An Imperfect Librarian (6 page)

Mercedes and Cyril were guardian angels, especially during the first few months. If it hadn't been for their hospitality, I might have headed back to Norway. They invited me for supper every third or fourth night. After we'd eaten, we'd play 120s or watch the news. I'd take the La-Z-Boy chair. They'd sit on the couch. By 9:30, she'd be asleep with her feet in his lap. Cyril's head would be plopped forward and he'd be snoring
into his chest. At that point, I'd open the basement door to go downstairs to my flat.

I spent Christmas with them and their daughter, Heather while she was home from university. Cyril gave me a fishing rod as a gift. “We'll go troutin' on the May 24th weekend,” he told me. Night after night, we played a trivia game. Cyril and I formed one team against Mercedes and Heather. I was good with literature. He knew all the answers in the sports categories. Mercedes and Heather beat us every time.

It was my second Christmas without Elsa. For the first one, she was with Brutus. I asked her if she'd come by. I told her about the gift I'd bought. She said maybe Christmas morning. I had everything ready, decorated our tree, bought some eggnog, put a ribbon on the bike. Every time a car pulled up I'd jump up to look out the window. By 4:00 in the afternoon, I turned off the Christmas lights. I ate some curried turkey from the corner store then drank half the bottle of wine with the card that said:
all my love, Carl
. When I woke it was December 26th.

Mercedes and Cyril weren't the only ones who helped me after I arrived in Newfoundland. Edith went out of her way to do things for me. She made sure I had lunch every day. She told me I should get out more, buy some new clothes, and find a proper living situation for a man my age. When I told Henry about her shoulds, he said Edith and I would make a fine pair. “She wouldn't get shagged in a bucketful of pricks and you wouldn't know a tit if it introduced itself to you.”

During my first month at the library, Edith spent more time in my office than her own. After a while, I had to stop leaving my door ajar. But then she'd knock; I'd answer and she'd come in. Henry and I eventually settled on a coded knock-knock-knock-knock, one of those quick, successive, galloping horse beats, four times in a row.

Henry was also very helpful during the first few months
and after. He drove me around everywhere and even lent me his car. Eventually, I thought it was time I bought one of my own. He came with me to help pick it out. I told him, “Thanks, Henry, I'll make the final decision.” I turned to the salesman in his eager-for-the-deal white shirt and skinny black leather tie to shake his hand.

Before I could open my mouth, Henry bumped against me, hands in his pockets, and announced loud enough for the salesman to hear, “It's a deflated, impotent prick of a car. You're wasting your fucking money. It'll be a worse pain in the arse than a severe case of haemorrhoids.”

I bought the car. It was a lemon. Henry was right. But that didn't justify his behaviour with the salesman. I told him that and he said I was a thumb-sucking sissy. The more time I spend in his company, the more I worry about his behaviour. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if he's thinking the same about me.

He did make it easier during those initial months when I thought I'd made a mistake moving to Newfoundland. I wasn't going to run into Elsa walking down the street in St. John's. I couldn't go to her flat to ask her why she wasn't answering my mail or my calls. It wasn't only Elsa I missed. Tatie and Papa were getting older and more dependent on me. The Oslo to Paris flight was quick and cheap. From there, I used to take the train to the nearby town where they'd pick me up in their car. I couldn't do that as easily anymore now that I was on the other side of the ocean.

For the first few months after I arrived in Newfoundland, Tatie called almost daily to talk about her news, local news, international news, no news. “I only wanted to say hello,” she'd say. “Is it all right to call you at work? Are you busy?” I was never too busy to talk to her. Mostly, she talked. I listened. “I hope you'll be moving back to this side of the world soon...” Some days the calls went on for a very long time. “I told the man at the
market I would never pay that price for aubergines, not if I was a millionaire but...” I was glad to hear that she was taking an interest in what was going on in their village. “Maximillian's wife had her surgery. She's doing well...”

