When we finally emerged from the cramped overheated offices of Brooklyn Realty, the sub-zero air sliced through my lungs, causing me to heave as if I were having an asthma attack. Then I sobbed.
Gregory, my husband who is all things to me, put his arm around my shoulder and let me cry for a while, which I did rather badly because it’s hard to shed tears in the bitter cold, and I was guiltily conscious of surreptitious glances from passers-by, who must have thought that someone had died.
Only partly true. There had been a death, but it had been of our beloved bookstore, which had fallen victim to the online and superstore market forces that had claimed the lives of so many of its brethren around the country. Not that we didn’t have a good run for a while, and not that the patient didn’t put up a valiant fight when signs of illness first appeared. Gregory and I did everything we could — frequent buyer cards, guest speaker series, ten percent Mondays — -to keep our doors open, but Americans (even New Yorkers, who like to think of themselves as beyond American) love a good deal better than they love their local merchants. And so one day we could no longer ignore the prognostications of our financial advisor: “This business is not going to make it.”
But luck was with us, as the demise of our store happened at the same time as the real estate boom in New York, which hit the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn with a bang. Gregory and I had bought the building for a song in a probate sale twelve years previously, right after we got married (he for the second time, me for the first). And now we had sold it for a small fortune.
“Monique,” Gregory said, waving a bank check in my face, “Think of it: We’re rich!”
I smiled weakly. “I know,” I said, sniffing back a few remaining tears. “I shouldn’t feel so bad about this.”
“No shoulds, please,” Gregory. “Well, except that we should go deposit this right now!”
He looped his arm through mine and pulled me with him into a run. I gamely galloped alongside, heading toward the bank on Seventh Avenue, until I stopped suddenly, yanking Gregory back with me.
“What?” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t want to pass The Fortunate Traveler.” (Apologies to Derek Walcott.)
“Honey, think of it as an opportunity for closure,” Gregory replied, taking me by the elbow and steering me a block ahead to the now empty picture window of the travel bookstore that had allowed Gregory and me to indulge in our two great passions: each other and travel.
Every day we worked side by side, a true gift to people who discover each other in middle age and are given the chance at building a relationship that isn’t hampered by the false expectations of youth or the siphoning demands of raising children. People would ask us, “How can you work together?” and our response — at least to each other — was, “How could we not?”
As to our second passion, even if we couldn’t travel as much as we liked (between minding the shop and our increasingly tight finances), we could make our travel fantasies manifest in the store. I now peered inside, past the good-bye note in the window thanking our loyal customers for their many years of patronage. Its narrow aisles were still illuminated by shafts of late-morning sunlight, but the terrazzo floor was no longer scattered with rugs we picked up on our journeys.
As I visualized our final thematic window display on Cornwall (books by Daphne DuMaurier, art prints from the Tate St. Ives, hiking guides to Cornish coastal footpaths, even the libretto from Pirates of Penzance), I let myself feel the reality of our new lives. Gregory and I, former school teachers turned failed entrepreneurs, were well beyond any new career ambitions. His three kids were grown; we owned our house in another, less up-market, Brooklyn neighborhood. And clutched in Gregory’s hand was our future.
The road ahead on this cold morning in the new millennium lay suddenly clear to me: We could be the travelers who had existed mainly in our imaginations. Opening ourselves to the possibilities of the moment, we could follow our destiny around the world.
What I could not have anticipated at the time was that, in our explorations, we would uncover not just the treasures of a place, but its dangerous secrets as well. Who could have known that fortunate travelers such as we would stumble upon murder?
LINKS
Derek WalcottCornwall
Daphne du Maurier
Tate St. Ives
Southwest Coastal Path
Pirates of Penzance
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