Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

They walked east on Houston to an old commercial building near Second Avenue, where, in a pungent loft containing perhaps an acre of various animal skins, Crosetti leaned against a bale of the stuff and watched Rolly negotiate for a considerable time with an elderly man in a skullcap, a rusty black suit, and carpet slippers. They seemed to be having a good time, and Crosetti noticed with interest that Rolly had subtly changed her delivery. She smiled more with Mermelstein, actually laughed a time or two, and in general seemed a louder, more aggressive person than the one he knew, more…dare he think it?…more Jewish? Her speech had also taken on the pace and accent of the outer boroughs.

He remarked on this as they left with a small roll of fine calf wrapped in brown paper.

“Everybody does it,” she replied lightly. “You talk to someone, you take on a little of their shtick, their affect. Don’t you?”

“I guess,” he said, but thought, Yeah, but I’m something to begin with, and what, my sweet, are you? He rehearsed this line, thought about voicing it, declined. Instead he said, “So, where to now?”

“Take the F to Fourteenth Street and the Broadway train up to Columbia. We have an appointment with Dr. Bulstrode in forty-five minutes.”

“Can we get something to eat first? I haven’t had anything to eat since last night.”

“You ate all my cookies.”

“Oh, right, sorry. Your elderly cookies. Carolyn, what is going on with you? Why don’t you live like a regular person, with furniture and food in the house and pictures on the wall?”

She started walking toward the subway entrance. “I told you. I’m poor.”

He hurried to catch up with her. “You’re not that poor. You have a job. You make more than I do. Where does it go?”

“I don’t have a mother I can live with,” she said tightly.

“Thank you. That puts me in my place.”

“That’s right. I’m not sure you understand. I am completely alone in the world, with no backup at all. No brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, godfathers. I have a clerk’s salary with no benefits. If I got sick I’d be on the street. I’ve been on the street, and I’m not going to go back.”

“When were you on the street?”

“That’s none of your business. Why are you always so snoopy? It gets on my nerves.”

The train came and they boarded it. When they were under way and in the zone of privacy generated by the subway’s roar, he said, “I’m sorry. I get it from my mother. She sits down next to someone on the subway and in two stops they’re spilling their life’s story. You know, Carolyn, most people like to talk about themselves.”

“I know and I think it’s a waste of time, people blathering on about their hard luck. Or fishing for compliments. Oh, no, Gloria, you’re not really that fat. Oh, your son’s at Colgate? How proud you must be!”

“But that’s what people do . I mean what else do you talk about? Books? Bookbinding?”

“For starters. I told you I wasn’t a very interesting person, but you don’t seem to want to believe it.”

“You’re a fascinating person, in my opinion.”

“Don’t be stupid! I have a very dull life. I go to my job, I come home, I work at my craft, I count the days until I can get to a place where I can really learn what I’m interested in.”

“Movies,” said Crosetti. “We could talk about movies. What’s your favorite movie?”

“I don’t have one. I can’t afford to go to movies. And as you obviously know, I don’t own a television.”

“Come on, girl! Everybody has a favorite movie. You must have gone to movies in your hometown.” This got no response. He added, “Which was where?”

“Okay, what’s your favorite movie?” she asked without much interest, after a pause.

“ Chinatown . You’re not going to tell me where you come from?”

“No place special. What’s it about?”

“What’s it about? You never saw Chinatown ?”

“No.”

“Carolyn, everybody saw Chinatown. People who weren’t born when it came out saw Chinatown . There are movie houses in…in Mogadishu for crying out loud, that ran it for weeks. Best original screenplay ever written, won an Oscar for that, nominated for eleven other awards…how can you not have seen it? It’s a cultural monument.”

“Not of my culture, obviously. This is our stop.”

The train screamed to a halt at 116th Street and they left the car. She took off with her characteristic impatient stride, and he trotted after her, thinking that his initial impression of Carolyn Rolly as a vampire or some other sort of unearthly creature had been fairly accurate, if she really hadn’t seen Chinatown .

They arose from the underground and walked through the noble gates into the Columbia campus. Crosetti had occasionally come up here to catch movies at film society showings and always felt, as he now did, a vague sense of regret. At age twelve his mother had brought him up to the campus and shown him around. She’d received her library science degree here, and he knew she had wanted him to attend. But he was not the kind of grind who could get the grades necessary for a white New Yorker to win a scholarship, and paying cash for an undergraduate degree on a cop’s pension and a librarian’s salary was out of the question. So he’d gone to Queens College, “a perfectly good school,” as his mother often loyally remarked, and also, “if you’re a success nobody cares where you went to college.” It did not rankle a lot, but it rankled; and on the occasions when he had to come up to the campus, he found himself studying the faces of the undergraduates and listening to snatches of their conversation to see if he could observe a major gap between their supposed Ivy-level smarts and his own. Which he could not.

Carolyn Rolly, he knew, had attended Barnard, just across the street. He knew because he was the filing system at Sidney Glaser Rare Books and had used this position to examine her résumé in detail. He did not at the moment think much of a Barnard education, since it had failed in her case to provide a familiarity with Chinatown. This was why she was so stuck-up, a Seven Sisters girl, after all, and probably brilliant too, since she said she was poor and clearly she hadn’t failed to get a scholarship.

In a mood to needle, he said, “So…back at the old campus, hey, Carolyn? I guess it brings those dear old Ivy League college days back. Look, if there’re any special customs like not walking on a particular plaque or bowing to a statue or something, you’ll let me know-I wouldn’t want to embarrass you or anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You and your college days. Class of ’99, right? Barnard?”

“You think I went to Barnard ?”

“Yeah, it was…” Here he stuck, but she instantly understood the reason.

“You little spy! You read my résumé!”

“Well, yeah. I told you I was interested. I went through your underwear drawer too while you were sleeping.”

At this he thought he noticed a look of real fear whip across her features, but it was gone in a flash, replaced by one of amused contempt. “I doubt that,” she said, “but for your information I didn’t go to Barnard.”

“You lied on your application?”

“Of course I lied. I wanted the job, and I knew Glaser was a Columbia alumnus and his wife went to Barnard, so it seemed like a good idea. I came up here, picked up some of the talk, learned the geography, audited a couple of classes, studied the catalogs. They never check résumés. You could say you went to Harvard. If you had, I bet Glaser would be paying you a lot more money.”