The Librarianist

When Bob is 23, his mother dies suddenly, just months after informing Bob that she has brain cancer. On her death bed, she tells Bob of his father—information Bob has longed for through his life. She explains that they met in a bar during the Depression and, though they both liked one another, they were together for only one night. She feels no remorse.

The funeral has been entirely planned by Bob’s mother. Attendance is small—only a dozen or so people, primarily his mother’s work colleagues. There is a tense moment at the graveside when the crane sticks as it tries to lower the casket into the grave. Then the wind uproots the tent under which the mourners stand. Bob briefly wonders if one of the men tending to the casket could be his father. Then he realizes it is his mother’s boss.

Mr. Baker-Bailey—Bob’s mother’s boss—wants to have dinner with Bob. Bob reluctantly meets him at a restaurant. Baker-Bailey drinks nonstop, ordering them each a steak dinner. He is perplexed by Bob’s refusal to consume alcohol. When asked about his work, Bob explains that he has just begun a career as a librarian. Mr. Baker-Bailey talks incessantly about Bob’s mother and the night ends when he begins to cry over her death. Bob quietly leaves.

Miss Ogilvie is a stern librarian who always demands silence. She does not mind if unhoused individuals use the library, so long as they are quiet. She deems all children unruly and supports corporal punishment.

She assigns Bob to the morning shift, intending this to be a cruel assignment, but Bob loves mornings. When she tries to move him to afternoons, Bob persuades Miss Ogilvie to allow him to remain on morning shifts. It is at the library where Bob meets both Connie and Ethan.

Bob meets Connie when she accompanies her father to the library. Her father is known throughout the city for his public rantings of his extreme views. He wears a cloak with a hood and requires Connie to do the same. Connie is 20 and nearly disappears beneath the hood.

One day at the library, Connie’s father berates two priests who frequent the library. He calls them dirty and strikes one of them on his nose. Miss Ogilvie stops the conflict and demands Connie’s father turn over his library card. She rips it up, banning him from all public libraries in the state of Oregon.

A few days later, Connie arrives with a list of books her father has asked her to retrieve. She has no library card but Bob agrees to give her one. They strike up a conversation and Bob is surprised when Connie seems to genuinely enjoy talking to him. After work, he has a drink at a nearby bar with Ethan.

Bob meets Ethan for the first time when he arrives at work one morning to find Ethan’s car parked in his library staff parking space. Ethan, who is asleep inside the car, explains to Bob how he came to be parked in the library parking lot overnight. He had returned home the previous night after seeing a movie—his apartment is above the pharmacy located across the street from the library—and discovered a white truck in his parking space. He suspected that the driver of the truck was inside of his apartment, waiting to kill him because of the married woman Ethan has been dating. Not wanting to enter his apartment, Ethan parked in the library parking lot.

Bob brings Ethan inside the library and gives him Crime and Punishment to read. At lunchtime, he shares his lunch with Ethan and they contemplate having Bob go to the apartment to see if the man is still there. Bob decides to do so and when the man answers the door, a pistol is visible on a table inside. Ethan waits at the library all day, reading, then returns home after the white truck has left.

The next day, Ethan returns Crime and Punishment to the library, having stayed up all night finishing it.

Connie continues to come to the library to retrieve books for her father and she and Bob get to know one another. She explains how her father came to gradually be a zealot after he pursued a career as a clergyman but was rejected by the church for being too socially awkward for acceptance. After Connie’s mother died, his particularities grew stronger and he began making demands of Connie, asking her to dress in a cloak. As they get to know one another, Connie repeatedly tells Bob that she hopes to one day be invited to see his home. Finally, she insists that she is coming to visit and Bob must relinquish.

On a Sunday, Connie arrives at Bob’s home. She loves the unkept garden outside and the freedom Bob has in living alone. She reveals her fantasy of living away from her father and working a job; Connie explains her father has some sort of health problem and she knows she will one day be free of him. She asks Bob what he likes about his work at the library.

When she prepares to leave, Bob offers to drive Connie home and she compromises by agreeing to let him drive her part way. She stresses to Bob that her father would never approve of her being in a romantic relationship so that she must keep her involvement with Bob a secret from him.

Bob and Ethan begin a routine of eating lunch every weekday at a diner called “Finer Diner.” They make friends with the waitress, Sally, who nicknames Bob “Patty” after he orders a patty melt. One day Bob asks Ethan how he might go about having sex with Connie. Ethan suspects Connie will willingly have sex with him and Sally agrees.

The next day, Connie’s father is admitted to the hospital for a 24-hour observation; Connie arrives at Bob’s home with an overnight bag, and they have sex. Bob reveals to Connie that this is his first time; when she does not say the same, he inquires about her virginity. She explains she has had sex with three men previously, each encounter meaningless.

One night at Ethan’s apartment, Bob drinks too much and sleeps on Ethan’s couch. A woman comes to the door sometime in the night and Bob hears she and Ethan having sex. They are so loud that the entire apartment building applauds when they are finished.

In the morning, the woman is gone and Ethan enters the apartment with pastries as Bob wakes up. Bob asks about the woman; Ethan explains he met her on the street. She is a wealthy, married woman and Ethan only knows her first name. She occasionally comes by for sex and Ethan never turns her away. Bob thinks about Connie, whom he has not yet introduced to Ethan. He wonders if he has subconsciously kept them apart for fear of Ethan stealing Connie away, then decides that he must prevent the two from ever meeting.

Soon after, Connie arrives at the library in tears, having told her father about Bob the night before. Her father has threatened to disinherit her. Bob proposes she move in with him and, when Connie asks if he is proposing marriage, Bob agrees to do so.

