The Book of Air and Shadows

6

Crosetti, bearing the rolled and wrapped maybe-invaluable manuscript under his arm, waited out on the deserted street for nearly half an hour, which he thought excessive. What was she doing in there? Although he had occasionally waited as long for women to get ready to go out. Although they weren’t going to the prom. He looked at his watch and paced and felt the craziness pluck at his mind.

She emerged wearing one of her black outfits, as if going to Glaser’s to work, and he wondered why. Maybe Bulstrode insisted on a certain formality, in which case he would be disappointed in Crosetti, who needed a bath and a shave and was wearing a T-shirt from a Springsteen concert, grubby jeans, and Nikes. He did not, however, complain to her about the waiting.

Nor did she apologize. Instead, she nodded at him casually and started off. He did not ask any questions about their destination, resolving to play it cool. He could be an international man of mystery too. They walked to Van Dyke and took the 77 bus to the Smith Street station, where they boarded the F train and rode noisily in silence to Manhattan. At Houston Street she got up and trotted from the car, and when he caught up with her he could not resist asking her about where they were going. Crosetti was not at heart cool.

“Mermelstein’s,” she answered. “They’re the last wholesaler of fine binding leather in the city.”

“They’ll sell you retail?”

“Mr. Mermelstein likes me.”

“Really. Does he…?” Crosetti made a pawing gesture. They were walking on the station steps, and she stopped abruptly and said, “He does not. You know, I’m really sorry I told you that about Sidney. Are you going to trot it out every time I mention a business connection with a man?”

“It’s erased from my mind as of this very minute,” said Crosetti, genuinely abashed, but also feeling a little manipulated. He also wondered why she was going to a wholesaler. Everyone in the old book trade in New York knew that the center of the bookbinding business was in Brooklyn, in Borough Park. He was about to ask her that but then stopped and figured it out for himself. Book dealers and major collectors had contacts among the regular bookbinders. If one of them were offered a Churchill Voyages at a fire-sale price, he’d check around with the bookbinder trade to see if the book had been doctored. It would not occur to any collector to imagine that the seller had done it solo, from raw materials. He was rather pleased with himself for having figured this out, any penetration of Rolly’s deviousness being to the good.

They walked east on Houston to an old commercial building near Second Avenue, where, in a pungent loft containing perhaps an acre of various animal skins, Crosetti leaned against a bale of the stuff and watched Rolly negotiate for a considerable time with an elderly man in a skullcap, a rusty black suit, and carpet slippers. They seemed to be having a good time, and Crosetti noticed with interest that Rolly had subtly changed her delivery. She smiled more with Mermelstein, actually laughed a time or two, and in general seemed a louder, more aggressive person than the one he knew, more…dare he think it?…more Jewish? Her speech had also taken on the pace and accent of the outer boroughs.

He remarked on this as they left with a small roll of fine calf wrapped in brown paper.

“Everybody does it,” she replied lightly. “You talk to someone, you take on a little of their shtick, their affect. Don’t you?”

“I guess,” he said, but thought, Yeah, but I’m something to begin with, and what, my sweet, are you? He rehearsed this line, thought about voicing it, declined. Instead he said, “So, where to now?”

“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’s salary was out of the question. So he’d gone to Queens College, “a perfectly good school,” as his mother often loyally remarked, and also, “if you’re a success nobody cares where you went to college.” It did not rankle a lot, but it rankled; and on the occasions when he had to come up to the campus, he found himself studying the faces of the undergraduates and listening to snatches of their conversation to see if he could observe a major gap between their supposed Ivy-level smarts and his own. Which he could not.

Carolyn Rolly, he knew, had attended Barnard, just across the street. He knew because he was the filing system at Sidney Glaser Rare Books and had used this position to examine her résumé in detail. He did not at the moment think much of a Barnard education, since it had failed in her case to provide a familiarity with Chinatown. This was why she was so stuck-up, a Seven Sisters girl, after all, and probably brilliant too, since she said she was poor and clearly she hadn’t failed to get a scholarship.

In a mood to needle, he said, “So…back at the old campus, hey, Carolyn? I guess it brings those dear old Ivy League college days back. Look, if there’re any special customs like not walking on a particular plaque or bowing to a statue or something, you’ll let me know-I wouldn’t want to embarrass you or anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You and your college days. Class of ’99, right? Barnard?”

“You think I went to Barnard?”

