Grace says, “She’s essentially cooking on a camp stove.”
Bonnie’s going to lose it. “You can’t do that indoors.”
“It’s not a camp stove,” says Clemence.
“Because of carbon monoxide, Imean. Roger, did you hear this? Clemence cooking on a camp stove?”
Roger wanders over from the barbecue. “That’s not a good idea, honey,” he tells her.
And Prudence says, “Seriously. You could poison yourself.”
“Like Sylvia Plath,” says Allison helpfully.
“Didn’t you and Toad have an electric oven? And induction stove?” Bonnie asks. “Ikind of wish you’d stuck with that.”
“Bonnie,” says Roger, evidently reminding her of a line they’ve drawn.
“Well, not with Toad, obviously,” says Bonnie. “By the way, don’t forget to pick up the letter. But Imean, with the electric. You both had such a nice kitchen. It’s too bad you couldn’t have kept it, but it would have been awkward, Imean. Once you start getting involved with all the neighbours …”
“It wasn’tallthe neighbours,” says Clemence. “And how do you even know about that?” Prudence raised her hand while staring at her lap. Allison has got her hands clamped over the twin’s ears. Clemence says, “This is appalling.”
Bonnie shrugs and smiles. “We don’t judge.”
“Except for the camp stove,” says Roger.
“It’s a fucking hot plate,” says Clemence. “Hot. Plate.”
“Well, hello to you, too, Clemence,” says Sandro, coming out of the kitchen. “Welcome back to the fold. Ahot plate, indeed,” and then he kisses her on the lips, in front of everybody, and she can’t tell if he’s being inappropriate or just European.
Five
Aperson can get used to anything, which was a fundamental lesson Clemence had learned—almost to her peril—during her marriage, but now she is determined to apply the same principle to her unfortunate mattress, and to her bed, which is short of a few bottom slats. There have been three different nights now that the mattress has fallen through and Clemence has woken up on the floor folded like origami. She decides there is a lesson here, something about the shifting ground beneath a person and how fate might possibly swallow them whole, and it’s going to be part of the story she’s living as she attempts to become a person of substance.
Clemence is determined to be the opposite of a princess, that proverbial one who slept on a pea. Clemence has kissed enough Toad that she knows that story already, and now she’s happy to be exploring a different one, up in her tiny apartment, where Bailey the cat has appearedonce more, and she opens the door to let him in, along with the fresh air and sunshine. He’s a beautiful cat, and Clemence wants to take a photo, to post it online,all that light—but she resists, because she’s aspiring to do less of showcasing her glorious moments, to keep something for herself, and also because she’s told her two best friends that the cat is a person and she needs to keep her story straight.
Clemence sits at the table, the unopened letter from Toad’s lawyer before her, as the cat traces figure eights around her legs, trailed by his bushy tail, soft on her skin, so she reaches down to pet him. Pushing the letter aside, again. She likes the company. Clemence hasn’t had a pet since she was a kid, mostly because with her and Toad at work all day, it never seemed fair and they’d been in agreement about so many things like that that it had been easy to believe their relationship was good. That they were compatible, which is what she told herself, but maybe she’d just been catatonic.
Take books, for example. Toad had been an early enthusiast of digital storage, putting all their music and movies online, and then one year for Clemence’s birthday, he’d made her put on a blindfold, leading her into her home office, and removing the blindfold for the big reveal.
“What’s this?” she asked. Her bookshelves, completely empty, except for the dust, in stark contrast to the pristine spots on the shelf where the books had been.
Toad had been so proud. This had been hardest to take. He’d been plotting this for weeks, refusing to reveal a single detail, but all the while bursting with suchexcitement that he couldn’t help alluding to a secret plan in the works. Clemence hoping that he’d booked them a trip, or designed a backyard garden, or ordered a bathtub with whirlpool jets—there were so many gifts he might have given that she would have received with pleasure. But no, instead, he’d digitized her entire book collection and gotten rid of the books. Like, he’d thrown them out, and not even in the recycling, and the garbage had been collected that morning. It was a tragedy no matter how you looked at it.
