The Lending Library

by Fogelson, Aliza

  “You see, my name is Dodie Fairisle.” I managed a smile, willing him to understand.

  He looked at me in anticipation. Shoot. I was sort of hoping he would pick up on my meaning.

  “Uh . . . your last name is Gargamel . . . ?” I backed away. My pajamas beckoned. And a brown paper bag for my head.

  He laughed—a practiced, throaty bark that was neither warm nor cool. “I’m giving you a hard time. I knew what you meant.”

  I exhaled. “Okaygoodnicetomeetyoubye!”

  As I turned to flee, he slipped his hand around my wrist and gently tugged me back to face him. “Wait a second. You are charming. Let me take you to dinner,” he ordered.

  I reflected for a moment. Most of his face was expressionless, but there was an eager gleam in his eye.

  “All right,” I agreed. Why bother living in New York if not to take a few chances?

  In the early days, dating Daniel G meant I had to get used to half-clad models swanning around his apartment, crashing on his couch, borrowing clothes from the showroom, and cozying up to him in restaurants or clubs whenever I went to the bathroom.

  However, after Daniel and I had been out on a few dates, the models disappeared. I wasn’t sure how he was sending a signal that he wasn’t interested in playing the field anymore, but everyone in New York besides me seemed to have gotten the message. Daniel seemed to revel in having an aspiring artist on his arm at events, and the press ate it up.

  As brilliant and funny and charming as he was, something wasn’t quite right. I began to notice that when I told him a story, he’d always swing the conversation back around to something that had happened to him. If I mentioned an exciting event or big deadline I had coming up, he never asked how it had gone afterward. If I said I’d had a bad day, I rarely got so far as to tell him why before I was commiserating over one of his problems with a supplier or another designer or an account. And he never remembered to find out whether the next day was better. The reality was Daniel G was very interested in me but not as interested as he was in Daniel G.

  “He’s a narcissist,” Coco claimed. That word always sounded so lovely that it was hard to believe it meant such an unpleasant thing. Ultimately, when I needed him most, he hadn’t been there for me. And to add insult to injury after our painful breakup, he’d asked me not to speak to the press.

  I pushed those thoughts away. For now, my hands would be full setting up the new lending library. First I had to figure out how the Hatshepsut to do that.

  I decided to focus on what was most important: the experience of the library. I had to set aside what other people did in their libraries and forget about what I didn’t know. Instead, I would try to think as someone who had been an attentive (okay, compulsive) patron of libraries for my whole life. I wanted to make it a place where I would feel comfortable and happy so that other people would too.

  The front entrance of my house faced west, and the back sunroom sat on the east-facing side. Light streaming from the southern window crossed the whole space all the way to the window on the north side. It could get warm in there with the full sun; I would need to set up some shelves in a way that created shade without risking damage to the books by putting them in the path of blazing heat. Some transparent curtains maybe—heavy enough to block the glare but thin enough for sunshine to suffuse the room. The door connected to the house was at the southwest corner three steps up into my kitchen and living room. I sat down on the stairs with a little sketch pad and drew out my vision. I knew I’d have to get in there with an actual tape measure at some point, but tape measures are scary. Like mayonnaise or Rodents of Unusual Size. So for now, I drew.

  I knew from all my library visits that the shelves were usually about six feet tall, and I could fit five of them in the center of the room with comfortable aisle space between them, maybe six if I squeezed them in. Then I could have low bookcases lining each wall below the windows except the solid west wall attached to the house and the left half of the north wall, which was also solid and windowless. The circulation desk would go in the middle of the west wall, and I hoped I could snug in a round table on the other side of it, in the northwest corner, for a few readers to sit at. In the south corner of the opposite wall were the french doors leading to the outside, and they were fortunately wide enough that I was sure I could fit the shelves and other furniture through. Well, pretty sure.

  I set my sketch pad down and wiped my brow. Beads of sweat came off on my fingers. I was breathing heavily, the blood pounding through my veins. The way the library needed to look was clear to me now, so close that I could practically smell the books.

