Searching for Grace Kelly (5 page)

“Oh, hush.” Laura's eyes zeroed in on a small basement window with
BOOKS
in arched gold letters across the middle. “That's it!”

MacDougal Books & Letters was more like MacDougal Attic, three tiny cement steps that led down into a messy closet of books arranged . . . well,
arranged
wasn't really the word, Laura noted. While some genres had their own clearly labeled shelves—“European History,” “Plays and Playwrights,” “Art,” and one in the back oddly declaring “Medieval Rituals”—most of the books were tossed about haphazardly, as if some overly aggressive cleaning woman had come in and simply flung those laying in her path. Others stood in teetering piles, threatening to topple at the smallest wind gust. The shop had the stifling, musty feel of a trunk that hadn't been opened in quite some time, with a smell of cedar and pipe smoke that was aggressive yet not entirely unpleasant. “Fantastic,” Laura whispered.

“What?” Dolly shook her head. She was already starting to perspire, and it wasn't even noon. “You
like
this place? I will never understand rich girls.”

“Can I help you, ladies?”

They turned to see a slightly rumpled man standing behind the well-worn mahogany counter. He wore a vest over a starched white oxford shirt and projected a faintly regal bearing, like a duke in an old oil painting. “Are you looking for something in particular?”

Dolly answered, “Oh, we're just brows—”

“I love your shop,” Laura interrupted.

“Thank you.” He lumbered out from behind the counter. “
You
are a serious bookworm, I can tell.”

Laura beamed. It was one thing to be called pretty; it was a true compliment to be called smart. “I'd like to be. I've just moved here. I want to be a writer myself.”

“I'd settle for having a nice lunch,” Dolly muttered from a row over.

“What kind of writer would you like to be?” the man asked.

“Honestly, I don't know. But the kind who writes things that change people's lives. Or . . . well, that sounds a bit egotistical, I think. Maybe just the kind who gets people to see things differently. Or perhaps one thing differently. To think about things. I think about things all the time.” She laughed. “Perhaps too much. I just love stories that take you someplace else, that give you a glimpse into how people live who are different from you.”

“Hmm. I have a book you might like,” the man said. “Wait here.”

Dolly weaved around to Laura's side. “How long do we have to stay? I'm melting like the Wicked Witch in here.”

Laura laughed. “Well, if the slipper fits—”

“That was too easy. C'mon, Laura, I want to go see pretty dresses and shoes. Do they even have those in Greenwich Village?”

“You've lived at the Barbizon since last September and you've never been down here? How is that possible?”

“Some of us find enough to do on the Upper East Side without having to come down with all the weirdoes.”

“They're not weirdoes. They're thinkers. They're
interesting
. And they're not big on rules. At all. Don't you ever just want to say, ‘I want to do exactly what I want,' and have no one say, ‘No, you can't do that'?”

“Only when it comes to Lindy's cheesecake.”

Laura watched the man walk back to the front of the shop; he had a slight hitch in his step, as if he was nursing a leg injury. “I'm gonna run and do some window-shopping and leave you to play librarian. I'll meet you back at the room. We're still going to the movies tonight, right?”

“Right. You pick.”

“I hope I didn't scare your friend away,” the man said as he shuffled up to her and watched Dolly leave the shop.

“Oh, don't worry about her. She's more of a
Photoplay
kind of gal.”

“Ah, well. What was it Abbott Lowell said? ‘Your aim will be knowledge and wisdom, not the reflected glamour of fame.'”

“Who's Abbott Lowell?”

“Was. He was the president of Harvard.”

“Did you attend Harvard?”

“No. I came from far too modest a background to aspire to the Ivy League.” He gave her an appraising look, took in her white sundress and ballet flats. “You, on the other hand. Let me guess: Seven Sisters.”

She smiled. “Oh, dear. Does it show that badly?”

“On the contrary, it shows beautifully. Now, don't tell me. I'm going to say . . . Vassar.”

“Smith.”

“Ah. The hair threw me. The Smith girls are almost always blondes.”