And this was years ago—it hadn’t even been the final straw. Clemence had convinced herself that her anger and disappointment were unreasonable. Was it possible—as Toad often suggested—that Clemence would have found fault no matter what he did for her? Which did seem to be the case, so she’d decided this was a problem she could fix by fixing herself, by adjusting her attitude. She’d pretended to be delighted by his gift, to be grateful. She told him, yes indeed, the extra space was great, and almost as good as the minimalist aesthetic, and the e-reader was awesome, even if the battery tended to run down too fast. All this instead of bursting into tears at the disappearing of her books, which were also a museum, her history. Clemence had thrown her arms around her husband and said thank you.
Amillion years ago, it seems, and now Clemence has found a bookshelf on the curb, sitting outside one of the hollowed-out houses with the dumpsters, and she hauls the bookshelf home, all the way up the stairs, not even pausing to examine the spots where it scrapes thestairwell, because those walls were already a mess. She drags it through the door and finds a space for it against the one wall that’s not sloping with the roof, and it fits precisely, as though the placement was meant to be. The cat goes to examine it, leaping right to the top shelf, then stepping along its length with ease and grace, sniffing around at the edges. The shelf is old, dark wood, made by hand back in a time when people had such skills. It’s a beautiful piece, a discard like all the rest of her furniture, but she’d chosen it, and if she ever moved out, Clemence would take it with her.
However now her back hurts, between the subpar mattress and carrying the shelf, a dull ache between her shoulder blades, and she’s got nobody here to give her a rub. Clemence lies down on the floor—cheap, stained linoleum that she’s scrubbed enough times to be so intimate with—and lets the cat walk all over her. There is relief in the pressure of her spine against the ground, and above her the bookshelf is towering, and empty. Clemence knows where she is going today.
The bookshop is onthe main street, just north of the church, the streetcar rumbling by as Clemence approaches. It’s not one of the new arrivals on the street, a sign of gentrification, but a mainstay, nothing boutique-ish about it. The sign is ancient,Crampton’s Used Booksellers, but theBhas weathered away. Not once since arriving in the neighbourhood has Clemence seen anyone going in or out of this store, just one of the many businessesalong the strip she’s been wondering about, along with the shop that exclusively sells christening gowns; the shoe repair place that’s open the first Wednesday of every month; and the variety store that is surely a front for something because the one time she tried to enter, the owner blocked the entrance, claiming that he didn’t have what she was looking for before she’d even told him what it was.
At the booksellers, however, Clemence encounters no such resistance. The sign on the door is flipped toOpen, the smell inside exactly what she’s been expecting—dust, and must, distinctly “old book,” and old books are everywhere, piled haphazardly alongside the shelves, which in places are packed with books in front of other books, and Clemence can’t decide whether she loves this arrangement (for the chance that in such a book trove, she might find some literary thing she never even knew she wanted) or if she hates it (because even if those books are here, how is she going to find them?).
There is a second floor, a poky staircase leading the way, with piles of books stacked on every step, and an ancient sheet of paper, yellowed, thumbtacked to the wall, faded ink explaining the esoteric categories to be encountered upstairs—books on billiards and badminton, hunting, harpsichords, and heretics. Literature, however, is here on the first floor, toward the back, and on her way through, Clemence passes the desk where the clerk sits, a slight man whose features she can’t distinguish because he’s got a book stuck in front of them. He doesn’t acknowledge her presence.
Clemence has an idea of what she’s looking for, books to replace the ones she lost in the purge. She’d brought her e-reader when she left, though she hadn’t wanted to. She doesn’t like reading on screens, for reasons both practical and aesthetic, and the device is also tainted for being a gift from Toad, but if she’d left it behind, she might have had nothing to read at all, been wholly at the mercy of other people’s tastes. Thinking about when she’d been a child visiting her grandmother, hiding out in the bedroom reading Danielle Steel novels on the bookshelf, all of them in large print. She wouldn’t have altogether minded reading those again, but her tastes have changed since she was eleven.
Clemence is looking for modern classics—Sulaby Toni Morrison; Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka books; as well as classic classics, all the way back to the Brontës—Jane Eyreand TheTenant of Wildfell Hall. But notWuthering Heights—there is nothing redeemable aboutWuthering Heights, Clemence had decided the last time she read it. She was through with romantic brutes. Heathcliff was a monster. No, she wants to populate her library with excellent women now, women who intuitively knew the value of themselves and their stories. But oddly, there isn’t a single Brontë on the shelf in this shop. She moves back to theAs, because surely she’d find some Austen—handsome old hardbacks, academic editions with highlights and underlines, cheap paperbacks riddled with typos by publishers cashing in on the public domain. But there aren’t any of these, either.
