pick me up and turn me round
This was my first fic for the inception fandom! And there are some first fic problems, like a beginning that clearly didn't know where it was going to end up, and too many fucking commas, and somewhat unsteady characterization, but I am sentimental and I like this one maybe more than some of my newer stuff, so I didn't really change a thing.
.pick me up and turn me round
arthur owns a bookshop. eames buys some books. written for poptartmuse's prompt.
pg . 4609 words
Eames swears he's not a hipster, or a pretentions twit, or--he's just--well, fuck, he likes books. Or not books, exactly; he likes the places where they are, the way they accumulate. He likes them in piles or their spines straight on shelves, alphabetized or Dewey decimaled or whatever the hell Library of Congress is, organized by color or title or impulse. And he likes bookstores with mismatched furniture badly upholstered, and too many shelves in too little space, bookshops that smell like paper and coffee, even though he mostly drinks tea. His parents had been academics, so he figures it feels a bit like home.
Eames is not an academic. He is also not at home. Which is maybe why he winds up looking through the phone book in his motel room for used booksellers, and then he takes the bus to Lincoln Park and walks a bit, cuts through the zoo just to see it, because it’s there and he knows there’s a gigantic fucking lake out beyond the intersection of the zebras and the apes. And that’s something, you know? Giant lake, put a zoo here. And the zebras are out, even in the winter, and the chimpanzees are eating snow like popsicles.
He gets sort of vague directions from the homeless man smoking outside the cat building, and even though he’d swear he was lost about five times, he eventually moves out of the neighborhoods of apartment buildings he doesn’t have enough money to even look at and into a place with some semblance of normalcy, shops and bars and cafes all cheek-by-jowl. He thinks this is the right area, or at any rate there’s probably a bookshop nearby, even if it wasn’t the particular one he picked out from the phone book: Inceptus, which is pretentious and Latin but somehow appealed to him anyway, maybe because it was odd to think of a store selling used books as the beginning of something, rather than the end, or just the endless middle, medius.
Eames finds it, anyway, off a side street and with the name printed on the windows in tidy serif font. A bell rings when he opens the door, and the girl behind the register looks up from her book and arches an eyebrow.
“Arthur’s in the back,” she says.
Eames pauses. “What?”
“What?” she peers at him. “Nevermind.” She tugs on the tail of her scarf, and goes back to reading her book.
Despite surly help, the bookshop itself is unfailingly, disconcertingly, neat. The widely-spaced bookshelves match, as do the chairs placed at the ends of the shelves; the font on the signs matches the font in the window, the sections are clear and the books are alphabetized. Eames would turn and leave directly if the entire space didn’t smell deeply of coffee grounds, but because it does he wanders in, running his hand lightly down the shelves as he passes. He’s distracted near the end by the particular texture of one book’s cloth-bound spine, which he fondles, though he wouldn’t say that, exactly, if asked. His father fondled books, probably more than breasts. Eames--Eames does not fondle books.
“Looking for something?” someone asks, sounding vaguely amused, and Eames looks up to see a long counter, a coffee roaster, an espresso machine, a slender man in a waistcoat who could be the girl out front’s brother, because they arch their eyebrows the same way.
“No,” Eames says, because he isn’t looking for anything, except a bookshop, which he found.
“Not an espresso, then?” says the man in the waistcoat, tapping the machine. “It’s not Intelligentsia, but our beans are better.”
“No thanks, mate.” Eames says, then adds, “And your need to play up your beans is disturbing.”
“I was not”--and here the man sounds somewhat fussy--“Playing up my beans. I was merely stating a fact.”
“And there you go, making what I said sound dirty. I was merely stating a fact. You’re trying to sell me on your beans.”
“Arthur!” the girl barks from the front of the shop, and Arthur slips out from behind the coffee counter, wiping his hands on a towel. He looks at Eames.
“We’ll continue this conversation later.”
When Arthur and the girl go into the back room, Eames palms a copy of On the Road and leaves.
Of course Eames goes back, but it takes a week. He wasn’t supposed to be in Chicago this long, television’s gotten boring and he’s finished On the Road so he figures he’ll return it.
It made sense in his head.
Inceptus is in the same place it was before, which should not surprise him but it does. The bell rings when he opens the door, and Arthur is sitting behind the counter instead of the girl, and he is wearing a waistcoat, and when he sees Eames he pauses.
“So. On the Road. I think we have a copy of the original scroll publication from ‘07, if you’re interested.”
“Well, fuck me,” Eames says, and grins in a way he hopes is charming, because after Arthur walked last week something about the shape of his ass lodged itself in Eames’ brain, and it doesn’t seem willing to leave.
“I know my stock.” Arthur says, flipping through the book he’s holding.
“Of course you do darling. And is it better, then, than Intelligentsia?”
“Do you even know what Intelligentsia is?” Arthur says, still looking at his book.
“A coffee bar. Terrible service. They make you steep the tea yourself.”
“Are your teeth bad, too?”
“What?”
“Talking to you is like playing British stereotype bingo. I’m concerned.”
“So that was a joke?” Eames says. “I think that was a joke. Are we friends? Does this mean you won’t report my petty theft? I brought your book back.”
“Will reporting it get you deported?” Arthur asks, sounding tired.
“No.”
“Then probably not. But just because we sell used books doesn’t mean we’re a lending library.” Arthur stands up and smooths out his waistcoat. Eames sighs.
“Do you not like me? I’m sensing you don’t like me.” Eames doesn’t know why he does this, really--these jokes. It’s not flirting, exactly, or if it is it’s sort of protective, defensive. Or offensive, the sort of flirting that works like a preliminary rejection.
Eames needs to stop psychoanalyzing himself, he decides.
