Book Loaned to Tom Andrews
I’d already found out that one of the secrets to happiness
was
never loan your
books. But I loaned it anyway. We were all of
us poor and
living
on ideas, stumbling home late to basement apartments,
talking
to ourselves.
What did we own except books and debt? When
the time
came
we could move it all in the trunk of a car. Tom knew what a
book
was worth—he
brought it back a week later, seemingly
unhandled, just
a little looser
in the spine, a trade paper edition of The Death of
Artemio
Cruz, required
reading for a course in postmodernism we
were suffering
through.
The book’s trashed now, boxed up and buried in the garage
with
a hundred other
things I can’t throw away. When I moved
back south I
loaned it again
to a girl I’d just met. At some party I’d said it was the
best
novel since Absalom,
Absalom!, which may have been true,
but mostly I was
trying to impress her,
and convince myself, still testing all I’d been told about
how
the matter of a
book is best kept separate from, well,
matter. Months
later it turned up
on my front steps without comment, the cover torn in two
places, the dog-eared pages of
self-conscious prose
stuck together
with dark, rich chocolate.
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