The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (24 page)

Surely it was thinking about himself and the meaning of his life that brought Rousseau to paranoia. He entered the “auto,” the powerful mobile and drove over the landscape of his biography with miraculous speed and no care for distance. Almost at the end of his recollections, his apologia, which he read aloud to the Count and Countess d’Egmont, Prince Pignatelli, the Marchioness de Mesmes, and the Marquis de Juigne, he utters a firm summation.
I have always suspected M. de Choiseul of being the hidden author of all the persecutions I had suffered in Switzerland.

1980

Saturday, November. Winter, thank heaven. Everyone is wearing something new in the fall line. Skirts are shorter and heels are, thereby, lower. Quite old ladies are in schoolgirl sweaters and men far from young are on silent roller skates — curving backward, slowly spinning around to make a deft, brilliant, soundless stop on the sidewalk.

November. People have stopped going to their country places for the weekend, because, it is said, there is too much going on in the city. How true that is. At the opera, machines float swans across the back of the stage and hurl swords through the air; ballet fans are gossiping on the mezzanine; the hardy are standing in fur or in fat jackets of spring-garden pinks and purples in the long lines outside the movie houses. The city people are as strong as athletes and in elevated spiritual condition, too. Happy hours inside the darkened halls, with so many performing up front in a flood of light. Creamy faces on the screen; thin chiffons and heavy velvets on the stage. He leaping, leaping, and she folding her arms in dejection, like the wings of a bird; another reaching so high, up, up, singing of her lover’s treachery to the cause of her father. Saturday night, sold out.

The cafés are steaming, and from the restaurant doors garlic floats toward the hoods of cars waiting for the light. The newspaper kiosks have tomorrow’s papers stacked outside and, as always, Roger’s secondhand bookstore on Columbus Avenue is open for business. The store is called The Pleiade, but Roger likes to refer to it as the “play aid.” He says he has learned to watch out for strangers who can pronounce the name properly, because they know what they are doing and are sure to steal him blind. This caution is not, in fact, Roger’s way at all. He approaches theft — the thin volumes hiding in overcoats and the large volumes in shopping bags — with a short cry of pain and a long journey into his imagination, where he finds some poor truant, beaten down by self-awareness like the man in
Notes from Underground
, poring with fevered eyes over his treasure.

It is almost eleven when we stop at the shop. Roger says: The overflow from
The Marriage of Maria Braun
is terrific.

Roger is a large man, with sand-colored skin and hair of a curious tan shade, and he is dressed in a sand-colored corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows. The elbow patches and the pipe he sometimes smokes do not give him the air of a professor or of a sportsman. He is too seedy and rumpled and sand-strewn for that. He is just the benign, beaming, outsized owner of The Pleiade, and he and his shop are rooted like cabbages in the mixed sod of Columbus Avenue.

Yes, a lot is going on, but Roger never goes to the opera, never goes to the ballet, seldom goes to the movies. He is stuck in his shop, like a flagpole on the village green. He is a man with a single overwhelming passion out of which his being flows. The modernist classics are his passion. Reverence, the tensions of love, the restlessness of pursuit inflect his utterance of the sacred names. Photographs of Frenchmen, Russians, Americans, Italians, martyrs of inspiration, are in frames on the walls of The Pleiade, and their mostly somber images, caught in the youth of radical invention, are lit like icons by the candle of Roger’s beaming eyes. He is haunted by memories. Where, oh where, is his lost copy of
A Barbarian in Asia
with the luck of Michaux’s signature circled by cryptic drawings?

Roger and his books. His old friends are aware that he does not
quite
read them and that there is no word accurate for his curious taking in. He flips through the volumes delicately, carefully, and in some agitation of mind and spirit. His classics, with their almost constitutional authority, live under a kind of glass in his admiration. New books, not quite yesterday’s or even of the last few years, he receives kindly and with generous hope, and he is quick to sort out those that have about them certain whisperings of futurity, of longevity. But it is not true that Roger has no knowledge of his books. The truth is that he knows them in an intimate, peculiar fashion. He knows well each flavor, each
spécialité
, each domain, and the very quality of the aspiration. In his cheerful heart all the ironies, overturnings, dissonances of modern art ring out their sad notes and fill him with happiness.

