The Best of Youth

by Michael Dahlie

  Henry wasn’t sure what she meant by this, so he simply repeated the question. “What did I do?”

  “What did you do to get assigned here?” she said. “How’d you get your community service? Unless maybe you’re a volunteer?”

  “No, no,” Henry said. “I’m not a volunteer.” And then, after a pause, he added, “Weapons violations. Illegal handguns. I got busted near Boston.”

  Sasha laughed, although she seemed not to be sure if Henry was joking. At last she said, “Pretty sketchy. I’m impressed.”

  “Well, it was all a mistake,” Henry said. “The guns were antiques. I inherited them from my parents. I was taking them from upstate New York to an antiques dealer in Massachusetts. I didn’t register them properly. I wasn’t walking around with illegal guns on purpose.”

  Sasha nodded and smiled. “Yeah, I figured,” she said. Henry wasn’t sure if this was some kind of slanted insult, but Sasha was smiling so broadly and now struck him as so nice (and so interested in Henry’s answer) that he decided there was probably nothing aggressive in what she had said. And after all, she was a fan of his work, although at the moment he wasn’t sure if she remembered writing the note on the back of the rejection slip he’d gotten from Suckerhead. Henry did, for an instant, consider reminding her of it, but the only formulation he could think of was, I just wanted to thank you for really appreciating my writing, and that hardly seemed like something he ought to say. At last Henry just asked, “What did you do?”

  “Got busted for an open container for a third time,” she replied. “They give you a lot of hours on your third time, if you’re not an alcoholic or homeless, but I really don’t actually drink that much. I like to drink in parks. That’s my problem. And I’m not very discreet, I guess.”

  Henry nodded and said, “Yeah, I understand. What’s better than drinking in parks? But three times. That’s a lot.”

  “Yeah, and I wasn’t even close to drunk for any one of them. It’s hard to believe you’re not allowed to drink a beer when you’re sitting under a tree.” Here Sasha hesitated for a moment, then added, “So, listen. I hate to say this, but I’ve got to leave now. I made arrangements earlier with the officer I work with. The librarian knows too. All the same, I feel bad leaving you. We’re almost done, though, so maybe it will only take you another hour to finish up. So is that all right? If I leave?”

  “No problem,” Henry quickly said. “I can get this done on my own. And it’s a double hour, so it’s good for me for that reason too.”

  “Okay.” Sasha smiled. “Well, thanks. Good luck on living down those weapons charges. And I really hope I see you in another library! I’ve still got a lot of time to serve.”

  “Me too,” Henry replied. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  Henry finished up his work for the day as quickly as he and Sasha had anticipated he would. Soon he too was leaving the Inwood Branch, and now thinking quite a bit, much to his surprise, about Sasha.

  6

  AT ANY RATE, for the next stretch of time Henry continued his various duties with the libraries, and he found the work to be reasonably pleasant. In October, though, now about the time that The Best of Youth was getting its prepublication reviews, Henry’s duties were changed slightly and he was given an assignment in Brooklyn that he was told would last for a few months. He was a little apprehensive about being placed on a single project for so long—who knew what he was being locked into? But when he arrived at the library’s warehouse in Red Hook, he was astonished (thrilled?) to discover that his partner in the project would be Sasha.

  He’d spent some time over the past many weeks thinking that he ought to contact her somehow, but he never had the courage to enact the various plans he’d devised. Emailing her to propose dinner, for instance, seemed extremely risky, as did using any of the other popular modes of communication for suggesting such a thing. Thus, when he arrived at his assignment and saw that she was his workmate, he felt unusually lucky.

  And Sasha, surprisingly, seemed very happy too.

  “It’s the gun trafficker!” Sasha yelled when she saw Henry. She was standing with a short, well-dressed man who was clearly in charge of whatever it was that Henry would be doing at the warehouse.

  “Yes, it’s me!” Henry said, trying to contain his grin. “Are you working here as well?”

  “Yep!” Sasha replied. “And I think it’s just the two of us!”

