by Jon Michaud
Thomas nodded and smiled, sympathetically.
Melissa pointed at the shelves. “That's just part of it. He belonged to this gaming club.” She paused, as if she was about to reveal something long-guarded about her husband. “Rather than trying to explain, maybe you should just follow me.” They went back into the living room and then through the formal dining room into the expansive, light-filled kitchen—the room where he would spend many hours with her in the coming months. A flight of stairs descended into a finished basement. It was a dull, functional space, like a bachelor apartment under the house. The furnishings were Spartan: a mini-fridge, a TV/DVD set up on an old faux-lacquered cabinet. Maps and charts were tacked to the walls along with the well-known portrait of a black sailor from the Revolutionary War. In the middle of the room was a Ping-Pong-sized table on which a green baize had been spread in an undulating layer. It was a land-scape, like one you'd see on a model railroad layout, only there were no tracks. Instead, there were configurations of lead soldiers, cannon, tents, and a church painted as if on fire, cotton-balls of smoke rising from the shattered stained-glass windows.
“Shiloh,” she said. “I think.”
Thomas cocked an eyebrow. “Is this part of the job?”
“No,” she said. “But these are.”
Shelved in a bookcase near the table were dozens of composition books with flecked black and white covers. Thomas pulled one down and opened to a random page. “The Battle of Austerlitz,” was written at the top of the page. There were lines of text in some kind of shorthand describing the moves in the battle.
“Logs,” said Melissa. “They need to be scanned.”
“Right,” said Thomas. “Anything else down here?”
“No,” she said. It seemed like she couldn't wait to leave.
He was there for another hour, taking a closer look at things and asking her questions. In addition to cataloging the library and scanning the game logs, Thomas was to cross-index them on a Web site so that a log from a battle would be linked to the appropriate titles in the library. This was to be her husband's parting gift to the members of his gaming club. Once the library had been cataloged, it would be transferred, he was told, to another gamer's house. Thomas gave her the name of a moving company that specialized in libraries. He went over his notes and arrived at a figure. The pricing for private collections was the same as for corporate clients. When he presented her with the estimate for the job, he assumed she would blanche. But Melissa glanced at it for the briefest of moments before saying, “Great. When can you start?”
Two days later, having been to see Mindy Evans in HR, having agreed (what choice did he have?) to the terms of his severance, having received the sympathetic handshakes and backslaps of his colleagues, who were, he could tell, relieved that it wasn't them, he returned to Melissa's house with a scanner, sheets of bar code stickers, and a laptop computer. The house had high-speed Internet access, and so he could download MARC records and wireframes from the Web developers. Despite his initial reaction, he was intrigued by his client. He felt that he had known women like her since high school; or, more precisely, he felt that he had been unable to know women like her since high school—attractive, cultured, and somewhat bored daughters of privilege who had seen so much of the world by the time they were eighteen that it was impossible to talk to them, let alone impress them. They'd had boyfriends ten years their senior, tried every drug and every position in the Kama Sutra, knew ahead of time what was going to be in fashion that season, and had already developed tastes in obscure writers and indie rock bands. Bethesda, where he'd grown up, had been full of such young sophisticates; so had Boston, where he'd gone to college. They could be found in New York, too, of course, but, by the time Thomas got there, he had given up on them; he was moving in another direction, a direction that would bring him to Clara.
He set up in the library. The deceased husband, Stephen, had his books organized chronologically, starting with the Babylonians and ending with books about Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism. (He'd like to see the layout for that game!) Many of the books were already in OCLC, so it was a simple matter of copy cataloging. At some point he'd have to access the library of the Imperial War Museum to process the more rarefied stuff. He played Stan Getz on the laptop's meager sound system as an antidote to the bleak weather outside and the bleak news about his career. The house was warm. He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves: the image of hard work. Soon he was contentedly lost in it.
At twelve-thirty, Melissa knocked on the door. “Would you like some lunch?” she asked. He had not seen her since his arrival that morning, when she'd given him a key and told him how to deactivate the alarm system. She said she would be in and out of the house all day, and he figured he'd drive into the center of town for lunch. As he worked, he'd heard her elsewhere in the house—footfalls and closing doors. And now she leaned on the entrance to her dead husband's library, her arms folded across her chest. She was more casually dressed—light gray cords, a pale pink Izod shirt, and a pair of matching Pumas, which looked like the shoes worn by tightrope walkers. Maybe she was a little older than he'd thought the day he'd come to give her the estimate. Maybe she was closer to him in age than he'd first figured.
“OK,” said Thomas, setting down a book on the Battle of Thermopylae.
“Good!” She gave him a little nod.
In the kitchen, he washed the dust from his hands. The farmhouse-style table had been set with two places. There was soup, a loaf of crusty bread, and a plate of cheese and grapes. A colorful bottle of mineral water stood like a maypole in the middle of it all.
“I didn't know this was part of the deal,” said Thomas.
“It's nothing,” she said, seating herself and indicating that he should do the same. “So, how's it going?”
“Fine.” Thomas tasted the soup—minestrone—and wondered if she had made it herself. The sink and the Viking range were spotless, as if the meal had been brought in by a caterer.
