Page 47

THIRTEEN

I said go.

Shit, Eddie. Now you’ve done it. Now you’ve really screwed up. What will you do now? Sleep on the street? In the park? At Port Authority? Go back in and beg?

Eddie stands on Bedford Street, with the camera slung over his shoulder. He looks up the street, down. Which way? It doesn’t matter, Eddie. Walk.

As he walks up Seventh Avenue, he feels a plastic card in his pocket. Another picture that never developed. He doesn’t even look at it. Just crunches it up in his hand and throws it in a garbage bin without even breaking stride. He won’t see, of course, that it did develop, after all, but its image isn’t like anything that he saw this morning. It’s a photograph of a girl, maybe fourteen, maybe sixteen, sitting alone on a park bench, reading a book. Portrait of Jennie , the book is called, and she’s nearly finished.

It was the first time that girl ever saw her future. She knew it would come, and it did come, but it wasn’t until after the war when, like everyone else it seemed, she opened a bookshop. She had no money, no experience, and if there was an entrepreneurial hair on her head, no one had ever noticed it before. But she did it, right there on Cornelia Street, dinky little Cornelia Street with its basement laundries and corner greengrocer and three tobacco shops. And people came. It was like flypaper, her shop, collecting everyone. The poets, the musicians, the actors, the landlords, the soldiers, the cooks, the swans, the communists, the painters, the subway drivers, the politicians, the organizers, the teachers, the mistresses, the queens. Capote came, and Cecil Beaton, even the Bouviers and Paleys when they ventured downtown. Dick Avedon came to shoot photos of Dovima in the back stacks. Rosalind Russell brought Peggy Cass, Christopher Isherwood brought Don Bachardy, Cecil Cunningham brought Anna May Wong. Allen Ginsberg brought cookies from San Francisco, Jean Cocteau brought cookies from Paris. Montgomery Clift fell asleep on the floor by the poetry section, where Anthony Perkins tripped over him and nearly broke his neck. She laughed then, and so did they. Louis Falco was there, skipping school to browse the shelves, just a teenager then, so beautiful. Some people swear they saw Garbo there, but you could never be sure with Garbo, because she’d stopped looking like herself.

The men came after the bar raids. They came after the rent boy roundups. They knew the shop was a refuge. Even the down-and-outs and drunks came, to lean against the shelves and thumb through GI paperbacks. She never kicked them out, even if they never bought a thing, because hardly anyone ever bought a thing. They just talked, and argued, and gossiped, and smoked, and flirted, and schemed, and lamented, and planned, and worried, and wondered, and stayed. Everyone stayed. Oh, it was an exciting time. Like magic. She was like magic. Have you ever known a person like that? A person who everyone loved?

Even when the landlord raised the rent after the election, the big one, and she feared she’d have to close up, the people rallied. They came together and paid the rent on her shop, their shop, and they paid it over and over, year after year, until the world changed again and she locked the door behind her for the very last time.

But Eddie won’t hear this story, not for a long time. For now he’ll just keep walking. Who cares where? He’ll walk every street in this city. What else is he going to do, besides walk?