Confessions of a Librarian

by Barbara Foster

  “Still a hopeless bohemian!” hissed Tiffany. Selecting six pairs of shoes, she thrust her credit card at an ecstatic salesperson, who stacked up her purchases to be wrapped. “Same old art for art’s sake, Bella, “ she sneered. “When the revolution comes you’ll be in some coffee house carrying on a pointless conversation... .”

  When I left, she was shaking her red curls, very pleased with herself.

  Stunned after being worked-over by the monster, I needed to speak to a reasonable member of the Club about meeting again. Around the time of Sarah’s death, Chloe had left a few messages on my answering machine. Phone tag became tiresome, but I continued calling. One message mentioned migraine headaches that she attributed to family problems and competition with a male boss. Another revealed that she had consulted a series of therapists (other than Marilyn). Her favorite shrink had suggested a change of scene, and I wondered if she had gone back to Greece.

  At home I picked up Chloe’s latest message: She was sick of New York, and had accepted a bank post in Singapore—a jumping off point for extensive travels throughout Asia! Busy packing, Chloe had no time to chat. I was crushed. I could hear the flutter of wings soaring aloft to the four directions. Was everyone going somewhere except me? Had Candy flown away too? I tried to call her parents, but I had misplaced their number. Fortunately, a month after Tiffany left, Candy phoned.

  “Hey, You’ve been scarce as whiskey at a temperance meeting.” I couldn’t help the cliché.

  “Yeah, I signed a contract for my burlesque book and the publisher wants quick edits.”

  “Great, I wish Sarah were here for this good news.”

  “I’m renting an apartment in Hoboken. Anyway, I’m never home. Take my cell number.”

  “Cell number?” I parroted. “You detest cell phones. Remember you said they cause brain cancer?”

  “Huh, maybe, but I’m always out with a first rate photographer I hired to shoot my burlesque cuties. Wonderful to have some cash for a change. Got to go. Later.”

  “What about the stuff I stored for you? A sequined fan, velvet whip and a few notebooks are still in my closet.”

  “Toss them all. I don’t perform anymore. My wardrobe’s grown more conservative, sharp suits like Chloe wears.”

  “How’s Marilyn?” I asked. “We haven’t spoken since Sarah’s funeral. Her phone’s always busy.”

  “Don’t know,” responded Candy. “Ask the old codger she hangs around with.” On that mysterious note, Candy hung up. Confused, I called Marilyn, who answered immediately.

  “Hi Bella, thought you were Franklin. We speak every day for hours.”

  “Franklin? Candy said you met someone.”

  “She wouldn’t understand our connection. Candy and I don’t get together anymore.”

  “Odd, she used to stay at your house pretty often.”

  “That was before Franklin. I met him through a colleague at a brunch.”

  “Is he in the arts, a jazz musician, or a sexy Latino?”

  “Hardly! He’s a widower, a retired lawyer in his mid-seventies,” she announced proudly.

  I gulped in disbelief. Marilyn had ridiculed older men. Because of her profession, they often kvetched about their illnesses. “Somewhere between fifty and death,” she used to describe them.

  “Tell me more,” I asked, while bracing myself for information that might doom the Club.

  “Things feel so right! He’s black, sensitive, sexy and active in the Democratic Party. Wedding bells are a real possibility.” Marilyn giggled.

  I’d wanted to bring up Sarah’s death, ask if Marilyn cared to share anything unsaid since the funeral. Now such a question seemed inappropriate.

  “Promise to come by soon. You’ll adore my sweetie,” she sighed. “He belongs to a ritzy golf club on Long Island. I’m learning to play,” boasted Marilyn.

  “Sure,” I agreed politely.

  “Are you ready to host the Club again?” I asked, trying to hide the urgency in my voice.

  “Frankly, Bella, I’ve moved on. So should you! This bacchante stuff is juvenile for sensible, mature women. Franklin attends this darling little Episcopalian church in the Thirties. Come along one Sunday. You might meet someone and stop running around.” On that profound note, Marilyn hung up.

