The Diary Thieves
The first chapter of the novel I am rewriting, which started as this short story.
There it was again, the tightening in her chest, the fear of what the night might bring, closing in around her, tunneling her vision, squeezing her throat.
Elle had taken the train to Brooklyn. She’d followed the instructions from the little encrypted messaging app. She’d walked out into the middle of nowhere, past the Navy Yards, under the BQE, turning when she got to an enormous self-storage facility.
Social situations always came with some measure of anxiety for Elle, but going to a meeting of the Secret Readers, and knowing they knew so much about her, tended to be the worst.
When she got to an empty block of factories, she leaned against a streetlamp and concentrated on breathing. She had studied ways to calm herself. She’s taken her pills, but it was only the excitement that let her keep the fear in check. She focused on her need until her pounding heart relented.
She looked at her phone again. The password to the messenger app was long, but she’d memorized it. Encrypted messages, burner phones, and even code words whispered through slits in doors. Things she never thought she could handle, but somehow she figured them all out. The curiosity trumped all of her shortcomings and failings and fear, eventually. Sometimes she just had to stop and wait for the anxiety to pass.
The little map started to make sense. Landmarks instead of street names and numbers. Less chance of someone figuring out where they were meeting. The secrecy was important, certainly, though sometimes it seemed a little much. What they were doing wasn’t strictly illegal. However, she tried not to think about where people got the diaries.
Her obsession, what had her out on a dark street looking for secret doors, started in a very common way. The first diary she ever read was one she was one many people have read. Often the only diary most people will ever read; The Diary of Anne Frank.
Sad, wise, informative, historical, but hardly scintillating by any stretch of the imagination. Still, something about it struck her. Something clicked. Reading someone’s personal writing. Reading words not meant to be shared. Imagining the writer furiously scribbling and then hiding their words. It captured Elle’s imagination.
Then at around fifteen, she found Anaïs Nin, who had published many volumes of her journals. Journals about living in Paris and New York, and Cuba. Journals of an artist and an adulteress. Elle bought a few of them at a time, usually from used bookstores. She stole a few from the library, too embarrassed to check out the somewhat risqué books. She read them over and over again, reveling in Nin’s secret life.
It was when she had run out of Nin’s words that she reached out, looking for more.
Autobiographies did nothing for her. It had to be written without the author knowing it would be published. There were a few books available in the mainstream that hit her buttons, but she always wanted more. She always wanted secret things, things no one else could read. She often dreamt of lifting up someone’s mattress and finding pretty little tomes. Stealing their most personal secrets.
Eventually, she started going to yard sales and estate sales. She searched eBay. She found rumors of the Dark Web, but she wasn’t savvy enough to really investigate them. Eventually, she found The Secret Readers.
The Secret Readers were, most simply, an online forum where people traded pictures and scans of diaries—all kinds of diaries and journals. From the angsty scribblings of teenagers, to the dramas of married adults, to the last words of death row inmates, the secret confessions of nuns, the rantings of people in asylums, from everywhere.
It wasn’t just diaries. There were small factions that collected love letters,
Dear John letters, unpublished poetry never meant for strangers’ eyes, even the seemingly benign, like shopping lists and doodles.
For a while, Elle had been fascinated by photos of the notebooks of homeless men. Their conspiracy theories and mad ramblings had a certain angry chaotic charm.
There was a hierarchy to the forums. Elle had to comment and post things and make herself known for almost a year before she got invited to the real threads. Outside of the simple superficial conversations where people posted the same twenty or thirty diaries that everyone knew about online. It took two years until she got invited to the local group.
The New York group was a splinter of the larger forum and was by invitation only and vigorously moderated. There were less than a hundred active members at any time. Most importantly, the New York group was not just an online entity, they had in-person meetings and in person readings.
The whole online thing was just a means to an end for Ell all along. She never much enjoyed text chats and discussion threads. She just wanted the physical secrets. She wanted to hear the inner narratives. She wanted to see the yellowed paper and touch the scratched-up covers. She wanted to smell those diaries.
That got her walking again, looking for a very particular landmark. The directions said, “Monkey with a hat.” Turning around in a circle, she saw another old factory building, but this one had faded paint on the brick façade. Some kind of mechanic, the information mostly faded, but a smiling chimp with a blue baseball hat pointed to the sky with a wrench.
