Thank you!
Dear Poem-a-Day Subscribers,
Thank you so much for reading my poems, and for your kind support. I’m in the midst of a move at the moment, and so will be taking a week or so off from posting. In the meantime, enjoy the story below (I figure a story = roughly seven poems?). Sorry for the weird formatting.
Thanks again and all best wishes,
Austin
*
Book World
It was the Monday after Thanksgiving when Annie learned that all remaining Book World stores, including the store she managed in Baraboo, would be closing after the new year. When she had finished reading the company email for the second time, she deleted it. The crinkly sound of the trash icon was cathartic. But she dragged the email out of the trash as if it were a piece of evidence she ought to keep, then picked up the phone to call George.
She kept getting his voicemail, which was odd, because the Book World he managed kept the same hours hers did. Nor did he respond to her first long ranting email or her shorter, softer follow-up. Now it was Wednesday, she still hadn’t heard from him, and she had begun to worry.
She would have thought that George would be dying to talk to her, now that all his theories regarding the fate of brick and mortar stores in the age of Amazon seemed to have been proven true. But at the same time she could just see George doing something melodramatic. Blowing his brains out amidst the bestsellers. That would be just like him. But wouldn’t she have heard? But, then again, who would have told her?
Her store was busier than usual today, as if people had heard about the imminent closing and thought if they spent enough money they might save Book World, but she knew the news hadn’t been made public yet. It was more likely that people had been doing their Christmas shopping at the mall and while walking back to their cars had noticed the companionable glow of the bookstore windows. Usually there was only one customer in her store at a time, if there were any customers in her store at all, and, after letting them browse on their own for a while, she would approach them in a delicate, casual way, as if she were working in a department store and they were shopping for lingerie (she believed literature to be even more intimate). Her favorite part of her job was helping a reader find a book they hadn’t known they were looking for. Over the years, she had established a rapport with a dozen or so customers who trusted her absolutely. She saw herself as a kind of therapist, working through the medium of literature.
But because there were several customers this morning, none of whom she had ever seen before, she remained behind the counter, feeling powerless, like a grocery clerk. Watching them browse books they didn’t know were doomed to be shipped off soon to dank warehouses, she thought she should be angry at the Book World Corporation, or at the company they had hired to assist with the liquidation, the aptly-named Yellen Partners. Instead, she was aware of a confused medley of sadness and restlessness, not anxiety, exactly, but a trembling feeling, like the feeling she had on mornings she put on a second pot of coffee.
Finally, there was only one customer left in her store. Annie watched her obsessively turn the carousel and approach the counter with the calendar she had chosen. Normally she would have made small-talk with this solitary customer, but she said nothing as she rang up her Grant Wood calendar. Perhaps the woman was made uncomfortable by her silence, because she said, “Year’s not even over yet and already I’m having to keep track of what all I have to do in the next.” It was a beautiful sentence, uttered in that effortlessly elegant way that one heard less and less often in Baraboo. From the woman’s hands and the care she took with the bills the hands handed her, Annie assumed she had driven into town from a farm. She regretted not being more present during their exchange and wished the woman a happy new year to make up for it, only to regret it, because the tone rang mockingly in the quiet of the store. Only when the woman had left did Annie realize how impatient she had been for the woman to leave so she could close up and drive five hours north to Ashland to check on George.
There were two signs to choose from to close her Book World. One she’d made herself for slow days when she needed some fresh air. It said: Be Book Soon! The other was the company sign that said, brusquely, Closed, and featured the store hours. After deliberating between the two signs, she hung the latter. After all, she wasn’t entirely sure she would be book soon. She flipped the switches and, in an instant, the garish overhead lights were replaced by the glow of the gray November sky, in which the books looked older, as if she ran a used bookstore of her own, a dream of hers once, since given up on. She locked up and walked to her car, feeling exposed and guilty. She half expected someone to come out of the Qdoba where she often ate a taco salad alone and accuse her of deserting her job.
