The Bookseller by Matt Cohen

Author:Matt Cohen [Cohen, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36743-3
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 1997-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

WHEN Martha left I was alone in the store. But in a bookstore there is always too much to do. Especially when there are no customers. You are standing in the middle of the store. Adjusting shelves, sorting out a couple of cartons of newly received books. Your hands are working. You are thinking official thoughts. All of human history and evolution have been required to lead up to this incredible triumph of efficiency. Meanwhile you’re not there. Without planning or wanting it you’ve dropped into another universe.

So it was that first afternoon back. I was rearranging books in the drama section; in bookstores the alphabet is always under stress. But though I was officially occupied, the smell of the books was reminding me—as it always had—of the inexplicable slightly musty odour that rose from Judith’s skin.

Now, standing at the drama shelf, I was bathing in the memory of Judith’s skin. Its odour, the way her bones made their vulnerable way to its surface, its long silky racecourses, the places where it thickened, the sharply defined tan lines across her upper arms and the way, north of the tanline above her breasts, a few freckles dotted her sternum like tiny lost islands from summer. I can remember everything about Judith’s body except how it actually felt to be inside it. The voluptuous mutual discovery of constant need, fear, satisfaction.

Desire: a sharp prolonged sensation brought on by the lack of Judith.

Desire: the need to complete myself by losing myself in Judith.

Desire: the secret glue of memory.

Desire: the desire for Judith had led me strange places. It even led me, I will admit, to a completely different desire—one common to many bookstore employees surrounded by great shifting seas of text. This came to me in Kingston. On the one hand, I was without Judith and missing her. On the other, I was surrounded by novels, poems, discourses on subjects real and imaginary, centuries of travel books to countries that no longer exist. The most modest set of covers contains twenty thousand words. And that is a very slim volume. Even a Harlequin Romance is longer. To say nothing of the multi-hundred-thousand-word barn-burners that dominate the best-seller list. And yet—a few words in the right place. Judith hypnotized by Juliet’s romantic lament. Judith, yes. In my case, she was the decisive factor. Judith that first day, her too-white skin and bell-like voice cracking open the store like a time-line from the future. Where more whiteness would be displayed. Skin, snow, the glowing emptiness of the night. The hum of tires, the scraping of shovels, the long white limousines of the pimps with their windows, their slamming doors, one man turning to the other in the middle of the night and saying “that hot bitch”.

To ease the burden of that desire. To take that desire and put it outside the room of my mind. To turn that desire into an inspired little trickster doing its tricks on a page instead of in my blood.

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