Book Lover. Karen Mack
crepe blouse, and a heavy, metal dragon on a long, frayed shoelace around her neck. There is an innocence about her that belies her appearance and her breathy little girl voice is punctuated with expletives like “asshole” and “fuck you.” Such a demeanor is particularly jarring in a setting like McKenzie’s, but her coworkers clearly regard her with respect, and I’ve heard she knows every female writer who has written anything of note in the last two hundred years.
I can’t tell if this fetching social misfit has rebellion on her mind or she just doesn’t want to reveal how adorable she is beneath all that black smudged kohl and bare skin. This girl definitely has a past, but she giggles like a kid with a wad of Bazooka in her mouth, and it is hard not to follow her around with my eyes. If she asked my opinion, I’d tell her to comb her hair, but that would probably be it. Her hair is the only thing that bothers me, oddly enough. I guess it’s “the look,” but it’s all messy and tangled in teased, rat’s-nest clumps and soft, mushy, wadded fluff. It seems as if she has purposely gelled it to have the appearance of “I just slept in a Greyhound bus station and was attacked by a band of homeless men who clawed at my clothes and completely ruined my hair.” You couldn’t get a comb through it if you tried, and then it would be an extremely painful process.
Maybe that’s the point that girls like Sara are tacitly addressing. Hair is beside the point—a time-consuming, unfulfilling way to go off on another fucking tangent, rather than getting on with your life, which leads me right back to where I am at the moment, roaming around the bookstore on a dead afternoon wondering how to approach Fred.
He is now busy with a frazzled-looking businessman who asks in a tense voice where the CliffsNotes section is located. Fred points toward the rear of the store and then asks him, “Which book?”
“The Scarlet Letter,” the man replies. “My kid’s hysterical. He just wrote a five-page paper and then somehow deleted it and it’s due tomorrow.”
Sara gives the guy a commiserating look. “Tell your son that Thomas Carlyle gave his only copy of The French Revolution to his friend to read and the guy’s maid thought it was garbage and lit the fire with it. Carlyle had a few rotten nights, but then he wrote the thing all over again.”
Fred looks at her in amusement. “Sara, I’m sure that’s going to make the kid feel much better.”
Then he turns to me and smiles. “Oh, hey, how are you? What can I help you with today?”
The first thing that pops into my head is that he recognizes me. The second thing is that the man who barbecued Carlyle’s manuscript was the writer and critic John Stuart Mill, and he ended up giving the book a rave review. However, instead of belaboring the point, I consider telling him I’ve just finished a 675-page historical thriller on seventeenth-century Oxford, England, by Iain Pears called An Instance of the Fingerpost and that I have been totally unsuccessful in getting anyone else in my life to read it. The book is a kind of Dickensian whodunit set in Restoration England that begins with an unexplained death in a small college town and builds up into a revelation that has to do with grand events in England and the world. It is intellectual, original, and chock-full of smoke and mirrors, but, unfortunately, has quotes by Cicero and Francis Bacon in the beginning, which definitely put off several of my less esoteric friends. It also has a cast of twenty-seven characters in the back that went on for several pages and includes names like Charles II, Christopher Wren, and John Locke. Even the name of the novel seems to be a deterrent, although I once explained to my sister that the title was a delicious part of the whole mystery.
“Delicious?” she sniffed. She actually was somewhat interested until I told her that the narrator seems clear-minded and sympathetic at first, until three hundred or so pages later when you learn that he’s fucking bonkers and is writing from the seventeenth-century English version of the booby hatch. She gave me a pained look and responded, “Who has time to read books like that?” implying, of course, that I do.
Fred is waiting for my response and I hesitate. I don’t usually have the desire, as so many pious, voracious readers do, to show off how inherently superior my literary tastes are, but I weigh whether I will make an exception in this case. Then I change my mind. I quickly ask if he knows of a sequel to the Pears book. He tells me that one just came out and it’s quite good.
“Not as good as the earlier book but an easier read. I’ll go get it.”
He returns empty-handed and says, “We must be all out.” I decide to order it (a reason to give him my name and phone number), and as I’m heading out the door, feeling pretty good about our encounter, he calls my name. “Hey, Dora,” he teases. I turn back expectantly and he says, “Do you want to pay for those or what?”
I realize that I’m clutching a bunch of books that I meant to purchase along with the Iain Pears. Shit. Shit. Shit. I’m an idiot. I blurt out, “I bet you think I’m one of those screwed-up kleptomaniac housewives who steals T-shirts to get her husband’s attention.” I give him a big lip-glossy smile. He looks at me like I’m insane. Nice, Dora.
“It is with books as with men; a very
small number play a great part.”
∼ Voltaire (1694–1778) ∼
Normally in my neighborhood it’s gridlock at this hour. There are five exclusive private schools within a four-block radius and Sunset Boulevard is jammed with Range Rovers, BMWs, Mercedeses, and Hummers, many sporting vanity license plates that say things like “US2BHIS.” In between, people in exercise clothes and leather Pumas hang out in the local Starbucks, power walk, bike along San Vicente Boulevard’s tree-lined bike path, or shop in specialized boutiques that sell hundred-dollar tie-dyed T-shirts. Palmer used to marvel at the large numbers of people who spend their days with no visible means of support. “We could be in Florida,” he said, “except nobody’s old.”
I’m heading home when I get a second wind and decide to take a slight detour. It’s one of those spur-of-the-moment things that you can’t seem to explain. Especially after what can only be described as a seriously awkward moment. No. Inept would be a better word. I think about what I said to Fred and then what I should have said. Then I go over it again in a different scenario. It turns over and over in my mind like an annoying melody that I can’t get out of my head. First I say this, then he says that. Oh, this is so ludicrous I have to stop. It’s a comment on my state of mind that I’m even analyzing this at all.
So, instead, here I am, sitting in my car like an undercover agent, while I wait for Palmer, my second husband, to emerge from the gated house that he and I shared for five years. This was our oasis, at least for a while. The house is one of those hybrid architectural buildings reminiscent of Old Hollywood. Part Italian villa, part Spanish hacienda. When we first moved in, I had it painted a faded terra-cotta, which is just now starting to look authentic. The driveway is lush with impatiens and lined with the requisite palm trees. I park on the narrow windy road in front of our house, my car wedged between a crisp navy van advertising Bel Air Plumbing and a battered wooden gardener’s truck. In Bel Air, you’re either a guest and you’re parked inside the gates, or you’re service personnel and you’re outside the gates, an L.A. version of Upstairs, Downstairs.
Then there’s that in-between category: personal trainers, yoga instructors, dog walkers, and masseuses. These people are often privy to the codes of their clients’ alarm systems and a few end up living gratis in the guesthouse. I remember right before I moved out last year, my neighbor’s masseuse, a rather sensitive young man named Roy, was held up at gunpoint by the now-infamous Bel Air Burglar as he entered their gate. Their dog, an imported German shepherd, sat immobile on his bed as the robbery was taking place. The dog was trained in Frankfurt and only understood commands like sitzen and attacke!
I reach behind me and grab one of the six books I had thrown into the car. One thing I’m glad about: I’m never bored and I never mind waiting—anywhere.