She drove through Baraboo slowly, not quite committed. But upon turning onto the highway the car seemed to sense where it was headed, like a horse sensing the barn, and she managed to reach the speed limit. In time, she was aware of the pull of the closed store weakening until she was finally free of it. If anyone complained that Book World was closed when it ought to be open, the worst that could happen was that she would be fired instead of being laid off.
North of Black River Falls it started to snow. She didn’t like driving period, much less in bad weather. Though she had grown up in Illinois, and had driven in snow all her life, it still made her nervous. It was worse driving now than it would be later, after the plows had been out. The further north she got, the worse the roads were. She drove with both hands gripping the wheel, feeling the tires flinch. The weather made her begin to doubt her decision. But she had come too far already. To turn around now was unthinkable.
As the landscape changed, the oaks turning to pines that lined the road, giving her the sensation that she was sitting still while the woods scrolled past, she thought of George.
Though they had known one another for seven years, they had never met face to face. They had only ever talked on the cordless store phones they pinched between ear and neck while stocking books or straightening shelves. It was as if they were working together in the same Book World, only it was so massive that they had to call one another from separate wings. When she had made this joke once, early in their friendship, he had suggested that it was downright Borgesian, wasn’t it?
“What?”
“Borgesian!”
“Oh, I thought you said Boar Hessian,” she said, spelling the words out so he’d get it.
“Now that would be quite a boar,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to cross that boar’s warpath.”
“His boarpath, you mean?”
“Precisely.”
She had never thought of herself as witty, but talking to George made her feel that she was. But George himself never seemed to laugh at their puns. He would plow ahead, as if humor was not the point of their conversations, changing the topic to talk about the publishing industry and the decline of the literary world.
“It’s the end of the Book World as we know it,” he liked to say, long before the email arrived informing them that Book World was going out of business.
He had called her within her first few months of managing her Book World. He said, “This is George Williams from the Book World up in Ashland. I hear you’ve just started and thought I’d give a call to see how you’re managing.”
She had thought at first that he was making a pun on the words manager and managing, but he seemed absolutely serious. Mostly to humor him, she had asked him a few questions, which he answered as if they were a matter of life or death. Then she apologized for interrupting him. A customer had walked in. “Go, go,” he said, as if the customer was in mortal danger. But before they hung up, he told her she should feel free to call him anytime and gave her the number for his store. Then he said something she had never forgotten.
“Annie,” he said, “I want you to remember one thing. Never demean yourself because you manage a Book World. You sell books. There’s no more beautiful profession on earth.”
The next day, in the loneliest stretch of the afternoon, she came up with some excuse to call him. At first their conversations revolved around her management of her store. He worked to convince her that her Book World was more hers than it was the company’s. His relationship with the Book World Corporation was fraught, despite the fact that Book World was a small, family-owned business. But his disgust for the Book World Corporation paled in comparison to his hatred of the juggernauts of literature, Barnes and Noble, Borders, The New Yorker, the big houses in New York, the marketing departments. These were saved from his ire by the rise of Amazon, which had become representative to him of all that was wrong with the world of literature, and with the world in general.
One day he emailed her a poem that she thought, at first, was his, but was actually from Ginsberg’s “Howl,” only George had replaced the word Moloch with Amazon:
Amazon! Amazon! Nightmare of Amazon! Amazon the
loveless! Mental Amazon! Amazon the heavy judger
of men!
Amazon the incomprehensible prison! Amazon the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Amazon whose buildings are judgment!
Amazon the vast stone of war! Amazon the stunned
governments!
Amazon whose mind is pure machinery! Amazon whose
blood is running money! Amazon whose fingers are
ten armies! Amazon whose breast is a cannibal
dynamo! Amazon whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Amazon whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Amazon whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets
like endless Jehovahs! Amazon whose factories dream
and croak in the fog! Amazon whose smoke-stacks
and antennae crown the cities!
Amazon whose love is endless oil and stone! Amazon
whose soul is electricity and banks! Amazon whose
poverty is the specter of genius! Amazon whose fate
is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Amazon whose name
is the Mind!
