The Land of Laughs (2 page)

I staggered over to the desk and, after wiping my hands on my pants, picked it up reverently. I noticed a troll who looked as if he had been dipped in talcum powder watching me from the corner of the store.

“Isn’t that a superb copy? Someone walked right in out of the blue and plunked it down on the desk.” He had a Southern accent and reminded me of some character who lives with his dead mama in a rotting mansion and sleeps under a mosquito net.

“Its great. How much is it?”

“Oh, well, you see, it’s already sold. It’s a rare one. Do you know why it’s not around anymore? Because Marshall France didn’t like it and refused to let them reprint after a certain time. Now, he was a strangey, that Mr. France.”

“Could you tell me who bought it?”

“No, I’ve never seen her before, but you’re in luck, because she said she’d he in to pick it up” — he looked at his wristwatch, which I noticed was a gold Cartier — “around now, eleven or so, she said.”

She. I had to have that book, and she was going to sell it to me, no matter what the cost. I asked him if I could look at it until she came, and he said that he didn’t see why not.

As with everything Marshall France had written, I fell into the book and left the world for a while. The words! “The plates hated the silver, who in turn hated the glasses. They sang cruel songs at each other. Ping. Clank. Tink. This kind of meanness three times a day.” The way all of the characters were so completely new, but once you’d met them you wondered how you’d ever gotten along without them in your life. Like the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that go right in the middle.

I finished and quickly went back to passages that I’d particularly liked. There were a lot of them, so when I heard the bell over the front door ring and someone come in, I tried to ignore whoever it was. If it was she, it could end up that she wouldn’t sell it and I wouldn’t have another chance to see the book again, so I wanted to eat as much of it as I could before the big showdown.

For a couple of years I collected fountain pens. Once when I was at a flea market in France I was walking around and saw a man in front of me pick up a pen from a seller’s table and look at it. I saw immediately from the white six-pointed star on its cap that it was a Montblanc. An old Montblanc. I stopped in my tracks and started a chant inside of me: PUT IT DOWN, DON’T BUY IT! But it did no good — the guy kept looking more and more intently at it. Then I wanted him to die right there on the spot so that I could pull it out of his lax hand and buy it myself. His back was still to me, but my loathing was so intense that it must have pierced him somehow, because all of a sudden he put the pen down, looked fearfully over his shoulder at me, and scurried away.

The first thing that I saw when I looked up from the France book was a nice denim-skirted fanny. It had to be her. PUT IT DOWN, DON’T BUY IT! I tried to cut my look straight through the denim and skin underneath all the way to her soul, wherever it was. GO AWAY, LADY! I WHAMMY YOU TO GO AWAY AND LEAVE THIS BOOK HERE HERE HERE!

“The gentleman over there is looking at it. I didn’t think that you’d mind.”

I suddenly had this wild romantic hope that she would be lovely and smiling. Lovely and smiling because she had the world’s best taste in books. But she was neither. The smile was only partly there — a little confusion and beginning anger mixed together — and her face was pretty/plain. A clean, healthy face that was raised on a farm or out in the country someplace, but never in the sun that much. Straight brown hair but for a small upward flip when it reached her shoulders, as if it were afraid to touch them. A sprinkle of light, light freckles, straight nose, wide-set eyes. More plain than pretty the more you looked at her, but the word “healthy” kept going through my mind.

“I wish you hadn’t.”

I didn’t know which one of us she was talking to. But then she marched over and pulled it out of my hand like my mother catching me with a dirty magazine. She brushed the light-green cover twice, and only then did she look directly at me. She had thin, rust-colored eyebrows that curved up at the ends, so that even when she was frowning she didn’t look too mad.

The dealer came dancing up and whisked my beloved out of her hands with a “May I?” and moved back behind the desk, where he started wrapping it in beige tissue paper. “I’ve been right here on this corner for twelve years, and sometimes I’ve had quite a few Frances, but usually it’s a drought with him, just an absolute desert drought. Certainly
Land of Laughs
in the first edition is easy enough to find, because he was so popular by then, but
The Green Dog’s Sorrow
in a first or any edition is as hard to find as the Hydra’s teeth. Say, listen, I think I have a
Land of
in the back of the store if either of you’d be interested.” He looked at us, eyes atwinkle, but I already had a first that I’d paid a fortune for in New York, and my opponent was digging around for something in her handbag, so he shrugged off the No Sale and went back to wrapping. “That’ll be thirty-five dollars, Ms. Gardner.”