She walked to that building. There was a flier taped to the door. “NYSR Journalism Study Group, Fifth Floor, Studio 58b.”
It was a long walk up the five flights of stairs, and she stopped to catch her breath when she got to the fourth floor. When she got to the fifth, she pushed open the large door that was propped half-open with a two-by-four. She found herself in a long empty hallway that was the same gray as the stairway, floor to ceiling.
She passed doors. Some were marked with simple placards noting “Jay Bird’s Tattoos,” and “New Urban Photography,” some completely anonymous, and still others elaborately covered with colorful signs, artwork, posters, and bumper stickers. Marijuana leaves, peace signs, graffiti.
Studio 58b was the last door at the end of the hall. The door was painted a muted rust red with a small hand-painted sign on a piece of cardboard that said: “By appointment only.” She heard some talking inside. She considered knocking, but decided just to enter.
There was a rush of fresh night air, incense, and the smell of wine. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to all the colors. The studio was surprisingly large, with a tall ceiling. Three of the studio’s walls were covered in bolts of gold, orange, and red fabric. The south wall was made entirely of windows, split into perhaps forty square panes, framed in chipped green painted metal. Many of the windows were open. The view was of the desolate industrial buildings around them and, in the distance, a tiny Manhattan skyline.
There were seven people in the studio. They all looked at her when she entered but turned back to what they were doing a moment later. Somewhat chaotic avant-garde jazz played lightly from unseen speakers.
In the center of the room were four rows of folding chairs, five per row. In front of the chairs was a battered and scraped-up wooden lectern draped with more gold and terracotta-colored fabric, which gave it the look of an altar. That look was emphasized by the two large candles atop it. It was obviously the place where people would read.
Two of the seven people in the room were sitting in folding chairs waiting, and five conversed around a table laden with food and drink. There were small but elaborately laid out cheese plates, sweating bottles of prosecco, jugs of water, and a few assorted bottles of whiskey.
Since the readings moved around quite a bit, there were often very different atmospheres and tones to each gathering. The last place was a somewhat sterile white-walled gallery with hummus, carrots, and a box of white wine. Before that, it was a community center basement, with an ancient coffee urn and donuts.
The group did a pretty good job of weeding out the truly scary, but the shared fetish of the group meant everyone had some level of creepiness. It was something she had to accept quickly when socializing with the New York group. Of the seven people in the room, she knew four by name, two by face, one was a stranger.
Tom from Jersey. In his late fifties, tall, balding, eyes that were far too intense, he had a low growl of a voice. There was a stoutness to him that frightened her a little, like some kind of old sideshow strong man. He liked journals of closeted men, which were not the rarest, but weren’t all that common.
Gordon was small and thin and wore very cheap black suits that made him look like a child at a funeral, though he was in his forties. He liked affairs, especially if he could get some love letters or pieces from both parties. His needs seemed complicated and exhausting to Elle.
Margot was the oldest of them, fragile and impeccably dressed. An Upper West Side dame, in pearls and giant broaches. She liked guilt, mourning, and misfortune. She liked stuff about class and money, neither of which interested Elle much.
Finally, there was Goldberg. She never knew his first name, though it was debatable if any of them used their real names. She went by Elle, but that wasn’t her name. In his late thirties, Goldberg had a large expressive mouth and wore nothing but tweed. Elle didn’t like him, on a very primal level. Perhaps it was because he liked the same things she liked; forbidden relationships. Those who pined for teachers or married friends or cousins. Diaries about secret taboo desires.
The host was pretty, petite, in her late twenties, only a few years younger Elle’s thirty. The host wore paint-splattered black overalls, and it seemed like she wasn’t wearing anything under them. Every move she made gave small electric glimpses of the sides of her breasts. Elle guessed she was the owner of the studio. She was drawn to her immediately.
Elle liked somewhat masculine women and effeminate men, usually. Perhaps she nestled between the two identities, born a woman, but doing her best to dress like Oscar Wilde. Or she would if she had the money. Okay, on a good day, it was more of an Annie Hall impersonation.
She nodded at those who nodded at her as she picked at the cheeses and olives, pouring herself a small but merciful glass of whiskey. It seemed like they were waiting for a few more people. In the meantime, she took a seat and tried once more to steady her racing heart.