Amazon in whom I sit lonely! Amazon in whom I
dream angels! Crazy in Amazon! Cocksucker in
Amazon! Lacklove and manless in Amazon!
And so on. She printed it out and hung it in such a way that only she could see it. But she still used Amazon. If George had known, she was certain he never would have spoken to her again.
But it wasn’t all negativity with him. He encouraged her to make her own decisions as to which books she displayed in the windows and on the main tables customers instinctually browsed upon walking in. She took his advice and began writing handwritten reviews that she stuck into the books, which seemed to bear this sign of her esteem proudly, like battle banners. Indeed, she began to see herself as engaged in a war, a war that George had recruited her to fight in. The enemy was faceless and vague, like a line of men silhouetted on a far ridge, and she wasn’t certain what the spoils of victory would be, or if victory were even possible, but her enlistment in this war was what had given her life meaning the past seven years.
At first they avoided talking about which books they loved and which books they hated, perhaps afraid that their tastes wouldn’t align, but one day George offhandedly mentioned one of her favorite writers, William Maxwell, as if they were old friends. She interrupted him, something she didn’t often do, to tell him how much Time Will Darken It had meant to her when she was in college in central Illinois. It had made what otherwise would have been an oppressive landscape seem magical and chthonic. She had never said the word “chthonic” out loud, and she mispronounced it, using a “ch” sound rather than a “k” sound.
“It’s ka-thonic,” he said, correcting her, but she could tell that he was pleased that she knew the novel, and the word.
This mention of Maxwell seemed to open a door. They learned, with relief, that they loved the same kind of literature, if not necessarily the same writers and novels. And George was more interested in poetry than she was, admitting to her that when he was a young man he had wanted to be a poet, and had even spent a confusing period of time in New York, hanging around the Cedar Tavern, too shy to pull up a chair at the important tables where the painters sat with colorful hands. When she asked him what he meant by “colorful hands,” thinking it might be some sort of subtle dig at homosexual gestures (she assumed he was much older than she, and that he held such prejudices), he’d said, “They were covered in paint, Annie!”
Despite some cursory differences, they both loved a certain thing that certain books did. This thing wasn’t marketable, it didn’t sell, it was quiet and subtle and required more from the reader than most readers were willing to give. But this quality that they constantly spoke of but could never quite define was why they loved literature. The most exciting moments of their friendship were when one had encountered this quality in a novel the other had yet to read. Then they would set the phone down and go off to find the book on their own shelves, like a piece of jewelry that had been in their house all their lives but the value of which they had been ignorant of. Or, if the book wasn’t there, they would exercise the power to order and stock it. Then they would go silent for a few days, reading the book behind the counter, until they couldn’t bear it anymore and would pick up the phone.
“Good, isn’t it?” the other would say, laughing. At first, it was more often George who would suggest she read a book she hadn’t heard of before, much less read, but over the years the balance of power had more or less evened out.
Still, either because of his seniority or his authority or the unflappability of his opinions, she would always defer to George. She knew that, if it weren’t for him, she might never have realized that she held the perfect job, perhaps the only job that could have given her any joy. As a younger woman she had tried to be a teacher, junior high, English, but had suffered such crippling anxiety attacks that she’d had to quit halfway through her first year. The breaking point was the day she’d tried to break up a fight between two boys. In their rage they hardly noticed her, and a fist caught her in the face. She crumpled to the floor like an unpinned boutonniere. That was the metaphor she used when, one afternoon, reflecting on her change of career, she told the story to George.
“Unpinned boutonniere. That’s good. Have you ever tried to write yourself?” he asked.
At first she didn’t understand his question. She thought he meant “right herself,” as if she were a listing ship.
“Oh, have I ever tried to write?” she said.
“That’s what I asked.”
“No.”
“You should.”
“No,” she said, surprised at her adamancy. “Literature needs people who are only readers.”
