Chapter Eleven

A life filled with so much waiting.  Waiting and waiting and waiting.  This was one of those times.

        The Tail had been accepted into the History program at the University.  It was a very competitive program, and it had produced many historians of note in recent years.  The faculty members behind the program were leaders in their areas of specialization, and the chair of the department had recently published a book that had made the bestseller lists.

His entry into this program had only been possible with financial aid.  He had come from poor beginnings, and he needed the help.  His father was a great source of encouragement, but his father’s checks always bounced.  Between the encouragement, the financial aid, and a string of part-time jobs, he managed to get by; but he was always half asleep, he was always yawning, and he was always on the verge of mental and physical collapse.

        College life had ceased being fun a long time ago.  College life had never been that fun anyway.  When it had been new to him, there were moments of discovery, but after a few months it became another obstacle.  All of the movies he’d been raised on, wherein college boys engaged in madcap escapades across Ivy League campuses – all of these movies, without exception – had begun to ring false in the midst of his freshman year.

        Instead it was only the same attitudes, carried over from high schools across the state.  There were girls who wouldn’t talk to him.  There were boys who smirked when he mumbled or said something embarrassing.  There were countless classmates and professors, all waiting to entrap him in moments of awkwardness.  It was just like high school, without the violence.

        He suffered them all, all the classmates and professors and stuck-up girls, because he believed that somewhere in the future he would find respect, and rewards, and congratulations for jobs well done.  Somewhere, he believed, on the other side of hard work and persistence, there lay his victory over all tormentors, everywhere.  He would outstudy them all.  He would dedicate himself to making something of his education.  He would play the game long enough to outlast the odds against him.  This he resolved to do.

        And so years of not getting laid and not getting invited to the really good parties had led up to this: his idea of school.  Here was a place where he could rise by his own efforts.  Or so he thought.  Here was a place he could shine.  He looked the other way when his professors failed to live up to his ideal of academic integrity.  He ignored the less worthy adversaries who somehow rose in everyone’s esteem.  He studied, he persevered, and he knew – or thought he knew – that in time he would outflank them all.

        He was in the library on a Friday afternoon, this 25 year old virgin with a scholarship and zero dollars in the bank.  He was reading books on alchemy.  He was reading books on philosophy.  He was reading books on how to read books.  He was even reading books that claimed to be histories of books written on the subject of book reading.  

Or maybe he was just tired.  It was all very confusing, especially when he couldn’t get enough sleep.  He couldn’t sleep with all the weight of time pressing against him.

There was a row of windows to his right, and beyond these windows was a spectacular autumn day, cool and crisp with bursts of sunshine.  From some place beyond those windows he could hear a man’s laughter, and pigeons would occasionally pass by on their way toward the quad, where many fed them.  The table where he sat was one of three placed next to the windows along a wide hallway.  In front of him there was a shelf full of books from the Biography section, while behind him the Arts section began with an introduction to ceramics.  On his left there was a railing that overlooked the first floor of the undergraduate library, and out of the corners of his eyes he could see staff and other students below where he sat, walking this way and that between large tables set out for reference works, ancient and entirely outmoded encyclopedias, quietly moldering from neglect.

        Few others could see him for all the books he had piled up on the library desk where he sat.  He was not unlike the monks who had written many of the books he then studied; he was almost invisible behind a wall of learning.   When he inhaled it was not living words that filed his lungs, but rather stale printed words, long overdue.  When he exhaled, only dust came out.  It was the dust of the ancients.

        He was also taking notes, and those few who saw him might have thought he was a handsome enough young man, or else that a handsome man slumbered within him.  Something in him was beginning to wake up, and after enough pages were turned he might have realized himself, he might have awakened, just half a step.  Yes, in study he was quite handsome.  He had shed the fat of earlier years.  He had learned how to dress better, and he no longer felt handicapped by his glasses.  He was lonely, yes, but he was waking up to possibilities.  He was waking up to his own worth.

       That was where she found him, while she was pushing her trolley through the stacks.  That was where it began, near the windows that overlooked the statue of George Washington, and the pedestrian bridge that spanned 15^th NE.  That was where the trap was set, or where fate had intervened.

