The Librarianist

At 11:55 p.m., Bob parked the Chevy across the street from Connie’s father’s house and cut the engine. The streetlight angled across the hood of the car, bisecting his torso; he held his wristwatch under the light to follow the sweep of the second hand. The street was quiet other than the ticking of the car. Midnight occurred and Bob stared at Connie’s second-story bedroom window. His heart thrilled when he saw that it was slowly opening; but then it became stuck in its casing, and Connie shut the window to try again. Suddenly the window shot up with a loud bang which set off the barking of area dogs. When the barking died away, Connie’s hand emerged from her darkened bedroom, and two suitcases came to rest on the roof above the porch. Bob exited the Chevy and slunk across the street and up the front yard to stand at the predetermined point of contact. Connie crept along, cases in hand; she tossed these to Bob, then knelt down and hop-dropped off the roof. Her skirt shot up and Bob noticed, for he couldn’t not, that she wasn’t wearing any underwear — a curious detail, but there was no time to consider it just then, as Connie landed on the grass, performing an impressive and unanticipateable paratrooper’s forward somersault. Bob helped her stand and took up her suitcases and together they hurried across the street to the Chevy. As Connie sat, she realized she wasn’t wearing underwear. “I’m not wearing any underwear!” she said, and Bob replied that yes, he had noticed, and so Connie suffered a short period of mortification. She explained she’d only just woken up and had dressed herself so quickly that she’d forgotten about her bottoms, as she called them. She said she was sorry for the visual, if the visual had been bothersome, and Bob told her it hadn’t been and could never be, and besides that it was dark, and he was having a fun, funny time. He was a young librarian living through an adventure of love and his scandalized sweetheart was falling through the sky without underwear on and the Chevy’s glasspacks were burbling reasonably in the summer night in Oregon. Bob drove across the river; the windows were down and the water gave off a coolness that poured into the car. Connie’s hair was twirling up and up; she had what could be described as an amorous expression on her face.

“I will marry you, Monsieur Bob.”

NINE DAYS LATER, CONNIE’S FATHER DROPPED DEAD WHILE WATERING the lawn out front of his house. Connie had left Bob’s number with a neighbor-confidante, and now the neighbor rang up to share the news on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Bob lay on the sofa looking down the hall at Connie standing in the kitchen and talking on the phone; she wore a white apron and held a long wooden spoon in her hand and she was nodding, and the spoon was also nodding, in the style of a conductor’s baton keeping time. “All right. Yes. Fine. Thank you.” She set the phone in its cradle. “My father’s dead,” she called, then returned to the stove to stir the soup. Bob moved to the kitchen and came up behind her to hold her about the waist, but she was behaving frostily and so he steered back to the sofa. A voice told Bob he should let her be; after dinner, after she’d thought of it, she calmly told Bob that, while her father was not a bad man, he was a foolish one, foolish and bad-minded, and she’d decided she didn’t want anything to do with his remains because he’d have enjoyed her discomfort in the face of them, and she refused to give him that final satisfaction. Bob said, “Remains.” Connie explained, “I’m supposed to go to the coroner and funeral parlor, sign off on the arrangements. Well, I won’t do it.” She was recalling all the little indignities she and her mother had suffered under her father’s vanity over the years and these memories were sitting poorly with her. Her anger was a healthy response, and Bob, unfond of the man himself, understood it, but he didn’t like to see her graciousness marred in this way; also, he thought she might regret her behavior later. When Bob proposed that he take care of the arrangements, Connie told him, “You don’t want to do that,” and this was true, he didn’t, but he said he thought he should do it anyway, unless she felt so strongly about it that she was prohibiting him from taking part. “I’ve never prohibited in my life, and I’m not about to start now,” she said.