Baltimore Blues

employee she made ten dollars an hour. Her aunt gave her kitchen privileges, health insurance, and six dollars an hour for working in the bookstore. Her time had never been considered worth thirty dollars an hour.

'Where does Ava work?' she asked.

He smiled. He really did look like Dondi, although not so vacant around the eyes.

'I'll fill you in at Jimmy's.'

Chapter 2

Tess did not have blueberry pancakes after all. She wanted them, but as soon as she walked into Jimmy's in Fells Point, the cook threw two bagels to toast on the griddle and poured fresh orange juice into a red plastic tumbler. Her usual: two plain bagels, toasted, one with cream cheese, one without. She had been eating the same breakfast at Jimmy's for two years, at least five days a week.

She had always wanted to walk into a place and have someone ask, 'The usual?' Of course, in her original fantasy the place had a long mahogany bar, men wore suits and women wore hats, and she would order a martini, straight up. No olive.

Rock, after a quick look at the place mat menu, ordered the carbohydrate special, a meal of his own creation: toast, pancakes, orange juice, fruit cup, and cereal with skim milk.

'No syrup or butter,' he told the waitress. 'Just lots of extra jelly.'

'That all?'

'Do you have any rice? Or some pinto beans?'

The waitress stalked off, unamused. Rock was an ardent believer in the idea that diet could boost athletic performance, although the parameters of that diet kept changing. Currently he shunned fat and most meat. Given his workout regime, however, he had to eat enormous amounts and drink protein supplements to maintain his weight. He never ate for pleasure and he never drank alcohol. His one vice was caffeine, which he claimed enhanced his performance. The kitchen in his little apartment in Charles Village was a shrine to coffee. Rock didn't own a VCR, a CD player, or a microwave, but he had a French press, a cappuccino and espresso maker, and a freezer filled with nothing but ice trays and bags of coffee beans, all labeled and dated. His chronic insomnia surprised only him.

Breakfast arrived within minutes, and both ate intently, swiftly, as if racing again. For Tess, meals were the high point of her day, which only made her more ravenous. Rock simply wanted to stoke the vast machinery of his body and get it over with. Tess was still working on her second bagel when he wiped the last bit of jelly from his plate with his last pancake.

'Now,' he began, rummaging in his wallet. He slid an envelope across the table to Tess, who took it happily. A check, she thought. A retainer. But inside she found only a small photograph of Ava and two sheets of paper with phone numbers and addresses. Rock also had included a basic outline of Ava's day-when she went to work, when she got home-and the places she frequented. That was his word, written on the list. She frequented a gym in Federal Hill, a bar near her office, and an Italian restaurant known primarily for its breathtaking views and inedible food.

'Funny,' Tess said, examining the envelope's contents.

'What?'

'You had this with you, all ready. Did you assume I'd say yes?'

Rock blushed. 'I know you can always use some extra cash.'

'Well, it's not as if I would do anything for money, you know. I have turned down PR jobs.' Being broke had become something of a shtick for Tess.

He didn't smile.

They said good-bye on the cobblestone street in front of Jimmy's, suddenly awkward with each other. Tess had worked for a lot of relatives, but never a friend. Rock seemed equally uncomfortable with the new relationship. He kept punching her on the shoulder, light taps for him, which left tiny black-and-blue marks. Finally he took his ten-speed out of Tess's trunk and headed up Broadway, the long gradual hill to Johns Hopkins Hospital and his life as Darryl Paxton.

Tess crossed the wide plaza on Broadway, cutting over to pretty little Shakespeare Street, where she sneaked glances into unshuttered windows. It was only 8 A.M. and other people, normal people as Tess thought of them, were still gathered at breakfast tables, or venturing out in bathrobes to grab the Beacon- Light. It was the kind of existence she had once imagined for herself, to the extent she had imagined such mundane details at all. A husband, a baby, a dining room table. Sometimes her aunt and her aunt's latest boyfriend set a place for Tess at their breakfast table, but their attempt at homeyness only exacerbated Tess's feeling of strangeness. It was odd, sitting down to Cheerios and blueberries with her aunt and her aunt's man of the month, both usually in bathrobes and flushed.

Shakespeare ended at Bond, the street on which Tess lived. She stopped and looked at the building she called home, a hulking warehouse of garnet brick with white trim, all buffed up with her aunt's love. The windows gleamed in the early morning light and the books inside-mellow shades of red, green, and amber-glowed like jewels in a box. Above the door the scarlet letters were so bright and bold they seemed three-dimensional: WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST. And, in smaller letters, for the occasional oaf who thought it was a lifeboat store: A SPECIALTY BOOKS EMPORIUM.

Not everyone would have seen the potential in a store that sold only women's and children's books. Tess's aunt, Katherine 'Kitty' Monaghan, was not like everyone. She was not like anyone. A librarian with the city schools for almost twenty years, she had taken early retirement after a parent complained fairy tales were godless, encouraging belief in Satan and the occult.

That was the official version. The longer version included the Super Fresh, a cabbage, and a rutabaga. Kitty was fired after she decked a mother who stopped her in the produce section and complained about Jack and the Beanstalk. It encouraged antisocial behavior, the mother complained. It glorified robbery. Kitty blackened her eye. The administration dismissed her: Apparently there was a policy against assaulting parents. She sued for wrongful dismissal. Kitty pointed out that the woman had accosted her in the Super Fresh, where she was clearly going about her business as a private citizen, and hurled a cabbage at her head when Kitty disagreed with her. That was the part Kitty found galling-not the cabbage at her head, but someone daring to talk to her about school while she was at the grocery store, a place she found quite trying under the best of circumstances. She threw a rutabaga back. Her aim was better.

'It was self-defense, pure and simple,' she liked to say. Luckily the union arbitrator agreed. The Baltimore school system settled for a substantial sum, and Aunt Kitty bought this old drugstore from Tess's mother's family, the Weinsteins, after they declared bankruptcy.

She converted the three-story building into a store and a home, adding an apartment on the top floor for a little extra income. More out of laziness than any sense of design, she left the old soda fountain, which divided the primary business, children's books, from the secondary one-feminist tracts, erotica, anything written by women and, in some cases, anything about women. It was possible, for example, to buy books by Philip Roth and John Updike at Women and Children First.

WACF was a cozy place, with armchairs, two working fireplaces, well worn rugs, and the original tin-pressed ceilings. People came to buy, stayed to browse, ended up buying more. The profit margin was slim, yet far more than Kitty had ever dreamed. Entranced by capitalism, she talked constantly of expanding. Perhaps she would serve espresso from the old soda fountain, or afternoon tea. Buy the building next door and open a bed-and- breakfast. Perhaps a bookstore just for men? Like a novice at the track, she was dangerously intoxicated with beginner's luck. Tess wouldn't be surprised if she lost all her money as quickly as she had made it.

'Dead White Males, how's that for a name, Tesser?' Kitty asked as Tess came through the front door. Kitty was sitting on the old soda fountain, wearing a silky kimono covered with cherry blossoms and sipping a cup of coffee. 'We could sell-well, I guess we could sell everything, all the classics. That would be the gimmick. It would be just an ordinary bookstore, but people would think it was special. And between the two stores I'd have most of the territory covered. Eventually everyone dies. Even Norman Mailer.'

'I like it,' Tess said. 'Then again, knowing the local immunity to irony, I see a men's group and the NAACP