Closer to where I started

Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill

One slow October Sunday, I run my fingers over the books
on the shelves above my table, like a pianist poised over his keys,
instead, a leap of every hue imaginable, and, of course, a chime:
Roland, yet another discourse on love, is the deep, mellow rumble of moss
green, Haruki’s twisting in hallways the tinny zigzag of all the neons
laced with cream, and another ping. The crooning of Gabriel a slide
keening over the creases of supposed memory, and that one bed you
have not visited, the rose you did not bother to snap off a bush, and yes,

perhaps, a sigh. And I pluck a book I bought months ago
from a secondhand bookstore, where I knelt in front of boxes packed
with volumes long ago pushed to the backs of shelves, giving way
to Octavio, Kazuo, or even Danielle, Dr. Spock and Dr. Seuss – hiding,
huddled, their spines curving, the gold on their cloths steadily losing
their glimmer, later on lost in the moving from one house to another
from whose pastel walls still hung the faint scent of paint. And in my hand,
this book falls open, and I read the pages dotted with yellow,

gray veins, the deaths of silverfish scuttling between tales, and all
the words turn fluid before my eyes, all of us aware of the drawn out
whirs of time, while all the other colors caged in fake mahogany
beams clatter what remains of their gold leaf against each other,
thudding in their places, sending out purrs and whines, and once,
even the beginnings of an aria. I come upon the expanse between 144
and 145, and see there, lying within the speckled tale of a beige-clothed
secretary hell-bent on seducing her lawyer boss, there, here,

a lock of hair, just a pinch of brown curl, fine, translucent if held
up against the afternoon light. And I imagine a child, his steps weightless
one moment, then heavy the next: dimpled feet padding none too gently
on the carpets, the knees raised gingerly, then stepping, again and again,
until he stumbles – discovering the first bars of a giggle – into
the outstretched arms of a mother who has put down the book
she has been reading this one rare, selfish afternoon. Oh, my sweet,
I hear this mother, and see her fingers twirl against the crown

of curls on his head, a few locks tangling with his eyelashes, and now
her mind hops and skips across the room, sliding into drawers,
into covered boxes, searching for the smallest pair of scissors, and one,
one simple snip would do, before the day is over,
before Gaitskill completes her tale, before a girl on her knees eases it
from the dust of a bookstore, a girl who could be doing other things,
instead of imagining herself lovelorn, clasping a brittle book in front of a shelf,
humming an old song, holding up a then-child’s lock of hair against the light.