But in a way, she had been writing. Not on the page, but in her head. Over the years she had known George, she had built up an idea of what he looked like, and this idea of him had ossified until it had assumed the solidity of reality, the way, she imagined, it did for a novelist, until their characters were more real to them than the real people in their lives. She loved the anecdote of Flaubert weeping while writing the death scene of Madame Bovary. George had told her this story as if he had been in the room where it happened. Through her relationship with George, she felt that she had been given a glimpse of what it felt like to be a writer.
She knew, without knowing it, that he was bearded, erudite, farsighted. He moved slowly, puttering around his store, putting on kettle after kettle of hot water for his tea. He’d gotten into tea while living in England, another confused period of his life that he had told her about in a rushed way, as if he was ashamed of it. He was “across the pond,” as he put it, because of something to do with Chaucer, and certain theories he had about the poet’s bones.
“They buried him outside a small chapel, what was it? Ah, yes, the chapel of St. Benedict. They put him there like he was nobody, like he was a pauper. They didn’t find his grave until 1866, and they wouldn’t have known it was his grave if it weren’t for an inscription. One moment, let me find it…here, listen to this, Annie:
‘Qui fuit Anglorum ates ter maximus olim
Galfridus Chaucer conditur hoc tumulo:
Annum si quaeras Domini, si tempora vitse,
Ecco notae subsunt quse tibi cuncta notant.
Octobris 1400.
Ærumnarum requies mors.
N. Brigham hos fecit Musarum nominee sumptus.’”
To her annoyance, he let the Latin hang in the air between them until she said, “And that means…?”
“Ah, yes, allow me to translate. It means, roughly:
‘Of old the bard who struck the noblest strains
Great Geoffrey Chaucer, now this tomb retains.
If for the period of his life you call,
The signs are under that will note you all.
In the year of our Lord 1400, on the 25th day of October.
Death is the repose of cares.
N. Brigham charged himself with these lines in the name of the Muses.’
That was written in 1556,” he went on. “And then, with great fanfare, his bones were transferred to Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where today schoolboys and schoolgirls pretend to grow solemn over the bones of the man who wrote The Canterbury Tales. But I have strong evidence that this Brigham stole Chaucer’s bones and replaced them with bones he found in back of a morgue. Chaucer’s bones could be anywhere by now. Hell, they could be in Baraboo. Do you believe me, Annie?”
“That his bones are in Baraboo?”
“That his bones aren’t in Westminster?”
“Yes, George, of course I believe you.”
In any case, his time in England was why he wouldn’t touch coffee.
“You shouldn’t, it’s often hot,” she’d said, aware that she was putting a British spin on her words.
“Tea’s just as hot and I touch it constantly,” he’d said. “I’m touching it as we speak.”
So she imagined him sipping his tea, which he made with characteristic fastidiousness, practically counting out the little cured and curled leaves. He wore those reading glasses that break in half at the bridge, and preferred to look over them rather than through them. He could never get the Internet to work, as if the Internet were a particularly recalcitrant employee. He had been tragically handsome once, striking what he believed to be a poetic pose against the brick walls of New York, of Oxford, smoking cigarettes, a paperback rolled up in his back pocket, widening where it had ridden up out of the pocket as he walked. She imagined his buttocks, the beauty and shapeliness of which he was wholly ignorant. She wished she had known him then, when they were the same age. She would have told him he didn’t know as much as he thought he did, then pushed him up against one of those brick walls and kissed him so hard their lips got mashed between their teeth. Later, in bed, sitting up against the headboard reading, she would pretend to like his new poem, like those schoolboys and schoolgirls pretending to be solemn over the bones of Geoffrey Chaucer, which were not, in fact, the bones of Geoffrey Chaucer, and he would pretend not to notice that she was pretending.
They had planned to finally meet a few years ago, at a booksellers’ convention in St. Paul, his home town. When she had asked if he was planning on staying overnight, he’d said no, as if the idea was the height of absurdity. He was busy with a thousand things at his Book World, a complete reorganization of the shelves that he was convinced would drive down sales of Harlequin romances and dog training books, while raising sales of serious literature, especially his favorite genre, literary biography.
