Later, after a stop at the futuristic supermarket that, like me, had recently gate-crashed this neighborhood, I found Keith alone in our apartment, still engrossed in a lucrative day's work, sprawled on the floor surrounded by tape splices, single-stepping through a video of his latest collaborative effort: the fifteen-second story of how a young woman and her breath spray find happiness together. "Dinner OK?" he asked, intent on the frame-by-frame.
"Yeah, dinner OK. Four-B's car alarm is howling again. Buzzing like a shorted bumblebee. Nobody paying any attention. Not even the beat police flinch anymore."
"Speaking of High Security, how's my Princess Grace?"
I'd lived with him long enough to follow every free association.
I was glad for glibness just then and retaliated in like currency. "American film actress. Born in Philadelphia, 1927? No,'28. Killed in Monaco car crash in September 1982. Almost a year already. God." I went to the window and held back the curtain. In the street below, late-evening pedestrians worked out the details of Brownian motion.
Tuckwell gave his representative laugh: a high-pitched, uncontrolled cackle. "Very good. Been earning your keep, I see. The Human Reference Shelf wouldn't care to say what day Mrs. Grimaldi died, would she?" I sat down next to him, looking for warmth that wouldn't aggravate the heat. He gave me a kiss on my exposed collarbone. I made no rejoinder, and he returned to work, adding, "See To Catch a Thief tot a demonstration of life imitating art."
The television was on, sound just loud enough to give voice to incestuous bad girls from Texas and tough but basically good inner-city cops. We witnessed the last five minutes of Five Minutes to Meltdown, where political extremists, natural disaster, and old-fashioned carelessness conspired to threaten the nuclear reactor on the community outskirts nearest you. Four young, lusty civil engineers narrowly thwarted the disaster. After, we caught the late news, fulfilling our social duty. Keith got his chance to make his favorite joke: "Twenty million face famine in Ethiopia. First, this." He made running commentary on all the spots, from headlines down to the perverse, trailing human interest. As usual, during commercials he cut the sound and ad-libbed. "Terrorism: the mini-series. Thursday, right here on—" Had he thrived in another decade, his manic energy might have made him an activist.
When one network in its allotted half hour said all there was to say about Tuesday, July 5, 1983, we switched to another. The coverage was identical, a half hour later. Keith carried on his inspired annotations, even after I stopped listening and disappeared into the bedroom. There I worked on loose ends, preparing for work the next day. I glanced at the librarian's trade journal, caught up on old correspondence, and, while I had the typewriter fired up, finished tomorrow's Today in History and the unanswered Question Board questions. I rolled a clean index card under the platen and typed "A: ". I remember pausing long enough to feel proud that what I was about to answer would have taken the median librarian, relying on Brewer's, Bartlett's, or the OED, considerable effort. Experience, private knowledge, could still stand one in better stead than mastery of the disjointed stockpile. I typed:
A: A "catch" is a form of musical round where identical voices enter at different times. The catch to a catch is that it is printed on one solo line. In the past, as a party game, singers would sight-read from catch collections, each group responsible for figuring out when to "make the catch," when to come in at the proper moment. Making the catch reached its peak of popularity under England's Charles II. The phrase may have originated earlier. Rounds in general are at least as old as the thirteenth-century tune "Summer Is Icumen In."
I stopped, realizing I was straying from the point, that summer was already two weeks gone. As the submitter had not deigned to sign the question, I left my answer similarly anonymous. The pair are both still on file that way. As I held the cards next to one another, checking my work, I knew I would not, contrary to all I'd ever assumed, remain a librarian forever.
Canon at Unison
My old associates threw me a going-away party today. It was, as going-away parties go, a bad mix of parting embarrassment and exhilaration. For want of a more plausible story, I spread the word around the branch that I am going back to school. Loosely interpreted, never a lie. The celebration was a sorry affair. Several colleagues brought homemade cookies, which nobody's diet permitted. We broke the rules and served Chablis in paper cups; everyone partook dutifully, in professional moderation. Separation — life's major emotion — is being slowly written out of our repertoire. A few friends will genuinely miss me, and I them. My buddy Mr. Scott, he of the eternal retirement threat, came up to me late in the afternoon, making no effort to disguise his eyes. "You beat me to it," he said, shaking his head. "I can't believe you beat me."
"I'm afraid I'm abandoning you, friend. Fight the good fight." Before I could get all the way through the sentence, he swept me up in an embrace, which we held for a long time by contemporary standards. Close to his ear, before pulling away from it for good, I whispered, "Work forever."
We all made the standard plans to stay in touch, plans we knew, even as we made them, would atrophy for no reason. As a gag gift, the collected staff presented me with a wrapped Facts on File binder stuffed with miscellaneous soap-opera synopses, gov pubs, library memos, and those You-Are-Next fliers collected from the prophets of apocalypse who hang around Grand Central. Then they presented me with my own copy of the Times Atlas. The combination of my long-expressed girlish delight in the book, the misplaced earnestness of the staff, and the hopeless ambition of the atlas itself — the simple description of how to get anywhere in the world — caught inside me. Seeing the effect the atlas had on me, my friends broke up the party.
As ironic token of affection, the staff let me have a last go at the Quote Board and Event Calendar. "Made me" might be more accurate. The work was more than I wanted to take on today, but I appreciated the gesture. For tomorrow's Today, I chose the Homestead Strike: the fifth day's clash between five thousand steel-workers and Prick's three hundred Pinkertons. I avoided my habit of extending the fact into exposition or mouthing my usual guarded meliorism. I wish I hadn't chosen that particular event; I'd hate to suggest that I've left on a labor dispute. But done is done. For my last ever selection for quote of the day, I posted vintage W.C. Fields:
It's a funny little world. A man's lucky if he gets out of it alive.
My final official act at the branch was to sort the unbound issues of Congressional Quarterly, which some malicious cit had mixed up beyond recognition. Alexandria arranged its scrolls by size— an order useless except to the initiated. The race's chief discovery may well be the idea that even a perfect stranger could retrieve things from parchments, given the sequence. Filing was a bit below my skills, but it was basically what I did for a living, until today. And in truth, returning the CQs to useful order gave me the thrill of send-off. I was packing my bags, feeling my freedom. I took a last look around my stacks. The collection suddenly seemed wonderful beyond naming. I had for a time lived here. Then I snapped the binders shut and was gone.