B
arrett walks the snowblown street, trailing two feet of green plaid scarf (his one concession to color) that, released from the hunker of his heavy gray coat, twists and eddies behind him.
It’s funny. When he ran through the storm an hour ago, wearing nothing but shoes and shorts, the cold felt enlivening, an ether that transformed him, like a man who falls overboard and discovers, to his astonishment, that he can breathe underwater. In boots and coat and scarf, however, Barrett just trudges along like anybody, a miniature Admiral Peary negotiating the ice field of Knickerbocker, no aspect of the fleet messenger about him, no wings threatening to burst from his ankles, just a guy leaning into the wind, putting one heavy boot in front of the other.
The shop will be cozily unilluminated, free of trade, the merchandise orderly and promising. It will be a sanctuary, uncompromised until the doors are opened to the seekers of Japanese jeans or intentionally wonky hand-knitted scarves or an original Madonna T-shirt from the
Like a Virgin
tour.
Twenty minutes later, Barrett emerges from the L train onto Bedford Avenue. The world is awake now. The corner deli glows fluorescent in the snow. People walk bundled, heads down. This early, Williamsburg is all commuters, men and women with regular jobs, wrapped in pricey down greatcoats, in Burton parkas, members of the nomadic New York tribe that colonizes the grim outer neighborhoods after the younger and more reckless citizens have opened coffeehouses and shops, as Liz and Beth did seven years ago, wondering how insane it was to try to sell their particular offerings in what had been a Polish travel agency, with a butcher shop on one side (now a stratospherically expensive children’s clothing boutique) and, on the other, a Goodwill store (which has, over the past decade, been a succession of failed restaurants, and is soon to re-open, at the hands of some new optimist, as what appears to be a perfect replica of a Parisian bistro, right up to its faux-nicotine-stained walls).
Even in its waking state, Williamsburg is quieted by the snow, veiled and muffled, humbled, reminded that a megalopolis is still subject to nature; that this vast noisy city resides on the same earth that has, for millennia, inspired sacrifices and wars and the erecting of temples, in an effort to appease a deity who could, at any moment, wipe it all away with one flick of a titanic hand.
A young mother, hooded, with a scarf pulled up to her nose, pushes a baby carriage, its small occupant obscured by a translucent plastic cover that zips up the front. A man in an orange anorak walks two fox terriers, both of which wear red booties.
Barrett turns onto North Sixth. There, in the middle of the block, is the brown-brick sternness of St. Anne’s Armenian Church. He passes it every day. Ordinarily it’s closed up, its windows dark and its imitation-medieval doors locked. Barrett’s comings and goings don’t coincide with the schedule of services, and it hasn’t, until this morning, fully occurred to him that the church possesses an interior at all. It might as well have been solid brick, not a building but a monument, in the shape of a church, to centuries of Middle Eastern murmurings, to the recitation of prayers and the kissing of icons, to the imprecations and hopes, the baptizing of babies and the dispatch of the dead. It had not quite seemed plausible to Barrett that this stolidly deserted edifice might, at certain hours, have a life.
This morning, though, eight o’clock mass is being celebrated. The heavy brown doors are open.
Barrett walks up the short span of concrete steps that lead to the entrance, and stops at the threshold. There it is, strange in its way but also deeply familiar—the brackish semi-light with its small glintings of gold, the priest and the altar boys (hefty kids, placid and rote, neither grotesque nor heroic, just adolescent schlumps—his own pudgy descendants), administering the ritual before an altar upon which two vases full of white chrysanthemums wilt under an enormous crucifix suspended from the ceiling, this one bearing an unusually gaunt and tormented Christ, who bleeds garishly from the wound in his greenish-white rib cage.
The scattering of parishioners, a dozen at most, and all, it appears, elderly women, kneel dutifully in the mocha-colored pews. The priest raises chalice and wafer. The faithful rise rather painfully to their feet (they must be subject to all manner of knee and hip complaints) and begin their trudge to the altar, to receive the host.
