the habit of being

Outside it was rainy and all the buildings seemed to be beige even though they all aren’t really. I had an umbrella but I didn’t have it up because I didn’t have gloves and having my hands in my pockets kept me warmer than the umbrella, which just turned inside-out with the wind. Even in my pocket my right hand was a little cold, because I had picked up a seven of spades from the sidewalk and it wasn’t dry.

After climbing the stairs to my apartment I went into the bath but didn’t wash because I wasn’t dirty. I just wanted to use the hot wet to get the cold wet off of me. There weren’t any bubbles and only a few stray hairs were floating in the bathwater. I had my book with me, which was A Moveable Feast. I liked this book very much because it was not really fiction and it was about writing and about living and about Paris. I liked it so much I couldn’t wait until I was back on the subway to finish it. I wanted to finish it somewhere quiet and alone.

I had the towel on the floor next to the tub so I could dry my fingers in case I had one hand in the water and one on the book and then needed to turn the page. The towel was pink. The towels all turned pink in the wash once, when one of them bled on the others. It’s been so long now that I don’t remember which one did the bleeding and which ones are really white and stained. I don’t remember which towels are mine and which ones are Jennifer’s either.

Jennifer lives with me and we’ve been friends a long time, and it was she who had given me this book to read. I had read another Hemingway a couple weeks ago and liked it a lot. I like Hemingway because he writes short books with short chapters with short sentences with short words. And also because one time someone compared my writing to his, which is very silly but no one had said I’d written like anyone famous and talented before, and it made me like Hemingway and made me like whomever had said it, though now I can’t even remember who that was.

I was in the tub with one foot on the faucet when I got to the very last sentence on the very last page of the book. Underneath it, written lightly in very thin pencil-line was:

Hi Jennifer
I Love you
Sharon

Sharon is my mother, and I would have known it was her even if she had not signed it, because her handwriting looks like mine except I bear down harder and my letters are skinnier and I would not have capitalized Love. To read this made the back of my throat get hot and then the back of my eyes get hot. I wished my mother had given this book to me instead of Jennifer. I had really liked it.

I realized then that my mother had probably sent this book to Jennifer when Jennifer had gone to study in Paris that summer. That was the same summer that I was lost on the Interstates with James. My mother could not send me books and write “I Love you” in the back of them because she did not know where I was. This would not have been the right book to give me then anyway. I had stopped really reading and Paris was an impossible thing to comprehend.