Elisabeth Harvor

Men of a Certain Age

Working at the bookstore gave me a new persona, an identity more brazen than the identity I knew to be secretly mine: the identity of a person who was almost pathologically shy. But when I got home from work in the evenings I needed to drink two or three glasses of wine to recover from all the hours I’d spent trying to pass myself off as an extrovert. I would stand sipping the wine as I looked out over peaked gables and chimneys, dark against snow in the winter, gleaming with a lonely evening shine in early spring rain. I skimped on almost everything else so I could afford to buy four bottles a week. French wine. Or wine from California. I wasn’t afraid of becoming an alcoholic, or at least not yet, what I was afraid of was taking drugs. I was afraid of smoking pot, I was afraid that even only one toke would have the chemical clout to turn me into a madwoman.

And then one afternoon in May five students, all laughing and talking, came into the bookstore. I knew them all, or at least I knew them all to see because we’d all been in the same Woolf class at Wilmot College and they were all high from some kind of excitement, but it could just have been because school was over and they’d been working in bars and clubs over the winter and so they could all now afford to fly off to London and Glasgow, and even down to Morocco for a week or two. I felt so wistful as I listened to them talk about their plans, which must have meant that I hadn’t foreseen how much their turning up in the bookstore with their stories of the bright world would upset me, that this was what I’d been most afraid of all along.

"So this is where you ended up..." they said, picking up books, then setting them down again and smiling at me with such watchful, diagnostic smiles that I could see they wanted to be kind to me, that they’d planned to cheer me up, but after they left I sat on my high swivel chair for a long time and stared out at the sunlit street, mesmerized by the way the day had gone so sadly perfect and hollow.