Last Bender

8.1

The Phoenix Park Restaurant dinner was not the first time Roy told me to become a librarian. Once, when I was in high school he met me at the main branch of the Public Library and we walked over to Grand Central together. We were to meet our father there for dinner at the Oyster Bar and then I was going home on the train and Roy was taking off.

“The thing about a library,” he said as we walked down 42nd Street, “is anyone can read whatever they want. No one’s there to tell you what to read or when to read it by or what to think. And even some poor black guy can walk in there and read and think and figure out his next move. We wouldn’t be here now if you didn’t have a public library. We’d still be pushing carts on First Avenue. But the thing is like, schools, they tell you what to read and they tell you what to think. So you gotta ask yourself, what’s better, being a professor somewhere, or being a librarian? Think about it. You know, I sometimes worry about you, that you’ll do something like become a professor, when you could be, like, the world’s greatest librarian. Isn’t that something to want to be?” He laughed. “Something nobody gives a fuck about? The best at it? Go for it man. Did you see dad’s beard?” He laughed drily. “He’s got a new girlfriend too. She’s like 23. I mean, doesn’t he even give a fuck about mom. I mean, she’s got her shit but he’s like, out of control. I don’t know. She’s not happy with the psychiatrist, I can tell.”

I didn’t even think I was listening, but here I am, a librarian without position, and by choice. It is an old profession, as is the book trade. But running a bookshop is a different sort of thing altogether. It is not like a Lord’s private library in Provence ca. 450 CE. It is a place of commerce. Retention is not the policy here. I am not the guardian of tradition. Virtue is no concern of mine. Books are exchanged for money, not saved for the ages.

I had not had a customer when Tammy Markham came in on her way home to Brooklyn (she takes the F train). She had her two kids with her and was looking good in faded bell-bottom jeans, boots and a black waffle pattern shirt. Her hair was cut at the shoulder and fell in curls and waves of white and chestnut. I said hello to the girls and they pretended at first not to know me, looking around and laughing.

“What am I, chopped liver?” I said.

“Limburger,” Tammy said.

“I’m not no Limburger.”

“Just limburger. We’ve been shopping.” The girls had two bags in each hand. June, the 17 year old, was dressed in athletic clothes and Mara, the 13 year old, was in high heels and a black miniskirt. Her blue fingernails clutched the strap of a maroon backpack.

I had an urge to tell Tammy that Sally had called, but I knew Tammy never liked Sally much, though she put up with her. Without any effort at all I knew just what she would say. And worse, the look on her face. I was anxious to close the store and go home to check my messages. “It’s been a slow day,” I said.

“Really? But everyone was out. They still are.”

“Well it was not a day to buy a book, it was a day to stop by and get out of the sun. They always blink back the dark when they come in on a day like this. Later in the summer, it’s for the air conditioning.”

“It is a dark business.”

“So are they all. One must make a living.”

“There are drearier ways than yours,” she said.

“I don’t dispute that. This is a commodious and gentle desiccation. Well girls, aren’t you dying to browse?”

“No thank you Alex,” Mara said brightly.

“Can’t you see he’s kidding?” June said. “God, you’re so stupid.”

“You call me stupid? Fucking bitch?”

“Oy,” said Tammy. “Girls. Girls! Shut up. Can’t you at least respect Alex enough not to talk like that.”

“Ah, Tammy, fuck it, that’s o.k. The world went to hell before they were born. That which is was predetermined long ago.” I addressed the ladies thus, “I changed your diapers, so don’t get wise with me.”

“Well, come to dinner then if you have time on Sunday. Ralph’s cooking, you don’t have to worry.”

The gals rolled their eyes. Mara said, “Well if he’s coming.”

“I will beat you both at poker. You will lose so badly that late into your lives when you are ancient, shriveled creatures and I am long past, you will still remember it.”

Tammy laughed. “A cracker barrel prognosticator?”

“No, the fatwa of your philosopher king!”

“Do you know the story of Demetrius of Athens?” she asked.

“Demetrius the Besieger?”

“Nope. The other Demetrius, Demetrius of Phaleron, the philosopher, and later, the decadent king of Athens. One of Alexander’s Macedonian generals put him on the thrown and he said to the Athenians, ‘Here is your philosopher king.’ Demetrius bankrupted them with feasts and entertainments.” She looked directly in my eyes and I looked away. “What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?” The girls drifted off to look at the big art books.

“Yeah I guess it’s.”

“That all?”

“I got a call from Sally.”

“What does she want?” she asked, making just the face, a pinch face it was! I was astounded. All those years, the mention of Sally elicited a pinch face from Tammy. And without fail. Even when they met. It was an uncharacteristic face for her. It was her Sally face. And she wore it now, asking what she always asks, “What does that woman want?”

