The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [78]
When the last book was signed and the “Thank you so much, Ms. Poggione” came, Nina said good-bye with a handshake and collected her possessions. It wasn’t until she was on her way to the staircase that she noticed him standing at the first-editions shelf, John-with-an-h Catau, running his fingers over the covers as if he were fascinated, absolutely fascinated, by the various Gail Godwins and Curtis Sittenfelds in their clear plastic sleeves.
She stopped short. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“Why, of all the places to run into each other,” he joked. Clearly he had been rehearsing what to say, but he made it only midway through the sentence before his voice tightened in a plexus of timidity and self-doubt, the same slipknot effect she had noticed the day before. “I’m sorry,” he continued. “Is this too much? This is too much, isn’t it? It’s not a long drive from Seattle to Portland. Two and a half hours. It was just that you said ‘some other time,’ so I thought maybe … well … tonight.”
For some reason she could not work up any anger toward him, or even any distrust. He was so obviously harmless—and not harmless in the thin-veneer way of countless serial killer movies, but truly harmless. He wore the fixed expression of a child caught filling the saltshaker with sugar. If only she weren’t so exhausted.
“I’m sick.” She said it once for herself and a second time for him. “I’m sick, John. And your attention is flattering, and if things were different, I would be happy to get a drink with you somewhere, but every minute I’m not holed away in my hotel room, alone, is hard for me. Do you understand?”
He grinned. “You remembered my name.”
“Bye, John.”
“Look, how about some coffee? There’s a coffee shop right downstairs. And then you can go back to your hotel and get some sleep and maybe tomorrow you’ll feel better than you do today.”
Make me better tomorrow than I am today. Make me better next week than I’ve been this one.
She was the type of person who never read her horoscope, never saved the slips from her fortune cookies, and yet there were times when she was all too willing to be guided by coincidence and intimation, those fleeting signals that flagged the air like torches and suggested the universe had lit a trail for her. Which was why, she supposed, she agreed to have a cup of coffee—one cup—with him. She ordered a small vanilla latte, iced, so that she could conduct it to the corner of her lip with a straw. Did she want something to eat? A scone?
“God no.”
She missed the days of dining out with her friends and lovers, indulging her appetite for lobster or curry, pad Thai or seasoned French fries, before she knew how much would be taken from her, and how quickly. Occasionally, in the stillness of a taxi or an airplane, she would catalog the pleasures she had lost. Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Strong mint toothpaste. Any food with hard edges or sharp corners that could pierce or abrade the inside of her mouth: potato chips, croutons, crunchy peanut butter. Any food that was more than infinitesimally, protozoically, spicy or tangy or salty or acidic: pesto or Worcestershire sauce, wasabi or anchovies, tomato juice or movie-theater popcorn. Certain pamphlets and magazines whose paper carried a caustic wafting chemical scent she could taste as she turned the pages. Perfume. Incense. Library books. Long hours of easy conversation. The ability to lick an envelope without worrying that the glue had irritated her mouth. The knowledge that if she heard a song she liked, she could sing along to it in all her dreadful jubilant tunelessness. The faith that if she bit her tongue, she would soon feel better rather than worse. The coltish rising feeling of sex or masturbation, and the way, as it gripped her, she no longer stood between