That night, he drives to Connie’s father’s house. At midnight, Connie throws two suitcases onto the roof from an upstairs window. She climbs onto the roof, throws them to Bob, then climbs down. As they drive away, she tells Bob that she accepts his marriage proposal.

Connie’s father dies nine days later. Upon learning the news, Connie refuses to tend to his remains, telling Bob that she will never forgive her father the indignities he made she and her mother suffer. Bob, feeling the body must be tended to, offers to do it, and Connie says she will not prevent Bob from doing so.

Connie’s father left instructions that an autopsy be completed because of his fear that he would be murdered by poison. The coroner, when Bob arrives to identify the body, explains that Mr. Coleman was indeed not murdered but died of heart failure. Bob explains the circumstances of he and Connie’s relationship to the coroner, asking if it is possible that Mr. Coleman died of a broken heart. The coroner is certain that the heart failure was due to a bitter heart, not a broken one.

Connie receives a letter a few weeks later informing her that she has been disinherited, but she is unsurprised and unaffected.

Bob successfully keeps Connie and Ethan apart, even though they both frequent the library. One day, however, they meet on public transit, and, when Ethan sees that Connie is reading Crime and Punishment, he knows instantly who she is. They enter the library arm in arm, joking and laughing, and Bob is mortified. Connie and Ethan insist they all have dinner and, during it, Ethan quiets his playful banter.

At home that night, Connie expresses confusion at Ethan’s sudden coolness. Bob wonders whether, if he ends his friendship, he can truly be content without Ethan in his life.

Four to five weeks pass and Bob does not see Ethan at all. Finally, Ethan appears at the library with a woman whom he introduces as his fiancée, Eileen.

Ethan explains that he and Eileen have come to invite Bob and Connie out to dinner. Bob explains they already have plans to host neighbors but invites the couple to join them.

When Ethan and Eileen arrive that evening, they explain they met in Acapulco when Ethan was working as a waiter in a seasonal position at a nearby resort. The Comets’ neighbors, Chance and Chicky Bitsch, arrive 15 minutes late. They joke about sex, and Chicky complains, after Eileen brags that Ethan “screwed [her] in the bushes” (167) in Acapulco, that Chance has never done the same.

Dinner commences, but Eileen eats only a small amount of the meatloaf. Bob is unsure why Ethan desires to marry her. After dessert, Chance and Chicky sneak off, then return separately with Chicky announcing that she has finally been “screwed in the bushes” (167). Eileen, having drunk too much wine, excuses herself to lie down. After she vomits, the night ends.

Less than a month later, Ethan phones Bob: His engagement to Eileen is off and Ethan is in the hospital. Bob rushes over; Ethan explains that the root of the problem is Georgie—Eileen’s mother with whom Ethan had a fling before proposing marriage to Eileen. He goes on to insist that he never intended the marriage proposal to be a serious one, but Eileen interpreted it as such. The previous day, Ethan decided to end their engagement—news that was not well-received by Eileen. She stabbed Ethan with a steak knife, landing Ethan in the hospital. Ethan regards the incident optimistically, joking that he successfully avoided both death and marriage.

Bob returns the next day to visit Ethan bringing Connie, per Ethan’s request. Connie is shocked that Ethan is refusing to press charges. Ethan explains that Eileen’s father offered him a check for $10,000 in exchange for legally agreeing not to press charges. Connie insists Ethan stay with the Comets during his recovery upon his discharge.

Ethan convalesces with the couple and Connie bends over backward to make the home and circumstances comfortable for him. As Ethan recovers, he begins buying lavish things with the settlement money. Bob grows increasingly worried that Ethan is falling in love with Connie.

One day upon returning from work, he finds Connie alone, angrily turning the pages of a magazine. Ethan has left suddenly. Bob believes that Ethan realized he was falling in love with Connie and needed to depart immediately to prevent this. When Ethan comes to the library the next day, Bob instructs him to apologize to Connie for his abrupt departure.

Connie decides she and Bob should take up hiking and, though Bob disagrees, plans a trip on a Saturday. Bob invites Ethan along, who is out of sorts but cannot explain what is bothering him. Connie is angered by this and, when they pick Ethan up on Saturday morning, she teases him and behaves cruelly toward him. Ethan sits sullenly in the back seat, rarely speaking.

Part way there, Bob stops at a diner to buy coffee for their thermos. From inside the diner, he can see Ethan and Connie having a conversation. When Bob returns, Ethan’s mood is much improved. On the hike, Ethan leads the way and Bob takes up the rear. At one juncture, they reach the river but the bridge is out. Bob attempts a crossing via a fallen tree but slips and falls.

After they have made it across, Connie insists Bob take up the lead and she and Ethan whisper together behind him, making Bob uneasy.

Ethan continues to come to the library and to daily lunches at the Finer Diner. However, he admits that something is still wrong that he cannot identify. He drinks coffee but never eats.

Meanwhile, Connie behaves strangely—for a week she gazes out of the window constantly and barely talks to Bob, then the next week she goes out of her way to please Bob, making his favorite meals and having constant sex. One day, Bob leaves work early and finds her sitting alone outside, a red string tied with a double bow on her wrist. He asks her later that evening about the string but Connie will reveal nothing about it. While she sleeps that night, Bob finds the string amid her jewelry. He attempts to tie it onto his own wrist with a double bow but cannot. Unsure how Connie could have tied such a bow herself, he asks her to show him how she did so the next day. Connie cannot tie the double bow onto her own wrist.