  On Monday afternoon, a few of my closest friends met me at school to ferry some books back to my place. My massive furniture order materialized right as we got home. Actually, the delivery truck was there waiting for us. Oops.

  “How long have you guys been here?” I asked, concerned.

  “About twenty minutes,” the head guy, whose name tag read DANA, said.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Nah, that’s okay. It’s not every day we get to deliver the contents of a library!” Dana gestured at the bookcases lined up in the back of the truck. My palms started sweating.

  “Are you going to have self-help books? Like The Secret? Or How to Win Friends and Influence People?” a teen-looking delivery guy asked as he headed up the ramp.

  “Sure,” I said, biting my lip. “We’re going to have a little bit of everything, hopefully.”

  The guys unloaded the shelves, and fortunately—with a little grunting and rotating and probably some swearing that I pretended not to hear—everything ended up inside the sunroom exactly where I’d drawn it. I thanked the delivery guys and tipped them generously, telling them to come back in the New Year after we opened.

  When they left, we ordered pizza, and Kendra mixed up a bunch of Bellinis to keep us buzzing along. So some thrillers might get mixed in with the romance section . . . no big deal.

  “You look really happy,” Kendra said, handing me another Bellini after we’d shelved the last of the books.

  “I am.”

  She clinked glasses with me. “Me too.”

  The other girls gathered around, wanting to get in on the toast. “Yeah, this place is going to be fantastic,” Geraldine said.

  “Thanks. That means a lot to me coming from the two coolest librarians I know.”

  Everyone burst out laughing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’ve never seen anyone smile so big!” Kendra giggled.

  “Just wait until the opening!”

  —FOUR—

  December 2007

  The lending library was my new crush. I thought about it when I was at school and when I was driving home. I basked in its presence. I kept imagining ways to make it happy or, rather, to make its visitors happy. I couldn’t wait to tell my older sister, Maddie, about it. But first, I was looking forward to a dose of vicarious dating.

  Maddie made a bigger effort to meet new people than anyone I knew. She seemed to have some kind of male magnet that I wasn’t blessed with, so her efforts were always rewarded with attention. Unfortunately, her own attention span lasted about as long as a fruit fly’s.

  She answered on the second ring. “Hey, princesspants.”

  I grinned. “Hi, hot stuff.”

  “What are you doing right now? I hear something going into the oven.”

  “Are you a dog? What’s with the supersonic hearing?” I asked. “I’m making Yorkshire pudding.”

  “What the hell is Yorkshire pudding?”

  “It’s kind of like a popover—”

  “Love those,” Maddie interrupted.

  “—usually baked in the drippings of roast beef.”

  “Ew, roast beast! But you don’t eat roast beast.”

  “I know.”

  “Um, Dodie, doesn’t that mean you’re making popovers?”

  “Okay, yes, fine,” I harrumphed. “But I was reading Dickens
, and he doesn’t call them that. He calls them Yorkshire puddings.” I wasn’t about to tell her that he also described them as blisterous. They really weren’t. Okay, well, maybe in shape they were, but as anyone who had ever eaten one knew, they were basically the perfect kind of bread. All crisp brown crust, just the tiniest hint of eggyness inside. When they came out of the oven, I would either butter them or use some Macon Farms cherry preserves or the last dregs of my Fauchon peach-vanilla jam. Or the almond cream Maddie had gotten me on sale at Dean & Deluca. Snapping back to it, I asked, “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the gym working off my popovers of a different kind.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “On the treadmill.”

  “Wow, you sound great,” I marveled.

  “Thanks, Do. But don’t be impressed. I started three minutes ago, so I’m only going one and a half miles an hour at this point.”

  “How’s your Dionysus?”

  “Gorge. I sat and stared at his marvelous, endless eyes and dark, full lashes for two hours last night,” she said dreamily. “It distracted me from the blather coming out of his mouth.”

