Marginalia

By Neil Wang

Clara knew it was wrong to write in a library book, which was why, the first time, she pressed so lightly with the pencil that the sentence looked less underlined than wounded.

The book was One Hundred Years of Solitude. Clara had carried one sentence from it since college: the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. In the margin, in the smallest script she could manage, she wrote Doesn’t this just break your heart? and closed the book quickly, as if the question had been someone else’s.

She was thirty-four, and she translated technical manuals for a living, mostly German into English and sometimes Japanese into French, at a desk facing a window that faced a parking lot. For eleven hours at a stretch she rendered instructions for industrial dishwashers, forklifts, and heat-recovery systems into language no one was meant to love. She had not minded. She had minded that she did not mind.

She returned the book to its shelf and walked home through the wet October dark and did not think about the sentence again until Tuesday, when she went back and found, beneath her own pencil mark, a reply in pen.

It does. But it’s the beauty that breaks my heart, not the sadness. To be so completely, so purely, oneself.

The handwriting was confident and slanted, written without hesitation, nothing like her own careful upright hand, and she thought it was the writing of a person who was not afraid of being read. She read it three times. The third time she felt the small warm shock of being answered.

That night she meant to write something about Márquez, something measured, and she drafted it on a Post-it and then a second Post-it and then crossed both out, because the measured thing was a way of pretending she was not rattled, and she was rattled. In the end she wrote the true thing. Are you messing with me?

His reply was there the following Tuesday. No. I check this shelf on Tuesdays. I have for a year. You’re the first person who ever wrote back to a book instead of just defacing it.

She did not answer that. She slid sideways instead, the way she always did when someone got close enough to be felt. Isn’t this a bad thing, though. Writing in books.

You did it first, he wrote. And you pressed so lightly I almost missed it.

She read that one more times than she would have admitted. It should have unsettled her, a stranger telling her he had looked closely enough to notice how hard she pressed a pencil, and some part of her did file it away as strange. She wrote back that night without drafting it first.

By the end of the month they were in correspondence. She did not tell anyone. There was no one to tell. Her sister lived in Edmonton and called on Sundays to talk about her children, and Clara listened, and made the right sounds, and afterward sat on the couch a long time with the phone still warm in her hand, looking at the wall. One Sunday she let it ring out, because she had a reply half-composed in her notebook and did not want to come down off it to make the right sounds about someone else’s life, and she did not call back until Wednesday. There was a problem with loving something that lived on a shelf, which was that she could not keep it. Each time, she had to return the book, and each time the replies went back into the dark with it, available to anyone, hers only on Tuesdays. So in November she bought her own copy. She told herself it was because she had always meant to reread it. Then she stopped telling herself that and admitted what she was doing, which was copying his replies into the margins of her own book in pencil, in her own small hand, so that on the nights the library was closed and the real book was on its shelf she could open her copy and read his sentences in the place where his sentences would have been. She was defacing a second book now. This one was hers. She did it carefully, in pencil, and once, comparing the two books open side by side on the bed, the library copy in his pen and her copy in her pencil, she had the brief disordered thought that the hands were not as different as they should have been, and she closed both books and did not think about it again.

She had decided, on no evidence but the slant of the writing, that the stranger was a man. He wrote about his grandmother’s house in Galway, the smell of peat and rain, a sentence she copied twice, once into the library book’s margin and once into her own: I think I have been trying to find my way back to that house my entire life.

Clara had grown up in seven apartments in four cities. She wrote back, I have never had a house. I have only had books. She regretted it as soon as she wrote it, because it sounded like something a person would say in a novel, but when she returned the next week she found his reply underlined twice: Then we have lived in the same house all along.

She read this in the stacks and felt something rise in her she did not have a name for, and then she walked home and looked at the rented furniture and the unframed prints and the kettle she had owned for eleven years, and she felt ashamed of how badly she wanted the sentence to be true.

Once she wrote, half meaning it as a test, that he didn’t really know anything about her, and it came out colder on the page than she felt, and she almost went back to soften it. The next week his reply did not argue. You’re right, it said. I’m sorry. Tell me one true thing and I’ll know one true thing. And she did, because the apology was exactly the right size, and she did not yet think to wonder how a stranger had learned to make one exactly that size.

She began to dress for her Tuesday afternoons, a scarf, a particular pair of earrings, and she told herself it was for herself, and then that she should at least be honest about who she was lying to.

Soon she had imagined him in some detail. Forty-two, married once and no longer, a coat that had been good ten years ago. He read in cafés. He underlined in pen because he was not afraid of the page. She knew none of this. She had constructed all of it from a slant of handwriting and a column of borrowed sentences she now kept in two books.

