The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [54]
“Take the F to Fourteenth Street and the Broadway train up to Columbia. We have an appointment with Dr. Bulstrode in forty-five minutes.”
“Can we get something to eat first? I haven’t had anything to eat since last night.”
“You ate all my cookies.”
“Oh, right, sorry. Your elderly cookies. Carolyn, what is going on with you? Why don’t you live like a regular person, with furniture and food in the house and pictures on the wall?”
She started walking toward the subway entrance. “I told you. I’m poor.”
He hurried to catch up with her. “You’re not that poor. You have a job. You make more than I do. Where does it go?”
“I don’t have a mother I can live with,” she said tightly.
“Thank you. That puts me in my place.”
“That’s right. I’m not sure you understand. I am completely alone in the world, with no backup at all. No brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, godfathers. I have a clerk’s salary with no benefits. If I got sick I’d be on the street. I’ve been on the street, and I’m not going to go back.”
“When were you on the street?”
“That’s none of your business. Why are you always so snoopy? It gets on my nerves.”
The train came and they boarded it. When they were under way and in the zone of privacy generated by the subway’s roar, he said, “I’m sorry. I get it from my mother. She sits down next to someone on the subway and in two stops they’re spilling their life’s story. You know, Carolyn, most people like to talk about themselves.”
“I know and I think it’s a waste of time, people blathering on about their hard luck. Or fishing for compliments. Oh, no, Gloria, you’re not really that fat. Oh, your son’s at Colgate? How proud you must be!”
“But that’s what people do. I mean what else do you talk about? Books? Bookbinding?”
“For starters. I told you I wasn’t a very interesting person, but you don’t seem to want to believe it.”
“You’re a fascinating person, in my opinion.”
“Don’t be stupid! I have a very dull life. I go to my job, I come home, I work at my craft, I count the days until I can get to a place where I can really learn what I’m interested in.”
“Movies,” said Crosetti. “We could talk about movies. What’s your favorite movie?”
“I don’t have one. I can’t afford to go to movies. And as you obviously know, I don’t own a television.”
“Come on, girl! Everybody has a favorite movie. You must have gone to movies in your hometown.” This got no response. He added, “Which was where?”
“Okay, what’s your favorite movie?” she asked without much interest, after a pause.
“Chinatown. You’re not going to tell me where you come from?”
“No place special. What’s it about?”
“What’s it about? You never saw Chinatown?”
“No.”
“Carolyn, everybody saw Chinatown. People who weren’t born when it came out saw Chinatown. There are movie houses in…in Mogadishu for crying out loud, that ran it for weeks. Best original screenplay ever written, won an Oscar for that, nominated for eleven other awards…how can you not have seen it? It’s a cultural monument.”
“Not of my culture, obviously. This is our stop.”
The train screamed to a halt at 116th Street and they left the car. She took off with her characteristic impatient stride, and he trotted after her, thinking that his initial impression of Carolyn Rolly as a vampire or some other sort of unearthly creature had been fairly accurate, if she really hadn’t seen Chinatown.
They arose from the underground and walked through the noble gates into the Columbia campus. Crosetti had occasionally come up here to catch movies at film society showings and always felt, as he now did, a vague sense of regret. At age twelve his mother had brought him up to the campus and shown him around. She’d received her library science degree here, and he knew she had wanted him to attend. But he was not the kind of grind who could get the grades necessary for a white New Yorker to win a scholarship, and paying cash for an undergraduate degree on a cop’s pension and a librarian