“My husband, Stephen, spoke highly of your work.”
Thomas gave her a quizzical look.
“Your team worked for him at Norse McConnell. He was a partner there.”
“Stephen Logan?”
“No. Logan's my maiden name. Stephen Epstein.”
“Ah,” said Thomas. “Right.” Norse McConnell was an accounting firm that had hired BiblioFile to digitize its archives. Stephen Epstein was the partner they'd dealt with. Thomas recalled talking to him about Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars, which he had been reading after seeing Gladiator on DVD with Clara. “If you like that, you should read Caesar's Civil War. I have a copy. I'll bring it in for you,” Epstein had said to him, but he'd never followed through, and Thomas had never gotten around to reading it.
“It was in his will,” said Melissa. “He wanted BiblioFile to do this thing with his library.”
“He asked for us by name? In his will?”
“Yes.”
“That's flattering,” said Thomas. “I guess he liked the work we did for Norse.”
“You should be flattered. Stephen was hard to please.” She immersed her spoon in the soup. “Do you think your estimate is realistic? Six weeks?”
“Definitely. We're going to have the notebooks OCR'd by a subcontractor in Bangladesh.”
“You're sending the notebooks to Bangladesh?” There was a note of distress in her voice.
“No, just the page scans. By FTP.”
“Ah,” she said, vaguely. “I don't mean to rush you. It's just that I can't sell the house until you finish.”
“You're selling the house?” Thomas didn't know when her husband had died or where in the grieving process she might be. He knew well enough how people could become unmoored by losses of this kind and briefly had a picture of Melissa wandering the world's sunny spots in grief, living off the million or more she was bound to get for the place.
“This summer. It's too big for just me. Besides, I've never really loved the suburbs
. I'm more of a city person. Stephen grew up in Newark and always wanted a place like this. He'd already bought this house when we met.”
“I see,” said Thomas. He remembered Epstein as being midfifties, smart and assertive, a little portly and graying, but hardly in decline. What killed him? Thomas wondered. He would have to look it up. This was going to be the strangest job he had ever worked. Out of the office, with no colleagues around, the trappings of the professional world gone. Somehow, it didn't feel quite legitimate. Anything might happen.
“You shouldn't have any trouble selling this place,” he said.
IN HIS MIND, that week was when the affair, which was not consummated until early March, had begun. Not during the lunch itself, but during the nights that followed, when he found himself behaving in peculiar ways. There were many things about this new job that he did not discuss with Clara—things that got overshadowed by the larger discussion of his pending unemployment. For one, he did not tell her that the widow was young and attractive; he simply let his wife assume that he was working for some crone who'd been married for half a century to a Seton Hall professor. He also did not tell Clara that the widow was making him lunch every day. Thomas even went so far as to pack himself a decoy lunch sometimes, saying it was too cold to leave the house to get something in town. These small deceptions and omissions added up, over time, to the big lie. The affair, which began as a guilty dalliance in his imagination, an escape from job loss and other troubles, eventually manifested itself, weeks later, in reality.
As the days passed, he looked more and more forward to going to work. While the long-term forecast was gloomy, there was warmth and light in the short term. He was pleased and surprised at how much time Melissa spent with him. She would bring him coffee, sit in one of the leather chairs in the study, and read one of her husband's books while Thomas worked, sometimes calling out a bit of information. “Did you know that Napoleon put buttons on the sleeves of his soldiers' coats to stop them from wiping their noses on their uniforms?” There were also stretches of time when she was not there. She had a twice-weekly tennis game at an indoor court in Montclair. Through the Tudor windows, he saw her departing in her form-fitting sweats and a puffy down jacket, the Prince bag over her shoulder. When she was out of the house, he fought hard against the temptation to nose around. Once, he gave himself a tour of the upper floor. The house was well kept except for the master suite, which was in disarray. There were bags and clothes piled up on the carpet, towels left on the floor. It looked like she might be going through her husband's things, or maybe she'd already started packing for when she sold the house. He touched nothing but stood in the room with the blunted winter light coming in through the blinds and briefly imagined how his own house would feel if Clara and Guillermo suddenly vanished. Stillness would come to mean sadness. The mundane sights of his existence would suddenly seem melancholy. He could see himself looking for company, becoming chatty with the UPS driver or the plumber, desperately wanting relief from loneliness and emptiness.
When she returned from tennis, she was not alone. At first he thought it might be a man she'd brought home, and he was simultaneously relieved and jealous. But it was a woman she led into the library, the pair of them holding bottles of Vitaminwater. Melissa's tennis partner was a little older, with thick auburn hair, wrinkles in her cleavage, and a big shiny diamond on her ring finger.
“So you're Tom! Nice to meet you,” said the woman, who was introduced as Lynne. He had the sense of being evaluated by her.
“You, too,” he said. “Good game?”
“No game. We just knocked the ball around for a while.”
Later, he heard them laughing in the kitchen, but he couldn't make out what they were saying. It was the first time he had heard Melissa give a full laugh. Something was making her happy.
