by Sue Halpern
“Patrick never worked for the Smithsonian. He was a doctor. Those bags are premiums, Sunny. You donate enough money and the organization sends you one. I don’t think that’s how Rusty got the bag.”
“Rusty? That’s his name? How do you know that?” Sunny’s arms were crossed, her face petulant. She looked like she wanted to accuse Kit of something but couldn’t think what.
“Because he put in an interlibrary loan request the last time he was here. You were downstairs. His name is Cyrus Allen. C.A. I’m guessing his middle name starts with an I. But he goes by Rusty.”
“What book?” Sunny asked.
“What book what?”
“What book did he request?”
“No book, actually. After he filled out the form I told him he needed a library card, which he didn’t have, and that was that.”
“What book didn’t he request?” Sunny tried again.
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“We’re not part of the FBI, Sunny,” Kit said. “As much as the FBI might want us to be.”
“Ugh,” Sunny said, walking away. “You sound just like my parents.”
* * *
Sunny/the Tip-Top
I didn’t tell Kit how I knew about the Tip-Top Motor Inn because, as Steve says, I didn’t want her in our business, but it happened right after we left her house. We weren’t even off Coolidge Street when Willow announced that we wouldn’t be going home for a couple of days. When I asked why we weren’t, my parents gave each other “the look.” When you sit in the backseat you often see “the look” pass between the people in the front seat, who are almost always your parents.
“We need to—” Steve started to say, only to be cut off by Willow, who said in her most Willowy voice, “We thought it would be fun to visit Rocco and Amelia.”
Rocco and Amelia are old friends of my parents from the Rainbow Gathering. Old, in that they’ve all known one another for a long time, and old in that they are older and have grown children. They’re the reason we live where we live. They knew the people who used to live in our house and even helped them build it. It’s small, more like a cabin, and it’s off the grid and down a long road with fields on either side, and you’d never know there was a city twenty minutes away. Willow likes to say it’s secluded, which is a Willowy way of not saying it’s isolated. It’s beautiful where we live, but there is no one else around, and being no-schooled, it can get pretty lonely. Homeschoolers and no-schoolers have activities together, but they are always planned in advance, usually by adults. That’s why, when the judge at kids’ court said I had to spend the summer working at the Riverton library, I was even less sorry for what I had done.
Rocco and Amelia used to live nearby, but a couple of years ago they moved to Heart Village, a cohousing community about three hours south. Cohousing is where people own their own place but share things like a kitchen and gardens and toys. They get together every day for meals and to watch movies, if they can agree which movie to watch. One time when we were there they had to have a “Heart-to-Heart,” which is what they call it when they ring a huge bell and everyone has to come to a meeting. Some parents were okay with showing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and other parents thought it was too violent, and the people who wanted the movie were telling the people who didn’t that their kids could stay home when it was showing, and the people who didn’t said that even if they did stay home, the film’s violence would poison the air, and in the middle of the discussion all the kids, every single one of them, marched into the meeting room carrying signs that said they’d go on strike and not do their chores if they didn’t get to vote, too. Even the parents who had been opposed to showing the movie were so impressed with the way the kids organized themselves that they gave in.
Going to Heart Village for a couple of days was definitely more exciting than going home, but apparently neither Willow nor Steve had checked in with Rocco and Amelia about this plan, so they had to find a pay phone to call them, which they finally found on the highway at a convenience store, and Willow volunteered to give them a call. When she came back, she was shaking her head. “BB answered the phone,” she said through the open window. BB is what everyone calls Rocco and Amelia’s son, whose real name is Bluebird. “He said that he’s there with Chandra and Chandra’s two kids, and that this would not be a good time.” Once again, my parents gave each other “the look.” Chandra is Bluebird’s girlfriend. She’s older and nobody except BB likes her.
“Now what?” Willow said.
Steve was quiet. “I’m thinking,” he said.
“We could just go home,” I volunteered. We were only forty minutes away. Sometimes I feel like the only sensible person in my family.
