Page 57 of The Librarians
The books are all large coffee-table volumes. The first one Hazel sees is a compendium on the treasures of the Forbidden Palace, the next about the fauna and flora of Patagonia, the next a collection of historic photographs of a hundred and fifty years of Black cowboys. The randomness of the shelving excites her—she can give herself a whole education by grabbing any one book and starting from there.
A few covers are set facing out—the pink palaces of Jaipur, a spiral galaxy in breathtaking detail, a gilded and ornately illustratedAthe height and width of a nightstand.
Tucked in among the books, Hazel finds a handful of personal touches. A tiny origami dragon in dark red paper, a glass jar of used tickets in fadedgreen and ocher, a large, intricate ship in a bottle, so detailed it even has a sailor on deck about to throw a message in a bottle overboard.
She trails her fingertips over the smooth exterior of the ticket jar. After she’d torn up Conrad’s phone number—and after she’d come to her senses—she’d found the tickets for the botanical garden and the cable car ride. And those were all the souvenirs she had of their time together.
She turns around to find both Ryan and Jonathan watching her.
“You’re right,” she says to Ryan, “I do love this house.”
“Sometimes I get on the ladder, swing around, and pretend I’m Belle fromBeauty and the Beast,” says Ryan. “Except, you know, around here Conrad is Beauty.”
Everyone laughs.
“Let’s go to the kitchen. You’ll love it too.”
And he is right again because the kitchen too is book-lined, with one shelf of cookbooks, one shelf of food anthropology, and one shelf of food memoirs.
“Whose books are these?” Jonathan asks the question on Hazel’s mind.
“Conrad’s. He inherited most of them—he says people leave him their book collections for some reason.” Ryan slides the food and drink the guests brought into the fridge. “A lot of them are pretty old.”
Hazel has already noticed that. Many of the cookbooks have lost their jackets; some even have food stains. A random one she picks up is in Spanish, published in Chile in 1955, and has handwritten notes in the margins by at least two different people.
Ryan moves to the stove and puts a pot of water to boil. “Tell me how you guys became librarians.”
“I’m just a clerk,” Hazel says quickly. She can recognize when a query isn’t meant for her. “Jonathan is the only properly credentialed librarian here.”
Ryan stirs an adjacent pot of pasta sauce that is already simmering. “Color me amazed when I found out, Jonathan. I don’t remember you being particularly bookish back in high school.”
Jonathan seems surprised that Ryan knows this much about him. “Good memory. I didn’t really become a reader until I was in the military—it tookvery little bandwidth to download an electronic book, as opposed to an episode of television. I borrowed most of the books from the library—”
“From Austin Public Library?”
Jonathan nods. “I used my mom’s account. So when I started to plan my discharge, I thought, why not become a librarian? Can’t be a bad thing to go to work surrounded by books.”
Ryan, still standing at the stove, listens attentively. But he does not look at Jonathan the way Jonathan looks at him. If anything, he reminds Hazel of a less determined version of Conrad in that cupcake shop.
Jonathan, on the other hand, does not see that which is blindingly obvious to Hazel. He basks in Ryan’s presence, in their proximity. Hazel feels less like a third wheel now and more like guardrails at the edge of a precipice, there so that Jonathan won’t plunge to his annihilation.
Or maybe Jonathan exists on a higher plane. Maybe he’s like the man in the Zen story, hanging from a vine, a tiger on the cliff above, a tiger in the ravine below, a rat gnawing away at the vine, who still manages to savor a wild strawberry he finds growing in the fissures of the rock face.
“I always enjoy it when people like their work,” says Ryan. “Good for you, Jonathan.”
He takes them on a tour of the house. When they come back, Ryan puts pasta in to cook and serves salad in the adjacent dining room.
Hazel anticipated that the space would have books on entertaining and such. Instead its shelves are jam-packed with history and social sciences, including a boatload of titles on politics and religion.
Both Hazel and Jonathan chuckle.
“Okay, a bit difficult to avoid politics and religion atthistable,” says Jonathan.
“It’s usually just Conrad and me, if there’s anyone at all, and we don’t avoid politics or religion.”
“How did you and Conrad meet?” Hazel finally gets to ask her question.
“My ex from medical school”—Ryan, distributing the salad, glances at Jonathan—“the one I told you about the other day—we’ve kept in touch over the years. His colleague and Conrad are friends. One day he was out and ran into them so they got to talking. Conrad was about to move to Austinand my ex said, hey, I know someone who’s an Austin native and I’m sure he’ll be happy to show you around.”