“What can I say?” Laura laughed. “I'm an iconoclast.”

“You're far too young to be anything of the kind,” he replied gently. “But you've got great spirit, I can tell. And, I suspect, a fair amount of verve. Qualities that will serve you well as a writer.” He reached behind him to the counter, extracted a card. “My manners are deteriorating as quickly as my body. Allow me an introduction. Cornelius Offing, at your service.”

Laura returned the pleasantry. “It's nice to meet you, Mr. Offing.”

“Connie, please. My family calls me Corny, which is not a name I wish to perpetuate to the grave. But they're set in their ways, so that battle's been lost. But you, you can call me Connie.”

For the next hour, he took her on a detailed tour of the tiny shop, dazzling her with his knowledge of writers, books, and publishing. The shop was stiflingly hot—Dolly had been right about that much—but it didn't seem to faze him. He showed off a limited edition of Keats and a set of Dickens bound volumes he said were rumored to have once been in the summer library of Queen Victoria. He inspected a copy of Steinbeck's
Sweet Thursday
. “I don't keep a lot of the popular fiction in here. I don't think it's why folks come into this type of place. Did you read this?”

“No. I read
Cannery Row
, though.”

“And?”

“I enjoyed it.”

“Mmm. Yes, the first is always better than the sequel. Still, this one is probably still superior to most of the stuff they print nowadays. I worry about what people are reading. Or, rather, not reading. But, oh well. Man cannot live by Euripides alone, I suppose.”

“Or
Photoplay
.”

He smiled. “You,” he said, “are an old soul, fortunately housed in very lovely wrapping. Tell me: What was the last book you really loved?”

“That's easy.
The Town and the City
.”

“Kerouac. Interesting.”

“I just thought it was so incredibly . . . real, somehow. Like, it put you there, both in New York and in that small town in Massachusetts. You could really feel the main character's struggle to find his own life. Maybe I adored it because of where I grew up. Has he written anything new?”

“No, though I do hear he's working on something that's almost done and thought to be rather brilliant. But you could go ask him yourself. Chances are he's just down the street.” He looked at his watch. “Though perhaps not quite this early. Probably still sleeping off last night's toot.”

She started. “John Kerouac lives down the street?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Connie chuckled, ambling back toward the counter. “And he goes by ‘Jack' now. He and his crowd spend most of their time at the San Remo. Little bar not far from here, right on MacDougal. You should go in sometime. Most bars don't allow women by themselves, but they sort of make their own rules at the San Remo.” Connie shuffled back behind the counter, hopped onto a stool with a wince. “Damn foot. Pardon my language.”

Her own foot was feeling much better than it had been last night, now that it was covered in a bandage. “What happened?” The kind of personal question that Marmy would have been appalled at her asking.

For a moment he appeared embarrassed. “Gout,” Connie replied. “Now not only do I have a foot that's constantly giving me pain, but I can't eat anything that tastes good, either.”

“Well, at least you can
make
your own food. They don't allow cooking at the Barbizon.”

“The Barbizon. My, I am slow on the draw these days. Should have known that's where you lived. The most beautiful girls in New York in that place. I've always said if I wasn't running this shop, I'd be a doorman there. Men bribe them just to find a way in to meet the girls.” He slid the book he'd brought from the back across the counter. “Here, I want you to read this.”

It was a slim volume, no more than two hundred pages, with a plain cloth cover and a title that read,
Will the Girl and Other Stories
. She took in the author's name. “Christopher Welsh,” she read aloud. “I've never heard of him.”

“You will. A very exciting new voice. Mark my words. This is his first collection of short stories. If you want to be a writer, there are worse people to emulate.”

She tucked the book under her arm, reached for the coin purse in her pocket. “Oh, no,” Connie said. “Consider it a welcoming gift.”

“Oh, I don't feel right about that. I have to pay you something.”

“I'll tell you what. You read the book, and when you're done, come back to the shop and I'll make us some tea and we can talk about what you thought of it. That'll be payment enough.”