“True,” Willow said, but in such a way that I knew it wasn’t.
That seemed weird to me, but I didn’t know why or what to say about it, so I shut up. Kit had let me take her copy of Pride and Prejudice, so I pulled it out of my bag, thinking maybe I would actually reread it, which is when I saw that there was a name written in blue ink on the inside front cover, actually what looked like three names—first, middle, and last. The middle one, Oliver, was crossed out with just a line through it, like it had been a simple mistake, but the other two were scratched out in black ink, the way you scratch out an answer you don’t want anyone to see. Even so, because it was felt tip over ballpoint, I could just make out that the first name was Kit. The last one was harder. Maybe something ending in Y.
Meanwhile, Steve was saying that he thought he remembered that there was a motel on a hill off the highway that was visible only when the leaves fell off the trees, so Willow went back into the store to ask for directions, and when she came back she was waving a card back and forth. Amazingly, the people who ran the store were related to the people who owned the motel. So Steve turned the car around and we drove off in search of it. That’s how we ended up at the Tip-Top Motor Inn. And that is where I saw the car that I was pretty sure was the same car I’d seen the guy from the library driving when I was waiting for Steve to pick me up from work.
* * *
The ladder is always there . . .
—Adrienne Rich
His name was Cyrus, which was old-fashioned, maybe a family name or a place name, though Kit didn’t know where he came from or where he lived, because once she told him he needed a library card, he didn’t fill out the paperwork that would have had that information. Instead he went back to the computer to try out different sequences of key words, as if they were numbers on a combination lock that would, with luck and the right twist, suddenly open and reveal what he was looking for.
“We’ve got a lot of resources for job hunters,” Kit offered, looking over his shoulder when she was walking by his carrel later that afternoon. The words on the screen were “Riverton National Bank,” “Riverton National Bank and Trust,” and “unclaimed property.”
“So I look like a job hunter?” he said, turning away from the screen. “That’s . . .” He paused. “. . . interesting.”
He was scowling. Was he scowling? Kit couldn’t tell. His eyes—chocolate brown, she noticed—had a distinct glower, but it could have been a fake, like he was trying to make her think he was angry. People did that. He was drumming his fingers on the desk, like he was impatient, like he had something more pressing to be doing than waiting for Kit to explain herself. Definitely a fake.
“Sorry. I was assuming,” Kit said. “But that’s what most people your age do when they come to the library to use the computer.” Obsessively. That’s what she wanted to say—she wanted to acknowledge he had been using the computer obsessively—but Kit held herself back, knowing it would sound judgmental. It wasn’t. It was a fact. It was true. Kit could hear Dr. Bondi, who seemed to have taken up residence in a corner of her head, explaining that the truth was not, despite popular opinion, objective. “Your truth and my truth are not necessarily the same thing, and yet neither is false. How’s that for
one of life’s conundrums?” Even so, she knew she was right. “Obsessive” was the correct adjective, and she couldn’t use it.
“And what age would that be?” Rusty asked.
“No idea,” Kit said. Not true. He was wearing a polo shirt, khaki shorts, and loafers, no socks. She knew this look. It was all over the catalogs. It was the official look of the Grey Goose ads in the back of The New Yorker: stubble-faced male, luminous teeth, dressed in faux casual, chatting up an alluring, windswept woman as they leaned against an oceanfront bar (Hawaii? the Seychelles?), a bottle of vodka between them.
He smelled of something vaguely familiar. She took a deep breath. Couldn’t place it.
“Guess,” he said. Now he was smiling, egging her on.
“That’s a dangerous game,” she said. Was he flirting? As much as Kit could remember, it felt like flirting.
“I won’t be offended. Give it a try.” He had turned all the way in his chair now and was looking up at her and tapping his foot as well as his fingers. “I’m waiting.”
“Twelve,” Kit said. Now it came to her: he smelled of turmeric. Did turmeric smell? Maybe it was cumin. Yes, that’s what it was. Cumin.
“Very funny.”
