The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(82)

True, the place was fit for new beginnings—the water glasses were crystal. Liesl’s eyes fell to the wall behind the bar. John saw it at the same time as she did. The twenty-foot wall behind the bar had been lined with bookshelves and filled with books. Thousands of them. And each of the thousands of books had its cover torn off, exposing its cream-colored paper and subtle stitching. Liesl asked the white shirt about it, waved her hand at the wall. The white shirt grinned. Said the designer had removed the book covers in order to create a more restful atmosphere. Wasn’t it delightful, he wanted to know. They left behind the crystal water glasses and went to a noodle shop down the street instead.

Seated, warm, and waiting for lunch, John pulled a brush pen out of his pocket. He took the thick paper napkin from under his glass of water and turned it over to the dry side. He began to sketch. He pursed his lips when he was doing it, the way he had pursed his lips while sketching for decades. He had sketched her hundreds of times in their lives together. She didn’t much like being looked at, but she had never minded being sketched. Their noodles arrived, and she stirred a clump of garlic through the hot broth. Her glasses fogged up, and the snow was still falling, and she felt like finally something good was about to happen.

He lay the completed sketch in front of her. Liesl Weiss. Black ink on paper. He took a bite of his noodles and immediately had broth splattered on his chin, on his nose. In John’s sketches, Liesl always looked so much like Hannah, and vice versa. The high cheekbones. The bemused half smile. In an ink sketch there was no telling that one had gray hair and the other had brown eyes. As if fearing that no one would ever see her looking fresh-faced and unflappable the way her husband did, Liesl always kept these sketches as proof. She quickly slid this one into her purse.

“Tell me about the commission.”

“Corporate portrait. I met the subject today, seems a nice fellow.”

“Corporate?”

“Here.” He reached across the table with a clean napkin and dabbed a spot of broth from her lapel. If someone else had done it, she might have been embarrassed, but he meant well. She could be a messy eater, and he knew it. As he knew everything about her. John didn’t love the idea of her, he loved the reality of her.

“I phoned my agent,” he said. “Told him I was looking to take on some work.”

The server came back to top up their water. John beamed a smile at the young man who was filling his glass, and once it was full, he picked it up and took a satisfied drink.

“I didn’t know you still had an agent,” she said. She put her chopsticks down and adjusted her tone to make sure it was clear she was being playful, not accusatory. “He was happy to hear from you, I’m sure.”

“A bit surprised.”

“He works with artists. He’s used to temperament.”

“I told him I wanted to work, but I’d prefer to paint people who are, you know, nice people. I haven’t been pulling my weight, I don’t think. I didn’t tell him that part. But it’s true.”

The table seated next to them had an order of gyoza delivered, and they looked so plump and delicious that Liesl immediately regretted not having ordered some. John read her mind.

“Gyoza?” he called to the server.

The server disappeared into the kitchen. The couple next to them ate their gyoza. Liesl and John were left to regard each other.

“We’re hardly starving,” she said. “I don’t want you to take work that you’re unhappy about.”

“I’m not unhappy.”

Liesl had been deafened by the chorus of voices in her head for so long. The daughter, the husband, the ex-lover who had been pulling her in one direction and then another for decades. She imagined the next phase of her life if she answered the call of those deafening voices: going to Francis to try and start something she had decided against twenty years ago, standing rigid and self-conscious in Hannah’s student apartment to deliver an old secret that might ruin them, closing the door on John when he was finally well, finally happy. At that table, in that restaurant with the soft snow falling out the window, a sketch of her own untroubled face in her purse and hot gyoza on their way out from the kitchen, the voices finally went quiet enough for Liesl to hear her own thoughts, to decide what she wanted.

“Good,” Liesl said. “I’m not unhappy either.”

***

Long after lunch, during that slow day of reassessment, she heard her first news of Vivek since just after Miriam’s death. It came from a history professor who was visiting the library to view a collection of nineteenth-century feminist periodicals that she wanted to use in her teaching. She was grumbling that she had been asked to take on the winter-term course at the very last minute, that another faculty member had been assigned to teach it, and wasn’t it always the way with this younger generation, that they couldn’t be counted on.

Liesl asked how the other instructor had weaseled his way out of teaching the course, and the woman had launched into a series of complaints about a man being assigned to teach a course on feminist history in the first place, and eventually she mentioned that the man’s wife had died, and he was leaving the university. Liesl turned the page of delicate newsprint to show the woman an editorial about a protest that had been staged at parliament. Liesl had prepared a printout from a digital edition of the paper of record covering the same event so that the woman could offer the contrast in how the event was discussed in her class. She was delighted by the idea, delighted that Liesl had so well understood her needs. The course was usually assigned to new faculty, she explained, and she hadn’t taught it in years and didn’t like the idea of being underprepared.