  Who could have predicted that our joyous summer romp would be the Club’s last meeting? “Nothing stays,” wrote Kander and Ebb in the song “Nowadays” from Chicago. Sorrowfully humming that tune, I often walked past Marilyn’s house. Without the bacchantes sharing their latest dramas, it seemed pointless to go upstairs. Did the pusses miss our carryings on? Their endearing antics had converted me into a catophile. I felt deprived without having three furry balls to stroke.

  I could not forget the funny things that had made our Club such a hoot. One afternoon Sarah brought Mexican food from a deli. We held a contest to see who could keep fiery peppers in her mouth the longest time. Once Tiffany brought old movie magazines and we combed through them to drool over our youthful heartthrobs. There had been bad stuff too, like Chloe’s getting mugged while coming home from a party at the Greek Embassy. Those times also stayed with me.

  Eventually, only after lots of Proustian remembering things past, I decided to make something happen in the present—to look for a new lover. Hopefully, he would be sensitive, live on the island of Manhattan and have an apartment with room for a frequent visitor. But where to meet such a paragon? Not in the Village bars, where intimate connections once were established over literary conversations. These havens had transmogrified into noisy sports bars where the television blared nonstop. A new strategy became necessary: Belladonna decided to put her bohemian persona in mothballs and enter the cyber age to post a personal ad online. Would there be many takers?

  EIGHTEEN: THE STARBUCKS STALKER

  All my possibilities, I was so hard to please. Simon and Garfunkel

  Right before Christmas, while I sat home lamenting the Confessions Club’s demise, my old friend Johnny called.

  “I’m coming over. Hope your VCR’s ship shape. Let’s watch Sex and the City videos. Remember that hysterical show when Samantha dates that twenty-something dude? What a hoot when she breaks off ’cause he makes fun of the wrinkles in her neck.” Johnny cackled.

  “I’m not in a silly mood these days. A friend died. What the hell happened to you anyway? Just disappearing like that.” After Johnny’s absence for several months, I barely recognized his voice.

  “Stella, my soulmate, dumped me for a geek into that virtual world crap on the Net. Hope their virtual doubles poison them both pixel by pixel. Can I come over tonight?”

  Johnny’s urgency made me the change plans I’d made to meet a girlfriend. He showed up in a billowing purple, pajama-style outfit belted with a golden sash. On every finger large, brilliantly colored rings sparkled. A heart-shaped necklace encrusted with stones of Byzantine magnificence glinted from his hairy chest. At first, because of his manner and inclinations, I had pegged Johnny as a flamboyant gay. Paradoxically, he lusted after the ladies! He was a fish out of water, like me, which is maybe why we clicked.

  After we hugged, Johnny brushed his waist length, Sixties-style-grayish hair back from his plump face. In need of a cut, it straggled onto his cheeks. Before he could say boo, I loaded my online dating woes on Johnny’s sloping shoulders.

  “Craigslist is full of weirdos. Like the submissive shoe salesman who kept waving a yellow sunflower in my face. One creep read my writing on the Net, swore I was another Anais Nin. But all he wanted was a sicko keen to be beaten up. Yuk! Nobody admits to being married. Or they mention it en passant as though it were an ice cream preference. They’re looking for a ‘nooner,’ so they can go home to wifey at night.”

  “Stop lamenting like the ancient Greek mourners. They banged their heads on the ground. Bang yours on the computer.” Tittering, Johnny pulled out a small hand mirror to pick at a blackhead on his turned up nose. “What do you expect—Antonio Banderas for free? P
ay something for a more upscale service.”

  “You used them all for years to find Stella. Losing her must be terrible.” As we sat next to each other in front of my computer, I sympathetically stroked Johnny’s arm.

  “Before her, I only met overweight klutzes and bimbos with whipped-cream brains. For me, sex must be an aesthetic experience, like looking at a painting by Botticelli. Bad example! His women are fatsos. Pencil thin is my ideal and not much over forty.”

  As ever, Johnny set standards that few women met other than the now dethroned Stella. I determined to avoid criticizing him, to enlist his extensive experience with Internet dating in my own quest. Bleary-eyed, I pressed my temples to ward off a headache from squinting at the screen trying to decipher responses to my personal ad.

  “Since you’re an expert at cyber-dating, could I read you my profile? When Johnny nodded, I printed out my Craigslist ad for him:

  Mature, redheaded, Greenwich Village bacchante hoping to connect on long term basis with an interesting, sophisticated gentleman unafraid to show his feelings. My likes: theater, museums, ballet, coffee houses, good conversation, green tea, Chopin. A man who lives in Manhattan highly preferred.

