The Secret of Lost Things

He led me to a small office in the very rear of the store, built high into the corner of the vast ceiling like a reef. I followed him up a narrow flight of wooden stairs, the handrail loose and broken.

“Wait here, girl.”

He indicated the patch of landing at the entrance to the office.

“My name is Rosemary, Mr. Geist. Rosemary Savage,” I said, tired of his anonymous address. I extended my hand then, thinking it appropriate, brave even, as I had seen Americans do. His hands remained clasped behind his back. He entered the office and reemerged holding several forms.

“Please fill these out. Print only.”

He handed me a pen and stood examining the activity on the floor below. From that high landing the chaos of the Arcade was fully evident, with the exception of Pike’s platform, where he moved as if choreographed, a small flicker of concentrated activity. I leaned over the rail, following the inclination of Geist’s head, to see what drew his attention. An obese man sat on the floor in a cul-de-sac made by piles of books, his legs splayed out like a toddler’s. He was turning the pages of a large photography book with one hand, his other hidden beneath the heavy covers opened across his lap. Even from the landing I could tell the images in the book were nudes.

“What are you looking at?” Geist asked me.

“Ah, just looking down where you were,” I said nervously.

“I don’t mean that,” he said. “What do you see?”

I described the fat man studying the photographs.

“Arthur!” Geist called down from the landing. “You should be shelving.”

“Just familiarizing myself with my inventory, Walter,” Arthur returned sardonically, his accent British and articulate.

He looked up at me and put a thick finger to his lips, indicating silence. Had I informed on him? Couldn’t Geist see what I had seen? Arthur returned to his nudes, his hand beneath the book’s cover moved rhythmically.

Geist stomped his small foot with impatience, and I noticed he was wearing elegant, polished boots, their smooth black shape nosing from his pant legs like the shiny heads of tiny seals.

“Mr. Geist, could I have something to lean on?” I asked, finding it difficult to write legibly without the support of a desk, and wishing to distract him, and myself, from Arthur.

“No,” he replied, his shifting eyes still directed over the rickety railing. He removed his glasses, placed them in his breast pocket, and continued to wait for me to complete the forms, his manner uncanny as his appearance.

Now that I was closer to him I could see Geist was younger than I at first thought, perhaps twenty years Pike’s junior, in his late forties. He was an unfinished version, a poor copy, of the masterful Pike, yet equally a creature from another time. Every feature was pallid. His hair was white and fleecy, the sheepish outcome of his soft face. His clothes were not as fastidiously kept as his boots, his trousers slightly frayed along the pockets. I completed the forms and handed them back to him.

“You will begin work tomorrow morning at nine,” he instructed without seeming to actually address me, a tactic he perhaps learned from Pike.

“You will finish for the day at six. Your responsibilities at the Arcade will, for the time being, be that of a floater. This means you do not belong in a specific section, as you have no expertise, but will float between tasks that are assigned to you. Do not concern yourself with assisting customers, you will only frustrate them with your ignorance.”

“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Geist,” I said, defensively.

He replaced his glasses, lodging them in the wrinkles of his forehead and frowning to keep them in place—or frowning because he thought me impudent. He leaned in toward my face, and his nostrils twitched as he appeared to take in my scent.

“Not in this one, Miss Savage,” he said. “Please do not interrupt. You will receive a salary of seventy dollars per week. There are no advances on wages. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” I said, afraid to lose the opportunity.

“Good. There is one more condition of employment you must understand.” Geist’s pink ears shifted back delicately. “George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books. Immediate termination of employment will result if theft is suspected.” This last admonition was said in an emphatic whisper.

Later, I saw the statement printed in placard capitals on a sign in the women’s bathroom, and again over the clock all employees punched when the day began and ended. Another sign was located directly in the line of vision on the wall in front of the staircase that descended to the cavernous basement. Reading these signs was like being regularly rebuked, and so they paradoxically served to remind patrons and staff alike that theft was in some sense assumed.

