with massive oak card files and oak reading tables where unshaved old men read newspapers under gooseneck lamps and rearranged rags in paper sacks. The original stage had been demolished, but cleats on the wall showed where ropes had once been secured.
The railings around the various balconies still described crude arabesques in bronze gone green, but the old floors of the balconies had been replaced by rectangular slabs of smoked glass that emitted pale emerald gleams along polished, beveled edges. Walking on this glass gave me vertigo, but once I started reading I'd slump to the cold, translucent blocks and drift on ice floes into dense clouds. The smell of yellowing paper engulfed me. An unglued page slid out of a volume and a corner broke off, shattered—I was destroying public property! Downstairs someone harangued the librarian. Shadowy throngs of invisible operagoers coalesced and sat forward in their see-through finery to look and listen. I was reading the bilingual libretto of La Bohème. The alternating columns of incomprehensible Italian, which I could skip, made the pages speed by, as did the couple's farewell in the snow, the ecstatic reconciliation, poor little Mimi's prolonged dying. I glanced up and saw a pair of shoes cross the glass above, silently accompanied by the paling and darkening circle of the rubber end of a cane. The great eye of the library was blurred by tears.
Across the street the father of a friend of mine ran a bookstore. As I entered it, I was almost knocked down by two men coming out. One of them touched my shoulder and drew me aside. He had a three days' growth of beard on his cheeks, shiny wet canines, a rumpled raincoat of a fashionable cut that clung to his hips, and he was saying, "Don't just rush by without saying hello."
Here he was at last, but now I knew for sure I wasn't worthy—I was ugly with my sissy ways and the mole he'd find between my shoulder blades. "Do I know you?" I asked. I felt I did, as if we'd traveled for a month in a train compartment knee to knee night after night via the thirty installments of a serial but plotless though highly emotional dream. I smiled, embarrassed by the way I looked.
"Sure you know me." He laughed and his friend, I think, smiled. "No, honestly, what's your name?"
I told him.
He repeated it, smile suppressed, as I'd seen men on the make condescend to women they were sizing up. "We just blew into town," he said. "I hope you can make us feel at home." He put an arm around my waist and I shrank back; the sidewalks were crowded with people staring at us curiously. His fingers fit neatly into the space between my pelvis and the lowest rib, a space that welcomed him, that had been cast from the mold of his hand. I kept thinking, these two guys want my money, but how they planned to get it remained vague. And I was alarmed they'd been able to tell at a glance that I was the very one who would respond to their advances so readily. I was so pleased the handsome stranger had chosen me; because he was from out of town he had higher, different standards. He thought I was like him, and perhaps I was, or soon would be. Now that a raffish man— younger and more handsome than I'd imagined, but also dirtier and more condescending—had materialized before me, I wasn't at all sure what I should do: my reveries hadn't been that detailed. Nor had I anticipated meeting someone so crosshatched with ambiguity, a dandy who hadn't bathed, a penniless seducer, someone upon whose face passion and cruelty had cast a grille of shadows. I was alarmed; I ended up by keeping my address secret (midnight robbery) but agreeing to meet him at the pool in the amusement park the next day at noon (an appointment I didn't keep, though I felt the hour come and go like a king in disguise turned away at the peasant's door).
The books in the bookstore shimmered before my eyes as I worked through a pile of them with their brightly colored paper jackets bearing photographs of
The railings around the various balconies still described crude arabesques in bronze gone green, but the old floors of the balconies had been replaced by rectangular slabs of smoked glass that emitted pale emerald gleams along polished, beveled edges. Walking on this glass gave me vertigo, but once I started reading I'd slump to the cold, translucent blocks and drift on ice floes into dense clouds. The smell of yellowing paper engulfed me. An unglued page slid out of a volume and a corner broke off, shattered—I was destroying public property! Downstairs someone harangued the librarian. Shadowy throngs of invisible operagoers coalesced and sat forward in their see-through finery to look and listen. I was reading the bilingual libretto of La Bohème. The alternating columns of incomprehensible Italian, which I could skip, made the pages speed by, as did the couple's farewell in the snow, the ecstatic reconciliation, poor little Mimi's prolonged dying. I glanced up and saw a pair of shoes cross the glass above, silently accompanied by the paling and darkening circle of the rubber end of a cane. The great eye of the library was blurred by tears.
Across the street the father of a friend of mine ran a bookstore. As I entered it, I was almost knocked down by two men coming out. One of them touched my shoulder and drew me aside. He had a three days' growth of beard on his cheeks, shiny wet canines, a rumpled raincoat of a fashionable cut that clung to his hips, and he was saying, "Don't just rush by without saying hello."
Here he was at last, but now I knew for sure I wasn't worthy—I was ugly with my sissy ways and the mole he'd find between my shoulder blades. "Do I know you?" I asked. I felt I did, as if we'd traveled for a month in a train compartment knee to knee night after night via the thirty installments of a serial but plotless though highly emotional dream. I smiled, embarrassed by the way I looked.
"Sure you know me." He laughed and his friend, I think, smiled. "No, honestly, what's your name?"
I told him.
He repeated it, smile suppressed, as I'd seen men on the make condescend to women they were sizing up. "We just blew into town," he said. "I hope you can make us feel at home." He put an arm around my waist and I shrank back; the sidewalks were crowded with people staring at us curiously. His fingers fit neatly into the space between my pelvis and the lowest rib, a space that welcomed him, that had been cast from the mold of his hand. I kept thinking, these two guys want my money, but how they planned to get it remained vague. And I was alarmed they'd been able to tell at a glance that I was the very one who would respond to their advances so readily. I was so pleased the handsome stranger had chosen me; because he was from out of town he had higher, different standards. He thought I was like him, and perhaps I was, or soon would be. Now that a raffish man— younger and more handsome than I'd imagined, but also dirtier and more condescending—had materialized before me, I wasn't at all sure what I should do: my reveries hadn't been that detailed. Nor had I anticipated meeting someone so crosshatched with ambiguity, a dandy who hadn't bathed, a penniless seducer, someone upon whose face passion and cruelty had cast a grille of shadows. I was alarmed; I ended up by keeping my address secret (midnight robbery) but agreeing to meet him at the pool in the amusement park the next day at noon (an appointment I didn't keep, though I felt the hour come and go like a king in disguise turned away at the peasant's door).
The books in the bookstore shimmered before my eyes as I worked through a pile of them with their brightly colored paper jackets bearing photographs of
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