The Bookstore by Deborah Meyler Read Free Book Online Page A

fingers. Let go, Esme, let go.”
    I shut my eyes, and let go.
    Afterwards, he says, “That was good?”
    I nod, still with my eyes shut. I cannot open them, like a child who hides from itself by shutting its own eyes.
    “Then why are you crying?”
    I shake my head, shrug. He will probably put it down to an overabundance of ecstatic sexual pleasure.
    “Esme?”
    “Yes?”
    “My turn.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    W hen I wake up, six hours later, I feel better, fresher. I have a grapefruit for breakfast, and as I drink my tea, I think that I mustn’t have much faith in Mitchell if I don’t even contemplate telling him. He said that thing in the diner about loving me—what if he does love me? If I have a termination now, and we stay together, if we got married—would I have to keep this a secret forever? If we were to have a baby in the future, he would think that child was our first, while I would always know it was our second. It would be starting off with a dishonesty. And what if he is glad that this one is here?
    I should tell him.
    His voice is hazy with sleep when I call. “It’s seven thirty A.M . on a Saturday. I could trade you in, you know . . .”
    I ask him to meet me in the Conservatory Garden in an hour.
    “Let me check,” he says. I wait while he pretends to be looking at all his Saturday-morning appointments. “Yeah, that should be fine. But I’ve got to go to the gym after that.”
    I think of that garden, at the very top of Central Park, because I went there once before, in high summer, when I first got to New York. Then, there were roses clambering up trellises and rambling over hedges, blue violets and pink-edged daisies tumbling fromthe flower borders onto the paths, a fountain where Pan played the pipes, and another where the three Graces danced, delphiniums and hollyhocks aiming too high, probably a bee with honeyed thigh . . . It was a pastoral idyll of a place; there was the sound of sap rising, there might even have been a shepherd or two. It is possible that I am remembering through rose-colored spectacles, of course, but roses there certainly were, scented and dazzling and abundant.
    Although summer is long gone, every season is concentrated in New York—the firework profusion of the summer flowers will have given way to a golden autumn.
    I walk along the sinuous path along the top of the park. It is a gnarled day, nearly November, dull with white skies, not the golden autumn you might imagine for New York. There are leaves, heaped in piles, but they are touched with a baser metal than gold. There is no wind to send them skipping, no energy, no anything.
    I pass a playground, with a couple of children playing in it, adults in drear attendance. The play seems desultory, as if they would rather be inside, and have been brought out “for their own good.”
    Around Harlem Meer, a couple of people are sitting on the benches, clutching plastic bags and gazing out at the steely water. A little while later, I reach the Conservatory Garden. I am much too early.
    The garden looks like a black and white photograph of that other time. The three Graces are still there, but in summer, the sun and water and flowers lent them life; you could almost hear their laughter as they danced. Now the fountains do not flow, and the dancing girls are leaden. The flower beds that not so many weeks ago were an insane acid trip of color are now bare, and the soil, invisible before in the explosion of petals, is now as gray as boiled mince, and raked smooth. It begins to rain, one or two drops, and then gives up even on that.
    The Pan statue with the girl is similarly wintry. The fountain,which in summer fell sparkling from the girl’s bowl into a jostle of air-blue water lilies, now dribbles into the drained pool, soaking the few leaves that are stuck to the concrete bottom.
    It isn’t of Pan with a maiden at all; there is a flagstone that says it is the characters in The Secret Garden. This feels like a setback. Pan was