Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

He studied her trudging along, silent, her head down, gripping her roll of book leather. No, he was not going to end it with a handshake at the subway and let her roll off into her own astringent universe again. He stopped and placed his hand on her arm. She looked up, her face blank.

“Wait,” he said, “what are we doing now?”

“I have to go to the paper guy in Brooklyn for the endpapers,” she replied glumly. “You don’t have to come.”

“That can wait. What we’re actually going to do now is go to the Citibank branch over there, on which this check in my wallet is drawn, and cash it. Then we’re going to cab to Bloomie’s, where I will buy a jacket and pants and a shirt and maybe a pair of Italian loafers, and you will buy a dress, with colors in it, something for the summer, and maybe a hat, and we’ll change into our new clothes and we’ll take a cab to a fancy restaurant and have a long, long lunch with wine, and then we’ll-I don’t know-do city stuff, go to museums or art galleries or window-shop until we get hungry again and then go out to dinner and then I will take you in a cab back to your spare and illegal loft and your two chairs and your lonely bed.”

What was that on her face, he wondered: fear, surprise, delight? She said, “That’s ridiculous.”

“No it’s not. It’s exactly what felons are supposed to do with their ill-gotten gains. You can be my moll for a day.”

“You’re not a felon.”

“I am. I converted my employer’s property to my own use, probably grand larceny if you want to get technical. But I don’t care. Come on, Carolyn! Don’t you ever get tired of grunging around, squeezing every penny while your youth withers a little every day?”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” she said. “It sounds like a bad movie.”

“But you don’t go to movies, so how would you know? Putting that aside, you happen to be absolutely right. This is exactly the kind of thing they put in movies, because they want people to feel joy, they want people to identify with beautiful people having fun. And now we’re going to do it, we’re going to imitate art, we’re going to be in our own movie and see what it’s like in real life.”

He could see that she was thinking about it, testing it, as we do with a limb lately out of a cast, gingerly, afraid to let it take the weight. “No,” she said, “and if the money’s burning a hole in your pocket why don’t you just give it all to me? I could live for three months on-”

“No, that’s not the point , Carolyn. The point is experience, for once, not prudence, red meat not ramen fucking noodles!” With that he grabbed her arm and hustled her across 116th Street.

“Let go of my arm!”

“No, if you won’t come along of your own free will, I’m kidnapping you. This is now a major felony.”

“What if I scream?” she said.

“Scream away. The cops will arrest me, and they’ll get the whole old book and manuscript story out of me, and then where will you be? Up shit’s creek is where, instead of dressed in a gorgeous new dress drinking champagne in a fine restaurant. You better choose right now, baby, because here’s the bank.”

He found acocoa silk-and-linen Varvatos jacket on sale for three-fifty and some linen slacks and a nubbly black silk shirt and woven Italian loafers to go with it and she was yelled and chivied into a Prada ruffle-front flowered dress, a matching silk scarf and shoes, a couple of sets of devastating La Perla underwear, and a big panama hat with an upturned brim like an English schoolgirl, all of which did not leave much change from a thousand bucks, and then they had lunch at the Metropolitan Museum and took in the Velázquez show and then went to an afternoon concert at the Frick that he happened to know about because his mom had tickets from her library mafia and had pressed them upon him (go, take a date!), another example of magic, because he’d been carrying the damn things around in his wallet for two weeks with no intention of going and now here it was that very afternoon. So they went, and it was the Concerto Vocale doing a program of Monteverdi sacred music. They sat in folding chairs and were lifted, to the extent their spiritual development then permitted, up to the divine regions.

Crosetti was no stranger to this world, his mother having made sure that American barbarism was not an option for him, but his covert glances at Carolyn revealed a person stunned. Or bored senseless, he really couldn’t tell; and after the concert he was hesitant to ask her which it was. But she said, after one of her long intervals of silence, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the world was really like that, the way that music says it is, just flowing along in beauty?” Crosetti thought it would be exceedingly fine, and used the Hemingway line about it would be pretty to think so, without attribution.

They walked down Madison and he got her into pretending to be not just temporarily rich and to select choice items from the windows of the great boutiques, and when they grew tired of that he steered her down a side street and into the first restaurant they encountered, because he was sure that anyplace they went to would be perfect and this one was, a tiny boîte specializing in provincial French cuisine, where the patron took a liking to the nice young couple and kept sending out exquisite little tastes from the kitchen and recommended the wine, and watched them eat the entrées, beaming; and except that he did not actually break out singing in an accent it was exactly like, as Crosetti noted, The Lady and the Tramp . Which she had actually seen, it turned out, and they talked about that and about other Disney movies, and about the films he loved and the ones he was going to make, stuff he hadn’t ever told anyone, and she talked about beautiful books, their aesthetics, their structure and the cryptic subtle beauties of paper, type, and binding, and how, as she put it, she wanted to make things that people would be handling and loving a thousand years from now.

He had to wave a hundred-dollar bill in the rearview mirror before the cabby would consent to take them to Red Hook, something he had never done before, nor ever dreamed of doing, and they arrived in the dark industrial street, and when the cabby had roared away with his C-note, Crosetti grabbed Carolyn Rolly, spun her around, and planted a good one on her wine-and-coffee-tasting mouth, and she kissed him back. Just like the movies.

Unlike, they did not tear off their clothes as they staggered up the stairs, into the loft, and into bed. Crosetti had always thought this a cliché and unrealistic; such a thing had never happened to him nor to anyone he knew who was not either drunk or cranked to the gills. So it was not going to happen in his movie. Instead, he sighed deeply and she sighed. He held her hand lightly, as if it were a dried blossom as they slowly ascended. They entered the loft, they kissed again. She pulled away and rummaged in a drawer. She’s going to light a candle, he thought, and she did, a simple plumber’s candle, which she stuck carefully in a saucer and set by the bed. Crosetti did not move. Then she looked straight at him, her face set in its lovely grave lines and silently and slowly took off her new clothes in the candlelight, folding them tenderly, which was exactly the way he would have shot it, maybe a little more blue coming in from the window, and as he thought this he laughed.

She asked him why he laughed and he told her, and she told him to undress, that this was the part they didn’t show in the regular movies, this was the fade-out. But after they were in bed together he thought of the horrible uncle and was abashed and too tentative until she used her nails and a harsh urgent command to unleash the animal. They did not practice safe sex, which he considered a little odd, a thought he entertained just before all thinking ceased.