Considering her swaddled in his bedcovers, Humphrey remarked, “You look like bear hyperbating for winter.”
“A bear doing what?”
“Hyperbating.”
“What is ‘hyperbating’? Sounds like a bear that can’t stop masturbating.”
“Don’t be disgusting pervert!”
“It’s a reasonable conclusion, Humph. There aren’t that many other words that end in ‘-bating.’ ”
“Plenty words end in ‘-bating.’ ”
“Like what?”
“Like … Like ‘riverbating.’ ”
“What is ‘riverbating’?”
“ ‘Riverbating’: when there is echo, you say it is riverbating.”
“ ‘Reverberating,’ ” she corrected him, “isn’t a word that ends in ‘-bating.’ ”
“Okay, I give you other.” He paused. “Here, I have it: ‘verbating.’ ”
“ ‘Verbating’?”
“When you speak something and I repeat it back same, then I am saying it verbating.”
“ ‘Verbatim.’ ”
“Yes, sure.”
Their current home was on the upper floor of a two-story storage space, with lightbulbs hanging from bare wires, the furniture damp. This main room served as kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and his sleeping quarters. She worried that he did this as gallantry, to ensure that she had the lone bedroom. Anyway, he was unmovable. Intermittently, she made efforts to clean the apartment. As for Humphrey, he was never renowned for tidiness. “My nature abhors the vacuum,” he said. In explaining his inertia, he cited a principle of physics that had yet to appear among the standard Newtonian laws: Slob Gravity. A slob such as himself, he claimed, struggles under a greater burden than others, being subject to a higher force of gravity. “More you are slob, more heavy gravity is.”
Over the years, he had amassed a huge library that was notable chiefly for its wretched condition. These were great works but pitiful volumes: disintegrating paperbacks of Kafka, Yeats, Goethe, Cicero, Rousseau. There were oddities, too, such as the user’s guide to Betamax, travel memoirs about countries that no longer existed, histories with half the pages and half the centuries missing, causing the Ming Dynasty to contest the Wars of German Unification with one swish of the page. Many volumes had come from garbage cans or boxes left on the sidewalk. This was less a library than an orphanage. His stated plan was to read everything ever printed. He claimed to be nearly there. Were it possible, he’d have read in the shower. But Humphrey’s books had little to fear from onrushing water, he and soap being on terms of only passing familiarity.
When they moved to this city several weeks earlier, Humphrey had gone immediately to explore the New York Public Library, awed by the ceiling fresco of heaven in the Rose Reading Room, at whose front bench he sat, watching readers submit chits for books. As in previous cities (their most recent being Barcelona), Humphrey’s next priority after books was finding the chess. This he located in Washington Square Park, where he watched ex-con hustlers facing off against nerdy grandmasters. He’d also discovered a Carmine Street store, Un-oppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books, where he could indulge another hobby, debating politics. He was still unconvinced about the Cold War. According to the world, capitalism had won that contest, but Humphrey called it a tie at best. He couldn’t see capitalism lasting. What was the point of any system, he asked, if it only encouraged the worst in humanity, elevating self-interest to a virtue? He described himself as a “Marxist, non-practicing,” and certainly seemed a Marxist in the sense of being broke.
His sole source of income was consulting for wealthy book collectors who sought to expand their hoards. He surveyed their shelves and identified which editions were lacking and where they might be found, marshaling his impressive recall of antiquarian bookshops around the world. The collectors (it was almost exclusively men who suffered this acquisitive hunger) viewed him as an idiot savant, a novelty act notorious for smelly clothing, thick accent, and gruff manner, along with rumors of an ancient stint in jail. Humphrey’s consultations were free, but the custom was to give him a volume of moderate value, which he immediately sold to Bauman Rare Books for spending money.
“Hungry?” He fetched a paper bag from the kitchen containing two stale croissants and one bruised avocado. Humphrey rejected the idea of meals, eating whenever he felt it appropriate, not because it was the ordained hour. His sleep followed the same principle: he remained up all night if reading, or slept till dark if the day offered nothing of note. To allow a clock to dictate one’s life was mere conformism. He emptied the bag onto the Ping-Pong table and invited Tooly to join him.
She dipped a croissant into her coffee, losing half the pastry in the mug, flakes floating, as he rhapsodized about his mushy avocado. Humphrey prided himself on the purchase of expired produce, which he talked supermarket stockers into saving for him. Despite moderate indigestion, he kept Tooly and himself going this way on almost no money. And Humphrey wanted nothing more than this existence: nibbles and books, gesticulating and pontificating, with Tooly there to answer back. “Movement is overrated,” he said.
She herself was subject to the laws of Slob Gravity, able to remain inside for days, her nose in books, consuming whatever vittles materialized on the Ping-Pong table. At other times, though, she marched outside, walking tirelessly around the city, marking her map, scanning for building doors left ajar and talking her way inside. Whichever condition — activity or indolence — held sway, Tooly struggled to break its spell. When slobbing around the apartment, she could barely propel herself farther than the bathroom and back. When striding block after block, she required a force of will to return home at all.
“Do you think,” she asked, following an hour of reading on the couch, “that I should get dressed at some point?”
“It’s nearly one P.M. — throw caution out of window.”
“If I threw caution out the window, I’d have to open the window. It’s too cold,” she said. “But I should get ready.”
He knew this meant a meeting with Venn. “Why you should go? Stay here. Is more comfy. You wait and I find you nice job.” Another of his pastimes was writing on her behalf to grand organizations, informing them of a young lady they must employ. She wished he’d stop this, but few of his correspondents answered anyway. When they did, Humphrey claimed it as the nearest miss. Yes, perhaps the U.N. secretary-general hadn’t hired her, but he had answered on proper letterhead.
“It wasn’t Kofi Annan who wrote back,” Tooly noted. “Some person in his office. An intern, probably.”
“Small details,” he said. “I beat you in chess?”
“I really have to go.” She sneezed, and his face lit up. Humphrey kept pharmaceuticals under his cushion, and prescribed to anyone who as much as cleared his throat. He especially loved treating her — he had done so often when she’d been sick in childhood. But Tooly couldn’t oblige with an illness today. “It was only dust.”
“Fine, fine — you must go to meeting? Go,” he said. “Just because I can at any moment fall, and my heart stops, and nobody here to call help? No problem. I wait on floor trying to breathe till you come home.”
“I ban you from falling over and dying while I’m out.”