A writer never knows if perseverance is his terrible weakness or his greatest strength. And with all those headlights floating divided in his rearview mirror, Author never can tell which belong to his reader, which pair is his beacon, a North Star, split, cast back, guiding him on.

The two arrive at a Denver bookstore, which is now half marijuana dispensary. A scheme, the owner says while dusting a beloved volume, to use one drug to pay for another. After an empty-but-for-his-lone-reader reading, it’s this man, flush with cash and good living, who tells Author to take any book he wants for his troubles. A gift of the store.

“Babel,” Author says, surprising himself. “The early stories.” He’d not let himself read them since he was a boy.

From Denver, Author crosses the Rockies toward the Pacific, with his reader (ever mindful of the speed limit) in hot pursuit. At Salt Lake City, Author hangs a northerly right and drives up to Vancouver through three days of rain. After reading for his reader in that lush city, Author turns his car toward the next bookstore, making his way back down the West Coast. The sun is with him this time, and Author drives with an arm stuck out the window, cooking his left side to a burn. At a gas station just north of Seattle, Author fills his tank with the last of the money he has. He is so strapped for cash that, a few miles farther on, he stops at a church-run stand by the side of the road. There, he sells the Babel he’s only just been given for a dollar
and watches the lady drop it into a box after marking it for two. “The stories,” he tells her, “are just the way I remember.”

Pulling into Seattle, a city where Author was once truly renowned, he knows, literally and figuratively, how low he’s been laid. That his old friend, the buyer for Elliott Bay Books, has arranged to host Author for a reading is an act of charity so undisguised, it leaves him humbled enough to receive another. Eyes down, Author enters the Come Unto Me Mission across the street from the bookshop and eats a bowl of soup, his first meal of the day.

Inside the bookshop, Author gives his name to the pierced-nosed clerk behind the counter. She tells him, without any emotion, that his reading is downstairs. Author is crestfallen as he approaches the basement steps. Then he hears the noise, and his heart is set aflutter at the sound of a reception in full swing. The energy, he can feel it in his feet through the floorboards. Author stops himself from taking the stairs two at a time.

There is indeed a crowd assembled when he reaches the basement. They are coffee drinkers filling a bookstore café. Author asks the barista, and she points. The reading is in a tiny room beyond.

How the noise had confused Author, how it had filled him with glee.

When the book buyer shows up, he finds Author waiting in the little room, and the years wash away. All that time nothing but a blink when there’s warmth between two people. They hug, and the buyer says, “You look good, just the same.”

Before the emptiness of the room sours the moment, the buyer tackles it head-on. “I’m really sorry,” he says. “It’s a great book. This, the no-show, it’s not you, it’s us. It’s been slow this season. Numbers are down.”

“It’s all right,” Author says. “The whole country is, for me, a desert—empty rooms from sea to shining sea.” It feels so good
to tell it to this man who knew how it once was, who’d orchestrated Author’s glorious sellout night a dozen years before, and yet who—with grace—now has acknowledged what
is
. Not like his reader. Not like his shadow, drowning him in faith. Author says, “You know what? Let’s not even wait. How about, for old time’s sake, let’s just get a drink—you and me?”

The buyer considers and then throws an arm over Author’s shoulder. “Sure, I’d love that,” he says. He drops his arm and slides through the café toward the stairs with the author, wistful, behind.

As they climb, Author hears it. He is surprised he does, with the music and the chatter, but there it is, from deep in the mix of the café. “Author! Writer! It’s time to start” is what he hears. “Writer, hello, where do you go?”

The book buyer half hears it himself—enough to pause, banister in hand. Author won’t have it. He keeps climbing, driving the buyer on. And Author’s old man—too slow to catch up and all those stairs before him—screams from below with all he’s got. “Hey, writer!” he calls, and then, “Hey, bookstore man! A customer down here! The writer must read!”

This, the book buyer doesn’t miss. “Would you listen to that?” he says. “Your public calling.” Before he says more, the author, hangdog, turns and heads downstairs.

· · ·

The reading is starting, but no one from the café comes in. Conversations continue. The music blares. It takes no small effort on the part of the buyer to convince the barista to turn the sound system down. There is—Author hears it—a low round of boos.

The old man sits in the front row in the tiny three-row back room. Small as it is, there’s still a plywood stage, a foot
high and not much deeper, with a little lectern perched at an angle, from which the author will read.

The emotion on Author’s face is clear. And the buyer waits for him to compose himself, though it’s quickly becoming obvious that Author’s despair is anything but subsiding. It seems to be frothing into a rage aimed, inexplicably, at the frail little man.

“Buddy,” the buyer says, trying to steer Author to the stage, “how about you just give the guy five minutes and then we’ll grab us that drink?” The buyer, without even noticing, is kneading Author’s shoulders and patting his back, as if coaxing him into the ring.

“Yes, five minutes,” the old man says. “Now up! Up on that stage. Time to start.”

This sets the author off.

“Stalker!” Author screams.

“Patron!”

“Do you understand how crazy it is?” Author says.

“Do you understand how crazy it is—
you
?”

Author stands silent, visibly shaking. The old man turns to the buyer, assuming he’s taken the author’s side.

“Tell me, why is the artist a romantic for surviving on a glimmer of hope? Why not the same for the reader? Why is my commitment a weaker thing? I came,” the old man says, “he reads!”

The author, as if the two men are alone in the world, screams back. “I won’t. Devil! Devilish, devilish old man.”

The old man is laughing. To the buyer, he says, “He’ll read, you’ll see.” And to Author, adamant, demanding: “Tell this bookman so he understands. Tell him what’s really at stake in your heart and mine.”

Author does not want to cry. He can feel his eyes wet, and goes as far as tipping his head back, praying a tear won’t fall.

“What? What?” the old man says, a hand cupped to his ear.

Author says, “It will not, aloud, sound so good.”

“Tell him!” the old man yells, pointing to the buyer. “Tell him why a man like you does what he does.”

“I write,” Author says, his face twisted into a wince, “to touch people in the way that I, as a reader, have been touched.” And here his expression unwinds. “And if I were still any good at all, it wouldn’t be just you two here listening. A failure, I admit it. Now you,” he says to the old man, “admit it, too.”

“Self-pity. The lament of the aging beauty queen. No,” the reader says, “I won’t admit failure for a book written for the ages.”

The two men stand there facing each other, Author now openly weeping. They are caught in a moment so large and so raw that they do not notice that the cell-phone ringers have gone silent and the coffee machine has lost its terrible hiss, that the chatter is missing from the next room as the whole of that coffee shop, drawn by the screaming, now crowds around the doorway, watching their fight.

It’s the woman from behind the counter, pierced and tatted and hair streaked blue. “Come on, read,” she says, her call immediately backed up by another. “Get up there,” someone yells. And another screams, “Hey, one old guy, give the other old guy his due.” A sizable audience is forming. Gunged up with all his blubbering and sniffling, Author takes his book and a stiff-kneed step up to the stage. He will read tonight to a mob.

“Oh, no!” the old man yells. “Not this way.” He gets behind the door and, with feet dug in, he pushes hard against it, attempting to close it on the assembled hipsters, who do not immediately retreat. “Out!” he yells. “Out, out, stylish young people!”