As she sat, she felt in her pocket for the book she had brought. She swallowed, hoping her luck would continue and she wouldn’t have to read. Still, she would do what she had to. She was willing to do a lot for her obsession.
There were many rules in the group. One of them was that no one asked where people got the diaries. There was certainly gossip, rumors, stories of holy grail finds in yard sales, illicit deals, and even whispers of elaborate heists.
Another rule was that everyone had to attend a meeting ready to read. Each meeting started with a roll call and then a random selection of three readers. Once, it was done by fortune cookies. Once, everyone drew a tarot card. Once, they all had to roll some strange multi-sided dice.
Looking around, she saw that there was a large spherical brass cage at the end of the buffet table. In it were white balls for Bingo.
Elle had never had much luck finding diaries, which was one of the reasons the Secret Readers were so important to her. Still, she knew she might have to read, so she brought the only thing she could think to bring—her own teenage diary.
It was not one of her five pink childhood diaries with their little heart-shaped locks. Nor was it one of the three purple diaries with shining gold engraved stars that she wrote in through middle school and early high school. She brought one of the four black leather-bound volumes she wrote in during the end of high school and the start of college.
She had it in the big pocket of her oversized black slacks, and occasionally she touched her pocket to make sure it was still there. A comforting rectangle of memories. She hoped she wouldn’t have to use it, she wouldn’t have to share it, but if she did, it would be a small price to pay.
Each reading she had been to was aesthetically very different, but emotionally very similar. The big secret in her life, the thing it was difficult to even explain, was all around her in those reading rooms. The thing she hid from the world was out in the open. In fact, she often felt like the least deviant person in the room during readings.
There was such an overwhelming sense of freedom and belonging. Knowing she wasn’t alone in her desires. Seeing the desperation in the eyes of others that she thought only existed in the mirror. All at once familiar, repulsive, and arousing.
Malloy and Levi came in together. Two handsomely disheveled men in their twenties, one dark-skinned with a Caribbean patois, the other a high-cheekboned Filipino. They always traveled together and didn’t seem to have particular themes to their readings. They just liked secrets.
Harp followed soon after, their de facto leader, though they had other leaders in the time Elle had been in the group. Harp was tall, vaguely Eastern European, and androgynous. As usual, they wore an off-white suit, looking a bit like Bowie in his Pale White Duke phase. They spoke very little, but seemed to command rooms when they did.
Some others trickled in. Elle knew she must have met them online, but she couldn’t put screen names to real faces. When there were fifteen of them, Harp went up to the lectern and cleared their throat.
“Under your seats, you will find a card with a number,” Harp said just loud enough to be heard by all. There were murmurs and chairs scraping as they all got their cards. Elle’s real “eleven.”
“Our host has offered to do us the honor,” they said, motioning to the overall-wearing painter. She curtsied, which might have looked awkward if someone less charming did it.
She turned the handle on the bingo cage, and the room was filled with the sound of clattering wooden balls. Elle wondered what the host’s connection was to The Secret Readers. Was she a member? A facilitator? A fan? When the clattering stopped, she reached in and pulled out three balls.
“Four, eleven, and nine,” she said simply. She had a New England accent, perhaps Maine. Elle’s stomach silently dropped. Her hands were instantly sweaty. For a moment, she couldn’t hear.
She saw the other two hold up their cards, so she did the same. It wavered in the air as her hand shook. Goldberg, a woman Elle didn’t know, and her. Goldberg turned and smiled at her. Anger tried to swell but was no match for the fear.
“If there are no comments from the group, I invite Mr. Goldberg up to read first,” Harp said, nodding to him and then taking a seat in the front row.
Goldberg was in brown and yellow herringbone tweed. His suit looked old, but not shabby, just well worn, most certainly vintage. His hair was salt and pepper. His shirt was light blue, and his tie was navy.
He brought up a tiny but thick notebook. It was hardcover, bound in red fabric. The corners were bent. It looked like it had been roughed up, maybe even found in the garbage.
He cleared his throat and looked over the crowd from the pulpit. Elle wondered if it was only her imagination telling her his gaze hovered on her before he opened the book.
