The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(8)

“Nothing to tell yet. You tell me about this fancy new job. I’m so proud of you, Mom.”

“Now you’re the one being silly.”

“Silly how! You’ve secretly been doing all of Chris’s work for years.”

“That’s not true. The collection that Christopher has built…”

“If the dude had to have a stroke for you to finally get the job title you deserve, I’ll take it.”

Liesl shooed her daughter out of the office. “Don’t ever say things like that where people can hear you.”

Liesl drank a lot more wine once John wasn’t there to see her pour it. She would have liked to go to bed but knew what her marriage needed was for John to go to sleep before she came up so she wouldn’t have to reassure him over and over that she wasn’t mad.

She heard the floorboards creaking above her. He was still awake. They didn’t need this big old house, spread over three narrow stories that increasingly made her knees ache when she came down to get coffee in the morning. Hannah rarely spent the night and had no real attachment to her childhood room, which was now mostly used to store canvases. John loved his attic studio and its dancing morning light, but Liesl would be happier if he rented a studio space and moved his operation there. She had once considered it romantic being married to a painter. But romance stories never detailed how much stuff came along with the profession. Blank canvases, abandoned canvases, completed canvases, oil paint, latex paint, paint remover, brushes, jars for brushes, scrappers, easels of every size. It was suffocating.

“I can’t even list it until you get rid of all this stuff,” a real estate agent had told her a couple of years ago when she had first begun to consider retirement and hoped to downsize to a smaller, easier home. The problem was that to John it wasn’t stuff. It was evidence of his work, the output of his heart, the proof of his talent and worthiness. He wasn’t suffocated by it; he was nourished by it. Liesl was awoken from her procrastination by the phone ringing.

“Hello,” Liesl said to the empty office to see how it would sound. She overpronounced the L. She held the O too long. She sounded drunk.

A second ring. Liesl glanced at the display. Marie Wolfe. Christopher’s wife, Marie Wolfe. Christopher’s wife, Marie Wolfe, who Liesl had not yet spoken to since his stroke. Christopher’s wife, Marie Wolfe, who Liesl would not speak to for the first time after all that Chablis.

Liesl clicked the red button on the phone to reject the call and went back to her work, building a rudimentary understanding of carbon dating so she could sound halfway intelligent denying the young professor’s request in the morning.

Mostly drunk and alone in one’s office is not a good way to build an understanding of carbon dating. “How do you get a book in a test tube?” Liesl asked herself. There was no one listening, of course, but she was embarrassed for having even thought it.

She sent an email to Rhonda that she could come see the book the next day and that they would discuss the rest then. It was time to go to bed.

***

Seven in the morning and Liesl had a headache. Not enough food, not enough water, more wine than was wise. She’d need to be more careful. She got to the library early enough that she was the one to switch off the alarm that she’d set the night before. She walked through reading rooms and work areas and row after row of cages and stacks in the basement, flipping on light switches. She would have liked to linger longer, but she wanted to feel more prepared than she had the day before. She wrote a note for Dan, asking him to pull the Peshawar back up and to bring it into her office. She checked her email to be sure that President Garber wasn’t springing another donor visit on her, and then she sat and processed invoices for recent acquisitions. The headache was nearly enough to convince her to break the rules about food and beverages near the books and risk a coffee stain on a medieval manuscript, but Liesl was ultimately a rule-follower, and throughout the morning the headache faded, even without the coffee she so craved.

The library was open. The staff had all arrived. Liesl walked out to the workroom. Dan was sitting at his desk wearing headphones plugged into the Discman and frowning. She tapped him on the shoulder and their dance—she attempting to exert authority and he rejecting it—began anew. He looked at her. He found the pause button. He pressed it. He took the headphones off and laid them neatly on the music player. Everyone in the workroom was watching.

“Good morning, Liesl,” he said. “Here to mingle with the commoners?”

“I need the Peshawar again this morning.”

“The Peshawar?”

Francis with his summer tan and his slicked-back hair was seated at the desk closest to Dan’s. He was pretending to read a bookseller’s catalog.

“I left a note on your desk this morning,” Liesl said.

“Right.”

“For you to bring up the Peshawar when you got in.”

“Right.”

“And you haven’t.”

“Right.”

Dan was the union representative for library workers. So if she fired him to exert some control or acquiesced to his bullying and burst into tears, there were sure to be consequences.

“Well, you’re in now. So I’m hoping you can fetch the Peshawar.”

“Christopher had a policy about pulling the Peshawar out for faculty,” he said. “It’s very fragile.”