Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

“Quiet,” he said.

“Quiet?”

“Be Quiet. Always saying that to me when I was a kid.”

B.Q. looked up from the keyboard and grimaced. His teeth were a rotting brown from the gums up, old-bone yellow and tobacco brown.

Handing over my keys I realized Don wasn’t due to pick me up for almost half an hour; it was bitterly cold outside and I needed to be warm while I waited. But Beefy John in his satisfied recline, his crossed arms, the words that pretty little girl of yours , the jagged mossy teeth of B.Q. — they made me uncomfortable. The words land shark came to me as I signed the work order, B.Q. leaning forward unnecessarily from the other side of the counter, so close that I could smell the residue of cigarettes. B.Q. wasn’t a shark, surely, he seemed more ruined than fierce, but the teeth. . I considered whether his meth use was current or past, whether teeth ravaged by meth could be reclaimed. Then I pivoted and walked out into the winter, pretending to have a goal.

Once I was on the sidewalk I slowed down and ambled, watching my breath fog and feeling the cold on my cheeks until I fetched up in front of the library and went in. I hadn’t had that goal in mind, of all the thousands of possibilities offered by libraries no single one presented itself to me, but there, right away, was the librarian I was attracted to. I had nothing to say as he looked up from the front desk, nothing at all. And yet I felt better already.

“Sorry, just coming in from the cold,” I blurted.

“What we’re here for,” he said.

I couldn’t think of any more small talk so I wandered along the shelves looking at titles, plucking out books at random. I seemed to be in a section either for children or for adults who were childlike: true-life accounts of balloonists, explorers. Pictures of famous caves. Prehistoric animals turned to fossil — trilobites that looked like beetles, ammonites that looked like snails. Real-life Monsters. Haunted Houses of New Orleans . The more I looked at the variety of subjects, the more hopeful I felt.

Maybe we could travel, I thought. Not just in my small car — across the world. To the Himalayas, say, jungles, dormant volcanoes with crater lakes, those acid lakes that shimmer turquoise in the sun. . we stood on the decks of ships, rode camels over Saharan dunes toward the pyramids, wandered the Prado, the Great Wall of China, treaded the paths of picturesque ruins. What, in the end, would keep us from the world? I’d planned to give her a solid, settled childhood, where she could have the same friends for years and run through the same backyards, a childhood much like my own. But maybe she didn’t need that. Maybe we could sail away, out of this chill into a summer country.

I hadn’t thought of the voice in a while, I thought (suddenly thinking of it). These days a memory of it will flash through me and what I notice is myself forgetting, the rarity of that flash. It’s like sickness — the whole world when you’re in its grips, but once gone, quickly dismissed. Within days you take good health for granted once again.

“We only have a fake log,” said the librarian, behind me. “It’s not as warm as the real thing.”

Privately joyful that he’d spoken to me, feeling as though I’d performed a small but neat trick, I followed him to a reading room. In the hearth an electric log glowed orange behind its fiberglass bark. The chairs were overstuffed, the high ceilings dark, but still I noticed, trailing after him, peering with difficulty at the fingers of his left hand, that he wore no ring, and I was pleased. I felt like a cliché noticing, a woman who read glossy, man-pleasing magazines, a member of some predatory horde. . he had broad shoulders, an elegant posture.

“I’m so glad there is a library,” I said. “In a town this small. With only one gas station and no fast-food chain.”

“The building was a gift from a wealthy benefactor,” he said. “He made his fortune in lumber. His wife died young and he never remarried. He died without anyone to inherit his fortune. Brokenhearted, they say.”

“Oh.”

“So he left his house to the town for a library. In short, his tragedy was our gain,” said the librarian.

“Oh,” I said again. “Yes!” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Luckily he smiled at me.

When he went back to his desk I sat gazing into the glowing seams of the artificial wood and wondered whether to ask him out. I wasn’t sure I could. It’d be a cold call; I had nothing.

And yet I might be restless enough to do it, I thought, I was bored and agitated at once these days. I was constantly aggravated by the open question of the gathering of motel guests, frustrated by the problem of their continuing presence — and then, bookended with that problem, there were the limitations of my existence and the tedious routine of our schedule. I felt drawn to the librarian but at the same time ambivalent about the prospect of not being alone, that is, not being alone with my daughter, the two of us a capsule. . the two of us close together after the leave-taking of the voice and our running away from Ned.

Of course it was premature to speculate, I knew nothing about him, but still, I thought, why actually try to know someone if you don’t wish to know anyone at all?

Still, in the end you seek out company again. After the noise has passed, after the great clamor’s hushed and the crowds have thinned — then a silence descends upon your room.

And though at first the silence is perfect, the silence is thought and peace, after a while the silence passes too.

IT WAS EMBARRASSING to ask him out and I had to buoy myself up with bravado: it didn’t matter if he said no. I had nothing to lose. The worst that could happen was that my life would remain the same.

In the few moments after, waiting for him to decline the invitation as I rested my fingertips on the edge of his desk, I thought of a girl from high school: she’d been average-looking and not particularly good-natured — in fact she was manipulative, crude, and often picked on easy scapegoats, the poor kids with hygiene problems, the loners. Despite this she always had a boyfriend, and her boyfriends were kinder and far better-looking than she. Waiting for rejection, I remembered her clearly.

Years after high school was over, when I was home from college on vacation, I ran into her on the street. We stepped into a nearby bar for a drink. I had an awareness of being only half there, as though the other half of me had continued along the sidewalk without acknowledging her presence. But we had caught each other’s eyes, we hadn’t flinched and glanced away in time — so there we were, perched on adjoining barstools with little in common.

We quickly ran out of old friends to mention and teetered on the brink of leaving, but we eventually succumbed to inertia and ordered more drinks. On the third she told me the key to men was that they always wanted sex but rarely had the luxury of expecting propositions. And they were tired of always having to be the ones to ask, she said. From the day they hit puberty they wanted to lay that burden down, so all you had to do, she said, was suggest sex and they would take you up on it. This applied equally with most married men, she said — to be honest, with any of them. Failure was rare, she said, and tipped back her glass all the way.

It was admirable, the ease with which she approached the question. It didn’t change my own behavior, however, which in that arena was passive; possibly this was part of why I found myself married to Ned.

In fact, looking back, you could say my passivity in that arena was the start of my greatest failure.

But seeing her unremarkable face in the bar mirror, I felt awed by her attitude, part aggression and part simple confidence. I believed someone should shake her hand or pin a medal on her lapel, but that someone would not be me: for I, even as I was impressed, felt a lucid dislike.