The Two Kinds of Decay

A Role Model

Five years earlier, when people visited the bookstore where I worked and asked for books for their graduating nieces, or for a trip to the beach, or for a plane ride, right away I would tell them to buy Catch-22.

I wore a tan apron with a green name tag on the right side. I asked slowly and clearly, May I help you find something?

I made eye contact with the customers, then walked them to the books they needed. Walking the customer was the important part. Just saying That section’s in the back, in front of Travel, or pointing to Pets, which was behind Science, didn’t result in sales as often as walking the customer to the very shelf, pulling the book from the shelf, and placing it in the customer’s hand.

One day my supervisor asked me to stop recommending Catch-22 to the customers and instead to recommend any of the new clothbound books stacked pyramid-style on the front table. Someone had bought Catch-22 from me at the front register, then come in later that day and returned it at the back register. My supervisor said it was the third or fourth return of the same paperback copy, and it was getting shopworn.

One night in 1994, because I had to be somewhere else, my college boyfriend brought my copy of Catch-22 to Joseph Heller’s book signing and had Heller inscribe it to me.

My copy of the book was a cheap paperback, with a bent aqua-colored cover, but I hope that as he held the book in his hands, Heller hadn’t wished I’d sprung for a clothbound copy of his new novel, whatever it was, and that he was happy I’d read his famous book so many times and that I’d loved it enough to send someone out to have it signed for me.

Six months later I received the diagnosis that would become the focus of my life, and Heller died four years after that — after a long, slow recovery from the same disease.