The Limits of Other People's Books

The work was considerable, and it was, for about three weeks, the best work she had ever done. She kept a ledger of her takings the way a less interesting person might keep a ledger of expenses, and the takings were marvelous. A pressed flower from a poem she would not name because the poem was sentimental and she was not, except apparently in the matter of its flowers. A brass button from the cuff of a soldier who, in the novel he belonged to, died on the next page; she had taken the button while he was still alive and standing in a corridor she had no business being in, and she did not look too closely at what that meant. A handful of cold sand from a beach in a book she had read at twelve and not since, which she kept in a jam jar and which never quite dried out. A fishhook. A playing card — the seven of something, the suit smudged. A single dried bay leaf out of a kitchen she'd entered for ninety seconds, which she put in a soup that night and which made the soup taste, faintly, of a house she had never lived in.

She was, she would admit if pressed, showing off, even if the only audience was the notebook. But the notebook, being a notebook, eventually started asking the hard question, because that was what she used it for, and the hard question was: so what.

Because here was the thing the marvelous takings would not stop telling her. Every one of them came out of a room she had not been allowed to touch. She could stand in the corridor; she could not open the soldier's letter. She could lift the button; she could not warn him about the next page. She tried — she was not proud of trying, but she tried — to move a chair in a parlor she had stepped into out of an Austen she'd been ruder about than the author deserved, and the chair would not move; or rather it moved, and when she looked away and looked back it was where it had been, unbothered, in the place the sentence had put it a hundred and fifty years before she got there. She tried to leave a mark. She licked her thumb, in a moor she had gone back to out of something like loyalty, and pressed it to a white stone, the way a child presses a thumb to fogged glass, and the moor took the gesture the way a lake takes a thrown coin: with a small acknowledging ripple and then nothing, the surface closing, the stone white, the heather indifferent. She had visited. She had not been there in any way the place would consent to remember.

It made her, by the end of the second week, properly furious — not the bright fury of being thwarted but the dull, aching fury of being a guest. She had spent her whole reading life arguing with books in their margins precisely because she refused to be a polite guest in them; she heckled Charlotte and corrected Tolstoy and told Hemingway, in pencil, exactly where he could put his iceberg. And now she had the most astonishing access any reader had ever had — she could walk into the rooms — and the rooms turned out to be the one place her arguing did not count. The books were finished. That was what nobody told you about a finished book: it was finished. The door was real and the latch was real and the apple was real, and all of it was somebody else's house, and you could no more redecorate it than you could repaint a memory. She could take the button. She could never give the soldier a different morning.

She put this down badly the first time and well the second. The first time she wrote, frustrated, I am a tourist with sticky fingers, which was funny and true and did not help. The second time she sat with it longer, and made the tea hot, and wrote: The problem is not that I can't take more. The problem is that I can only take. I am reading worlds I have no vote in. And under that, because she had been raised by every essay Mr. Behr ever shoved at her to follow a complaint until it turned into a question, she wrote the question, and the question was so simple that it frightened her a little, sitting there in her own ordinary handwriting in her own ordinary kitchen:

What if the book were mine?

Not someone else's parlor. Not the wings of someone else's stage. A house with her name on the deed, where the chair moved because she moved it and the soldier got a different morning because she wrote him one — a place where being a guest and being the author were, for once, the same person. She looked at the sentence for a long time. She thought about every address she had ever visited and how all of them had been written down by somebody before she arrived, and she thought, with the slow cool click she had learned to trust, that there was exactly one address in the world that had not yet been written by anyone at all.

She reached for the empty notebook.