He started tapping more quickly. Ring finger, middle finger, index finger. No wedding band. A player.
“Forty-five,” she guessed. Forty-five, divorced, two children who lived with their mother, big alimony check every month.
He touched his hand to his forehead. “Oh God, have I aged that much?”
“Forty-five isn’t so old,” Kit said. “Or so they say. It’s the new twenty-five, right?” Was she flirting? She checked herself. It felt so weird. Like her mouth was moving independently, saying whatever it wanted to say, ignoring her brain, which was waving a big red flag.
“So you’re forty-five,” he said.
“Not quite,” she said. This, she figured, would put an end to it. Telling a man you were closer to fifty than to thirty was like putting on an invisibility cloak.
“Well, you look great for almost forty-five,” he said—judiciously, she thought. A throwaway line: “You look great!” What men tended to say, though she never understood why that was okay. And now he’d be waiting for her to thank him.
When she didn’t, when the silence between them extended a beat past comfortable, he tried again. “Better, apparently, than I do,” he said, and laughed.
“Nice recovery,” she said, running a hand through her hair, conscious for the first time in a long time of the coarse strands of gray that had begun to run riot. When she was younger, in college, and a single gray hair would appear out of nowhere, Cal would reach over and pull it out by the root and call her “my old lady,” and they would both laugh, as if being old was an impossibility, like being black if you were white, or short if you were tall. And now she was old, or older certainly, and the gray was advancing like a sly and wily enemy, as time, and the scree it carried—down her face, along her neck—were advancing, too.
“Thirty-nine,” he said as she made her way back to her desk. And: “You can call me Rusty.”
Sunny was downstairs with the toddlers, a few people were browsing the stacks, and a few others had taken the chairs vacated by the Four and seemed to be napping. It was a scorching-hot day, and the library, built largely of granite, was one of the coolest places in town—and it had a public bathroom. Chuck wanted to charge people for the privilege—it was one of his moneymaking schemes—but all the women were opposed, even when he argued that they could put in a machine that would wrap the toilet seat in plastic, and a sanitizing hand dryer, and a chaise or daybed. Evelyn objected—everyone would be asking her to make change—and Barbara objected—“This is a library, not a homeless shelter”—but Kit was unsure. The library might not be a homeless shelter, but some days it felt to her like adult day care. She didn’t mind. Everyone needed a place to go. Barbara would come back from Library Association meetings fired up about the “modern” library, but Kit sometimes wondered if the modern library wasn’t one that was filled with machines and gadgets, but simply a place with comfortable chairs and a place to pee, especially in a city where the last diner had closed and the Dollar Tree had a big no loitering sign in its window. “We should have a loitering encouraged sign out front,” Kit proposed at a staff meeting, only to be met with groans from Evelyn and Chuck, and a “let’s be serious” look tossed in her direction over the top of Barbara Goodspeed’s reading glasses.
From Kit’s desk she had a clear line of sight to Rusty’s back, which was again hunched forward toward the computer screen, and the back of his head and his well-developed triceps, which escaped the banded cuff of his shirt. He had been flirting with her, she was sure of that. Some men couldn’t help themselves. She could hear Bondi again: “Did you want him to flirt with you? Were you flirting with him?” Was she? He was the type who wore loafers without socks. In other words, someone she couldn’t possibly like.
“You are wearing sandals without socks.” Dr. Bondi’s voice again.
“But sandals are supposed to be worn without socks,” she said.
Bondi: “‘Supposed to’? Is there a rule? What are you really saying?” Not “What are you saying?” but “What are you really saying? What’s the not-so-hidden message?”
Kit thought about this. Was she really saying that by looking at a man’s feet she could tell that he was a poseur, or arrogant, or disingenuous, or all of the above? She was.
“People make judgments like that all the time,” she could hear herself saying to Dr. Bondi. “It’s probably hardwired or something, so our ancestors could quickly assess if someone was friend or foe. Flight or fight. It was probably wise to err on the side of caution.”