“I’m a small business owner. As a rule, we don’t like thieves,” Arthur says, looking haughty. His face is thin and so is his nose, and when he looks haughty something about it reminds Eames of a horse is a horse of course of course.
“I’m not a thief,” Eames says, which is true to an extent, but it is almost equally false. “Here’s your book,” he says, and tosses it to Arthur, turning around and going out the door before he can see the arc of its flight, whether it lands with pages splayed, and if it does, whether this bothers Arthur at all.
Eames goes back two days later, and the dark-haired girl is at the register, talking to a boy in girl’s jeans and over-sized glasses.
“Arthur’s in the back,” she says this time, looking at him directly.
“Is that all you know how to say?” Eames asks, and the girl twirls her scarf.
“Does it matter?”
So Eames goes to the back, puts his elbows on the counter, and asks Arthur if he serves tea.
“It’s better than Intelligentsia,” Arthur says, and charges him exponentially more than the listed price. Eames pays it without protest, and when he drinks the tea it is good, and probably better than Intelligentsia, but he doesn’t tell Arthur that.
Instead, he returns the next day and orders more, because the giant fucking lake is hedged with ice and he doesn’t like it here. And also because the tea was better than Intelligentsia’s, and while Eames knows there’s a Russian tea house in the Loop somehow it doesn’t seem worth it.
Once again Arthur over-charges him, and once again Eames pays it. And so maybe Eames isn’t surprised when Arthur comes out from behind the counter after serving a couple with matching haircuts and sits down at his table.
“Looking for something?” Eames asks.
“Are you?” Arthur says, and something about the way he says it, or something in the corner of his eyes--Eames says yes. Eames says he’s looking for a book.
“You probably want the one you were fondling when you first got here. The Yosemite, first edition, but from a library, colored in and thoroughly foxed. Forty.”
Eames buys it. The girl introduces herself as Ariadne when she checks him out and tells him not to mind Arthur, he’s just like that. When Eames is walking back the snow shifts to sleet and starts to fall slantwise, and it doesn’t bother him much.
Eames doesn’t like The Yosemite, and he isn’t sure why Arthur told him to buy it and now he’s out forty dollars. Also, he’s still in Chicago. He doesn’t really understand that. On the way to Inceptus he stops at the conservatory near the zoo, and take in the moist warm air and the bright green plants in the middle of winter. If he ever gets any money, he thinks, he’s moving somewhere south--where the air is humid or dry, and the plants aren’t the plants you find in America or England, which seem to be mostly the same. The plants in the conservatory spill everywhere, like they can’t be contained.
Eames tells Arthur he wants a book about plants, and Arthur mentions Michael Pollan and a group of hipsters drinking coffee start talking about Pollan and fair-trade-organic-shade-grown things, where their clothes come from and the things they can cook. Arthur says maybe not Michael Pollan, then, and gives him something called Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire.
-
Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire turns out to be a sort of girly romance novel, and although half of Eames enjoys it he’s starting to wonder about Arthur’s taste, as his recommendations seem to be wholly nonsensical. He kept The Yosemite, because at least it was old, published the same year the Titanic sunk, but he brings Hothouse Flower back.
“You said you wanted a book about plants,” Arthur says.
“And the only two books about plants you have are The Botany of Desire and this? I thought you knew your stock.”
“I do,” says Arthur. “But I don’t know you.”
“A book about plants,” Eames says, slowly this time. “It’s not that hard.”
Arthur shrugs again, with his whole body--the motion is smooth, and reminds Eames that he still hasn’t forgotten the shape of Arthur’s ass. It reminds Eames, also, that Arthur is wearing a waistcoat.
“I’ll make you some tea. On the house.” And Eames doesn’t say that he deserves it, with the exorbitant price he’s been paying, but instead he takes the tea and sits down, and Arthur makes a few lattes for a group in clashing plaid and then sits down across from him.
“So. You know I don’t know your name?”
“Eames,” says Eames, and appreciates that Arthur doesn’t ask whether that’s first or last.
“Why do you want a book about plants, Eames?” Arthur asks, and Eames is and isn’t surprised when he tells him.
After that Eames tells Arthur things, when he asks and when he doesn’t. They’ll sit together at a table in the back of the bookshop, Arthur’s long slender hands folded between them, and Eames will tell him things and Arthur will give him books, and somehow the conversation doesn’t feel one sided at all. Eames thinks it should, because he’s the one who talks and Arthur’s the one who listens, mostly, and Eames’ parents had sent him to a shrink that had worked like that and Eames had never liked that, had been sharp and snide. But with Arthur the books are like answers, so Eames eats them up, swallows them whole. He reads those novels Ariadne says they read in American high school, The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye, and books he always swore he wouldn’t read, The Brother Karamazov and 1984 and things by John Steinbeck. He reads books he’s never heard of, and ones he had read already in childhood, and that he remembers like dreams. It’s like going to uni, only better, and Eames sometimes forgets that there’s a reason he’s in Chicago and also he wants to leave, and the wind is sharp and cold.
A month after Eames first visited Inceptus his boss starts talking about going back to London, and the thought rolls around like a marble in his head. When Eames closes his eyes he can see it, a cat’s eye marble shot through with red.
He goes to Inceptus with the marble still in his head, and Ariadne grins at him from behind a stupidly bulky knit scarf, one she made herself and finished the week before.
“Arthur’s in the back,” she says as she flips through a magazine, and Eames stops.
“You said that to me the first time I came here, you know.”
“Did I?” Ariadne says. The magazine she is reading is something about graphic design, and the paper is glossy and thick. Eames realizes he knows almost nothing about Ariadne; she is in college, he thinks, or high school, or maybe neither.
