Writers & Lovers(57)

In the middle of the reading, my heart starts beating way too fast. My hands and feet feel swollen, like my pulse is inflating them. There are three people to my left and four to my right and we are packed in so tight my knees are pressed against the back of the chair in front of me. Getting out will create an upheaval. And all I can think of is getting out. I’m like a bag of panic held in by a thin sac of skin. I clench and unclench discreetly in my metal chair that has come up from the basement.

When he’s done, people smash their hands together, and it sounds like an audience of hundreds. He steps away from the music stand and sits at the signing table. A line quickly forms, and people begin gushing one by one. He moves them along quickly, as he did on Avon Hill when he was a stranger to me.

I drift over to the wall of fiction. Annie does have a good collection. Many of my favorites are there: The Evening of the Holiday, Beloved, Independent People, Troubles, Housekeeping, Woodcutters. In college, my litmus test for a bookstore was Hamsun’s Hunger. It’s there, too. They calm me, all these names on spines. I feel such tenderness toward them. I brush my fingers across the row of Woolf novels. I don’t own many books anymore. I shipped my books to Spain but I couldn’t afford to send them back. They’re still at Paco’s. I doubt I’ll see them again.

There’s a woman hanging back from the table, watching Oscar with a small smile. When the last person in line moves away, her smile grows and changes her whole face.

‘Vera!’ Oscar stands up and comes around the table and hugs her tight and they’re laughing. She points to something on the cover of his book and they laugh harder. She’s around his age, in black jeans and pale leather boots, the posture of a dance teacher.

We walk to a bistro down the street. Oscar slips his arm through mine and slows us down a few steps behind Annie and Vera.

‘So,’ he says.

‘You were great. You’re a pro. You had them eating out of your hand.’

‘I want to have you eating out of my hand.’

‘I was.’

‘What’s wrong? Are you nervous?’

The boys are sleeping at Oscar’s parents’ house. The plan is for me to stay overnight at his house.

‘I don’t really sleep.’

‘Good. I have no plans to sleep, either.’

‘No,’ I say, but Vera is holding the door of the bistro open for us, and I can’t explain.

We are put at a small round table, Oscar on my left and Vera on my right. Annie is across from me, but I don’t exist to her. She swivels back and forth from Oscar to Vera, pounding them with questions.

After a few rounds, Vera turns to me. ‘What are you interested in?’

I look at her blankly, and she laughs. ‘I’m just trying to subvert the where-do-you-live-what-do-you-do line of inquiry.’

‘Well, that’s refreshing. I am interested in—’ Feeling normal. Not having cancer. Getting out of debt. ‘Books, I guess.’

‘What do you read?’

‘I love Shirley Hazzard and—’

‘I love her.’ She glares at me.

‘She’s my personal god.’

‘I never meet people who have read her.’

‘They actually had The Evening of the Holiday back there at the store.’

‘My favorite.’

‘Mine, too. The glove.’

‘The glove!’ She puts her hand on my arm.

We compare other writer loves, exchanging names and bouncing in agreement and writing down the few that don’t overlap.

When she asks me if I write, I nod apologetically. Another wannabe. She must be surrounded by them. But she seems pleased. She asks me what I’m working on and I tell her and she asks all sorts of questions about it and I wind up telling her about my mother and Cuba and the long list of questions I was keeping at the back of my notebook to ask her when she got back from Chile and how she died instead. She puts her hand back on my arm and says she’s so sorry and she means it. She’s one of the ones who knows. She says her mother died six years ago, also suddenly, also with no goodbye. ‘For years the only sentence I could write that meant anything to me was: “She slipped on the ice and died.” I don’t know how you finished that novel. Have you read it, Oscar?’

‘Read what?’

‘Casey’s book?’

‘She won’t let me near it.’

Probably true. Though he’s never asked.

Our food comes, and Oscar asks Vera about New York and the friends they have in common and the editor they once shared until the editor tried to write his own book and had a full psychotic break.

Vera leaves before dessert. She’s driven more than an hour to Oscar’s reading and has to fly to London tomorrow for another leg of her tour.

‘I loved her,’ I tell Oscar on the way home.

‘You two really hit it off.’

‘She likes you.’

‘We’ve known each other a long time.’

‘She likes you likes you.’

He chuckles and does not deny it.

‘Have you guys ever—’

‘No,’ he smiles. ‘Not really.’ He feels me looking at him. ‘There was some kissing. Years ago. In our twenties.’ I picture him giving her his little pecks on a couch in the seventies. ‘She was too serious for me.’