  I snickered. “That’s a little creepy of you, though. I mean, is it obvious to him you just think he’s pretty? Wasn’t he weirded out by all that staring?”

  “Nope. He kept saying, ‘My eyelashes are beautiful, no? Keep looking at me; I think that makes them grow.’”

  I rolled my eyes and laughed. “I can see why you wanted to tune him out then.”

  “Yeah. That’s why he’s Mr. Right Now. Enough about him. Mom told me you’re starting a library?”

  “I’m really excited about it. You know that little corner in our attic with the squishy chair where I always used to read? I set up a corner like that in the library here. And I’ve been cutting up the art from old calendars and turning them into bookmarks so I can write a little note telling people why I chose that book for them. Remember the back sunroom? That’s where I put it. It’s such a great, sunny space, and the trees all around make it feel homey and cozy too.”

  “It sounds awesome. I can’t wait to see it when I’m there. Listen, I’d better kick it up a notch. Blasting up to three miles an hour! Enjoy the dickens out of those popovers.” She laughed.

  I rolled my eyes again. “Thanks. Enjoy the workout.”

  “If you say so. And hey, I’ll see you next weekend.”

  “I know! Excited to celebrate your birthday!”

  “It’s really coming along, isn’t it?” I said to Geraldine.

  The smell of books was already filling the air. They neatly lined the shelves except for the decorated bins I’d put out with picture books for the kids to rifle through, one low corner bookcase that had a squishy chair shoved in next to it, and a stack of random books on top of it meant to entice people who didn’t know what they were looking for. I would keep refreshing it with totally unrelated books—some delicious beach reads by Sophie Kinsella or Hester Browne or Zane, some Nicholas Sparks tearjerkers, some award-winning new literary fiction, some scandalous memoirs. The rest of the books in the library were divided into fiction, narrative nonfiction, and illustrated books arranged in alphabetical order. People could find their way to the books they loved, and the hunt would be fun.

  “Definitely getting there. But it still needs something,” Geraldine said, her hand on her hip, her head cocked as she scrutinized one side of the room.

  “Well, I want to leave the bulletin board blank for now so the kids can fill it up with requests and drawings and stuff.” The thought made me smile. A wooden credenza I’d gotten at an auction and moved around my house aimlessly for the past three months had finally found its true home beneath the bulletin board. On top of it, I’d placed a little basket labeled COMMENT CARDS with a stack of them to write on and slip into the envelope, inviting COMMENTS, THOUGHTS, BOOK WISH LISTS for the bulletin board. A handful of pencils sat in a colorful Italian tomato can. There were also a pad of construction paper and two boxes of crayons.

  “No, that’s not it.” Geraldine was shaking her head. She was trying not to smile or to glance at the door into my house, which, I now realized, Kendra had disappeared through a while ago.

  A moment later, she returned, gingerly carrying something in her arms.

  Oh no. Was that . . . had she . . . ?

  “This is what’s missing!” Kendra announced, as though she was continuing the conversation Geraldine and I were having.

  Even seeing the wood frame on the back of the canvas made the corners of my mouth pull down. Then Kendra turned the canvas around. I clenched my fists hard.

  “Yes!” Geraldine clapped. “It’s perfect!”

  There, staring me in the face, was one of my paintings—two mermaid sisters holding hands, one with red-gold hair, one with honey-gold hair, their tresses trailing, their eyes starry as though lit from within. I sat down heavily in a child-size chair, feeling it creak under me. My knees were shaking; I crossed my arms over them so Geraldine and Kendra wouldn’t notice.

  But of course they did. Kendra had seen my artwork previously—by accident when we went up to my attic to pull down a box of books and she remarked upon the row after row of canvases turned away to face the rafters—and I had shared the story of my spectacular failure as an artist with her.