        In that moment of study she passed him by, headed toward another corner of the library, where books on scientific topics were housed.  She was wearing tight blue jeans and a blue sweater, and her blonde hair was tied behind her ears with an elastic band.  Her neck was the most graceful thing about her, but almost as charming was her rounded face, coming to a modest point at her chin.  She had an intense gaze that most men found disconcerting, and eyes that might have been blue or green, depending upon the quality of light which came through the library windows.  Her breasts were round and well-shaped, her limbs were long and athletic, and her wide hips distracted many of the library’s patrons from their studies.  

She had chosen to look his way that day, and most others would have found in her quiet appraisal a cause for hope.  Yet he, with all his persistent immaturity when it came to sexual matters, could only view her from the periphery of his vision, as if she was a phantom inhabiting that hallway, an unlikely spirit that would pass by and then vanish from his plane of existence.  She continued on, her gaze unchallenged.

He listened as the squeaky wheels of her trolley faded into the background.  He wanted to turn around and look for her, but he was scared of what he had seen in her gaze.  He was terrified of it.

She was a romantic girl, with blue green eyes and golden hair.  She was a girl who had already conquered many hearts, and who had never been conquered in turn.  She had seen him, and it might not have been love at first sight, but it was something like a feeling of kinship, a feeling of wanting to protect him from himself.  She saw him from the other side of the Biography section, and their eyes had met for the briefest of moments.  That was all it took for her.  She decided then that if she wanted him, he would be hers.

        Later, when the two of them were married and their first child was on the way, they would speak of this almost-meeting in the library.  He would then confess his love for her, again and again, and he would say that this love sprang into being from that moment.  He would thereby convince himself, over the years, that this was so.  

She, however, would make no claims as to where their love originated, but she would speak instead of how he held his pen just so, and how he spent so many hours at that desk in the library, and how he looked so determined, so intent.  She would never know how to speak of love in his language, because she put more faith in her powers of calculation, and in the number of promises given, alongside the number of promises kept.  It wasn’t that she felt nothing for him.  It was just that she was too experienced to be the same kind of romantic.  She didn’t have that sort of aesthetic to contend with, though she did want him.  Certainly she wanted him.

        She recognized her own desire for him even then, but at that time she placed the few science books on the shelves where they belonged, and headed toward the elevator for another load of books.  Seeing him had been enough.  There was still time.  It was her last year of college, her course of study in Business nearly complete, but there was still time.

He would be there for three more years, after all.  One of her friends had told her this.  She still had time to lay her plans.  She was watchful, and she was careful.  If she truly wanted him, he was as good as hers.

She was already tired of screwing anonymous guys at parties.  She was already tired of the tired conquests.  She began to think instead of that hunched halfway handsome boy in the library, and how gentle he might be with her, and how she could teach him so many things.  If it was not love, it was at least not condescension.  If it was not pity, at least it was not an obsession.  It was a quiet thing between them, a kind of friendship that she yearned for every day.  She wanted an ordinary boy to talk to in the middle hours of the night.  She didn’t really want another handsome boy.  She didn’t need one yet.

        He returned to his books and tried to rid his mind of her image.  This, as one would expect, only brought her image back more forcefully.  Her blue green eyes were staring back at him from the words and the paragraphs of Erasmus.  Her golden hair found echoes in the poetry of Ovid.  His budding knowledge of long-gone ages towered over him for a moment, but this knowledge was teetering, unsteadily perched upon the shifting curves of that lovely girl seen in the library.

        As if girding himself for battle, he pulled down another book from the pile and recommenced his studies.  He needed to remember what was driving him.  He needed to remember what he wanted.  He needed to remember his past, and how one goes about erasing such a past.

There was such a wealth of ambition in him then.  All of his imagined adversaries had been defeated – in potential – the instant they had come across his path.  He could see his future laid out upon the gridwork of his own labors: a shining city upon a hill, or perhaps a great high tower, from which to scorn the world.  He was trying to imagine himself the hero in his own story.  He was trying to make it real.

        She was a minor distraction.  This was what he told himself.  He decided then and there that he would not yield to her.  But he would.