“You won’t even stay for the party?” she asked.
“What party?”
“There’s a party the night of the convention.”
“I don’t party, Annie.”
“Well, it’s not really a party, George. It’s more like a reception.”
“Fine, I don’t reception.”
They planned to meet the morning of the convention, in the lobby. She would have coffee, he tea. Then they would go to panels together, carrying those cream-colored book bags they hand out at such things. He would hate it all, leaning over, his lanyard swinging around his neck, to whisper, “We’re all doomed,” and she would smell him then, the ointment he used to soften his beard, the cologne he wore in memory of his father, who’d sprayed it on his neck every morning before going to work for an advertising agency in St. Paul.
“He knew Fitzgerald!” he’d told her. “They were boys together! American boys!”
Back then she’d had employees, and had left the store in the care of a young man who, she would find out later, had been stealing books, hundreds of books (an offense that, to her frustration, George seemed too easily to forgive, as if the employee had been some sort of Robin Hood, stealing from the Book World Corporation in order to distribute literature for free to the masses, when, in fact, he was selling the books on Amazon). But checking into the hotel the morning of the convention, she was handed a message from the concierge. George had become ill and couldn’t make it. It was only then that she’d realized she had no interest in the convention, that she’d only wanted to meet him, and maybe, if she could have found the courage, invite him up to her room.
She went to a few panels in the morning, realized she wasn’t listening to anything anyone was saying, and spent the afternoon walking along the river, crossing it whenever she came to a bridge. She spent a long time looking down at the water from the Washington Avenue Bridge. George had told her of how Berryman had jumped from it one day, but not before waving, as if bidding goodbye to the world. Looking down, she tried to imagine wanting so desperately to die. Or, perhaps, wanting so desperately not to live.
She tried to dress up and go to the party, or the reception, whatever it was, but she felt awkward and foolish, as if she’d been jilted. She tried to lean against the wall, but it turned out not to be a wall, just a big black curtain. They’d made a massive ballroom smaller for the booksellers’ convention. She kept backing up until she had disappeared into its folds, watching the reception through the narrowest possible opening, before reluctantly emerging.
She was about to go up to her room when a man came over and introduced himself. It was as if he’d recognized that she was about to leave. He was bald and had extraordinarily small glasses. He seemed to have to keep his head in a certain position so as to see her through them. He asked her if she needed a drink, then went off to get her one. She could have left then, as he waited in line. There was something furtive about him that she didn’t like. He kept leaning to the left and the right to see how many people were ahead of him. But she seemed fixed in place, as if she was having her photograph taken before that huge black curtain. They ended up drinking too much, tried and failed to dance, then went up to her room and slept together. In the morning she heard him talking to someone she assumed was his wife on his cell phone in the bathroom, the faucet running. She stuffed her things in her suitcase and was gone before he came out.
When she got back to her Book World, there was a message from George. His cough seemed put-on, but she forgave him and called him back right away. He wanted to know all about the convention. She told him about the panels she’d gone to, and he insisted that she repeat everything the panelists had said.
“Fools,” he declared summarily. “But tell me, how was the party?”
“The reception,” she said.
“The reception.”
She hadn’t planned to, but she told him about the man with the tiny glasses, implying, without going into detail, that they’d slept together. And for the first time she heard George laugh, a big, hearty laugh, the kind of laugh kings used to laugh, coughing up flecks of meat.
She knew what she was doing, telling him about the bald bookseller with the tiny spectacles and the wife. She was trying to make him jealous, but his laughter ended up hurting her more than her story seemed to have hurt him. Their relationship had always been strictly platonic. How could it not have been, considering the fact that they’d never met? And yet it was a relationship that meant a great deal to her, and she needed to believe that it meant a great deal to him, as well. Based on how often they spoke, nearly every day, sometimes several times a day, she assumed he felt the same way, but she couldn’t be sure.
