Since he had read the crabbed, blocky capitals of her name on the airmail envelope, the sealed envelope with its unknown contents, an urgency had propelled him forward, out of his office, toward the airport, toward Ohio. But now, however, all haste abandoned him, replaced by a dread and a longing to abort his journey. The taxi seemed suddenly to hurtle forward at alarming speed, now past flashing fields and silos, now into the leafy purlieus of the college town.
The feeling of wanting to turn back stayed with him, even after he had checked into the Sidon Inn. Though the afternoon was not far gone, his plan to deliver his letter this evening seemed to him suddenly impracticable. He needed to get his bearings. He should figure out where he could get something to eat. He would wait until morning to find the library where she worked.
He realized in the morning that he could hardly have missed it, the immense white marble cube standing out amid the earnest brick and stone of the other college buildings, like a spaceship in a used-car lot. Inside, he approached the circulation desk to ask for Archives and Special Collections. A student crowned in dirty-blond dreadlocks, neck tattooed with what looked like a morning glory vine, directed him to the fourth floor, then added with disarming chipperness, “I was just heading up there for my shift. I can take you there if you like.”
“Um, first I have to—” said Spurlock, overcome by the desire to flee. But flee where? There was nothing to the town except for a ramshackle main street, where leather-necked farmers docked their pickups outside the diner, and little swarms of college students, trailing cigarette smoke and patchouli, hovered around the lanterned patio of a coffee shop called Torrify! There was a used-book store and an old art deco movie theater operated by the college’s Film Studies Department. He didn’t know what he had imagined for her, but it wasn’t this earnest, threadbare place. “Actually,” he said, “that would be very kind.”
As they climbed the stairs to the Department of Archives and Special Collections, the student introduced herself as Cat and asked his name. “Nelson’s a cool name,” she announced, as though to reassure him. She explained that he’d have to leave his bag in a cubby outside the reading room, though he could keep his laptop. Nelson Spurlock did not have a laptop and blinked twice when Cat pointed to the stack of claim slips, “for when you want us to retrieve a title.” Spurlock muttered something about needing to get settled and to “check the holdings,” then felt himself blushing at the falsehood, but Cat merely buzzed him through a door into the small reading area, saying she’d be back to check on him in a little while. Spurlock found himself alone now, seated at a long table, in a book-musted stillness he had neither remembered nor missed since divinity school.
“Not a lot of business today,” Spurlock ventured to Cat twenty minutes later when she returned.
“There never is. Unless one of the profs brings a class.”
“Is Miss…Oppen in today?”
The name as he uttered it sounded like one he’d made up, but Cat replied, “Emmy? She should be. No requests?”
“No requests,” said Spurlock, adding, “Not just yet,” when he detected a quizzical edge in Cat’s expression. He could ask to see her, but he knew he would be unable to state a reason for his visit and resolved to wait, laying out the envelopes down beside him, where they suggested with plausible fraudulence documents for a research project. After what must have been two hours, Cat poked her head into the reading room. “I’ll be knocking off soon,” she said. “You sure there’s nothing I can call up for you?”
Spurlock surprised himself by saying, “Yes, in fact—Herbert. George Herbert, um, the Anglican divine, priest, I mean—his poems. You seem to have here—you appear to have a copy of— Just one minute and I’ll have the slip made out.”
Blundering around the computer catalog, Spurlock found the title, wrote out “The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations” on a call slip, and handed it to Cat. Spurlock braced himself for a quip about private ejaculations, but all she said was “Got it. Herbert, George. Back in a sec.”
When Cat returned, the white gloves on her hands and the old volume they held stood out in sharp contrast with her dreadlocks and tattoos. She eased the book open on a pair of angled foam blocks she’d placed in front of Spurlock. “When you are done with it, just leave it on the blocks and let us know. We’ll take care of it.” The volume she’d presented was smaller than Spurlock imagined, re-bound in buckram, and the pages, when he opened them, displayed a hectic, almost childish disorder, with their f-shaped S’s, the irregular spellings. Surely at one time, he thought, the text had seemed as transparent as daylight. For Spurlock, however, the pages appeared to busy themselves even as he watched—like an ant colony he’d kicked by accident—with the task of restoring and repairing their ruptured privacy. Abruptly, he realized he was reading lines he had encountered before.
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight
For thou must die.
He recognized the tone, at once weightless and grave, before he recognized the words. Of course, it had been in Abend’s confession. Not Abend’s, Oppen’s.
Sweet
