She looked at her watch; was startled to see how much time had passed since they’d sat down. Mulligan, reading her, had rocked back in his seat and was inserting his arms in the sleeves of the parka draped over the back of his chair, contorting himself like a little kid. She made her excuses and stood, eager suddenly to end the interview. His coat got caught on his chair as he tried to rise to say goodbye.
In the end, she was surprised to discover that she felt she’d experienced a personality with some genuine force to it, an oddball authority that appealed, that put off, that attracted, that ultimately spooked her out of her chair and out onto the main street to regard again the fudge, the shoes, the leather handbags, all gleaming through the glass onto sidewalks buried under snow. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that the one thing that she’d missed in her life — in high school, in college, throughout each of those formative passages that people seemed to hold close — had been the life-changing friend and companion whose bright light shined on all the dull edges of the everyday. Had she resisted that kind of force? Becky had force and persuasiveness, but it had been the force and persuasiveness of a pack of cigarettes, a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor. Various men had excited her, but she had always conspired with them to ruin things, by blending the pleasure of mutual iconoclasm with the easier intimacy of sex, which generally turned out to be more of an outright exchange than a blending: suddenly the singular soul mate would disappear, transformed into just another boyfriend who demanded that she punch in and punch out and not do weird things with her hair, and that never lasted long.
ON THE SIDEWALK outside was a signboard displaying a shopper’s guide to downtown, and she scanned it for what she sought. The store, Ambit Books, was a few blocks farther along Front Street. It was a big, airy place — bigger, really, than demand appeared to necessitate. Most of the activity was in a coffee bar that took up about a quarter of the floor space, where two baristas served a half dozen customers; the hiss of the espresso machine and the rhythmic thunk of sodden coffee grounds being knocked out of the filter basket filled the store. The clerk up front was idle, arms folded across the top of her cash terminal. Kat found the fiction section toward the back, and there were paperback copies of Alexander Mulligan III’s three books: two novels, Fallen Sparks and A More Removed Ground, and a collection of short stories, The Proposition, the Tautology, and the Contradiction.
Kat enjoyed looking at books, the fussy business of jacket copy and blurbs, review quotes and author bios, acknowledgments and dedications. She sedulously examined all such matter on any book, even one she fully intended to read, before alighting on the text itself. These were new-looking editions, designed to complement one another, and she was slightly disappointed because the bio, with its serene list of the cumulative honors and accomplishments achieved over nearly fifteen years, was identical in each title. Mulligan lived in New York City with his family, where he was at work on a new noveclass="underline" this intelligence was obsolete, apparently. None of the books included an author photo. Each acknowledged the help of the usual foundations, editors, agents, and other individuals providing aid and comfort. The short stories had appeared in magazines she had heard of and in obscure-sounding journals. The review quotations were typically hyperbolic. She flipped through the books, hoping to become duly excited, but she didn’t. It was not inviting stuff, in her opinion. She knew that she wasn’t quite sure how to be impressed by a book, specifically by fiction, and she’d long ago determined not to feel guilty over failing to respond to art for which claims had been made that weren’t supported by her experience of it, but it was disappointing anyway. It was because she’d met him and had found him engaging and interesting enough as a human being that she’d hoped that his books would be even more so.
In the end all it added up to was around twelve hundred pages, over fifteen years. In the end it really wasn’t very impressive, as achievements went, when you thought about it. In the end she took all three of the books up to the counter and bought them, the clerk scanning and bagging them without comment, although Kat wasn’t quite sure what she’d expected, a chat or an opinion or what: she didn’t actually enter the dismal swamp of an independently owned bookstore often enough to be familiar with the fringe benefits currently on offer for patronizing such a place, unless it was just a general feeling of virtuousness, like you got for contributing to your local public radio station. The girl just shoved the books in a plastic bag as if they were socks or pork chops and sent her on her way, corroding a little more the romance that survived, God only knew why, in Kat’s heart.
She stepped out onto the street. The sun was beginning to break through the clouds, a little, and she tried to stay in it as she headed back to her car. As unexciting as she found the books, she was oddly excited to possess them. She felt that somehow she had illicitly found out something about Alexander Mulligan, although she knew this was absurd: writers deliberately published these things, didn’t they? Still and all, she would have been reluctant, even embarrassed, to admit to him that she’d gone to buy his books after having lunch with him.
PART 3. ATTACHMENT THEORY
16
I SAT on the sofa, a package of Wheat-Free Oatmeal Snackimals balanced in the palm of my hand. I’d unexpectedly encountered this latter-day hippie product at the vast, the cosmically sized, Meijer’s hypermarket where I go to hike the aisles in awe and, almost incidentally, to buy groceries. That had been the highlight of my day, apart from the moment that afternoon when I’d nearly run over some laptop-carrying kid racing out of Starbucks and into Front Street traffic.
The cookies were one of my children’s favorites, they reminded me of my children, I’d bought them as an aid to “thinking of” my children, but now I’d eaten every last one without sparing a single thought for them. Fuzzily, I gazed at the package (stoned-looking cartoon animals), then moved it to my mouth and emptied it of whatever was remaining at the bottom. Cookie fragments spilled out of the gas- and light-impermeable, shelf-stable, food-grade metalized plastic pouch and landed on my lap. Certified Organic crumbs and NASA-developed technology: the divergent dreams of the sixties, realized in unison. At last.