The Paris Review - Fall 2016

she’d get fired. Leslie couldn’t in good conscience hope for that, but, well, it
was entirely out of her hands, wasn’t it?
Amy’s piece was pretty clean, but the week’s book review, of an eco-memoir
about the grasslands of Eastern Montana, was a mess. It was by a recent graduate
of the M.F.A. program, an eco-poet who couldn’t, or chose not to, organize
his sentences in the traditional manner. Nature careth not for such frivolities,
but even an alternative weekly required the occasional comma. She spent a solid
hour rewriting the piece, knowing she’d catch shit for being overzealous. But she
didn’t want to contribute to the prevailing idea that everyone born after 1984
operated in a void of good intentions without recourse to actual knowledge.
Despite her rejection of its trappings, Leslie had been thoroughly and
expensively educated, and some of the content had stuck, even as she’d
worked hard to smother her recollection of it under a scratchy blanket
of booze and “other.” Oh, she was an expert on “encountering the other,”
and she wasn’t talking about UM’s shit show of a diversity fair. She missed
cocaine, but there wasn’t much of it in town, and the couple of times she had
run across it, it had been awful. The grungy kids did heroin—it was back!
even the Times said so!—but she’d always been afraid of that. She wanted to
kill time but not, you know, kill it. Like, permanently.
SHE ARRIVED AT THE BOOKSTORE a half hour before Cal’s reading
so she could look at books and help set up. There was a drunk, itinerant
man sprawled on the sidewalk next to the door. He was moaning and slowly
kicking his legs like he was swimming.
“Are you all right?” Leslie said loudly.
The man moaned louder and kicked with more purpose, in her direction.
She went into the bookstore. Kim was behind the desk, staring intently at
the store’s computer screen.
“Have you seen that guy out front?” Leslie said.
“I don’t want to call the cops on him,” Kim said, eyes still on the screen.
“But if Max gets here and he’s still out there, he’s not going to be happy.
Mostly I don’t want to deal with it.”
“He doesn’t seem to be in a position to be reasoned with.”
“Indeed.”
Leslie wandered among the new-books tables, browsing through the
poetry and the stuff from the independent presses. How the store stayed in
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