Barrett stands at the threshold, studded with the falling snowflakes that linger for a moment on his coat before vanishing.
B
eth says, “I think I want to go to work today.”
The rite of early morning silence has been observed. Beth sits at the table, nibbling an edge of the toast Tyler has made for her.
“You think?” Tyler asks. He’s never sure, lately, whether to encourage her to do more, or less.
“Mmm-hmm,” she says. “I feel pretty good.”
Her tiny white teeth negotiate, without visible appetite, a morsel of crust. She can seem, sometimes, like a small wild animal, suspiciously but hopefully testing something unfamiliar that’s been left on the ground
“It’s really seriously snowing out there,” Tyler says.
“That’s part of why I want to go. I’d like to get snowed on.”
Tyler understands. She’s been especially eager, these past weeks, for whatever strong sensation she might be able to manage.
“Barrett’s already there,” he says.
“So early?”
“He said he wanted to be there alone for a while. He wanted a dose of total quiet.”
“And I want to go out into the weather and the noise,” she says. “We always want something else, don’t we?”
“Well, yeah. We always want
something
.”
Beth frowns at her crumb of toast. Tyler reaches across the tabletop, puts his hand on her pale forearm. He didn’t expect to feel quite so incompetent at tending to Beth, quite so unsure about almost everything he says and does. The best he can manage, usually, is trying simply to accompany her as the changes occur.
He says, “Let’s get you cleaned up, then.”
He’ll run a bath for her. He’ll soap her shoulders, trickle warm water down her knobbly back.
“And when you’re ready, maybe I’ll walk you to the subway. Would you like me to do that?”
“Yes,” she says, with an illegible smile. “I’d like that.”
She’s touchy about being ministered to. Treat her too delicately, and she bridles (“
I can walk up a flight of stairs on my own, thank you
,” “
I’m talking to someone, I’m fine, I like this party, please don’t ask me if I want to lie down
”); treat her too casually, and she becomes indignant (“
I may need a little help with these last few steps
,” “
I’m exhausted by this party, I really need you to take me home now
”).
“Eat your toast,” he says.
She takes a single, game bite, and puts it down again. “I can’t, really,” she says. “It’s very good toast, though.”
“I’m widely known for my toast.”
“I’m going to go get dressed.”
“Okay.”
She stands, comes to him, kisses him lightly on the forehead, and for a moment it seems as if she’s the one who’s comforting him. It’s not the first such moment.
Tyler knows what Beth will do. She’ll drape the clothes she selects on the bed, gently, as if the fabric had nerves. Everything she wants to wear is white, these days. White connotes virginity in some cultures, mourning in others. For Beth, white connotes a form of semi-visibility, a neither-here-nor-there quality, a sense of pause, an un-color, which apparently feels right to her, as if the assertions implied by colors, or black, would be inappropriate, maybe even impolite.
B
arrett sits in the empty shop like a young raja, alone with his treasures.
Treasure
is of course a bit of a stretch—it’s merely what Liz refers to as “merch.”
Retail. Not exactly high art, not exactly the search for the cure. But still …
It isn’t trivial. It may not be profound but it isn’t trivial either, the little treasure hunt, the bodily satisfactions. The ongoing search, by Liz and Barrett and Beth (when she can manage it, though it’s been some time since she’s been able to manage it) for the genuine among the dross, for the small wonders—the paper-thin leathers and robust, ink-blue denims; the talismans on chains—that echo, in affordable (semi-affordable) form, the jewel-dusted scarves and talking books and articulated golden elephants that once were presented to sultans. The objects and garments that are made by people who might have been tailors or weavers in England two hundred years ago; swift-fingered, charmingly peculiar people who wake every morning eager to knit more caps or cast another silver amulet, people with something witchy about them, people who may in some inchoate way believe that they are producing not mere products but protective gear that just might keep the righteous warrior alive as he storms his way to the Grand Vizier’s tower.
