An Imperfect Librarian (23 page)

He bounces again. “Nancy,” he says. “Any cleavage?”

“I've only met her two or three times.”

He gazes out through the window. “Cleavage or no cleavage, I can't wait. We're heading to the steakhouse. I love a thick, juicy
steak, medium rare, mashed potatoes on the side, gravy. I wonder if I could lose a few pounds by then.”

“In three days? Not unless you sever a few limbs.”

“Not what I had in mind,” he says.

“If you wore a longer shirt, you might look slimmer.”

He lifts his shirt then leans over to look for his navel.

“It's there. Big, round, visible every time you wear that shirt,” I reassure him.

“It drives the women wild,” he says.

I nod to confirm then raise my eyebrows for added effect. “I bet.”

“My cardiologist said it was the cutest one she's ever seen.”

“I didn't know you had a heart problem.”

“I don't. What I have is a beauty for a cardiologist. I call her every so often: ‘Dr. Hogan, I can feel my heart skipping. I think this is it.' ‘Come over right away,' she says. I take off my shirt and lie down. She bends over me with her stethoscope and my heart pounds at the rate of a jackhammer gone berserk because I'm gazing straight down that long, narrow crease between her melons.”

“Buy a shirt if you don't own one.”

He squints at me. “Right you are. Easier than dieting. You are getting better. Giving me advice for a change. Whoever would have thought?” Henry cuts short his visit to take a detour to the shopping mall for a new shirt.

Not long after, Edith arrives with a box of Christmas decorations. “Continue on with whatever you were doing. Don't worry about me. I'll keep myself busy.” She turns on her portable CD player with Christmas music.

I go back to working on my laptop. When Edith's finished decorating, I call her over by my bedside. “Do me a favour? Pick me up a gift for Mr. Mercer? A Christmas gift?” I whisper.

“I'd be happy to play your Christmas elf. What did you have in mind?”

“A book about the weather, storms, lots of pictures, colour. Don't worry about the cost.”

“Anything else?”

“If I wasn't stuck in the hospital, I might have bought you a book. What would you have liked?”

“Nothing at all for me.”

“Don't you have a favourite book or author?”

“I like to read for the sake of reading.”

“What if everyone had to memorize one book to be communicated to future generations, what would yours be?”

“That's a strange question.”

“Just curious. I was thinking about
Fahrenheit 451
lately and people learning books off by heart.”

“Why didn't you say so in the first place? Under the circumstances, we'd need to preserve the great literature of the world. Shakespeare.
Romeo and Juliet
. Definitely. The greatest love story of all time.”

“I'd like to buy you a fine copy for Christmas. Can you look for one?”

“If you'll autograph it:
to my Juliet
.”

“How about we settle on:
Merry Christmas from your good friend Carl
?”

Edith's visit ends. Then comes the prodding and poking by the doctor, a visit from the nurse, an inedible hospital supper, and finally, a visit from Norah. I ask her to draw the curtains around my bed but she plays coy. She complains about the state of the road and hints that she'll need to leave early.

“You only just got here. I want to be with you.”

She kisses me on the forehead. “Sometimes, Carl, you're so much fun to be with. I have wonderful memories of the summer
we spent together, like the time the oar fell in the water. You jumped in after it with your life jacket and Folio thought you were drowning. Other times...”

“Other times what?”

“Other times you complicate things unnecessarily.”

“I'm going to be divorced soon. I haven't been with her, with Elsa, in ages.”

She lowers her head. “I'm not talking about that. I'm tired. Really I am. They didn't give me tenure. They said I wasn't doing enough research.”

I reach forward to wipe off a tear from her cheek. She turns away from me. We hold hands in the blinking lights of the uninvited Christmas tree. The conversation shifts to the weather, the animals and her planned visit to Walter's family for Christmas dinner. She leaves when the nurse arrives.