Goldberg read.
June 29th - I’m grateful to be in the back seat alone. We ended up being too many people even for the station wagon, so we took three cars. So here we are, driving back upstate for the summer.
The Morgensterns will be at their cabin next door, and so our two families will have joint cookouts and so on, as usual. I’m dreading Lisa Morgenstern’s arrival, but apparently, we’ll have a few weeks before she gets there to annoy me and bat her big cow eyes.
In a shocking turn of events, cousin Anthony is coming with us. It’s Anthony now that he is in college. He dreads Tony, apparently, as much as I hate Mikey. It’s bad enough we can’t pick our names, must they give us nicknames as well?
July 2nd - A constant tension has been laid over the big summer house like a fog. It’s everywhere, touching everything. I feel it from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep. I feel it most acutely when I’m in bed but also when we are all in the big parlor together.
Summer in the Hudson Valley is calm, warm, and humid, but the big house is kept cool. Every morning, Dad reads his paper, Mom reads her romance novels, Peggy knits, the boys play with their toy trains on the floor, and I sit as far from Cousin Anthony as I can.
He is very good at not getting caught watching me, but I feel his eyes on my bare legs, on my neck, on my body. I sit by the window, writing in this diary, and he examines me from across the room. Sometimes I wonder if he knows I’m gay. Other times it seems absurd that he wouldn’t know. I never really know what I look like to people. In the mirror, it’s obvious. In my father’s eyes, it’s impossible.
I feel like eventually I will be taught the rules. How to find the others like me. The signals, the handshake, whatever it was. They don’t seem to teach that at Croton Prep.
I feel like there has always been this shadow between Anthony and me. His two faces, the one he puts on for everyone else and the one he shows me, secretly, over his shoulder.
Nothing has ever happened. We’ve never talked about it. But it’s always been there. Now that I’m eighteen and he’s twenty-two, it somehow seems more straightforward. Somehow it feels darker, more threatening, and simultaneously more real, more possible.
I hate it. And I hate that it is comforting. Like no matter how ugly I feel or how much of an outcast, there is this dark shadow that wants me, in whatever possessive perverted way.
I remember when I first figured out my body, at night, in bed. It wasn’t the hunky jock boys at school I thought about or even the preppy popular ones. It wasn’t someone in drama. It wasn’t even movie stars. It was always ugly people. It was mean people. Even if I tried to jerk off thinking about Tom Cruise, the fantasy would shift, and he would become a distorted shadow figure.
Scarred faces and big hairy hands. Tall cruel men who reach out to cover my mouth. Anthony, with his face drawn down, looking at me through his thick eyelashes, smiling at my discomfort. He wasn’t ugly on the outside, but his insides made me squirm.
July 5th - Last night, before the fireworks, with the sweetness of the margarita I stole swimming in my mouth, I met Anthony’s gaze with a wink instead of an eye roll. I thought he would be surprised, but he wasn’t. He was aggressive.
With the younger boys splashing in the pool and my parents busy with Gin Rummy, we found ourselves at the other end of the backyard following the little stone path to the tool shed.
He came up from behind me and pushed me against the small wooden shed. His bare chest against my bare back. I put my hands on the warm wood, the flaking paint. I didn’t look back.
“Tell me to stop,” he whispered in my ear, his hands on my bare stomach. I wore nothing but my swim trunks. I didn’t tell him to stop.
His fingers were greedy for my skin, my chest, slipping under my wet swimsuit. He let out little growls when he touched me. My body itched for his strong hands, and his eager attention.
There were a few new first times to check off my list. I don’t know how to celebrate them. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do while he knelt in front of me, so I rested my hands on his head, in his hair. It felt like swimming in hot water.
After all of the various doings, we walked back as if nothing had happened. I felt the smile on my face when we were back with everyone else. It was so strange that no one noticed my blush because my face felt like it was on fire.
Then, this morning he was gone without a word. My father told me over bacon and eggs that Anthony was up with the sun and on the first train back to the city.
I walked to the beach with my hurt. He texted me later that I was “too pretty” and that he “couldn’t control himself around me.” It was the first time anyone had ever called me pretty. There is something potent in that word, far beyond handsome. That made it easy to romanticize the loss of him. It made me feel like a siren. It made me feel like a treasure men might die for. I liked that.