“Okay, Connie,” Laura said, shaking his hand. “You have a deal.”

 

She fought the instinct to leave.

The interior of the San Remo was everything a literary bar should be: a light fog of cigarette smoke opening up to pressed tin ceilings, scarred wooden booths, a bar of old warped wood that curved seductively from front to back. Laura had walked up and down the block three times before mustering the courage to venture inside.

At midday on a Saturday in June it wasn't yet busy, which only made her feel more self-conscious: no crowd to thread through or to disappear into. A few wiry young men were at the far end of the bar gesturing wildly with their cigarettes and talking loudly over one another, all of them dressed almost identically in white T-shirts or short-sleeved oxfords, slim black trousers, and loafers. One in dark-rimmed glasses appeared to be making a particularly angry point to the others. Laura looked toward the rear and saw a back booth occupied by a white man and a Negro woman. She'd never seen people of different races sitting socially with one another, never mind a man and a woman. The man casually caught her eye and she looked away.

I'm not ready for this
, she thought.
Maybe I can get Vivian to come back with me
. It seemed like the kind of place that an aspiring chanteuse would frequent. And the type of place that an ex-debutante from Greenwich, Connecticut, never, ever went to.

No
.

She had faced down Box Barnes; she could face down her own fears about fitting in. She had to stop this, the second-guessing, the doubting, the unsteadiness. She knew she didn't belong in the patrician world of Greenwich. Why was it so hard to imagine that she could belong in a place like this?

“Hello.”

The bartender was no more than twenty-five, and maybe considerably younger; it was always harder to tell with men. Like the fellows at the end of the bar, he was slender, with rounded shoulders and a tapered waist. But his nose was too big for his face, giving him a slightly ethnic look, though what that ethnicity was exactly was hard to determine: Polish? Italian? He had short brown hair that seemed to go in eight different directions, ending in a small cowlick on the back of his head. Unlike the rest of the men in the bar, he wore blue jeans and a shirt in a bright shade of green, which accentuated his hazel eyes.

He smiled at her, tapped the bar. “Come on over. We don't bite.”

She sauntered over—she felt that was how people moved inside a place like this—and slid her book onto the bar. He read the cover and seemed mildly surprised.

“Let me guess: You've been to see Connie.”

She laughed. “Does he send all the wayward girls from the Upper East Side here?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Are you wayward?”

She fought for a snappy reply, something worthy of Oscar Wilde, or at least Katharine Hepburn, but it wouldn't come. “Just a girl who likes books, I guess. How did you know I'd seen Connie?”

He began picking up some wet glasses and drying them with a hand towel. “He's the only guy who would sell a book like that.”

“Have you read it?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know what kind of book it is?”

“I know.”

She picked up the slim volume again, started paging through it. “Didn't you ever hear the phrase ‘Don't judge a book by its cover'?”

He laughed. “You bartend long enough, you hear a lot of phrases.”

“I see. Do you read a lot?”

“Hardly ever. No time.”

“Everyone has time to read. Eisenhower reads. You can't be busier than Eisenhower.”

“Personally, I don't think Ike works too hard. Are you always like this?”

“Like what?”

“Sassy.”

“You think I'm being sassy?”

“I know girls, and I know a sassy one when I see one.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “Maybe you need to know more girls.”
One for Hepburn!

He laughed, threw the towel over his left shoulder. “What's your name?”

The second time she'd been asked by a young man in the last day. “Laura.”

“Well, hello, Laura, wayward girl from the Upper East Side. I'm Pete, slouchy bartender on the Lower West Side. Now, what can I get ya?”

“I wasn't sure you would serve a single woman at the bar.”

“Take a look around,” he said. “We serve everybody.”

Upon closer inspection, each of his eyes had a slightly different hue—the left dark cocoa, the right milky coffee, both tinged with green. The result was that they gave his stare a slightly shape-shifting effect, as if his face were constantly moving. Studying him bought her time; she had no idea what a woman was supposed to order in a bar. Where she was from, women weren't
in
bars. Where was Dolly when you needed her?