Also.
How dare Edgar Thibaud have used the past few years to grow so … tall? And … good-looking?
Edgar Thibaud said, “I wasn’t sure it was you, then I noticed the weird boot on one foot and the beat-up Chuck on the other, and I remembered that red pom-pom hat. I knew it could only be you. ’Sup?”
’Sup? he wanted to know? So casually? Like he hadn’t ruined my life and killed my gerbil?
Edgar Thibaud sat down next to me. His (deep green, and rather beautiful) eyes looked a little hazy, like perhaps he’d been smoking from the peace pipe.
“I’m the captain of my soccer team,” I announced.
I don’t really know how to talk to boys. In person. Which is probably why I’ve become dependent on a notebook for creative expression of a potentially romantic nature.
Edgar laughed at my idiotic response. But it wasn’t a mean laugh. It sounded like an appreciative one. “Of course you are. Same old Lily. You’ve even got the same black-rimmed glasses like you wore in elementary school.”
“I heard you got kicked out of high school for some conspiracy plot.”
“Just suspended. It was like a vacation, actually. And check you out, keeping tabs on me all this time.” Edgar Thibaud leaned into my ear. “Anyone tell you that you grew up to be sort of cute? In, like, a misfit type of way?”
I didn’t know whether to be flattered or outraged.
I did know his breath in my ear sent very unfamiliar shivers through my body.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him, needing trivial conversation to distract me from the sordid thoughts my mind was starting to spin about Edgar Thibaud … with his shirt off. I could feel my face turning hot, blushing. And yet my dialogue was no racier than: “You didn’t go away for Christmas like everybody else?”
“My parents went skiing in Colorado without me. I annoyed them too much.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.”
“No, I did it on purpose. A week without their bourgeois hypocrisy is a week of paradise.”
Was Edgar Thibaud even speaking? I couldn’t stop staring at his face. Just how exactly had it turned so handsome in the intervening years?
I said, “I think that’s a girl’s beret you’re wearing.”
“Is it?” Edgar asked. “Cool.” He cocked his head to the side, pleased. “I like girls. And their hats.” He reached to grab my hat from my head. “May I?”
Edgar Thibaud had obviously evolved over the last few years if he had the decency to ask for my hat, rather than snatch it off my head and then probably throw it to the dogs to play with, as the old Edgar on the school yard would have done.
I moved my head down so he could take my hat. He placed my red pom-pom hat on his head, then put his beret on mine.
His beret on my head felt so warm and … forbidden. I liked it.
“Want to go to a party with me tonight?” Edgar asked.
“Grandpa probably won’t let me go!” I blurted out.
“So?” Edgar said.
Exactly!
Clearly, it was time for Lily to have the kind of boy adventures that would allow her to give legitimate love advice, later in the future.
I might have arrived in Tompkins Square Park with my heart still intent on a Snarl, but right in front of me, I had a real, live Edgar Thibaud.
The secret tactic of a good hard bargainer is to know when to compromise.
For instance.
I will demand a puppy if I am forced to move to Fiji.
But I will settle for a bunny.
eleven
–Dash–
December 27th
So I found myself once again at the Strand.
It hadn’t been a late night—Priya’s parties tended to fizzle before the Cinderella hour, and this was no exception. Sofia and I stayed together most of the evening, but once we emerged from the bedroom and started to mingle with everyone else, we stopped talking to each other and instead talked as two parts of the larger group. Yohnny and Dov left to see their friend Matthue slam some poetry, and Thibaud never showed. I might have lingered until Sofia and I were almost alone again, but Boomer had consumed about thirteen too many cups of Mountain Dew and was threatening to make holes in the ceiling with his head. Sofia was going to be around until New Year’s, so I said we had to get together, and she said yeah, that’d be good. We left it at that.
Now it was eleven the next morning and I was back in the bookstore, resisting the siren call of the stacks in order to find and, if necessary, interrogate Mark. I was walking with a lady’s boot under my arm, like some pallbearer for the post-melt Wicked Witch of the West.
The guy at the information desk was thin and blond, bespectacled and tweeded. In other words, not the guy I was looking for.
“Hey,” I said. “Is Mark here?”
The guy barely looked up from the Saramago novel in his lap.
“Oh,” he said, “are you the stalker?”
“I have a question to ask him, that’s all. That hardly makes me a stalker.”
Now the guy looked at me. “It depends on the question, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m sure stalkers have questions, too.”
“Yes,” I conceded, “but their questions usually run along the lines of ‘Why won’t you love me?’ and ‘Why can’t I die by your side?’ I’m more along the lines of ‘What can you tell me about this boot?’ ”
“I’m not sure I can help you.”
“This is the information desk, isn’t it? Aren’t you obligated to give me information?”
The guy sighed. “Fine. He’s shelving. Now let me finish this chapter, okay?”
I thanked him, though not profusely.