She stopped at a Culver’s outside Eau Claire for lunch, eating a Butterburger with a side of cheese curds and a lemonade. While she ate, she went online on her phone, typing his name and touching the “News” tab, but there was no article on the suicide of a local bookseller, no accident report. All that came up was the usual detritus of any web search, and a story that had been written about him by the local paper a few years before. He’d sent it to her when it came out, with some self-disparaging remark. Now, sitting in the cold car, she read it again through her breath, as if it might contain some clue to her affection for him. For the first time, it struck her as odd that the profile didn’t include a picture of him.
It was getting dark by the time she reached Ashland. She could imagine the crowds of tourists on a summer day, the ice cream dribbling down the knuckles of kids astride bikes, the couples walking along the water, the lake the closest they would come to seeing the ocean. But the town was deserted now. The buildings had a hunkered quality, like dogs anticipating blows. She thought of how cold it would be in a month, the lake wind careening down the alleys, but she liked winter. Winter had always been the best season for bookselling, not just because of the holidays, but because of the sanctuary the store provided, the light and warmth and companionship of shelved books.
She knew the address of his Book World by heart, 301 Main Street, but she wasn’t quite ready to pass the store yet. She was afraid that she would find it closed, and afraid of what the darkened windows might imply. She avoided Main Street altogether and drove out to the Marina. She parked and walked out upon the pier. George had mentioned that he kept a boat in the harbor there, the Anna Karenina. She looked for it, but most of the boats had been dragged inland for winter. There were only a dozen or so boats still docked there, and these seemed neglected. She feared for them, imagining their hulls being crushed in a vice of ice.
There were a few boats on the other side of the pier. She almost didn’t bother looking, but she crossed over, looked. And there it was, a pretty blue boat with yellow trim and lettering: the Anna Karenina. Then she looked closer. No, it said Annie, not Anna. It was clear that the a had been painted over and replaced with ie. Seeing this testament to her, she finally believed that she meant at least as much to him as he did to her. She almost felt that she could go home now, as if finding his boat in the harbor, secretly named after her, was the reason she had driven north. But she couldn’t go home without making sure he was all right.
Realizing that his Book World would be closing soon, she took a picture of the Annie Karenina, then another of just the name, then another of just her name, then walked back to her car, her arms crossed, her hair blowing inland.
Pulling up across from the store, the sight of the lit windows comforted her. Someone was inside, and if it wasn’t George, who could it be? She couldn’t imagine anyone else managing his Book World, which looked just like her Book World, but instead of being in a strip mall, crammed between a Qdoba and a Verizon store, it was tucked into a block of historic brick buildings like a new book shelved amidst older volumes. And unlike her Book World, which was a single-story structure, there were several stories above his store. She imagined living with George above his Book World, which would be their Book World, and which wouldn’t be called Book World anymore. It would be called George & Annie’s Books, specializing in rare volumes picked up at estate and library sales across the country. She could see the sign, the lettering the same as the lettering on his boat.
It was nearly 6. She considered waiting in her car for him to emerge from the store, but she decided to go in. Crossing the barren, frost-heaved street, she knew she looked somewhat wild after her time at the lake. She tried to smooth her hair back but it wouldn’t be tamed. She opened the door and went inside. There was no one at the desk to greet her. Classical music was playing, the Brandenburg Concertos. She smiled at the books displayed on the first few tables, the handwritten notes poking up out of them. She read his description of Time Will Darken It:A book that makes the seemingly ordinary world of central Illinois feel magical and chthonic.
She walked around the store as if she were a regular customer. The floor was covered haphazardly with rugs, and there were alcoves where chairs and sofas stood, old, musty-looking pieces, the kind that are a struggle to get out of. On one sofa, a decrepit-looking man had fallen asleep. She thought at first that it might be George, but she assumed the man was homeless, and was just trying to stay warm for as long as possible. His unkempt beard was yellowed around his mouth with what she assumed were tobacco stains, his nails long and unclean-looking. She tried to tiptoe past him without waking him, but when she stepped on a loose floorboard he came to.
