The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(24)

It brought Dan no pleasure, none that Miriam could see, to make his new coworker so miserable. She sat on a step stool next to him and wrapped her arms around her body. He could feel she was waiting for reassurance that her secret wouldn’t become public, but he was in no position to offer her that. He wished her no malice, but that was perhaps the best reason of all to tell someone what he’d seen.

“You know,” Dan said, “everyone always says that the time they were caught doing something was the first time they ever did it.”

Dan scratched a book title off his list with a pencil. He looked only at the call numbers on the flags that poked out of the books, and not at the titles. He didn’t have any interest in the titles, in the books that some upmarket surname working on their second PhD would pore over for weeks.

“I promise this is a really good job,” said Miriam. “I know that it pays the same as the job in shipping, I know that, but it’s not all skids and loading docks. It’s beautiful books and brilliant minds. If you stick around, if you get to know the place and the people, you might be softened by the work. Inspired by it even. I was trying to do a good thing, bringing you here.”

“Listen. You seem nice. I have no quarrel with you. I’ve seen plenty of what I needed to see of the people to make my judgments,” Dan said. “And as for being inspired by work, you and I must come from different worlds. I don’t need to be inspired by my work. I need to be paid for it, and for it to not interfere with the rest of my life.”





7


Liesl completed the check of stack 538 as she had done with stack 537 and stack 536 before it. She scratched the row off her list and did some mental math that identified some day, approximately six months in the future, as the estimated date of completion for the current effort.

“Stack 540 is done,” Francis called. “Can you cross it off the list?”

“Should I start in another area?”

“No, keep going. I like the idea of us meeting in the middle. Very unlike us, wouldn’t you say?”

“The things that unite us, Francis.”

“I don’t know. More like reunite us.” They were both poking their heads out of their stacks and looking at each other down the aisle. “Can I be honest? For a long time I thought that once we got old, when the past was far behind us, we’d be friends again.”

“Francis. You didn’t have to wait until we got old. I’d have been friends all along.”

“Well, you know. There were the old complications. And my wife didn’t very much like you.”

“Nor you, in the end.”

“Indeed. I think I’d have stayed with her, though, if I’d been given the choice.”

“Would you have?”

“Yes, I think so. She was never very nice, but there’s a lot to be said for not having to be alone as you enter your Metamucil years.”

The old librarian, before he’d become old or a librarian, had served in the Foreign Service in some mysterious capacity. His facility with languages and the quick analysis of texts was an asset from the period, but the total lack of interpersonal relationships from that period of his life was a liability. The gregarious, intelligent, well-brought-up man with the mysterious brown eyes had spent his formative years learning to be alone. The lesson had stuck.

“And she doesn’t mind being alone? Or is she with someone now? You’ve never told me.”

“She’s done with all that. Who needs a lover when you have a terrible grandchild to dote on? Perhaps if I didn’t find the little bugger so hateful I’d have an easier time of it all.”

Liesl walked around the corner and got started on stack 539, wondering now about what the lack of Christopher might mean to a man like Francis. She had stopped talking and so had he, but they were within each other’s body heat now—him checking the books at one end of the stack and her at the other until eventually they would meet in the middle. He was pulling a book gently by its spine; she was opening an unmarked box.

“I think it’s lonely,” said Liesl. “No matter what. It’s just a thing about getting older.”

“Come on. That’s just the feeling of lovely Hannah growing up. Not the same thing.”

There was a long-unspoken rule that they didn’t talk about Hannah. Certainly not when they were alone. She should have chided him for it, but to do so would mean breaking the rule herself so she let it pass quietly.

“That’s part of it, I’m sure. But not all.”

“John-O still having his troubles?”

“Nothing like that,” she said. “I just think people retreat in on themselves as they age. So even if you’re not alone it can get a bit lonely.”

“I don’t know,” Francis studied the colophon of a book that was clearly not one of the Plantin volumes. “I think it’s the fact that our friends keep dying on us.” He reshelved the book and pulled out its nearest neighbor.

“Well, yes. That certainly doesn’t help.”

“I think I know what you’re saying, though, about the loneliness that arrives in your sixties. I can’t imagine it gets better as time goes on.”

“Married or not, it creeps in.”

“Still. Must be nice to have someone around to shag,” Francis said with a grin.