“If I dye my hair blond,” she says, “can I be Julie?”
It isn’t just a matter of dabbing paint in blank spots. William takes photographs. He makes sketches. He scrapes off loose paint. He draws outlines in chalk so that he can erase his mistakes with wet rags.
The street people are curious. Every morning they come pecking around him like pigeons. He hires them to sweep up paint chips, hand his rags up and down, move his ladder. He pays them with footlongs and pink lemonades from Snoopy’s.
When it rains, the street people huddle under the stairwell at Cooper Square to keep dry; William comes into the store. He leans on the counter and rifles though just-arrived books. He likes to collect things he finds in them — receipts, business cards, pressed flowers. He collects inscriptions, copying them into the blue spiral notebook he carries around everywhere.
He shows Addie this one from Sister to Sister: Women Write about the Unbreakable Bond.
Christmas 1995. Maybe this book will help explain our friendship. Read it when you need encouragement. My sister = my best friend. I love you. Love, Leslie
What’s curious, he says, is how this book ended up in a used bookstore, why Leslie’s sister didn’t want it.
Addie guesses maybe it embarrassed her. The pink cover, the girls in straw hats, Leslie’s loopy handwriting.
“No,” William says, “I think it was something else. The unbreakable bond broke.”
It’s less of a mystery how they ended up with The Audubon Guide to Fishes and Mammals, inscribed “To Michael, who thinks and acts and smells like a fish. Happy birthday, your Dad.”
A State student brings in a stack of Viking Classic paperbacks, including a copy of Madame Bovary on which someone has scrawled in thick black ink, “What should Emma do? Change her expectations!”
Addie says, “Sorry, we don’t buy books with the answers on the cover.”
It’s an actual policy, one they had to make after Vivian, a part-time clerk who also came with the store, bought a box of Agatha Christies from a customer who had written the name of the murderer on every title page.
“How could you not have noticed?” Addie asked her.
“Well,” Vivian said, “you still have to read the book to find out if the answer’s right.”
William says his favorite writer in high school was J.D. Salinger. “I felt like I was related to the Glass family,” he confides to Addie. “Their long-lost brother William. For a while I even tried to write like Buddy Glass.”
“Lots of words?”
“And parentheses.”
“Footnotes.”
“Italics, lots of italics.” William smiles. He has brown eyes, hopeful, hungry, trusting. Like the eyes of a dog, Addie thinks. A dog can see into you, all your secrets, and still not leave you; that’s what people say. She has never had a dog.
“Now you,” he says. “Tell me an embarrassing secret.”
“But that wasn’t embarrassing,” Addie says. “Salinger was everybody’s favorite.”
“Not everybody pretended to be a Salinger character.”
“Yes, they did.”
“Tell me a secret anyway.”
“Okay. Here’s something I’ve never told anybody. I’ve never understand all the fuss over Madame Bovary.”
William laughs — a furry, barking laugh.
He always shows up when he says he’s going to. He always tells Addie what he’s doing so she’ll know what she’s paying him for. Once the basic mural is done, he says, he’s going to “ghost” it — sand it with a belt sander, apply milk wash, tea stain. Spatter white paint to make bird poop. “It’ll look like it’s been here forever,” he says.
He talks to Addie about her work. “Bookseller — a perfect word. Double o’s, double l’s, k in the middle, breaking things up. Like a bookend in the middle of a shelf.”
He makes it seem okay to love your work and not worry about other things you would rather love.
On story mornings, another Peale idea, children line up on the sofa like dolls. Boys swing their legs, girls tug at their hair bows while their mothers browse the store for books they will never have time to read.
One week Peale invites William to lead story morning.
“William here is a mural painter,” Peale announces to the children. “Any of you know what that is?”
The children stare mutely at William. His face is cleanshaven and bright, his hair still damp from the shower. He’s wearing a clean black T-shirt and clean black jeans. He says, “Who’s heard of Roy Lichtenstein? Diego Rivera? Famous mural painters. My heroes.” He holds up a book he found on the art shelf. “This is one of Diego’s murals. He was Mexican. Who knows where Mexico is? Diego used to eat people. He liked women best, their legs and brains.”
“Ew,” a boy says.
“Ew,” another boy says.
A girl in pink raises her hand. “I don’t think that’s true,” she says. “I think you made that up.”
“Be polite,” Peale says, and smiles at the girl so hard he scares her.
“What murals did you paint?” asks the boy sitting next to her. He is fat, with rolls in his neck and arms.
“I’m repainting the red hammer on the side of this store, for one,” William says.
“What else?”
“Have you seen the new restaurant in City Market, across from where they drop the big nut at New Years? I painted that mural.”
“It’s an acorn,” the girl says. “The nut is an acorn.”
“Correct,” William says. “You, young lady, know your nuts.”
“Read to us,” she says.
William takes out his blue spiral notebook. He runs his hand through his hair. “Want to hear a story I wrote?”
“Yeah!” the boys yell.
“Okay, but remember, I’m a painter, not a writer. I just sometimes write things down. This is called ‘People in Cars.’”
He begins: “One day, everybody in cars forgot where they were going. A lot of them went to work because they couldn’t think what else to do. Some made U-turns and headed back home or wherever they’d started from. Some pulled off the road and parked. Some took naps. They hoped everything would be fine when they woke up, but even in their dreams they were lost.”
One boy looks worried. He kicks at the sofa.
“Some just kept driving. They thought if they drove long enough they would get to the right place, wherever that was. Unless they ran out of gas first. They couldn’t ask for directions, because what would they have said? ‘Excuse me, where am I going?’”
They laugh. “Excuuuuse me,” the fat boy says.
“Is that story true?” the girl says.
William continues: “Nobody knew everybody else was lost. They all thought they were the only ones. They started getting mad. Pretty soon they were all yelling and flipping the bird and crashing their cars into each other.”
“Flipping the bird!” the fat boy screams. He slides closer to the girl, crowding her.
She shoves him away. “Then what?” she says.
“The end,” William says.
“That’s not a story. Read a real story. Read Angelina Ballerina.”
“Crash!” the fat boy says, and pounds the girl’s arm.
The business next door, Curtain Call, sells theater curtains. Women show up for work early every morning wearing smocks and carrying Tupperware lunches. Their husbands drop them off. From her upstairs window, Addie watches the women kiss their husbands good-bye, then disappear down a hole in the sidewalk. They will spend the day in a basement full of sewing machines and bolts of flame-retardant velvet, coming up only for cigarette breaks and lunch.