Peaceable Kingdom by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page B

felt so close to Lily in The House of Mirth that when she took opium and died, an odd electric shiver shot across my scalp. We had six Edith Wharton books. When I finished them, nothing else seemed appealing and for a while I felt lost.
    Then I became interested in a man named Lewis and the problem of what to read was solved because now I could read what he read. I put aside the books he returned and later took them home. To start, these were mainly cookbooks with photos in which dusty bits of Mexico or Tuscany peeked disconsolately at you from behind shiny platters of food. The first time I noticed Lewis—one of the summer helpers must have issued his card—he was returning a book he opened to show me a huge plate of black pasta on which some mussels had been fetchingly strewn.
    “Isn’t it wild?” Lewis said. “Isn’t it pornographic?”
    “How do they make it black?” I said.
    “Squid ink,” Lewis said. He looked at me almost challengingly, perhaps because our town was very health-conscious, on strict natural and macrobiotic diets that would probably not include squid ink—though you might ask why not. The previous week, at a potluck Sunday brunch, I got up to help clear the dishes and was scraping grapefruit shells into the compost pail when my hostess said, “Stop!” It wasn’t compost, it was the tofu casserole main course. After that, the black pasta looked as magnificent as the walled Tuscan city behind it, and when I said, “Have you ever made this?” there was a catch in my voice, as if we were gazing not at pasta but at a Fra Angelico fresco.
    Lewis said, “No, I use the pictures for attitude. Then I make up the recipes myself.”
    I wondered whom he cooked for, but didn’t feel I could ask. It crossed my mind he might be gay—but somehow I thought not. After that, I paid attention: Lewis came in about twice a week, often on Mondays and Thursdays; I always wore jeans and sweaters, but on those days I tried to look nice.
    One day a Moroccan cookbook segued into a stack of books about Morocco which I checked out for him, longing to say something that wasn’t obvious (“Interested in Morocco?”) or librarian-like (“Oh, are you planning a trip?”). If he was en route to Marrakech, I didn’t want to know. When he returned the Morocco books I guiltily sneaked them home. That night I sat at my table and read what he’d read, turned the pages he’d turned, till a hot desert wind seemed to draft through the house, and I felt safe and dozed off.
    He chose topics apparently at random, then read systematically: theater memoirs, histories of the Manhattan Project, Victorian social mores, the Dada avant-garde, Conrad, Apollinaire, Colette, Stephen Jay Gould. I read right behind him, with a sense of deep, almost physical connection, doomed and perverse, perverse because to read the same words he’d read felt like sneaking into his room while he slept, doomed because it was secret. How could I tell him that, with so many books in the library, I, too, just happened to pick up The Panda’s Thumb ?
    No matter what else Lewis borrowed, there were always a couple of art books. He renewed a huge book on the Sistine Chapel three times and when I finally got it home I touched the angels’ faces and ran one finger down the defeated curve of the prophet’s shoulders. He often had paint on his clothes, and when I’d convinced myself that it wasn’t too obvious or librarian-like, I asked if he was an artist. He hesitated, then went to the magazine shelf and opened a three-month-old ArtNews to a review of his New York show. There was a photo of a room decorated like a shrine with tinfoil and bric-a-brac and portraits of the dead in pillowy plastic frames. He let me hold it a minute, then took it and put it back on the shelf. I was charmed that he’d given me it and then gotten shy; other guys would have gone on to their entire resumes. I wanted to say that I understood now how his work was like his reading,