“Carolyn? You all right?”
No answer. Crosetti shrugged and went to change the diapers. The blotters. They were barely damp now and the pages seemed almost dry to the touch, maybe a little cooclass="underline" the miracle of capillary action. They were still buckled along the edges, in the way of paper that has been wetted, and the gilt edges of the text block no longer had the perfect smoothness of the pristine book. He wondered how she was going to fix that.
As he worked he heard sounds from the sleeping zone: throat clearing, the swish of fabric, the sound of running water, a toothbrush in action, more cloth sounds, the water again, the clunk of a pot, openings of cabinets. He was just finishing the last of the volumes when she appeared at his side, dressed in yesterday’s overalls and black Converse high-tops with bright blue socks; she held two mugs of aromatic bad coffee, one of which she handed to him.
“I’m sorry I don’t have any cream. Or milk.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry I startled you when the alarm went off. You looked like you were going to jump out of your skin.”
A blank look here, a small shrug. She opened a volume of the Voyages and felt the paper. “This is good. It’s almost dry.”
“What are you going to do about the buckling?”
“Press it out, or use heat. This kind of linen rag paper is a lot like cloth. I’ll iron every edge if I have to and then trim and regild.” She turned to face him and smiled. “Thanks for the help. I’m sorry I was cross with you last night. I’m not very social.”
He said, “You let me sleep with you on our first date. I’d call that social,” and instantly regretted it when her smile faded, replaced by a wary look and a very proper sniff. Then, in her characteristic way, she pretended nothing untoward had been said and announced her plans for that day. She had to go out and buy leather for the covers and arrange for the patterned endpapers to be re-created; there were specialty shops in New York that did this sort of work.
“You want me to come along?” he asked when she had finished.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary. It’s going to be quite tedious. A slog, really.”
“I’m a slogger.”
“No, thanks. I think I have to do this by myself. And, ah, I’d like to get started right away.”
“You’re booting me out?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. I’m sure you have things to do…”
“Nothing more important than traipsing around after you, carrying packages and hoping for the tiniest smile.”
He got it, just. Desiring to build on this, he asked, “Don’t you want to see what I discovered in those manuscripts we found in the cover padding?”
“Like what?”
“Well, for starters, they were written by a man who knew William Shakespeare.”
This got a reaction, although not exactly the one he desired. Her eyes widened, startled, and then rolled in disbelief. “I find that rather unlikely.”
“Come here and I’ll show you,” he said, and led her over to the spool table, where the folio sheets were stacked. He pointed to the key lines and explained about the ciphered pages. She examined the writing with the magnifying glass, and took her time doing it. He sat next to her and inhaled the scent of her hair. He did not kiss the back of her neck, although he had to actually grit his teeth not to.
“I don’t see it,” she said, at last. “Shakespeare was a fairly common name in some parts of England, and that name could also be ‘Shawford’ or ‘Sharpspur,’ not Shaxpure.”
“Oh, please!” he exclaimed. “Sharpspur who wrote plays? For the king? And who was suspected of being a papist and was significant enough to prompt an intelligence operation against him?”
“Shakespeare wasn’t a papist.”
“He might have been. There was a program on PBS I saw that was pretty certain he was one, in secret, or at least that he was raised Catholic.”
“Uh-huh. So on the basis of-what is it?-two hours’ experience in interpreting Jacobean secretary hand and a TV program you think you made a major literary discovery?”
“And the cipher letters?”
“They’re probably Dutch.”
“Oh, fuck Dutch! They’re in cipher.”
“Oh, you’re an expert on ciphers too? Jacobean ciphers?”
“Okay, fine! One of my mother’s best friends is Fanny Doubrowicz, who happens to be head of the Manuscript and Archives Division at the New York Public Library. I’ll show it to her.”
He was watching her face as he said this and so was able to observe the quick intake of breath and the slight whitening around the nostrils that signaled…what? Spinning wheels, hatching plots? He’d seen it before when he’d called her on her current scam about the books and now here it was again.
She shrugged. “Do what you want, but I think it’s unlikely you’re going to find a world-class expert on Jacobean secretary hand in the New York Public Library. Ninety percent of their holdings are American, mostly the paper of local writers and prominent families.”
“Well, it looks like you know everything, Carolyn. I guess I’m just a big asshole, who will now”-here he made a show of stacking the manuscript sheets-“get out of your hair, and take my pathetic manuscript to my low-end pathetic expert who will obviously tell me that it’s a letter from some Jacobean pissant about his case of gout.”
He strode over to her workbench and snatched up the brown paper that had wrapped the Voyages yesterday and began to secure the manuscript in it, using the jerky, clumsy motions that indicate irritation.
“Oh, don’t,” she said from behind him in an uncharacteristically high voice. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to behave. You were so excited about it and I just…”
He turned around. Her mouth was turned down into an amusing inverted U like many of the indeterminate bumps that made Jacobean secretary hand so confusing. It looked like the start of another wailing session. But she continued in the same strangled voice: “I never see anyone. I haven’t got a life. The only person I’ve talked to in years is Sidney, and he just wants to be like my mentor, which means mainly he gets to paw me and…”
“Sidney paws?”
“Oh, he’s harmless. He thinks he’s some kind of big-time rake, but all he does is take me to expensive lunches and squeeze my leg under the tablecloth and sometimes in the shop, if we make a big sale he’ll grab my ass and hold on for a little too long, and he’ll kiss me semi-quasi-paternally on the mouth. He’s the last man in New York who chews SenSens. That’s the extent of my whoredom. I need the job and the food. You’re the only one I ever told this to. Talk about pathetic. I have no friends, no money, no place to live…”
“You live here.”
“Illegally, as you guessed. This building is condemned for human habitation. They used to store DDT here and it’s totally contaminated. The guy who owns the building thinks I just work here. He’d like to paw me too. You’re the first person my own age I’ve been with in, I don’t know…years.”
Who is also dying to paw you, thought Crosetti, but said only, “Gosh, that’s sad.”
“Yes, pitiable. And you’re decent to me and I treat you like shit. So typical! If you were a complete shithead I’d probably be slavering at your feet.”
“I could try to be a shithead, Carolyn. I could write away to the Famous Shitheads School and take a course.”
She stared at him and after a moment laughed. It was an odd barking sound not too distant from a sob. “But you hate me now, right?”
“No, I don’t,” said Crosetti with as much sincerity as he could cram into the phrase. He was thinking about why she should have chosen to isolate herself so. She was not a fatty, not disfigured, presentable, “classy” as his mother had observed, no reason for someone like that to skulk in the shadows of the city. And she was, if not actually a beauty, a…what was the word? A fetching woman. When her face was together, as now, when she was not scowling or scarily vacant, she could have fetched him from Zanzibar.