my friends go to the library anymore. If you want a book, you just go to the bookstore that’s closest to your house and buy it. Hardcover, trade paperback, mass market, it doesn’t make any difference. People who pay twenty dollars for parking don’t quibble over the price of a book.
I live four blocks from McKenzie’s, a small local bookstore on San Vicente, one of those dinosaurs that doesn’t exist anymore except in affluent neighborhoods. It’s a place where the salespeople actually read and can tell you where you can locate books by Evelyn Waugh or Michael Frayn. They’ll also give you a list of other books by the same author, quote some of their favorite passages, and then add some completely random piece of information, such as the fact that Mark Twain’s brilliant The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn went through seventeen hundred revisions, and the most recent draft was unearthed in a Hollywood attic some years ago.
There isn’t a reason in the world for me to hit that damn bookstore again this week. I have four brand-new books by my bedside and two more on the kitchen counter. Then there are the three Booker Prize winners that are still in the bag in the trunk of my car and one new nonfiction literary history of Henry James in my purse, which I plan to start when I go to the hairdresser’s next week.
I collect new books the way my girlfriends buy designer handbags. Sometimes, I just like to know I have them and actually reading them is beside the point. Not that I don’t eventually end up reading them one by one. I do. But the mere act of buying them makes me happy—the world is more promising, more fulfilling. It’s hard to explain, but I feel, somehow, more optimistic. The whole act just cheers me up.
I pull into the parking lot, turn off the motor, and rummage through my purse for lip gloss and concealer. I flip down the mirror and take a good look at my bare, unmade-up face. Terrible, just terrible. Even worse than I thought. That’s it for me. No more book binges.
My hair is nice, though. It used to be “dirty blonde,” but Franck, my brilliant Belgian hairdresser, has fixed all that. I now have that natural, sun-kissed California look that no one can get without a lot of money and a cauldron of chemicals.
I smear on some Nars cherry lip gloss, decide to bag the rest of the makeup, and head in. McKenzie’s is like no other bookstore. It is a complex of three white, cottage-like buildings situated around a small tree-lined plaza with benches for customers to sit and read, nurse a cappuccino, or just hang out. There is a small café that sells newspapers and magazines, and a big sign over the cash register reads “No Cell Phones.” Other buildings house history, psychology, fiction, and nonfiction. I always start off in the fiction building, where there are long tables laden with the latest hardbacks. And occasionally, when I have time, I’ll wander briefly through the other buildings. Each one has the same basic feel of being in someone’s messy library or living room, an ambiance that appeals to someone who is obviously a bookworm or an intellectual and who compulsively owns and collects countless numbers of books. Even though there is some semblance of order, books are always stacked high in every corner, on the brick floor, on window ledges, even on the cash register table, where one has to literally shove them on the floor before making a purchase.
I always feel a little put out in the beginning at the mess and disarray, but then the subliminal message takes over, that this is the place for the true book lover, a person who, naturally, is oblivious to order in the outside world. The fantasy is carried out right down to the employees and the rap they give you when you buy a book. “Are you a member of KUSC?” they ask kindly. That’s one of two classical cultural radio stations in L. A. and if you know what’s good for you, you say yes and get a 10 percent discount.
The people who work here are an essential part of the whole mystique. The women all have the same “I don’t care what I look like” attitude, the kind of thing you’d see in photo essays about the seventies when Ivy League radical coeds had wild flyaway hair and wore faded bell-bottoms and no makeup. The girls at McKenzie’s look this way, with their pale faces, unmanicured hands, those round-toed black canvas Mary Janes, long skirts, and bagged-out sweaters with fuzzy textures. They do, however, wear bras and obviously love a good literary conversation. They also know their authors in an impressive but smug sort of way.
It doesn’t seem as if any of them are all that busy except the lean, scrawny guy in an apron who runs the café in the back. At the moment he’s making a latte as he carries on an animated conversation with a customer about an obscure poet who he says has Neruda-esque leanings. His name is Ken and he has spiky red hair, a face covered with an explosion of freckles, and a sparse iodine-red goatee. If he were a woman, the red-hair thing would probably work, but on Ken, it’s somehow geeky and unfortunate, as if he were an alien from the red planet. He has odd pinkish, translucent skin with haunting puffy, watery blue eyes, and his eyelashes and eyebrows are so pale they seem invisible. As I glance in his direction, he zones out into a calm, fogged-over gaze like a narcoleptic.
And then there is Fred. He is looking me over, inspecting me. And in truth, that’s why I am here. One of the girls told me he has a degree in comparative literature and he did his thesis on heterogeneous space in postmodern literature. What does that mean?
Virginia would probably say he looks like a bum, but there is something engaging about him in a disheveled kind of way. He has the stance of an aging ex-football player who’s put on a few pounds, yet he still possesses the thick strong neck and prominent Adam’s apple of a former athlete. When you look straight at him, his face is nice. But from the side, you can tell his nose has been broken a couple of times and his chin is sharp and jutting. I watch him stride around the shop with a certain air of unconscious grandeur, even though he’s too tall and bearish to be navigating the narrow straits of the place.
Right now, he’s helping a woman and her friend choose the next selection for their book club. He gives them an evasive half smile and looks away, sweeping back his shaggy bangs in a distracted kind of way. Why is it women always seem to fall for men who divert their attention elsewhere and focus anywhere but on their face? They dig the absentmindedness and inattentiveness when, in fact, the pose is often calculated to make an impression. Nevertheless, Fred is appealing in an untrustworthy, Southern gentleman sort of way. He has a slight drawl, although I could be imagining that. But he does seem like the kind of guy who could sit on his veranda with his big black retriever, smoking a stogy and watching the sun set over his cotton fields. The look, however, is strictly L.A.—jeans, a faded gray Gap T-shirt under a stretched-out, old V-necked sweater, and red-rimmed eyes as if he’s been up all night doing god knows what.
The overall effect is disconcerting. The energy in the air around him amps up the molecular composition of the place, compelling housewives, students, and literary losers to seek his counsel. The man knows his effect on people and uses it.
I see the women close in on him. The prettier of the two is dressed in what has become the young, affluent Brentwood housewife uniform—Juicy sweats. The designer outfit consists of tight, body-hugging velour pants that sit ultra-low on the hips and matching sweatshirts that are purposely unzipped just down to the cleavage. A friend of mine read in the Jacksonville paper that the city council was about to pass a “butt crack” law, which would label this kind of attire “lewd exhibitionism.” But this is L.A., and no one seems to be complaining. It’s kind of the opposite of what sweats are all about—relaxed, comfortable, with no hint of forced sex appeal. Remember putting on sweats when you felt fat or bloated? Well, forget it. The figure has to be absolutely perfect, and if it isn’t, there’s no way to camouflage anything. So now, schlepping around in any old comfortable pair of sweats to run an errand is passé.
All this runs through my mind as I watch them talk to Fred about a few options. They finally request twenty copies of Tuesdays with Morrie, and I see someone breeze past them sneering under her breath, “That figures.”
Her name is Sara, a childlike Goth girl who looks like she’s in her early twenties. She has shoe-polish black hair, chewed-off fingernails, multiple piercings in her ears and left nostril, and cracked, peeling, kewpie-doll lips that glisten with a fine film of strawberry-tinged ChapStick. Her face has the plush, rounded innocence of a child and yet there is an air of intimidating self-sufficiency about her. Today she’s wearing an incredibly short miniskirt over her petite but shapely legs