Tatie worried about me. She worried about Papa too. Especially about his memory. She told me about an incident when he was making rice. He boiled the kettle, then dropped the bouillon cube inside. Tatie warned him he'd spoil the kettle if he dissolved the cube in there. He ignored her. Months later, he was making a dish that called for bouillon cube. She held out the kettle to him.

“I'm not going to put the cube in there,” he said. “That will ruin the kettle. What's wrong with you, Georgette?” When she argued with him, he told her she was losing her mind.

Tatie never had any children of her own. Papa said it was because the French weren't meant to mate with the English. When her English husband Philip left her, she clung to me like I was the last child on earth. Even when I was no longer a child, she insisted that I stay with her. “You can't leave me alone. You're all I have.” When I turned thirty, she decided it was time for me to move out. “Find a wife,” she told me. I was almost forty by the time that happened.

I brought photos of them with me to Newfoundland on my laptop. Elsa was in nearly all of them including those with Tatie and Papa. I had taken hundreds of shots of her during our trip to Egypt. There were before and after renovation pictures of our flat. I also had various photos of her important moments: at her third-place road race win, first day on the job at the travel agency, posing with her guru yoga teacher.

When Mercedes realized I had photos of my life in France, England and Norway, she wanted to see them. I started with the Tatie-Papa photos. Next, we looked at some photos of Elsa. After about fifty, Mercedes said she had something to show me. She
hurried off to another room while I sat back on the La-Z-Boy and watched the local news with Cyril. She returned during a Central Dairies commercial.

“Let me help you with those,” I told her.

She unloaded the albums into my arms. It didn't take her long to find the photo she was searching for. “That's my friend Nancy,” she said. “She's a nurse too. There's tons of fish in the ocean, you know.” After that incident, whenever they invited me for supper there'd be another woman sitting by my side. First there was Nancy, then Sharon, Heather, same Nancy, Patricia, Carol, Nancy again.

For New Year's, I went with Mercedes and Cyril to the harbour-front. It was so jammed with people that I lost sight of the two of them not long after we arrived. The revellers huddled together under a sky with a shiny black marble finish. The clock ticked down, people chanted
five, four, three...
fireworks exploded. The ships' horns blasted and echoed off the surrounding hills. People I didn't know hugged me, shook my hand or shoved against me. Then, someone grabbed me from behind. It was Mercedes. She wrapped her arms around me. “We're some glad you're with us,” she said. Cyril gave me a friendly smack on the shoulder.

“Now's the time for resolutions,” Mercedes announced. Cyril resolved to finish installing the clapboard on the house, Mercedes resolved to not nag him anymore about the clapboard, and, for lack of a better idea, I resolved to do more fishing. Mercedes winked at me.

Cyril said, “I was thinking we should rent us a place up in Terra Nova National Park for that May 24th weekend and...”

I'd never felt a wind as cold as what rolled down between the hills to the harbour-front that night. Somehow, though, I didn't mind. People told me I'd get used to the weather on the island and I guess they were right.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
HE DAYS DRAG INTO WEEKS
, the weeks drag into months, the months drag me forward. I pretend to be listening during meetings where they ramble on about e-solutions, e-learning, e-searching, e-libraries when all I care about is e-lsa. I adjust to life on a barren island, to the foreign Newfoundland accents, to the unconscious kindness of the locals. I don't adjust to being so far away from Elsa, yet so close to knowing that she may never leave Brutus. I'm tired of opening my email to find the usual
Message blocked for this recipient
.

Six months on the opposite side of the ocean and the closest I've come to an email from her is one with an E in the sender line. The sender is Edith.

We should go for a beer after work today. What

do you say?

Edie

xoxox

P.S. Careful. In your last email, you had “there”

books. Should be “their” books.

We meet in the library lobby then walk to the Campus Quaff where it's standing room only. Edith nudges so close to me you'd swear we were two of twenty sardined into an elevator. Before long, a group of people leave. Edith swoops down on two vacated chairs. We sit together, elbows touching.

“See her?” Edith says. She reaches her hand in front of my face to point at someone at the opposite table. “Remember Paul Hiscock? The man I introduced you to in the campus cafeteria? The one who's married to the secretary of the director of the library's financial section? That's his wife.”