  Through the many long hours of gallery work in New York—cataloging, stuffing envelopes, entering mailing addresses—I had nursed my ambition as a painter, sacrificing lots of beer-soaked nights with friends to save up for new paints, brushes, and canvases and devoting a corner of my tiny apartment to my easel and a growing body of work.

  One day, the owner of the gallery where I was interning finally let me show him some of my paintings. “Stick to data entry,” he advised me. I faked a stomachache, went home, and cried for the entire weekend until Daniel returned from a model-scouting trip in Morocco.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked when he called from the back of a cab. It was early in our relationship, and—considering how nice his apartment was—it hadn’t made sense for us to stay at mine before. So Daniel had never even seen my artwork.

  “My boss hated my paintings,” I confessed.

  “What? That’s crazy. Let me see what he saw,” he insisted. “I’ll give you my honest opinion.”

  “Okay.” I sniffed. Thirty minutes and one rapid cleaning spell later, I buzzed him up.

  “Seriously, Dodie, you’ve got something here,” he said when he looked at my paintings. He pulled a half dozen of them out of the careful layers of canvases I’d made along the floor around the easel. “They’re different from anything I’ve seen before, and I’ve seen a lot of art.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He looked thoughtful and said, “Listen, let me talk to a couple friends and see if I can get your stuff viewed by someone else.”

  I guessed Daniel loved a good challenge because within a month he got me booked for a group show at a small but well-respected gallery in Chelsea.

  To make a long and painful story short, Daniel and my family and friends loved my work. The Times called it “mawkish and sentimental,” and New York magazine put it in the Highbrow Despicable column on the Approval Matrix with the line “incomprehensibly childish art from a supposed adult.” It should have given me some satisfaction to be featured in such a legendary spot—“Even the ‘Despicable’ ones are cool,” Sullivan had insisted—but it didn’t. The other reviews were pretty similar. Some of them talked about how all the subjects’ eyes shone with a glee that can’t exist in a world where puppies are run over, or they snarked that the artist seemed imprisoned in a strange, warped optimism.

  Maddie dropped the f-bomb fourteen times in a row trying to convince me that the blasé New York press should take its head out of its glutei maximi (my words, not hers) and stop writing reviews from their postcocaine binge crashes.

  Daniel had a friend send me an emergency supply of vacuum-packed cheeses from Paris.

  I lock
ed myself in my apartment for yet another tear-filled weekend, packed away my paints and paintings, drowned my sorrows in tomme vieille and comté fruité, and admitted to myself that I didn’t have the talent or the thick skin to be an artist. What people said deeply hurt me. It felt like an attack not only on my work but also on my way of looking at the world. Secretly, a small part of me had hoped Not Dad might be inspired by my success—or, as it turned out, failure—to get in touch with me all those years after abandoning our family. But of course, he never contacted me about the show or the savage reviews.

  “What should I do now?” I asked Daniel. A part of me wanted him to say, “Take some time and then start painting again. Screw them.”

  Instead, his response was: “I was afraid this might happen.”

  “What? The bad reviews? Why?” I assumed he meant that some mean critics can torpedo new people for the fun of it.

  But no. “I want you to be happy, Do. But maybe it’s better to accept that your painting isn’t good enough rather than spend years trying to make it happen?”

  My jaw dropped. Not good enough? That’s what he thought? And he had allowed me to expose my work to the world anyway? I wanted to say, “I thought you believed in me.” But there was no point. Daniel’s meaning was clear, and my heart was broken. I could never be with him again after that.

  I had enrolled in teacher education classes a week later figuring I could use my passion for art to help little ones learn it. I loved what I did now. I didn’t love seeing a reminder of my failure clasped between Kendra’s hands. And I certainly didn’t love the idea of all the library patrons being forced to look at my painting or—Geppetto forbid—thinking that I was showing it off.

  Kendra and Geraldine had obviously followed the range of emotions on my face. Geraldine patted me on the shoulder. Kendra sat down in the other child-size chair, holding the painting on her lap and resting her knees against mine. The mermaids stared at me. I put my hand over their eyes.