“Help you find anything?”
It was George.
“Just looking,” she said, wondering if he would recognize her voice. Her heart was beating so wildly she thought he must be able to hear it.
“I close in ten minutes,” he said, glancing at his wrist as if there was a watch around it. Then he closed his eyes.
It wasn’t too late. She could still say, “George. It’s me, Annie.” He would laugh that rare laugh of his. She would pull him up out of the sofa with both hands, then hug him. She would berate him for not being in touch, then ask him to dinner. It was still possible, until it wasn’t. She had kept walking.
Browsing, she felt like an idiot. He was waiting for her to leave so he could close up the way she had waited for the farmwife to pick out her calendar so she could drive north. She circled back to the front, picked up Time Will Darken It, and went up to the counter. Eventually he came walking over, breathing audibly, humming along with Bach.
“Find something, did you? Ah, Time Will Darken It. Isn’t that the truth? $25.95.”
She gave him his card, preparing herself for the moment he read her name, glanced up, cried out, “Annie!”
“Receipt?” he asked, handing her her card back.
“No, no thank you.”
Their eyes met as he handed her the novel. They were not the eyes she had imagined. There was no kindness in them, no merriment. She knew what kind of man he was now, the kind of man who enjoyed holding forth to a woman on the phone, but who, in the world, was unpleasant to be around. She knew now that she shouldn’t have feared for him. For all his talk, he wasn’t the kind of man who would blow his brains out amongst the bestsellers, or join the table of painters and poets at The Cedar Tavern. He was just a bookseller, that most beautiful of professions…
She drove straight home, fast, as if down the curvature of the earth. The roads had been plowed and salted. She was so tired she had to stop at a McDonald’s near Eau Claire for coffee. But when she got to Baraboo she didn’t feel like going home, so she went to Book World. Not wanting anyone to think the store was open, she felt her way in the dark to the far back, where there were a few chairs and a lamp. This had been George’s idea, of course. He believed that if you gave customers the opportunity to sit down and start reading a book they were interested in, they were more likely to buy it. Reading, they begin to feel that the book is theirs, and can’t imagine leaving it behind.
She sat down and read the introduction to Time Will Darken It in which Maxwell describes looking through one of his wife’s books, Artists on Art, and reading the painter Francisco Pacheco describing how to paint a landscape. In the midst of a technical discussion of how to divide the canvas into planes and the proportions with which one should render “the figure or saint,” Maxwell stumbled upon the beautiful phrase that would give his novel its title.
But after reading the first sentence (“In order to pay off an old debt that someone else had contracted, Austin King had said yes when he knew that he ought to have said no, and now at five o’clock of a July afternoon he saw the grinning face of trouble everywhere he turned.”), she felt too tired to do the novel justice, and set it aside until morning. Ready to go home now, she switched the lamp off and again made her way through the dark store, but this time she noticed the blinking red light on the cradle of the old cordless.
“Hello, Annie. Thought I might catch you before you went home for the day. Forgive me for being out of touch. I didn’t know quite how to talk to you about the news. So I’ve spent the past few days reflecting, like a goddamn mirror. And I’ve decided, it might be the end of Book World, but it isn’t the end of the world World. I’m thinking about going back to England after the new year, see if I can’t get to the bottom of this Chaucer nonsense. I’d like to see some heads roll in the Medieval Lit departments. And why shouldn’t they? The Middle Ages were a ‘rolling heads’ kind of time. But mostly I want to see England again before I croak. Not the most pleasant time of year to be over there, but I’ll take some London rain over Ashland snow. I thought maybe you might like to come along. I’ve been a stingy man and I have some savings. I could cover your flights. Anyway, call me first thing tomorrow. Oh, by the way, you’d never guess which novel a young woman bought from me tonight just before I closed. I tell you, it really bucked me up, selling it to her. I’ll tell you what it was in the morning.”