Thirty-five! I would have paid … “Uh, Ms. Gardner? Uh, would you be willing to sell the book to me for a hundred? I mean, I can pay you right now for it, cash.”

The guy was standing behind her when he heard my price, and I saw his lips move up and down like two snakes in pain.

“A hundred dollars? You’d pay a hundred dollars for this?”

It was the only France book that I didn’t have, much less in the first edition, but somehow the tone of her voice made me feel dirty-rich. But only for a moment, only for a moment. When it came to Marshall France, I’d be dirty all day, so long as I could have the book. “Yes. Will you sell it?”

“I’m really not one to interfere, Ms. Gardner, but one hundred dollars is quite an extraordinary price even for this France.”

If she was tempted and if the book meant as much to her as it did to me, then she was feeling pain. I almost felt sorry for her in a way. Finally she looked at me as if I’d done something nasty to her. I knew she was going to say yes to my offer and disappoint herself.

“There’s a color Xerox machine in town. I want to have it copied first, then I’ll … then I’ll sell it to you. You can come over and pick it up tomorrow night. I live at 189 Broadway, the second floor. Come at … I don’t know … Come at eight.”

She paid for it and left without saying anything more to either of us. When she was gone, the man read the little slip that had been in the book and told me that her name was Saxony Gardner and that besides Marshall France books she’d told him to keep an eye out for any old books on puppets.

She lived in a section of town where you rolled your windows up in the car as soon as you drove into it. Her apartment was in a house that must have once been pretty snazzy — lots of gingerbread and a big comfortable porch that wrapped around the whole front of the place. But now all that it looked out on was the singed skeleton of a Corvair that had been stripped of everything but the rearview mirror. An old black guy wearing a hooded gray sweatshirt was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, and because it was dark, it took me a moment to see that he had a black cat on his lap.

“Howdy doody, partner.”

“Hi. Does Saxony Gardner live here?”

Instead of answering my question, he brought the cat up to his face and crooned, “Cat-cat-cat” to it, or at it, or something. I don’t like animals too much.

“Uh, I’m sorry, but could you
tell
me if —”

“Yes. Here I am.” The screen door swung open and there she was. She walked over to the old man and touched him on the top of his head with her thumb. “It’s time for bed, Uncle Leonard.”

He smiled and handed her the cat. She watched him go and then vaguely motioned me to his chair with a wave of her hand.

“Everyone calls him Uncle. He’s a nice man. He and his wife live on the first floor, and I have the second.” She had something under her arm, which after a while she took out and shoved at me. “Here’s the book. I never would have sold it to you if I didn’t need the money. You probably don’t care about that, but I just wanted to tell you. I sort of hate you and am grateful to you at the same time.” She began to smile, but then she stopped and ran her hand through her hair. It was a funny trait that was hard to get used to at first — she rarely did more than one thing at a time. If she smiled at you, then her hands were still. If she wanted to brush the hair away from her face, she stopped smiling until she’d brushed.

After I had the book I noticed that it had been neatly rewrapped in a piece of paper that must have been a copy of some old handwritten sheet music. It was a nice touch, but all I wanted to do was tear it off and begin reading the book again. I knew that’d be rude, but I was thinking about how I’d do it when I got home. Grind some beans in the Moulinex, make a fresh pot of coffee, then settle in the big chair by the window with the good reading light …

“I know it’s none of my business, but why on earth would you pay a hundred dollars for that book?”

How do you explain an obsession? “Why would you pay thirty-five? From everything you’ve said so far, you can’t afford
that
.”

She pushed off the post she’d been leaning on and stuck her chin out, tough-guy style. “How do you know what I can afford and what I can’t? I don’t have to sell it to you, you know. I haven’t taken your money yet or anything.”