“I know you don’t like her, but it was quite unsettling. We talked.”

Tammy relaxed a little and walked towards the desk. I went and got a chair and she sat down behind the desk, facing me. “So what does she want?”

“Got me. To talk. Be friends maybe?”

“Why now? I don’t get it. What’s it been. 25 years?”

“She’ll be back in the city.”

“I always thought you were right to put all that behind you.” Even as she said it she looked unhappy. “I’m not saying you could. Well, how do you feel? You’re not falling back in love with her are you?”

“That would be crazy, right?”

She rubbed her chin and then smiled. “I would never suggest such a thing of you.”

“But maybe that’s what she wants?”

“How did she sound? Did she say that?”

I tried to remember how she had sounded. “Up beat. She’s a tenured professor at NYU with a hit book.”

“So maybe she was just calling to gloat.”

“She said she couldn’t stand the thought of me hating her or blaming her.”

“Hate I don’t know but blame? Who else would you blame?”

“Well, whatever. She wants to be forgiven.”

“Yeah, who doesn’t.”

“I just didn’t even remember what had happened.”

“Well then, what do you want? If it’s disturbing.”

“Disturbing. Yes.” I rubbed my face and bit my lip, thinking. “I might want to be disturbed. In the right way.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I see where you’re going. You don’t really want to see her, you want to sleep with her.”

Was that so crazy? I wasn’t even sure that was it. “I’m not even sure,” I started to say.

“Oh now, busted! Don’t try to squirm out, dude.”

“O.K. so fuck man. But I didn’t know that’s what it was till just now.”

“What are you, a girl?” She laughed and looked around. “I can’t imagine you anywhere but here.” Then she looked at me and I could fleetingly see her as a 50 year-old woman, and not as an twelve year-old girl in tennis whites. Her daughters looked like their father, Ralph. They had his straight hair and narrow nose and thin lips. But June in her grey sweats had Tammy’s energy, and lack of self-consciousness. They looked up from the Warhol book at their mother and June smiled, lips pushed off of her teeth by invisible braces. “I don’t know what I would do,” Tammy said at last. “I guess not remember who they even are. Back then,” she whispered, “I was so high, I don’t remember a thing. You I remember. Just not the girls I went home with.”

“I guess we got away with something, right?” I asked.

“I guess so, cause here we are.” And we both felt sad, but we were both smiling because after all, it was good to be there.

“See you Sunday then?” Tammy asked. Then to the girls, “Say g’bye guys.” They bickered over who would put it back; I had them trained to do it right and I was still foreign matter enough to occasionally want to impress. Tammy got up out of my chair and I stood. I kissed her at the door and the girls joined us.

They said, “G’bye, Alex.”

“G’bye.”

For a while I stood at the door, watching the street. I shut down the computer and locked the register drawer in the floor safe in back, turned off the lights and pulled down the gates. The street was all in shadow now though the sky was still blue and the sun was sinking through the side streets, lighting up walls of glass and flashing on concrete. The door closed behind me and I started up the steps.

I thought briefly of buying a fish and roasting or steaming it. But the thought of walking out there and down to Chinatown to lug a cold dead animal up five flights of steps was ruinous to my intention as were the two slices of pizza I had eaten at 3. But I knew I’d be hungry, there was no use pretending otherwise. At 8 I would want to eat, wouldn’t I?

I always feel better after seeing Tammy. That’s the way it’s been. I was there when her children were born and when her father died of aids, I was there. He and her mother were just names to me, though I had been in her house in Larchmont, where scenes from a student soap opera I was in were shot. But she didn’t even acknowledge my existence at that point. She was lighting the show and volunteered her house during the day when her parents were away, her father at work, her mother at various functions and committee meetings. She wasn’t beautiful anymore and I wasn’t in love with her but I couldn’t stop watching her work. She didn’t talk much and she was always reading some weird book she picked up somewhere, whatever was just lying around. It’s like with that Bukowski. I have no idea who left it there in the station. And no one had to tell Tammy a Black Sparrow book was worth taking.

And there are times when she just has to have something or she will go out of her mind. It might be a movie or a song or a place she needs to walk. Once, Tammy called me late at night. I lay in the dark, my mind chattering through the events of the day as I tossed back and forth. In vain I tried to invoke Sally but even she couldn’t stop the overflow of thought and emotion provoked by Douglas Eakens (up to that point merely one of my more interesting regulars), when he noticed I was reading Batsard’s. I had been thinking about what I would do when Sally went to graduate school. I didn’t think about much else. I could apply to library schools in cities where she applied for graduate schools. Cities, not burgs. New Haven no doubt is a city, but there are cities and there are cities.

In any event, I had amorphous thoughts about becoming a librarian and was going about it autodidactically, which is stupid.