“Why?” Eames asks, although he thinks knowing might make him a little sick.
“You look like someone else,” Ariadne says. “And people come here to see Arthur, you know. No one comes to see me.”
“I do,” says Eames, although that is patently untrue. Ariadne punches him lightly in the shoulder, and it hurts more than it should. “I could.”
“No,” Ariadne says. “Not really. But at least you know my name.”
And so Eames says her name, just to try it out, and instead of going to the back he just goes outside, into the wind, and walks somewhere else. But he finds his way back to Inceptus, and when he walks past the second him Arthur is outside, closing up. Here’s wearing a black wool peacoat, and Eames has never seen him outside the store or wearing anything other than his dress shirt and waistcoat, and although those are, he imagines, under the coat, there is something about it that makes Arthur look very young.
“Arthur,” Eames calls, and Arthur looks up at him.
“Ariadne said you were in. Did you need a book?”
“Not today, no.”
“Hm,” Arthur murmers, and falls into step besides him on the sidewalk, like they are going somewhere together.
Eames finds he has nothing to say.
“I’m leaving soon,” Eames says, because the quiet makes him uncomfortable, like maybe Arthur’s just a stranger he’s fallen into step with.
“Back to London, is it?” Arthur’s hands are buried in his pockets, and he’s looking at the ground, where there’s a thin layer of flaky snow.
“I guess so. Won’t need to suffer through your sub-par cups of tea.”
“But better than Intelligentsia, right?”
“Reckon so.”
“And you can steal from someone else,” Arthur says with a sidelong glance.
“Hey--I haven’t stolen since On the Road,” Eames says, mock-indignant.
“Why did you?”
“To see if I could.” And Eames thinks: Because I didn’t think I’d come back. They get to an El station and Arthur stops short.
“This is me,” he says, nodding to the stairs.
“Later,” Eames says, and Arthur descends.
The next day Arthur gives him Jane Eyre. Eames isn’t sure what to make of it. He’d read it, before, for A-levels, and Arthur’s books have rarely fallen into a pattern, but this book seems to define the pattern by being outside of it. Eames hates Jane Eyre, and finds Mr. Rochester somewhat terrifying, and doesn’t believe in love like that. He wonders if there’s some sort of card he didn't know he had that he’ll have to turn in when he gets back to Britain. He tells Arthur as much.
“I hate Jane Eyre,” Eames says.
“The book or the girl?”
“Both.” Eames is drinking tea, and Arthur is sitting across from him, like they usually do. For all of Ariadne’s comments Eames still hasn’t seen anyone else sit with Arthur like this, and he’s taken to reading his books at one of the uncomfortable chairs in the shop, on the weekends or on weekdays when he has the time, just to watch. Ariadne looks at him cross-eyed when he makes eye contact with her, but otherwise no one’s commented.
“That’s because it’s a girl’s book,” Ariadne contributes, coming up from behind. She’s looking at Arthur more than Eames. “I read it when I was sixteen and I loved it. At twenty-one, not so much--that kind of love makes sense to sixteen-year-old girls.”
Arthur looks grumpy, at this, though Eames doesn’t know why. He keeps drinking his tea, and Arthur stands up and starts to pace, moving up and down the shelves, and Ariadne looks at Eames like this means something, but Eames still can’t figure out what’s going on. Arthur is still moving when Eames finishes his tea, so Eames goes up to the cash register, looking for Ariadne.
“I think you broke him,” Eames tells her, watching Arthur stalk like a cat. “I think Jane Eyre was his favorite novel and now he’s worried he’s a sixteen-year-old girl trapped in a thirty-year-old man’s body. What are you going to do about this?”
“What are you going to do about this, you mean,” Ariadne grumbles. “He is a sixteen-year-old girl trapped in a thirty-year-old man’s body. Once that’s established, we’ll all be much happier.”
“I thought he was a sixty-year-old woman, you know,” Eames ponders. “No one who dusts that much can be quite right.”
Ariadne snorts, and goes back to her magazine just as Arthur slides out of the stacks. He hands Eames a thick volume.
“Kenneth Rexroth,” Arthur nods. And so Eames takes it, and pays.
Eames doesn’t know what to do with the Rexroth. It’s poems, all of it, and he’s never liked poetry; and besides that the poems themselves are strange and Zen, and sometimes peculiarly sexual, one about fishing with lures made from an absent lover’s pubic hair, a poem for children or maybe not for children that mentions hyena clitorises. Apparently Arthur is trying to demonstrate that he is not, in fact, a sixteen-year-old girl, though these poems just make Eames want to giggle uncomfortably like one.
“That was the worst misfire since Hothouse Flower,” Eames whispers to Ariadne when he returns the book. “I really think you broke him.”
“Because he can’t recommend books you like anymore?” Ariadne asks. “That’s not how it works, Eames.”
“That’s how it worked before,” Eames says, and he’s not sure if he’s being purposefully dense or he just is dense, dense is what he is. He certainly feels dense, but he’s not sure what he’s supposed to be understanding. “Has this happened before? Has he been broken?”
“Arthur recommending books--it’s a thing. I can’t explain it to you. You figure it out,” Ariadne says, and goes back to the volume she’d opened across her knees, something with glossy pages and pictures.
Eames moves to the back of the shop, and of course Arthur is there, though he’s talking to a man with a thick thatch of blond hair. Eames nods to him and goes over to his table to wait, and then Arthur comes over with the other man.
“Eames, this is Cobb--Cobb, Eames,” Arthur nods to both of them, like that settles it, and Cobb looks uncomfortable.
“Arthur rents this space from me. He says you’re a good customer.”