“Yeah, it was…” Here he stuck, but she instantly understood the reason.

“You little spy! You read my résumé!”

“Well, yeah. I told you I was interested. I went through your underwear drawer too while you were sleeping.”

At this he thought he noticed a look of real fear whip across her features, but it was gone in a flash, replaced by one of amused contempt. “I doubt that,” she said, “but for your information I didn’t go to Barnard.”

“You lied on your application?”

“Of course I lied. I wanted the job, and I knew Glaser was a Columbia alumnus and his wife went to Barnard, so it seemed like a good idea. I came up here, picked up some of the talk, learned the geography, audited a couple of classes, studied the catalogs. They never check résumés. You could say you went to Harvard. If you had, I bet Glaser would be paying you a lot more money.”

“Good God, Rolly! You don’t have any morals at all, do you?”

“I don’t do any harm,” she said, glaring. “I don’t even have a high school diploma, and I don’t want to work in a sweatshop or do cleaning, which is the only kind of jobs a woman can get without one. Or whore.”

“Wait a minute, everyone goes to high school. It’s compulsory.”

She stopped walking and turned to face him, dropped her head for several breaths, and then looked him straight in the face. “Yes,” she said, “but in my case, when my parents were killed in a car wreck I went to live with my crazy uncle Lloyd, who kept me locked in a root cellar from age eleven to age seventeen, as a result of which I didn’t have the opportunity to attend high school. I got raped a lot though. Now, is there anything else you’d like to know about my goddamned past life?”

Crosetti gaped and felt his face flush. He could see liquid trembling on her lower eyelids. “I’m sorry,” he croaked. She turned and strode rapidly away, almost running, and after a miserable moment he skulked after her into a tan brick building with a columned entryway and up two flights of stairs, stumbling a little because he was kicking himself so hard. Okay, end of story, expunge her from his mind, he’d done it God only knew how many times before, no stranger to rejection, not usually quite this stupid, not quite so much his own stupid fault, but still he could go out classy, do this business with Bulstrode, a little correct nod and handshake afterward, walk off. God! How could he have been so tooth-hurtingly dumb! Woman tells him she doesn’t want to talk about her past, so of course he does nothing else, and…but here they were, she knocking tap-a-tap on frosted glass and a plummy voice from within, “Yeh-ehss.”

The man was wearing a vest, or what he would have called a waistcoat, and as they entered he was slipping on the brown tweed suit jacket that went with it: a short plump man in his fifties, with smooth dull pale brown hair worn medium long and arranged so as to hide a bald patch in the center. Jowly, with round tortoiseshell glasses. Hand when shaken unpleasantly soft and moist. Crosetti hated him already; it made a pleasant change from the current self-contempt.

They sat. She did the talking. Bulstrode was interested in the provenance, the age and origin of the volumes of the Churchill in which the manuscript had been found. She gave these details tersely and, as far as Crosetti could tell, accurately. While this went on he looked around the office, which was small, not much larger than a suburban bathroom, with one dusty window looking out on Amsterdam Avenue. A single glassed-in bookcase, books on only one shelf, otherwise full of stacked papers, untidily arranged. Besides that, two wooden armchairs (in which Rolly and he were sitting), a standard wooden desk somewhat battered, a scatter of papers and journals thereon, and a large framed photograph, whose image Crosetti could not see, although he shifted and peered to the extent propriety allowed.

“Very interesting, Miss Rolly,” the professor was now saying. “May I examine the documents?”

Both Rolly and Bulstrode now looked at Crosetti, and he felt his heart sink, as we do when an unfamilar doctor asks us to slip out of our clothes and into a gown. The papers were his, and now they were passing out of his hands, to be confirmed as genuine or rejected as spurious, but by someone else, someone he didn’t know, whose eyes were all funny behind those thick lenses, avid, crazed really, and Rolly’s eyes were blank blue fields with less feeling in them than the sky itself, and he had to resist the urge to grab up his package and flee. But what he did was to pull out only the letter from Richard Bracegirdle to his wife. It was easy to distinguish these pages by feel from the rest of the sheets. Let’s see what this geek had to say about the letter before exposing the ciphered letters was Crosetti’s thinking.

