Our Two-Person Book Club Lasted Thirty Years
One book a month, two chairs, and a friendship with a syllabus.
Marianne and I were the only two people who ever showed up to the Tuesday book club at the Deepdale branch library, and the librarian cancelled it to our faces.
"Two members isn't a club," she said, unpinning the notice from the board while we stood there holding our copies of Beloved. Marianne, sixty then to my twenty-nine, looked at the woman the way you look at weather. "Two members is exactly a club," she said. "Everything larger is a committee." Then she turned to me, a stranger in a wet coat, and said, "First Thursday of the month. My kitchen. Bring your own opinions, I have too many already."
That was October 1995. We held the last meeting this past March. Three hundred and fifty-three books, one kitchen, two chairs, and a friendship that outlasted four prime ministers, two of my careers, one of my marriages, and, in the end... one of us.
The rules accreted like limescale. You finished the book or you came anyway and confessed. No phones on the table, a rule invented before it was needed, which was very Marianne. Whoever hated the current book most picked the next one, a system she designed, she claimed, "to punish the sulky."
One question each per meeting that the other had to answer honestly, about the book or not, and we were both cowards about that rule for the first five years and surgeons with it ever after. Coffee in the two green cups her late husband had brought back from Portugal, mine always on the left.
If you have never had a ritual like this, I do not know how to explain what it holds. It is not the books... the books are the excuse the calendar needs.
People ask what a two-person book club talks about for thirty years. Here is a sample. Whether Ishiguro's butler knew. Whether my first novel manuscript was honest (her verdict: "It's very well built, like a show home. Nobody lives in it"). Whether her son's fiancée was a mistake (mine: yes; history's: also yes). What Middlemarch understands about marriage that I, mid-divorce with my chin in my hands at her table, did not. The year Asha left me, Marianne chose the books like a doctor writing prescriptions, and never once said the word divorce. She just kept handing me lives worse and braver than mine, one spine at a time.
We fought once, properly, in year twelve.
She told me I had become a man who wrote for applause, that my second book was "three hundred pages of ducking." I called her a spectator, safe in her kitchen, grading lives she'd never risked. Terrible things, both true.
We did not speak for five weeks... but the first Thursday came, and I stood on her step at seven exactly, because missing the meeting was a language neither of us was willing to speak, and she opened the door holding the next book and said, "You're on the left," and we discussed A River Runs Through It in a fury of politeness until, somewhere around the second coffee, we were us again. The ritual did what neither of us could do on purpose. It let us back in without a door.
The chemo year, 2011, we dropped novels entirely. Her concentration was shot and she refused abridgements on moral grounds, so we read poems instead, short enough to survive a bad afternoon. She liked the ones about hope least and needed them most, and told me so, which was the bravest sentence I heard that decade. When her hair grew back she chose Lonesome Dove, seven hundred pages, out of what she called "spite toward my own mortality."
She was ninety this past winter. I knew what the cough meant before either of us said it. At the February meeting she assigned March's book as always, Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, thin as a wafer, and I understood that too. She died on the eighteenth, at home, her son on one side and her daughter on the other, and the following Thursday I sat in my car outside her house for forty minutes... because my body did not know where else to be on a first Thursday at seven.
Here is the turn I did not see coming.
At the funeral her son Peter handed me a parcel, wrapped in the brown paper she saved from deliveries. "She was very specific," he said. "After the service, not before. She said you'd make a scene, and she wanted to miss it." Inside was a ledger, the stiff gray kind ironmongers used, and in it, in her tall hand, every meeting we ever held. Date. Book. And one line.
I assumed the lines would be about the books. They were about me.
"Oct 1995. Beloved. The boy in the wet coat disagrees like someone starving. Feed him." "June 2003. Middlemarch. He is lonely and lying about it. Assign Eliot until he stops." "May 2007. A River Runs Through It. We said unforgivable things. He came anyway. Note: he came anyway." "Nov 2011. Poems again. He watched me not eat and pretended to be quarreling about stanzas. I let him. That is also love." Three hundred and fifty-three entries, and I read every one at her kitchen table like a man finding out he had been photographed his whole life from a window across the street, except the photographer had also fed him dinner once a month for thirty years.
We thought we were reading books. We were taking attendance for each other's lives.
The last entry was dated the day before she died. "Book 354. He'll think the club is over. Tell him: a syllabus doesn't end, it just changes teachers. He picks now. He must pick something he'd have hated at thirty. And he keeps the chair."
I have written about her since, or tried, walking straight at the grief the way she'd have made me do by the second coffee. Most of it is ducking, three hundred pages of it; she'd have caught that. But one piece came out clean, about how memory is not a warehouse but a meeting you keep attending, and I read it aloud in her kitchen before Peter sold the house, to the chairs, feeling like a fool, feeling exactly right.
The club continues.
First Thursday, seven o'clock, my kitchen now. I make two coffees because the ritual is the ritual, mine on the left, hers on the right in the green Portuguese cup Peter insisted I take. Book 354 was Beloved, back where we started, and she was right, I would have hated rereading at thirty what I could barely survive at sixty. I read the best paragraph of each month's book aloud to the second chair... and I do not feel her there, I want to be honest, this is not that kind of story. What I feel is thirty years of first Thursdays holding the room in shape, the way a riverbank holds a river.
The right-hand coffee goes cold every month. I have decided that is not the sad part. The sad part would be an empty table. Somewhere in the ledger she wrote, "Ritual is just love with a calendar," and I am keeping the calendar, and the cup steams for a while every first Thursday, which means that for ten minutes a month, at least, everything on that table is still warm.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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