“I guess,” says Eames, because he’s not sure what else to say. Cobb nods at that, and they both fall silent, and Eames has to wonder if, in addition to being dense, he has always been this awkward. He doesn’t think so; he thinks he used to be charming. He wonders if the Chicago winter is making him go into hibernation, maybe his body is thickening with fat and he hasn’t noticed, and his brain is becoming sluggish. He read about bears one day at the zoo, how they plug up their butts with fiber so they don’t need to take a dump all winter, and it sounds bizarre and painful and he tries to remember why he was in Chicago in the first place, and why he’s still here.
Cobb says something else and drifts away, over to talk to Ariadne or out the door, and Arthur comes over and drops a book on the table. It’s a small paperback in terrible disrepair, the spine is broken in twenty places and the pages are dogeared. It’s not the sort of thing that Arthur usually has in his shop at all, a mutt among purebreds.
“I might,” Arthur says. “Be a sixteen-year-old girl.” Then he sets down a cup of tea and goes to tend to the line that has formed at the espresso machine.
The book is called The Blue Castle, and it’s by the woman who wrote Anne of Green Gables, and it’s about a girl named Valancy. It’s positively schmaltzy. Eames is pretty sure he doesn’t know what’s going on any more, because now it’s been a run of three terrible recommendations and at first Eames thought Arthur didn’t understand him and now he’s starting to think he, Eames, doesn’t understand Arthur, and he doesn’t know what to do about that. He is beginning to agree with Ariadne and Arthur, and he is beginning to worry that the waistcoat somehow disguised breasts, the pompadour hid pigtails.
It happens like it usually does: Eames goes back to Inceptus, and Ariadne looks up from her book and at him, and Arthur is in the back with the espresso machine and some customers. Eames gets a pot of tea, and when there’s a lull Arthur sits down with him, in the chair across from him, and rests his hands on the table.
“Arthur,” Eames says. “Tell me why you wanted me to read this book.”
Arthur gives Eames Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and goes back to the espresso machine.
Eames doesn’t like to talk about his job. It’s stupid, really. It’s stupid and dull and he hates it. They send him to Chicago for a month and a half when it seems wholly unnecessary, and his long-term stay motel is shoddy, but he does it, damnit. And then they tell him he’s needed back in London, now right now, and suddenly, more than anything, he wants to quit, but he doesn’t know what he’d do if he did.
So he doesn’t answer the phone and he reads Letters to a Young Poet, straight through from beginning to end, and he wishes someone had given it to him when he was twenty and uncertain, instead of now when he is thirty and trapped. He thinks thirty might be too young to be trapped, but he feels a cage around his edges--he has been living his life completely at the bookshop very nearly since he got here, pushing his work into some other compartment of life that’s only half-lived. He works in offices. He talks to people. He is sharp and charming and Eames, thoroughly, but he’s started to feel unlike himself. He doesn’t think a poet, a fucking poet like his mother--this shouldn’t be speaking to him. But it is, stupidly. When it stinks of Christian symbolism he rolls right through it, because the words are speaking, they are saying something, like maybe all those other books were leading up to this.
Eames’ phone rings. He doesn’t answer it.
He goes back to Inceptus. He is always going back to Inceptus. He remembers when he first went there, and how he thought it was odd that a used bookshop would name itself after beginnings. He thinks it makes sense now, maybe.
He still doesn’t know why Arthur gave him The Blue Castle, and Jane Eyre, and those bizarre poems. This stops him short, and so he winds his way back towards the zoo, even though it’s a bit of a walk and in the cold--he’s gotten used to walking in the cold, because this is Chicago, and his shoulders are big. Maybe. He’s not sure what he’s thinking anymore, but he goes to the gate at the south end of the zoo, and walks past the empty cages and then the elk, the apes and the monkeys and the small mammal building. The cat building, he walks past that too, and the seals and the penguins and the bird building, the Africa building and the empty yards for the African animals, the polar bears. He doesn’t go inside the buildings look at the animals, which makes him wonder why he came here. But when he comes out at the other end there’s the conservatory, where the plants are, and maybe he was going there all along, and the zoo just distracted him.
It’s like he remembered--the plants are thick and lush, and always green. The building itself is like part of the whole, the glass panels and the ancient metal bits of uncertain purpose melding with the green, with the ropy plants. There are some tourists milling around, families with children, and a homeless man muttering to himself on a bench. A woman is answering questions, and Eames doesn’t ask any, but he listens.
Eames wonders if he can ask Arthur why he gave him Jane Eyre and Kenneth Rexroth and The Blue Castle all in a row and get a straight answer out of him, now. If not, he wonders if he can ask Ariadne.
Eames goes back to Inceptus. It’s like it usually is, again. It’s completely different. He thinks that he will answer the phone when he gets back to his motel, but first he will go to Inceptus.
Ariadne is in the front. “Arthur’s in the back,” she says, though Eames knows.
“Explain to me about Arthur recommending books,” Eames says to her, because he thinks he should.
“We don’t serve tea,” Ariadne tells him, and Eames looks at her.
“Yes you do.”
“No. We don’t,” Ariadne says, and Eames knows he’s missing something big, he can feel it, it’s like a word on the tip of his tongue.
“It’s on the menu.”
“The menu,” Ariadne says. “Is a chalkboard.”
Eames thinks he might get it. He goes to the back.
“You don’t serve tea,” he says to Arthur, because no one is in line, and it’s like the first day he came here, which seems like last year or yesterday but is neither one of those.
Arthur looks at him.
“I’m looking for something,” Eames says to Arthur, and Arthur looks at him still, but Eames thinks he is beginning to smile. It’s hard to tell, with Arthur.
Eames leans forward. “No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.”