He slumped in his chair as Bulstrode took the letter and spread the pages out on his desk. It was fear that made him hand them over, a chicken-guts fear of appearing even more stupid in the damned woman’s eyes than he was already. He knew he would never remove the shame of that moment with Rolly from his mind, it would be a lifetime image, bubbling up at random time and again to blight his joy and deepen depression. And also the image of the girl locked in the root cellar listening to the approaching steps of her tormentor, and he’d never now be able to help her with that through love, he’d screwed that up too, you asshole, Crosetti, you complete turd…

“Can you read it, Professor?”

This was Rolly; the sound of her voice jerked Crosetti from the dear land of self-flagellation, Bulstrode cleared his throat heavily, and said, “Oh, yes, indeed. The hand is crude but quite clear. A man I imagine who did a good deal of writing. Not an educated man, I think, not a university man, but a writing man all the same. A clerk perhaps? Originally, I mean.” Bulstrode returned to his reading. Time passed, perhaps half an hour, that seemed like time in the dentist’s chair to Crosetti. At last the professor sat up and said, “Hm, yes, in all, a very interesting and valuable document. This,” he continued, pointing, “seems to be the last letter of a man named Richard Bracegirdle, who apparently was wounded at the battle of Edgehill, the first major battle of the English Civil War, which took place on October 23, 1642. He is writing from Banbury, it seems, a town close to the battlefield.”

“What about Shakespeare?” Crosetti asked.

Bulstrode regarded him quizzically and blinked behind his thick spectacles. “Excuse me? Did you think there was some reference to Shakespeare in this?”

“Well, yeah! That’s the whole point. This guy says he spied on Shakespeare. That he had an autograph copy of one of his plays, in fact, that he was the one who got Shakespeare to write one of his plays for the king. It’s right there on the signature page.”

“Really. Dear me, Mr. Crosetti, I assure you there’s nothing of that sort. Secretary hand can be quite confusing to ah…an amateur, and people can see all sorts of meanings that don’t exist, rather like finding pictures in clouds.”

“No, look, it’s right here,” said Crosetti and came out of his chair and around the desk. Picking up the manuscript and indicating the relevant lines, he said, “This is the part I mean. It says, ‘They tell all the tale nearly of our spying upon the secret papist Shaxpur. Or so we thought him although now I am less certain. In that manner and bent of life he was a nothing. But certain it is he wrought that play of Scotch M. I commanded of my Lord D. his plot and of him in the king’s name. I find passing strange that all though I am dead and him also yet the play lives still, writ in his own hand and lying where only I know and there may it rest forever.’”

Bulstrode adjusted his eyeglasses and issued a dry chuckle. He picked up the magnifier he had been using and placed it over a line of text. “Very imaginative, I must say, Mr. Crosetti, but you’re quite mistaken. What this says is, ‘I shall tell to you of the sale of gems secretly proper Salust.’ The man must have been some sort of factor in Salisbury for this Lord D. Then it goes on, ‘Of these thefts I lack shriving. In that manner and bent of life I was a nothing.’ And further along he writes ‘the pearls live still willed by his own hand,’ and he says he alone knows where they are. I’m not entirely sure of what ‘willed by his own hand’ means, but in any case the man was clearly dying and probably in intense distress. He seems to flit from subject to subject. In fact, much of this may be pure fantasy, going through his life in a kind of terminal delirium. But the document is interesting enough as it is without bringing in Shakespeare.”

“What does the rest of it say?”

“Oh, it contains a quite vivid description of the battle itself, and these are always of interest to military historians. And apparently he served in the early stages of the Thirty Years’ War, ditto. He was at White Mountain, Lützen, and Breitenfeld, although he gives no detail about these. Pity. A professional artillerist, it seems, and trained as a cannon-founder. He also claims to have made a voyage to the New World and been shipwrecked off Bermuda. A very interesting seventeenth-century life, even a remarkable life, and potentially of great value to certain narrow fields of study, although I suspect there’s also a touch of Munchausen in his narrative. But nothing about Shakespeare, I’m afraid.” A pause here. Leaden silence for a good thirty seconds; then, “I would be happy to purchase it from you, if you like.”

Crosetti looked at Carolyn, who returned a neutral stare. He swallowed and asked, “For how much?”

“Oh, for a Jacobean manuscript of this quality I should think perhaps, ah, thirty-five would be the going rate.”

“Dollars?”

An indulgent smile. “Hundred, of course. Thirty-five hundred. I could write you a check now if you like.”

