The Librarianist

Sam picked at the crust of his pie with his fork. He was smiling the smile of secret knowledge. “A couple times over the years it’d happen where Mom’d say, ‘I wonder what old Bob Comet’s doing?’ Or, I can remember her peering out the window one morning in winter, holding back the curtain and saying, ‘You think Monsieur Bob’s going to work in this snow? With that old bald-tired car of his? I don’t know, I don’t think so.’”

Bob sat watching the coffee cup in his hand. In a sense this was just what he had hoped to hear, but he wasn’t prepared for it, and for him to learn of these tiny moments was at once the most merciful evidence, but there was also a second sense, which was a quick or flashing outrage. That Connie should invoke an old pet name when they were separated by mere city blocks was outrageous to him, and he sat for a half minute choking against this clash of feelings. Sam didn’t notice that his words had had any effect; he was signaling to the waitress that they were ready for the check. Sam paid, and he and Bob headed back in the direction of the center. Bob was quiet for much of the walk, so that Sam wondered if something had been spoiled in their meeting; but then when they arrived at the center Bob was again himself, and he volunteered to copy the snapshots and send them along if Sam wished it, and Sam said he did, and he wrote out his address and gave this to Bob. The two men shook hands and Bob watched as Sam drove away in an old pickup truck. He turned to look up at the center and saw Maria standing in the window of her office. She held her hands out, palms up: How had it gone? Bob made the half-and-half gesture, and then walking fingers, and she nodded, and Bob struck out to lap the block and think and wonder about all the things that had and had not happened.

LIFE AT THE GAMBELL-REED SENIOR CENTER CARRIED ON. THE TREE outside Bob’s window grew to fullness, obscuring the view completely. It was hot that summer, often uncomfortably hot, as there was no central air conditioning in the building. Bob added his voice to the chorus of complaints; Maria told him, “We’re all suffering here, Bob.” Bob pointed out that she was getting paid to suffer, and Maria named the figure of her salary, which effectively ended the conversation. Bob went around in a T-shirt and slept with the window open. In the night, a cool wind rustled the leaves of Bob’s tree and poured over him as he slept. In the morning, the heat returned. Linus switched out his big beret for a mesh-back baseball hat with an electric fan built into its bill. Jill was the only one in favor of the heat. “I should have been a lizard on a rock,” she said. “In a way, though, you are,” Linus told her. The rains arrived, the autumn, and the leaves of Bob’s tree turned impossible colors and dropped away, his sidewalk view returned to him.

It was incredible to think that only one year had passed since he’d made his failed attempt to connect the people of the center with Poe’s “The Black Cat,” but here and it was Halloween again, and there was a Halloween party, and Bob was a subtle vampire. Maria said he would look very dashing if only he would move a little more quickly, that the cape would fly out behind him; but he was moving as fast as he could or cared to, he said. He had a pair of plastic vampire teeth but he wore these only briefly because they hurt his gums. Maria was dressed up as a convict with a plastic ball-and-chain that she twirled above her head to good comic effect. Linus was dressed as a graduate, in a cap and silky black gown, and he had rolled up a piece of paper in his hand with a blue ribbon tied around. Jill sat at her distant table wearing no costume and staring at her slippered feet. She’d not had the money or ingenuity to procure or fabricate a costume for herself and felt bitter about being left out. Maria found some cat ears for her, and Jill put these on, and allowed that Maria could draw whiskers on her face with a mascara pen. Maria was solemn as she held a ruler against Jill’s cheek to ensure a straightness of line. Afterward, Jill was shy in her thankfulness. “Can you tell what I am?” she asked Bob. “I’m a cat.”

At eleven o’clock a bus pulled up outside the center and a stream of costumed children poured in. Maria had organized the visit through a contact at a nearby elementary school; the day before she had described it to Bob as a meeting between two groups at opposite ends of the life spectrum. “There is the youth, their stories unwritten before them, and you all, with your accumulated wisdom, looking back. Isn’t it possible that you’ll all meet in the middle and establish a connection?” Her optimism was true, and sincerely felt; and yet, Bob wasn’t so sure the experiment would yield favorable results.