Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
It was called the Winding Stair, with a charming facade painted an olive green and the words Book Shop on one window formed with what looked like cutout pages from a newspaper.
“I don’t come into town very much,” Eamonn said as he held the door open. “But when I do, I try to come here.”
“Howya,” the clerk said when we walked in. “Anything I can help you with, let me know.”
The shop was cozy, with curated shelves of books in various categories, including an entire display on Irish literature, another of beautiful special editions of public domain classics.
There was a wine-colored wingback armchair that I could imagine a writer sitting in for an event, reading aloud from their latest work, even though the space was small.
There was also an old typewriter on one of the tables next to stacks of books, like it was part of a writer’s cluttered office.
I touched a finger to one of the typewriter keys.
“You could still take a literature class just for fun,” I said to Eamonn, who I’d felt coming up behind me. “Do a seminar on, I don’t know, Ulysses. Although I’m realizing you never told me if you liked that book or not, so maybe it would be a bad choice.”
“It’s probably a perfect choice,” Eamonn said, skimming his hand over the stacks of books until he landed on a hardcover of Ulysses, which he flipped open to the first page.
They sure did celebrate their homegrown writers here; it was really something.
“I don’t know if I can say I like it. It’s not what I’d pick up for a good time necessarily.
But it rewards a close read, and I respect that about it.
There’s so much in it, more than enough for a class—allusions to the Odyssey and Hamlet, Irish history, Catholicism, a very Dublin sense of humor, it’s such a musical book if you can hear the dialogue read aloud the right way.
The first time I read it I definitely thought, what the fuck is this book even talking about. I couldn’t keep track.”
“And yet you kept going.”
“It was the part where he wipes his dried snot on a rock.”
That surprised a laugh out of me. “What?”
“It’s toward the beginning here somewhere,” Eamonn said, flipping through the pages.
“He’s on the beach, looking out over the water, thinking about various stuff—the writing is all stream of consciousness and distorted, it’s hard to follow, and then he just reaches up into his nose, extracts a crusty bit of snot, and wipes it on a rock. ”
“Ew,” I said, but gently. At least it was out in nature, I supposed.
“It was such a human thing to do,” Eamonn said. “It made me think, let me hang with this book a bit longer, see what else it’s got up its sleeve.”
“Probably another booger,” I said.
“That’s what makes it so famous. Joyce works in mucus the way other writers might work in metaphors. Like you work in watercolors.”
“Please,” I said, laughing. “I’m begging you, stop. I guess now I have to read this book, huh?”
“Snot a bad idea.”
I swatted him in the stomach, and he gave a smiling oof. I’d done it more to touch him than anything else, even though it was only glancing contact, just the softness of his sweater against the back of my knuckles.
“At least I got you with that one,” he said. “You left me hanging on my Obama joke.”
I was surprised to hear him reference that, as if it was something he’d been thinking about. He seemed surprised by it, too, or maybe a little abashed. He closed the book and placed it back at the top of its stack, pushing the corners of the books together so they all lined up.
“I don’t think you need to read it if you don’t want to,” he said. “Life’s short, you should read whatever books you want. I only felt like it, and had the time.”
I liked watching him handle the books, the veins on the back of his hand, the way his long fingers could stretch around a whole stack as he slid them into place. When he asked me a question, I completely blanked and had to get him to repeat it.
“What do you normally read,” Eamonn said, “when you take a book to a restaurant to eat by yourself?”
“It’s a lot of romance,” I said, giving a slightly apologetic wince and then hating myself for doing it.
There was no reason I couldn’t own up to what I liked to read.
It wasn’t just that I often braced myself against any of the usual dismissive reactions to the genre, although those could be annoying.
It also felt too…revealing, somehow. It cut a little close, telling someone how much you liked reading about people falling in love.
It felt too much like naming your own secret desires out loud.