Crosetti felt his belly twist, and the sweat started to bead up on his forehead. This was wrong. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. His father had always talked about instinct, although he always called it his gut, how you always went with your gut when you were out on the street in harm’s way. Crosetti’s gut made him say, “Uh, thanks, but I think I’d like a second opinion. I mean on the translation. Um, no offense, Dr. Bulstrode, but I’d like to eliminate the possibility that…” He gestured haphazardly, not willing to put it into words. He had remained standing after handling the manuscript, so it was an easy matter to snatch the papers from Bulstrode’s desk and slip them into the brown paper wrapper. Bulstrode shrugged and said, “Well, suit yourself, although I doubt you’ll get a better price.” Turning then to Carolyn, he asked, “And how is dear Sidney these days? Quite recovered from the shock of the fire I hope.”

“Yes, he’s fine,” said Carolyn Rolly in a voice so unlike her own that Crosetti stopped wrapping and looked at her. Her face was pained in a way he could not interpret. She said, “Crosetti, would you step outside for a minute with me? Excuse us, Professor.”

Bulstrode smiled a plump formal smile and gestured to his door.

Outside, a scant summer population of students and professors passed to and fro; it was clearly the interval between classes. Rolly grabbed Crosetti’s arm and pulled him into an alcove, the first time since the crying jag of the previous evening that she had touched him. She clung to his arm and spoke vehemently in a hoarse tense voice. “Listen! You have to let him have those goddamn papers.”

“Why do I? He’s obviously trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”

“Not our eyes, Crosetti. He’s right. There’s no mention of Shakespeare. It’s some petty clerk running a scam and dying and confessing his sins.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Why not? What’s your evidence? Wishful thinking and three hours’ experience with secretary hand?”

“Maybe, but I’m going to show it to someone else, someone I trust.”

As he said this, he saw her eyes grow fat with tears and her face began to crumple. “Oh, God,” she cried, “oh, God, don’t let me come apart now! Crosetti, don’t you get it? He knows Sidney. Why do you think he mentioned him just now?”

“Okay, he knows Sidney-so what?”

“So what! Jesus, man, don’t you see? He knows the manuscript came out of the Voyages, so he knows I’m taking the book apart. And that means…”

“You’re not just breaking it, like Sidney told you to. You’re trying to doctor it, which means you’re going to try to sell it. And he’s, what? Threatening to tell Sidney unless we give him the manuscript?”

“Of course! He’ll tell him, and then Sidney…I don’t know, he’ll fire me for sure and he might call the cops. I’ve seen him do it with shoplifters. He’s nuts that way, people stealing books and I can’t…I can’t take the chance…oh, God, this is horrible!”

She was frankly crying now, not hysterical yet as she was the night before, but building up to it, and that was something Crosetti had no wish to see again. He said, “Hey, calm down! You can’t take what chance?”

“The cops. I can’t be involved with the police.”

Lightbulb.

“You’re a fugitive.” It wasn’t a question. Obvious, really; he should have picked it up right off the bat.

She nodded.

“What’s the charge?”

“Oh, please! Don’t interrogate me!”

“You didn’t whack Uncle Lloyd?”

“What? No, of course not. It was some stupid dope thing. I was desperate for money and I moved packages for some people I knew. This was in Kansas, so of course the sky fell in and…oh, God, what am I going to do!”

“Okay, get yourself together,” he said, resisting the urge to wrap his arms around her. “Go back in there, and tell him it’s a deal.”

He started to move away and her face stiffened in what seemed like panic; he was happy to note that she clutched at his arm, as at a plank in a shipwreck.

“Where’re you going?”

“I just need to do something first,” he said. “Don’t worry, Carolyn, it’s going to be fine. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“What should I tell him?” she demanded.

“Tell him I got the runs from the excitement of his generous offer and I’m in the bathroom. Ten minutes!”

He turned and raced down the stairs, three at a time, holding the rolled manuscripts under his arm like a football. Out of Hamilton at a run, he threaded through a quad full of strolling young people who had higher SATs than he did and ran into the vast columned bulk of Butler Library. One advantage of having a well-known research librarian for a mother is that she knows nearly all the other research librarians in the city and is pals with a number of them. Crosetti had known Margaret Park, the head research librarian at Butler, since childhood, and it was an easy matter to call her up and get permission. All big libraries have large-format Xerox machines that can reproduce folio pages; Crosetti used the one in the Butler basement to copy all of Bracegirdle’s papers. He explained to the bemused but amenable Mrs. Park that this was all to do with a movie he had a chance to make (somewhat true) and could he also cadge a mailing tube and buy some stamps?

