Clemence tops up her glass. “We’re talking spiritually,” she insists. “And it didn’t do a thing. And I’ve had time to reflect now.” She takes a sip. “Ithink what Ineed is a little bit of drama. You know the way it goes when youstart something with somebody at work?” She’d met Toad when they worked together in the student union pub a thousand years ago. “And all of a sudden, you’re excited about going to work? Even if nothing ever happens there, because it would be inappropriate.” (Not true. She had got it on with Toad in the room in the back among boxes of beer nuts.) “And there’s thisfrisson.” She feels strange saying this word out loud, because it’s one of those words she’s only seen written down, and Clemence can’t quite remember if it means what she thinks it means, but she’s thinking of fizz. She’s watching the bubbles in Jillian’s glass again, and the sun’s nearly gone.
“Everyday life just made a little bit more exciting—and it’s more about anticipation than anything coming to fruition. Idon’t want the fruit, Iwant the blossom.” Perhaps she’s making no sense at all. “But Ihave this problem. Imean, I’ve had it, where Ialways take the fruit. Ican’t say no to fruit.” This is all getting a bit Book of Genesis. “So maybe it’s best if the fruit is a little bit rotten? Or at least pale and dyspeptic. An unsuitable attachment, something inconsequential. Something that wouldn’t even get written into a book.”
“How is your book going, anyway?” Naomi asks. Ever since Clemence had mused about writing one, no one will let her forget it.
She counters, “When are you going to be getting around to having children?”
Naomi retreats.
“So you want drama,” says Jillian. “What you’re saying is that you’re bored.”
“And not horny.” Naomi has emptied another bottle of wine. There’s row of them now. Mrs. Yeung is going to see them in the recycling and arrive at conclusions—that Clemence has been entertaining visitors, that Clemence is a lush.
“Oh, I’m horny,” says Clemence. “But Ilike that part. I’d honestly thought that my sex drive died, but now it’s restarted, and I’d thought it never would. It feels so good to be yearning. Ithought I’d never yearn again. But I’m good with being slow but steady. It’s like cultivating a flame. No, Ijust want an object. Is that wrong?”
“Objectification?” asks Jillian. “Isn’t that supposed to be wrong?”
“Not when it’s a man,” affirms Naomi. “That’s like reverse racism. It’s nonsense. Isay you’re allowed to make an object out of any man you like. So venture forth. You’re only righting the balance.”
“It’s like she’s an authority,” says Clemence to Jillian.
“As long as you like what she’s saying,” says Jillian.
“I’m saying I’m ready for the cake course now,” says Naomi, and Clemence has to haul herself back up to her feet, which is even harder to do with the world spinning.
So this is howa woman builds a life, in bits and pieces. You realize there are these little things you’re missing—a box of matches, a roll of tape, Q-tips, a needle and thread—and you head out to buy them, many of these available in Crampton Goldberg’s little grocery store where you only have to blow the dust off. You pick up a chive plant andput the pot on the deck, snipping odd fronds for seasoning or garnish. You go running once, and only once, but your shoes give you blisters, so you purchase a box of Band-Aids from the pharmacy, along with a small first aid kit since you’re already there. Clemence finally buys a can opener, and also a beautiful yellow teapot from the potter at the market in the park because she’d been drinking her tea cup by cup, and the kettle was working overtime. She likes a pot so it can linger, lasting halfway through the morning. She is working on her index, for a biography of Alvin Puddicombe, an obscure mid-twentieth-century regional poet, fuelled by rage and alcohol. He used to beat up his girlfriends. Puddicombe always had girlfriends—what is the matter with women?
Clemence sits at the desk she has made at her kitchen table, and contemplates the logistics of indexing. That she has the power to give this book a kind of shape: Puddicombe, Alvin: Impotence. Improprieties. Infidelities. Intoxication. Where did the impulse come from to fashion such men into legends?
When the first pot of tea is finished, she puts away that work and opens another file. She has been writing. If anybody asks her how that book is going, she still refuses to answer, because she doesn’t want to jinx it, but at least it’s going now, words on a page. “So this is how a woman builds a life, in bits and pieces,” she writes. She never knew how much a box of matches would matter. When she’d been married, she’d had all the material goods a person could desire. Once upon a time, Clemence had been co-owner of six coffee grinders, which is hard tobelieve now, when going out to buy a simple yellow pencil encompasses an errand. Leading to the need for a sharpener, of course, but she can borrow one from Doug, the agoraphobic artist who lives downstairs. He makes her stand in his doorway sharpening the pencil to a point, the shavings trailing on the floor. He tells her the mess doesn’t matter.
It feels good to be creating, sitting at the table, pencil in hand. To be enduring, too—the notion that soon she will have spent an entire season here. Soon the summer will be over, fall will begin, and Clemence will discover all kinds of new things about her new home. How the leaves change and when they’ll let go of their branches, and how the light will hit her bed in the morning when those branches are bare, and maybe it will be cool enough that she’ll have to acquire another blanket for her bed, but at the moment that seems impossible, far more likely that the heat of the summer will continue forever, just the way that Clemence, only a year ago, couldn’t have imagined a world beyond her old life with Toad.
