Jonathan: Okay, so, I’m going to go.
It wasn’t really fair on him. We’d had a straightforward and fond relationship up until that point, and our jokes had been mostly taking the piss out of other people. I couldn’t just expect him to start playing silly games, the kind me and James were now doing, when there was no pretext for it in our relationship.
The only reason I remember the date is because I was working that afternoon, and Dr. Byrne came into the bookshop.
Dr. Byrne had come into the shop before, of course. All of my college professors had. We were a big bookshop, and we carried a lot of stuff from the smaller, Irish-run presses. I often got a nod from faculty members of UCC, people who weren’t necessarily my tutors but who recognised me and were willing to make small talk about the holidays. But now it was different. He had hand-picked me to be in his seminar class of final-year students, so he knew me.
It was a Thursday night, the weather bitter cold outside, and the shop was set to be quiet until it closed at 9 p.m. Processing my grief, I started marking down a stack of literary-themed calendars on the counter. WAS: 9.99 / NOW: 4.99.
“Rachel,” Dr. Byrne said. “I didn’t know you worked here.”
“Hello!” I said brightly, stumbling into that young person’s problem of never knowing how to address your professors, your parents’ friends, or your friends’ parents. “Yes!”
“Any recommendations?” he asked politely, which is something people always ask if you work in a bookshop. I could never remember the title of a single book.
I looked down at his stack: a reissued book of poetry by Irish revolutionaries and a snow thriller. I wanted desperately to recommend something tense, lean and masculine to show him that I understood men.
“…Hemingway?” I threw out, uselessly.
“Ah,” he said, without emotion. “Batman for fat, bookish boys.” Then he looked down at himself. “I’ll take two.”
I burst out laughing. I hadn’t grown out of the schoolgirl giggle habit. I was always nervous and I was always laughing my head off.
“Like Dorothy Parker,” I said, “is Wonder Woman for depressed girls.”
I couldn’t believe I had come up with a line like this so quickly. He laughed instantly, caught my eye, and I thought: Fuck me and I’ll say more things!
He tilted his eyes skyward, trying to remember the verse. “Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful…” He trailed off.
“You might as well live,” we said together, and then we smiled. With perfect conviction I realised that I was going to rebound from my ex-boyfriend with my college professor. How chic!
“She went bull-fighting with him once, you know,” he said. “For a magazine. I think they wanted her to be appalled by him, but she couldn’t have been more charmed.”
“Me neither,” I answered. And then: “About Hemingway, I mean.”
He looked at me, perplexed at this half-flirting, but not altogether uninterested.
“I wonder if I might trouble you”—he pointed at the computer at the end of the counter—“to check a book for me.”
“Of course,” I said, stationing myself at the creaky PC. “What do you need?”
“Well, ah, it’s a little odd.”
He coughed, and I had a painful fear that he was about to open our affair with a red-faced request for The Joy of Sex or something. I considered whether I would still go through with our relationship even if he did this. Surely not, Rachel?
“I was wondering if you had, on pre-order, a book called The Kensington Diet by…” He rummaged in his pockets, and looked at the emergency exit sign. “By, ah, Dr. Frederick Byrne.”
“Oh,” I replied, strangely embarrassed for him. “Right! Okay!”
I started to type. “On pre-order, did you say?”
“Yes,” he rushed. “It’s not coming out until February.”
“February eleventh,” I said, reading the screen. I named the publisher. They were famous, and Irish, and famous because they were Irish. They discovered a lot of authors that would then abandon them for larger contracts in the UK.
“I wanted to know how many the shop had on order,” he asked. “Bit pathetic, but this is my first time publishing outside of an academic press, and I’m hoping more than four people might read it.”
I saw that the order selection was zero.
“Fifteen,” I said. “Fifteen copies.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Quite a lot, then.”
“Yes,” I answered, trying to suppress the blush that always accompanies my lies. “We’re very excited about it.”
He cocked an eyebrow, wary that I might be making fun of him.
“I mean, obviously we’re excited about it, if my manager is ordering in copies. What’s it about?”
“Irish writers during the famine, the artistic response to Victoria starving us out of it,” he answered. “Very cheerful stuff, I assure you.”
I remembered the Eavan Boland poem that I had done for the Leaving Cert. She and Adrienne Rich were the only poets I liked at school.
“What is your body now,” I said, quoting her. “If not a famine road.”
“Very good,” he said, and the atmosphere was tense again, too much like teacher and student. He was growingly conscious of how vulnerable he was, enquiring about his book like that. That particular poem also had a certain relevancy to his personal life, but we’ll get to that later.
James came over and started scanning a stack of books he had just recommended to an old woman. James didn’t read much but he was constantly watching films, and for that reason he was always selling Notes on a Scandal and Perfume: The Story of a Murder. He had the best sales numbers of anyone on our team, which is why Ben kept him long after his Christmas-temp term was up.
“What’s the craic?” he said cheerfully. James would never judge you for talking to a friend at work, and you could always count on him to cover if someone popped in to see you.
“James, this is Dr. Byrne,” I said. “He’s one of my lecturers.”
“Well, how do you do?” James said. He didn’t go to college but loved talking to people connected with it like this. It was somewhere between a piss-take and genuine admiration.
“Very well, thanks.”
Dr. Byrne moved quickly, as if realising that he had been lingering too long. I wanted to dive across the counter and keep him from escaping out of our private world filled with little poses and sexy jokes about literature. But I could not do this, so he paid for his things and left.
The rest of the shift passed quietly. Now that we were living together, James and I loved arranging our shifts so that we were both closing. We pulled down the shutters ten minutes early and blasted our own music through the speakers as we tidied up.
I, however, was taking longer than usual.
“What are you at?” He put his head on my shoulder, gazing at the monitor. “Who’s Dr. Frederick Byrne?”
“My college professor. The one who came in earlier? And this is his book.”
“And who’s Moira Finchley?”