He rolled the copies into their tube and added the originals of the ciphered letters and the sermons. As he did this, he wondered why he hadn’t shown them to Bulstrode along with the Bracegirdle letter. Because the guy was an asshole and he was screwing him in some way on this deal, although Crosetti couldn’t prove it, and besides there was Carolyn to consider. But keeping the ciphers to himself gave him an obscure pleasure. Shakespeare or not, the sheets had kept their secrets for four centuries and he was reluctant to let them out of his own hands, he who had brought them into the light. He sealed the tube, wrote out an address label, added postage, dropped the tube into the outgoing mail cart, and trotted back to Hamilton Hall.

Fifteen minutes later he was walking with Rolly down the center of campus again, but in the opposite direction. Crosetti had a check for thirty-five hundred folded in his wallet and was feeling not exactly good, because he felt he’d been ripped off in a number of ways, but that he’d done the right thing. Doing the right thing had been a major expression around the house while he was being raised. His father had been a detective second grade with the NYPD in an era when to be a detective was to be on the pad, but Charlie Crosetti had not been on the pad, and had suffered for it, until the revelations of Serpico, when the chiefs had cast around for the straight and clean, and found him and promoted him to lieutenant in command of a Queens homicide squad. This was taken as a sign in the Crosetti household that virtue was rewarded. The present Crosetti still tended to believe this, despite all the evidence to the contrary that had accumulated in the years since. The woman walking beside him, however, seemed to set the moral universe on its ear. Yes, she’d been hideously abused (or so she said) but had responded with a kind of desperate amorality, a stance he found hard to condone. Every skell has a hard-luck story, his dad used to say. But he could not consider Carolyn Rolly a mere skell. Why not? His gonads? Because he lusted for her? No, not that either, or not only that. He wanted to ease her pain, make her grin, release the girl he glimpsed hiding under the dour, ascetic bookbinder.

He studied her trudging along, silent, her head down, gripping her roll of book leather. No, he was not going to end it with a handshake at the subway and let her roll off into her own astringent universe again. He stopped and placed his hand on her arm. She looked up, her face blank.

“Wait,” he said, “what are we doing now?”

“I have to go to the paper guy in Brooklyn for the endpapers,” she replied glumly. “You don’t have to come.”

“That can wait. What we’re actually going to do now is go to the Citibank branch over there, on which this check in my wallet is drawn, and cash it. Then we’re going to cab to Bloomie’s, where I will buy a jacket and pants and a shirt and maybe a pair of Italian loafers, and you will buy a dress, with colors in it, something for the summer, and maybe a hat, and we’ll change into our new clothes and we’ll take a cab to a fancy restaurant and have a long, long lunch with wine, and then we’ll-I don’t know-do city stuff, go to museums or art galleries or window-shop until we get hungry again and then go out to dinner and then I will take you in a cab back to your spare and illegal loft and your two chairs and your lonely bed.”

What was that on her face, he wondered: fear, surprise, delight? She said, “That’s ridiculous.”

“No it’s not. It’s exactly what felons are supposed to do with their ill-gotten gains. You can be my moll for a day.”

“You’re not a felon.”

“I am. I converted my employer’s property to my own use, probably grand larceny if you want to get technical. But I don’t care. Come on, Carolyn! Don’t you ever get tired of grunging around, squeezing every penny while your youth withers a little every day?”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” she said. “It sounds like a bad movie.”

“But you don’t go to movies, so how would you know? Putting that aside, you happen to be absolutely right. This is exactly the kind of thing they put in movies, because they want people to feel joy, they want people to identify with beautiful people having fun. And now we’re going to do it, we’re going to imitate art, we’re going to be in our own movie and see what it’s like in real life.”

He could see that she was thinking about it, testing it, as we do with a limb lately out of a cast, gingerly, afraid to let it take the weight. “No,” she said, “and if the money’s burning a hole in your pocket why don’t you just give it all to me? I could live for three months on-”

“No, that’s not the point, Carolyn. The point is experience, for once, not prudence, red meat not ramen fucking noodles!” With that he grabbed her arm and hustled her across 116th Street.

“Let go of my arm!”