George Pike himself called to me as, newly hired, I passed his platform on my way out.

“George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books!” he cried, characteristically speaking of himself in the third person.

Theft was a problem, as I would discover. The Arcade was regularly scouted by shoplifters; but more seriously, there had been several scandals involving ludicrously overpriced volumes whose provenance had been fictitiously embellished, resulting in what Pike defended as imaginative pricing. Scandals only increased the number of customers, both sellers and buyers. In other words, theft ran both ways at the Arcade.

“Why you stopped saying hello to me?” the dark lady of the front desk asked loudly when I returned to the Martha Washington. She had taken the wires attached to the television from her ears, and I could hear a tinny whining, the sound of cartoons speaking cartoon language.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to be pleasant. “But I stopped saying hello to you because you didn’t respond. I just gave up.”

“Don’t give up!” she said, enigmatically. “You just got here. That’s what can happen in New York. You give up. I know. I come to this country from Argentina. My brother, he own this hotel. My name is Lillian. Lillian La Paco. Still say hello, miss. You the only one who does.”

“All right, Lillian,” I promised. “I’m Rosemary,” and for the second time that day I stuck out my hand, only this time it was taken.

“Rosemary Savage,” I told her as we shook hands. “Nice to meet you, Lillian, and I’ll still say hello. I’m certainly not about to give up. I just got a job. My first proper job ever.”

“Ah,” Lillian said wisely. “Then you begin!”

“Yes,” I nodded, pleased with her pronouncement. “Yes, now it all begins.”

I went to my room at the end of the corridor and locked the door. I’d bought a pound of cherries from a street vendor to celebrate my employment, and I sat on the single bed savoring them. I felt optimistic; felt breath coming back into my flattened-out self.

Now that I had work, surely someone would notice if I died tragically at eighteen, having, say, choked to death on a cherrystone I might have neglected to spit out. I could stop fantasizing about what terrible things might befall me and write home to Chaps, reassuring her and myself. I could stop searching the streets for a sign. I had already found more than I could have imagined.

I pulled the Huon box from its silk scarf and recounted what had happened that day: how strange Pike was but how commanding; how bizarre Geist, and how I was already sure he disliked me; Arthur sitting with his nudes in the art section like a great obscene baby.

I missed Mother with an ache that could only be managed by a sort of separation from ache. A pain so deep that I came to observe its presence at a slant, sensing it crouched, and off to one side. If I could contain the pain in something like a transparent globe, it wouldn’t overwhelm me. If I didn’t look at it in its dark entirety, I could manage. Speaking to her helped. Chaps had told me I must give sorrow words.

I kissed the smooth Tasmanian heartwood, set it aside, and sat back against the pillows to relish more cherries. I spat a stone across the room, aiming at the metal bucket that served as a garbage bin, and heard a satisfying ping as it hit home.

“This is the beginning,” I told Mother. “Don’t you worry and I won’t either.”

I had a job to go to, and was expected at nine. They would know Rosemary Savage there, and notice me gone if I happened to disappear. I was an inhabitant of a great, perhaps the greatest, city. And what was more, I would always have books to read.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Arcade existed according to a logic all its own, governed by a set of arbitrary rules invented and maintained by George Pike. Paperbacks were never shelved. As the poor relations of hardcovers, they were heaped without order upon tables near the store’s entrance and priced identically—one dollar and fifty cents—whether fiction or history, a thousand pages or barely more than a hundred.

Pike was unimpressed by innovation. Any “new” book (one published within the past two years and hardbound) would never cross his oak table but was immediately sent to a vast, low-ceilinged basement, to be priced by Walter Geist. These books Pike cared nothing for, although he received a daily accounting of their acquisition, at one-quarter of the publisher’s list price, and subsequent sale, at one-half of that same price. So if a reviewer brought in a book that the publisher listed at sixteen dollars, Geist would give him a quarter of that, four dollars, and the book would go on the Arcade’s shelf in the basement priced at eight dollars.

