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In the bookstore I saw a man flip off a book.
I mean, he didn't stand on it and do a somersault - he gave it the finger, flipped it the bird. It wasn't a big production like he wanted everyone to notice, but it wasn't covert either, with his hand ready to dart back to his pocket. Just a brief matter-of-fact thrust as he walked by the Featured Titles table. I couldn't see his face.
Several copies of the book were stacked on a corner of the table. I picked the top one up; it was a harmless-looking and well-reviewed novel of the type they call "literary fiction." Not my thing really, but my wife might like it. I was in the store to find something for her. I carried it with me into the paperback aisles.
Wouldn't you know it, someone was standing right in front of the shelf I wanted. That always happened to me in bookstores, which is one reason I never went into them unless I was after something for my wife. You could often get such a person to move, though, if you craned your neck into their airspace and breathed a little louder than normal.
In this case, however, the obstruction was the man who had flipped off the book. He glanced down at the copy in my hand.
"You're getting that ?" he said, turning back to the shelves.
"It's for my wife," I said. "She's not well."
"Why don't you just hold a pillow over her face?"
He was already walking away. I'd hardly gotten a look at him, or maybe just a flash when he'd glanced at the book. I opened it. On the inside flap was a picture of the author in three-quarters profile. I had the impression it was the face I had glimpsed a moment before.
I was standing in the checkout line when a woman approached. "Are you really going to get that?" she said, making needy eyebrows. Behind her I could see that the corner of the Featured Titles table was bare. Everyone in line ahead of me had a copy of the same book.
I gave her my copy and headed out to my car. I would just use the pillow instead.
*
Several copies of the book were stacked on a corner of the table. I picked the top one up; it was a harmless-looking and well-reviewed novel of the type they call "literary fiction" - just my kind of thing. I carried it with me into the used-book basement.
Wouldn't you know it, there was a reading going on. The middle aisles had been shifted to the sides of the room and their places taken by rows of folding chairs. Most of the seats were occupied and the featured author was already at the podium, reading from his book. The podium was set up in its usual place in front of the fiction wall, meaning that nobody could browse the used fiction until the reading was over.
The featured author was reading from the same book I held in my hand. The man who had flipped off the book was there, too, standing by one of the shifted aisles with his back to the audience and pretending to look at a book on glass-blowing. From this angle I could see that it wasn't a man after all but a woman, very slender and short-coiffed.
I was in the checkout line after the reading when the woman approached. "Are you really going to get that?" she said.
She craned her neck into my airspace and whispered that once upon a time she had been the comely young student of the very author who had written this novel. It was a creative writing class and he had seemed deeply impressed with her work, so impressed that he was considering leaving his wife. In retrospect he had been much more impressed by the fact that, from behind anyway, the student had had the body of a fourteen-year old boy.
Finally to get her to stop calling he told her what he really thought of her little stories. Metafiction was out, he said. It was so nineteen seventies. Now it was all a return to psychological realism with sophisticated deployments of free indirect discourse, or close third to dummies like her, and organized around epiphanies that reconcile us to the way things are. When she was older she would understand.
Two months later she received a postcard from a writing conference in Key West: P.S. Nobody says 'comely', either .
*
I was standing in the checkout line when a woman approached. "Are you really going to get that?" she said, making her finely-crafted eyebrows even craftier. She craned her neck into my airspace and in a creamy, erotic whisper told me how the story ended.
"Thanks a lot," I said. I returned my copy to the corner of the table and headed out to my car.
Outside the sky over the parking lot was now completely dark. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. nth.