I got up from Leonard’s tired chair and dug into my pocket for the fresh hundred-dollar bill I always carry hidden in a secret compartment of my wallet. I didn’t need her, and vice versa, and besides, it was getting cold and I wanted to be out of that neighborhood before the jungle war drums and tribal dancing began on the hood of the Corvair. “I’ve, uh, really got to go. So here’s the money, and I’m very sorry if I was rude to you.”

“You were. Would you like a cup of tea?”

I kept flashing the snappy new bill at her, but she wouldn’t take it. I shrugged again and said okay to the tea, and she led me into the House of Usher.

A three-watt brown-yellow bug light burned in the hall outside what I took to be Uncle Leonard’s door. I had expected the place to smell like low tide, but it didn’t. In fact it smelled sweet and exotic; I was sure it was some kind of incense. There was a staircase just past the light. It turned out to be so steep that I thought it might lead to the base camp on El Capitan, but I finally made it up in time to see her going through a door, saying something over her shoulder that I didn’t catch.

What she probably said was watch your head, because the first thing I did when I walked through her door was wrap myself in a thousand-stringed spiderweb, which gave me a minor heart attack. It turned out to be puppet strings, or I should say one of the puppets’ strings, because they were hanging all around the room in elaborately different macabre poses that reminded me of any number of dreams I’d had.

“Just please don’t call them puppets. They’re all marionettes. What kind of tea would you like, apple or chamomile?”

The nice smell came from her apartment, and it was incense. I saw several sticks burning in a little earthenware bowl full of fine white sand on her coffee table. There were also a couple of strange, brightly colored rocks on it and what I assumed to be the head of one of the marionettes. I had it in my hand and was checking it out when she came back into the room with the tea and a loaf of banana bread she’d baked.

“Do you know anything about them? That one’s a copy of the evil spirit Natt from the Burmese Marionette Theater.”

“Is that what you do for a living?” I swept the room with my hand and almost dropped Natt on the banana bread.

“Yes, or I did until I got sick. Do you take honey or sugar in your tea?” She didn’t say “sick” like I was supposed to ask what kind of sick, or was she feeling better now?

After I drank what had to be the foulest cup of hot liquid I’ve ever consumed — apple or chamomile? — she took me on a guided tour of the room She talked about Ivo Puhonny and Tony Sarg, Wajang figures and Bunraku, as if we were all best friends. But I liked the excitement in her voice and the incredible similarity between some of the puppet faces and my masks.

When we were sitting down again and I liked her about a hundred times more than at first, she said she had something to show me that I’d like. She went into another room and came back with a framed photograph. I had seen only one picture of France before, so I didn’t recognize this one until I saw his signature in the lower-left-hand corner.

“Holy Christ! Where’d you get this?”

She took it back and looked at it carefully. When she spoke again her voice was slow and quiet. “When I was little I was playing with some kids near a pile of burning leaves. Somehow I tripped and fell into it, and the burns on my legs were so bad that I had to be in the hospital for a year. My mother brought me his books and I read them until the covers came off. Marshall France books, and books on puppets and marionettes.”

I wondered then for the first time if France really appealed only to weirdos like us: puppet-obsessed little girls in hospitals and analyzed-since-five boys whose fathers’ shadows were stronger than the kids’.

“But where did you get this? I’ve seen only one picture of him, and that was when he was young, the one without his beard.”

“You mean the one in
Time
magazine?” She looked at hers again. “You know when I asked you why you’d be willing to spend so much money for
Peach Shadows
? Well, do you know how much I spent for this thing? Fifty dollars. I’m one to talk, huh?”

She looked at me and swallowed so hard that I heard the
grumph
in her throat. “Do you love his books as much as I do? I mean … having to give this to you actually makes me almost sick to my stomach. I’ve been searching for a copy for years.” She touched her forehead and then ran her fingertips down the side of her pale face. “Maybe you should take it now and just go.”

I shot up off the couch and put the money on the table. Before I left, I wrote my name and address on a slip of paper. I handed it to her and jokingly said that she could come and visit the book whenever she wanted. Fateful decision.