Arthur smiles.
Eames kisses him.
notes: Eames' last line is from Rainer Marie Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. The title is from the Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" which is a GREAT GREAT song.
.pick me up and turn me round
arthur owns a bookshop. eames buys some books. written for poptartmuse's prompt.
pg . 4609 words
Eames swears he's not a hipster, or a pretentions twit, or--he's just--well, fuck, he likes books. Or not books, exactly; he likes the places where they are, the way they accumulate. He likes them in piles or their spines straight on shelves, alphabetized or Dewey decimaled or whatever the hell Library of Congress is, organized by color or title or impulse. And he likes bookstores with mismatched furniture badly upholstered, and too many shelves in too little space, bookshops that smell like paper and coffee, even though he mostly drinks tea. His parents had been academics, so he figures it feels a bit like home.
Eames is not an academic. He is also not at home. Which is maybe why he winds up looking through the phone book in his motel room for used booksellers, and then he takes the bus to Lincoln Park and walks a bit, cuts through the zoo just to see it, because it’s there and he knows there’s a gigantic fucking lake out beyond the intersection of the zebras and the apes. And that’s something, you know? Giant lake, put a zoo here. And the zebras are out, even in the winter, and the chimpanzees are eating snow like popsicles.
He gets sort of vague directions from the homeless man smoking outside the cat building, and even though he’d swear he was lost about five times, he eventually moves out of the neighborhoods of apartment buildings he doesn’t have enough money to even look at and into a place with some semblance of normalcy, shops and bars and cafes all cheek-by-jowl. He thinks this is the right area, or at any rate there’s probably a bookshop nearby, even if it wasn’t the particular one he picked out from the phone book: Inceptus, which is pretentious and Latin but somehow appealed to him anyway, maybe because it was odd to think of a store selling used books as the beginning of something, rather than the end, or just the endless middle, medius.
Eames finds it, anyway, off a side street and with the name printed on the windows in tidy serif font. A bell rings when he opens the door, and the girl behind the register looks up from her book and arches an eyebrow.
“Arthur’s in the back,” she says.
Eames pauses. “What?”
“What?” she peers at him. “Nevermind.” She tugs on the tail of her scarf, and goes back to reading her book.
Despite surly help, the bookshop itself is unfailingly, disconcertingly, neat. The widely-spaced bookshelves match, as do the chairs placed at the ends of the shelves; the font on the signs matches the font in the window, the sections are clear and the books are alphabetized. Eames would turn and leave directly if the entire space didn’t smell deeply of coffee grounds, but because it does he wanders in, running his hand lightly down the shelves as he passes. He’s distracted near the end by the particular texture of one book’s cloth-bound spine, which he fondles, though he wouldn’t say that, exactly, if asked. His father fondled books, probably more than breasts. Eames--Eames does not fondle books.
“Looking for something?” someone asks, sounding vaguely amused, and Eames looks up to see a long counter, a coffee roaster, an espresso machine, a slender man in a waistcoat who could be the girl out front’s brother, because they arch their eyebrows the same way.
“No,” Eames says, because he isn’t looking for anything, except a bookshop, which he found.
“Not an espresso, then?” says the man in the waistcoat, tapping the machine. “It’s not Intelligentsia, but our beans are better.”
“No thanks, mate.” Eames says, then adds, “And your need to play up your beans is disturbing.”
“I was not”--and here the man sounds somewhat fussy--“Playing up my beans. I was merely stating a fact.”
“And there you go, making what I said sound dirty. I was merely stating a fact. You’re trying to sell me on your beans.”
“Arthur!” the girl barks from the front of the shop, and Arthur slips out from behind the coffee counter, wiping his hands on a towel. He looks at Eames.
“We’ll continue this conversation later.”
When Arthur and the girl go into the back room, Eames palms a copy of On the Road and leaves.
Of course Eames goes back, but it takes a week. He wasn’t supposed to be in Chicago this long, television’s gotten boring and he’s finished On the Road so he figures he’ll return it.
It made sense in his head.
Inceptus is in the same place it was before, which should not surprise him but it does. The bell rings when he opens the door, and Arthur is sitting behind the counter instead of the girl, and he is wearing a waistcoat, and when he sees Eames he pauses.
“So. On the Road. I think we have a copy of the original scroll publication from ‘07, if you’re interested.”
“Well, fuck me,” Eames says, and grins in a way he hopes is charming, because after Arthur walked last week something about the shape of his ass lodged itself in Eames’ brain, and it doesn’t seem willing to leave.
“I know my stock.” Arthur says, flipping through the book he’s holding.
“Of course you do darling. And is it better, then, than Intelligentsia?”
“Do you even know what Intelligentsia is?” Arthur says, still looking at his book.
“A coffee bar. Terrible service. They make you steep the tea yourself.”
“Are your teeth bad, too?”
“What?”
“Talking to you is like playing British stereotype bingo. I’m concerned.”
“So that was a joke?” Eames says. “I think that was a joke. Are we friends? Does this mean you won’t report my petty theft? I brought your book back.”
“Will reporting it get you deported?” Arthur asks, sounding tired.
“No.”
“Then probably not. But just because we sell used books doesn’t mean we’re a lending library.” Arthur stands up and smooths out his waistcoat. Eames sighs.
“Do you not like me? I’m sensing you don’t like me.” Eames doesn’t know why he does this, really--these jokes. It’s not flirting, exactly, or if it is it’s sort of protective, defensive. Or offensive, the sort of flirting that works like a preliminary rejection.
Eames needs to stop psychoanalyzing himself, he decides.
“I’m a small business owner. As a rule, we don’t like thieves,” Arthur says, looking haughty. His face is thin and so is his nose, and when he looks haughty something about it reminds Eames of a horse is a horse of course of course.
