The Librarian by Larry Beinhart

Author:Larry Beinhart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nation Books

Chapter

THIRTY-FOUR

THE PHONE RANG as Inga picked up her pocketbook.

What a thing it was to be old. Most of the time she accepted that age came creeping like cold from out of the ground, and had crawled up her legs and around her thighs and pubis and belly and breasts and neck and all around her face like some invisible vine, you couldn’t see the vine itself, but you could see the lines it left and you could see how it pulled all the flesh downward into the ground.

She watched the students go by.

Once she had been so young and so wild and her flesh had been as firm as any of theirs. She could dance, dance all night long, making the boys hot and horny and grabbing at her, making them dance to try to keep up with her so that one of them would be the last one standing when she chose to go home, hoping she would choose to take that one home with her and sometimes, laughing, she did and tore at them as hungry for it as they could ever be, rode them as often as they rode her, an old woman’s memories wondering where the sap went. A good thing, she told herself—imagine if she came climbing across the library counter and jumped on some eighteen-year-old.

There’d been love and she’d thrown herself into it, broke up her professor’s home and then won and kept the prize for herself, but that had been, she now understood, the end of her, the beginning of the fade from Viking girl to married Twentieth Century Western Civ woman. Then he’d gone and ruined it all, ruined both their lives, he’d committed suicide and she had never recovered, never been young one day since, consumed herself with wasted days of grief, regret, anger, and guilt.

She picked up the phone and it was Taneesha, who started to tell her all about David having sex with a horse. Neither of them believed it. Well, Taneesha gave it some credence. Maybe not credence, but she was clearly getting the entertainment value out of the story.

Then Taneesha said that Homeland Security and the FBI were coming to take all David’s papers and secure his computer and lock up his office or whatever the hell they did and everyone was being alerted that if David was seen, to call security instantly.

Inga felt her heart start to pound. She was angry. She hated these police that came into libraries. Libraries were freedom. They were the torches in the darkness, bastions against the inherent power-mongering fascism of all government.

“I have to go,” she told Taneesha, much to the other woman’s disappointment. “I have to go.”

She marched into David’s office. Maybe he did have sex with animals. If he did, there would probably be pictures or stories about it on his computer. She hated the idea of thought crimes.

Even if that were all lies, there would be evidence of his life on his computer. There would be . .

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