  At this point the well-dressed man interrupted to confirm that it would just be the two of them. “Just you two, for the next few months,” he said. And then, after introducing himself to Henry as Nicholas Boyer, he began explaining the task he and Sasha were being given.

  Their assignment (which Nicholas described as he led Henry and Sasha through the warehouse and past countless stacks of boxes) would consist of cataloging thousands of books that had been left to the library by a man named Sam Harrington, who, at the time of his death, owned a gigantic apartment on Fifth Avenue, as well as homes in Litchfield and Southampton. In general, this was not an unusual kind of bequest. People often donated their book collections with the idea that they might do some good once they were gone. Unfortunately, most collections contained little or nothing that was useful to the library. This particular collection, however, likely had among it some books that were worth significantly more than the standard price-per-kilo paid by interior decorators, so the New York Public Library’s bibliographers needed a full account before they could make decisions about what to auction off and what to keep in their special collections. Mr. Harrington had obviously been extremely wealthy and had a few items—medieval manuscripts, unusual author letters, etc.—that were immediately culled because their whereabouts and existence were well known. But as for the various Hemingway first editions and books signed by the likes of John Dos Passos and Willa Cather, there was no telling where they were in the boxes. And certainly there were lesser-known authors who had also produced books of value, and these especially would need to be scrutinized by the library’s experts.

  Interestingly, Harrington had assembled his own extensive catalog, but he’d long ago been lost to Alzheimer’s and had never gotten around to computerizing it. And this handwritten catalog had, surprisingly, been destroyed in a small fire, caused by a grandson who had left an untended cigarette in his grandfather’s study in the Litchfield property. The fire damaged several books as well, but the bulk of the collection had been elsewhere, and the fire department was able to put out the fire before it swept through the house and into the main library. This story was quite interesting to Henry, especially since he was always fascinated by irresponsible grandsons of rich people. But as he listened to Nicholas give them the details of it all (as they walked in a circle around the warehouse looking at the boxes of books), Henry mostly thought about how happy he was that Sasha was there.

  7

  AND SASHA INDICATED that this was her feeling as well: “I was hoping I’d run into you again,” she said after Boyer’s tour. “But this seems like extra good fortune, since this gig will be for the next few months. Not just a day of reshelving books where we don’t get to talk.”

  “Yes,” Henry said, and, although he wanted to add more, he stopped because he himself was also so excited that he imagined he might embarrass himself.

  “I remember reading that story you wrote about that lonely eighty-year-old guy,” she said. “I loved it! I wrote that to you.”

  And now Henry felt even more nervous, but just as he was wondering how badly he was blushing, Sasha suddenly turned her head and looked away from Henry, and he could see that she was blushing too, surprised, it seemed, by her expression of enthusiasm. It was a strange phenomenon, bashfulness, for someone so well tattooed.

  In any event, before long Henry and Sasha were opening their first boxes, each with a laptop they’d been given by Nicholas, and beginning their cataloging project using some kind of simple but highly specialized database program that was, apparently, built exclusively for librari
ans.

  The work was fun, that first day, with just the right amount of interesting subject matter—original copies of The Dial, first editions of Jack London and Joseph Conrad, several somewhat pornographic French novels (so identified by Sasha, who seemed to speak French). But there was also enough straightforward clerical work to be done that they could chat as they went, not always having to concentrate too hard. It was a very easy kind of pleasure, listening to Sasha talk about the books she liked and what she liked about Brooklyn and even listening to her give short translations from the French erotic literature: “Her nipples pressed against his cheekbones as she said, ‘We mustn’t be doing this,’ ” and “twenty strikes against the buttocks is the thing for you, my lady, although I’ll give you just ten if you bring your maid back in to watch.”

  And they had serious conversations as well—Sasha’s father had fled her family when she was two and she spent some time talking about how close she was with her mother despite the fact that they were nothing alike. “She was pretty upset when I moved here to go to NYU, and she loves to tell me that New York has had a terrible influence on me, even though we’re really tight. She’d do anything for me, but mostly what she’d like to do is fix me up with a nice boy from Grosse Pointe and de-pierce me, despite the fact that that doesn’t really work. And no amount of laser therapy is getting rid of my tattoos.”

