Read Online Stolen Pleasures by Gina Berriault - Free Book Online Page B

he’d told himself so many times before, lifelong. He knew from saintly experiments of his youth that when he fasted in sympathy, punishing himself for what he thought was plenitude, his conscience began to starve, unable to survive for very long without a body.
    A brandy at the long bar, and the bartender slapping down the napkin, asking the usual. “When you going to sell me that Borsalino?” Then, “This man’s a librarian,” to the bulky young
man in a broadly striped sweater on the stool to the left of Perera. “He’s read every book in the public library. Ever been in there?”
    â€œNever was.”
    â€œYou can ask him anything,” said the bartender, and the man to Perera’s right did. “Do you know right off the number of dead both sides in the Civil War?”
    â€œWhose civil war?”
    Taken for a tricky intellectual, he was left alone.
    A theater critic, that’s what he wished to be mistaken for, passing the theaters at the right time as the ticket holders were drifting in and the lines forming at the box office. Women’s skirts and coats swinging out, swishing against him, and a woman turning to apologize, granting a close glimpse of her face to this man who appeared deserving of it. A critic, that’s who he was, of the musical up there on the stage and of the audience so delightedly acceptive of the banal, lustily sung.
    Past the lofty Hilton at the Tenderloin’s edge, whose ultra-plush interior he had strolled through a time or two, finding gold beyond an interior decorator’s wildest dreams. Its penthouse window the highest light in the Tenderloin sky, a shining blind eye. Around a corner of the hotel, and, lying up against the cyclone fence, the bundled and the unbundled to whom he gave a wide berth as he would to the dead, in fear and respect. Over the sidewalks, those slips of refuse paper he’d always noticed but not so closely as now. Alert to approaching figures, to whatever plans they had in mind for him, and warily friendly with the fraternal clusters, exchanging with them joking curses on the weather, he made his way. Until at last he stood before the mesh gate to his apartment building. A gate
from sidewalk to the entrance’s upper reaches, requiring a swift turn of the key before an assault. The gate, the lock, the fear—none of which had been there when he moved in.
    The only man in the Western world to wear a nightcap, he drew his on. Cashmere, dove color, knitted twelve years ago by his dear friend and lover, Barbara, a librarian herself, a beautiful one. Syracuse, New York. Every year, off they’d go. Archaeological tours, walking tours. Three winters ago he was at her bedside, close by in her last hours. She, too, had corresponded with writers. Hers were women—poets, memoirists—and these letters, too, were in his care. Into his plaid flannel robe, also a gift from her, the seat and the elbows worn away. He always read in this robe in his ample chair or at the kitchen table or in bed. Three books lay on the floor by his bed, among the last he’d ever consider ordering for any library. One had seduced and deceived him, the second was unbearably vain, and he was put to sleep by the third, already asleep itself, face down on the carpet.
    When he lay down the inevitable happened. At once he wondered where the poetry stalker might be, the librarian stalker with the excitable cough. Could Darío have imagined that his earnest little attempt to accept God’s ways would wind up in the parka pocket of a sidewalk sleeper, trying to accept the same a hundred years later?
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    AT HIS DESK he was always attuned to the life of this library, as he’d been to every library where he’d spent his years, even the vaster ones with more locked doors, tonnages of archives. This morning his mind’s eye was a benign sensor, following the patrons to their
chosen areas. He saw them rising in the