Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Elliot put his jacket on and went into the outer office, where the secretary sat frowning into the measured sound and light of her machine. She must enjoy its sleekness and order, he thought. She was divorced. Four redheaded kids between ten and seventeen lived with her in an unpainted house across from Stop & Shop. Elliot liked her and had come to find her attractive. He managed a smile for her.

“Ethel, I think I’m going to pack it in,” he declared. It seemed awkward to be leaving early without a reason.

“Jack wants to talk to you before you go, Chas.”

Elliot looked at her blankly.

Then his colleague, Jack Sprague, having heard his voice, called from the adjoining cubicle. “Chas, what about Sunday’s games? Shall I call you with the spread?”

“I don’t know,” Elliot said. “I’ll phone you tomorrow.”

“This is a big decision for him,” Jack Sprague told the secretary. “He might lose twenty-five bucks.”

At present, Elliot drew a slightly higher salary than Jack Sprague, although Jack had a Ph.D. and Elliot was simply an M.S.W. Different branches of the state government employed them.

“Twenty-five bucks,” said the woman. “If you guys have no better use for twenty-five bucks, give it to me.”

“Where are you off to, by the way?” Sprague asked.

Elliot began to answer, but for a moment no reply occurred to him. He shrugged. “I have to get back,” he finally stammered. “I promised Grace.”

“Was that Blankenship I saw leaving?”

Elliot nodded.

“It’s February,” Jack said. “How come he’s not in Florida?”

“I don’t know,” Elliot said. He put on his coat and walked to the door. “I’ll see you.”

“Have a nice weekend,” the secretary said. She and Sprague looked after him indulgently as he walked toward the main corridor.

“Are Chas and Grace going out on the town?” she said to Sprague. “What do you think?”

“That would be the day,” Sprague said. “Tomorrow he’ll come back over here and read all day. He spends every weekend holed up in this goddamn office while she does something or other at the church.” He shook his head. “Every night he’s at A.A. and she’s home alone.”

Ethel savored her overbite. “Jack,” she said teasingly, “are you thinking what I think you’re thinking? Shame on you.”

“I’m thinking I’m glad I’m not him, that’s what I’m thinking. That’s as much as I’ll say.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t care,” Ethel said. “Two salaries and no kids, that’s the way to go, boy.”

Elliot went out through the automatic doors of the emergency bay and the cold closed over him. He walked across the hospital parking lot with his eyes on the pavement, his hands thrust deep in his overcoat pockets, skirting patches of shattered ice. There was no wind, but the motionless air stung; the metal frames of his glasses burned his skin. Curlicues of mud-brown ice coated the soiled snowbanks along the street. Although it was still afternoon, the street lights had come on.

The lock on his car door had frozen and he had to breathe on the keyhole to fit the key. When the engine turned over, Jussi Björling’s recording of the Handel Largo filled the car interior. He snapped it off at once.

Halted at the first stoplight, he began to feel the want of a destination. The fear and impulse to flight that had got him out of the office faded, and he had no desire to go home. He was troubled by a peculiar impatience that might have been with time itself. It was as though he were waiting for something. The sensation made him feel anxious; it was unfamiliar but not altogether unpleasant. When the light changed he drove on, past the Gulf station and the firehouse and between the greens of Ilford Common. At the far end of the common he swung into the parking lot of the Packard Conway Library and stopped with the engine running. What he was experiencing, he thought, was the principle of possibility.

He turned off the engine and went out again into the cold. Behind the leaded library windows he could see the librarian pouring coffee in her tiny private office. The librarian was a Quaker of socialist principles named Candace Music, who was Elliot’s cousin.

The Conway Library was all dark wood and etched mirrors, a Gothic saloon. Years before, out of work and booze-whipped, Elliot had gone to hide there. Because Candace was a classicist’s widow and knew some Greek, she was one of the few people in the valley with whom Elliot had cared to speak in those days. Eventually, it had seemed to him that all their conversations tended toward Vietnam, so he had gone less and less often. Elliot was the only Vietnam veteran Candace knew well enough to chat with, and he had come to suspect that he was being probed for the edification of the East Ilford Friends Meeting. At that time he had still pretended to talk easily about his war and had prepared little discourses and picaresque anecdotes to recite on demand. Earnest seekers like Candace had caused him great secret distress.

Candace came out of her office to find him at the checkout desk. He watched her brow furrow with concern as she composed a smile. “Chas, what a surprise. You haven’t been in for an age.”

“Sure I have, Candace. I went to all the Wednesday films last fall. I work just across the road.”

“I know, dear,” Candace said. “I always seem to miss you.”

A cozy fire burned in the hearth, an antique brass clock ticked along on the marble mantel above it. On a couch near the fireplace an old man sat upright, his mouth open, asleep among half a dozen soiled plastic bags. Two teenage girls whispered over their homework at a table under the largest window.

“Now that I’m here,” he said, laughing, “I can’t remember what I came to get.”

“Stay and get warm,” Candace told him. “Got a minute? Have a cup of coffee.”

Elliot had nothing but time, but he quickly realized that he did not want to stay and pass it with Candace. He had no clear idea of why he had come to the library. Standing at the checkout desk, he accepted coffee. She attended him with an air of benign supervision, as though he were a Chinese peasant and she a medical missionary, like her father. Candace was tall and plain, more handsome in her middle sixties than she had ever been.

“Why don’t we sit down?”

He allowed her to gentle him into a chair by the fire. They made a threesome with the sleeping old man.

“Have you given up translating, Chas? I hope not.”

“Not at all,” he said. Together they had once rendered a few fragments of Sophocles into verse. She was good at clever rhymes.

“You come in so rarely, Chas. Ted’s books go to waste.”

After her husband’s death, Candace had donated his books to the Conway, where they reposed in a reading room inscribed to his memory, untouched among foreign-language volumes, local genealogies, and books in large type for the elderly.

“I have a study in the barn,” he told Candace. “I work there. When I have time.” The lie was absurd, but he felt the need of it.

“And you’re working with Vietnam veterans,” Candace declared.

“Supposedly,” Elliot said. He was growing impatient with her nodding solicitude.

“Actually,” he said, “I came in for the new Oxford Classical World . I thought you’d get it for the library and I could have a look before I spent my hard-earned cash.”

Candace beamed. “You’ve come to the right place, Chas, I’m happy to say.” He thought she looked disproportionately happy. “I have it.”

“Good,” Elliot said, standing. “I’ll just take it, then. I can’t really stay.”

Candace took his cup and saucer and stood as he did. When the library telephone rang, she ignored it, reluctant to let him go. “How’s Grace?” she asked.