  “Yes, I think they’re there for life,” Henry said, although just as quickly he wondered if this was somehow rude. But she swiftly replied, “Yep, there for life!,” seeming to indicate that she had no problem at all with Henry inspecting her and forming opinions about her body.

  Thus, the first day of the new job was patently excellent, and Henry walked to his subway (he only shared three short blocks of the journey with Sasha) thinking about all he and Sasha had talked about and just how lucky he was to be working with her. He did think of things he’d wished he’d said, and good ways to bring up again subjects upon which he felt he hadn’t quite performed well enough. The next day, though, passed as well as the first (without revisionist reflections from Henry), and they were on to other conversational topics as soon as the day began. And the following day as well, the conversation was just as happy, although this particular day ended with a bit of difficulty, since it meant that their current work week (both were on the hook for three four-hour days per week) was at an end and that it would not be until the next Tuesday that they’d see each other again. Henry did consider asking Sasha out to something like drinks or dinner, but he concluded that this was too emotionally dangerous, especially since it could lead to a few months of intolerable embarrassment if they had to work together after she rejected his advances. On this account, though, Sasha provided just a bit of a solution.

  “Why don’t you stop by my job—my real job—over the weekend? I work at a gallery in Chelsea. The show we’ve got on now is great, and if you came at about six or so you could buy me a beer after we close.” To this, Henry agreed, and it was quickly determined that he’d be by late Saturday afternoon to see her at her work. And that Saturday he was indeed in Manhattan, very much looking forward to what Henry was barely allowing himself to consider a date.

  8

  SASHA WORKED FOR A gallery called Christian Conrad. It was on Twenty-second, near Tenth, and, according to what she told Henry, she’d done well there. Her success, however, was entirely fortuitous, she insisted, coming mostly as a result of the gallery’s unanticipated triumphs with three consecutive shows of Eastern European painters who were suddenly in vogue. They were excellent painters, to be sure, but why their excellence rose above the excellence of others was a puzzle.

  “I also speak Hungarian,” she’d told Henry. “And to be honest, Eastern European people seem to like me. I did a year abroad there, in Hungary, which is why my Hungarian is good. Plus my grandmother, on my father’s side, is Hungarian, and she spoke it with me growing up, so I guess the sounds don’t throw me like they do most people.”

  This all interested Henry very much, and on his way to Sasha’s gallery he thought about how much fun it would be to hear her speak Hungarian, all the while looking for places where he might take her for a beer. Chelsea always seemed very strange to him, almost as if everyone in his McCarren Park building had aged fifteen years and moved to Manhattan. Still, there seemed to be several interesting places to have a drink, and Sasha would probably be good for a recommendation. And they did end up somewhere that Sasha liked—a kind of Swiss restaurant (they’d just spent an hour looking at the latest lithographs by some sort of rebellious Czechoslovakian person)—and after a beer at the bar they decided to eat dinner there. They talked with the same kind of ease they’d found together at work, and Henry was even relaxed enough not to be preoccupied with the implications of the event. And when they parted (at Sasha’s subway back to her end of Brooklyn), Henry didn’t even consider trying to kiss her. This is not to say that he didn’t want to, but he was just so happy and not feeling any sort of pressure to make a move, as it were, and he embraced her warmly as they said farewell without any kind of awkward advance, wistful sigh, or, as was common with him, a lengthy speech about the “confusing feelings” he was having.

  Henry even found that he was excited to work on his writing that weekend, feeling no desire to go out or even to eat anything more than a few bowls of noodles. And on Tuesday, back in Red Hook, things continued as they had the previous week, and when Thursday arrived and their work for the week was done, they once again made plans, this time to meet Whitney and his girlfriend for dinner, although it was all arranged in such a straightforward way that Henry again couldn’t bring himself to call it a date. By this point, however, he was fully conscious of the fact that he liked Sasha very much.

