The Secret of Lost Things

It was something of a trick also that Oscar often sought to engage in conversation by expressing an interest in clothing. He was reserved by nature, phlegmatic, but knew well that an interest in another’s clothes flattered the wearer. I imagined this something his mother, the dressmaker, had taught him.

Oscar was sought after by regular customers looking for an insider watchful on their behalf, a staff person willing to perform special favors and engage in secret confidences. Oscar always played for both sides.

The Arcade was frequented daily by several bibliophiles who obsessively searched for fresh inventory; books that were stacked to be shelved after Pike had priced them. Oscar was especially favored by two competing Civil War buffs, both of whom bought his consideration with morning coffee, the occasional lunch. Small cloth-wrapped bundles (like Japanese favors) would appear at intervals, bribes for withholding books from sale. Oscar wasn’t particularly interested in the Civil War, except for the uniforms, but he was knowledgeable about the volumes in his section and managed to conduct intense conversations with collectors in diverse subjects—history, biography, philosophy, anthropology, science.

I consciously chose to emulate him. Oscar was quick, and remembered most of what he’d heard or read. He wrote everything down. Impressionable as I was, I took to carrying a small notebook, determined to assume for myself Oscar’s observant style.

It is through my own notebook that I recall these days, my first months in the city, my apprenticeship. And through my clear recollection of that girl who was so raw, so avid, that she ate up every detail, absorbing into her body whatever might later be needed as provision, whatever might sustain her should it all, once more, disappear.

At the Martha Washington, I befriended Lillian slowly, in increments, for she was prickly.

“What are you watching there, Lillian?”

“I am not watching, Rosemary,” she answered, her eyes flickering from the television screen for an instant.

“It looks like you’re watching,” I ventured.

“Everything not how it looks. Especially not here. I am not watching, but I am thinking. Watching help me to think, and sometimes not to think.”

“I don’t know how you can think with that thing in your ears and the sound turned up so loud.”

“I need that noise. I don’t hear so well. But I’m thinking all the same,” she said.

“What do you think about, Lillian?” I asked, wanting to know her, needing a friend. She was a little older than Mother, but younger than Chaps. She was the only person I knew outside the Arcade, and really the first person I met in New York.

Lillian heaved an enormous sigh, and closed her eyes against the tears that had filled them.

“I cannot say what I think of,” she answered, thickly.

I couldn’t understand what I had provoked with my question. Confused and embarrassed that I’d been unwittingly careless, that I’d upset her, I was about to apologize. But Lillian visibly collected herself, focused instead on the television, her expression changing rapidly into one of disdain.

“Well,” she said, sniffing. “One thing I think from this television is that Americans are stupid!” She waved her hand at the small screen.

“Oh, I don’t think Americans are stupid,” I said, thinking of Pike, of Oscar, “I have a job now, at an enormous bookstore, and it’s full of brilliant Americans. Readers!”

“Pah,” Lillian said, smiling, recovered by the change in subject, by her sense of humor. “You only think they are brilliant,” she imitated my accent, “because you are a child.”

“Lillian, I’m eighteen years old,” I said, indignant.

She nodded as if to say, “Exactly—you are a child.”

“They have Spanish books in that store where you work?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ll look for you. I think you can find anything in the world at the Arcade.”

“You can’t find what I’m looking for,” she said, darkly. “But bring me Spanish books if you have. I will pay you for them. I maybe should be trying to read again. And to forget about these idiots.”

Before she replaced the earpiece and turned her attention back to the television screen, she handed me a letter.

“This come for you,” she said. “From your country.”

“Thank you, Lillian.”

The letter was from Chaps. I hurried to my room eager to read my first letter in America. It was disappointingly short.

July 5

Dearest Rosemary,

Thank you for your card. Tasmania is a lonely place without you, without your mother, but, as I like to say, loneliness is good practice for eternity.

