And then she felt ingenuous, seeing how conventional it was to think books had to be shelved in regulation bookcases. The Troll Kings were frisky again, going at top speed before collapsing.
ANN WAS TROUBLED by Jimmy’s suggestion about sewing. For the most part, this feeling was vague, nothing that could stop the train she was on. She didn’t feel a sense of danger, yet she often felt that nothing was ever for sure with Jimmy. Sometimes she felt a momentary foreboding, a fear that they would not end up together, but then he would suddenly thrust his face in hers and grab her and pull her into the pillow of his shaggy hair and hold her close with what genuinely felt like love and affection. And kindness.
PIXIE HAD COVERED the floor of her burgundy bathroom with pink pebbles, a layer two inches deep. She must have lost her mind, Ann thought.
“The tiles will be all scratched up. Jingles will have a fit!”
“I knew just what you’d say!” Pixie laughed, chortled in fact. It was as if she had staged the scene just to hear Ann fuss.
Pixie said, “This is so sensuous. I put lotion on my feet and then saunter around in here. The pebbles buff the feet!”
“How can you clean the floor?”
“Oh, Ann, you’re so practical.”
Ann figured Pixie would get bored with the novelty by the time the floor got dirty. The surface would be covered with scratch marks, making an accidental artwork.
“Jingles will kick you out!” Ann said.
She wondered why she was incapable of thinking up something so outrageous, unless the photo dress counted. But that was Jimmy’s idea. She wondered if she should get a load of pebbles for her bathroom. It was an original thing to do, and she rather liked the effect, just as she had liked Pixie’s bathroom lace swath. But she couldn’t chance having to pay the cost of replacing floor tiles. And she felt that Pixie had been laughing at her.
JIMMY BANGED ON Ann’s door the next afternoon. She had just finished reading and underlining some passages in a critical essay about Keats’s odes. Poor Keats, dead from TB in his twenties. A spunky redhead with a spicy sense of humor and a love of cats and a tragic awareness of his fate.
“Special delivery,” said Jimmy, with a grin. “I’m the Bookshelf Man.”
He carried several bricks in his arms. He set them near the wall where Ann’s books languished and teetered in random piles. The pristine white bricks were like slices of cake.
She helped him haul twenty-four more white bricks and three redwood planks up the stairway. He stacked the bricks and laid the planks, making four complete shelves, counting the floor.
The bookshelves were beautiful—Danish modern, Ann thought. Jimmy began placing her books on the shelves.
“Do you want them in alphabetical order?”
“No. Groups—Old English, Victorian novels, Romantic poets.”
“How about color? The blue ones here and the yellow ones. I could make a color wheel.”
“You’re weird.”
Together they organized her books, with running commentary on whether they had both read a given book. Ann pointed out Norman O. Brown’s exhilarating Life Against Death.
“I read this, but Pixie thought it was drivel. ‘Pop pap,’ she called it.”
“Pixie pooh-poohed it as pop pap? Stop the presses!”
Jimmy always made Ann laugh. She hadn’t mentioned the book to Frank the psychologist.
With satisfaction, she surveyed the small unit of Old English texts and the large Irish section. Jimmy devised new subcategories such as Modernist Poets and Scribner Editions. Her art books were too tall, so he laid them horizontally on the open end of the lowest shelf. On the top shelf, he made a bookend by setting her large volumes of Freud and Jung horizontally next to the books on mythology. They seemed to belong together.
“There,” said Jimmy, standing back to admire his work. “See, I’m good for something.”
ANN WORE BLUE bell-bottoms, a peasant blouse, and water buffalo sandals the night she brought Jimmy to Meredith and John’s for dinner. Meredith had insisted that Ann bring her new boyfriend over. Ann felt she would be bringing him on approval, and she was watchful, a little nervous, seeing Jimmy through their eyes—overly serious, too shaggy. And she saw them through Jimmy’s eyes—straight and prissy, fatally conventional. Jimmy was eager to meet Kentuckians, although Ann had insisted they were not at all like her parents.
John had smoked a salmon in an outdoor contraption like a baby spaceship, and Meredith made a complicated sauce, which she explained in detail to Ann in the kitchen. Ann doubted that she would ever make such a sauce or smoke a fish. As Meredith neatly fitted a Tupperware container together and burped it, Ann tried to describe how she and Jimmy were suited for each other, free to imagine something new together.
Meredith said, “Wait till you have kids.” The two little boys had been put to bed, but they reappeared in the kitchen, underfoot.
“You may not have a cookie,” she said to the older one. “You’ve already brushed your teeth. Now go to your room and read. In five minutes, I’m coming to tuck you in.”
Ann recalled the way Meredith had swaddled the little boys into bed. She had asked Jimmy at what age boys started to play with themselves, and he didn’t remember. He thought it was always, probably even in the womb. “Why not?” he said.
Jimmy sat between a rubber plant and a dieffenbachia, and Ann sat across from him on a striped love seat. John installed himself in a high-backed chair like a king on a throne. Meredith was looking at Jimmy as if he were an overgrown kid. She must have been thinking she would like to take her scissors to his hair, Ann thought. Jimmy was smoking more cigarettes than usual.
They drank Manhattans and tackled bowls of pistachios peeping like clams from their bright green shells. Ann was aware of the color-coordinated family of furniture. Small lights beamed up like admirers at some reproductions of abstract expressionism on the walls. The surroundings struck her as strange—the pale green shag rug, the orange drapes pulled shut across the sunset. It was more luxurious than any place she had ever lived, but she saw it now through Jimmy’s eyes—ordinary, artificial, meaningless. She realized that the African market baskets had been seized from their source like elephants or lions—for show. These insights made her feel a bit smug.
John served the salmon. It lay on its side, staring at the ceiling, on a fish-shaped platter, with sprigs of greenery adorning it.
“Sprigs of greenery, like it’s caught on seaweed when you reeled it in,” said Ann, the cocktail clogging her brain.
John laughed. “I doubt if the seaweed would have made it upriver.”
Strains of unidentifiable classical music played low on the stereo in the living room. As they ate, in the bay-windowed dining room, John and Jimmy picked up an earlier conversation about the war. They wandered down several obscure trails. The salmon was delicious.
John said, “I don’t agree with you, Jimmy. Johnson has to escalate. I don’t like this war any more than you do, but he can’t leave the others there to take all the risk. With more troops, it will be over sooner.” He waved his fork in the air.
“But why send these yokels who have no idea where Vietnam is?” Jimmy was louder than usual. “That’s not fair. It’s a con, a trap, the draft.”