The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

  She texts her boss in New York: Doesn’t look like there’ll be any orders from Island.

  The boss replies: Don’t fret. Only a little account, and Island does the bulk of its ordering in anticipation of the summer when the tourists are there. The guy who runs the place is weird, and Harvey always had better luck selling the spring/summer list. You will, too.

  AT SIX O’CLOCK, A.J. tells Molly Klock to leave. “How’s the new Munro?” he asks.

  She groans. “Why does everyone keep asking me that today?” She is only referring to Amelia, but Molly likes to speak in extremes.

  “I suppose because you’re reading it.”

  Molly groans again. “Okay. The people are, I dunno, too human sometimes.”

  “I think that’s rather the point with Munro,” he says.

  “Dunno. Prefer the old stuff. See you on Monday.”

  Something will have to be done about Molly, A.J. thinks as he flips the sign to closed. Aside from liking to read, Molly is truly a terrible bookseller. But she’s only a part-timer, and it’s such a bother to train someone new, and at least she doesn’t steal. Nic had hired her so she must have seen something in the surly Miss Klock. Maybe next summer A.J. will work up the energy to fire Molly.

  A.J. kicks the remaining customers out (he is most annoyed by an organic chemistry study group who have bought nothing but have been camped out in magazines since four—he’s pretty sure one of them clogged up the toilet, too), then deals with the receipts, a task as depressing as it sounds. Finally, he goes upstairs to the attic apartment where he lives. He pops a carton of frozen vindaloo into the microwave. Nine minutes, per the box’s instructions. As he’s standing there, he thinks of the girl from Knightley. She had looked like a time traveler from 1990s Seattle with her anchor-printed galoshes and her floral grandma dress and her fuzzy beige sweater and her shoulder-length hair that looked like it had been cut in the kitchen by her boyfriend. Girlfriend? Boyfriend, he decides. He thinks of Courtney Love when she was married to Kurt Cobain. The tough rose mouth says No one can hurt me, but the soft blue eyes say Yes you can and you probably will. And he had made that big dandelion of a girl cry. Well done, A.J.

  The scent of vindaloo is growing stronger, but seven and a half minutes remain on the clock.

  He wants a task. Something physical but not strenuous.

  He goes into the basement to collapse book boxes with his box cutter. Knife. Flatten. Stack. Knife. Flatten. Stack.

  A.J. regrets his behavior with the rep. It hadn’t been her fault. Someone should have told him that Harvey Rhodes had died.

  Knife. Flatten. Stack.

  Someone probably had told him. A.J. only skims his e-mail, never answers his phone. Had there been a funeral? Not that A.J. would have attended anyway. He had barely known Harvey Rhodes. Obviously.

  Knife. Flatten. Stack.

  And yet . . . He had spent hours with the man over the last half-dozen years. They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

  Knife. Flatten. Stack.

  And how rare is it to find someone who shares your tastes? The one real fight they’d ever had was over David Foster Wallace. It was around the time of Wallace’s suicide. A.J. had found the reverent tone of the eulogies to be insufferable. The man had written a decent (if indulgent and overlong) novel, a few modestly insightful essays, and not much else.

  “Infinite Jest is a masterpiece,” Harvey had said.

  “Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life,” A.J. had countered. “Style, no substance, my friend.”

  Harvey’s face had reddened as he leaned over the desk. “You say that about any writer who was born in the same decade as you!”

  Knife. Flatten. Stack. Tie.

  By the time he gets back upstairs, the vindaloo is cold again. If he reheats it in that plastic dish, he’ll probably end up with cancer.

  He takes the plastic tray to the table. The first bite is burning. The second bite is frozen. Papa Bear’s vindaloo and Baby Bear’s vindaloo. He throws the tray against the wall. How little he had meant to Harvey and how much Harvey had meant to him.

  The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.

  No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset. No one cares why a thirty-nine-year-old man has thrown a plastic tub of vindaloo across a room like a toddler. He pours himself a glass of merlot. He spreads a tablecloth on the table. He walks into the living room. He unlocks a climate-controlled glass case and removes Tamerlane from it. Back in the kitchen, he sets Tamerlane across the table from him, props it against the chair where Nic used to sit.

