Innocence

In the painting, evergreen boughs were wound around the columns that flanked the entrance to the library, and wreaths with huge red bows hung on each of the four tall bronze doors. Snow fell into a white-blanketed street, and the world looked more right than perhaps it had ever been since 1905.

“If you don’t want to talk with me, I’ll never bother you again. I love the library too much to give it up, so I’ll visit some nights, but I won’t look for you. Take a little time to think about it. If you do want to talk, for the next half an hour, I’ll be in the main reading room, among the stacks, where the bad man couldn’t catch you, where you ran just like a dancer dancing. I’ll be in the aisle with Charles Dickens.”

I knew her to be bold and quick and not a mouse. But a mouse behind the wainscot, smelling a cat and being smelled by it, just a thin width of cherrywood away, could not have been more quiet than this girl.

11

IN THE MAIN STACKS, EACH AISLE HAD ITS OWN light switch, and I clicked on only the one. The high-mounted sconces with their brushed-steel brass-trimmed shades funneled light down to glimmering pools on the caramel-marble floor.

Having removed the bulb from one sconce, I stood as near to Dickens as I dared, his books in light and I in shadows. If the girl should come, I would not by either intent or accident expose my face to her. Under my hood, reflected light might shimmer in my eyes, but she wouldn’t be able to see the color or the details, or whatever quality of them made people want to slash and burn me.

If she came and for a while we conversed like equals, and if then a sudden intuitive understanding of my nature caused her to turn and flee, I wouldn’t pursue her but would instead run away from her. In time, therefore, after her terror passed, she might realize that I not only meant her no harm but also respected—and did not resent—her antipathy.

To be my friend, maybe you must be like me, one of the hidden. It might not be possible for anyone who lives in the open to tolerate a thing like me. But always I had remained hopeful that, among the millions on this Earth, there might be a few who could summon the courage to know me for what I am and have the self-confidence to still walk part of this life with me. The girl, mysterious in her own right, was the first in a long time who seemed as if she might have that capacity.

Just when I thought she would not come, she appeared at the farther end of the aisle, moving into the light from the last sconce. Standing there in her silvery shoes and black jeans and black sweater and black leather jacket, with her feet wide apart and her hands on her hips, she looked as if she had stepped out of one of those comic books that I don’t like very much. I mean those comics in which everyone, good guys and bad guys alike, is very self-assured and tough and determined and proud of himself. They stand with their chests out and their shoulders back and their heads lifted, looking heroic and confident, and their hair is always blowing even in scenes where there is no wind, because they look better with their hair blowing. In the library, of course, there was no wind, and the girl’s hair wasn’t blowing, but it was long and black and shaggy, so that it kind of looked as if it must be blowing even when it wasn’t.

I don’t much like the superheroes and supervillains in many of those comic books because, maybe except for Batman, the way they pose dramatically all the time really does reflect how they think of themselves. Very self-righteous, whether saving the world or blowing it up. So in the thrall of power fantasies. This girl looked like she stepped out of a comic book, but somehow I could tell that the way she posed wasn’t a reflection of how she really thought of herself.

Or maybe I was deluded. The fallow soil of loneliness is fertile ground for self-deception.

After regarding me from a distance, she took her hands from her hips and approached neither warily nor boldly, but with the same effortless grace that she had shown earlier.

As she stepped into the lamplight that fell across the books by Dickens, I said, “Please stop there.” She did. We were no more than twelve feet apart, but my hoodie and the fact that I had disabled the nearest sconce spared her from the shock of my appearance.