Nine
On Thursdays, Clemence goes to the bookstore and talks to Toby. She doesn’t tell the people in her life that this is what she’s there for, but she lets everybody know that she’s found another job. Her work at the bookstore too is like the box of matches and the needle with thread, another item gathered. The entire block owned by Crampton Goldberg is transformed into someplace different now that Clemence knows its history, and she feels connected to it. This is how a woman builds a life, and she’s sorting the books. Mrs. Yeung’s church is looking for donations for their upcoming winter jumble sale, and books are always a big seller, she says, a bit of information that makes Clemence feel good about the world for once.
She is performing the same tasks at the bookstore that she has been doing in her own life, establishing order, making space where everything was crowded before.Cluttering the aisles are boxes of books that have never been opened, and these are mainly used as furniture when a rare customer sits down on them to browse the shelves. Clemence opens one box and finds that the books inside have literally turned to dust, bindings made redundant as the pages disintegrated, but not all the boxes are all as bad as that. In another, she finds vintage editions of V. C. Andrews novels, spines barely cracked. And there’s one stuffed with all the copies ofThe Pilot’s Wifethat she’d been wondering about on her first visit.
She tells Crampton about Mrs. Yeung and the church jumble sale, reminding her that there are more books within the walls of the shop than she could hope to sell. Crampton consents to donate some of the overflow, though partly in the interest of making the shop into less of a fire trap.
“And you’re talking to Toby?” she asks. Toby is hiding again, and Clemence will have to head into the maze to find him. To talk to him. She’s promised Crampton Goldberg, who insists he needs the company.
But Toby does not agree. Clemence finds him upstairs on a ladder with a roll of duct tape, because there’s a hole near the ceiling where mice are getting in, leaving droppings among the microwave cookbooks. No doubt if he slipped up there, that delicate man would wind up in traction, and Clemence resists the flutter in her person at the thought of Toby tied up.
The tape, she suggests to him, might not be the most effective arrangement. Surely mice could chew through such a barrier? And Toby welcomes her feedback as muchas he appreciates anything she offers him, which is pretty much not at all.
She stays by him, not to talk, because she has no desire to be a distraction from the matter at hand, to send him toppling, but because if it happened, she’d be able to call an ambulance right away. Breathing a sigh of relief as he climbs down the ladder, returning to safety, but then he trips over a box and she catches him. He lands right in her arms.
Toby is more substantial than she’d imagined—and yes, she’d imagined plenty. This is what a person does with their unsuitable attachments after all, idle fantasies, but in these, it was always more like holding a feather, because he’s so slight, but the reality of holding him is that he has all these sharp angles, shoulders and elbows. He has a pimple on his lip, the very worst place for such a thing. Clemence is close enough to note the patchy way his eyebrows are connected, and oh yes, this is intimacy. And the way he has entirely submitted, his whole body gone slack, Clemence wondering how he’s managed to lose consciousness without hitting his head.
But Toby is dramatic—after just a few shifts together, she knows this. Although he’s not an actor, but a set painter, an artist who had to give up the trade, he’d explained to her, when he developed an allergy to the paint. He’d completed a college diploma, but there’s nothing he can do with his training now. And after wasting years on futile dreams, Toby is resentful of anyone whose achievements vaguely resemble success, Clemence discerning that he finds her own presence only vaguely tolerable becausehe gets to feel superior when he’s with her—a strange and novel experience for him—being, after all, the store’s full-time employee, while she stops in for a few hours a week on some whim of Crampton Goldberg’s.
Toby lives in one of Crampton’s apartments, a bachelor above the old shoe store. When his college program was completed and he couldn’t find work, Crampton gave him this job, which he doesn’t seem to realize is charity. Toby’s arrogance, Clemence supposes, is a posture to compensate for his lack of anything to be arrogant about.
“There you go,” she tells him, setting him back on his feet. Dust and spiderwebs are caught in his shaggy hair, but this is what happens when you spend long enough in the bookshop. Clemence has taken to having a second bath when she gets home before lunch, washing off the grime, and yes, thinking of Toby’s hands on her body as she pours the jug of water over her head and shoulders, and her thoughts of this have been so vivid that it’s as though it’s actually happened. In fact, when she looked down after he’d fallen and found him in her arms, the scene felt so familiar, and it didn’t surprise her that he’d linger.
But of course, it should have. Once Toby regains composure, he jerks away from Clemence, as though she’d startled him, and turns around, refusing to acknowledge that she may have saved his life. He doesn’t say a word, and takes off, possibly embarrassed, leaving her among the cookery books, forcing her to follow him back through the store, because this is what Crampton demands of her, and also because it’s kind of fun.
