The Librarianist

He found he disliked leaving the house for work, leaving Connie and Ethan alone for so many hours, and would shudder in crossing the threshold of the front door, as though revolted by a magnetic field. The days at the library were longer than usual, and when he came home Connie was distracted, either tending to Ethan or cooking for him or else tiptoeing around because he was having his nap. Bob recognized that Ethan had truly needed a place to recuperate and was glad to give shelter to his friend; but he also felt that his household had become infected by an imbalance that was, at the very least, an imposition. He was approaching the tipping point toward a true unhappiness when Ethan began his return to health, and Connie became less distracted by her caring for him, and so she came back to Bob. By the end of the first week of Ethan’s three-week stay, Bob was relieved of his petty fears and jealousies by simply witnessing the way Ethan and Connie behaved around each other. The truth was that they liked each other. The truth was also that they loved and adored Bob, always so enthusiastic at his return in the evening, wanting to know all the gossip of his workday. They laughed together at the dinner table — Ethan could only gently laugh — and Bob understood that nothing of his relationship with Connie had been compromised.

Ethan improved further, and with his awakening he was visited by a desire to spend some of the money his wound had yielded him. He began making purchases by telephone and mail so that each day when Bob came home there was something new to show off, a wristwatch, or robe, silk pajamas, a shaving kit, all the little male niceties he had until that time gone without. He gave Bob any number of gifts in this same line; Bob suggested Ethan might buy Connie something as well, and Ethan became shy and said that he knew he should but that when he’d brought it up to Connie she had refused him in a way that he took to be heartfelt.

By the end of the second week Ethan was ambulatory and spent the days climbing up and down the stairs, circulating through the bathroom and kitchen and living room, making small messes at each location he visited. Bob had seen Ethan’s apartment and knew he was a sloppy man, but to experience such disarray in his own orderly home was something else. Ethan was a great one for picking a book off the shelf and taking it to some far corner of the house, leaving it open-faced on the floor, where it would remain until Bob dusted it off and returned it to its home. When Bob found a book left out overnight on the grass in the backyard, he went to get Ethan from the kitchen and walked him, in his pajamas, to the back door. He pointed at the book. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry,” Ethan told him.

One evening Bob came home to find Ethan and Connie bickering in the living room. “Ethan is trying to give us money,” Connie said. Bob had had a bad day at work and was climbing up the stairs to seek out a bottle of aspirin in the bathroom. “So he wants to give us money,” Bob said. “Let him.” Connie and Ethan both raised their eyebrows at that. Ethan never did give them any money.

At the end of the third week, Bob and Connie were married, with Ethan standing as best man. The newlyweds didn’t ask Ethan to leave, but he was left to his own devices while they were hidden away in their room all through the weekend. On Monday Bob came home from work to find Connie sitting alone in the nook, reading a magazine, but angrily. “Good news, Bob. You can take the cotton off your alarm clock.”

“He’s gone home?” Bob asked.

“He has.”

He sat down opposite her. “That’s not so bad a thing, is it?”

She said, “Of course he’s well enough now, and if he wants to go, then go. But no, I don’t understand why he did it the way he did it.”

“How did he do it?”

“He came downstairs after you left for work and he was dressed and packed and said he was going home and thanks, a lot. Those were the words he used, comma after the thanks. Walked right out the door.”