Back at the big house, I moped and read poetry and contemplated what to do with another two weeks.
The Morgensterns will be here soon, and with them, the torture of Lisa’s endless prattling. Still, her brother will be here too, and I haven’t seen him for three years. He’s been at college, like me, and I wonder if it did to him what it did to Anthony. Perhaps the tool shed will need another visit. Perhaps I’ll become the slut of the little summer village up here.
The gardeners and townies can all take a turn after I run through my cousins and the older brothers of my friends. I’m horrible, but at least I can make myself laugh. Time for a swim.
With that, Goldberg closed the book. There was scattered, somewhat awkward applause. Looking around, Elle saw some red cheeks and some crossed legs. Their host got up for water. Elle wanted some as well, but couldn’t get her legs to move.
As always, it pressed Elle’s buttons in a way that made her mute and unable to move. Gears turning in her head. The bit about fantasies, ugly faces, and mean people. So on the nose for her, it could have been a page from her own diary. She thought about the phrase “too pretty,” the uncontrollable desire of men. The frightening potency of an older man. How it was repulsive and alluring.
“It made me feel like a siren. It made me feel like a treasure men might die for.”
She closed her eyes briefly and let the thrill fill her. All those secrets. All those details. That last bit, that dirty bit. Potent.
“Sebastian,” Harp said from their seat, and Elle turned to see a woman she had never met get up to read next. She was tall with light brown skin, liberally peppered with freckles. Her hair was a short afro.
She stood in front of the group with the confidence of someone used to speaking in public. She had a small crooked grin.
Sebastian read.
I see him once a year. Well, sometimes we bump into each other around the city, but really I only see him once a year on purpose. Every year on my birthday. It’s a very special day, sacred and frightening. There aren’t many things I consider sacred in this world. Honestly, there aren’t many things I consider truly frightening, either. I’ve seen too much. Still, every birthday, I risk my life as a tradition. As a sacrament.
He’s a horrible person, Benjamin. I know that. He’s hurt people I know, people I love. It’s part of the reason I go out of my way not to engage with him the rest of the year. It’s also the reason I see him that day. He’s the only one who I can do it with, and I need someone there.
I get a room for us at the Chelsea Hotel. It’s a pain in the ass to book, but worth it. We need the chaotic energy of that place. We need the ghosts and the memories.
We meet at the bar across the street. I buy him his bourbon. We catch up in a very perfunctory way. I don’t really want to know about his life, and honestly, I don’t want to tell him about mine. Eventually, I ask if he has “it,” and he gives me a crooked cocky smile and nods.
We go back to the room, and for one time a year, that one day I see him, I revisit another old friend.
He has his lucky spoon with him and cooks in the bathroom. Powder swirling in water, bubbling, and that very particular smell. Light, almost vinegary. I tie myself off and wait. He smiles at me as he prepares my shot.
I know I’ll get sick. The fact that he usually doesn’t tells me it’s not as infrequent an act for him. The pleasure waves are tidal, crashing with memories of another life. The pull of it. The desperation that once ruled everything in my world. The singular gravitational center of my universe. That Black Hole I somehow escaped. The purity of the pleasure is always startling.
Every birthday I spend in that hotel. Where the muses haunt every bathroom, and I tempt fate. Just to see. Just to fuck with myself. Just to revisit an old friend who is an asshole in the place where poets and rockstars and gods have done the same thing a thousand times before us.
And for a while, I talk to him like he is actually still my friend. He’s good at being on drugs in a way a lot of other people aren’t. We hold each other sometimes. We help each other get through it. Then we sleep.
Then in the morning, the spell is over. His banter is back to being annoying, and I pay for his coffee and bagel and escape as quickly as possible. I go back to my life, but every year it does something to me. It centers me. It makes sure I don’t get too big-headed or cocky or maybe even too jaded.
It’s stupid, but I think of la petite mort. Every birthday, I will not settle for the little death. I want to touch something bigger, something stronger, something genuinely deadly.
Then I spend a year happy that I lived through it, never sure if I’ll go through it again.
She closed the book. The room was silent. The energy was so dramatically different from the first reading that no one seemed to know how to process it.
