Book Doctor. Esther Cohen

chosen those books out of hundreds of queries, maybe more. She placed ads in writer’s journals, on bulletin boards, and in bookstores, but most of the mail came from strangers who had gotten her name from clients and friends. She found out very quickly that the world was full of unwritten books, ideas, and intentions. Many people, old, young, educated or not, poor, rich, in-between, wanted a book that was theirs.

      Almost every day, she received letters about books. These letters were her life. They were her friends and her children. They were her secret mantra, her addiction, her way of living. They were funny and sad and alive, and she waited for them, often saving them to open at very particular moments: at three o’clock on a winter Wednesday when nothing else could possibly happen, or at six on Thursday nights in the spring. They were rituals, small holidays. She carried them with her on trips and when she went visiting. Parceling them out each day like vitamins. She saved each query in a file, for no particular reason except that she liked getting so many letters from strangers. She didn’t want to let them go. And she answered them all, trying to say something more than No.

      She often chose which manuscripts to take by how the packages felt. If she could feel something inside the envelope, some sign of life, if the handwriting had a portent to it, if a certain heft was there, or a lightness, or if she just liked the way the envelope looked—the placement of stamps, the color ink, the texture of the paper—she’d take it on.

      She had some rules. No violent books. No books where the author used flags or love stamps on their query letters. No books that were racist or sexist or stupid. No books with light in the title, or dolphin, dog, or whale. No books that made fun of Jewish mothers. No survivor stories. No books about rocks, or money, or rockets, or rivers, or snow. No books with characters named Pops, or Peeps, Mary Lou, Anne Marie, Jean Marie, or Jean. No books with titles in Latin. No books with the word sweet anywhere in the text. Or testosterone or self-love. No books that she could forget too quickly.

      Harbinger came to her through a friend of a friend. She could tell, by the overly polite professional way he called her Miss Rosen, that he was trying hard, but she knew too that his book was probably not very good. In the beginning this feeling about authors bothered her. She knew good books were rare, although everyone who came to her more or less believed that theirs, the story they chose to tell, would be the way they would at last receive their due. The rest would logically follow: recognition at long last, and grants, good jobs, rewards, and then, Eternity.

      At first what amazed her were the stories, their range and subject matter, the countless ideas people had for their books. Some wrote novel after unpublished novel. Others had an idea, and just knew it should be a book. Some loved Asian history, or Einstein, or making chairs, or egg recipes, or researching revolutions, or why some people sneezed and others didn’t, how people prayed, what wellness meant. They wrote often, no matter what their lives were like, no matter what got in the way.

      Arlette was a person full of doubt. She doubted she could do very much except fix a sentence, replace one word with another: celadon for light green, ecstasy for intense happiness. Even her changes, her reordered paragraphs, were never absolute. She knew they could always be better. So could her life. She imagined herself otherwise, a person she would never be, confident, sure. Unambivalently idealistic, committed to large goals, alongside elegant, memorable sentences. She wanted, if she was entirely honest, to sit in a room—it didn’t matter where—and write: every story she knew, every story she didn’t know. She wanted to describe earthy strangers, married lovers, Jerusalem, Jackson Heights, white peaches, home-care workers, the hands of young children. She hardly wrote at all.

      But it was always somehow there, right below the surface. She imagined it would begin with the weather: a Turgenev storm maybe, wet but not too cold. Jerusalem dampness, melting to light pinkish sun. Dampness that held the smell of kerosene. Sun would hover behind clouds, perceptible but barely. She pictured characters having a picnic under an ancient tree, twisted and beautiful, an eternal tree along a rill. The muezzin would climb up onto his tower, and his sounds would cover the picnic, adding eternal song.

      She could smell light dust, and greenness. Her characters would eat bright red luscious tomatoes, milky white sheep’s cheese, and shiny olives wet with garlic and fragrant oils. They would carry their bread in colorful handkerchiefs. Sometimes, she imagined her characters fighting. She did not ever actually begin in earnest although she often took notes, and wrote ideas, and names in particular, along the margins of magazines, on envelopes and bills, which she would then save in a file marked “Jerusalem, One Day.”

      She always took notes on trips. She would jot down names of small-town beauty shops, Hair-em Salon, or Hair Today, or of strangers she’d meet on buses, Middle Easterners in particular, Jiryis Jiryis, Vartanoush Guroyian, Aryeh Moore, thinking someday she’d weave them together into a coherent, melodic narrative wail, set on top of Jerusalem’s hills, replete with Hasidic bike boys and Hadassah ladies gone wild, Arab olive wood sellers and Palestinian philosophy PhDs, German doctors and thin Swedish tourists. Jerusalem seemed like the only real place for her novel. Not for its holiness, though holiness never hurt. But because of its crazy contradictory powers, its deep memorable fragrance, and its ancient white stones. And the unlikely lovers so possible there, Coptic clerics and Danish dancers, white-garbed nuns and Swedish men, young handsome rabbis, long Dutch girls, dark Palestinians in complex ménages. It was, for her, a place of beauty, of pain, of humor and presence.

      Unlike Venice, achingly beautiful but wetly remote, or Bali, captivating but full of frightening frogs and monkeys, Jerusalem seemed full of stories she knew in her blood.

      She also knew too well how easy it was to fail. She had seen, over and over again, how readily one could write an empty sentence, create characters who barely mumbled, tell a story no one wanted to hear. To write a book that was not Shakespeare or Joyce, was not rhythmic or engaging, was not gentle or angry or even honest. These things scared her.

      Still books obsessed her, obsessed her for what they could be. She’d been a book addict all her life, always reading. She was a difficult reader, and knew that it was easier to criticize people who were trying than to actually write herself. Like a single aunt, other people and their books became her life. She would meditate on occasion, go to movies, see friends for dinner, but it was books that took over her days, all those characters, all those plots and theories and stories about everything from Elvis’s hairdresser’s memoirs to the Exxon Valdez. These stories became her life.

      Along with Jake.

      Jake was very opinionated. Sometimes she joked that his thinness was the result of his feeling that no food was good enough to enter his body. Jake, when people asked what he did, would reply that he was In Film. He meant that he worked in a place called Film Focus, a nearly Italian downtown theater, small and modern, dark and imposing, that saw the world as a series of film festivals organized largely by subject. All you could eat at the Focus was espresso with biscotti, almond or chocolate. White sugar was taboo.

      Jake ran a series called Point of View. As he explained to Arlette many times, not everything was a point of view. His point of view specialty was drama.

      Nature was the example he’d give. A documentary that you’d see on PBS on black bears in Montana was definitely not a point of view. Much else was, however, and many evenings, Arlette would watch the point of view Jake had chosen. In a way, their work was similar, though Jake did not agree. He believed that film transcended written language. That it was more, and better, that moving image was comparable to nothing else. That it was as close as you could come to the dream life really was.

      Jake saw film as a real chance for audience. For very large numbers. Particularly because of videos and DVDs. Of course, Jake’s own tastes had nothing to do with audience. He liked experimental Czech films, sometimes animated, films that only showed at midnight during the week at the Focus. Films about puppets, and music, and death. He liked film noir, and had many favorite directors: Kurosawa, Scorsese, Coppola, Herzog, Bertolucci.

      They argued about this often. They’d met at a Fellini retrospective at the Focus, three years before. Arlette had just broken up with a Palestinian revolutionary named Fuad. She felt relieved. Fuad always made her feel