ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 100
The apartment was small. We all read a lot, except Bobby. He
worked too much to read, he’d complain, but then he’d spend hours
lifting weights. Ashley’s bookshelf was in the living room, which
connected to the kitchen. The living-room-kitchen opened, by the
sliding door, to the balcony. Next to the sliding door was the computer, where Bobby would play video games at night and I would
play Portishead and write in the afternoon. The bookshelf was small
and Ashley’s taste in books was, if not bad, not ambitious, though
deceptively broad. Brian, Ashley, and I read a great deal, but not
typically Ashley’s books.
We read books I stole or bought at a discount by buying another
book, putting the “discounted” books in my backpack, and explaining to myself that the price of the one included part of the price of
the other. Maybe Brian gave me Borges’ stories to correct my habit
of fiction. The store with the best discounts is called The Almost
Perfect Bookstore. It consists of a single, large, haphazard room
with piles of books forming a labyrinth of texts stacked, thrown,
and otherwise disordered. There was such a profusion of books that
the average person would think that the word “perfect” in the name
referred to a situation in which the building would cease to exist,
and the books would, of themselves, form a library whose walls
were more books, written in microfilm and coded language. Frumpily smiling middle-aged women in glasses guarded The Near Idyll,
with an elderly man who smelled of lavender and Saint Simeon
hanging from his wrist.
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Coming back from the bookstore was the payoff. I’d return while
Bobby was at work. Brian would still be asleep, half sprawled on
the coffee table, and half on the floor, and Ashley would be on the
balcony under the tree drinking coffee. Nevermind the half-conscious stealing, the explicit condescension in literary tastes, or the
obvious immorality underlying it all, everything was fine when
a long-limbed and small breasted body stood up from a wooden
folding chair and smiled, laughing through a deviated septum and
