not know what I wanted, Arthur stayed with me for three strained, unerotic days before the house-sitting grapevine came through for him again, and he moved out.
21. The End of the World
One morning about a week into the strange new August, I was awakened by a telephone call from a woman at the Hillman Library, who told me, in a stunningly icy tone of voice, that I'd been sent several notices informing me of Sigmund Freud's
'I returned that book in July,' I said, rubbing my eyes, remembering the day very clearly. I'd received no notices, but since I'd moved at the beginning of the summer, I supposed they hadn't been forwarded.
'Urn, well,' she said, her voice melting for a moment. 'If that's the case, you have to come down to the library, in person. Yes, to initiate a Search and Recovery.'
Of course, I'd been carefully avoiding going anywhere near the Hillman Library. I walked into work along back streets, ate my lunch in the workroom of the bookstore, and I was constantly on the alert and ready to run at the first glimpse of a certain aqua ribbon. Arthur and I, through an unacknowledged and unspoken agreement, didn't discuss his days at work, and if he had any nasty encounters by the card catalogues or at the water fountain, or if vicious rumors about him began to circulate through Reference, Acquisitions, and Gifts and Exchanges, I never found out about them. I begged the righteous librarian to allow me to initiate a Search and Recovery over the telephone, but she would hear nothing of it. I was in midsentence when she hung up.
Arthur had the day off. I found the scrap of paper on which I'd written down his new number, and called him to find out what he knew about Searches and Recoveries, but I got only his sleepy voice on his latest answering machine. He was spending the day, I remembered, with the lovely Riri, at her cousin's out in Latrobe, something he'd been promising her for months.
'This is Art,' I said, after the tone, 'and I'm about to enter the jaws of death.'
Thus I resigned myself, thinking that at least it would be simpler, somehow, if he was not at the library when I finally reentered it, which, half an hour later, I did. Fans of the unconscious will be interested to note that I'd taken care to dress well, in summer colors-pleated khaki pants, white shirt with salmon pinstripes, loosely knotted Hong Kong cotton tie. I hurried up to the tall, actorish fellow who worked behind the front desk, and I looked cautiously around me as I approached him.
'I'm here to initiate a Search and Recovery,' I said.
He blinked his entire face.
'P-pardon?'
'I got a call today from someone here who said that I had to initiate a Search and Recovery.' I glanced over my shoulder, toward the elevators, expecting at any minute to be spotted and seized.
'Uh huh,' he said. 'I see.'
Libraries, I knew, are frequently the haunts of twitching, mumbling paranoid schizophrenics, researching their grandiose conspiracies, and so I was embarrassed by the look he gave me, which suggested that my insistence on Search and Recovery was probably due to my fervent belief that Richard Nixon, Stephen King, and Anita Loos were intimately connected to the sinking of the
'It's some form I'm supposed to fill out,' I said.
'Oh? I've never heard of it. Do you know who you spoke to? No? Maybe you'd better go back to Administration and ask.'
'Um. I was afraid-I was hoping-do you think you could go back and ask for me? Ha ha. See, there's someone who works in the back offices that I'd rather not run into.'
His eyes lit up and he wiggled his eyebrows. With very dramatic deliberation, he reached behind him for a stool and sat down. He picked up a pencil and tapped it against his temple.
'Be brave,' he said.
It was perfect. I stopped dead at the entrance to the elevator corridor, and there she was, behind her bars, dressed to kill, pearls, blue sundress. Her locks were lighter than ever, nearly strawberry blond, pulled up and wrapped into a palm tree of hair that rose from her head and spilled its bright ends outward in a silly, fetching spray. She raised her face, which was suntanned and barely painted, the stalk of hair swayed, and whatever expression I expected to see- rage, embarrassment, unrecognition-was absent. She grinned. It was all I could do then, in the flash of her old, unlooked-for smile, to keep myself from running to press my face against the grille, into the window that I loved so much. But I kept a grip on myself and slowly came, self-conscious, suddenly stiff- legged, and holding out my hands, as though to catch a spinning beach ball. As I passed the elevators, their Up arrows lit and chimed, one, two. The doors slid open with the sound of murmured approval, and the corridor behind me filled with a little audience.
'Phlox,' I said, fifteen inches away from her lips. 'Oh, Phlox.'
'Do you love me?' she said, still seated, radiant with patience and anticipation, and obviously feeling that she held the strings. Her light, unconcerned tone of voice might as easily have said, May I help you?
I didn't stop to think, and said that I did.
'Wait,' she said. She stood, turned from me, and walked out of the office, swinging her hips, and she came around to the other side of the window, where our hands went out, our fingers tangled, and I put my mouth to hers. After we'd kissed for a minute, with all her well-informed co-workers watching us through the magic grille, she drew back and looked at me, without a trace of hurt or anger on her face. There was only half-suppressed mirth, the rapid blinking of disbelief. She cocked her head to one side.
'I'm so sorry,' I said.
'Hush,' she said, and giggled. 'Come on.'
She took my hand and pulled me down the hall, into the stairwell, her white pumps tocking against the tiled floor. For a second I shut my eyes just to listen to the promising clatter, to think once again, Ah, there's a woman coming; here comes a woman. Under the staircase we kissed, pushing our hips together. We began to get the same wild notion then; she grabbed at my hand with both of her hands, walking backward, and pulled me up the stairs, to the third floor of the library, where there were, all around the outer walls, tiny dark rooms, with tiny desks, that the library rented to graduate students.
'They're locked, aren't they?'
'Not this one,' she said, tugging me toward a door, which opened with a twist of her flushed hand.
'How do you know about this?' I slipped in behind her, whispering, and she closed the door.
'Hush,' she said. 'Everyone knows about this. Sit down, we'll have to be quick. Here.'
She leaned forward to unzip my pants, like a child unwrapping a doll. They fell and puddled around my ankles. I sat.
'Oh,' said Phlox, touched, when she saw my erection. 'It's so lovely.'
'It is?'
'It's so handsome and polite.' She hitched up her dress; no panties.
'Were you prepared for this?' I said, this suspicion dawning on me, honestly, for the first time.
'I've been prepared for this for a week now,' she said, taking my fingers. 'Just feel how prepared I am.'
Down upon me she settled herself, wiggling, making the necessary adjustments, and there, once again, were the aptness, the welcome give of giving skin, the warmth, the human and fragrant slipperiness, and I sighed as though I ached in every muscle and were sinking into a hot bath. In sixty seconds it was all over, and it had all begun again.
But it was different.
That evening, Phlox called to invite me to dinner, and without hesitation I said that I would be right over. Abandoning the necktie this time, I brushed my teeth, grabbed my keys, slapped three
