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“Emo!”

Amid the slumping, shuffling, strung-out-looking crowd (this is the red-eye, after all), I see one person moving at a distinctly faster clip, head erect and eyes focused. She sees me and darts over.

“Where are your bags?” I ask.

“Oh, this is everything,” she says in her excellent English, while holding up a handbag that couldn’t contain the contents of a glove compartment. “Come on, let’s go.”

Thinking she means “let’s go home,” we get in the car and I start driving toward Staten Island. But she means let’s go to the store.

“I didn’t come here to sit around,” she says, and when I try to protest, she won’t hear a word. So we go to Brooklyn, and as a result, Emo, who’s nearly sixty (though she looks twenty years younger), works an eight-hour shift at a deli after flying across the country in the middle of the night.

And so it starts, this new phase in the store’s life. Emo takes over the morning shift and within weeks has it running smoothly, even to the satisfaction of those finicky commuters. This frees up Kay to focus on things like protecting ourselves against the onslaught of inspectors and adding new products to the inventory. Meanwhile, Gab starts work at the bank, and, true to her promise, finds energy to hold down the night shift once or twice a week, plus weekends. She does not find the return to legal work mind-numbing, at least for now. Overall, things seem to be settling down, and the summer looks promising. The only one who hasn’t found his footing is me.

NAKED WITH DESIRE

AT THE PARIS REVIEW, ABOUT A MONTH AFTER THE DEBACLE with the anthology, I find out my punishment: I am being sent to Chicago.

George wants two editors to attend the Chicago Book Fair, a summer festival billed as “the largest book fair in the Midwest.” There’s an old tradition at the Review of attending large open-air book fairs—I think George has this fantasy that away from the hoity-toity confines of Manhattan publishing, we’re going to mix it up with everyday Americans, who are suddenly going to develop an insatiable desire for highbrow literature and subscribe to the Review. Generally, the staff hates it for the same reason. Not that we don’t want everyday readers as subscribers—we do, we absolutely do—but because the act of selling it to them in person tends to reveal just how depressingly unrealistic such aspirations are.

I arrive in Chicago with Brigid on a June morning on which it is simultaneously scorching and snowing—snowing dandelion fluff, that is, or some other kind of white, cottony, intensely allergenic weed. It is good to be out of New York, good to be in the Midwest, good to be on the majestic Great Plains. However, after invading my nostrils, the drifting spores, whatever they are, make my head feel like a giant mound of half-baked dough, just like the goo-covered cinnamon rolls we keep being offered on the concourse of Midway Airport. (“Would you like a gooey slab of uncooked bread drizzled with gooey vanilla-cinnamon-marshmallow frosting?” the employees of the fast-food chain selling them keep jumping in my way to ask. No thanks, I say, trying to be nice about it despite my throbbing head.)

Things get worse at the fair. In the morning, after setting up our booth, we sell exactly one subscription—an exchange with the editor of another literary magazine with a name like Thin Paper. There seem to be two fairs going on today: one featuring Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, and Elizabeth Berg, author of Ordinary Life and nineteen hundred other bestsellers I’ve somehow never heard of, which is attracting throngs of sweaty, fun-loving, kid-towing Chicagoans. The other fair, the one that Brigid and I are a part of, is a ghetto of literary magazines like Thin Paper, as well as some writers’ workshops and eco-Marxist publishing collectives exiled to a quiet street three blocks away, near the Porta Potties.

Occasionally someone from the other fair, the one with the crowds, drifts in our direction by accident.

“Did you come all the way from Peeeh-ris?” one woman asks, stopping to look at our