now she's glaring at me. For sitting on the floor? I sit on the floor to do paperwork all the time. There's no room for chairs. It has to be for schmoozing with a male customer.
Miss Trilby dumped the mail on the counter and swept into the back room.
'Cheerful today, hmm?' said Scuroforno.
'Really, she's so good to me. She lends me money to go to Seattle and see my daughter. She's just nervous today.'
'Ah. By the way, before I leave, do you have a cold, or were you crying?'
Gretchen reddened. 'I have a chronic sinus infection.' She suddenly saw herself objectively: stringy hair, bad posture, skinny. How could she be flirting with this man?
He touched her wrist. 'Take care.' And strode through the door into the street.
'Him you don't need,' said Miss Trilby, bustling back in and firing up the shop's ancient Kaypro computer.
'Did I say I did?'
'Your face says you think you do. Did he buy anything?'
'I'm sorry. I can never predict what he'll be interested in.'
'I'll die in the poorhouse. Sell him antique medical texts. Or detective novels. He stands reading historical novels right off the shelf and laughs. Pretends to be an expert, finds all the mistakes.'
'What have you got against him, besides reading and not buying?'
'Oh, he buys. But Gretchen, lambkin, a man like that you don't need. Loner. Crazy.'
'But he listens. He's so understanding.'
'Like the butcher with the calf. What's this immortal cancer stuff he's feeding you?'
'Nothing. We were talking about Ashley.'
'Sorry, lambkin. Life hasn't been kind to you. But be a little wise. This man has delusions he's a vampire.'
Gretchen smoothed the dust jacket of Euryanthe and Oberon at Covent Garden . 'Maybe he is.'
Miss Trilby rounded her lips in mock horror. 'Perhaps! Doesn't look much like Frank Langella, though, does he?'
No, he didn't, thought Gretchen, as she sorted orders for reprints of Kadensho's Book of the Flowery Tradition and de Honnecourt's Fervor of Buenos Aires .
But there was something appealing about Nick Scuroforno, something besides his empathy for a homely divorcee with a terminally ill child. His spare, dark humour, maybe that was it. Miss Trilby did not understand everything.
Why not make a play for him?
Even to herself, her efforts seemed pathetic. She got Keesha, the single mother across the hall in her apartment, to help her frost her hair. She bought a cheap cardigan trimmed with angora and dug out an old padded bra.
'Lambkin,' said Miss Trilby dryly one afternoon when Gretchen came in dolled up in her desperate finery, 'the man is not exactly a fashion plate himself.'
But Scuroforno seemed flattered, if not impressed, by Gretchen's efforts, and took her out for coffee, then a late dinner. Mostly, however, he came into the bookstore an hour before closing and let her pretend to sell him some white elephant like the Reverend Wood's Trespassers: How Inhabitants of Earth, Air, and Water Are Enabled to Trespass on Domains Not Their Own . She would fiddle with the silver chain on her neck, and they would slide to the floor where she would pour out her troubles to him. Other customers seldom came in so late.
'You trust him with private details of your life,' said Miss Trilby, 'but what do you know of his?'
He did talk. He did. Philosophy, history, details of Gretchen's daughter's illness. One day, she asked, 'What do you do?'
'I steal souls. Photographer.'
Oh.
'Can't make much money on that artsy stuff,' Miss Trilby commented when she heard this. 'Rumour says he's got a private source of income.'
'Illegal, you mean?'
'What a romantic you are, Gretchen. Ask him.'
Gambling luck and investments, he told her.
One day, leaving for the shop, Gretchen opened her mail and found a letter — not even a phone call — that Ashley's remission was over. Her little girl was in the hospital again.
The grief was surreal, physical. She was afraid to go back into her apartment. She had bought a copy of Jan Pienkowski's Haunted House , full of diabolically funny pop-ups, for Ashley's birthday. She couldn't bear to look at it now, waiting like a poisoned bait on the counter.
She went straight to the shop, began alphabetizing the new stock. Nothing made sense, she couldn't remember if O came after N. Miss Trilby had to drag her away, make her stop. 'What's wrong? Is it Ashley?'
Gretchen handed her the letter.
Miss Trilby read it through her thick lorgnette. Then, 'Look at yourself. Your cheeks are flushed. Eyes bright. Disaster becomes you. Or is it the nearness of death bids us breed, like romance in a concentration camp?'