Elle stayed in the moment as long as she could. The images of the story in her head. The darkness. The fear. The smell. The desperation. As much as she wanted to enjoy the way the story swirled complexly in her head, the knowledge that she would have to read next was there, like a train in the distance. Its approach undeniable, inescapable.
Sebastian sat, and Elle knew she should stand, but once more, her legs didn’t seem to function.
“Elle?” she heard Harp ask, as if from a great distance. There was a beat. She swallowed. Somehow she was standing, walking sideways to get past the other chairs, her legs jelly. Then she was at the podium.
Her hand went to her pocket, slipped in, felt the hard corner of her diary. She took it out and placed it on the podium. It opened to where she had placed a bookmark. The bookmark was from The Strand. She felt very numb and cold.
She read.
September 30th - I have a hundred prospective lovers at this college, and all I can think of are the ones I can’t have. The ones I shouldn’t have. The problem is I think I could have them if I really tried—my untested powers of seduction.
It seems like the mere suggestion of taboo is enough to get me started. An RA isn’t strictly off limits, but Meredith, with her lanyard-butch charm, makes me blush just passing her in the halls.
I’ve come thinking of her warning me about being too loud. Covering my mouth. Tell me all the rules I’m breaking. Telling me she can smell the pot I’m hiding under my mattress. Telling me she knows I sneak out to go clubbing. Telling me I’m a bad girl and she’s going to spank me until I’m obedient.
She’s good fantasy fodder, because the idea of professors is too intense to even play with. I try desperately not to think of them that way. If I let my mind play with them too much, I won’t be able to look at them in class without blushing.
I wonder how they do it. All that attention pointed at them all day. Most of them don’t even seem to notice. That makes it worse for me, because I just want them more. The colder they are, the better. The meaner, the more exacting, the more grumpy and curmudgeonly, the more I want to be the one that takes me.
The chipper ones are useless to me. Make me earn it. Make me work for it. I want to be the one who makes them break their rules.
I listen to the gossip. There is always someone fucking a professor. I can live vicariously. It doesn’t make me jealous. If they did it with someone else, I didn’t want them. I had to be the one who pushed them over the edge. I had to be the one who made them break the rules.
October 10th - It’s finally getting cold, and it makes the world electric and real. The summer is a fog, and everything is soggy and limp. In the crisp autumn air, my brain just works better.
In statistics, I made a list of all the ways sex could be forbidden. I made a list of people it would be inappropriate to fuck. I numbered that list. Tonight when I get home, I’m going to roll dice and force myself to masturbate thinking of whoever matches the number—emotional Russian roulette.
October 12th - I’m alone in my dorm room, and my heart is racing, and I don’t know what to do with my hands. Dr. Carlson’s hand was on my knee one hour ago. A completely inappropriate place for his hand to be. A completely inappropriate thing to have happened.
I went to his office because he wrote a note to do so on one of my papers. I was nervous I had done something wrong, forgotten some requirement for class. I was scared I was failing, which is ridiculous. I’m an A student. When I got to his office, he just narrowed his beady eyes at me and told me to close the door and have a seat.
On his desk was my list. Eighteen names on a piece of graph paper. “People It Would Be Very Very Wrong To Fuck,” was written on top of it. His name was number twelve, just under my step-sister and just above my best friend’s boyfriend.
Dr. Carlson got up and picked up the list, bringing it over to me. He sat down next to me and handed it to me. “I don’t know if I should be flattered or insulted. Is it a good list to be on or a bad one?” He chuckled, putting his hand on my bare knee, my skirt riding up a little as I sat up straighter. His pinky moved up slightly, moving up my inner thigh. My legs opened instinctively.
He laughed as he stood up. I felt humiliated by my desire, which, in many ways, was ideal for me. I saw him straighten his trousers, similarly affected.
“Please be more careful with your personal writings. Someone else on that list, like your roommate, might not be as understanding,” he said, going back behind his desk and sitting down.
I don’t even remember leaving. It was like I blacked out. It was like time dilated. I just remember being back in my dorm room, locking the bathroom door, and furiously getting myself off.
Elle’s hands were numb as she finished. Her ears were ringing. She found her seat and was dimly aware of scattered applause. She groped around for her glass of whiskey and downed it, looking vaguely at the table and wondering when her legs would work enough for her to get another.
