Literary Story
Agnès Madrigal
In this first draft for a lengthier text, a narrator recollects an old boyfriend while looking for his name on the spines of books in her neighborhood bookstore. As the manuscript begins to unfold, the reader learns that her loss of him is not the greater loss. This is the first offering in our series Rough Drafts.
It is raining, raining like it has not in months, and I’ve left my umbrella at home. As I return from work and the cold drops fall with more force, I duck into the bookstore a few blocks from my house. It’s an old bookshop, one that’s been around since the seventies and one that survived the many closures over the past decade. There is a coffee bar at the back and leather benches scattered throughout. The bell jingles as I push open the glass door. The air inside is warm. Piano music plays on the radio and there’s the wonderful faint aroma of the coffee brewing. The woman at the counter knows me as one of the locals, though we don’t call each other by name. She smiles, says hello, as I pull down the hood of my wet jacket and wipe the raindrops from the lenses of my glasses. I do as I almost always do here, browse through the new books on the big tables in the front of the store, then head into the fiction section, which this bookstore has created as a little annex, off to the side with tall sweeping shelves of colored book spines and a rolling ladder. After turning over and quickly paging through some of the books on the tables, I walk into the fiction area, where it feels like the air changes, all the stories printed in those books filling it somehow, charging it, conspiring to make one’s life small in comparison to all the tales that abound, in this single room, but in other rooms also, in rooms where stories occur though they are never written down.
The narrator, a writer, remembers an old boyfriend who became a successful author. She finds his books in bookstores and recounts their time together and the origins of his writing. Photograph by Master1305
I will know that I am over Gregory when I stop looking for his books on the shelves at bookstores. Out of habit, perhaps, I look for him immediately. I find his beautiful English surname on the spines of the thin elegant books he’s written, the ones that are published by the small press in the city we used to live in together, a press that prints his books with a clean modern typography and simple pretty photographs on the covers: a man clinging to an old-fashioned telephone in the shadows of a corridor; a man and woman embracing on a balcony overlooking a sprawling unknown city; a simple oak-topped desk with a notebook, a scattering of pens, and some inky black scribbles on a piece of paper. I know all of his novels. I check to see that they are all there, they usually are. It is satisfying somehow, a relief even, but I don’t know why. And then I can move on, can look at the other books on the shelves, the books by others who also had lives outside Gregory’s pages, lives with others, with lovers, with persons they maybe destroyed also, or tried to, or didn’t mean to. It’s unclear what Gregory had intended. The result for him is the same: his literary success as evidenced in the sexy bound books I find in every bookshop; photographs of him in the pages of the journals, usually in front of a stack of books or, sometimes, paired with his pretty new wife or their big furry dog named Rex.
“I will know that I am over Gregory when I stop looking for his books on the shelves at bookstores.”
—Agnès Madrigal, from a first draft of “Literary Story”
Gregory was not going to be a writer. He dropped out of medical school while I was finishing my MFA from one of the more prestigious writing schools in the Midwest. He read my stories for me, offered thoughtful feedback—it was thoughtful, he was good—and encouraged me. I still recollect my handwritten pages in his hands, the slim delicate fingers of the would-have-been surgeon. Sometimes he read passages out loud in his deep hollow voice that emanated surprisingly from his slender body. He was larger than me, but small for a man. His skin clung tightly to his bones without the padding of muscle found more commonly in young men. When we made love for the first time, he had seemed a skeleton, a skeleton with flesh so tautly pulled over it that it seemed the work of a sculptor barely smoothing her clay over a wired form. It was startling in its way, but beautiful also, as loving another is always beautiful, transcending whatever of another’s failures, flaws, uglinesses. After the first time, I ran my fingertip in a straight line between his jutting ribs, in the concave impression that seemed a shallow ditch, a dried pond, one of the many strange landscapes of a human body.
When we moved together to the city, the big literary city where I hoped to sell my books, Gregory attended the various parties with me, the stuffy little soirées in editors’ living rooms, in windowless bars with worn painted walls and strong but otherwise unremarkable cocktails. I worked for a magazine then, so I received the invitations and watched these rooms, eyed the men ordering more of the drinks for one another, toasting one another; saw the women circling about in their crisp blouses and skirts, in their perfectly flattened and clipped little hairstyles, with their pretty faces and their big painted eyes. Once, it was Gregory, clinking his glass with a rather important acquiring editor from one of the larger houses. I remember hearing the editor’s words falling through the bustling room, refracting on the etched Scotch glasses, tumbling amid the rest of the noise—the other conversations, the clattering of the bartender making drinks, the ragtime jazz music feebly playing on the speakers: You should write, Gregory. You really should. I think there is a story in you.
“She felt herself shifting into the third person. She felt herself, though she didn’t know it then, fading.”
—Agnès Madrigal, from a first draft of “Literary Story”
And in those words, she felt herself shifting into the third person. She felt herself, though she didn’t know it then, fading—she was fading—into the curled and water-stained art posters in their cheap plastic frames attached haphazardly to the walls; the glass bud vases on every table, each with a limp and queasy pink tulip; the scuffed tiled floors that were laid beneath everyone so unevenly that they kept adjusting their footing as they stood and that the tables all required little sugar packs be placed under the legs to balance them; the red vinyl booth under her with various black smudges on its surface and one split crack that revealed a bursting, browned yellow foam; the more-than-half-empty wine glass with red dribbles on its domed sides and set partly upon a creased paper napkin with a lipstick smear and the scratched formica table beneath, and her forefinger with its chipped-crimson-polish nail slowly encircling the rim.