Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

where your house is. It is not very far from my apartment.Ten blocks or so to walk. I don’t go there yet. I walk within a block or two of it and turn aside. That is a house you never meant me to see. (The places where I live are just the opposite; I deck them out and wait for them to come to life, when you visit me.) Now I can see it if I want to. I can walk past on the other side of the street, my heart pounding, able only to glance at it once or twice, then growing bolder I can walk slowly. Dusk is the time I would choose, to loiter not far from the open windows, to listen for music or voices. Imagine this real, a real house, where people wash dishes and oversleep. At night if she doesn’t draw the curtains I can look into your rooms. Are the pictures your choice, or hers? Neither. Both. These discoveries cause me ordinary pain.
    Once I read a story, a true story, in a magazine—it may have been one of the magazines you worked for—about a woman who had lost both her young daughters in a car accident, and every day when the other children were coming home from school she would go out and walk along the streets as if she expected to meet her daughters. But she never went as far as the school, she never looked into their empty classrooms, she could not risk that.
    I go to your wife’s store, that is what I can do. I don’t know the name. I look up bookstores in the yellow pages of the phone book. BARBARA ’ S BOOK MART , that must be it. From the name I expected something self-conscious and quaint; I am surprised to find it so large, bright, busy and commonplace. No medieval or Tudor trappings; no trappings of any kind. This is a solid, year-round business, not tricked out for tourists.
    I know her at once, though she has changed. Her hair is gray, grayer than mine, pulled into a bun. Features less sharp than they were, no make-up, a sallow skin, and still those flashes of vivid attractiveness; her quivering, witty, irritable style. She wears a faded purple smock with bands of Indian embroidery. She moves stiffly, having had to learnto walk again, after the cartilage in one knee was removed. And she is heavier, as you said; she is a stocky middle-aged woman.
    She has come from the back of the store carrying a couple of large art books. She goes behind the desk, puts them on a shelf, speaks to the salesgirl as if continuing a conversation started earlier.
    “Well, I don’t know how—invoice—phone them up and tell them that isn’t the way we do things around here—whole damn lot’s got to be returned.”
    I remember her voice, the same voice I heard all that time ago at one or two parties—a clear challenging voice that seems to come into its own on a certain level of exasperation, a voice that excels in saying
My God what are those idiots thinking of!
Suppose she recognizes my voice, or my face? I don’t think she will. She is not a person to remember people at the fringes, she is always at the center, and she has no information about me, has she? She cannot expect me here.
    Nevertheless I feel conspicuous, guilty, strange. Yet I stay for a long time, I wander all over the store. It’s frightening, there are so many books. I always seem to stop in front of books telling people various ways to be happy, or at any rate peaceful. You have no idea—well, maybe you do have an idea—how many books of this sort there are. I am not scornful. I think I ought to read them. Or at least some of them. But all I can do is stare at them in stupefaction. Other books deal with magic, there are really hundreds of books about witches, spells, clairvoyance, rituals, all kinds of tricks and wonders. These books seem to me all the same—the happiness-and-peace ones and the magic wonders—they don’t seem like separate books at all, that is why I cannot touch them. They are all flowing together around the store like some varicolored marvelous stream, or wide river, and I can really no more understand what is inside them than I can breathe underwater.
    I come day after day. I do buy a few paperbacks. Ibrowse, as they must think, for hours. Once she looks at me, and smiles, but it is only the quick blind smile she has for a customer, I listen to her talking to the salesgirls, laughing, carrying on a joking, also serious, feud with somebody on the phone, demanding her tea with honey, mock-righteously refusing cakes. I hear her successfully, sometimes charmingly, bully the customers. I can imagine becoming her friend,