And so, as she sat in the kitchen with the twins, she made a secret prayer to God or some vague stand-in for God that the father of her unborn child be T. K. and not Cal, the serial narcissist, or Hector, the Peruvian dealer who had shown her his gun and called her “mi pequeño coño.”
She considered keeping the child. Raising him alone. She really did. Particularly if it was T. K.’s — she could see herself devoting the rest of her life to raising his brilliant little son. Reading him Robert Louis Stevenson. Telling him about the father he never knew. But then she had a fever dream in which she was trapped in an infinitely long hall of white doors, all of them without doorknobs. Each door was unlocked, she knew, but she had no way of opening them. She woke up sweating, terrified. For the first time, the baby growing inside her felt foreign, thrust upon her by a guiltless world.
The next morning, she called the number the twins had written on the prescription bottle and then rode the subway up to Harlem to the fixer’s house. In the subway car, she found herself studying the faces of the weary black men, willing them to be T. K., willing them to come rescue her from what she was about to do.
The fixer’s name was Jarmal, and he was not charming in the least. He took her into his living room, where there was a yellowing dentist’s chair in the middle of a stained afghan rug. The room’s shelving was stuffed with collected Oriental tchotchkes that had been hastily covered in plastic sheeting, creating the impression of an impromptu crime scene.
“Take off your clothes and then take this,” he said, handing her a pill.
Afterwards, she was so groggy and in such excruciating pain that she forgot to ask if the fetus had been black, whether you could even tell that kind of thing before a baby was born.
She paid him $75 for his services. All things considered, this seemed like a fairly good deal until she developed an infection one week later that landed her in the St. Luke’s emergency room. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Her parents arrived, horrified at the doctor’s declaration that their oldest daughter had come within “two hours of dying,” whatever this meant. Vivienne even called her on the phone, her honeydew voice mimicking concern, with mixed results. Her sister was cursed with the unexamined libertarian ignorance that only the very privileged could espouse: she believed everything that happened to you, good or bad, was the result of your own choosing. The problem was that in Charlene’s case, this was most likely true.
Charlene refused her parents’ offer to help her recuperate in their soft Trenton lair and (this part was implied) to take stock of how far she had fallen with a Rutgers degree in hand. Wounded, they made sure she was going to live and then promptly cut off her allowance.
She convalesced back in her squalid little Hell’s Kitchen den, hardly leaving her bed for almost three weeks. Unexpectedly, Lila and Vespers displayed some real maternal behavior, checking in with her nightly and bringing her back sad little clumps of foraged groceries. They even chipped in to cover her rent that month. Charlene, feeling the full effects of her withdrawal, pleaded for opioids. To their credit, the twins refused. Charlene became manic. More than once, she seriously considered suicide. Her only solace was a stray cat that frequented their fire escape. She fed him butter pats and named him Bumble Bee — Bee for short. Bee had a gift for non-judgment.
She rediscovered her books. She read and reread A Tale of Two Cities and then devoured Anna Karenina three times through. The words suddenly all felt new, as if they had been freshly planted on the page. She developed a pathological kinship for Anna’s character. Charlene was not deterred by her limited selection; rather, the repeated rhythms of the narratives beat back the wet terror festering inside her chest.
When she was well enough to leave the apartment, she made two decisions: (1) She would find a job, a real job, and (2) she would go clean. Her fortitude on item number 2 felt shaky, so she wrote her intentions for sobriety down onto a piece of monogrammed stationery that her parents had given her the previous Christmas. She initialed the page and then hid it beneath the floorboards of her room.
In fact, it was her fortitude on item number 1 that proved the problem. She was not good at finding a job. There was something liberating about being completely broke in New York. Or maybe she was just lazy. She began spending all of her waking hours at the Strand, reading entire novels as she stood next to the towering rows of shelving. What a strange population haunted those aisles: maharajas and heart surgeons, shell-shocked vets and Shakespeare scholars, hunchbacked pensioners and schizoid hoboes. Lured by literature or the promise of literature, they came and they usually stayed, and some of them slept and a few of them peed. She read the rest of Tolstoy, then Dostoyevsky, then Dickens, and when she tired of Dickens she turned to Woolf and then Melville. She read the Iliad. She read the new Vonnegut. She read The Crying of Lot 49 and afterwards was so overcome with what we are able to accomplish with the simple constellation of words that she walked right out of the store in a daze, forgetting that she was holding the book in her hands.
A hand grabbed her shoulder. She turned to find a cute, bespectacled young man doing his best impression of an angry manager. He demanded the book back, threatening some kind of intense police intervention. Realizing her folly, Charlene began to apologize profusely, though she also couldn’t help but be amused by this man’s clear dislocation from the outside world. He was a fish out of water; he belonged back among the books. Relieved, the man quickly dropped his austere routine, and soon they were both absorbed in a cyclical conversation about Pynchon, right there on the sidewalk amid the December rush of shoppers. The bookstore and the city and everything else fell away, and the universe contained only him and her and the delightful possibility of the Trystero all around them. She was not sure how much time had passed, but she surprised herself by asking him for a job. She was good, she said. She knew what the books needed.
The man’s name was Petar — it was spelled with an a, as she would later come to learn. Needless to say, she was hired. Needless to say, she also began sleeping with Petar. He was kind and gentle and terribly nerdy. Together they got matching tattoos of the Trystero post horn on their ankles. The relationship lasted just long enough to make her believe that she was capable of caring again.
The job itself was a revelation. She loved haunting the bookstore after hours, glimpsing the occasional spine of an old library copy, its Dewey Decimal numbers protected by a crumbling layer of Scotch tape. She began to memorize the index of Dewey Decimal subjects, pairing those numerals with its far-flung content:
813: American fiction
883: Classical Greek epic poetry and fiction
646.7: Personal grooming
179.7: Euthanasia
621.38416: Radio operations (ham)
The system was a salve against the chaos of life, and the disparate glimpses of its calculus made her miss the rigorous order of a true library, where each volume was slotted into place like a giant stopwatch of human knowledge. She realized she had been avoiding her calling. Books, the cataloging of books, that pursuit without end, was the only way to quell the panic.
She applied and was accepted into the master’s program in library science at Syracuse. The year was 1969. Back in her parents’ good graces, she borrowed their nearly expired woody, packed up everything she owned, which was not all that much, bade the melancholic twins, Bee, Petar, and the great city adieu, and headed north.