Free Birds of America by Lorrie Moore Page B

“I mean, you probably always wanted to be a librarian, right?”
    She looked at all the crooked diagonals of his face andcouldn’t tell whether he was serious. “Me?” she said. “I first went to graduate school to be an English professor.” She sighed, switched elbows, sinking her chin into her other hand. “I did try,” she said. “I read Derrida. I read Lacan. I read
Reading Lacan
. I read ‘Reading
Reading Lacan’
—and that’s when I applied to library school.”
    “I don’t know who Lacan is,” he said.
    “He’s, well—you see? That’s why I like libraries: No whos or whys. Just ‘where is it?’ ”
    “And
where
are you from?” he asked, his face briefly animated by his own clever change of subject. “Originally.” There was, it seemed, a way of spotting those not native to the town. It was a college town, attractive and dull, and it hurried the transients along—the students, gypsies, visiting scholars and comics—with a motion not unlike peristalsis.
    “Vermont,” she said.
    “Vermont!” Nick exclaimed, as if this were exotic, which made her glad she hadn’t said something like Transylvania. He leaned toward her, confidentially. “I have to tell you: I own one chair from Ethan Allen Furniture.”
    “You do?” She smiled. “I won’t tell anyone.”
    “Before that, however, I was in prison, and didn’t own a stick.”
    “Really?” she asked. She sat back. Was he telling the truth? As a girl, she’d been very gullible, but she had always learned more that way.
    “I went to school here,” he said. “In the sixties. I bombed a warehouse where the military was storing research supplies. I got twelve years.” He paused, searching her eyes to see how she was doing with this, how
he
was doing with it. Then he fetched back his gaze, like a piece of jewelry he’d merely wanted to show her, quick. “There wasn’t supposed to be anyone there; we’d checked it all out in advance. But this poor asshole named Lawrence Sperry—Larry Sperry! Christ, can you imagine having a name like that?”
    “Sure,” said Olena.
    Nick looked at her suspiciously. “He was in there, working late. He lost a leg and an eye in the explosion. I got the federal pen in Winford. Attempted murder.”
    The thick coffee coated his lips. He had been looking steadily at her, but now he looked away.
    “Would you like a bun?” asked Olena. “I’m going to go get a bun.” She stood, but he turned and gazed up at her with such disbelief that she sat back down again, sloppily, sidesaddle. She twisted forward, leaned into the table. “I’m sorry. Is that all true, what you just said? Did that really happen to you?”
    “What?”
His mouth fell open. “You think I’d make that up?”
    “It’s just that, well, I work around a lot of literature,” she said.
    “ ‘Literature,’ ” he repeated.
    She touched his hand. She didn’t know what else to do. “Can I cook dinner for you some night? Tonight?”
    There was a blaze in his eye, a concentrated seeing. He seemed for a moment able to look right into her, know her in a way that was uncluttered by actually knowing her. He seemed to have no information or misinformation, only a kind of photography, factless but true.
    “Yes,” he said, “you can.”
    Which was how he came to spend the evening beneath the cheap stained-glass lamp of her dining room, its barroom red, its Schlitz-Tiffany light, and then to spend the night, and not leave.
    Olena had never lived with a man before. “Except my father,” she said, and Nick studied her eyes, the streak of blankness in them, when she said it. Though she had dated two different boys in college, they were the kind who liked to leave early, to eat breakfast without her at smoky greasy spoons, to sit at thecounter with the large men in the blue windbreakers, read the paper, get their cups refilled.
    She had never been with anyone who stayed. Anyone who’d moved in his box of tapes, his Ethan Allen