Dr. Bondi’s voice: “And you’re fine with this?” She could hear his skepticism and knew it was really her own skepticism. Kit smiled to herself. The good doctor had trained her well. And then, again, Bondi: “No, Kit, you trained yourself. This is you.”
* * *
Sunny/spies
Cyrus is definitely in the unique name category, like Solstice. There’s a book in the library called One Thousand Names for Your Baby, and if Solstice and Cyrus are in it, they’ve got to be at the bottom of the list. So we have that in common. Also, he’s not from here. His car has New Jersey license plates. No one from here drives a convertible. It’s too cold, though it’s got to be cold in New Jersey, too. Like Willow says, people are mysterious. I still think he may be some kind of detective or private eye, but Kit says that’s impossible, because what detective or private eye would have his bag monogrammed? She’s got a point, though that could be a decoy. Maybe his name isn’t Cyrus. Maybe he’s carrying that bag to throw people off. Maybe he wants people to think that’s his real name. Maybe he figured that if someone saw those initials on such an expensive bag they’d never question his pseudonym, because who would spend that much money if C.I.A. weren’t his real initials? Kit did tell me that L.L.Bean sells lots of monogrammed items that people have returned, and if you don’t mind wearing a shirt or a bathrobe with someone else’s initials, you can get them really cheap. Steve, for once, thinks I may be onto something. He says I need to steer clear of the guy.
* * *
Between the worker and the millionaire / Number provides all distances . . .
—Delmore Schwartz
Cyrus Ingram Allen arrived in Riverton on June 24 at 4:38 in the afternoon after a five-and-a-half-hour drive from Hoboken. It was a sweltering day, and he drove with the top of his Mercedes CLK350 down and the wind wrestling with the sun to keep him temperate and in a better mood than he should have been in. It had been a rough nineteen months as all the pieces of his well-constructed life had fallen over in quick succession like a stack of dominoes: the financial crisis knocking over the job at the boutique investment firm; knocking over the expense account; knocking over the weekends in Cabo, the nights-to-days at Tenjune, the bottle service at the Marquee, the gorgeous women who seemed to materi
alize by his side and disappear when he tired of them; knocking over the Hamptons summer share; knocking over the retirement account (uninsured; insurance was for pussies who didn’t understand the relationship between risk and yield); knocking over the Jersey condo with its unadulterated view of the Manhattan skyline. Gone, all of it gone, but not the car. At least he had paid cash. Walked into the showroom on Eleventh Avenue, pointed to the steel-gray cabriolet with the pillarless rear windows and AMG wheels, and said, “I’ll take one of those,” as if he were ordering a hamburger at McDonald’s. An hour later he was on the West Side Highway, driving up to Westchester on the Saw Mill, playing with the acceleration.
“What’s with you guys?” the state trooper said when he pulled him over. But the officer got it, he was a guy, too, and let him off with a warning—not that Rusty heeded it. The car was just too fast and too responsive to treat like some elderly relative with a faulty ticker. So the car survived, even after he had to give up the spot in the parking garage that cost as much as a family in Newark spent on rent, which was either a lot or a little, depending on how you looked at it, but either way was, eventually, moot. And worry as he did at first that the car would be a target out on the street, it turned out to be just one in a line of Audis, BMWs, a Jaguar, a Porsche, and other Mercedes hugging the curb. All these cars like his, no longer under protective cover, which was as clear a sign of the times as the for rent sign on the Gentlemen’s Barber Club, where guys had been happy to leave a fifty-dollar tip for a fifty-dollar shave and shiatsu.
He had his car, and in the trunk were the last remnants of the life he had been leading—two suitcases and a duffel (Fendi, matching)—and that was that. He was thirty-nine and shedding everything that had made him feel successful, which were the same things that made him feel, more recently, like a failure. He was on the road. The car radio no longer worked, and he could never hear it anyway with the top down, but he had his iPhone (reduced to iPod status now that he had canceled his data contract) and a pair of headphones, and why not listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nicki Minaj full bore, drilling into his brain and filling it with voices other than his own?