Reading Online Novel

Glass Houses(47)



Elizabeth didn’t think it would matter one way or the other.





2


It was the time change that was getting to her, Phillipa Lydgate was sure of it. She had been up early and out all day; and for a while there, around noon, she had been ready to collapse. Now it was nearly ten o’clock, and she was wide awake and raring to go. The city of Philadelphia had the look she loved most about cities, the one where the streetlights glowed in the darkness and glistened in reflection on rain-coated streets. The traffic was not bad. In spite of everything she had heard about American cities, she didn’t feel threatened in this one. The truth was, she never felt threatened in cities. What she did feel, at the moment, was exasperated. It had been a long day, and she didn’t think she had even a paragraph’s worth of material to put into a column.

There was a newsstand on the corner of wherever it was she was. She thought it must be a relatively wealthy area, since there were lots of little stores and the people walking around were mostly white. Of course, they were only mostly white, so it was possible that this was a semidepressed neighborhood, but with a good facade, so that it wasn’t really noticeable. She stopped at the newsstand and bought a copy of The Inquirer, which she should have done first thing this morning. It hadn’t occurred to her. The man behind the cash register was South Asian, but people here would say Indian or Pakistani. The South Asians were everywhere really. Phillipa couldn’t get over the way they had spread.

She turned back to the street with the paper under her arm and looked around. Most of the stores sold clothes or shoes and were shut up for the night, but their windows were not hidden behind protective metal shields. Two of the stores were bookstores, and both were open. The first one was a specialty store. All the books were about travel to one place or another, or about the places you might travel to. She stood for a while before a display of books about various aspects of Islam: the Koran; some commentaries on the Koran; a history of the Moorish occupation of Spain; a cookbook about the foods of Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria; a large volume on the history of Islamic art. There were two or three people in the store. One of them was at the cash register in the back, buying a stack that had to be a foot tall.

Phillipa went down the block and across the street and looked into the windows of the other bookstore. This was a general bookstore, but not the kind she was used to hearing about in America. There were no best sellers in the windows, and no displays of teddy bears or mugs. The front window was full of a display of the books of what it called “Beat America,” which seemed to have something to do with Beatniks. Phillipa knew some of the names of some of the writers—Jack Kerouac, certainly, and Alan Ginsberg, who was a gay rights activist—but most of the others meant nothing to her at all. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. A Coney Island of the Mind. She searched her memory for it and came up blank. She went to the other window and found another display, this one on “Square America.”

If the display on Beat America had made her feel blank, the one on Square America made her feel blanker and gave her the uncomfortable feeling that she was failing to get a joke. The window on Square America was less crowded, though, and through it she could see all the way to the back of the store, where there seemed to be some kind of coffee bar. At least people were sitting in chairs at little tables and drinking coffee while they read books. Phillipa had heard of this. The Barnes & Noble chain of bookstores had coffee bars, which were supposed to make people forget that they were owned by corporate behemoths who cared nothing for literature and only worried about the bottom line.

She stepped back and looked up at the facade of the store. It was called Belles Lettres, and nothing indicated that it was owned by any kind of corpo-rate behemoth at all. It reminded her of Shakespeare & Company in Paris, except that it was cleaner and seemed to be better organized. Americans were always such maniacs for cleanliness and order. It was as if they were afraid of the messy smelliness of real life. She looked back at the Beat America display again. Then she made up her mind—it had been hours since she’d put any caffeine into her body—and went inside.

The inside of Belles Lettres wasn’t a quiet place. The people in the coffee bar all seemed to be talking to one another. Phillipa made her way to the back, past displays of Jose Saramago’s novels and the poetry of W. B, Yeats. There was also a little pile of books of essays by V S. Naipaul. She made it to the coffee bar and looked around. Only two of the tables were empty. The rest were, if anything, overoccupied.

The one closest to the coffee machines themselves was occupied by an impossibly tall, impossibly thin, impossibly fit young man with blond hair who sat with his chair tilted back against the wall and his long legs stretched out in front of him.