6. Margot
MARGOT
By the fourth visit I had started writing him, which is exactly how I fall for anyone, and exactly how I ruin them.
It works like this. A man comes into my shop often enough, and my brain, which has never once known how to leave a thing alone, starts taking notes on him without asking my permission: the economy of his hands, the half-second of quiet before he answers a question as though he is checking it for tripwires.
I tell myself it is research. It is, technically.
It is also the other thing, the one I am not ready to put in a sentence I would have to keep.
He comes in the evenings, always near close, always alone.
He never announces himself and never has to, because the shop changes temperature when he is in it, as a room does when someone walks in and quietly decides he is responsible for everyone's safety.
He buys something every visit, which I appreciate, because Vera has a print run to earn out and I have a lease I keep only by force of habit.
He studies the backs of books he has plainly already read.
And one evening, without a word or a glance for credit, he crouches and shims two years of wobble out of the poetry shelf with a folded receipt and a patience I have never once spent on my own life.
He never buys what I expect. He passes the thrillers and the new releases and the tables I built to move stock, and he buys poetry, and history, and once a battered field guide to the birds of North America that I cannot picture him needing.
"For a friend," he says, when I raise an eyebrow, and I have learned that "for a friend" is the sentence he reaches for when the truth is a room he has decided I am not going into.
I am building a map of his lies. It is the most romantic thing I have done in years.
He is the only customer I have ever had who argues with me correctly.
He tells me I am wrong about an ending I have defended for a decade, and instead of being offended I am awake until two in the morning discovering that he is right.
He asks what I am reading and then actually reads it, so that the next night he can name the exact page where it lost him, and he is always right about the page.
I have wanted, my whole life, to be read that closely.
I did not know it would feel so much like being followed.
One evening I test him. I hand him a novel with the last forty pages torn out, a mangled donation I keep behind the counter as a joke, and I ask him how he thinks it ends.
He turns it over, reads three pages at random, and gives me an ending.
It lands close enough to the real one that I feel briefly and pleasantly robbed.
"How do you do that?" I ask. "People are only ever the endings they have already had," he says, "printed a little differently each time.
" I do not sleep especially well after that one.
He knows poetry the way other people know the weather. One night he sets a slim Russian collection on my counter, a poet I have never heard of who wrote three thin books and then walked into a war and did not walk back out, and I ask him where he found it.
"A man gave it to me, a long time ago," he says.
"What man was that?"
"He is not around to be asked about." He says it lightly, the way a man closes a door he would rather you not hear latch, already turning us both to the poem on page forty, and I cannot tell whether I have been charmed or steered, and I am starting to think the honest answer is both.
He reads me the poem in the original first, and I understand none of it and could listen to it for the rest of my natural life, and then he reads it in English, plainly, with no performance in it at all.
It is about a man who watches a house from the road because he is not permitted inside it.
When he finishes he watches my face instead of the page, and I get the sudden vertigo of a woman who suspects she has just been told something and has no way to prove it.
"That is very sad," I manage.
"He did not think so," Daniil says. "He thought the road was the only honest place to love a thing from, close enough to see and too far to ruin." He closes the book. "He was wrong, but he was wrong beautifully, which is how wrong men get remembered."
I write all of it down later, and hate myself a little, and do it anyway.
This is the shape of him. He will talk about a book until the streetlights come on, and tell me nothing at all about the man holding it.
I know his taste and not his history. I know he turns down the chair I offer every single time and stands instead where he can keep the door in sight.
I know he says he is a translator. And I have started to suspect that a person can be a house with every window lit and every door bolted, and that I have developed a reckless appetite for standing on the step, knocking.
Some nights he stays until I flip the sign, and then he lingers on the sidewalk without admitting that is what he is doing, studying the sky like someone with nowhere he needs to be, until I have the deadbolt thrown and the gate rattled down.
He never says he is waiting to see me safely up the stairs, and never has to, because when I glance back through the glass he is still on the corner, and he does not leave until my lamp comes on in the window above the shop.
I should find it alarming. I have catalogued, with real care, the precise degree to which I do not.
Birdie and Mateo have opened a book on him. It is an actual one, with odds, kept on the back of a receipt roll.
