ROSEBUDS

Walking the through the library stacks, John starts to get that sinking feeling of being a fraud again.  The books all staring at him - Dostoevsky?  never read him; Hemingway, Faulkner?  nothing.  Wait, there was that summer he read "Light in August" but he had no recollection of the book and knew that he had probably read it more to cast a certain image for the counter girls at the pizza place who all went to Smith College and always had so many interesting things to say and wonderful observations about art and music.

Art?  He knew nothing about it.  Sure, he knew all the names (Da Vinci, Rembrandt, van Gogh) but only from the game--Masterpiece.  And he could easily connect book titles with their authors from his days lying on the floor of his Dad's office staring at his parent's bookshelves.  Who wrote "Trinity?"  Leon Uris.  "Steppenwolf" was written by Herman Hesse.  All this knowledge was simply stowed up there in his brain.  He knew nothing about these books nor anything about the authors or what made them write, or even why his parents would read them.  "The Jungle" was written by Upton Sinclair, but Sinclair Lewis wrote "Babbitt" and "Rabbit, Run" was written by John Updike.

Upton Sinclair Lewis Babbitt Rabbitt Updike Upton Sinclair Lewis Babbitt Rabbitt.

He ran his hand along the wooden railing up in the third level, east stacks.  From here he could peek down at the co-eds sitting at the long wooden tables below, doing their homework, their petty researches, and look down their tank-tops and blouses, at the smooth curves and that plunge into shadow and lace...at least in the summer.  In the winter it would only be the fashionably-casual college sweatshirts, earnestly sending text messages from behind musty Marx/Engels tomes, stuffing the paragraphs down for Intro. to Poli. Sci. through their cat's-eye frames.

He sat down on the floor down at the end of the third aisle of shelves.  They kept the 17th century Spanish drama anthologies here so he knew he could have at least a few moments alone.  He took a swig from his granddad's whiskey flask and pulled out the copy of Leaves of Grass that he had printed out off the Kinko's computer that morning.  It had come out of the printer on pink paper for some reason.  Someone must have forgotten to take the paper out but after a moment he thought that maybe Uncle Walt wouldn't have minded.

"Are you the person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose."

The girl at the circulation desk stared at him when he walked in; her eyes lingered.  He was afraid to even take out a book lest she think he did it only to talk to her.  And even if he got up the nerve he would say nothing.  She would tell him when the book was due back and he would nod silently.  He had thought about her masturbating that morning.

"Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?"

He looked at the titles of the books where his feet propped on the shelves.  "Calderon & Lope de Vega: The Romantic Dramas".  That's an El Greco painting he thought.  More useless knowledge.  What makes El Greco so special?  Maybe he had it wrong.  Was El Greco the artist or the painting?  The girl in 'Great Film Directors' would know.  She always had more to say about the movies than the other kids in the class.  All that shit about the "deconstruction of the renaissance" in The Third Man.  He thought the movie was boring and fell asleep in the darkness of the screening room.

"Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?"

At noon he could go to the campus post-office to see if his girlfriend had sent him anything from her college in Indiana.  They persisted in using snail-mail to communicate; she found it more romantic than their respective Yahoo e-mail accounts.  The effect was that they had this built in remove from each other's lives but maybe that was good thing.  Maybe that kept it safe and in its place.  He would see her periodically, summers, holidays and they would call each other once a week.

In the letters she wrote about her classes and her professors but never really deep things about her personal life, that is, outside of him.  She would say where and when she went places and did things like: "I gave myself a pedicure before I went out with Peggy to the basketball game" but never really a lot about how it all made her feel.  Maybe feelings don't matter.

"Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?"

This library used to be the school chapel.  The stained glass persists still and the late morning sun shines through coloring his skin.  He holds up his hand to see the alien skin there, the shades of reflected saints.  What would it be like to fall from the third tier, falling through these stacks of history and literature?  On the window sill there is an accumulation of wax; maybe a leftover from some decades old mass, lingering from days of Latin eucharists and frustrated Jesuits.  Or maybe just some other boy needing to check for a line from a Spanish play in a blackout; or late at night after the library had closed.  Is there a secret entrance to this place?