  “Cheers, you piece of crap,” he says to the slim volume.

  He finishes the glass. He pours himself another, and after he finishes that he promises himself that he’s going to read a book. Maybe an old favorite like Old School by Tobias Wolff, though his time would certainly be better spent on something new. What had that dopey rep been going on about? The Late Bloomer—ugh. He had meant what he said. There is nothing worse than cutesy memoirs about widowers. Especially if one is a widower as A.J. has been for the last twenty-one months. The rep had been new—not her fault that she didn’t know about his boring personal tragedy. God, he misses Nic. Her voice and her neck and even her armpits. They had been stubbly as a cat’s tongue and, at the end of the day, smelled like milk just before it curdles.

  Three glasses later, he passes out at the table. He is only five foot seven inches tall, 140 pounds, and he hasn’t even had frozen vindaloo to fortify him. No dent will be made in his reading pile tonight.

  “AJAY,” NIC WHISPERS. “Go to bed.”

  At last, he is dreaming. The point of all the drinking is to arrive in this place.

  Nic, his drunken-dream ghost wife, helps him to his feet.

  “You’re a disgrace, nerd. You know that?”

  He nods.

  “Frozen vindaloo and five-dollar red wine.”

  “I am respecting the time-honored traditions of my heritage.”

  He and the ghost shuffle to the bedroom.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Fikry. You’re turning into a bona fide alcoholic.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. She lowers him into the bed.

  Her brown hair is short, gamine-style. “You cut your hair,” he says. “Weird.”

  “You were awful to that girl today.”

  “It was about Harvey.”

  “Obviously,” she says.

  “I don’t like it when people who used to know you die.”

  “That’s why you won’t fire Molly Klock, too?”

  He nods.

  “You can’t go on like this.”

  “I can,” A.J. says. “I have been. I will.”

  She kisses him on the forehead. “I guess what I’m saying is I don’t want you to.”

  She is gone.

  The accident hadn’t been anyone’s fault. She’d been driving an author home after an afternoon event. She’d probably been speeding to catch the last automobile ferry back to Alice. Possibly she had swerved to avoid hitting a deer. Possibly Massachusetts roads in winter. There was no way to know. The cop at the hospital asked if she’d been suicidal. “No,” A.J. said. “Nothing like that.” She had been two months pregnant. They hadn’t told anyone yet. There had been disappointments before. Standing in the waiting room outside the morgue, he rather wished they had told people. At least there would have been a brief period of happiness before this longer period of . . . He did not yet know what to call this. “No, she was not suicidal.” A.J. paused. “She was a terrible driver who thought she wasn’t.”

  “Yes,” said the cop. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

  “People like to say that,” A.J. replies. “But it was someone’s fault. It was hers. What a stupid thing f
or her to do. What a stupid melodramatic thing for her to do. What a goddamn Danielle Steel move, Nic! If this were a novel, I’d stop reading right now. I’d throw it across the room.”

  The cop (who was not much of a reader aside from the occasional Jeffery Deaver mass-market paperback while on vacation) tried to steer the conversation back to reality. “That’s right. You own the bookstore.”

  “My wife and I,” A.J. replied without thinking. “Oh Christ, I just did that stupid thing where the character forgets that the spouse has died and he accidentally uses ‘we.’ That’s such a cliché. Officer”—he paused to read the cop’s badge—“Lambiase, you and I are characters in a bad novel. Do you know that? How the heck did we end up here? You’re probably thinking to yourself, Poor bastard, and tonight you’ll hug your kids extra tight because that’s what characters in these kinds of novels do. You know the kind of book I’m talking about, right? The kind of hotshot literary fiction that, like, follows some unimportant supporting character for a bit so it looks all Faulkneresque and expansive. Look how the author cares for the little people! The common man! How broad-minded he or she must be! Even your name. Officer Lambiase is the perfect name for a clichéd Massachusetts cop. Are you racist, Lambiase? Because your kind of character ought to be racist.”

