The Librarianist

MOST WEEKDAY AFTERNOONS, BOB AND ETHAN MET AT THE FINER Diner for lunch. The diner was oddly situated: when you entered you were faced with a horseshoe-shaped bank of stools screwed into the green-and-red-checked linoleum flooring. There were no other seats besides these, and no booths; in the center of the horseshoe was a sort of antistage, a sunken area where the waitress, Sally, performed her duties. The first time Ethan and Bob entered they were met with the scent of burned coffee and wet rags, an assemblage of gray-faced men looking up from their plates of beige foods, beasts at a trough. “Finer than what?” Ethan asked. None of these men answered; but Sally turned away from the cash register to look Ethan full in the face. Resting her hands on her hips, she told him, “Well, honey, I guess I’ll have to show you.”

Sally was a fascinating character in certain waitressy ways. She was of the seen-it-all variety of working human, and possessed a lusty attractiveness, this partly due to her silhouette but also the unmistakable vulgar glimmer dancing in her eyes. From the instant she first saw Ethan she gave him her every attention, which generally took the form of innuendo-heavy observational wisecracks. After Ethan ordered a patty melt, she began addressing him as Patty, not because she didn’t know his name — she had asked him that off the bat — but because she wished to establish a unique connection, and a pet name worked in favor of this. Each time Bob and Ethan entered, Sally would call out “Patty!” from wherever she stood in the room, and the lonely, unrich diner men, with their ulcers and pep pills and skull-throbbing toothaches, would turn to mark Ethan’s response. These men longed for nicknames from Sally, but Sally was beyond their grasp, just as Ethan was beyond hers. Five years earlier and she probably could have conquered him, if briefly; but now there was not a chance. She didn’t love Ethan, she knew almost nothing of his life or personality, but craved his attention as a representative of youth and virility, and in homage to what her social currency once had been. Her own youth was only just cooling off, she seemed to be saying to him; and when she called him Patty, then she must have felt some reverberation from those sleeker, wilder days. Ethan feigned obliviousness at the attention Sally paid him, behaving neutrally, never in an unfriendly fashion, but never reciprocating the advances even slightly, which would have sent the wrong signal. “Cruel to be kind?” Bob asked, and Ethan touched a finger to the tip of his flawless nose.

A day came where the diner was all but empty and Bob decided he would talk to Ethan about Connie, and sex, and the idea of sex with Connie, and the fact that he’d not had sex before. He’d come close, once in the eleventh grade, and then again in college, but he felt no true connection with either girl, and so close had been close enough. He’d begun to think of himself as one who could and would live without experiencing carnal relations, when here was Connie, and while he couldn’t say for certain, she did seem to want something more of Bob than was the norm according to his circumscribed experience. She’d visited Bob’s house three times by this point, but they’d never shared a proper kiss, even. Intercourse was as sheer an event as murder, to Bob’s mind; how could he do such a thing with Connie? After they placed their orders, Bob stated his position and named his concerns. Ethan said nothing until after Bob had finished, when he asked, “Has it occurred to you she might want you to do it?”

“It’s occurred to me,” said Bob. “I guess it feels far-fetched.”

Ethan spoke of a need for action in terms that were not crude for the sake of crudeness but which did not account for Bob’s sense of reverence. “I don’t know this girl, obviously,” Ethan was saying, “but in my experience, I’ve never met a young person, male or female, who didn’t enjoy fucking a partner of their choosing.” Bob felt a flash of anger at the use of vulgarity in such proximity to Connie and said, for the first time, “Now, look, I’m in love with this girl.” Ethan was startled by Bob’s declaration; his expression cycled from an amusement to a sudden kindness, then into a sheepishness or shyness. He said, “Well, that’s something else, then, Bob. I really wouldn’t know much about things like that. So maybe it’s true that I’m out of my depth, but my understanding is that love and fucking go together pretty well. This young lady is flesh and blood and bone, and while it’s possible she doesn’t ever wish to be made love to in her lifetime, it does appear to me that you’re doing her a disservice by putting her on whatever pedestal you’re putting her on. Here, let’s ask Sally. Hey, Sally?”

Sally was setting their plates on the counter. “Yes?”

“What we’re after is some worldly advice, do you mind?”

“Could not mind less.”