Douglas Eakens was the first librarian I ever met, and also the greatest. He was a cantankerous Anglo-Catholic socialist from somewhere in the north of England, in his mid-fifties, with a red face and a sour, alcoholic nose. He had the feel of a poob bouncer ca. 1955, which he had been, for a time. He enjoyed a pint and an impious joke. As people go (never mind liebrayrearends), they don’t come any better.

I am always surprised by how dry the industry is, given its ballast of eccentricity. I have never known a librarian to let down her hair and shut the blinds, though I have seen one or two trip drunkenly out of her thong. Primarily one encounters manias, for collections or else for some antiquarian pursuit: jousting, tractor pulls, soap making. Some fellows write haiku and others ride choo choo trains. I knew a librarian who, for over twenty years, could be found performing as a one-man-band in dives. He drove his contraption around in a ‘66 Dodge Dart. He had a kick drum on the floor, bass drum on his chest, cymbals under his arms, bugle, kazoo and harmonica on metal bars ranged before his mouth and a synthesizer strapped to his back, which he operated with a pair of electronic glasses that responded to blinks.

 I’ve known Hegelians, Gurdieffians, Steinerists, Reichians, Stoics, Buddhists but whatever the pursuit it comes down to books. That’s why most of us are there. In a library, there is no way around the fact of books. Paying a bibliophile to be a librarian is like paying a fat man to go to the China Buffet.

“Whoot are you doing with a book like that?” he asked, taking a sip of coffee. He was fierce to behold, framed by Broadway traffic and grey-white hair tossed in the ten directions. He rubbed them into ten more. “Principles of Descriptive Bibliography.” He rolled his Rs.

“I’m thinking of going to library school. I wanted to read a classic.”

He turned the book over in his hands. “This bloody stoof will kill you.” He laughed. “What do you want to be a librarian for?”

“I love books.”

“Hmm. Well, then you ought to get a job working with books. Come by my office. I’ll show you around the stacks.” He finished his coffee and put 25 cents on the counter. His eyes, in deep sockets, were pale blue. Capillaries and veins webbed his forehead. “Well you know, books like Batsard’s are only part of what this business is about. You see, he wants you to read a verbal description that is so accurate, it would be as if you held the book in your hand and could do anything but read it. You will know its dimensions, the number of signatures, the printing details, the size of the paper. But, without the book, where is the record? Hm? Somewhere in there it says that the amateur cannot teach himself the science of descriptive bibliography. It can only be done by someone with long experience of books. How they are made, and how they are preserved and restored.”

“I worked in bookstores for years. I’m a collector. I’d love to see the stacks. I don’t know your last name though.”

“Oh yes, Eakens. Douglas Eakens.” He smiled and went out the door. I couldn’t believe it. I wondered what it would be like to be on the inside of something.

It was no use trying to sleep. When the phone rang I answered hoping it would be someone I knew, and it was Tammy, out of breath, crying, something I had never known her to do before. “Alex, you have to help me, I have to hear Elton John. Can you bring over some records? You have them don’t you?”

“Well, everyone’s out tonight. Hold on, I’ll check.” Faced with the riot of titles and no discernible order, I decided that the order was determined by level of enthusiasm. As he raged in one direction, all music metonymically related formed a clade. And from this clade was excluded all items deemed not. I knew his current fascination with proletarian music from the thirties did not by Rube Goldberg machinations lead to Elton John, so I searched for an abandoned vein of seventies pop and there they were, Honky Chateau, Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player, Good Bye Yellowbrick Road, all together towards the back, near the kitchen wall. “How are these?” I read off the titles.

“Oh, thank god! Pleeeaaase come over with them Alex, I’m begging you.”

I looked at the clock. It was two in the morning. “Yeah, I’ll be there in a half hour.”

“Take a cab. I’ll pay you back.”

She answered the door in grey sweats. Her eyes were red and tears were still wet on her cheeks. She had a bottle of Rolling Rock and a cigarette in one hand. She grabbed the records with the other and marched back to the stereo. “I can’t get these out of my head. I’m gonna go crazy.” She put on Honky Chateau and moaned with pleasure. “Do you want something? I’ve got beer. We could smoke a joint. I know you don’t do that, but. What do you want?”

“Just a beer is fine.” We sat on her bed and faced the mute black and white TV with a bent wire hangar sticking out of the antenna holes. It was red and every few hours the sound would go off and you had to hit it hard in just the right place. The bed was unmade. She pulled the sheets up and smoothed them out and threw a few more pillows from the floor against the wall so I could sit. A baby blue down comforter was bunched up at the end of the bed.

 “What’s going on?” I asked, after settling in against the pillows. She lay beside me chewing her lower lip.