And, yes, we are creatures of the flesh. Who knows that better than Barrett? Who’s better acquainted with the invisible fibers that tie yearning to vestment; those solemn parades of gold-threaded chasuble and starched white whisper of alb under the suffering wooden eyes of the crucified Christ? Doesn’t the secular world want, need, to walk both proud and penitent, robed, for the benefit of some savior or saint? We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need raiment, we need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster before we’re wrapped in our winding sheets, and returned.
Barrett sits behind the counter, with his reading spread before him: the
Times
, the
Post
, and this tattered copy of
Madame Bovary
, which he is reading for the sixth time. He roves among all three.
There’s this, from Flaubert:
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
This, from the
Times
:
Spammer Jeremy Jaynes, rated the world’s eighth most prolific spammer, was convicted today of three felony charges, after sending thousands of junk e-mails through several servers, all located in Virginia.
Right. Searching for sails in the mist, waiting for the ship that might—might—arrive; scanning your computer screen for … the off chance, the insider tip, the gold that’s been buried, all this time, right there, in the backyard …
And this, from the
Post
:
STONE COLD!
Two Nigerian women were stoned to death on charges of adultery, which is a capital crime under Islamic law.
Didn’t Flaubert execute Emma for her crime? Yes, but then again, no. Flaubert wasn’t moralistic … or, rather, he wouldn’t have shaken his plump pink finger at Emma for committing adultery. He was a moralist in a larger sense. He was, if anything, writing about a French bourgeois world so stifling, so enamored of respectable mediocrity …
Emma was getting spammed, right? Adultery wasn’t her undoing. It was her capacity for foolish belief.
This is Barrett’s pleasure; his ongoing pursuit. Project Crackpot Synthesis. It’s a mental scrapbook; an imaginary family tree, not of ancestors but of events and circumstances and states of desire.
He’s starting from
Madame Bovary
simply because it’s his favorite novel. Because you’ve got to start somewhere.
It does not, of course, lead anywhere. It accomplishes nothing. Still, he is, he thinks (he hopes), with this simple job and these un-sought-after, unpublishable projects, making progress. He’s a shopboy, he moves the merch, and that’s enough, it’s exactly enough, to support and counterbalance studies that have no known destination, no future readership; that anticipate no scholarly discourse or rebuttal. It helps, too, that his job and his projects overlap. When it’s time to open the shop (only twenty minutes to go), he’ll wonder which Emma Bovary is bestowing ruin upon herself and her family by buying those three-hundred-dollar jeans, that vintage biker jacket priced at nine-fifty (even Liz is appalled by that one, though she’s canny about what the market will bear; she understands the credibility imparted by stratospheric prices). It is, Barrett knows, a romance, and a perverse one at that, the whole notion of a house brought down by pettiness and greed. It’s nineteenth-century. Citizens of the twenty-first century can max out their credit cards, they can extend their limits, but actual destruction, death by extravagance, is no longer possible. You work something out with the credit card company. You can always, if it comes to that, declare bankruptcy, and start over. No one is going to swallow a fistful of cyanide over a pair of ill-purchased motorcycle boots.
It’s comforting, of course it is, but it’s also, somehow, discouraging to live within a system that won’t permit you to self-destruct.
Nevertheless. There’s something about the courting of disaster, in shopping terms, that fascinates Barrett, that holds his attention, helps render him satisfied with his current stature. It’s the technically extinct but somehow still plausible hint of calamity implied by the impulse purchase—the impoverished dowager or disinherited young earl who says, “I’m going to walk the earth in this perfectly faded Freddie Mercury T-shirt (two-fifty), I’m going to the party tonight in this vintage McQueen minidress (eight hundred), because the moment matters more than the future. The present—today, tonight; the sensation of walking into a room, and creating a real if fleeting hush—is what I care about, it’s all right with me if I leave nothing behind.”