If one were to say: Roger, do you admire Bruno Schulz?, he would answer: Oh, yes, oh, yes. And then, reflecting, he might add: But I like
Crocodile Street
better than
Sanatorium
. He has made a judgment, reached into the bibliophile quarry that is his head, and brought to life the elusive pages with their type, their chapter headings, their beginnings and endings, their place-names that sparkle with fresh consonants and vowels. And he knows what there is to know of lives — the terrible struggles of authorship that have undone so many.

At The Pleiade, a thin young woman, with hair cold and shiny like a wet cap, set over large, steady eyes, is drinking coffee at a long table at the back. Lois, Roger says.

Up front, there stands on tiptoe a not unusual bookshop scarecrow in black trousers, frayed jacket, and painful shoes long worn by feet much larger than the feet currently trying to find a grounding in them. This pitiful person is holding a book some distance from his eyes. Crazy, Roger says.

A very large dog, like a huge ball of dust, sleeps in the middle of the shop and must be circled by the customers. So it is, with small variations, seven nights a week at The Pleiade. Now a young couple, whispering, examine the titles on the shelves. Roger’s eagerness follows their glances. He is in search of essence, the young couple’s essence, to be revealed to him as a hand pulls a volume forward and then slowly pushes it back into place. Roger sees the light of recognition and the blankness of ignorance.

Pound’s
ABC
, the young man whispers to the girl. Twenty-five dollars. The expensive jewel lies in the young man’s palm for a moment and then is returned to its alphabetical resting place.

Roger watches the unrolling, as it seems to him, of their biography. He is deeply interested, although the couple do not reveal any eccentricity and their passage through poetry, criticism, art, and fiction is unremarkable. But there is a longing, perhaps, a tenderness and wonder, before first American edition and original English edition, before the contemplation of the out-of-print, the signed, and the limited.

At last the girl buys a paperback for two dollars and fifty cents.
Kafka’s Diaries
, volume I. Roger’s smile seems to fade a bit, although not in dishonor to Kafka, for whom he feels a love almost criminal. The fading seems to be a disappointment that the young couple had been thus far deprived of the volume.

They go out in their matching ski jackets, jog down the avenue with their blond hair flying behind. Roger collects his decisions about them. Poets, he says. I think they live downtown, but not in the East Village. Something like West Tenth Street. Respectable types, Amherst and Wellesley. Those two are spacing lines on a page.

Roger. I can see again his large head bowed, as if in grief, in the Milton seminar at Columbia some years ago. He brought to graduate studies his pen and his notebook and the steady downward tug of his dilatory, procrastinating nature. It was the modernist T. S. Eliot and his resurrection of the metaphysical poets that had led Roger disastrously to the seventeenth century. By the perverse authority of institutions he was brutally dragged by his light curls into the study of Milton, a poet not even very high in the regard of Eliot at the time. Roger endured for a few months. He wrote in the margins of
The Student’s Milton
: “Cf. Virgil,” after one line; and “See Pliny the Elder,” after another; and at the top of a page “Pythagoras was the only one who had heard the spheres’ music.”

But his head was too big and his eyes were too small for the peering at lines, and he shuffled about in the text like a melancholy sheep in a pen. At last, he gave up and went cheerfully loping off into the meadow of upper Broadway, and came to a stop some years later as the proprietor of The Pleiade. And yet, even now, Roger can sometimes be heard in the doorway of his shop, greeting a friend with “Hail, holy light!,” the only phrase from
Paradise Lost
sequestered in his memory.

Roger knows well a number of regular visitors to The Pleiade and he has friends, themselves a miscellaneous collection, from his Columbia undergraduate days. He knows a French-literature scholar, a Socialist, a Catholic poet, and a lawyer who plays the violin and reads Kleist and Novalis in German.

The night is ending and Lois is nodding at the table. Before Lois, Maureen was for some months sitting at the table, sitting there silent and beautiful and abstracted — very, very much in the Lois manner.

Where is Maureen?