Every other hardcover book in the Arcade, Pike had held in his hands at one time, remembering more of them than seemed humanly possible.

Pike employed a considerable number of eccentric individuals, Geist aside, and it remained a mystery why he had employed me. I was not eccentric, unless being an eighteen-year-old orphan from Tasmania made me so. As well, a number of the Arcade’s employees had rather dramatic aspirations. They were variously failed writers, poets, musicians, singers, and were marked with the clerkish frustration of the unacknowledged, the unpublished. The Arcade’s thousands of volumes mocked, in particular, literary aspirations. The out-of-print status of most of the stock was further proof of the futile dream of publication. As a monument to literature, the Arcade had an air of the tombstone about it.

“You will work this morning with Oscar Jarno in Nonfiction,” Geist directed, my first morning. “You will follow his orders.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Walter,” Oscar said, his voice mild and confident.

He had approached us soundlessly. He smiled then and touched my arm, almost imperceptibly. I was struck by his appearance, and moved by his gesture, the first indication of kindness since my arrival. Oscar’s extraordinary eyes were brass-colored and large; warm as the sun that never reached the Arcade’s interior.

“Don’t mind Walter,” Oscar confided, steering me away from the manager and toward the rear of the store, my elbow cupped in his hand. His touch left me a little breathless; eager to catch every word he spoke.

“He really can’t help his officious manner,” Oscar went on. “It’s important to Walter that he appear in charge. Obviously, he requires all sorts of allowances.”

Immediately then, I imagined Oscar Jarno took me into his confidence. He released my elbow once we reached the Nonfiction section, and ran his hand over his pale brow, leaving it to rest at his temple, as if he had a slight headache.

“Your blouse, Rosemary, is made from a type of polished cotton not commonly available in this country. I am interested to see how well it takes the dye.”

He fingered my sleeve gently and I thought in that moment that I’d do anything to keep his attention.

“Lovely,” he said into my face. “A type of faille.”

Oscar was slightly taller than me, and handsome in a poetic sort of way. His head was perfectly shaped, as if sculpted, and the contrast of his golden eyes against the pallor of his skin was dramatic. There was little else dramatic about him—he was soft-spoken, articulate—but there was a magnetism to his face: in the smooth planes of his cheekbones, the wide brow above rich eyes.

When I met him, Oscar had been at the Arcade for five years, and because he was quiet and reliable, Pike had come to accept that he worked only in the Nonfiction section and that whatever Oscar was doing in that suburb of twelve tall stacks would be accomplished with a minimum of fuss. More than a few customers were devoted to him. Oscar passed most of his day seated on a stool, writing in a black notebook, exempt from the loading and unloading of heavy boxes of books. No one questioned his special status.

He knew a great deal about many subjects, but his personal interest was cloth. His mother had been a dressmaker and had introduced him to fabrics—their names and properties.

Pike had occasional use for Oscar’s knowledge; he’d ask him to check rare bindings and speculate on their provenance or even how they might best be repaired. Oscar had had some experience with restoration, and with arcane materials like vellum. I witnessed his value to the Arcade during the first days he was training me. Pike called for Oscar from his platform, and I followed as he hurried to respond (the only time Oscar moved quickly).

“Ah, Oscar,” Pike said sharply, gesturing to a customer at the base of his platform who held an old volume in his hands.

“We have here Old Court Life in France, which should be on its way to the Rare Book Room for repair but has been kidnapped by this fellow. At the risk of encouraging such practices, please examine.”

Customers were always trying to snatch books before Pike had appraised them, before they had been allocated a value and destination. No doubt they wanted to believe that they had discovered something of greater worth than Pike would have reckoned.

As I watched, Oscar took the book gently in his hands, turning over the tattered binding, a smile cornering his mouth. Oscar was thin. His skin was so fine and dry it made a slight rustle when his hand moved across his brow, in an anxious sweep. His dark hair receded in a way I quickly loved, revealing, as it did, more of his remarkable face.

