The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

Author:Patrick deWitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

THE ENGAGEMENT WITH EILEEN DIDN’T LAST OUT THE MONTH. BOB found out from Ethan, who called him at work and told him, “I’m at the hospital.”

“Has someone been hurt?” Bob asked.

“I’ve been hurt. I’m still hurt, actually. Will you come visit me? There’s no one fun to talk to here.” Bob took a long lunch break, stopping for a bouquet of flowers on the way. When he arrived at the hospital he found Ethan abed, bored-looking but apparently healthy. When he made to sit up, though, he winced in what Bob took for significant pain. Bob pulled up a chair and asked what had happened. “The whole thing started,” Ethan said, “with Eileen’s mother, Georgie.”

Georgie, Ethan told Bob, was Eileen but twenty-five years older, and hardened by a life of lovelessness and languor. She could drink a bottle of champagne at brunch with never so much as a slur, she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and her pastime was viciousness, directed at her daughter in the morning hours and her husband after the sun set. Georgie endeavored to get Ethan off on his own and she succeeded without very much trouble at all, for she wore her age and vices well, and Ethan had not met a woman before who thought so little of telling him precisely what she wanted him to do. Georgie was a force, and she had style, and for a time these two were simpatico. “The other waiters got wind of my position and explained my good fortune to me. All I had to do was keep the husband in the dark and at season’s end I’d have a hundred-dollar tip and fond memories to boot. Fine, but there was Eileen, looking up at me as I poured her coffee, and I just had to engage with her. Georgie got wind of the budding friendship and made to head us off at the pass but it was too late, we’d already broke bread. Broken bread. The bread was in pieces.”

“So, the story you’re telling me,” Bob said, “is that you made love to your fiancée’s mother.”

“No, Georgie wasn’t my fiancée’s mother at the time of our entanglement. If we have to name a crime here, I guess you could say that I became engaged to the daughter of a woman I’d had an affair with.”

“So there was never any overlap?”

“That’s not a very friendly question, Bob. But yes, all right, preceding the engagement there was overlap, and yes, it became messy and complex. There was a lot of running around and ducking into closets, things like that. Each woman wore a strong perfume but not the same brand; I’ve never taken so many showers in my life. I managed to keep my relationship with Georgie hidden from Eileen and Eileen’s father but there were some very close shaves, and the stress level was high, and between the romantic cloak-and-dagger and the work schedule I wasn’t sleeping hardly at all. Around the same time Georgie and I started falling apart, Eileen and I became engaged.

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