She shivered a little and pulled the comforter up to her chin. “You would not believe what’s going on. Nothing, that’s what’s going on, nothing.” She covered her face with her hands and pressed her eyes till a groan came out of her that was so guttural it was hard to interpret. “Did you ever think you knew how crazy someone was and then find out that you have no idea?” she said through her hands. “A year ago I could have told you why my father was totally fucked up. I could have named the reasons, given dates and times. I had this fucking bill of particulars. But I didn’t know the half of it. He was arrested down in Riverside Park, you know where the 96th Street Exit is on the Henry Hudson? They caught him giving someone a blowjob. My lawyer father who takes the Stanford Local to Grand Central five days a week and plays golf at Century? Is gay? What the fuck? Are we really all like this? My whole family, a fucking mystery? Everybody lies? Would I show them who I am?

“Never. I know what they think. They don’t hide it. But daddy’s giving blow jobs in the park and I’m a fucking lesbian?

“I had to talk to my mother on the phone. She said–” Tammy started to laugh and had to catch her breath. She touched my arm and said, “She said, ‘Your father was arrested for having oral sex with a man in a parking lot.’ It’s the way she said oral sex, I literally had to bite my fist to keep from cracking up. ‘Are you laughing?’ she asks, oh…in that grating, Great Neck accent…. it used to embarrass me so much. She was a Temple lady. I loathed temple ladies. You’re lucky Alex, you never had to go. I used to look at all those fat calves and ankles bulging out of their shoes with such fucking horror. And all I could think was that one day I would look like that. Scooping out kugel at functions and Israeli folk dancing. And they didn’t like it any more than we did, they just did it. I mean, doesn’t that make it even more disgusting, when they don’t believe and don’t even have the fucking guts to admit as much?

“Emma didn’t care, she just split but I felt guilty all the time. I look at my mother and she looks like someone who if she doesn’t let it out she’ll lose her mind; but if she ever does let it out, if she sees it all, then she’ll really go insane. The whole thing would come apart. Better to dish out the kugel. Then your faygelah husband comes home a day late because he’s been sitting in the Tombs all weekend waiting for a judge. It was just to torture him, cause he was one of their own. Kai Halpern, he’s the lawyer, called her at three in the morning. They play Bridge together. Whatever. I’ve been to their house. I played with his kids. They lived out on the Island. His son’s a big time junkie. I used to see him down on Avenue B all the time.

“I’ve never been what they are. That’s who I am, who’s not them. They can’t be me. My life is bars and parks. That’s mine, he doesn’t get that. None of them do. How it all became like this. Who was the first? What did they do? Was it in the body, the heart, or was it something they said or did, or thought to do?

“I’m doing all the wrong things. I haven’t hung a show in months. All I do is pour drinks from 8 till 4, three nights a week. It’s not bad but, last week I was drinking Southern Comfort just because it was funny. I still have some if you want.”

“I’m fine.”

“But the thing is, I didn’t come back to tend bar and take drugs. There was something I wanted to do. Maybe I should have done what you did, just work with books. But there’s no money in it, and it doesn’t seem like you have any fun.”

“But I’m a counterman now. I make coffee and serve donuts, like in high school.”

“I remember that. You worked at Dunkin’ Donuts on the graveyard shift. We would go in there and laugh at you because you were so straight, and then we started to think you were really cool. I never got it one way or another till Hunter. I didn’t even think of you as the donut guy. But in that class your face suddenly seemed so familiar, like I had known it my whole life.”

“Or since sixth grade anyway. You played tennis down at Flint Park. You wore whites and those bands around your wrist and head.”

“Oh yeah, it’s tennis or horses, right? Man. It’s hard to even remember what being a kid was like. When was it you first thought, I’m not looking at anything real. That’s what they say. It all passes you by and then you’re nothing. That’s what it was all along, what you were becoming. They say you’re becoming something but that’s not what you’re becoming at all. I don’t think I want to fuck another woman as long as I live. I’m done with pussy. I’m done with nothing. I just want to get the fuck out of here and it feels like the way out is the way in.” She kicked the down blanket to the foot of the bed and stared at her beer and said, “Miserable comforters are ye all.”

Shortly before sunrise I walked home, a miserable comforter indeed, and without Joseph’s records. The worktable by the door was piled up with books and notebooks and typescripts. There were dictionaries, French, German, English, open at one end, with a yogurt cup and spoon and stacks of index cards. Lydia’s bed was still empty. Every time I passed it I checked to see if she was lost in its rumpled covers. It was beginning to look like a shrine we had erected to bring about her return instead of what it actually was, neglect.

Sally grunted when I climbed in next to her. “Are you asleep?” She grunted again. I rubbed her till she got wet and fucked her from behind and fell asleep inside her.