You walk into the bookstore and you keep your hand on the door to make sure it doesn't slam. You smile, embarrassed to be a nice girl, and your nails are bare and your V-neck sweater is beige and it's impossible to know if you're wearing a bra but he—he being the bookstore employee, who you know as Joe—doesn’t think that you are. You're so clean that you're dirty and you murmur your first word to him ‘hello’, when most people would just pass by, but not you, in your loose pink jeans, a pink spun from Charlotte's Web and where did you come from?

You are classic and compact, my own little Natalie Portman circa the end of the movie Closer, when she's fresh-faced and done with the bad British guys and going home to America. You've come home to me, delivered at last, on a Tuesday, 10:06 A.M. Every day he commutes to this shop on the Lower East Side from my place in Bed-Stuy. Every day he closes up without finding anyone like you. Look at you, born into his world today.

He’s shaking, and would pop an Ativan but they're downstairs and he doesn’t want to pop an Ativan. He doesn’t want to come down. He wants to be here, fully, watching you bite your unpainted nails and turn your head to the left, no, bite that pinky, widen those eyes, to the right, no, reject biographies, self-help (thank God), and slow down when you make it to fiction.

You disappear into the stacks—Fiction F-K—and you're not the standard insecure nymph hunting for Faulkner you'll never finish, never start; Faulkner that will harden and calcify, if books could calcify, on your nightstand; Faulkner meant only to convince one-night stands that you mean it when you swear you never do this kind of thing. No, you're not like those girls. You don't stage Faulkner and your jeans hang loose and you're too sun-kissed for Stephen King and too untrendy for Heidi Julavits and who, who will you buy?

If you were teenagers, he could kiss you. But he’s on a platform behind a counter wearing a name tag and you’re too old to be young. Night moves don't work in the morning, and the light pours in through the win-dows. Aren't bookstores supposed to be dark? Note to self: Tell Mr. Mooney to get blinds.

Curtains.

Anything.

He picks up your second book, Desperate Characters by one of his favorite authors, Paula Fox. This is a good sign, but you could be buying it because you read on some stupid blog that she's Courtney Love's biological grandmother. He can't be sure that you're buying Paula Fox because you came to her the right way, from a Jonathan Franzen essay. You reach into your wallet.

« She's the best, right? Kills me that she's not more famous, even with Franzen gushing about her, you know? »

Thank God. He smiles. "The Western Coast." You look away. "I haven't gone there yet." He looks at you and you put your hands up, surrender. « Don't shoot. » You giggle. « I'm gonna read The Western Coast someday and Desperate Characters I've read a zillion times. This one's for a friend. »

"Uh-huh,"He says, and the red lights flash danger. For a friend.

"It's probably a waste of time. He won't even read it. But at least she sells a book, right?" "True." Maybe he's your brother or your dad or a gay neighbor, but he knows he's a friend and he stabs at the calculator.

"It's thirty-one fifty-one." Joe says with a slight smile across his face.