I knew, walking up to it, that I should not. I had not stopped at it on any of the previous three launch nights. I had a rule. The rule had served me well. The rule was: do not stop at bookshop windows on launch nights. The rule was: head down, J train, home, kettle, bed.
I stopped.
The window display had been redone for the week. There was a long sweep of dove-gray paper laid out across the floor of the window, and along its center, in three neat staggered stacks, twelve copies of the new hardcover. The cover was the cover I had argued, very gently and via two intermediaries, against—a soft-focus photograph of a half-open door, which had nothing to do with the book—but the cover was beautiful in the way that things you have lost arguments about are sometimes. The title was in a thin cream serif.The Quiet Hour.The author’s name was in a slightly larger thin cream serif beneath it. Above the stack, on a small easel, was a hand-lettered card, the letters formed in the careful loose hand of a bookseller who clearly enjoyed her job.The year’s most luminous novel,it said. And then, in smaller letters underneath:—our pick for October.
I stood on the sidewalk in the rain and read the card twice.
In the dark glass of the window, my own reflection had assembled itself over the display like a double exposure. A thin woman in a wet black coat, hair coming the rest of the way down now in earnest, the knot at her nape giving up by degrees. Hazel eyes I had not, in any deliberate way, looked into properly in years. The reflection laid itself precisely over the stack. Myforehead floated above the title. My collarbone floated above the author’s name. My mouth—which was the part of my own face I had always found least bearable, because it was a mouth that gave away whatever I was actually thinking if I let it—hovered over the wordsour pick for October.
For one half-second I let my eyes go to my own eyes in the glass.
Then I slid them past.
I walked.
I got to Bowery. I went down the steps of the J train, past the man playing a battered tenor saxophone in the mezzanine, past the smell of urine and warm electrical equipment, past the woman who sold loose cigarettes by the turnstile and gave me, as she always did, a small respectful nod which I returned. I tapped my MetroCard. I waited four minutes for the M train, then realized it was a J after all, then got on.
The J was almost empty at that hour going outbound. I took a seat by the window on the south side of the car and pressed my forehead to the glass. The cold went into the bone of my forehead and was, for a moment, the most distinct sensation I had had all evening.
I got off at Myrtle-Broadway. I came up out of the station into rain that had not let up. The four blocks to Suydam Street were partly under standing water at the curbs, the kind of black puddles that turned out to be shin-deep if you misjudged the step. I misjudged one. My right Mary Jane filled. I kept walking.
I bit the inside of my left cheek the whole way home, and I found the small ridge of scar tissue with my tongue, and I held it there.
Thefourflightsupto my apartment took me longer in wet shoes than they did in dry ones, because the right Mary Jane squelched against the marble of each step in a way I was too tired to find funny.
I let myself in. The apartment was as I had left it at five-thirty. One room, north-facing, the window over the desk fogged at the corners from the temperature difference between inside and out. The fiddle leaf fig in the corner—the one I had bought at the bodega on Knickerbocker six years ago for nineteen dollars and had, against every prediction including my own, kept alive—leaned very slightly toward the lamp. Three towers of books along the eastern wall, alphabetized by author, then within author by year, then within year by my own private affection. A small kettle on a small two-burner stove. A bed I had made that morning out of habit even though no one was going to see it. The desk by the window. The chair pushed in. The drawer.
The drawer.
I peeled the wet blouse off over my head and dropped it into the laundry bag on the back of the door. I unhooked the bra. I stepped out of the Mary Janes and left them, soaked, on the doormat. I pulled the gray hoodie off the hook—the one with the cuff I had worried into a small frayed half-moon—and I pulled it on over nothing else, and I tugged the sleeves down past my wrists, and I stood in the middle of my one room in the gray hoodie and a pair of damp tights and I breathed.
I should have made tea.
I should have boiled the kettle and made tea and gotten into bed with the laptop and watched something that did not require me to think and gone to sleep at eleven, the way I did on launch nights, the way I had done on three previous launch nights, the way the small careful protocol of my survival had been designed.
I went to the desk.
I did not turn on the desk lamp. The streetlight on Suydam Street, even through the rain, was enough to see by. I pulled out the chair. I sat. I put my hand on the brass pull of the drawer and I held it there for a count of ten, the way a person holds the cap of a bottle they have promised themselves they will not open, and then — because something had cracked in the fluorescent light of the Crosby’s ladies’ room and I had not been able to put it back together on the J train or in the rain on Knickerbocker — I opened it.
The manuscript was where I had left it in June.
Two hundred and forty pages, hand-numbered in pencil along the bottom right corner because I did not trust the printer at the FedEx on Fulton with anything sequential. The title page on top.Salt and Stay.My name underneath it, because in the privacy of my own drawer I had, for once, allowed myself my name.A novel by Rachel Booker.The B was a little crooked because theoof the typewriter had stuck.
I had not opened the drawer since June. I had told myself, in June, that I would open it again when I had the bandwidth. I had told myself, in July, that I would open it when the new Margot deadline cleared. I had told myself, in August, that I would open it after Labor Day. I had told myself, in September—I had stopped telling myself anything in September.
I lifted the title page.
The first line of chapter one was the line I had written in October of last year on the L train going the other direction, in a notebook I had since lost.
By the ocean it’s easy to take up space.
I read it.
I read the second line.
In the city, in the gaps between other people, there’s no space to take.
I sat very still.