“I saw some over there,” he said, leading me to a shelf that was mostly general fiction, but did have a few romance novels mixed in alphabetically by author. It was comforting to see names I recognized, even if the editions were a little different. Another touch of the familiar in a foreign place.
“Do you read romance?” I asked. I was impressed that he’d even known what to look for.
“I’ve read some,” he said. “I think. You’re more the expert, you can tell me. Where would I start?”
I pulled a book off the shelf, handing it to him. “This one is a bit melancholy, I’ll warn you,” I said. “But it does end in a happily ever after—spoiler alert, except not, because it’s baked into the genre.”
He flipped the book over as if to scan the back cover copy, but I could tell he wasn’t really reading it.
That disappointed me a little. He was being polite, which I appreciated, but if he was going to go through the motions he really didn’t need to.
As he’d said, life was short, and if he wanted to read other stuff, that was fine.
I just wished he wouldn’t patronize me by asking about it in that case.
“What do you like about romance?” he asked, and maybe it was because of those thoughts, but my answer came out sharper than I normally would’ve said it.
“It makes me feel hopeful,” I said. “Men aren’t trash, multiple orgasms are real, true love is out there, that kind of thing.”
Eamonn made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cough.
“What, you don’t agree that men are trash?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“That was the part that least caught me up,” he said.
He slid the book back into its place on the shelf, and we kept wandering around the bookstore. It wasn’t very large, but still, when he headed into another room I let him go without following, making my way instead to the shelf of Irish folklore I’d seen right by the door as we walked in.
I had to flip through a few books until I found one that listed “The Wooing of Becfola” in its contents. My heart kicked up a beat as I turned to the story.
I skimmed the first few sections, discovering that Eamonn had really given quite a good overview of the tale. Becfola arrives mysteriously, the king asks her to marry him, but she leaves him to go off into a fairy realm.
Then it got into new parts I didn’t know yet.
In the fairy world, Becfola follows a light that beckons her, which turns out to be a fire where a young man is roasting a boar.
She’s struck by the young man’s beauty, and also by the fact that he barely looks at her—just lets her eat some of the boar and then lets her follow him onto a boat and to the place where he goes to sleep.
She watches him and thinks about how beautiful he is and why he doesn’t seem to admire her own beauty the way everyone else has.
Eamonn rounded the corner heading back into the front room, his body language loose and casual as he scanned the book spines.
He didn’t seem as if he was looking for anything in particular, just browsing, and I appreciated the chance to watch him for a second.
He had such long lashes—I could see them from across the room, the shadow they cast over his cheekbones as he looked down at a shelf of books.
His face had a shadow over it most of the time, it seemed to me.
It was as if there was a deep sadness inside him, so far down that he probably thought he hid it well, but then he looked at you and it was right there in those eyes.
His browsing had been bringing him closer to me, but then the clerk said something that made Eamonn back up and talk to him.
There were some typical pleasantries at the beginning—the clerk making a comment about the weather, Eamonn asking a question about a book that was propped up on the counter—and eventually the talk turned to football and a bunch of specifics I couldn’t follow.
I brought the folklore book with me over to the wingback chair in front of the window, where I sat with it on my lap, leaning over it as I read the rest of the tale.
So Becfola has now left the king and is off in some magical realm with this beautiful, aloof young man, and they’re awoken to seven men who want to fight.
The young man, of course, defeats all of them.
Becfola wants to know why he battled them, but more important, why he won’t even look at her.
He says he’s not worthy of the mate of the King of Ireland until he has won the kingship of his own fairy land, and she should return to her king and her home until he’s ready to get her. By my hand, he says, I will come.
Becfola returns to her king, and is astonished when it seems as if no time has passed at all.
The king treats her as if she’d only just decided against her Sunday rendezvous that had set her out in the first place.
She knows the original prince she’d been planning to meet—god, I’d already forgotten about that poor sap—is probably still out there, waiting for her, but she realizes she doesn’t care about him anymore.
She only cares about the beautiful young man, her fairy beau.