When her eyes were able to focus again, she sighed at the sight of Goldberg, holding a full cup of whiskey out for her. “You seemed like you needed it,” he said with a little chuckle.
She took it, though she loathed him even more after his reading connected with her so profoundly. For some reason, the thought of him enjoying the bit of her life she shared made her uncomfortable in a new and profound way.
Looking around, she saw the usual post-reading mingling. In some ways, it was even better than the reading. People were able to touch and leaf through the diaries that had been read. People mingled and talked about their shared “hobby.” She swallowed, wondering who might want to examine hers. Examine her.
Goldberg waited for her to look at him again. She realized he would be the first, of course. She took the book out of her pocket again and handed it to him, trying hard to be detached, to dissociate enough to look like she didn’t care. He was so intent on looking at the book, she doubted he even noticed her grimace.
There was a common rote checklist they did when looking at a diary. Like watch dealers or antiquers or any other hobbyist/fetishist. Look at the spine, go over the covers with your fingers, open the book, and see if there are any inscriptions or notations. Any dates, any names, any clues.
Goldberg, like many others, was obsessed with locks. Almost all of the little locks on diaries were simple and mostly cosmetic. Still, many collectors liked to keep them intact, and make replicas of the original keys.
Elle had blacked out her name in her diary. She had left the date. She had gone over that book page by page a hundred times and ripped out any entries that had any personal facts. She’d crossed out a few names. She’d sanitized it of details, but left all of the truths.
He nodded sagely at the numbers. His fingers traced ballpoint pen drawings of crows and bare-limbed trees. He found the bookmark she had left and read over the entries she had just read. Then he looked up at her.
His whisper was low and conspiratorial. “I’ll give five hundred,” he said, looking around, knowing it was uncouth to talk about a purchase at a reading. She simply shook her head, no.
“I can’t go any higher than seven,” he said, paging through to the end.
“It’s not for sale. I don’t have a large collection. This is one of my only pieces,” she said, stumbling a little over the lie. He looked at her. He might have thought her hesitation was some negotiation tactic. He nodded, almost impressed.
“Perhaps a rental or a trade? One month with mine for a month with yours? And a c-note to sweeten the deal?”
She swallowed and closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. “I don’t want to make a deal with you, Goldberg. I don’t like you,” she said, the words making her cold and strong.
His back straightened. He closed the book and held it out to her. “Fine. Bitch,” he said, almost under his breath.
Others came to see her book, but she was less uncomfortable with their attention. She didn’t look at any of the other diaries. Goldberg’s was the only one she wanted to see, but that was ruined. She had another whiskey and then another, only to remember how little she had eaten that day.
As the evening went on, the vibe changed. People paired off. Partaking in their secret activity made many of them amorous. Malloy and Levi made out against a wall.
The host, in her artfully paint splattered clothes, watched everyone with cool amusement. Her eyes fell on Elle, and she felt a little flutter. If she wasn’t in a panic spiral, she would happily do whatever the host told her to do. Unfortunately, she felt like she was going to throw up.
Elle had only partaken in this aspect of the group once, with Harp. The first reading. Of course she went home with the leader. The one that had the only real forbidden quality. The sex was good, though Elle wasn’t able to relax enough to come.
Elle considered that she may have really fucked things up for herself. Pissing off Goldberg might get her banned or uninvited from the next reading. He was one of the most prolific posters.
When he returned to her all smiles, holding his coat and briefcase, she wondered if it was to twist the dagger. He put his things down next to her, awkwardly, and straightened his tie.
“Sorry if I was pushy. No hard feelings. I always enjoy your insight on the forum. Good to see you, Elle,” he said, and she gave him a tight-lipped smile.
“It’s fine,” she said and hated herself for it. He grinned with his eyes.
“Take my memory and leave, you bastard,” she thought.
He put on his coat, picked up his things, and left.
She got her coat, almost falling over as she stood up. The room swam, but it felt good. It made the anxiety dull and distant. She said goodbye to no one. She carefully walked down five flights and then walked five blocks and got a taxi from an app on her phone. Technically they weren’t supposed to, but she couldn’t even wrap her head around trying to find the subway.
It wasn’t until she got home that she realized her diary was gone.