  “Jazz up that pitch,” commanded Johnny. “Sounds like a prissy librarian, sexy as the Dewey decimal system. C’mon, stop whining. Answer some of those guys.” Johnny raised his plucked eyebrows.

  “I’d like to meet a decent man, not an almost-divorced, wiseguy hiding his wedding ring, or moaning about his daughter not getting into Vassar while insisting that he come over ASAP to strip you naked. Single ones are either too young or live in Jersey.”

  A poem I wrote proclaimed my reluctance to entertain “gentlemen callers” at home. Before Johnny could blink, I recited “No Four Walls, No Romance”—

  I don’t care if your prick

  Stretches from the Village to 14th

  Forget the argument

  Do you have an apartment?

  There’s no use blabbering

  Of things we’ve in common

  Don’t bother to phone

  If you don’t live alone

  Life’s too fleet for games

  Fumbling hands and long

  subway rides

  If you live in Great Neck

  I’ll take a rain check

  If you’ve no apartment

  Call another number

  Save your randy advances

  For more likely romances.

  A stony-faced Johnny listened to the poem while noisily grinding his teeth. He used to beg me to share my creative efforts, but tonight nothing pleased him. Stella’s rejection had turned my supportive friend into a curmudgeon.

  “Grumble, grumble, grumble! So what if your pad’s not done up with bric-a-brac or silver and crystal goblets! Most guys on Craigslist just want to find a hottie and get laid,” scoffed Johnny. “For five years, I spent a fortune on pay sites and met zilch—until Stella.” Johnny’s eyes teared but he kept on: “Stop being a quitter after only a few months of posting. Lucky you didn’t meet one of those perverts who tie women up with duct tape.”

  “It’s exhausting and bewildering!” I groaned. “Reminds me of interviews for a job you never get. Last week this Internet hunk of all hunks, touting his plush Chelsea pad, enticed me to a midnight rendezvous. Fortunately, we met in a coffee house first. Turned out this shabby stringbean with furry teeth lived in a welfare hotel. Liars! They send photos that are years old, or someone else’s mug. A few sent pictures of their cocks.” Despondent, I sighed.

  “Big and frothy?” queried Johnny wistfully. “Mine’s nothing to brag about. Wish I had one big as a baby’s arm then I could fuck like a goat.” When I kicked him in the shins, Johnny growled.

  Then, glancing around at the clothes, papers, and books I kept handy in the living room, he attacked: “Get rid of the junk piled high on that bench and chairs. What an eyesore! You in training for a bag lady?”

  “Boy, you’re in a testy mood. Did you binge, or go off your diet?” From heavyset to plain fat, Johnny’s weight yo-yoed up and down. Meanwhile I never saw him eat much.

  “This room’s a shit hole, admit it,” persisted Johnny. “If you empty the garbage out of this space, you can bring guys home and work your wiles. Stupid to cloister yourself like a literary nun.”

  “I write here, Johnny. Three computers, two printers, a fax, that’s why the apartment’s crowded. And my husband has his space too.”

  At the word husband Johnny sniffed. He knew nothing about my domestic life and avoided the subject. He knew me as the bacchante whose wild side allowed her to tolerate his ultra-bizarre behavior. A married woman in an open, honest situation who had certain obligations bored him.

  “That bench in the center’s the worst culprit,” he ranted on. “Put that junk into a bag for Goodwill.” Folding my blouses, dresses and slacks strewn on furniture, a sour-faced Johnny sashayed around the room like a bloated Tinkerbell.

  “Hands off, that’s Betsey Johnson and Ralph Lauren!” I snatched my clothes from him. His glittering, lizard-like eyes settled on caches of shoes. My Imeldaesque collection, which numbered in the hundreds, was stuck under furniture, in nooks and crevices all over the apartment. At the college where I worked the overflow filled two lockers.

  “If you throw out old clothes, you’ll have room for new ones,” Johnny jibed. “Enough ravaging thrift shops, already! Enter the 21st century, get yourself a cell phone. Open a window in here. It’s airless, a mummy’s tomb.” Gasping, Johnny aggressively banged my living room window upward.

