Trust Exercise(47)

After the sun had dipped under the opposite buildings, the inside of the store looked brighter, and Karen could see all the way to the lectern and chairs without standing too close to the glass. Now she stood leaning on the streetlight, again knowing that this way she couldn’t be seen from inside, where, finally, a pale thin man with a curtain of hair in his face came to the lectern, spoke briefly, and slumped out of view. Then Sarah came to the lectern. A curtain of hair fell in her face also; her hair was smooth and dark like an expensive piece of furniture. In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could think of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies are theirs. Sarah seemed to have learned that expensive self-care also proved that her body was hers. Every inch of her surface was polished. It couldn’t be an accident that her side-parted hair was just slightly too short to remain anchored out of her face every time her right hand, in a demure little movement, tucked it behind her right ear. She tucked; and it fell out, eclipsing her face. She tucked; it fell out. Karen wondered if this tic was as conspicuous to the people inside, who could hear Sarah reading, or if the sound of her voice made the gesture less noticeable.

In time the sound of applause was faintly audible through the glass. Then apparently there were questions. Sarah stopped tilting her head toward the lectern and looked straight at her audience so that the curtain of hair kept itself to one side and didn’t need to be tucked anymore. Sarah listened intently, nodded, spoke, and smiled a few times. She looked less self-conscious and pretentious, more relaxed and intelligent. Her smile, which had always been one of her best features, also seemed somehow improved, like her hair. Sarah had one of those faces that, when she wasn’t making a particular expression, tended to look preoccupied, worried, or mad. You couldn’t know what, if any, thoughts were storming across her brain at any given moment, but a lot of the time it seemed as if you could see them, and that they were hostile. Back in high school certain teachers, the ones with thin skins and quick tempers, had always been telling Sarah to wipe that look off her face, which seemed to startle Sarah or injure her feelings—her eyes would widen and sparkle as if they were wet—so that you wondered if “that look” possibly stood for nothing, not hostile thoughts but no thoughts. When Sarah smiled, all this uncertainty about her thoughts disappeared. But she didn’t smile often or at least didn’t used to.

After a second burst of applause people started leaving their chairs and milling around again. The pale thin man led Sarah to a table that was covered with a white cloth and tidy stacks of books and Sarah sat down behind the table with a self-conscious attitude of being very closely watched doing this ordinary thing of sitting down and so trying to do it as if she wasn’t in fact being watched, which only made her seem more as if she was performing—performing modesty, just as when she kept tucking her hair. Someone handed Sarah a Sharpie and a line formed in front of the table of people who wanted their book to be signed, and Sarah vanished from view behind the line of people awaiting their moment with her. At this point it might make you impatient to hear me change my mind again, but the truth is that after deciding not to sit in the audience I had never decided quite how to approach. I guess I’d thought of her leaving the store the same way she’d gone in, and the two of us there on the sidewalk. The sun had finally gone down, it was night and the sickly orange glow from the streetlight made the sidewalk feel private and maybe too private. I hadn’t planted myself in her audience. I hadn’t broken the fourth wall for my own satisfaction, but the line was a different arrangement. It promised each person a private encounter, but under the rules of encounters in public. Such as, everyone smiles and nobody runs. All these thoughts made up a lengthy hesitation during which everyone in the bookstore who was also hesitating about getting in line, or who was buying a book before getting in line, had now gotten in line so that when Karen entered the bookstore and got in the line, she was last. For a moment the store’s brightness, blinding after the side walk’s dim glow, made the decision to come inside seem like an error. Often the experience of our simplest perceptions, for example the feeling of blindness that comes from walking into a very bright space after standing for an hour in the dark, leads to an inaccurate thought—I’ve made a mistake—which leads to a feeling—anxiety—which reinforces the thought. One of Karen’s favorite authors, because although Karen doesn’t really read fiction, or much of anything that a store like Skylight Books stocks, Karen reads all the time and possesses some real expertise in a handful of favorite subjects, wrote a book that, once Karen had read it, enabled her to analyze her feeling-states as clearly as if they were passing through prisms, that didn’t just make them visible but broke them down into all their components. Once you can do that, it’s a challenge to not view other people as blind. Previous experience with the condescension of religious belief helps somewhat in correcting overestimations of yourself. Categorizing in ways that make sense from the gut, putting like things with like, helps somewhat, and being able to do that is why Karen’s good at her job. While waiting in the line, which was completely made up of people pointed intently at Sarah, people who refused to even glance at each other because they didn’t want to believe there might be someone else who had the same special connection with Sarah they’d formed just by reading her book, Karen had plenty of time to get out her own copy of Sarah’s book. It still had Karen’s bookmark stuck in it at page 131, commemorating the point at which the end had come, in Karen’s opinion. If Karen, as the reader will learn, had no problem closing the door on her mother when her mother attempted to visit, Karen certainly had no problem closing the covers on a book that featured her mother but purged Karen in most ways that mattered.