The last stop on our search for an art deco vanity was a place out on the Bar Harbor Road, lousey with buoys and little foot bridges leading nowhere, that (I always assumed) only sold ceramic lighthouses and lobster keychains.
G— suggested it as soon as I walked in the door. My desire for a dressing table had triggered an old, shared but long-abandoned pleasure: antiquing. My very specific vision—and the hopelessness of it—brought out the best in him. It was an old way of loving, his running ahead of me into the different booths so that he could return, barely composed, a cat with a mouse dangling in its jaw, announcing his find.
I'd been rather ashamed of my interest. It took me some time to tell him.
Now I was feeling that I had caught my beautiful firefly again, this man whose attention I so desperately wanted. Like folds of a deep and heavy curtain, the decades obscure vulnerability—what had been the easy kinetics of new love.
The silo at the side of the building seemed a literal prop.
But we'd barely entered before the I Love Lucy kitchen table and the mannequins in Mamie Eisenhower dresses promised—on one of these floors—a vanity with the walnut bookmatch veneer and bakelite pulls that had become my obsession.
We climbed stairs, stepped onto landings, and passed through different rooms whose progression had the dissociative effect of an art museum. In one, a seller shifted her wares on shelves with determination: ambitious—or desperate for a sale. In another, I sat on the floor and tried on an old penny loafer whose leather was the color of milk chocolate.
I'd given up looking for furniture when I asked G— what was in the room he'd just returned from.
Just books.
We were both depressed about the end of my search. There were no more places near.
I left G— resting on a chair beneath a tree of hatboxes and started into the room of books.
The last room of our vanity shopping.
The space was incredibly large. It had both the size and formal arrangement of a proper, public library, but there were no overhead lights with which to read the spines. My gaze searched for some order. Little pieces of white card had been taped onto some of the shelves but had torn away or fallen onto their faces; with my thumb and index finger, I lifted one or two.
Other labels remained in place. An old arrangement began to emerge like beds of an abandoned garden. I saw "Engineering," then "Prayer." A section on Eastern Religions was of respectable size.
An empty spindle-back chair sat facing one of the stacks, giving the impression of its last occupant as he must have sat, straining to read the spines or flipping the pages of a potential purchase—years ago.
The atmosphere was still and dark, and feeble daylight from a bank of windows at the end of the room never disturbed the darkness in which the books lived: some lying on their sides like toppled headstones, others packed tightly—unremoveable, out of reach.
Loose papers and slender, spiral-bound publications seemed to litter the shelves the way fresh flurries blur the edges of the curb from the road: annual reports, real estate licensing workbooks, and church cookbooks.
I saw a scratched, jacketless LP record that said If You Find Me Annoying, Tell Your Friends. A broken shellac 78 announced a Fox Trot.
Instinctively, I moved toward a source of light, around a corner.
It was at the end of a corridor marked "Travel"—a small open window.
It had briefly rained as we had gotten lost in the labyrinth, and there were faded travel brochures and maps on a shelf beneath the window that had blown up and gotten wet. And I looked out the little window down to the parking lot and into the gray field beyond.
I smelled the rain that had fallen and saw the drops on the cars, the small puddles.
I felt suddenly that faraway feeling: of vacation, of an unknown place, of being temporarily outside of your life—of new love.
The sensation quickly passed.
I grabbed an old, floral-covered Osbert Sitwell I wanted to show G— and retraced my steps through the cavernous room.
He wasn't interested in the Sitwells anymore, and we left by what seemed a secret stairway, partially blocked at the bottom, that put us in the middle of another floor we hadn't yet seen.
This had been, in fact, a large, genuine barn.
But we were tired of looking at antiques.