  “Who are you to talk?” I shot back. “With a house full of porn books and magazines! When I open the door to get a Coke from your fridge, it’s covered with magnets of girlies with their legs spread. Did I download forty thousand porn photos from the Net? No wonder your neck gets stiff! Masturbating with your eyes riveted on those hotties for hours.”

  “Can’t help it if I’m lonely. Sometimes late at night, just for company, I call the suicide hotline. The endless stories I make up about offing myself blow the counselors’ minds. At least I don’t grouse about the people I meet online. Of course, so few answer my ads.”

  Shoulders drooping, arms hanging listlessly, Johnny reminded me of a petulant sheep dog hungering to be stroked. For company, he always carried around a book, usually in French by an author who’d created a world he imagined himself part of. Today he clutched Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu to his concave breast. When the phone rang, I moved to answer it.

  “Hey, Johnny, please get on the extension in back. It’s probably another one of my demented suitors—in a sexless marriage no doubt.” Suspiciously, I stared at the phone receiver.

  “Hullo, said a happy, optimistic voice. Is that you, Bella?”

  “Sure, who’re you?”

  “George here. Loved your ad. Thanks for trusting me with your number. Would you like to meet soon? I work in Manhattan and live on East Fifty-Eighth Street near Bloomingdales.”

  My eyes sparkled as I envisioned alternately shopping and making passionate love.

  “Do you recall my ad?” George recapitulated: “Photographer, loves to explore the world, a decent chef in my spare time.”

  “Sounds great! Are you attractive?” I ventured.

  “I have brown curly hair and green eyes. I’m six feet tall and slim. A sensitive Pisces, up for anything. Just love intellectual women!”

  “That’s great. Where’ve you traveled?”

  “I’ve photographed everything from the large horned wildebeest in Africa to the Hairy Ainus, people who live in the northern islands of Japan.”

  The more places he mentioned, the higher my imagination leapt like a gazelle: I saw myself wearing a pith helmet to match a cute khaki outfit. I am trekking beside George and his bearers. After a grueling expedition, just the two of us in a cozy hut, I am rewarded with lovemaking to die for under a mosquito net—an X-rated remake of Snows of Kilimanjaro. This guy sounded like a gift from t
he gods.

  “I’m free on Tuesday. Would you like to make plans?” George inquired. “We’ve got a love for adventure in common, plus lots more.”

  “Let’s do Starbucks at Sheridan Square at seven,” I suggested.

  “Okay, I’m not a Starbucks guy, but why not? I’ll be wearing a blue jacket, grey pants, no tie. D’you mind?”

  “Dress as you like,” I answered. “That day I’ll call to confirm.”

  Writing down George’s cell phone number made me want to levitate. Would our meeting evolve into a dinner date, or would drinks be more appropriate? Should I color my roots, have my nails done? Mentally, I selected and discarded different outfits. I vowed to bowl George over with my style, not to mention my intellect. Until he reappeared, I forgot Johnny was hanging on my back room phone extension.

  “Finally, a mensch,” I sighed.

  “Why Starbucks?” asked Johnny. “Tacky! Their coffee’s bad and too expensive. And who wants to sit with a bunch of robots glued to their computers sending instant messages to other robots?”

  “It’s convenient and neutral. Call me the Starbucks Stalker. Around fifty guys, maybe more, I’ve met there. Let this be my last ad in the personals!” Imploring the goddess of love, I folded my hands in prayer, which made Johnny roar.

  “Sure, Craigslist addicts all say they’re going to quit. Bet you’re back online posting as soon as your current ad expires.” From a supportive friend, Johnny had been transformed into a cynical know-it-all who was jealous of my good luck. He jabbed me in the ribs and leered: “Just in case he’s cute, have a helluva’ nasty nasty for me. My flesh is so deprived I know how Rodney Dangerfield felt. ‘If it wasn’t for pickpockets,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have any sex life.’”

  “How about that pre-Stella Polish woman with enormous boobs you rejected when she wanted to snuggle? Bet she would have devoured you like a chocolate bar. That belly dancer from Flatbush sounded sexy.” Hoping to lighten Johnny’s mood, I tried to sound like a matchmaker.