Page 34 of The Last Book Party

With a wink, he turned and left. Danny walked over, holdinga record album. I grabbed it from him. “Hey, it’s the Monkees!” I said, a little too loud.

Danny looked at the door.

“Who was that?”

I hadn’t realized he had noticed.

“Oh, that was Henry,” I said. “My employer.” I tried to make the word sound formal.

“Your employer?” Danny scowled, looking into my eyes for long enough that I had to turn away. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

I’d forgotten how well he knew me.

31

On summer weekends, the vast parking lot of the Wellfleet Drive-In Theatre was home to a flea market where vendors set up folding tables to sell inexpensive antiques and collectibles—tools, costume jewelry, and vintage kitchenware—as well as old books and magazines, arts and crafts, batik wall-hangings, wrap-around skirts, discounted T-shirts and underwear and Cape Cod sweatshirts in the pale colors of saltwater taffy. I loved looking through the antiques and old books, hoping for one of those rare and wonderful moments when I would find something appealingly quirky that had unexpected relevance to my current circumstances. During a visit to the flea market the previous summer, not long after Malcolm had admitted to me that he couldn’t cook a single dish, I’d found a British parody from 1930,Take Forty Eggs: A Comprehensive Guide to Cookery and Household Management. I bought the book for Malcolm, who adored its loopy humor, like a recipe for Parrot Pie that began, “Take one parrot or twelve parakeets…”

The sun was already strong when I got to the flea market, the heat from the blacktop pulsing through my rubber flip-flops.I walked by the tables of Red Sox baseball caps and Ray-Ban look-alike sunglasses to the back rows, where antiques vendors had spread their wares on tables and tarps under the vast movie screen. I made my way slowly past old fishing rods, crystal candy dishes, and Fiestaware, to the middle row and a table of costume jewelry, where I sifted through a bowl of earrings in search of something that might work with my costume. When I looked up, I saw Henry in the next row, sorting through a pile of yellow slickers.

“Expecting rain?” I said, walking up to him.

He smiled broadly.

“Fancy meeting you here!”

I had been dying to see Henry since the day before at the swap shop, and it was hard not to lean in and kiss him. But my parents had friends who frequented the flea market, so I kept a reasonable distance and hoped Henry’s ruse about meeting me there included a plan to go somewhere together before heading home. We both made an effort to chat somewhat formally, like employer and employee who had run into each other unexpectedly. I asked if Tillie was with him.

“She finds old things depressing.”

We wandered, together and not together, from the tool vendor to a display of cheaply framed photographs of bright orange sunsets. Lingering over a table covered with used books, we smiled at each other when a woman in Bermuda shorts strolled by, glanced at a biography of the Roosevelts and sneered to no one in particular, “Eleanor and Franklinwho?”

Holding up a copy ofThe Bluest Eyeby Toni Morrison, I asked Henry if he had loved it as much as I did. When he confessed he hadn’t read it, I put down fifty cents and bought it for him. I spotted a tattered paperback ofWinesburg, Ohio.

“Hey,” I said to Henry, “you know Franny’s friend Jeremy? Did you ever read his collection of short stories based on these, but set at Choate?”

Henry looked confused, as if he’d forgotten my connection to his son.

“Franny’s friend?”

Feeling foolish for mentioning Franny, I hoped that Henry didn’t remember my hanging out with him at the party in June, let alone the night of the lobsters. To get him to stop thinking about Franny, I continued talking about Jeremy. “I think Jeremy won some kind of prize for it.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Henry said, sifting through a stack of oldLifemagazines. “He was a precocious one, that’s for sure. Those stories weren’t half bad. Hasn’t he sold a novel? About a forbidden love affair in Nepal?”

“Yes, and it’s amazing. Malcolm adored it, gave him a good deal for a debut author. It’s fascinating—set in a leprosy colony, if you can believe it. It tells the story of a romance between a young girl who lives there and the doctor’s son. It’s beautiful.”

Henry looked confused and annoyed. I realized my blunder immediately; why would Henry, frustrated by Malcolm’s lack of interest in his own work, want to hear about Malcolm’s discovery of an exciting young writer—his own son’s friend, in fact? How stupid of me to talk about Jeremy and Franny, both closer to my age than to Henry’s, which probably reminded Henry I was young enough to be his daughter, or his son’s girlfriend. I cursed myself for not having thought of this before babbling about Jeremy.

We walked over to tables of sweatshirts, T-shirts, and socks, but Henry seemed to have lost interest, to have forgotten his ostensible reason for coming to the flea market in the first place. “So no socks?” I said, holding up a pair of white tennis socks.

“I don’t need socks.”

I sorted through a pile of T-shirts with silly slogans, looking for one that might amuse Henry. I held up one that readGAG ME WITH A SPOON, which Henry had recently declared “an unfortunate and classless expression.”

“How about this, then?” I said. “Your favorite.”

He looked pained to see the slogan and walked toward a table of discounted windbreakers, which he sorted through as if looking for his size. I caught up with him and asked if he was OK. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, I ran my finger beneath the hem of his shorts.

But without looking at me, he said, “I should get back. I’ve been gone long enough. We’ve got people coming for mixed doubles.”

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