AND I THOUGHT WELL
AS WELL HIM AS ANOTHER

By Catherine E. M. O’Neill

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The humdrum of the traffic was smothered by the oak doors. Classical music reeled around the grandiose entrance. An exam board notice requested silence. I stood at the bottom of the stone stairs looking up at the marble male statue, book-ended by the same type of plant that had been found on my return from honeymoon: left in the sink by the previous owner and nearly twenty years on shabbily refusing to die.

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The distant discordant plucking of a young violin and a muffled cough carried from the exam room. A stairlift yellowed and invitingly sat idle. My wool swathes now seemed choking and my suede boots were lined with the salt of the pavements. Watching the eyes of the three lofty men, I took the left turn of the grand staircase, glancing at the noticeboard spread with fliers for recitals and lectures that I wouldn’t be permitted to attend.

 

This hour between hospitals and appointments was undetectable. Here and now I could have those needed moments of calm amidst the murmur of the Lit & Phil library and my book: Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart.

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The light from the Georgian domed skylights touched me warmly as I walked to the shelf where the book would be waiting for me. On each visit I would note the date and something about that day to help chart all the times I had managed to escape. The list was on a green slip torn from a notebook; my little scribblings between appointments. The day of my radiotherapy was the last time I’d been.

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Today I felt worse.

 

The men in their earthy toned sweaters sat mumbling around the large oval table, as I ducked under the iron spiral staircase to retrieve my book. I left a hand on the balustrade’s smooth faded brass. My left hand lay on the punctured iron tread, each step grasping the winder, unaware of the path each part was creating, twisting upwards to the walkway above, but splitting the light.

 

My head swam, and I grasped the lump in my pocket: it was a small piece of wood: twisted, layered, beautiful yet full of rot. I’d seen it on the floor of his car that morning and had let my fingers grasp at it as I tried not to listen to his loud music. I squeezed it in my palm now remembering his voice- the loud voice and the heat of the burning words as I lay unresponsive and praying that he’d give in and leave.

 

The red spindles stood tall as I took my book and sat in my normal chair.

 

On my last visit I’d read up to the nineteen-sixties of the history of the bookshop that I’d once visited when nineteen. Sylvia Beach had set it up, she’d published James Joyce’s Ulysses and then later closed her doors to the Nazis wanting to buy from her. Years later that spirit and name passed onto the once American soldier, hobo-traveller and story-seeker: George Whitman. The wonderful stories of the tumbleweeds: poets, writers and the soulful ones that turned up to sleep where they could and read and talk and live. George would make soup on a little stove, which could be seen in a hole in the floor from beneath by customers. All the greats had been there.

 

I sighed as my eyes lapped up the images. A woman sat looking up from the pages at me- her brown hair long and centre-parted; strong beautiful features and a fire in the eyes for words with the unasked for admiration of the zealous men that filled the floor around her. Turning the page, I stopped: 1968-the Paris riots- a woman with defiant arms raised, one hand clasping a flag pole as she sat on the shoulders of a young man.

 

La Beaute est dans la Rue.

 

Her expression solid yet her eyes were saturated with a fear and weariness that I knew.

The pain in my head from the swelling caused by the radiotherapy had paralyzed my voice, as his jagged words fell on me.

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I’d wanted that afternoon to tell the nurse what he’d done; I wanted now to tell the young woman who sat on the chair near me. I wondered what Sylvia Beach, or George Whitman would have told me to do. I turned the page and in a large beautiful font the words of the poet and once tumbleweed James Baldwin spoke to me.

 

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive”.

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The clock was ticking. In the oak bookcase nearest to me was the ‘heavy’ literature that I should have been reading. I found the ‘J’s and brought back to the table a green copy of Ulysses. I’d read how stately, plump Buck Mulligan had came from the stair head three times, yet I’d never got to the end. I opened it backwards and read the final lines.

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I looked up into the spiral staircase and saw the landing close enough to climb to. I’d never yet climbed it, but I would today. First, I pulled my green slip from my book, added the date in ink and wrote deliberately and clearly my note to remember this visit:

 

                And I thought well as well him as another -- no I said, no, no more.

 

 

                -The End-

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