Michael Chabon

MY WORST NIGHTMARE WAS a boring nightmare, the dream of visiting an empty place where nothing happened, with awful slowness. I would awake tired, with a few unremarkable traces that never seemed to do justice to the dull fear I had felt while still asleep: the memory of the low hum of an electric clock, of an aimless albino hound, of a voice incessantly announcing departure times over a public address system; and that summer, my job was a dream of this sort. I’d wanted to work in a true, old-fashioned bookshop, crammed with the mingled smells of literature and Pittsburgh blowing in through the open door. Instead I’d got myself hired by Boardwalk Books.

Boardwalk, a chain, sold books at low prices, in huge, fluorescent, supermarket style, a style pervaded by glumness and by an uncomprehending distaste for its low-profit merchandise. The store, with its long white aisles and megalithic piles of discount thrillers and exercise guides, was organized as though the management had hoped to sell luncheon meat or lawn-care products but had somehow been tricked by an unscrupulous wholesaler—I imagined the disappointed “What the hell are we going to do with all these damn books?” of the owners, who had started in postcards and seaside souvenirs on the Jersey shore. As far as they were concerned, a good book was still a plump little paperback that knew how to sit in a beach bag and keep its dirty mouth shut.

Literature was squeezed into a miniature and otherwise useless alcove between War and Home Improvement, and of all the employees, several of whom were fat and wanted to be paramedics, I was the only one who found irregularity in the fact that Boardwalk sold the Monarch notes to works, such as Tristram Shandy, that it did not actually stock. I was to spend the daytime summer stunned by air-conditioning, almost without a thought in my head, waiting for the engagement of evening. Summer would happen after dinner. The job had no claim upon me.

Early one evening at the beginning of June, a few days after the party at Riri’s, my lease on the “Claire apartment” had at last come up. I locked the glass door of Boardwalk behind me, said good-bye to Gil Frick, flinched at the slam of sudden heat outside, and, with the very last of the furnishings from the old place in a grocery bag on my lap, rode the bus to my new house, on the Terrace.

The Terrace had been, many years ago, a fashionable place to live. A horseshoe of large, identical brick houses enclosing a long incline of grass, it still retained some of the genteel quality of an enclave that had once attracted families with servants and livery. I knew this last from the fact that I was moving into what had been a kind of coach house or chauffeur’s quarters, small rooms over the garages behind the Terrace proper. None of my new neighbors seemed to bear any resemblance to me: an old man, babies, parents.

After setting the brown bag down among the scattered cartons of my life from the old place, I went outside to rest and smoke at the top of the twenty-six fissured concrete steps that drew up to my door. To the left, the Terrace, the kids and happy schnauzers running there; to the right and all before me, the maze of tumbling stables and garages, some doorless, most sheltering skis or autos. Along the tops of all the garages ran apartments like mine, spindly creepers in their windows, various musics from radios coming through their wire screens. The late sun was still the major fact of the day, setting the parked cars around me to creak, heating the metal banister against my bare neck. A warm breeze carried dinner smells and birdsong across the neighborhood, ran lightly over my sweaty face, and stirred the hair on my arms. I had an erection, laughed at it, and patiently pushed it down. Four years of familiarity and unconcern with Pittsburgh turned suddenly to arousal and love, and I hugged myself.

The next day was my day off, and I had plans. I walked into Hillman Library, sleeveless and sunglassy and ready for lunch with Arthur. The summer term had started (but not for me!), and the library was relatively crowded with students in shorts, struggling to remain seated and docile and scholarly. Arthur typed book acquisition forms in a room off the same hallway as the Girl Behind Bars, and to get to him I had to pass those bars, behind which she sat again today. I approached slowly, glad to be wearing sneakers and not my noisy shoes, because she was intent on fooling with her piles of books and did not glance up, and I got a good look at her.