Mateo runs the espresso cart two doors down and holds opinions the way other men hold season tickets.
He props himself in my doorway one afternoon while Daniil is deep in the stacks and gives me his current line under his breath.
"He's a cop, working undercover," he says.
"Nobody holds that still unless he's been shot at for a living. "
"He's an assassin," Birdie says from behind the register, not looking up from her phone. "He's widowed, his backstory is tragic, and my twenty dollars is on tragic and staying there."
"He is a translator," I tell them, not for the first time.
"That's the least believable thing a man could be," Birdie says, "and I'd like the room to note that you're the only one buying it."
The betting has spread. The woman who runs the dry cleaner has him as a hit man in witness protection.
Mateo posts him at even money for a cop and long odds on a defrocked priest, which I find funny right up until I do not.
Everyone on the block has a theory, and every theory is a small knife, and I am the only one still insisting on the dullest answer available, a translator, a quiet man, nothing to see, exactly the way you insist a house is not on fire while you are still deciding whether to run.
Later, when he has gone, Birdie leans her whole weight on the counter and studies me like something under glass.
"You go quiet when he's here," she says.
"And you never go quiet. I've known you six years and never once watched you run out of words, and that man walks in and you turn into a woman in an oil painting.
" I tell her I have no idea what she means.
"That's the other thing," she says. "You've started lying to me.
They're small, and they're practice." She is twenty-two, and she is not wrong, and that is what I hold against her most days.
Hemingway, for his part, has declared war.
This is a cat who has spent his entire life ignoring the human species with genuine dedication, and he has decided, apparently on principle, that Daniil is the one exception worth making.
He stations himself beneath the poetry table and ambushes the man's ankles with the conviction of a much larger and more righteous animal.
Daniil, who I am fairly certain could take a knife off a stranger without raising his voice, endures it with the grave patience of a man serving out a sentence.
"He can smell it on you," I tell him once, "whatever it is you are not saying.
" Daniil looks down at the cat for a long moment.
"He is a good judge," he says, and offers nothing more, and Hemingway bites him again, thrilled.
Here is the part I would not say with the lights on.
My book had been dead for two months. Vera had nothing, I had less, and the cursor had turned into a small blinking accusation.
Then a quiet man started haunting my shop, and now I write past midnight with the lamp low and the cat asleep on my rejected pages, and the man on my screen has a stillness I did not invent and a way of reading a room that I have flatly stolen.
The character is not him. The character has a different name and a far worse coat.
But he answers every question except the one about himself, and he moves like a man counting exits, and last night I wrote a sentence about a man who loves a woman by watching her, and then I had to get up and stand at the window a while, because it was the best thing I had written in a year and I did not understand where it had come from.
The wanting arrives the way rent does, all at once and somehow already overdue.
One evening he is later than usual, and I catch myself reshelving the same three books by the window so I have an excuse to watch the street, and when the bell finally goes my whole chest does something I would be humiliated to describe.
He sees it. He sees everything. He says nothing about it, which is either kindness or tactics, and I have lost the ability to tell his kindnesses from his tactics, and worse, I have stopped wanting to.
Once, reaching past me for a book on a high shelf, he stops with his arm above me, close enough that I can feel the cold the street left in his coat, and for a stretch of time frankly indecent for a bookshop, neither of us moves.
Then he takes the book, and steps back, and says something dry about the failings of the Dewey decimal system, and I laugh far too hard, and the moment files itself into the drawer where I keep the things I am not dealing with.
Tonight he drifts to the locked cabinet at the back, the one full of Josie's stranger stock, the first editions nobody on this block could afford and the poetry in six languages that never once made sense as inventory for a shop that lives and dies on paperbacks.
He reads a spine through the glass, slow and thorough, as though it might turn out to be evidence.
Then he asks, one degree too casually, about my grandmother and the shop's history.
And because I have spent a year and a half waiting for anyone at all to want her, because grief is only love with nowhere left to go, I light up like a struck match.
I start telling him about Josie's famous regulars, the judge and the priest and the courtly old Russian, the standing jokes and the small rituals of a shop that was somebody's second home for forty years. I don't notice him go very, very still.