It was a tough time to be a librarian. It was never easy to be a keeper of books, but it was particularly tough during that turnover winter of ’69, a hinge point when the world rubbed its eyes and realized all was not as it seemed. Students were too busy protesting and talking about protesting to really read anything of substance, and libraries shifted from being quiet places of study to social justice performance spaces and raucous backdrops for self-important sit-ins. The books, poor things, suffered the brunt of this indignity. Various wet concoctions were thrown around in the stacks that should not have been thrown around in the stacks. The books were used as props, shelter, weapons. Precious manuscripts, seen as relics of the establishment, were soiled with palimpsestic hippie poetry and bodily fluids. Students stole everything by Nietzsche and Marx. The entire section on Zen Buddhism (294.3927) disappeared overnight. Charlene found herself shooing away half-naked couples smoking grass and/or fornicating in the stacks on a daily basis. Heavy times. Groovy times. Just not for a librarian. Charlene might’ve cared more about the whole movement if she hadn’t found it all so completely juvenile. She felt like an older sister watching her younger siblings tear apart the house while their parents were away.
There was a professor in her department, H. H., whom she greatly admired. He excelled at that high-wire act — unique to the professorial métier — of appearing both desperately out of fashion and yet also far ahead of his time. A wearer of herringbone tweeds, H. H. had a thick mass of brown hair that, despite vigorous morning placations with a comb, always seemed to untangle gravity’s spell by lunchtime. He was a true scientist of books, the only person she had met whom she could definitively call a genius. H. H. was working with a library in Ohio to develop a computerized system that would eventually replace the card catalog. He and Charlene got into endless arguments about this — she defending the sanctity of the cards and he dismissing them as already outdated, an anchor weighing down civilization’s eternal march forward.
“Paper will soon be a thing of the past,” he said. “It probably already is.”
“And so what of the library? Should we just burn down all of our cultural cathedrals?”
“The library is not a cultural cathedral. It is an outdated warehouse.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Progress, my dear. It’s the only truth in life. There are some things that you just cannot fight, though I must admit, I find it quite charming when you do.”
When Houston Revere, a drawl-edged southerner in her program, asked her if she was sleeping with H. H. yet, she responded with a surprisingly venomous denial.
He held up his hands defensively. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said.
On the one hand, it would’ve been so easy to slide down such a path. Her time in the city had left her with a sexual aptitude that she was not necessarily proud of. She knew that men found her particular mixture of melancholy and candor alluring, but every time she thought of H. H.’s hands upon her (and she would admit, she had thought of those hands, of running her own hands through that pritchkemp mane), she was filled with a sense of terror, of falling backwards into a lake with no bottom. This was familiar territory that she had sworn off for the abstinence of the bibliography. She did not want to turn back. His lingering gaze, despite the heat it elicited in her chest, felt like a force prying her fingers off the tiller.
And so she started sleeping with (it must be said, a somewhat surprised) Houston. True to his southern roots, Houston was polite and oddly balletic in bed, but altogether prosaic. When he came, he sounded like a seagull. It was just what she was looking for. She fought off all uncertainties with the banality of their lovemaking.
Then, in May, the shootings at Kent State popped the balloon of tension that had been steadily inflating that entire spring. Students all across the country recoiled at pictures of bodies lying facedown on the pavement like lonely, discarded mannequins. These pictures were pictures of them: they could’ve been lying on that pavement, with young runaways wailing above them at the bewildered National Guardsmen: What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?
At Syracuse, the academic pursuit seemed wholly worthless in the face of such mortality, and so the remainder of that semester withered and died with barely a whimper. Exams were optional; students, unsure of what still lassoed them to campus, clustered around boys with guitars on the quad who tried to mimic Dylan’s whining pontifications. As she hurried past these sing-alongs en route to the Carnegie Library, Charlene silently tsked their laziness, their disheveled, E-minor self-importance. Where was Homer when you needed him? Mēnis—rage so pure it could be felt only by the gods:
Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls.
These boys with guitars wouldn’t know real rage if it clobbered them on the head. They had no idea. Achilles, who became so intoxicated with mēnis after the Trojans murdered his lover, Patroclus, that he killed everyone in sight, and when their bodies choked the waters, he fought the river god, too. Achilles, who finally tracked down Hector, his lover’s murderer, and threw a spear straight through his neck, tying him to his chariot and dragging him around Troy for nine days until the mass of flesh became unrecognizable as anything human. That was dedication. Not these slow-jam-acoustic-hashish-hippie symposia. This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.
One night, she was working late in the bowels of the library, reorganizing the card catalog — something she often did when she did not want to face the solitude of her insomnia. The campus was practically empty, so she was surprised when H. H. appeared in the doorway, his tie undone, his hair standing at attention. His car was not working, he said. Would she mind if he waited here with her?
She did not ask what he was waiting for. They spoke briefly of something potentially meaningful, about the viability of protest, about the inevitability of cultural evolution. A theorist was mentioned. There was a silence. She was aware of the space between them. And then he was coming toward her, and she could hear the card rustle in her hands and she could smell the drink on his breath and then he was upon her, with his mouth open and his tongue wandering in circles, and she was receiving this tongue, falling into him, hating him.
“Charlene,” he whispered. “I’ve wanted this for so long.”
He undid his corduroy trousers and placed his hand on the back of her head and pushed her down and she took him into her mouth.
• • •
IN THE END, she barely slipped out of Syracuse with a degree. Her version of the narrative blamed everything on that night, located his assailment as a kind of anti — deus ex machina, where the universe performed its ultimate act of subterfuge while she was busy trying to play by the rules. It was analyse réductrice, but it gave her an excuse to drop the tiller entirely.
She started to drink again, with an enthusiasm honed by a year and a half of sobriety. She bounced around several Jersey librarianships, but she had no appetite for the job anymore. The books mocked her. She now saw the arbitrariness of the Dewey system as an exercise in futility — clearly, it was impossible to classify anything of real consequence. Meanwhile, Louise and Bertrand, once so hopeful for their daughter’s turnaround, worried at her sharp descent.