  “Mr. Fikry,” Officer Lambiase had said. “Is there anyone I can call for you?” He was a good cop, accustomed to the many ways the aggrieved can come undone. He set his hand on A.J.’s shoulder.

  “Yes! Right on, Officer Lambiase, that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do in this moment! You’re playing your part beautifully. Would you happen to know what the widower is supposed to do next?”

  “Call someone,” Officer Lambiase said.

  “Yes, that is probably right. I’ve already called my in-laws, though.” A.J. nodded. “If this were a short story, you and I would be done by now. A small ironic turn and out. That’s why there’s nothing more elegant in the prose universe than a short story, Officer Lambiase.

  “If this were Raymond Carver, you’d offer me some meager comfort and darkness would set in and all this would be over. But this . . . is feeling more like a novel to me after all. Emotionally, I mean. It will take me a while to get through it. Do you know?”

  “I’m not sure that I do. I haven’t read Raymond Carver,” Officer Lambiase said. “I like Lincoln Rhyme. Do you know him?”

  “The quadriplegic criminologist. Decent for genre writing. But have you read any short stories?” A.J. asked.

  “Maybe in school. Fairy tales. Or, um, The Red Pony? I think I was supposed to read The Red Pony.”

  “That is a novella,” A.J. said.

  “Oh, sorry. I’m . . . Wait, there was one with a cop I remember from high school. Kind of a perfect crime thing, which I guess is why I remember it. This cop gets killed by his wife. The weapon is a frozen side of beef and then she serves it to the other—”

  “ ‘Lamb to the Slaughter,’ ” A.J. said. “The story’s called ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ and the weapon is a leg of lamb.”

  “Yes, that’s it!” The cop was delighted. “You know your stuff.”

  “It’s a very well-known piece,” A.J. said. “My in-laws should be here any minute. I’m sorry about before when I referred to you as an ‘unimportant supporting character.’ That was rude and for all we know, I am the ‘unimportant supporting character’ in the grander saga of Officer Lambiase. A cop is a more likely protagonist than a bookseller. You, sir, are a genre.”

  “Hmmm,” said Officer Lambiase. “You’re probably right at that. Going back to what we were talking about before. As a cop, my problem with the story is the timeline. Like, she puts the beef—”

  “Lamb.”

  “Lamb. So she kills the guy with the frozen lamb chop then she puts it in the oven to cook without even thawing it. I’m no Rachael Ray, but . . .”

  Nic had begun to freeze by the time they had pulled her car out of the water, and in the morgue drawer her lips had been blue. The color had reminded A.J. of the black lipstick she’d worn to the book party she’d thrown for the latest vampire whatever. He hadn’t cared for the idea of silly teenage girls prancing about Island in prom dresses, but Nic, who had actually liked that damned vampire book and the woman who wrote it, insisted that a vampire prom was good for business and also fun. “You remember fun, right?”

  “Dimly,” he had said. “Long ago, back before I was a bookseller, back when I had my weekends and my nights to myself, back when I read for pleasure, I recall that there was fun. So, dimly, dimly. Yes.”

  “Let me refresh your memory. Fun is having a smart, pretty, easy wife with whom you get to spend every working day.”

  He could still picture her in that ridiculous black satin dress, her right arm draped around the porch column and her comely stained lips in a line. “Tragically, my wife has been turned into a vampire.”

  “You poor man.” She crossed the porch and kissed him, leaving a lipstick trace like a bruise. “Your only move is to become a vampire, too. Don’t try to fight it. That’s the absolute worst thing you could do. You gotta be cool, nerd. Invite me in.”

  The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

  1922 / F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Technically, a novella. But then novella is something of a gray area. Still, if you find yourself among the kind of people who bother to make such distinctions—and I used to be that type of person—it is best that you know the difference. (If you end up going to an Ivy League college,* you are likely to run into such people. Arm yourself with knowledge against this bumptious lot. But I digress.) E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a “single sitting” was longer back in his day. But I digress again.

