Eleanor looked at me hard. “So tell me who you really are and what you’re doing. I mean, you appear out of the night, kindness personified, you walk into my life when I’ve never been lonelier, you’re going where the wind blows but you don’t have a change of clothes. What are you running away from?”
“Who said I’m running away?”
“We’re all running away. Some of us just don’t get very far. Yours must be some tragic love affair for you to run with only the clothes on your back. What was her name?”
“Rita,” I said, suddenly inspired. “It’s funny, she was a book person, a lot like you.”
“No kidding!”
“The same only different.” I fiddled with the check. “She’d love that story you told me.”
“The book world is full of stories like that. Books are everywhere, and some of them are valuable for the craziest reasons. A man gets put on an Iranian hit list. His books go up in value. A guy writes a good book, a guy writes a bad book. Both are worth the same money on the collector’s market. A third guy writes a great book and nobody cares at all. The president of the United States mentions in passing that he’s a Tom Clancy fan and suddenly this guy’s book shoots into the Hemingway class as a collectible. And that president is Ronald
“Not to me it doesn’t.”
“It defies logic, but that’s the way it is today. People latch onto some new thing and gorge themselves on it, and the first guy out of the gate becomes a millionaire. Maybe Clancy
“How do you learn so much so young?”
“I was born in it. I’ve been around books all my life. When I was fourteen, I’d ditch class and thumb my way into Seattle and just lose myself in the bookstores. So I’ve had six or seven years of good hard experience. It’s like anything else—eventually you meet someone who’s willing to show you the ropes. Then one day you realize you know more about it than your teacher does—you started out a pupil, like Hemingway with Gertrude Stein, and now you’ve taken it past anything the teacher can do with it. And it comes easier if you’ve had a head start.”
“Starting young, you mean.”
She nodded. “At sixteen I had read more than a thousand books. I knew all the big names in American lit, so it was just a matter of putting them together with prices and keeping up with the new hotshots. But it’s also in my blood. I got it from my father: it was in his blood. It took off in a different direction with him, but it’s the same stuff when you get to the heart of it. Books…the wonder and magic of the printed word. It grabbed my dad when he was sixteen, so he knows where I’m coming from.”
“Does your father deal in books?”
“He wouldn’t be caught dead. No, I told you his interest went in another direction. My dad is a printer.”
She finished her coffee and said, “I’d give a million dollars if I had it for his experience. My father was present at the creation.”
I looked at her, lost.
“He was an apprentice at the Grayson Press, in this same little town we’re going to. I’m sure you’ve never heard of the Grayson Press, not many people have. But you can take it from me, Mr. Janeway, Grayson was the most incredible book genius of our time.”
6
There wasn’t much to see of North Bend, especially on a dark and rainy night. I got off at Exit 31 and Eleanor directed me through the town, which had long since rolled up its awnings for the night. The so-called business district was confined to a single block, the cafe, bar, and gas station the only places still open. But it was deceptive: beyond the town were narrow roads where the people lived, where the Graysons had once lived, where Eleanor Rigby had grown from a little girl into a young woman. We went out on a road called Ballarat and soon began picking up numbered streets and avenues, most of them in the high hundreds. It was rural by nature, but the streets seemed linked to Seattle, as if some long-ago urban planner had plotted inevitable annexations well into the next century. We came to the intersection of Southeast 106th Place and 428th Avenue Southeast: I still couldn’t see much, but I knew we were in the country. There was a fenced pasture, and occasionally I could see the lights of houses far back from the road. “Here we are,” Eleanor said abruptly. “Just pull over here and stop.” I pulled off the road across from a gate, which was open. My headlights shone on a mailbox with the name rigby painted boldly across it, and under that—in smaller letters—the north bend press. We sat idling. I could hear her breathing heavily in the dark beside me. The air in the car was tense.
“What’s happening?” I asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Not the kind of problem you’d imagine. I just hate to face them.”
“Why would you feel like that?”
“I’ve disappointed them badly. I’ve done some things…stuff I can’t talk about…I’ve let them down and suddenly it’s almost impossible for me to walk in there and face them. I can’t explain it. The two people I love best in the world are in there and I don’t know what to say to them.”
“How about ‘hi’?”
She gave a sad little laugh.