Mercedes, Cyril, Henry and Edith show up early the next morning. Henry sits on Mr. Mercer's bed. They finger through the weather book and exchange weather stories. Henry opens the Swiss chocolate bar. “Eighty percent cocoa. I wasn't skimpy on your gift, Carl, was I?” he says.

Cyril and Mercedes give me a book on hockey. Cyril explains the new rules the NHL wants to bring in and why they could favour the Canadiens over the rival Leafs. Mercedes and Edith concentrate on the Scrabble game. That's a gift from Edith. The St. Bonaventure's College school choir is doing rounds of rooms. They sing “We wish you a Merry Christmas.”

I wish. But I don't waste it on a Merry Christmas.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

T
RUE TO THE PREDICTIONS OF
my doctor, I emerge from the hospital a new man. Wish I could say as much good about my car. While I was in hospital, it was buried under a mountain of snow – most of it dumped by the plough. Cyril said it took two men to shovel it out. He had a peek at the engine then replaced the battery for me. He won't take any money for it. “In exchange, you can let me win at the next game of 120s,” he says. I'm willing to forgive its squeaks and squeals on condition it can get me to Cliffhead. It starts OK. In the end, the problem's more with the road than the car. No one ever taught me to drive on an obstacle course with drifts that behave like speed bumps, patches of black ice slick as grease under the wheels or occasional white-outs that make me wonder if I'll still be on the road when they pass.

Her private road is ploughed better than the main. The dogs bark when I pull in near the barn. They run to the car. “No, Folio! Get down, Folio!” Norah's not as enthusiastic with her welcome. She doesn't bother to stop shovelling the walkway to
greet me. She doesn't stroke my head or draw me closer. We don't lie together hugging in the snow. There's no talk of missing each other, no smell of her hair.

I follow her into the porch. There are muffins bottom-up on a rack on the kitchen counter. There's the usual faint whiff of wood burning in the stove. The kitchen light is a quiet copper glow from the orange and red glass in the tiffany lamp over the table. Straight ahead, in the living room, there's the natural light of day, the kind Mercedes claims is best for cleaning and dusting. Back in the kitchen, Norah finds ways to be busy.

I lay my jacket over the arm of the chair then glance at the spiral bound manual:
Faculty Association Grievance Procedures.
She clears off the table.

“How have you been?”

She places a mug in front of me. “OK.”

I take hold of her hand but she pulls it away. “Elsa and I are not what you think. I never talked about it because it didn't matter because you know how I feel about you.”

She goes to the counter and starts washing muffin pans. “Why were you watching me in the Reading Room?”

I was prepared for a question about Elsa. “I can't help it if my office looks down into that space.”

“You'll only make this conversation more painful by denying it,” she says.

The coffee pot gurgles.

“I'm not denying anything. It's not what you think. Henry had a plan to save my project and–”

“I asked
why you
were watching me, not why your friend Henry was watching.”

“I told him I didn't want to use binoculars–”

“Oh my God. I don't believe you.” She picks up the cloth to wash the counter.

“It didn't last for long. I didn't want to do it but he–”

“You also asked a clerk in the Reading Room if you could see my request slip. Are you going to blame that on Henry as well?”

“I just wanted to check in the databases to see who you were because–”

She lays down the cloth, opens a drawer then takes out an envelope. “Binoculars? Database? Plus snooping in Francis' office, telling the Chief Librarian that Francis was linked with my father in some scheme to rob the library, talking–”

“That's not true! Francis is feeding you lies. You can't believe anything he says.”

She reaches her hand into the envelope then throws five photos onto the table. I wonder if they cost her as much as I paid for them. No wonder the cook said business was booming. “Why should my relationship with Francis concern you? I don't interfere with your life.”

I shove the photos away from me. “The cook was Henry's idea. Besides, you can interfere as much as you want. At least then I'd have some reassurance you care about me.”