“No, if you won’t come along of your own free will, I’m kidnapping you. This is now a major felony.”

“What if I scream?” she said.

“Scream away. The cops will arrest me, and they’ll get the whole old book and manuscript story out of me, and then where will you be? Up shit’s creek is where, instead of dressed in a gorgeous new dress drinking champagne in a fine restaurant. You better choose right now, baby, because here’s the bank.”

He found a cocoa silk-and-linen Varvatos jacket on sale for three-fifty and some linen slacks and a nubbly black silk shirt and woven Italian loafers to go with it and she was yelled and chivied into a Prada ruffle-front flowered dress, a matching silk scarf and shoes, a couple of sets of devastating La Perla underwear, and a big panama hat with an upturned brim like an English schoolgirl, all of which did not leave much change from a thousand bucks, and then they had lunch at the Metropolitan Museum and took in the Velázquez show and then went to an afternoon concert at the Frick that he happened to know about because his mom had tickets from her library mafia and had pressed them upon him (go, take a date!), another example of magic, because he’d been carrying the damn things around in his wallet for two weeks with no intention of going and now here it was that very afternoon. So they went, and it was the Concerto Vocale doing a program of Monteverdi sacred music. They sat in folding chairs and were lifted, to the extent their spiritual development then permitted, up to the divine regions.

Crosetti was no stranger to this world, his mother having made sure that American barbarism was not an option for him, but his covert glances at Carolyn revealed a person stunned. Or bored senseless, he really couldn’t tell; and after the concert he was hesitant to ask her which it was. But she said, after one of her long intervals of silence, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the world was really like that, the way that music says it is, just flowing along in beauty?” Crosetti thought it would be exceedingly fine, and used the Hemingway line about it would be pretty to think so, without attribution.

They walked down Madison and he got her into pretending to be not just temporarily rich and to select choice items from the windows of the great boutiques, and when they grew tired of that he steered her down a side street and into the first restaurant they encountered, because he was sure that anyplace they went to would be perfect and this one was, a tiny boîte specializing in provincial French cuisine, where the patron took a liking to the nice young couple and kept sending out exquisite little tastes from the kitchen and recommended the wine, and watched them eat the entrées, beaming; and except that he did not actually break out singing in an accent it was exactly like, as Crosetti noted, The Lady and the Tramp. Which she had actually seen, it turned out, and they talked about that and about other Disney movies, and about the films he loved and the ones he was going to make, stuff he hadn’t ever told anyone, and she talked about beautiful books, their aesthetics, their structure and the cryptic subtle beauties of paper, type, and binding, and how, as she put it, she wanted to make things that people would be handling and loving a thousand years from now.

He had to wave a hundred-dollar bill in the rearview mirror before the cabby would consent to take them to Red Hook, something he had never done before, nor ever dreamed of doing, and they arrived in the dark industrial street, and when the cabby had roared away with his C-note, Crosetti grabbed Carolyn Rolly, spun her around, and planted a good one on her wine-and-coffee-tasting mouth, and she kissed him back. Just like the movies.

Unlike, they did not tear off their clothes as they staggered up the stairs, into the loft, and into bed. Crosetti had always thought this a cliché and unrealistic; such a thing had never happened to him nor to anyone he knew who was not either drunk or cranked to the gills. So it was not going to happen in his movie. Instead, he sighed deeply and she sighed. He held her hand lightly, as if it were a dried blossom as they slowly ascended. They entered the loft, they kissed again. She pulled away and rummaged in a drawer. She’s going to light a candle, he thought, and she did, a simple plumber’s candle, which she stuck carefully in a saucer and set by the bed. Crosetti did not move. Then she looked straight at him, her face set in its lovely grave lines and silently and slowly took off her new clothes in the candlelight, folding them tenderly, which was exactly the way he would have shot it, maybe a little more blue coming in from the window, and as he thought this he laughed.

She asked him why he laughed and he told her, and she told him to undress, that this was the part they didn’t show in the regular movies, this was the fade-out. But after they were in bed together he thought of the horrible uncle and was abashed and too tentative until she used her nails and a harsh urgent command to unleash the animal. They did not practice safe sex, which he considered a little odd, a thought he entertained just before all thinking ceased.

