SPENT HIS EVENINGS AT CHURCH , I WENT TO the mall. What odd peace I found there. Smoking in the parking lot’s vast floodlit grid, I was supervised by the gray bulb
of the water tower. At night the pace of commerce slowed and the halls were strangely hushed. Muzak played to a deserted food
court. Tired retailers became sculptural and enigmatic in their chairs, languidly counting the day’s take. I pressed past
the kiosks and novelty stations and moved deeper in.
Perlmutter’s Bookshop, stationed along an obscure curve of the mall’s third ring, was not a thriving concern even in peak
hours. Perlmutter himself had died six months before, leaving a legacy of customer complaints and unclassified volumes. The
woman who’d taken it over had shoulder-length brown hair and wore cashmere sweaters and plaid skirts. Clara was her name,
freshly printed on the plastic badge she wore around her neck.
The pleasure I took watching her struggle to organize the shop was hard to locate or justify. Lately I’d had plenty of timeto contemplate how long it had been since I’d touched a woman’s body, and in truth I was having a harder time enjoying my
videos: I kept getting hung up on the fact that the belles of
Card Catalog Confidential
weren’t real librarians. They probably weren’t even readers, those lithe and tweed-skirted belles. Clara, by contrast, was
the genuine article, a laid-off librarian forced by circumstance to confront Perlmutter’s mostly used inventory. She worked
in a systematic way, pulling and sorting from the beached boxes that lined the aisles, climbing stepladders to slot an orphaned
title in, bending over the desk to check her bibliography on the computer. She had a peculiar sigh that started sharp, then
slid down to cadence.
I grabbed a copy of Bernhard’s memoir from the stack on the desk and brought it to the corner armchair. At this outpost I
could read, or watch Clara, or gaze through the front windows at the consumers walking the hedge labyrinth, heads down. Toward
closing time Clara would settle behind the desk herself, and the only sounds in the shop were our turning pages.
I only broke this silence once, to ask whether I was bothering her.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I kind of enjoy having you there, like a gargoyle or something.”
I smiled and returned to my reading.
M EMOIRS OF M Y N ERVOUS I LLNESS
took its title from a book published in 1903 by Daniel Paul Schreber, a baroquely crazy Prussian judge who wrote a long,
vivid, heavily footnoted book to establish his sanity and in the end proved just the opposite. Bernhard’s memoir was published
posthumouslyin 1984 and seemed to have been written with great reluctance. Feeling that his buildings were unappreciated, watching his
“slum of a body” decay daily, Bernhard wrote his bitter book from the newly completed Traumhaus during one of Trude’s coldest
winters. “I spent my whole life waiting for a convalescence that never arrived,” he wrote from the Schreber Suite. Bernhard
had left Europe almost fifty years before. Disgusted by the athletic bodies on display at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he fled
to America, though he avoided the orange groves and beaches of Southern California favored by so many of his fellow émigrés,
settling instead in Trude, “a city that was as sick as I was.” Depression-era Trude was a truly bleak place, as the theatres
and mansions of the 1890s had already fallen to ruin, without gaining the historic cachet they have today.
The young Bernhard found work at a brick-export business and lived in a squalid rooming house, where he worked on his English,
lost his virginity to a toothless prostitute, and contemplated what he called “the Weimar solution.” His despair lessened
as his English improved, and he discovered the haven of the Central Library, chiseled with uplifting quotes and studded with
churchlike stained glass windows. He studied European and
of the water tower. At night the pace of commerce slowed and the halls were strangely hushed. Muzak played to a deserted food
court. Tired retailers became sculptural and enigmatic in their chairs, languidly counting the day’s take. I pressed past
the kiosks and novelty stations and moved deeper in.
Perlmutter’s Bookshop, stationed along an obscure curve of the mall’s third ring, was not a thriving concern even in peak
hours. Perlmutter himself had died six months before, leaving a legacy of customer complaints and unclassified volumes. The
woman who’d taken it over had shoulder-length brown hair and wore cashmere sweaters and plaid skirts. Clara was her name,
freshly printed on the plastic badge she wore around her neck.
The pleasure I took watching her struggle to organize the shop was hard to locate or justify. Lately I’d had plenty of timeto contemplate how long it had been since I’d touched a woman’s body, and in truth I was having a harder time enjoying my
videos: I kept getting hung up on the fact that the belles of
Card Catalog Confidential
weren’t real librarians. They probably weren’t even readers, those lithe and tweed-skirted belles. Clara, by contrast, was
the genuine article, a laid-off librarian forced by circumstance to confront Perlmutter’s mostly used inventory. She worked
in a systematic way, pulling and sorting from the beached boxes that lined the aisles, climbing stepladders to slot an orphaned
title in, bending over the desk to check her bibliography on the computer. She had a peculiar sigh that started sharp, then
slid down to cadence.
I grabbed a copy of Bernhard’s memoir from the stack on the desk and brought it to the corner armchair. At this outpost I
could read, or watch Clara, or gaze through the front windows at the consumers walking the hedge labyrinth, heads down. Toward
closing time Clara would settle behind the desk herself, and the only sounds in the shop were our turning pages.
I only broke this silence once, to ask whether I was bothering her.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I kind of enjoy having you there, like a gargoyle or something.”
I smiled and returned to my reading.
M EMOIRS OF M Y N ERVOUS I LLNESS
took its title from a book published in 1903 by Daniel Paul Schreber, a baroquely crazy Prussian judge who wrote a long,
vivid, heavily footnoted book to establish his sanity and in the end proved just the opposite. Bernhard’s memoir was published
posthumouslyin 1984 and seemed to have been written with great reluctance. Feeling that his buildings were unappreciated, watching his
“slum of a body” decay daily, Bernhard wrote his bitter book from the newly completed Traumhaus during one of Trude’s coldest
winters. “I spent my whole life waiting for a convalescence that never arrived,” he wrote from the Schreber Suite. Bernhard
had left Europe almost fifty years before. Disgusted by the athletic bodies on display at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he fled
to America, though he avoided the orange groves and beaches of Southern California favored by so many of his fellow émigrés,
settling instead in Trude, “a city that was as sick as I was.” Depression-era Trude was a truly bleak place, as the theatres
and mansions of the 1890s had already fallen to ruin, without gaining the historic cachet they have today.
The young Bernhard found work at a brick-export business and lived in a squalid rooming house, where he worked on his English,
lost his virginity to a toothless prostitute, and contemplated what he called “the Weimar solution.” His despair lessened
as his English improved, and he discovered the haven of the Central Library, chiseled with uplifting quotes and studded with
churchlike stained glass windows. He studied European and
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