The Strand proudly proclaims itself as home to eighteen miles of books. I have no idea how this is calculated. Does one stack all the books on top of each other to get the eighteen miles? Or do you put them end to end, to create a bridge between Manhattan and, say, Short Hills, New Jersey, eighteen miles away? Were there eighteen miles of shelves? No one knew. We all just took the bookstore at its word, because if you couldn’t trust a bookstore, what could you trust?
Whatever the measurement, the applicable fact was that the Strand had lots of aisles to shelve. Which meant that I had to weave in and out of dozens of narrow spaces—dodging disgruntled and pregruntled patrons, ladders, and haphazardly placed book cairns in order to find Mark in the Military History section. He was buckling a little under the weight of an illustrated history of the Civil War, but otherwise his appearance and demeanor were similar to that of when we first met.
“Mark!” I said in a tone of holiday camaraderie, as if we were members of the same eating club who had somehow found ourselves in the lobby of the same brothel.
He looked at me for a second, then turned back to the shelf.
“Did you have yourself a merry little Christmas?” I continued. “Did you make the yuletide gay?”
He brandished a volume of Winston Churchill’s memoirs and pointed it accusingly at me. The jowly prime minister stared from the jacket impassively, as if he were the judge of this sudden contest.
“What do you want?” Mark asked. “I’m not going to tell you anything.”
I took the boot from under my arm and placed it on Churchill’s face.
“Tell me whose boot this is.”
He (Mark, not Churchill) was surprised by the appearance of footwear—I could tell. And I could also glean from the knowledge he was trying to hide that he knew the identity of its owner.
Still, he was obstinate, in the way that only truly miserable people can be obstinate.
“Why should I tell you?” he asked, with no small amount of petulance.
“If you tell me, I will leave you alone,” I said. “And if you don’t tell me, I am going to grab the nearest ghostwritten James Patterson romance novel and I am going to follow you through this store reading it out loud until you relent. Would you prefer me to read from Daphne’s Three Tender Months with Harold or Cindy and John’s House of Everlasting Love? I guarantee, your sanity and your indie street cred won’t last a chapter. And they are very, very short chapters.”
Now I could see the fright beneath the defiance.
“You’re evil,” he said. “You know that?”
I nodded, even though I usually saved the word evil for perpetrators of genocide.
He continued, “And if I tell you, you’ll stop calling and coming by. Even if you don’t like what you find?”
That seemed uncharitable to Lily, but I would not let my pique peak.
“I will stop calling,” I said calmly. “And while I will never allow myself to be banned from the Strand, I promise not to seek information when you are sitting at that particular desk, and if you are ever working the cash register, I will make sure to maneuver so that you are not the clerk who rings me up. Will that suffice?”
“There’s no need to snarl,” Mark said.
“That wasn’t snarling,” I pointed out. “Not even remotely. If you’re planning to make it in the bookselling arena, I would advise you to learn to make the distinction between a snarl and a well-placed bon mot. They are not one and the same.”
I took out a pen and offered him the inside of my arm.
“Just write down the address and we’ll be squared away.”
He took the pen and wrote down an address on East Twenty-second Street, pressing down a little too hard on my skin.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, reclaiming the boot. “I’ll be sure to put in a good word with Mr. Strand for you!”
As I exited the aisle, I felt a treatise on American naval misadventure shot-put past my head. I left it on the ground for the shot-putter to reshelve.
I will admit: There was a part of me that wanted to wash my arm. Not because of Mark’s handwriting, which was the kind of chicken scratch more associated with death row convicts than bookstore clerks. No—it wasn’t the handwriting I was tempted to erase, but the information it conveyed. Because here was the key to meeting Lily … and I wasn’t sure I wanted to put it in the lock.
Sofia’s words were nagging at me: Was Lily the girl in my head? And if she was, wasn’t reality bound to be disappointing?
No, I had to reassure myself. The words in the red Moleskine were not written by the girl in your head. You have to trust the words. They do not create anything more than themselves.
When I rang the doorbell, I could hear it chime throughout the brownstone, the kind of intonation that lets you believe a servant will be answering the door. For at least a minute, there was a responding silence—I shifted the boot from hand to hand and debated whether to ring again. My restraint was a rare victory of politeness over expediency, and I was rewarded eventually by a shuffle of feet and a maneuvering of locks and bolts.
The door was answered by neither a butler nor a maid. Instead, it was answered by a museum guard from Madame Tussauds.
“I know you!” I sputtered.
The old woman gave me a long, hard look.
“And I know that boot,” she replied.
“Yes,” I said. “There’s that.”
I had no idea whether she remembered me from the museum. But then she opened the door a little wider and motioned for me to come in.
I half expected to be greeted by a waxwork statue of Jackie Chan. (In other words, I expected her to have taken some of her work home with her.) But instead, the foyer was an antechamber of antiques, like suddenly I had stepped back into a dozen decades at once, and none of them were later than 1940. Next to the door was a stand filled with umbrellas—at least a dozen of them, each with its own curved wood handle.
The old woman caught me staring.
“You’ve never seen an umbrella stand before?” she asked haughtily.
“I was just trying to imagine a situation where one person would need twelve umbrellas. It seems almost indecent to have so many, when there are so many people who don’t have any.”