One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(29)

“So am I,” said the visitor, tapping his lips where a pipe would be.





The Beautiful Girl in the Bookstore





She loved the kind of books you could buy in stores that also sold things.

Her favorite store, which was only two or three blocks away from where she and Sophie lived that year, depending on how you walked, was full of books, and it was also full of things.

Sometimes in the afternoon, when she and her boyfriend ran out of things to talk about, which was often enough, they went to the bookstore.

He looked at the books. She looked at everything.

Some of the things that the store had: oversize fashion magazines from the 1940s and ’50s; vintage maps from back when states were just scraggly lines, just guesses; railroad spikes that had been made into bottle openers. There was a magnifying glass built out of a knotted clunk of iron with a foggy lens that magically made even the most serious face, her boyfriend’s face, for example, evaporate into a vague and bloated and goofy smile that never failed to make her laugh.

Things like that.

“How good does this book smell,” she said, pulling a paperback from a shelf. “Like dust on a bottle of vanilla.” She turned it to read the front. “Salinger! I love him. Four dollars. Perfect!”

She always thought how much better the store would look if they arranged the books at least a little bit by color. She only brought this up once, the first time she thought it, because he hated that idea, a lot. But sometimes when no one was looking, she would shuffle one or two books in that direction. And she was right, it did look better that way.

“You know what would make this store perfect?”

He said he didn’t.

“A photo booth!”

He smiled but said that he didn’t agree.

In the end, this one wasn’t for her. She waited until a morning fog of dishonesty settled over them one day, and she disappeared into it. She loved him, but she never quite got over the suspicion that she was just his favorite thing in the bookstore.





MONSTER: The Roller Coaster





The almost-legendary artist Christo was on the verge of completing a dream that he had held close through his entire career: to design an American roller coaster inspired by nothing less profound than life itself—life, the ultimate roller coaster.

Today was an important one for Christo. It was the day that he and his financiers would observe the reactions of the most consequential people who would ever ride the ride: the twelve persons selected at random for a small focus group.

Each member of the focus group took a seat on the wrong side of a wall of one-way glass. (Ah, or was it the right side, when their opinions mattered so!) They were seated along the safely rounded rim of a lacquered oval table, each behind a placard that identified him or her by a bold capital number. (Did numbers have capitals? These certainly seemed to be!) To Christo, the twelve souls who convened in this dark room on this beautiful day appeared to be a thrillingly, even transcendently average-looking group. But he was careful, even in the privacy of his own mind, not to condescend to them in any way: these twelve were representatives of those whose approval he sought the most, and it would be an unfair and ultimately unsatisfying hedge on his hopes if he were to diminish them now. After all, who better than they to judge an amusement park roller coaster? Who better than they to judge life?


“All right, everyone,” said Tom, the focus group leader. “What did people think?”

“I didn’t like all the ups and downs,” said 1.

“I wanted more ups and downs,” said 2.

“Why did the family part at the beginning end so abruptly?” asked 3.

“I hated the family part!” said 10.

“Also, why were there two of them?” asked 4. “There was that track that took you out of the family at the beginning, and it was so exciting and sudden but it lasted like two seconds and led you right to another part that ended up almost exactly the same as the first one.”

“It wasn’t exactly the same,” clarified 5. “But yeah, it had a lot of the same dynamics.”

“I liked how we kept going in circles,” said 8.

“I actually felt pretty sick from all those loops during the ride,” said 1.

“Me too,” said 12. “But when you’re not right in the middle of it, and you just take in all the patterns, it looks really beautiful.”

“Yeah,” said 10. “When you look back at the end, and you see all the people way back at the beginning, looking so small and everything, about to go on those same loops you just went on? That’s really cool. You forget that when you were on that part of the ride, you were actually throwing up all over the place.”

“Did people like certain parts of the ride more than others?”

“I thought the first half was more fun, but the second half was more interesting,” said 9.

“Yeah,” said 12. “Somehow, in the second half, it felt like I was actually driving the car I was in. Even though of course we were just along for the ride, same as always.”

“Exactly,” said 9.

Exactly! thought Christo.

“It got really boring for a long time,” said 1, 2, 8, and 10.

“Should it be shorter?”