Books, new and used, are brandished shoulder high in the plate-glass window, displayed on shelves draped with evergreen boughs and artless tinsel garlands. All the current rivals lurk there—Sexton’s All My Pretty Ones, Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero, Shirley Jackson, Janet Frame, Lessing’s Golden Notebook. Assia’s perfect, so true to life, standing inside at the counter, her lips moving soundlessly behind the pane: wide gray eyes questioning the shopkeeper, smiling cosmetically at just the right moment. That fine nose like something chipped off a Greek statue by a tourist; the marble luminous skin, cool as a morgue. Sylvia is rooted to the spot, gawking, wordless, the little match girl standing outside, scratching her pitiful flares. What could she possibly say? She has so much to say! And all of it merciless; all of it useless. The damage is already done. Assia turns her elegant back, disappearing after the shopkeeper down the aisles of books stacked to the rafters, inserting herself deeper into the heart of all Sylvia cherishes, into her new life, this last untainted bastion, into Sylvia’s intimate mystery of words. And Sylvia can only watch: silenced behind the cold glass, without a voice, her thoughts derailed, her nerves shot, utterly divided from anything she might do to change this, to rehabilitate her innocent hopes, all the afternoon’s shallow pleasures turning to ash like the apples of Sodom. Her own fevered reflection—her sallow transparency in the unflattering glare of shop light, the grief ringing her eyes, the baggy wool she can see now hanging off her bones—revealing her true and sudden poverty, which is written all over her face.

20. “Stopped Dead”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Stopped Dead”

DECEMBER 18, 1962

LONDON

Hung out over a dead drop, her bundles forsaken across armrests and velvet in the balcony’s first row, the curving balustrade with its polished brass rail and glossy molding all that keep her from plummeting over the edge into the pitch-black below, a netherworld alive with the random rustle of unseen watchers. Watching and waiting, tense in their seats, masticating popcorn—a plague of insects eating the place alive. Behind her, overhead, a cone of light cuts the plenary darkness, filtering forward from its slit in the wall. The two loaded reels of the cinema’s projector spin, their flickering hiss muffling the obscenity of rasping mandibles, of crunching sweets, the tic of wings and voracity.