She pushes them back towards me. “Is that how you show you care? And this too?” She throws another photo on the table. It's a slightly unfocused shot of a man in the entrance to the Crimson Hexagon, wide-eyed like an animal caught in headlights. I feel like I'm in a hole so deep, I'd need an elevator to get out of it.

“Francis gave me the photos while you were in hospital. I didn't mention them at the time because you weren't well.”

“Francis is the one who's unwell.”

“What's wrong with you? What have you got against him? He's a good man.”

“He's a good liar and a good manipulator. I can see he's manipulated you.”

“Your liar gave up a scholarship to Princeton because Will
needed him here to work on his collection of Newfoundland materials. Your manipulator was more caring to me than my own father.”

“If he's such a knight in shining armour, why aren't you with him now?”

“Why aren't you with your wife?”

“Because I don't love her.”

“I couldn't force Francis to love me.”

“You'd have to be an idiot to love him.”

“Are you calling me an idiot?”

“That's not what I meant.”

“Stop interfering. Leave Francis alone!”

“If you're foolish enough to care about Francis, you deserve what you get.”

She shakes her head. “Who appointed you judge of what I deserve? How dare you, of all people, pretend to know what I need? Francis was right about you.”

“Meaning?”

“He told me you were spying on me.” She pauses. “He told me there was a librarian watching, checking on me. I didn't believe him. Who could be that anal to want to spy on other people?”

“Is that to get me back for the comment about being an idiot?”

“It's to show you that I couldn't believe you'd be so preoccupied with someone else's affairs. It's none of your business what I was doing in that room. If I want to take my father's materials that's my business. If Francis wants to help me that's our business. None of it has anything to do with you.”

“It's about time you admitted you're involved with him.”

She pounds her fist on the counter. “I'm not admitting anything. What we were doing is none of your business.”

“That's where you're wrong.”

She turns her back to me and faces the sink. “I never should have bothered with you. I shouldn't have even approached you at the booth that day. I was only doing it to prove to Francis that you were harm–”

“You were using me.”

She picks up the cloth and scrubs the counter again. “I was defending myself. I didn't know who you were, beyond some computer technician who–”

“I'm a librarian. Don't you realize that by now? You were dishonest from the beginning, all the way throughout.”

“It's ironic you interpret it that way. My perspective is the exact opposite.”

“So it's my fault. Is that it?”

“If you hadn't interfered–”

I stand up from the table. “If I hadn't interfered, we may never have met each other.”

“Perhaps that would have been better,” she says.

The sentence has the clarity I've been expecting and dreading at the same time. “Goodbye, Norah. Thanks for everything. Lessons, meals, bonfires.”

She throws the cloth in the sink. The counter sighs relief. She goes to the living room then up the stairs to the peak. I take a last glance across the stretch of hardwood floor to the windows. I open the door to the porch. Folio is waiting for me. She has no photos to throw in my face or surprise revelations that make my stomach churn. I pat her head and rub her ears. She licks my hand. “That's enough now. Stop that. Don't jump up. Folio. No!” I squeeze out through the door backwards. I hold her off with my hand. She takes one last lick.

In the rear-view mirror I see the red of the hexagon, the same one in the photo she threw on the table. I turn off of Norah's road onto the two-lane highway. Something small and fast darts in front of me. I slam on the brakes. The car twirls
around. I turn the wheel and the car spins in the opposite direction then stops with a thud against the pile of snow on the side of the road. Octavo and Quarto run out of the woods, across the road, then back into the woods again, chasing whatever it was that almost caused me to end up in a ditch. A man knocks on my window.

“You OK, buddy? Need some help?” he says.

I roll down the window. He stares in at me.

“I'm OK. It's the dogs from the lane to Cliffhead. They were chasing something. I saw it, braked, lost control.”

“That's Myrick's hounds. She's wild as they are, talkin' to herself like that all the time, livin' by herself in the woods over the cliff. If somethin' like that runs out in front of you, keep on drivin'. Run it over if you got to. Don't kill yourself for a cat, fox or rabbit.”