The Librarianist

One day, a Wednesday, and after Ethan stood Bob up for lunch, Bob came home early from the library. He didn’t tell Connie he was coming home early, he just did it. When he pulled into the driveway he saw that the front door was half open, and he wondered what this could mean, and why it made him feel afraid. He walked up the path and into the house, moving from room to room, slowly, stepping softly. He was listening, but there was nothing to listen to. He walked to the living room and saw the back door was open and that Connie was sitting on the bench in the yard, sitting up very straight and staring upward, as one in the grips of a beatitude. She wasn’t smiling but her carriage and expression presented a higher joy, like a religious fanatic filled up by the Spirit. Bob walked over and sat next to her on the bench. He saw that she had a length of fat red string double bow-tied around her wrist, and that she was pinching and petting it. She still was looking away when she said, “Hello.” She was wearing makeup, perfume. She turned to look at Bob.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You seem strange.”

“I’m not.” She rested her face against Bob’s chest. “Your heart’s beating so fast.” She leaned back to make a study of Bob, and for a time she was herself again, in her eyes, in the way she looked at him, worried but also amused — Connie.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

Bob said that it was nothing, just that he’d missed her, and then he kissed her, and she kissed him back but quickly pulled away. She stood up from the bench and asked if Bob was hungry and he said that he wasn’t. She said she was going to make soup for dinner and he said soup was fine. She pulled him up to stand and walked him to the living room. She sat him down on the couch and pressed a book into his hand and brought him a beer in a chubby brown bottle. She returned to the kitchen and Bob was not reading the book or drinking the beer but visualizing Connie’s sounds as he heard them: the clap of the cutting board laid out on the countertop; the knife unsheathed from its block. She began chopping up an onion. Bob could see her movements so clearly in his mind, as if he were standing just beside her.

“What’s that string on your wrist?” he called.

She stopped chopping the onion. “Some string.”

“But who tied it on you?”

“I tied it on myself,” she told him — just like that. Bob didn’t say anything more about it. They hardly spoke through the afternoon or at the dinner table. After they ate, they cleaned the kitchen together, but it felt as if each person was pretending the other wasn’t there. They moved upstairs and Bob undressed and redressed and got into bed while Connie shut herself up in the bathroom and ran a bath. When she came out after, she was wearing her pajamas, and the string wasn’t on her wrist. She got into bed with Bob and they lay there in the dark. After a while, he could hear the sound of Connie sleeping. Bob lay awake for a long time, but eventually he also fell asleep, without meaning to or knowing that he was. He woke up just before five, slipped out of bed and into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the light.