“I’m not a thief,” Eames says, which is true to an extent, but it is almost equally false. “Here’s your book,” he says, and tosses it to Arthur, turning around and going out the door before he can see the arc of its flight, whether it lands with pages splayed, and if it does, whether this bothers Arthur at all.
Eames goes back two days later, and the dark-haired girl is at the register, talking to a boy in girl’s jeans and over-sized glasses.
“Arthur’s in the back,” she says this time, looking at him directly.
“Is that all you know how to say?” Eames asks, and the girl twirls her scarf.
“Does it matter?”
So Eames goes to the back, puts his elbows on the counter, and asks Arthur if he serves tea.
“It’s better than Intelligentsia,” Arthur says, and charges him exponentially more than the listed price. Eames pays it without protest, and when he drinks the tea it is good, and probably better than Intelligentsia, but he doesn’t tell Arthur that.
Instead, he returns the next day and orders more, because the giant fucking lake is hedged with ice and he doesn’t like it here. And also because the tea was better than Intelligentsia’s, and while Eames knows there’s a Russian tea house in the Loop somehow it doesn’t seem worth it.
Once again Arthur over-charges him, and once again Eames pays it. And so maybe Eames isn’t surprised when Arthur comes out from behind the counter after serving a couple with matching haircuts and sits down at his table.
“Looking for something?” Eames asks.
“Are you?” Arthur says, and something about the way he says it, or something in the corner of his eyes--Eames says yes. Eames says he’s looking for a book.
“You probably want the one you were fondling when you first got here. The Yosemite, first edition, but from a library, colored in and thoroughly foxed. Forty.”
Eames buys it. The girl introduces herself as Ariadne when she checks him out and tells him not to mind Arthur, he’s just like that. When Eames is walking back the snow shifts to sleet and starts to fall slantwise, and it doesn’t bother him much.
Eames doesn’t like The Yosemite, and he isn’t sure why Arthur told him to buy it and now he’s out forty dollars. Also, he’s still in Chicago. He doesn’t really understand that. On the way to Inceptus he stops at the conservatory near the zoo, and take in the moist warm air and the bright green plants in the middle of winter. If he ever gets any money, he thinks, he’s moving somewhere south--where the air is humid or dry, and the plants aren’t the plants you find in America or England, which seem to be mostly the same. The plants in the conservatory spill everywhere, like they can’t be contained.
Eames tells Arthur he wants a book about plants, and Arthur mentions Michael Pollan and a group of hipsters drinking coffee start talking about Pollan and fair-trade-organic-shade-grown things, where their clothes come from and the things they can cook. Arthur says maybe not Michael Pollan, then, and gives him something called Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire.
-
Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire turns out to be a sort of girly romance novel, and although half of Eames enjoys it he’s starting to wonder about Arthur’s taste, as his recommendations seem to be wholly nonsensical. He kept The Yosemite, because at least it was old, published the same year the Titanic sunk, but he brings Hothouse Flower back.
“You said you wanted a book about plants,” Arthur says.
“And the only two books about plants you have are The Botany of Desire and this? I thought you knew your stock.”
“I do,” says Arthur. “But I don’t know you.”
“A book about plants,” Eames says, slowly this time. “It’s not that hard.”
Arthur shrugs again, with his whole body--the motion is smooth, and reminds Eames that he still hasn’t forgotten the shape of Arthur’s ass. It reminds Eames, also, that Arthur is wearing a waistcoat.
“I’ll make you some tea. On the house.” And Eames doesn’t say that he deserves it, with the exorbitant price he’s been paying, but instead he takes the tea and sits down, and Arthur makes a few lattes for a group in clashing plaid and then sits down across from him.
“So. You know I don’t know your name?”
“Eames,” says Eames, and appreciates that Arthur doesn’t ask whether that’s first or last.
“Why do you want a book about plants, Eames?” Arthur asks, and Eames is and isn’t surprised when he tells him.
After that Eames tells Arthur things, when he asks and when he doesn’t. They’ll sit together at a table in the back of the bookshop, Arthur’s long slender hands folded between them, and Eames will tell him things and Arthur will give him books, and somehow the conversation doesn’t feel one sided at all. Eames thinks it should, because he’s the one who talks and Arthur’s the one who listens, mostly, and Eames’ parents had sent him to a shrink that had worked like that and Eames had never liked that, had been sharp and snide. But with Arthur the books are like answers, so Eames eats them up, swallows them whole. He reads those novels Ariadne says they read in American high school, The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye, and books he always swore he wouldn’t read, The Brother Karamazov and 1984 and things by John Steinbeck. He reads books he’s never heard of, and ones he had read already in childhood, and that he remembers like dreams. It’s like going to uni, only better, and Eames sometimes forgets that there’s a reason he’s in Chicago and also he wants to leave, and the wind is sharp and cold.
A month after Eames first visited Inceptus his boss starts talking about going back to London, and the thought rolls around like a marble in his head. When Eames closes his eyes he can see it, a cat’s eye marble shot through with red.
He goes to Inceptus with the marble still in his head, and Ariadne grins at him from behind a stupidly bulky knit scarf, one she made herself and finished the week before.
“Arthur’s in the back,” she says as she flips through a magazine, and Eames stops.
“You said that to me the first time I came here, you know.”
“Did I?” Ariadne says. The magazine she is reading is something about graphic design, and the paper is glossy and thick. Eames realizes he knows almost nothing about Ariadne; she is in college, he thinks, or high school, or maybe neither.
“Why?” Eames asks, although he thinks knowing might make him a little sick.
