Middle Age by Joyce Carol Oates

peacefulness, in winter especially, as he leaned on his elbows on the counter, gazing out. “Not that I’m a happy man, nor even an unhappy man,’’ he’d told her. “But happiness, unhappiness, are too trivial to matter.
    In such a place you become your own imagining. You feel nothing, or everything. You melt out into the sky.”
    Marina said, trying for a brisk practical tone, “The refrigerator. I’ll come empty it, and the cupboards, some other time. Not now.”
    Roger was walking swiftly ahead. But Marina, seeing a stack of books
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    J C O
    on the floor, beside a closet, its door partly ajar, paused to inspect them, and this was the first of her shocks: these books in their bright, glossy covers, newly purchased, were from the Salthill Bookstore. Marina swung open the closet door to see more books, a hundred books perhaps, stacked sideways on the shelves. Poetry, fiction, art, history. She stared at first without comprehension. Then the realization came to her, like a blow to the chest: Adam had purchased these books himself.
    Since Adam’s investment in the bookstore and his frequent visits, especially when he took over in Marina’s absence, she’d noticed an increase in sales and profits. Some months, the increase was modest; at other times it was—well, heartening, exciting. “Adam, there’s good news: we’re making money .” Marina had attributed this business upsurge to her new partner’s simple presence in the store: Adam was a popular Salthill figure whom other men liked to talk with and to whom women were attracted. Individuals who’d never entered the Salthill Bookstore dropped by when Adam was around. It was his idea to buy some rattan chairs, get a coffee machine, encourage customers to sit down in frank imitation of the big chain bookstores; he’d envisioned expanding into the adjacent store, where a picture framing business was on the wane; unlike Marina, he never worried about the future. Because he was subsidizing the business . Our best customer .
    Marina recalled with a pang of embarrassment packing a box of unsold books back in January, mostly poetry books from distinguished small presses, and asking her assistant to return them to the distributor, and returning next day to the store to discover that the box was gone. Marina’s assistant reported that Adam had “sold” the entire box—to a “collector from New Jersey.” Janice hadn’t been in the store at the time of the purchase, and hadn’t seen this serendipitous customer, who was described as a retired English professor from a women’s Catholic college with a special interest in contemporary American poetry, but the sale was in the computer, an astounding $68.. How naive Marina had been, how desperately she must have wanted to believe! Seeing some of the titles now on Adam’s closet shelves, stuck away unread, Marina recalled how adroitly Adam had deceived her. Though she’d been mildly suspicious, in a teasing sort of way, about Adam’s special customers (“Women, obviously”) who only appeared when Marina was nowhere near.
    When will I meet this customer, Adam?
    Marina dear, she’s so much older than you are, have pity on her. We all must have our romantic fantasies .
    Middle Age: A Romance
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    “Marina, is something wrong?”
    Roger, who’d gone on ahead, had returned to see why she wasn’t following him. Marina lifted angry tear-brimming eyes to his face. “Adam was humoring me. Buying books from the store, all these .” Roger frowned and seemed embarrassed. In a clumsy gesture of sympathy he picked up one of the poetry books and leafed through it as if seeking evidence to refute Marina’s suspicions. She said, “I wanted so badly to believe that . . .
    business was improving.” And a good man, a gallant man, had entered her life, to change it forever . “I suppose—everyone in Salthill knew?” Roger said, in his lawyerly, argumentative voice,