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21st December 2019
03:00pm GMT
I picked one up. “What are these?”
“So I don’t hurt the books,” she explained.
“I want you up front,” I countered. “This is just a basic job, mostly stocking shelves, manning the register.”
“Okay,” she said. “But did you know that there are copies of Alice in Wonderland that are worth over a million dollars?”
I laughed. “I hate to break your heart, but we don’t have Alice downstairs.”
“Downstairs?” she asked. “Is that where you keep the special books?”
I wanted to place my hand on the small of her back and lead her down to the cage, where the special books are preserved, boxed, saved. I wanted to strip her down and lock us inside and have her. But I was patient. I gave her a W-9 and a pen.
“You know, I could help you go yard-sale-ing for old books,” she said. “You never know what you’re going to find at yard sales.”
I smiled. “Only if you promise not to call it yard-sale-ing.”
Amy smiled. The way she saw it, if she was going to work here, she was going to make a dent. She wanted us to travel uptown to estate sales and hunt library clearances and jam our hands into empty boxes on the street. She wanted to work together and this is how you get to know someone so well, so fast. You descend into musty vacated rooms together and you rush outside together to gulp the fresh air and laugh and agree that the only thing to do now is get a drink. We became a team.
An old woman pushing a walker looks up at me. I smile. She points at the violets. “You’re a good boy.”
I am. I thank her and keep walking.
Amy and I started dating a few months ago while we were on the Upper East Side in a dead man’s parlor. She tugged on the lapel of the navy blazer she had bought for me—five bucks—at a tag sale. She pleaded with me to drop seven hundred on a signed, wrinkled edition of The Easter Parade.
“Amy,” I whispered. “Yates isn’t big right now and I don’t see a resurgence on the horizon.”
“But I love him,” she begged. “This book means everything to me.”
This is women; they are emotional. You can’t do business like this but you also can’t look at Amy with her big blue eyes and her long blond hair out of a Guns N’ Roses song and say no to her.
“What can I do to change your mind?” she wheedled.
An hour later, I was the owner of an overpriced Easter Parade and Amy was sucking my dick in a Starbucks bathroom in Midtown and this was more romantic than it sounds because we liked each other. This was not a blowjob; this was fellatio, my friends. She stood and I pulled her boyfriend jeans to the floor and I stopped short. I knew she didn’t like to shave; her legs were often bristly and she’s all about water conservation. But I did not expect a bush. She kissed me.
“Welcome to the jungle.”
This is why I smile as I walk and this is how you get happy. Amy and I, we are sexier than Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo on the cover of The Freewheelin’ and we are smarter than Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz in Vanilla Sky. We have a project: We are amassing copies of Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s one of our favorite books and we reread it together. She underlined her favorite parts with a Sharpie and I told her to use a more delicate pen.
“I’m not delicate,” she said. “I hate delicate.”
Amy is a Sharpie; she’s passionate. She fucking loves Portnoy’s Complaint and I want to possess all the dark yellow copies ever made and keep them in the basement so that only Amy and I can touch them. I’m not supposed to overstock a title, but I like fucking Amy near our yellow wall of books. Philip Roth would approve. She laughed when I told her that and said we should write him a letter. She has an imagination, a heart.
My phone rings. It’s Gleason Brothers Electricians about the humidifier but it can wait. I have an e-mail from BuzzFeed about some list of cool indie bookstores and that can wait too. Everything can wait when you have love in your life.
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