“You look like someone else,” Ariadne says. “And people come here to see Arthur, you know. No one comes to see me.”
“I do,” says Eames, although that is patently untrue. Ariadne punches him lightly in the shoulder, and it hurts more than it should. “I could.”
“No,” Ariadne says. “Not really. But at least you know my name.”
And so Eames says her name, just to try it out, and instead of going to the back he just goes outside, into the wind, and walks somewhere else. But he finds his way back to Inceptus, and when he walks past the second him Arthur is outside, closing up. Here’s wearing a black wool peacoat, and Eames has never seen him outside the store or wearing anything other than his dress shirt and waistcoat, and although those are, he imagines, under the coat, there is something about it that makes Arthur look very young.
“Arthur,” Eames calls, and Arthur looks up at him.
“Ariadne said you were in. Did you need a book?”
“Not today, no.”
“Hm,” Arthur murmers, and falls into step besides him on the sidewalk, like they are going somewhere together.
Eames finds he has nothing to say.
“I’m leaving soon,” Eames says, because the quiet makes him uncomfortable, like maybe Arthur’s just a stranger he’s fallen into step with.
“Back to London, is it?” Arthur’s hands are buried in his pockets, and he’s looking at the ground, where there’s a thin layer of flaky snow.
“I guess so. Won’t need to suffer through your sub-par cups of tea.”
“But better than Intelligentsia, right?”
“Reckon so.”
“And you can steal from someone else,” Arthur says with a sidelong glance.
“Hey--I haven’t stolen since On the Road,” Eames says, mock-indignant.
“Why did you?”
“To see if I could.” And Eames thinks: Because I didn’t think I’d come back. They get to an El station and Arthur stops short.
“This is me,” he says, nodding to the stairs.
“Later,” Eames says, and Arthur descends.
The next day Arthur gives him Jane Eyre. Eames isn’t sure what to make of it. He’d read it, before, for A-levels, and Arthur’s books have rarely fallen into a pattern, but this book seems to define the pattern by being outside of it. Eames hates Jane Eyre, and finds Mr. Rochester somewhat terrifying, and doesn’t believe in love like that. He wonders if there’s some sort of card he didn't know he had that he’ll have to turn in when he gets back to Britain. He tells Arthur as much.
“I hate Jane Eyre,” Eames says.
“The book or the girl?”
“Both.” Eames is drinking tea, and Arthur is sitting across from him, like they usually do. For all of Ariadne’s comments Eames still hasn’t seen anyone else sit with Arthur like this, and he’s taken to reading his books at one of the uncomfortable chairs in the shop, on the weekends or on weekdays when he has the time, just to watch. Ariadne looks at him cross-eyed when he makes eye contact with her, but otherwise no one’s commented.
“That’s because it’s a girl’s book,” Ariadne contributes, coming up from behind. She’s looking at Arthur more than Eames. “I read it when I was sixteen and I loved it. At twenty-one, not so much--that kind of love makes sense to sixteen-year-old girls.”
Arthur looks grumpy, at this, though Eames doesn’t know why. He keeps drinking his tea, and Arthur stands up and starts to pace, moving up and down the shelves, and Ariadne looks at Eames like this means something, but Eames still can’t figure out what’s going on. Arthur is still moving when Eames finishes his tea, so Eames goes up to the cash register, looking for Ariadne.
“I think you broke him,” Eames tells her, watching Arthur stalk like a cat. “I think Jane Eyre was his favorite novel and now he’s worried he’s a sixteen-year-old girl trapped in a thirty-year-old man’s body. What are you going to do about this?”
“What are you going to do about this, you mean,” Ariadne grumbles. “He is a sixteen-year-old girl trapped in a thirty-year-old man’s body. Once that’s established, we’ll all be much happier.”
“I thought he was a sixty-year-old woman, you know,” Eames ponders. “No one who dusts that much can be quite right.”
Ariadne snorts, and goes back to her magazine just as Arthur slides out of the stacks. He hands Eames a thick volume.
“Kenneth Rexroth,” Arthur nods. And so Eames takes it, and pays.
Eames doesn’t know what to do with the Rexroth. It’s poems, all of it, and he’s never liked poetry; and besides that the poems themselves are strange and Zen, and sometimes peculiarly sexual, one about fishing with lures made from an absent lover’s pubic hair, a poem for children or maybe not for children that mentions hyena clitorises. Apparently Arthur is trying to demonstrate that he is not, in fact, a sixteen-year-old girl, though these poems just make Eames want to giggle uncomfortably like one.
“That was the worst misfire since Hothouse Flower,” Eames whispers to Ariadne when he returns the book. “I really think you broke him.”
“Because he can’t recommend books you like anymore?” Ariadne asks. “That’s not how it works, Eames.”
“That’s how it worked before,” Eames says, and he’s not sure if he’s being purposefully dense or he just is dense, dense is what he is. He certainly feels dense, but he’s not sure what he’s supposed to be understanding. “Has this happened before? Has he been broken?”
“Arthur recommending books--it’s a thing. I can’t explain it to you. You figure it out,” Ariadne says, and goes back to the volume she’d opened across her knees, something with glossy pages and pictures.
Eames moves to the back of the shop, and of course Arthur is there, though he’s talking to a man with a thick thatch of blond hair. Eames nods to him and goes over to his table to wait, and then Arthur comes over with the other man.
“Eames, this is Cobb--Cobb, Eames,” Arthur nods to both of them, like that settles it, and Cobb looks uncomfortable.
“Arthur rents this space from me. He says you’re a good customer.”