  9

  THUS, IT PROMISED TO be a good weekend, but dinner was not until Saturday, and Friday brought with it a fairly ugly scene for Henry. He’d promised Abby he’d attend a show of hers, which he happily did, despite the fact that there was a chance Kipling would be there—the advanced reviews, by this point, were now out and Henry had, by then, completed his earlier reflections about the soothing chaos of McCarren Park (and his love of Pernod).

  “I haven’t seen you in over a month,” Abby had yelled on the phone. This was true, and it made Henry feel bad enough that he agreed to go to her concert. It really did trouble Henry that he and Abby had been so distant recently, but when he finally arrived at the venue for Abby’s performance—it was at a sort of fashionable basement bar on the Lower East Side—he remembered why he’d been avoiding her: Kipling was there, and soon Henry was sitting beside him and having exactly the kind of conversation he’d been working to avoid.

  It had already been a bad day on that front. That morning Abby had emailed Henry to confirm plans and had attached a link to a popular morning news program that featured an interview with Kipling. Henry hadn’t seen the interview yet and he was horrified to spend the next three minutes watching Kipling talk about how “vital” writing was to him, how it was an “essential component” of his “entire outlook on life.”

  “This book,” he said, “has been one of the most liberating artistic experiences of my life. And as challenging and agonizing and painstaking as the process is, not many things have ever filled me with this kind of passion.”

  At this point, Henry still wasn’t sure if Kipling had even read the novel, and certainly his comments were so vague that Henry had to conclude that his artistic front man still had only a flimsy grasp of what the book contained, other than that it included a young person and an old person (“in a relationship that gets at the very heart of the troubles our nation is seeing today”). Thankfully, Kipling did not expand on his theories about the social history of China.

  At any rate, it was all completely repulsive, and so that night at Abby’s event, when he spotted Kipling (and Kipling spotted him), Henry did what he could to come up with a reason not to sit together—not to speak at all, in fact. But before he could formulate a
proper excuse for such behavior, he found himself seated next to the great author, listening to tales of what a “wild ride this book shit” had been. “And the fucking sales!” he said. “They’re already through the roof.” (The book was just now starting to appear in stores.)

  Fortunately, the music started soon after Henry arrived, preventing any type of real conversation, and Henry found that he made it through the next hour without having to do much more than ask and answer mundane questions about Merrill and the house in England and the weather. When the first set ended, Kipling went backstage to see Abby—Henry declined his own invitation—so it looked as if after another loud set of viola and bassoon music Henry could leave without having to interact much more.

  But once the music started again Henry decided to use the men’s room—there had been too many people waiting during the break—and he was startled to discover, as he went into one of the several single-occupancy bathrooms, that Kipling was close on his heels and that he followed him through the door and locked it behind them as they stepped in.

  “Hey, hey,” Kipling said. “How about a line with your colleague?”

  “What?” Henry replied with an inquisitive nod of his head, although he knew exactly what he had been asked.

  “Cocaine?” Kipling said, his own head-nod working now, and with the slight smile he added it seemed that Kipling believed this was an offer of some kind of camaraderie. A sincere one. Kipling quickly qualified the offer by adding, “I don’t do this every night. I really love it, but it’s not very good for you. That’s what they say, at least.”

  “Yes, no, thanks,” Henry said, surprisingly feeling a little charitable now toward Kipling, again because this did seem like a friendly gesture. “It’s been a while and it’s not really my thing anymore.” Henry had done the drug only once, in college, and he’d enjoyed himself so much that he drank half a bottle of tequila and vomited on the floor of an apartment belonging to a woman he’d felt he was in love with. After that, he couldn’t hear the word “cocaine” without feeling incredible remorse. Henry once again thought of that terrible night and how he had tried to clean up his own vomit with the mania that only coke can provide, and by the time Henry had gotten around to focusing on the issue at hand, Kipling was chopping up lines on the face of a small mirror that he had pulled from his jacket pocket. It was not something Henry wanted to be part of, but he didn’t know what protocol was in this kind of situation and he was afraid to open the door to leave, in case someone saw what Kipling was doing. But Kipling started talking again, once more shifting Henry’s attention.