  Gimmicky, oddball story of the challenges of owning a town made of diamonds and of the lengths the rich will go to protect their way of life. Fitzgerald is in fine form here. The Great Gatsby is unquestionably dazzling, but that novel occasionally seems overgroomed to me, like a garden topiary. The short-story format is a roomier, messier affair for him. “Diamond” breathes like an enchanted garden gnome.

  Re: its inclusion. Shall I do the obvious thing and tell you that just before I met you I too lost something of great, if speculative, value?

  —A.J.F.

  *I have thoughts about this. Remember that a fine education can be found in places other than the usual.

  Though he can’t remember how he got there or having taken off his clothes, A.J. wakes in bed wearing only his underwear. He remembers that Harvey Rhodes is dead; he remembers being an asshole to the comely Knightley Press rep; he remembers throwing the vindaloo across the room; he remembers the first glass of wine and the toast to Tamerlane. After that, oblivion. From his point of view, the evening had been a triumph.

  His head is pounding. He walks out to the main room, expecting to find the vindaloo detritus. The floor and the walls are spotless. A.J. digs an aspirin out of the cabinet while silently congratulating himself for having had the foresight to clean up the vindaloo. He sits down at the dining-room table and notices that the wine bottle has also been thrown out. Odd for him to have been so fastidious but not unprecedented. He is nothing if not a neat drunk. He looks across the table to where he’d left Tamerlane. The book is gone. Maybe he only thought he’d taken it out of the case?

  As he walks across the room, A.J.’s heart is pounding in competition with his head. Halfway to the bookcase, he can see that the combination-locked, climate-controlled glass coffin, which protects Tamerlane from the world, is wide open and empty.

  He pulls on a bathrobe and throws on his running shoes, which haven’t gotten much mileage on them of late.

  A.J. jogs down Captain Wiggins Street with his dingy plaid bathrobe flapping out behind him. He looks like a depressed, malnourished superhero. He turns onto Main and runs straight into the sleepy Alice Island Police Station. “I’ve been robbed!” A.J. announces. It was only a short run, but A.J. is breathing hard. “Please, someon
e help me!” He tries not to feel like an old lady with a stolen handbag.

  Lambiase sets down his cup of coffee and takes in the distraught man in the bathrobe. He recognizes him as the owner of the bookstore and the man whose pretty young wife had driven into the lake a year and a half back. A.J. looks much older than the last time he’d seen him, though Lambiase supposes that is to be expected.

  “All right, Mr. Fikry,” Lambiase says, “tell me what happened.”

  “Someone stole Tamerlane,” A.J. says.

  “What’s Tamerlane?”

  “It’s a book. It’s a very valuable book.”

  “To clarify. You mean someone shoplifted a book from the store.”

  “No. It was my book from my personal collection. It is an extremely rare collection of poems by Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “So, it’s, like, your favorite book?” Lambiase asks.

  “No. I don’t even like it. It’s crap, it’s jejune crap. It’s . . .” A.J. is hyperventilating. “Fuck.”

  “Calm down, Mr. Fikry. I’m trying to understand. You don’t like the book, but it has sentimental value?”

  “No! Fuck sentimental value. It has great financial value. Tamerlane is like the Honus Wagner of rare books! You know what I’m saying?”

  “Sure, my pops was a baseball card collector.” Lambiase nods. “That valuable?”

  A.J. can’t get the words out fast enough. “It was the first thing Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote, back when he was eighteen. Copies are extremely rare because the print run was fifty copies, and it was published anonymously. Instead of ‘by Edgar Allan Poe,’ it says ‘by a Bostonian’ on the cover. Copies sell for upward of four hundred thousand dollars depending on condition and the mood of the rare books market. I was planning to auction it off in a couple of years when the economy had had a little time to improve. I was planning to close the shop and retire on the proceeds.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Lambiase says, “why would you keep something like that in your house and not in a bank vault?”

  A.J. shakes his head. “I don’t know. I was stupid. I liked keeping it close by, I suppose. I liked being able to look at it and be reminded that I could quit anytime I wanted to. I kept it in a combination-locked glass case. I thought it was safe enough.” In his defense, there is very little theft in Alice Island except during tourist season. It is October.