THE JOB TURNED out to be easier than he thought, requiring less time than he'd predicted. (Epstein was, not surprisingly, a very organized man.) Thomas had looked him up on Nexis. He'd died of a brain aneurism in November, aged 49, survived by his wife, Melissa, 31. Thomas hoped that the collection would tell him more and searched the books for underlining, highlighting, marginalia, and ephemera, but the books were pristine. They looked unread, like books in a bookstore, except each volume had a bookmark on the last page, and the bookmark—a three-by-five index card—held a list of page numbers. Next to some of the page numbers were symbols, such as an asterisk, a question mark, or a check. On the card for the first volume of Shelby Foote's Civil War: A Narrative, he found the following:
36
37
293*
305
335
580
792
794
That wasn't many numbers for a very long book. As Melissa had said, Epstein was hard to please. Thomas followed the asterisk to page 293 and saw the tiniest of dots in the margin next to a sentence about how Jefferson Davis had once imported camels to try to facilitate populating the southwestern United States. It was an interesting enough historical anecdote, but it told him nothing about Epstein. Many of Thomas's investigations wound up this way, which is to say inconclusively. Nor were there many revelations to be found in the log books from the battles. They were a bore to read, no more than chronicles of troop movements, feints, attacks, counterattacks, casualty tables, wins, and losses, the handwriting so exactingly precise that OCR was a breeze. Thomas wanted the human element—evidence of fear, dismay, and, occasionally, triumph—but he suspected, from the evidence of the library and the logs, that Epstein's goal in life had been to squash such things. About the only thing Thomas gleaned from his work on the library was Epstein's admiration for certain generals: Grant, Rommel, and Pershing. And so, maybe the library did tell him something in the end: that Epstein had been all about control.
Thomas slowed his pace of work in February; he began lingering over the lunches with Melissa. He began pausing to read passages from some of the books. He was dreading his looming idleness, but even more he was dreading not having a reason to come to Melissa's house every day. The scans arrived from Bangladesh, where they had been sorted into a fielded database, searchable by date, nationality, commanding officer, and so on. Thomas had never been to BiblioFile's facility in Dhaka, but he had often spoken to the staff there, Bangladeshis with Anglophone (and probably bogus) names like Rupert, Winston, and Matilda. Business hours in New York meant that it was the middle of the night in Dhaka, but he could always hear the hum of the call center in the background, the sound of hundreds of BiblioFile clients across the United States receiving customer support. He could not help thinking that the workforce in Dhaka was also partly to blame for his downsizing.
Melissa seemed to be aware of his dawdling, seemed to welcome it. A kind of heightened conspiratorial intimacy had developed between them. Two of Thomas's college love affairs had begun in the last weeks of the academic year, when nobody seemed to care about consequences and everybody was bent on not letting opportunities slip away. As he neared the completion of his work on the Epstein library, he had the same feeling. During one of their February lunches, he asked her how she had met her husband.
“Ah,” and here she hesitated, dipping her spoon into her soup. “I worked for him. After college, I was with a temp agency and they sent me to Norse McConnell to replace his secretary, who was on maternity leave. He dismissed me after a week, called me into his office on Friday afternoon, and I remember thinking how upset he looked. I thought he was going to ream me, to tell me I'd been doing a terrible job, but he explained that he was transferring me to another department because he wanted to ask me out on a date and it wouldn't be appropriate for him to do so while I was working for him. He said he hadn't been able to concentrate all week because of having to talk to me and walk past me every day. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘I fire people all the time and never give it a second thought, but here I am talking to you and suddenly I'm all flustered.’ ” She dropped her voice to imitate her deceased husb
and, fretted her brow and clutched her fists. Thomas loved it.
“Stephen was a gentleman,” she went on. “He had these very old-fashioned manners, wore a pocket square, all that. All of that stuff was very important to him. He'd grown up poor—he was a self-made man. He took me once to the street in Newark where he'd spent his early childhood. It was one of the streets that was burned in the riots in the sixties. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there are still blocks of Newark that haven't been rebuilt from the summer of 1967.”
Thomas had seen them. Not long after he and Clara moved to Millwood, he'd taken a drive through Newark. The city frightened him.
“So, did you feel like a prize?” he asked her.
“You mean a trophy wife?”
“Sort of, but more than that.”
“No one has ever had the guts to ask me that, though I'm sure most people think it. You know what? Yeah, sometimes. And, you know what else? I didn't think it was so terrible to be his prize. To be valued that way. Whatever else happened, I always felt important to him, cherished.” She paused. “I'm only starting to figure some of these things out now that he's dead. Do you ever feel that way with your wife?”
“Like a prize? No. It's different—” Thomas got up from the kitchen table and the vegetable soup they had been eating to answer his cell phone, which was ringing in the library. He thought it might be Anderson checking in with him, but the caller ID showed an Essex County area code with a number he did not recognize.
“Hello?”
“Thomas?” It was Clara's voice.
“Yes?”
“I'm at Summit Hospital. I need you to get over here. Dr. Simeon's office.”
“What is it?”
“Just come. Now.”
“I'll be right there.” He knew what this meant. He flipped his phone closed and went back into the kitchen, where Melissa had stopped eating.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Is everything OK?”
“That was my wife,” he said. “Sorry. Family emergency.”