“This volume is bound in Chardonnet silk,” Oscar said, his voice soft, authoritative. “A fabric named for the French chemist who invented a process to produce it.”

Pike’s eyes narrowed appreciatively, pleased at the opportunity to overprice the shabby volume based on Oscar’s remarks.

“Chardonnet silk was first commercially produced in France in 1891,” Oscar added unnecessarily, as the customer was already removing it from his hands in a proprietary way.

“Thank you, Oscar,” Pike said, dismissing him.

Pike stretched down from his platform and took the volume from the customer. He then unconsciously proceeded through his ritual gestures—he flipped to the title page, scanned the copyright, his thumb fanned the edges of the entire book, he closed the volume, reopened it at the first page, took a pencil from behind his ear—and marked a reassessed price. He handed it down to the customer.

“But this is outrageous, Pike!” said the man, furiously. “Nothing short of robbery!”

“Rosemary,” Oscar whispered, as we returned to his section. “Do you know what the common name for Chardonnet silk is?”

“No,” I said cautiously. “I’ve no idea.”

“Rayon,” he said, stifling a small chuckle. “Made from extruded wood pulp. Not silk at all, of course. Remind me to tell you the history of silk.”

He covered his mouth with his fine, long hand and, sitting up on his tall stool, took out a black notebook and began to write in it rapidly.

Oscar’s face appeared composed of layers of papier-mâché, and this quality made his face seem expressionless as he wrote. He gave the impression of a man-sized marionette: his head large and shaped upon a soft, slight body. When Oscar looked at me, his round eyes glowed as if they reflected light, but over time I came to understand that this was a trick of their splendid color. The irises were actually golden.

It was something of a trick also that Oscar often sought to engage in conversation by expressing an interest in clothing. He was reserved by nature, phlegmatic, but knew well that an interest in another’s clothes flattered the wearer. I imagined this something his mother, the dressmaker, had taught him.

Oscar was sought after by regular customers looking for an insider watchful on their behalf, a staff person willing to perform special favors and engage in secret confidences. Oscar always played for both sides.

The Arcade was frequented daily by several bibliophiles who obsessively searched for fresh inventory; books that were stacked to be shelved after Pike had priced them. Oscar was especially favored by two competing Civil War buffs, both of whom bought his consideration with morning coffee, the occasional lunch. Small cloth-wrapped bundles (like Japanese favors) would appear at intervals, bribes for withholding books from sale. Oscar wasn’t particularly interested in the Civil War, except for the uniforms, but he was knowledgeable about the volumes in his section and managed to conduct intense conversations with collectors in diverse subjects—history, biography, philosophy, anthropology, science.

I consciously chose to emulate him. Oscar was quick, and remembered most of what he’d heard or read. He wrote everything down. Impressionable as I was, I took to carrying a small notebook, determined to assume for myself Oscar’s observant style.

It is through my own notebook that I recall these days, my first months in the city, my apprenticeship. And through my clear recollection of that girl who was so raw, so avid, that she ate up every detail, absorbing into her body whatever might later be needed as provision, whatever might sustain her should it all, once more, disappear.

At the Martha Washington, I befriended Lillian slowly, in increments, for she was prickly.

“What are you watching there, Lillian?”

“I am not watching, Rosemary,” she answered, her eyes flickering from the television screen for an instant.

“It looks like you’re watching,” I ventured.

“Everything not how it looks. Especially not here. I am not watching, but I am thinking. Watching help me to think, and sometimes not to think.”

“I don’t know how you can think with that thing in your ears and the sound turned up so loud.”

“I need that noise. I don’t hear so well. But I’m thinking all the same,” she said.

“What do you think about, Lillian?” I asked, wanting to know her, needing a friend. She was a little older than Mother, but younger than Chaps. She was the only person I knew outside the Arcade, and really the first person I met in New York.

Lillian heaved an enormous sigh, and closed her eyes against the tears that had filled them.

“I cannot say what I think of,” she answered, thickly.

