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Number 485, April 8, 2004
Marilou Awiakta ,
1936-
“If
ever you explore a Parisian woman’s heart, you will find the money-lender
first, and the lover afterwards.”
—Vautrin
to Poiret, Goriot, and the law student in Old Goriot, Vol. XIII, Part I
By
Lee Ingalls
The
security guard at the New York Public Library asks where you’re going. He's
standing next to the coat check window and you watch him remove a pair of latex
gloves. You wonder why he's wearing latex gloves. You've been to the library
many times and you never noticed any one wearing latex gloves.
To look for a book, you
say. The guard nods dubiously and, gloves off, takes a pack of cigarettes out
of his pocket and uses his fingernails to carefully remove a smooth white paper
cylinder of chopped weed. The coat-check attendant (who also wears latex
gloves) looks at you with pity in his large brown eyes as he takes your coat.
Your scarf is stowed in one pocket and in the other your leather gloves, which
now seem pathetically permeable and inadequate.
Because
the library is under renovation, you travel down the hall to the temporary
catalogue room where you consult a computer terminal, providing key words and
phrases in hopes that some volume resting on a shelf far below you will provide
you with what you need. You hope for a match and lo, there are forty-three. You
narrow your search and there are seventeen, of which one seems worthy of closer
inspection. The terminal provides the secret code for the book you want. You
write the code, the title and the author’s name on a two-part form. A woman
marks the number 118 on the form and separates the two parts of the two-part
form, giving you the bottom part, the canary-colored carbon chit.
You
retrace your steps across the marble floors, past the coat check window and
toward Room 113, the Gottesman Exhibition Hall,
which is serving as the library’s temporary reading room on the ground floor
while the grand soul-elevating reading room up on the third floor is
renovated. Outside the temporary
reading room another guard (without latex gloves) asks to see your canary chit.
This guard tells you that you must check your briefcase, and gives you the
impression that you should already know this and that your lack of knowledge
has somehow disappointed, even offended him. You return to the coat check
window with your briefcase and with a terse question for the first guard but he
is gone, is probably standing outside one of the Library’s many doors smoking a
cigarette with his bare hands.
Free of
concealed impediments, supposedly no longer a threat to public property you
hadn’t intended to deface, you enter the Gottesman Exhibition Hall's to wait
for your number to come up on the large board over the pick-up counter. You
take no notice of the hall's ornate architecture. You’re thinking about the
gatekeepers, the little tyrants, the speed bumps turning New York gradually
from Imperial Rome into the Rome of a summer package tour, another halting
bureaucratic ruin, minus the two-hour lunch break and the superabundant
high-quality espresso. You wish the coffee was as good here. You wish you
weren't so prone to vast socio-historical generalizations.
Waiting
brings with it special trials in this city, this New York. Waiting is all but
intolerable in a place so full of so much bustle, even if things don’t take as
long here as it seems. Of course, you are not alone. No one who waits in New
York ever is. Where millions are in motion, millions wait. Wait on buses, wait
on trains, wait for buzzers outside of doors. You hope for the best, hope that
you actually need what you’re waiting for. At the same time you can’t help feeling
that precious moments of your life are going unexploited, and while you are
stuck here in the library like a chump waiting for #118 to appear, someone who
just moved here yesterday has snapped up your unattended moments and is
optioning them to Robert De Niro's production company.
In the temporary reading room, some stare at the numbers on their yellow chits, some sigh as they look at the lucky people at nearby tables who already have their books. Numbers appear and disappear over the pick-up counter, where almost no one was stirring. You wish #118 would rise from the subterranean stacks, wish you had left the apartment earlier, wish for a better metaphor. Your feet are tired. You wonder how long you’ll have to keep up this second-person narration. How are you doing? You’re fine.
surface tension
settled into cushions
in the solarium
cat tinkling around bare feet
we read
evening falls
on orchid-skirted palms
sprays of lemon blooms
swathe cherubs
pages turn, breaths echo—
at babes’ ankles
we skim the water
the surface dimpled
by your breath
your skin cool
dry
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righteous gear for leftist minds
your
antidote for corporatus mediorcritus
now online