The Word Exchange: A Novel by Alena Graedon

Author:Alena Graedon [Graedon, Alena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385537667
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

There was no mistaking the Mercantile Library: its name was chiseled right into the stone, below the bank of third-floor windows. Two carts of marked-down books were on sale outside, and an urn carved above the door seemed hopeful to me then, a symbol not of death but immortality. The timelessness of words.

As I stepped into the warm, dim anteroom, any mantle of worry lifted. Unbuttoning my coat, I walked past a pair of leather couches, a wall of books. At the reference desk my eye caught a sign announcing meetings of societies for Proust, Trollope, Musil. Johnson. I thought of Doug, and in that moment the thought made me smile.

But the librarian didn’t seem amused. “May I help you?” she asked coolly, tapping her seal-slick hair. Pretty pale hands extruded from dark cardigan sleeves. I’d forgotten the Merc was a private library.

I tried to keep smiling; when she asked if I was a member, I thought my lie sounded almost sincere. And at least she didn’t ask me to repeat it. (My fingers still reflexively felt in my pocket for my tube of pills.) But she wanted to see my card. When I patted artlessly at my coat, she asked, unbending, for ID, indicating their registry—a large wooden cabinet with tiny drawers: a card catalog, I later learned. “I don’t have that either,” I said. Her mouth scalloped in a scowl. But when I explained that I’d just given up my Meme and hadn’t gotten around to procuring a new form of identity, she sighed and slid a clipboard toward me. “Don’t forget next time,” she said.

I wavered just a moment before signing Alice Tate. Blushing, I realized I’d taken Bart’s last name. It gave me a flashback to lower school, in the days before the Meme—before most lower schoolers even had cell phones—and to scribbling pages of Anana Ringwald and Tobey Johnson, my name and my crush’s conjoined. Did my subconscious think I wanted to be Anana Tate? I shook my head. Those weren’t the feelings I had. Bart either.

I climbed the first stairs I saw, an open metal flight that took me to a mezzanine reading room. It resembled my grandparents’ parlor in their Connecticut country house. Same high ceilings and table sheen. Herringbone floors. Baubled chandeliers. Musky smell of old leather. I sloughed off my coat on a chair by the Johnson collection, near the baby grand. Imagined Doug beneath it, snoring a sweet, humble music, and my eyes pricked.6

I thought I was alone. But soon, as I looked around the room, I heard an unusual sound coming from a hidden corner. The jangly melody of metal on metal. As if a janitor were walking by with a bouquet of keys.

Curious, I strode to the other end of the room, pretending to need an atlas beached on a table, and found that the odd sound was coming from a woman’s gold bangles, which lightly bubbled together each time she turned a page. She looked like she

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