“The best?”
You nod and I want to kiss you. I want to take you onto the tracks before engine engine number nine grinds to a halt and swallows you whole and fuck the drunk out of you until the New York transit line swallows us both. It’s too hot in here and it’s too cold out there and it smells like burritos and blow jobs, middle-of-the-night New York. I love you is all I want to say so I scratch my head. “Hard to pick one, ya know?”
“Okay, look,” you say and you swallow, bite your lip, redden. “I didn’t want to freak you out and be, like, this psycho who remembers every tiny little social situation she gets herself into or whatever, but I was lying. I do know how I know you.”
“You do?”
“The bookstore.” And you smile that Portman smile and I pretend not to recognize you and you wave those hands. Such small hands. “We talked about Dan Brown.”
“That’s most days.”
“Paula Fox,” you say and you nod, proud, and graze my arm with your hand.
“Aah,” I say. “Paula Fox and Spalding Gray.”
You clap and you almost kiss me but you don’t and you recover and sit back and cross your legs. “You must think I’m a fucking lunatic, right? You must talk to like fifty girls a day.”
“God, no.”
“Thanks,” you say.
“I talk to at least seventy girls a day.”
“Ha.” And you roll your eyes. “So you don’t think I’m, like, stalker-crazy.”
“No, not at all.”
My middle school health teacher told us that you can hold eye contact for ten seconds before scaring or seducing someone. I am counting and I think you can tell.
“So true. Which bar do you work at down there? Maybe I’ll come by for a drink.”
I won’t judge you for trying to reduce me to someone who services you, who rings up your books and delivers your picklebacks.
“I just fill in there. Mostly I’m at the bookstore.”
“A bar and a bookstore. Cool.”
The cab rolls to a stop on West Fourth Street.
“Is this you?” I ask and you like me for being deferential.
“Actually,” you say and you lean forward. “I’m just around the corner.”
You sit back and look at me and I smile. “Bank Street. Not too shabby.”
You play. “I’m an heiress.”
“What kind?”
“Bacon,” you sass and a lot of girls would have gone blank.
We are here, at your place. You are looking in your purse for your phone that is on the seat between us, closer to me than you, and the driver shifts. We’re in park.
“Here we go again with me and the always disappearing phone.”
Someone raps on the car door. I jolt. The motherfucker actually knocks on the window. Benji. You reach across me and roll down the window. I smell you. Pickles and tits.
“Benji, omigod, this is the saint who saved my life.”
“Good job, dude. Fucking Greenpoint, right? Nothing good happens there.”
He raises his hand for a high five and I meet his hand and you are sliding away from me and everything is wrong.
“I can’t believe this but I think I lost my phone.”
“Again?” he says and he walks away and he lights a cigarette and you sigh.
“He seems like a jerk but, you have to understand, I lose my phone all the time.”
“What’s your number?” I blurt and you look out the window at Benji and then look back at me. He’s not your boyfriend but you’re acting like he’s your boyfriend.
I’m good, calm. “Beck,” I say. “I need your number or your e-mail or something in case I find your phone.”
“Sorry,” you say. “I just spaced. I think I’m still kind of freaked out. Do you have a pen?”
“No,” I say and thank God that when I pull a phone out of my pocket it’s mine and not yours. You give me your e-mail address. You’re mine now and Benji calls, “You coming or what?”
You sigh.
“Thank you so much.”
“Every time.”
“I like that. Every time. Instead of ‘anytime.’ It’s pointed.”
“Well, I mean it.”
Our first date ends and you’re going upstairs and fucking the shit out of Benji but it doesn’t matter, Beck. Our phones are together and you know that I know where you live and I know that you know where to find me.
7
MY thoughts are firing too fast (you, me, your tights, your phone, Benji) and when I get like this there’s only one place for me to go. I walk to the shop, go to the way back and unlock the basement door. I close it behind me and stand in the vestibule that looks to Curtis, to anyone, like a storage closet. I fish in my pocket for the true key, the key that unlocks the next door, the final barricade between the shop and the soundproof basement. I lock the door behind me and by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs I am smiling because there it is, our beautiful, enormous, beastly enclosure: the cage.
“Cage” really isn’t the right word, Beck. For one thing, it’s huge, almost as big as the entire fiction section upstairs. It’s not a clunky metal trap you’d find in a prison cell or a pet shop. It’s more like a chapel than a cage and I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank Lloyd Wright had a hand in the design, what with the stark mahogany beams as smooth as they are heavy. The walls are genius acrylic, unbreakable yet breathable. It’s mystical, Beck, you’ll see. Half the time, when collectors write fat checks for old books, I think they’re under the spell of the cage. And it’s practical too. There’s a bathroom, a tiny stall with a tiny toilet because Mr. Mooney would never go upstairs for “something as banal as a bowel movement.” The books are on high shelves accessible only by climbing a ladder. (Good luck, thieves.) There’s a small sliding drawer in the front wall, the kind they use at a gas station in a sketchy neighborhood. I unlock the door and go inside. I’m inside and I look up at the books and I smile. “Hi, guys.”
I take off my shoes and lie back on the bench. I fold my hands under my head and tell the books all about you. They listen, Beck. I know it sounds crazy, but they do. I close my eyes. I remember the day we got this cage. I was fifteen and I’d been working for Mr. Mooney for a few months. He told me to come in to meet the truck at eight sharp. I was on time but the delivery guys from Custom Acrylics didn’t show up until ten. The guy behind the wheel beeped and waved for us to come outside. Mr. Mooney told me to observe as the driver yelled over the roar of the engine, “Is this Mooney Books?”
Mr. Mooney looked at me, disgusted by Philistines who can’t be bothered to read the sign above the shop. He looked at the driver. “Do you have my cage?”
The driver spat. “I can’t get this cage in that shop. Everything’s in parts, guy. The beams are fifteen feet long and the walls are too friggin’ wide to get through that door.”
“Both doors open,” said Mr. Mooney. “And we have all the time in the world.”
“It ain’t about time.” He sniffed and he looked at the other dude in the truck and I knew that they weren’t on our side. “With all due respect, we usually put these babies together in backyards, mansions, big open spaces, ya know?”
“The basement is both big and open,” said Mr. Mooney.
“You think we’re getting this fucking beast into a basement?”
Mr. Mooney was stern. “Don’t swear in front of the boy.”
The guys had to make at least two dozen trips, lugging beams and walls out of the truck, through the shop, and down the stairs. Mr. Mooney said not to feel bad for them. “They’re working,” he told me. “Labor is good for people, Joseph. Just watch.”
I couldn’t imagine what the cage would look like when it was done, if it was ever done. The beams were so dark and old-fashioned and the walls were so transparent and modern. I couldn’t imagine them coming together until Mr. Mooney finally called me downstairs. I was in awe. So were the delivery guys. “Biggest one ever,” said the sweaty driver. “You keeping African grays? I friggin’ love those birds. They talk, so cool.”
Mr. Mooney didn’t answer him. Neither did I.