Wilton smiled tightly and looked away.
What he wouldn’t give right now to tell Wilton about the documents Helen had bought off Bridgette. Or see Wilton’s face when Aaron and Helen published their article. If, that was, Helen hadn’t decided to cut Aaron loose and go it alone. Or if she and the documents hadn’t fallen into a rabbit hole. Or if she wasn’t in a hospital somewhere in this crowded, lonely city—which he was determined to find out by the end of today.
Aaron looked at his watch. Five minutes to go.
Wilton exhaled, then spoke without looking at Aaron. “I’ve never forgotten the time I offended her.” He shook his glossy head slowly. “It was years ago. I made a rude joke, and I turned around and she was there, and the look she gave me nearly turned me to stone.”
At Wilton’s admission, Aaron felt his lips curl into a smirk—but as Wilton continued speaking, the feeling of superiority faded and was replaced with a suspicion that, in fact, Aaron might like Wilton more than he liked himself.
“She’s the kind of person whose good opinion matters, you know?” Wilton said. “Because it’s not easily earned.”
Aaron nodded.
“I’ve never earned it,” said Wilton.
Behind the thick glass, Librarian Patricia materialized. A brief rasp of metal and she’d unlocked the door from the inside, and Wilton was off into the room before Aaron could find words for what he wanted to say: I could use a friend like you.
Patricia was staring at him. He realized he was standing in the entry, blocking the door from closing. “Listen,” he said to her. “I can’t reach Helen. She was going to bring in some documents, maybe you’ve seen her?”
Before he’d finished speaking, Patricia’s expression had thickened into a scowl. She shook her head once, hard. It struck Aaron that she too had been worried—and that she was among those whose worry took the form of anger at the world for its failure to remain safe. “I haven’t seen her in days,” Patricia said—and as if his own troubles had given him new ears, Aaron understood that her terseness was love—that all of it was love: the Patricias’ world of meticulous conservation and whispering vigilance and endless policing over fucking pencils.
“I’ll call her myself,” Patricia said. “If she doesn’t answer I’ll go to her home after the carpenter comes to finish the installation. That’s in two hours.”
Using the grooved pencil Patricia procured from a pocket, Aaron wrote his mobile number on a white slip of paper from the circulation desk, and accepted the one she gave him.
And then he was free. He couldn’t believe how easily Patricia had slipped the responsibility out of his hands and into her own. He wanted to kiss her withered cheek in gratitude.
But a minute later, adrift in the atrium outside the rare manuscripts room, it occurred to him that she’d lifted responsibility from him the way one takes an injured animal out of the hands of a small child.
Was there no point when Aaron Levy would rise to the occasion—no Thank you, ma’am, but I’ll handle this one myself? Wasn’t that part of Aaron’s definition of a man . . . or didn’t he have one any longer?
The thought made him do something so illogical, only an idiot would call it courage. He made his way out of the building at a clip, across the courtyard, and to the History Department. Yes, he’d do it: announce his failure, fall on his own sword to prove (to whom?) he’d some grain of integrity left. For months he’d imagined rebooting his academic career with the work he’d done with Helen—he’d pictured marching into Darcy’s office and informing him that while Shakespeare was no longer a going concern, Aaron had a brighter, shinier dissertation topic. Except now, since Marisa’s news, he couldn’t credibly argue that he was capable of writing anything. And without Helen’s austere judgments echoing in his ear, it appeared he was capable of nothing. Hours at his desk producing no words, until the computer threatened to swallow him whole. Even the new documents now seemed a mirage, Spinoza’s signature a fantasy of Aaron’s own desperate ego. And here he was, knocking on Darcy’s office door—not in the tweed jacket he usually wore to meetings, but in—what? He looked down and saw blue jeans and a blue T-shirt—both rumpled, as Wilton’s attire had been, only Wilton’s disarray had been fashionable and this was the real thing. As he heard Darcy’s footsteps approach the door, he realized he’d worn this T-shirt three days already this week.
Darcy opened the door. “Hello,” he said, looking surprised. “Had we scheduled a meeting?”
The mere sight of Darcy gave Aaron comfort: the square, metal-framed glasses, the thinning brown-gray hair, the tall but slightly stooped figure. Darcy had the mildly preoccupied air of a man steeped in the slow labors of history, whose confidence that the details of the rest of life could be entrusted to someone else—presumably a wife hovering just offstage—had largely been borne out.
Darcy still had a hand on the doorknob, and Aaron could see he was ruing the interruption. “Or did you want to schedule something?” he said.
His voice was reasonable, even fatherly, and it steadied Aaron. Still, he found himself unable to answer.
“Well,” Darcy said after a moment. “Do come and sit.”
Aaron stepped into Darcy’s office, but instead of sitting in his usual seat beneath Darcy’s towering bookshelves, he stood, his hands on the wooden back of the chair. “I’m having,” he said, “a bit of a hard time.”
His voice cracked on the final word. He felt himself on the cusp of a fatal error—yet unlike all the other times Aaron Levy had lost control, this time it wasn’t his temper that had driven him here, but a sense that he was made of something so brittle the slightest breeze could turn him to ash and it was essential that someone see before it was too late.
Sitting very still at his desk, Darcy offered a cautious smile. “Shakespeare treating you poorly?”
Aaron shook his head. It was a moment before he trusted himself to speak. “I seem to have made a mess of my life.”
A lone set of footsteps passed and faded in the hall outside Darcy’s office. “How irretrievable?” Darcy said.
He felt feverish; his throat was impossible. “I don’t know yet. I might need to take some time off. I think I’d like to write a dissertation with certain materials Helen Watt has found. Only I’m having trouble focusing, because of some personal things, and now . . .” He struggled. “Now I can’t find her,” he finished, knowing he wasn’t making sense, knowing he sounded like a boy who’d lost his mother in a department store.
“What do you mean, you can’t find her?” Darcy spoke sharply.
Aaron recalled, suddenly, that they were friends. “She hasn’t answered my calls.”
Darcy frowned and glanced at the clock. Then, pocketing his worry for later, he leaned forward. Forearms resting on the desk, hands steepled, he addressed Aaron. “I never advise making sudden changes,” he said slowly, “while one’s life is”—he gestured with one hand—“in flux.” The hand returned to its side of the steeple. He fell silent again, and Aaron saw he was trying to leave Aaron room to recover—backtrack, minimize what he’d said. But Aaron was silent.