I couldn’t understand what I had provoked with my question. Confused and embarrassed that I’d been unwittingly careless, that I’d upset her, I was about to apologize. But Lillian visibly collected herself, focused instead on the television, her expression changing rapidly into one of disdain.

“Well,” she said, sniffing. “One thing I think from this television is that Americans are stupid!” She waved her hand at the small screen.

“Oh, I don’t think Americans are stupid,” I said, thinking of Pike, of Oscar, “I have a job now, at an enormous bookstore, and it’s full of brilliant Americans. Readers!”

“Pah,” Lillian said, smiling, recovered by the change in subject, by her sense of humor. “You only think they are brilliant,” she imitated my accent, “because you are a child.”

“Lillian, I’m eighteen years old,” I said, indignant.

She nodded as if to say, “Exactly—you are a child.”

“They have Spanish books in that store where you work?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ll look for you. I think you can find anything in the world at the Arcade.”

“You can’t find what I’m looking for,” she said, darkly. “But bring me Spanish books if you have. I will pay you for them. I maybe should be trying to read again. And to forget about these idiots.”

Before she replaced the earpiece and turned her attention back to the television screen, she handed me a letter.

“This come for you,” she said. “From your country.”

“Thank you, Lillian.”

The letter was from Chaps. I hurried to my room eager to read my first letter in America. It was disappointingly short.

July 5

Dearest Rosemary,

Thank you for your card. Tasmania is a lonely place without you, without your mother, but, as I like to say, loneliness is good practice for eternity.

I was heartened to hear from you and thrilled that you would so soon have found yourself employed—and in a bookshop! I couldn’t wish a better occupation for you, my dear Rosemary. My own little shop has given me a dignified, ethical life, and work I believe meaningful. Selling books provided shape to my life, and reading them, a shape to my mind that I doubt I could have formed otherwise. That you are employed in such an extraordinary place gives me great satisfaction. (Perhaps I was training you all along!) The difference, though, is that you are also immersed in experience, and not just taken up with lines on a page.

You will find interesting people, you will read, you will be able to live the way you want. I have heard of the Arcade, of course, but never imagined you would find your way there.

I’m sure your mother is with you always, but her absence is perhaps at times unendurable. For me it is. Don’t be frightened to love. Look for it. I want you to have the life I did not choose. Take it, Rosemary dear.

With all my love, I am your own

Esther Chapman

P. S. Have you opened the package yet? Remember, a book is always a gift.

George Pike was not a demonstrative man. As he worked on his platform in a reverie of pricing, his gestures were reverential, ritualistic. His intention was that he remain inaccessible, above us all. Geist was his foil and henchman. Pike had a deep love of books, but his motivation for maintaining the Arcade was not esoteric. His chief inducement was evident: Pike loved money.

In slow moments—when gathered together awaiting a shipment, or lining up on Fridays to receive our meager pay from Geist—the staff liked to pick over rumors of Pike’s legendary wealth, his frugality, his stinginess. Each secondhand book passed through his elegant hands because he trusted no one but himself to assess its value. No one else could, the value being weighed not only against some actual market notion but against his very personal assessment of the book’s worth to him: what it cost him to acquire, and what the volume’s sale would put in his pocket. The margins and his profit were tabulated instantly, the result of years of obsessive deliberation, an abacus in his head shifting beads back and forth in a silent, urgent reconciliation.

That Pike was exceedingly rational didn’t mean that his notion of value wasn’t arbitrary. It was particular and absolute, almost adolescent in its despotic insistence.

At intervals throughout the day and at closing time, Pike would momentarily replace Pearl, the Arcade’s rather arresting cashier, then a preoperative transsexual, at the single register. Pike would remove larger bills, checks, and credit-card receipts, then disappear up the broken wooden stairs to the office at the back, reappearing (as in a conjurer’s trick) moments later upon his platform, behind his table, a book in his hand, a pencil behind his left ear, his meditative pricing resumed. Pike shrunk considerably whenever he left his platform, only to attain his previous consequence once he returned to the stage.