Gone for a spell to the topless towers, Roger says. Is there regret in his tone? No, not exactly. It is Roger’s way to meet fate with the sweetest accommodation of the trivial or the violent alteration. Profound passivity, a little wonder, and a flash of puzzlement here and there, and the flux of his domestic arrangements serenely made its way to sea. For this, the troubled people who floated down on him, as if he were a pier for a sudden anchorage, were perhaps grateful.

The topless towers was his designation of Maureen’s hometown, Troy, New York. And it was there she would go when the peaceful vacancy of her nature took a little turn to the left or right and she had to be got back on the road again.

Lois is a friend of Maureen’s, Roger explains. She’s looking for work.

Lois nods, and her meditative gaze is so untroubled that it has the effect of a signal of trouble itself.

From time to time, the iron gates over the front of The Pleiade remained closed past noon, and some of Roger’s commercial neighbors were taken by curiosity. The cook from the Chinese restaurant often walked out in his apron and peered through the gated windows into the impatient jaws of the dog. The fat palmist, awaiting the evacuation sure to arrive when the landlord, stuck with the derelict for so many years, could decide to what brilliant, prosperous use the palmist’s street-front broom closet might be put, glared with deep intention at the locked gates, as if she had at last accomplished a predicted malediction. There was no cordiality between Roger and the palmist, because he detested the occult and the pornographic and, to him, the palmist united the two in her black coils of hair and in the beseeching, whimpering noises directed at passersby.

But soon there would come Roger in a taxi, and out of the taxi came shopping bags filled with more books bought from a bankrupt hole-in-the-wall competitor. The gates rolled back, the cut-rate bin was trundled to the pavement, and the luckless, sneering palmist saw The Pleiade’s Mostly Mozart poster return to life. The slim volumes again dozed in the afternoon light. The large volumes of the
High Renaissance
and
The History of Egyptian Art
listened once more to the gassy braking of the No. 11 bus. All was well, except that Roger was undergoing a brief sinking spell because of the new burden of his infatuated buying.

Roger does not drink, but he eats quite a lot of apples, pizzas, and hamburgers, and makes many cups of coffee in his electric pot. He lives in the large, decaying building over the shop. He is one of those brought up by well-to-do parents sent to good schools, to France for a summer — who, on their own, show no more memory of physical comforts than a prairie dog.

Once, in the bookstore, the lawyer friend spoke about a visit to the apartment to look at a violin Roger had bought. Lethal squalor, he kept repeating, lethal squalor. Yet he found in this jumbled, tumbled theater of belligerent disorder a fine violin, old paintings of curious interest, fine brasses black with tarnish, rare books, carved wood: twenty-five years of desultory buying in junk shops, elephantine carting, and, at last, forgetful dumping. The lawyer observed that Roger would never starve but he might die from stepping on a rusty nail.

Roger has his dog, with its concentrated sleepy look, and his Maureens and Loises with their unconcentrated, dream-heavy eyes. He has his shop, where he spends his waking hours, and when that is over he goes upstairs to rest, like a peasant returning to his hut at sundown. Perhaps he sleeps on a pallet, wrapped in his winter sheepskin in the unthinkable darkness in which one imagines his bright, daylight smile there someplace in the clutter beaming away like a night lamp. No matter — the patrician in him is not entirely erased and lingers on in an amiable displacement, remaining in his contentment to keep pace with just where he is, to raise prices as the rent rises, to keep out the street winds, to fill the shopping bags with new loot, and to feel a certain discomfort and confusion when he makes a sale. His father left a good deal of money, but Roger does no resentful bookkeeping. Instead, he shows a flare of pride that his mother is in her ninety-sixth year, consuming the real estate, the insurance, the stocks like an admirable, slowly grazing animal.

The wind from the river comes up suddenly to disperse the Saturday-night rubbish. Into the air go newspapers, candy wrappers, loose tobacco, and the sluggish waters at the curb stir under the tidal moon. The bookstore empties and Roger sighs in the mixed feelings of the end of another day of his long, long celebration. He directs Lois to go across the street to the all-night Puerto Rican grocery store to buy cornflakes. She looks uncertain of this journey but takes the five-dollar bill, scurries away among the cars, looking like a small, blackened crossing sweeper of a century ago.