The Paris Review - Fall 2016

usiness selling such strange and unpopular books remained its enduring
mystery. There must have been enough people buying them to sustain the
small shop, but she didn’t seem to meet them. Secret intellectuals, speak up!
Reveal yourselves!
The big problem that Leslie had, as far as she could tell, was that she
was still, at twenty-nine, a person without well-established and verifiable
thoughts or opinions about things. Other people were moving through the
world and analyzing what they saw with some kind of consistency, a set of
values that was sustainable and based on . . . something—what they grew up
with, what they had developed later in opposition to what their parents had
told them. Of course, she knew that there was no such thing as a balanced
consciousness, or, if there was, it existed primarily in idiots and self-satisfied
creeps, men mostly, who chose not to question their lives for fear of realizing
they were terrible failures. But still. Everyone else always seemed to be doing
better at it than she was.
“You want to help me with the chairs and stuff ?” Kim said, finally turning
to her.
“Sure.”
Kim was one of the good ones, a seriously noncomplacent person. She
struggled openly with the borders of her life. She was writing a memoir about
her peripatetic childhood, much of which involved traveling the country in a
van with her family, moving between cultish New Age communities in dire
poverty. Kim’s rejection of her family was partial and unhappy. She loved
them and forgave them in principle but also had to stay away from them and
have almost no contact with them whatsoever because most of their interactions
triggered major depressive episodes.
Leslie had been at the Rose with Kim one night when Kim got a call
from an unknown number. Usually she screened such calls, but she was
drunk and expecting to hear from a man she’d recently slept with, so she
answered it. Leslie watched as she listened in silence for a minute to someone
speaking on the other end, and then held down the power button until the
phone turned off.
“That was my father.” she said. “I’m going to need you to hang with me
for the rest of the night. Sorry.”
Then they’d gotten ugly drunk—drink-spilling, falling-off-barstools,
shouting-at-the-TV drunk. Jamie had been there, blessedly, to drive them
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