One night in her own copy, in pencil, in the margin beside a paragraph that had nothing to do with it, she wrote a thing she did not put in the library book, because it was not for him to find, it was only true. I know him better than people I’ve known for years. She looked at it a while. Then she closed the book and went to sleep, and in the morning she did not cross it out, because it was the truest sentence she had written in a long time and she could see no reason to take a true thing back.

She was also beginning to suspect he came to the library on a schedule, because the replies were always there when she returned, never delayed, never missed, always in the same pen, and she had never once seen him, never passed a man at the shelf with a book open and a pen in his hand, though she had started coming earlier and earlier to try. Once she came on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday and the reply was already waiting, which meant he had come early, which meant he had been thinking about when she would come.

In December he left a note tucked into the pages, on cream-colored paper, in the same slanted hand.

Clara. (I hope that is your name. I saw it on the checkout card. Forgive me. I could not keep calling you “the woman with the beautiful handwriting” in my head.) I would like to continue this in person. Saturday, noon, the café across the street. I will be the one with the yellow book.

Leo

She read the note twice. The first time she felt the heat rise in her face. The second time she registered that he had seen her checkout card, which meant he worked at the library, and that he had been carrying her name for weeks while she had been carrying only a slant of handwriting, and a book she had defaced to keep him in.

She wore the scarf. He was older than she had pictured, silver in his hair, a face that had been outdoors more than indoors, and he sat near the back with a yellow paperback and four sugar packets arranged in a neat square, and when she came in he stood up too quickly and his chair scraped and he laughed at himself, and Clara felt the first true rush of relief, because he was nervous, a real person being nervous, not the correspondent of her imagination but a man who had over-organized sugar packets while waiting.

“Clara,” he said.

“Leo.”

They sat. He rearranged one of the sugar packets, noticed himself doing it, and laughed again.

“I’ve been practicing this,” he said. “I’m doing badly.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“I’m not. I had a sentence ready and I forgot it.”

She smiled, and it felt like something she had not done in months. “Tell me when it comes back.”

He told her, over the next two hours, that he had been a journalist, that he had worked in Beirut and Sarajevo and Kabul, that he had stopped because he could not sleep anymore, that he had taken the library job because he wanted to be around language that was not on fire, and there was a catch in his voice when he said the word Sarajevo, as if it still had weight he could not lift.

She told him about the manuals, about the forklift, about the eleven-year-old kettle, and she heard her life sound smaller in the telling than it had felt while she was living it, and she was performing the smallness slightly, to give him something to rescue.

“This is strange to say,” he said, looking at the table. “But I feel like I already know you. Better than people I’ve known for years.” He smiled, embarrassed by it. “That’s the kind of thing you’re not supposed to say at the first one of these.”

She did not answer right away. She had written that sentence in pencil, in a book on her nightstand, in a margin he had never seen, and had kept it out of the other book on purpose, and here it was in his mouth, almost exactly, the way a thing sounds when it has been carried a long way and set down a little differently than it was picked up. She told herself people said this.

People said this all the time, at first meetings, it was nearly a cliché, it meant nothing. She had a whole career in the distance between what a sentence said and where it had come from. She let it pass.

When the coffees were cold he reached across the table and let his fingers rest beside her hand without touching it. “I should tell you something.”

“All right.”

“I’m the head librarian.”

She had known. For ten minutes, or for three weeks, or for as long as she had been refusing to ask herself the obvious question. She kept her face still.

“I’ve known who you were since the first note. The checkout card had your name. I…”

He paused. “I kept the book on hold sometimes. So no one else could take it out. Between your visits.”

Clara felt the warmth in her chest cool by a degree, not much, but enough to notice. She thought of her own copy on the nightstand, his sentences in her pencil down its margins, and she waited to feel caught out, two people exposed at once, and the feeling did not come.

“For how long?” she asked.

“Since October.”

“You knew my name in October.”

“Yes.”

She studied his face for the thing she had built out of fourteen sentences, and his face held still under the looking, the way a face holds still when it is being read closely, or the way a page does.

“That’s a lot of holds to put on one book,” she said.

He exhaled. “I know.”

“You could have just said hello.”

“I know. I was afraid you would be disappointed.” He turned the yellow paperback a quarter turn on the table, squaring it to nothing. “I wanted to give myself time to become someone you would not be disappointed in.”

It was the right thing to say. It was exactly, precisely the right size, the way the apology in November had been exactly the right size, and for one cold second she heard her own cadence in it, the rhythm of a sentence she might have written. She looked at him. He looked back, waiting, his face open and still and unreadable, a held

thing, and she opened her mouth.

“Tell me about Sarajevo,” she said.

END