“I guess,” says Eames, because he’s not sure what else to say. Cobb nods at that, and they both fall silent, and Eames has to wonder if, in addition to being dense, he has always been this awkward. He doesn’t think so; he thinks he used to be charming. He wonders if the Chicago winter is making him go into hibernation, maybe his body is thickening with fat and he hasn’t noticed, and his brain is becoming sluggish. He read about bears one day at the zoo, how they plug up their butts with fiber so they don’t need to take a dump all winter, and it sounds bizarre and painful and he tries to remember why he was in Chicago in the first place, and why he’s still here.
Cobb says something else and drifts away, over to talk to Ariadne or out the door, and Arthur comes over and drops a book on the table. It’s a small paperback in terrible disrepair, the spine is broken in twenty places and the pages are dogeared. It’s not the sort of thing that Arthur usually has in his shop at all, a mutt among purebreds.
“I might,” Arthur says. “Be a sixteen-year-old girl.” Then he sets down a cup of tea and goes to tend to the line that has formed at the espresso machine.
The book is called The Blue Castle, and it’s by the woman who wrote Anne of Green Gables, and it’s about a girl named Valancy. It’s positively schmaltzy. Eames is pretty sure he doesn’t know what’s going on any more, because now it’s been a run of three terrible recommendations and at first Eames thought Arthur didn’t understand him and now he’s starting to think he, Eames, doesn’t understand Arthur, and he doesn’t know what to do about that. He is beginning to agree with Ariadne and Arthur, and he is beginning to worry that the waistcoat somehow disguised breasts, the pompadour hid pigtails.
It happens like it usually does: Eames goes back to Inceptus, and Ariadne looks up from her book and at him, and Arthur is in the back with the espresso machine and some customers. Eames gets a pot of tea, and when there’s a lull Arthur sits down with him, in the chair across from him, and rests his hands on the table.
“Arthur,” Eames says. “Tell me why you wanted me to read this book.”
Arthur gives Eames Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and goes back to the espresso machine.
Eames doesn’t like to talk about his job. It’s stupid, really. It’s stupid and dull and he hates it. They send him to Chicago for a month and a half when it seems wholly unnecessary, and his long-term stay motel is shoddy, but he does it, damnit. And then they tell him he’s needed back in London, now right now, and suddenly, more than anything, he wants to quit, but he doesn’t know what he’d do if he did.
So he doesn’t answer the phone and he reads Letters to a Young Poet, straight through from beginning to end, and he wishes someone had given it to him when he was twenty and uncertain, instead of now when he is thirty and trapped. He thinks thirty might be too young to be trapped, but he feels a cage around his edges--he has been living his life completely at the bookshop very nearly since he got here, pushing his work into some other compartment of life that’s only half-lived. He works in offices. He talks to people. He is sharp and charming and Eames, thoroughly, but he’s started to feel unlike himself. He doesn’t think a poet, a fucking poet like his mother--this shouldn’t be speaking to him. But it is, stupidly. When it stinks of Christian symbolism he rolls right through it, because the words are speaking, they are saying something, like maybe all those other books were leading up to this.
Eames’ phone rings. He doesn’t answer it.
He goes back to Inceptus. He is always going back to Inceptus. He remembers when he first went there, and how he thought it was odd that a used bookshop would name itself after beginnings. He thinks it makes sense now, maybe.
He still doesn’t know why Arthur gave him The Blue Castle, and Jane Eyre, and those bizarre poems. This stops him short, and so he winds his way back towards the zoo, even though it’s a bit of a walk and in the cold--he’s gotten used to walking in the cold, because this is Chicago, and his shoulders are big. Maybe. He’s not sure what he’s thinking anymore, but he goes to the gate at the south end of the zoo, and walks past the empty cages and then the elk, the apes and the monkeys and the small mammal building. The cat building, he walks past that too, and the seals and the penguins and the bird building, the Africa building and the empty yards for the African animals, the polar bears. He doesn’t go inside the buildings look at the animals, which makes him wonder why he came here. But when he comes out at the other end there’s the conservatory, where the plants are, and maybe he was going there all along, and the zoo just distracted him.
It’s like he remembered--the plants are thick and lush, and always green. The building itself is like part of the whole, the glass panels and the ancient metal bits of uncertain purpose melding with the green, with the ropy plants. There are some tourists milling around, families with children, and a homeless man muttering to himself on a bench. A woman is answering questions, and Eames doesn’t ask any, but he listens.
Eames wonders if he can ask Arthur why he gave him Jane Eyre and Kenneth Rexroth and The Blue Castle all in a row and get a straight answer out of him, now. If not, he wonders if he can ask Ariadne.
Eames goes back to Inceptus. It’s like it usually is, again. It’s completely different. He thinks that he will answer the phone when he gets back to his motel, but first he will go to Inceptus.
Ariadne is in the front. “Arthur’s in the back,” she says, though Eames knows.
“Explain to me about Arthur recommending books,” Eames says to her, because he thinks he should.
“We don’t serve tea,” Ariadne tells him, and Eames looks at her.
“Yes you do.”
“No. We don’t,” Ariadne says, and Eames knows he’s missing something big, he can feel it, it’s like a word on the tip of his tongue.
“It’s on the menu.”
“The menu,” Ariadne says. “Is a chalkboard.”
Eames thinks he might get it. He goes to the back.
“You don’t serve tea,” he says to Arthur, because no one is in line, and it’s like the first day he came here, which seems like last year or yesterday but is neither one of those.
Arthur looks at him.
“I’m looking for something,” Eames says to Arthur, and Arthur looks at him still, but Eames thinks he is beginning to smile. It’s hard to tell, with Arthur.
Eames leans forward. “No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.”
Arthur smiles.
Eames kisses him.
notes: Eames' last line is from Rainer Marie Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. The title is from the Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" which is a GREAT GREAT song.