I was heartened to hear from you and thrilled that you would so soon have found yourself employed—and in a bookshop! I couldn’t wish a better occupation for you, my dear Rosemary. My own little shop has given me a dignified, ethical life, and work I believe meaningful. Selling books provided shape to my life, and reading them, a shape to my mind that I doubt I could have formed otherwise. That you are employed in such an extraordinary place gives me great satisfaction. (Perhaps I was training you all along!) The difference, though, is that you are also immersed in experience, and not just taken up with lines on a page.

You will find interesting people, you will read, you will be able to live the way you want. I have heard of the Arcade, of course, but never imagined you would find your way there.

I’m sure your mother is with you always, but her absence is perhaps at times unendurable. For me it is. Don’t be frightened to love. Look for it. I want you to have the life I did not choose. Take it, Rosemary dear.

With all my love, I am your own

Esther Chapman

P. S. Have you opened the package yet? Remember, a book is always a gift.

George Pike was not a demonstrative man. As he worked on his platform in a reverie of pricing, his gestures were reverential, ritualistic. His intention was that he remain inaccessible, above us all. Geist was his foil and henchman. Pike had a deep love of books, but his motivation for maintaining the Arcade was not esoteric. His chief inducement was evident: Pike loved money.

In slow moments—when gathered together awaiting a shipment, or lining up on Fridays to receive our meager pay from Geist—the staff liked to pick over rumors of Pike’s legendary wealth, his frugality, his stinginess. Each secondhand book passed through his elegant hands because he trusted no one but himself to assess its value. No one else could, the value being weighed not only against some actual market notion but against his very personal assessment of the book’s worth to him: what it cost him to acquire, and what the volume’s sale would put in his pocket. The margins and his profit were tabulated instantly, the result of years of obsessive deliberation, an abacus in his head shifting beads back and forth in a silent, urgent reconciliation.

That Pike was exceedingly rational didn’t mean that his notion of value wasn’t arbitrary. It was particular and absolute, almost adolescent in its despotic insistence.

At intervals throughout the day and at closing time, Pike would momentarily replace Pearl, the Arcade’s rather arresting cashier, then a preoperative transsexual, at the single register. Pike would remove larger bills, checks, and credit-card receipts, then disappear up the broken wooden stairs to the office at the back, reappearing (as in a conjurer’s trick) moments later upon his platform, behind his table, a book in his hand, a pencil behind his left ear, his meditative pricing resumed. Pike shrunk considerably whenever he left his platform, only to attain his previous consequence once he returned to the stage.

That there was a single cash register was an instance of the Arcade’s antiquated operation and evidence of Pike’s apprehensions with regard to money, with regard to theft. Contradiction was key, and efficiency mattered not at all.

Although there were lulls in customer purchases, for most of the Arcade’s business hours a queue snaked single file through and past the tables of paperbacks. Customers would become impatient and occasionally abusive while waiting. It was something of a sport among the staff to inflame already angry customers while they waited in line, a game that shocked me at first, unfamiliar as I was with that sort of impoliteness, schooled as I had been by Mother and Chaps to treat customers obeisantly.

“I’ve been standing here for thirty minutes!” a disgruntled customer would complain.

“Today’s your fucking lucky day then,” Bruno Gurvich, a burly Ukrainian who sorted paperbacks at the front tables, would shoot back.

“Pearl must be picking up the pace a bit! Yesterday you’d have been here an hour at least.”

Bruno was a musician with the temperament of an anarchist and the breath of a bartender’s dishrag. He gave the lie to bookselling as a genteel occupation, to Chaps’s ideal.

Bruno winked at me when he noticed my horror at this sort of exchange.

“Don’t look so shocked, girlie,” he said, dumping paperbacks in front of me. “Pike doesn’t care how you talk to the regulars so long as they’re buying. I got two separate assault charges pending for roughing up customers over Christmas last year, when we were really busy. This is nothing.”

No doubt he was trying to impress me.