2-floor bookstore full of vintage editions of classics in paperback, hardcover, magazines, etc. The shelves cover all the walls and the second floor in maze-form.
There's a coffee bar with great expresso and a champagne bar with prohibitely expensive but delicious bubblies
Earl Grey tea and a Nabokov collection of stories
From a book about old movie classics
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| From the Complete Collection of The New Yorker Cartoons since the 1920s! |
I needed a break and thought being alone would do me good. He texted me later that night letting me know at which Patton Ave bar he was. I proudly chose to ignore his message and start writing. This is what turned out 'inking' six long napkins;
Nabokov wasn't doing it
The room was dimly lit and enclosed by shelves of colored book borders that skipped in front of my pupils in vertical rainbow form. They were definitely a distraction. There was a wedding reception in the room below mine. It was probably the best man toasting. His light, humorous tone attracted my hearing, his occasional nervous halts deviated it but he did raise small intermezzos of laughter from the cloud of snobs that surrounded him. It wasn't enough, though; I had to think of something else.
One of the cigarettes was broken. The other one wasn't but both were wrinkled to the fashion of a pocket-to-thigh press. Should I smoke the good one now?
The tea; Earl Grey because of a movie I had watched recently. It wasn't bad, fake sugar and all. Nah, still not enough
Nabokov wasn't doing it
Neither was Faulkner nor his words like mudchinking and ramshackle. Nor the details of a German Shorthaired Pointer's coat illustrated in the restroom [which was short and thick except in the ears and head were it was soft]. His tail and ears were comprehensively explained too.
The table, probably six foot by one, with an indented appearance, with the look and feel of unrefined wood coated with enamel, was covered with books of camping, old cinema pictures, The New Yorker cartoons...It was golden oak and a contre coeur with the black and red chairs, next to the red walls and the green-lined door. I knew I had to think of something else
Nabokov wasn't doing it.
Neither was Faulkner nor the bits of Mahler's No. 2, Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre, Grieg's Peer Gynt that skipped my head to the rhythm of my fingers' flicker of the discs. I delved four of five shelves of $4.99 CDs, curiously placed next to an unused kitchen sink in the library's second floor. The whole place was a continous assembly of mazes made of leaves of pages that smelled humid. I did humor myself by going through them several times, losing the stairs once and hiding for about an hour in the most tucked up corner I found.
There were still scraps and strips of tunes left but not deafening enough to quiet my irascible and persistent thought.
I had to think of something else.
I sat at the table still restless, but very tired. Was it the walking? The thinking?
Nabokov wasn't going to do it. Nor was Faulkner. I didn't care about the castle, the cloud or the lake in Russia or the founding of Yoknapatawpha County. There were a couple of light blue eyes about two blocks away from the books that I could stare at for hours. He probably felt warm and I was feeling cold. Mahler wasn't going to do it. My fingertips liked rummaging through his curls more than playing with this pen.
I lit my wrinkled cigarette as I asked the couple outside where Patton Ave was.
