She tousled my hair. I liked that. It showed affection, not just lust. I opened two beers. The steaks were almost done.
We ate. The food was wonderful, the company superb. We didn’t talk at all.
It wasn’t till much later, sitting by the fire, when she started to unwind. “I called Paul right after I talked to you the other night,” she said. “The night…it happened.”
“Paul is…?”
“The guy I was gonna marry”
“I love the past tense. Go on.”
“It was three o’clock in the morning back there. I got him out of bed. Guess I could’ve waited, but somehow it seemed too important. God, it seemed earthshaking. I felt like my whole world had tilted off its axis.”
I kissed the side of her head.
“I called him to say good-bye,” she said.
Suddenly there was no more white space, no eternity between the lines. “I met him in Greenpeace a couple of years ago. That’s where I go every summer, to work in the field. I saved a whale this year, can you imagine that? Got in a wet suit, put myself between him and the killers, and harassed them till they went away. I didn’t know I’d have the courage to do it till the time came: then there was no thought of not doing it, it was what I’d come for. We lost a volunteer this year, did you know that? We had a young man killed in a protest over a nuclear test. I knew him slightly, but his death made everything very suddenly real. I knew I could die too, and I didn’t want to. I expected to be blown into nothing every minute. Have you ever seen what a modern harpoon gun can do? It’s frightening, and here you are, taunting them, daring them to shoot you with it, knowing they’d like to do just that if they could find a way to call it an accident. They had me on NBC that night. Paul got me a videotape of the broadcast and I never looked at it: it diminishes the real experience too much. It’s what Hemingway meant when he wrote about hunting and war. Everything’s ruined when you talk too much. I used to read that and think, What macho garbage, but goddammit, he’s right. They show a twenty-second clip on Tom Brokaw and what it really was was a two-hour test of wills. Hemingway was right, the old fool. You do something that people call heroic and you can’t talk about it, you can’t sit in front of a tube and gloat over a tape, all you can do is carry it in your heart. Even talking about it this much fucks it up.”
She pointed to the picture on the wall: the guy in the wet suit.
“That’s Paul. I’ll take his picture down if you want.”
“Leave it,” I said. I could afford to be generous. I knew Paul would be glad to let me be the picture on the wall and him be here on the sofa.
“He’s a good man. I don’t know why things never really… what’s the word?”
“Ignited.”
“Yeah, that’s the word. He really is a fine man. Doesn’t deserve a bitch like me. You, on the other hand…”
“I think I can handle you.”
“I’m sure you do. So handle me, Janeway: tell me what you want to know.”
“Anything you want to tell.”
“Oh, please. Don’t go soft on me now. You’ve been pushing me since the moment I first saw you. Long before that, if you count that snotty phone message.”
“Then tell me all of it.”
It took her a while to get started. We loosened up with brandy and put some logs on the fire.
“I was working in a bookstore in Dallas. We had a customer named William J. Malone. You know the name?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You would, if you’d been in the business longer. William J. Malone was a collector of books. You didn’t see his name much in AB. He was one of those guys who didn’t like limelight. A lot like me that way. Very private. No friends. Distant. I guess to people who didn’t know him, full of mystery. But all the so-called big boys of the book world knew him. He had no credit limit with anyone. A thug from your side of the tracks would say he had deep pockets. And the ruling passion of his life was books. Modern lit, that was his thing. He was the last of his line and he never married, but God— what a bookman! Malone knew everything. He had a wall of reference books but he didn’t need them. He had it all in his head. The joy of his life was to go into a bookstore and find wonderful things. He didn’t care about the money, it was all a game. He paid what they asked and never wanted a discount, didn’t matter whether he spent ten dollars or ten thousand. If he wanted something, he got it.
“Malone knew more about books than any ten dealers I ever met. In Dallas, where he lived then, he was a major celebrity in the bookstores, though he tried not to be. I don’t know what first attracted him to me—maybe the fact that I didn’t scrape and bow whenever he walked in the door. All I know is, suddenly he was in my life. What kept drawing him back to that one bookstore turned out to be…am I vain enough to say it?…me. We had something going from the start, long before we ever talked of such things. It’s like something in the air that only the two of you can see. You know how that can be, Janeway, I know you know.”
“I know now.”
“Yes. That’s exactly right. And when it happens, you don’t care who the other person is, how old he is, how much money he’s got. People who let stuff like that matter to them are fools. Things like race, religion, politics— none of it matters. So one day Malone came in and asked if I wanted to be his assistant. I quit my job on the spot. The guy I was working for was a jerk: I’d‘ve quit in another week anyway. I didn’t even ask Malone what kind of