“How can she be his wife if he's married to the secretary of whatever?”

“He's married to the secretary of the director of the library's financial section.”

“Is this a conversation about bigamy?” I joke.

“What are you talking about?”

“That's exactly what I'm asking you?”

“You're asking me if the conversation is about bigamy?”

“Forget it, Edith. It's not important.”

I do speak the same language as people in Newfoundland, at least in theory, so I should be able to get my meaning across but I don't. It's worse when I try to be funny. I've been trying hard since I arrived in Newfoundland. Everyone else here seems to be a natural with it. Cyril's been giving me lessons. He thinks I'm catching on.

Edith and I watch the crowd while we wait for a waitress to serve us. A group of people is heading towards the door. That's when I notice her. “Do you know that woman just leaving? The one with the shoulder-length black hair and yellow raincoat?”

“Norah Myrick?” Edith says. “The last time I laid my eyes on her, she was downtown, in a bar, smack dab in the
centre of the dance floor slithering like a snake. Mr. Myrick wouldn't have approved.”

“Her husband?”

“Jesus, Mary and Smallwood! No. Her father, William Myrick. Patron saint of Newfoundland books. That man knew more about the millions of items in the archives and Reading Room than all of us put together. God love him. He was working on a book. He'd say, Edie dear, tell me the truth, Edie, what do you think of this title? My favourite was
Memories of a Silent Voice: The Written Tradition in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Rural Newfoundland.
He used to travel to the outports collecting every scrap of written material he could put his eyes on: diaries, ships' logs, journals, pamphlets, store ledgers, notebooks, letters, you name it.”

The waitress interrupts. We study the menu:
deep-fried cod, deep-fried shrimp, deep-fried cod tongues, deep-fried chicken, deep-fried squid, deep-fried onion rings.
We place our order.

“Have I ever seen Mr. Myrick in the library?”

“Not unless you're seeing ghosts,” she says. “You might hear stories about him though.”

“You mean he was a saint with a sin?”

“I didn't bother signing things out for him when he came to the archives. I knew what he had. He liked to work in the evening. We closed at five so he'd bring home what he needed. He'd been coming to the archives for years. He donated huge amounts of materials. They didn't know him in the Reading Room like I did. Students take care of the dealings with the customers nowadays. Part-timers, most of them are. They don't know our regulars. We'll all be replaced by students sooner or later. God help us.”

The waitress returns with our drinks, fish and chips. Edith waves to people.

“So what was his sin?”

An Imper fect Librarian

“He was working in the Reading Room at the time. At the end of the day, he dropped whatever he was working on into his briefcase then walked out the door. He didn't go far. The alarm nearly gave him a heart attack. He told me that on the phone after. The student-clerk tried to take his briefcase. William smacked him right across the head with it. He wasn't allowed within fifty feet of the campus after that. It's a shame. You know another thing that's a shame? You sitting so far from me. Move over closer. Don't be so unfriendly.”

The bartender calls out, “Happy Hour, five to seven.”

“That's Great Big Sea's music,” Edith says. “You can't live in Newfoundland and not be a fan. I'll buy you a CD.” She sings along in a high-pitched voice that pays more attention to clear diction than melody. She nudges closer to me, drops her head to touch my shoulder then smiles. “We should do this more often. Why don't we try going out together for a while?”

“I'm not interested in dating right now. Why don't you speak to Henry?”

“Don't insult me, please,” she says.

“What's wrong with Henry?”

She adds salt and vinegar to her chips. “You should know. You spend enough time with him.”

“I rely on him for advice and–”

“Don't let yourself be influenced by him. When administration announced they were advertising the digital systems position, he threatened to stage a one-man strike. If he had his way, you wouldn't be here.”

The steam is rising off the gravy. I grab a chip and pop it in my mouth. “I don't blame him for feeling threatened. If the Internet takes off, eventually we won't need Information Services Librarians anymore. We'll have interactive support built into the software with the searching capacity and skill of thousands–”