Clemence has started to get a bad feeling. Iris Murdoch.Clemence has never read a book by Iris Murdoch in her life, but she knows they should be here. She has perused enough used bookstores to be familiar with the landscape—Anita Brookner, and Margaret Drabble, and Amy Tan, and multiple copies of all those books championed by Oprah in the 1990s.The Pilot’s Wife. Clemence had once been to a second-hand bookstore whereThe Pilot’s Wifewas free with any purchase, but here at Crampton’s, there is not a single copy. In fact, there is not a single book by a woman author in the entire literature section. Not even Virginia Woolf, she realizes with dismay, as she makes her way to the alphabet’s end.
Clemence returns to the desk where the man there hasn’t moved. He’s reading a play,The Way of the World, by William Congreve, and of course he is. She’s standing right there, but he still doesn’t look up from the book.
There is a bell, so Clemence rings it, and the bell is so loud it makes her jump, but the man behind the counter doesn’t flinch, only lowering his book, oh so slowly, and there he is, that face, pale with delicate features, and there’s a piece of tissue stuck to a spot on his cheek where he cut himself shaving, and he’s missed some other spots, which might be for the best. He needs sunshine. He needs a haircut. He needs, he needs, he needs, which is the kind of man who once upon a time rendered Clemence completely silly, and she almost forgets that she’s furious. But only almost.
The delicate features are like stone, his face devoid of expression. He doesn’t even speak, as though lowering his book was enough acknowledgement of her presence,and perhaps even too much. Clemence has no doubt that if they remained staring at each other like this forever that he would never be the first to break.
She says, “Where are the women?” He pretends not to know what she’s talking about, still unmoving. She gestures behind her, “On the shelf, the fiction. Why are there no women there?”
He finally speaks, “Literature,” but he says it in three syllables, “Lit-trit-chure,” so maybe he’s English, or just pretentious, the latter option plausible. And then he says nothing more—is it possible he doesn’t speak English at all?
“You don’t stock women in your bookstore?”
He laughs. “Of course, we do.” No accent. He’s just a jerk.
“Ididn’t see them,” Clemence tells him.
“Because you were looking in the wrong place,” he says.
“Well, where are they?”
And he’s deigned to raise his arm so he can gesture down the other aisle, the one with another yellowed sign, this one labelledWomen’s Fiction.
“You’re joking!” yells Clemence. This is a set-up. Someone’s going to jump out with a camera and the punchline, that this is a statement on the value of women’s work and women’s words. “The difference of value persists,” wrote Virginia Woolf over a hundred years ago—but it’s only Clemence and the pale book man, and there’s no camera. There is nothing funny about it.
The man shrugs, and seems to injure his shoulder in the process, and it’s this way that a person can be so repellent and endearing at once. Clemence wants to slap him,but she’d probably kill him, he’s so frail, and so she steps away from his desk and goes to investigate the Women’s Fiction aisle.
Even though she should have stormed out of the store, haughtily, in a rage. Imagine the bookstore where women’s novels don’t get to be literature, although Clemence knows that in many bookstores this is indeed the case, but presented with more subtlety. She has to see it for herself, though, this crime against gender equality. It’s probably no accident that the lights are dimmer in this section and the shelves are crooked, as though they’re on the verge of falling down.
And there she is, Maeve Binchy, like the sight of a friend in a room full of strangers, and before her Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and then Angela Carter, and Brontës on the shelf above, Jane Austens all in a row on the floor so that Clemence needs to crouch down to examine them, inhaling a load of dust in the process, and she sneezes boisterously before she can stop herself from doing so. The sound of her outburst echoes throughout the otherwise silent shop.
Everybody is here, she thinks with relief, and notes that it’s kind of nice not having to wade through Norman Mailer to get to Flannery O’Connor and Ann Patchett. And she is altogether stunned to find multiple novels on the shelf by Barbara Pym, whose books are usually so hard to come by second-hand. She’d once found a shoebox stuffed with Pym paperbacks at an estate sale, because it’s only upon death that most readers tend to be willing to part with them—and now Clemence has grabbeda few before she’s even processed what she’s doing.No Fond Return of LoveandAn Unsuitable Attachment, clutching them close to her chest, never mind the dust. The dust is essential. And she knows that she too is unwilling to part with these books now, never mind her principles against supporting a shop like this. But maybe she could steal them? Wouldn’t that be a kind of liberation in fact, taking these novels away to a place where they’d be valued, and dusted, and actually read?
But Clemence Lathbury is not a thief, and also Clemence Lathbury desires an excuse to return to the pale book man, against her better impulses, and she explains the whole thing to herself as she selects some other books—finds a copy ofSula, and a first edition ofThe Republic of Loveby Carol Shields. Arespectable haul, it is, and of course, all of the books are priced at just a dollar or two, which might be the upside of supporting a bookstore in which women are devalued. At least it’s a bargain?
And the pale book man. He’s reading again, Clemence sees as she approaches the counter. Perhaps this might be just the thing, she wonders, an inappropriate fixation with which to occupy herself, to keep her from falling into lust or obsession with someone too appealing. This man appears unhealthy, unattractive, is clearly a terrible conversationalist, and most likely a misogynist to boot. He looks asthmatic, and she wonders how he functions here amid all this dust. She could long for him the way that Barbara Pym heroines lust after pale young curates, a perfect arrangement, destined to go nowhere. Such anunsuitable attachment, at this moment in her life, might be precisely the distraction Clemence needs.
She resolves to change her approach. Smiling now, as she clears her throat and calls for his attention less obnoxiously than with the bell. Piling the books on the counter, and he consents to put his own down, although he sighs, evidently bothered that she’s once again disturbed his reading.
“So, you found them,” he says, beginning an elaborate process of marking the sales into a ledger, nothing automated about it, and Clemence realizes that this is another place that’s cash-only. She has some money in her wallet, and she hopes it’s enough.
“But Idon’t understand,” Clemence tells him. “Why you catalogue the books the way you do.”
“Ijust work here.” He enters the final book on the list with his pencil’s dull nub. He pushes the pile of books back toward her and gives Clemence the total. “And it’s a system as arbitrary as any other.”
“But it’s not.” Clemence fishes a bill out of her wallet. “It’s not arbitrary at all. Has anything ever been less arbitrary than the distinction of women’s fiction?”
“Iwouldn’t know,” he says, turned away from her now, making change from a drawer beneath the desk. “Idon’t read the stuff, myself.”
“Well, Imean you only work in a bookstore,” says Clemence. “It’s not like you’re supposed to be any kind of an expert on books.”
He nearly flings the change at her. “I’m not an expert on anything.”
“Certainly not customer service,” says Clemence, holding her new books close.
“Nope,” says the pale book man, and she can’t tell if he knows that she’s mocking him. He takes himself very seriously. He doesn’t bother to ask her if she wants a bag.
“You could come back, though,” he calls out to her as she’s walking away. She stops, turns around. “If you’ve got a problem with the cataloguing,” he explains. “Crampton’s here Wednesday mornings. If you want to register an official complaint.” He’s daring her.