After that, the director was out of the building for a long time. When he returned, Crosetti was on his back, feeling the sweat and other fluids drying on his skin, staring up at the tin ceiling. The candle was only an inch high. He had nothing to say, and his mind was quite blank: dead air, white screen. They’d had the setup, the development, the first plot point (discovering the manuscript), the second plot point (this incredible evening), and now what? He had no idea what the third act was going to be, but he was starting to feel fear. He’d never had anything like this happen to him, except in dreamland. He reached over to caress her again but she held on to his hand and kissed it. She said, “You can’t stay.”

“Why not? Are you going to turn into a bat?”

“No, but you can’t stay. I’m not ready for…mornings. And all that. Do you understand?”

“A little. I guess. Well, Red Hook at…where’s my watch? Threeten a.m. with a roll of cash and smelling like a bordello. That sounds like fun.”

“No,” she said, “I’ll wash you.”

She took him by the hand and led him to the sink behind the screen, lit two candles set in wall sconces made of tin cans, and filled the sink with steaming water. She stood him on a thick straw bath mat and washed every inch of him, slowly, with a washcloth and Ivory soap. Then she drained the suds and washed him with clear water, kneeling lightly on one knee like a courtier before the prince. She had small flattish breasts with broad pink nipples. Despite the night’s epic exertions he hardened painfully under this treatment. It had an unnatural appearance, like one of her bookbinding implements, something suitable for burnishing leather to a high gloss. She looked up at him and said, “You can’t go out in Red Hook at three a.m. in that condition.”

“No, it would be unwise,” he said in a hoarse croak.

“Well, then,” she said.

He noticed that she held it at the base with two fingers, the other three extended, like a duchess sipping tea. Her dark little head moved slowly back and forth. How did they learn how to do that, he thought, and also: Who are you? What are you doing to me? What’s going to happen?

THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (6)

Thus I began my lyfe as an ordnancer of the Tower 10s. the moneth wage, prentice wages that but beggars cannot be chusers. We took lodgings two mean roomes in Fenchurch St. by Aldgate, verey poore were wee but had liverie from the Tower so saved on my cloathes. One yeare spent thus: in the winter of the second yeare came a chill & my mother sickened & wee had not coales enow to warme her. Methinkes she wase besydes wearied from her sorrowes. Alas to come to this end through no fault of hers: all ways a good, sober, virtuous woman & no papiste neither, as I asked her then, she sayinge no sonne but I did pray for the sowles of my dead babes & for the sowles of my parentes as wee learnt in the olde religion a great sinne I know & wille burn in Hell for it though I praye God not. Soe she died 2^nd February AD 1606 & is buried in St Katherine Colemanchurch. Now you know, my Nan, that after that sadde tyme you gave me comfort soe that I wish to marry you but your father sayeth what, nay nay, no man can marry on prentice wages how will you keepe my daughter & I hadde no answer & and left sad & wast sad many daies.

Comes now Thomas Keane saying ho Dick what say you to Flanders? For I am off to-morrow to deliver four cannon royal to the Dutch at Sluys & shoot em too against Spain. Come & be my mate & matrosse: wee will eate cheese & drinke genever & blaste papiste dogges to Hell. I answer him yes by G-d & my hand on’t & the thynge is settled. We must needs goe from the Tower at night for the Kinges majestie had late made peace with Spain so ’twould be thought ille to arme Spaines foes. But some at court (that Prince Henry I think mee who after untimely died) thought it a shame on England to shrink cowardly from warre gainst wicked King Phillipe who pressed so cruel on the reformed faith. Besides the Dutch had payed for the gonnes before this so wase it justice too, for the King would not yield a pennie backe & thus we went for the honour of England besydes.

Wee brought out the cannon & theyre carriages braken all in peeces & all necessaries as: 500 shottes, rammers, worms, port-fyres, &c. by barges & then to the Pool where mariners swayed them into the holte of the ship Groene Draeck a saloop of 6 gonnes belonging to Captain Willem van Brille. Soe with a fair wind wee sayled down river. A three-daye voyage wee had & a goode enough sea for winter not too colde & wee ate fresh: bread & cheeses, pickel-herrynge, ale. At Sluys a flat dreare place to my eye all brick dun or red & verey goode businesse since the Spanish have tooke Ostende these many moneths tis the onlie port in western Flanders. Soe we off-lade the gonnes & placed them on theyre carriages.

Nay I am too longe about my foolishe youth & I fear I have but little tyme. My wound now gripes me more than before & the surgeon saith it is fowle & gives me two daies no more.