Love Stories in This Town. Amanda Eyre Ward
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weighs eighty tons.
After work, James picks me up and we go driving. Sometimes we drive over to Pork Chop John’s for sandwiches, sometimes to the flats for a beer, and sometimes we go all the way out to Deer Lodge where the prison is or to Anaconda where the smokestack of the old smelter rises up like an arm. James! He smells like hard work—a cinnamon, cigarette smell. When James started calling me, he had just dropped out of tenth grade. Butte is small; I knew who he was, of course, and that he lived with his deadbeat father in a drafty double-wide. Nobody thought it would last, the studious girl and the grocery guy with a tattoo of his dead mother on his back.
After work, James plays saxophone for the Toxic Horns. His hair always looks messy and sticks up like a little chickadee. His tongue is the softest thing in the world.
Back to Monday. By the afternoon it’s raining, and that’s the best time to shelve. It’s quiet and warm in the library, and the books are all organized and beautiful. I’m humming and checking out the Romance section when there’s a shriek from the second floor. It’s Pearl and she goes, “OH NOOOOO! AAAH!” and the upstairs exit slams shut and Pearl comes running down the stairs like a puppy. Her mascara is smudged and her wiglet is askew.
“What? What?” goes Rosie, and Pearl can’t say it. She breathes in and out and finally she says, “There was a man upstairs.”
A man? (All the librarians are spinsters or divorcées and hate men.) I was like, “Pearl, men are allowed to go wherever they—”
And Pearl goes, “NO! You don’t UNDERSTAND!” And she starts crying. Rosie leads her by her little liver-spotted hand into the bookbinding room and Pearl’s shoes make this shuffling sound. You can hear the two of them talking quietly and then Pearl’s crying, Rosie’s soothing sounds. A few minutes later, Rosie comes out. Her mouth is drawn together tight as a prune.
“There is a masturbator loose in the Periodical area,” says Rosie.
By now all the regulars have dropped their newspapers. Nobody’s even pretending to browse. Old Ralph (of course) leads the way. He runs up the stairs with determination on his face for the first time since I have known him. Abe follows him and the little biddies stand at the foot of the stairs chirping encouragement.
Nothing.
The masturbator had escaped. That afternoon, Rosie gets the whole story out of poor (Catholic as they come) Pearl. She had noticed a strange man in the Science periodicals. (I was like, “What was he reading? Discover? Scientific American?” but Rosie told me to zip my lips.) The man was tall with brown hair combed back. He had a receding hairline and was wearing jeans, a brown leather jacket, and white penny loafers.
So, Pearl’s organizing the magazines, maybe reading a bit as she usually does, which is why it takes her forever and a day, and she hears sounds from the man. What sounds? Grunting sounds and breaths, little short ones. (Pearl kept saying, “Like a bear, like a bear,” but nobody wanted to explore that statement.) So finally she looks up and his back’s to her. He’s hunched a bit.
You have to understand about Pearl. She’s sixty-five, and her husband was brought over straight from County Galway. He was killed in a mine explosion, but not before he left Pearl for a stripper. She never remarried, or went on a date, or even talked a whole lot to a man after that. In short, the masturbator had to turn around, raise an eyebrow, and give Pearl an eyeful before she realized he was no regular library patron. She was paralyzed for a minute. According to Rosie, who appointed herself official psychoanalyst, he finished the job right there and then, and that is why Pearl doesn’t use the water fountain anymore. Pearl finally screamed and came galloping down the stairs, and the masturbator escaped.
James drove past Pork Chop John’s. He had showered, and didn’t smell like his lunch-break Winstons but like Paco Rabanne. “What, did you leave work early?” I said.
He looked at me, and put his hand on my knee. “Annie,” he said, “I did. I left work early today.” He was talking like a movie, which pissed me off. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Usually, we couldn’t find enough to say to each other—what food must be like in foreign countries, why our parents failed, MTV. In summer, we lay in the bed of James’s truck and made up stories of our bright future, our heads cradled by James’s winter parka and snow pants.
While James was busy squeezing my knee, he missed the light on Mercury and almost ran into a hippie Volkswagen van. “Van!” I cried, and he hit the brakes in time. “I’m hungry,” I said.
“Darling, you shall be fed,” said James.
“I’m in an onion ring mood.”
James shook his head. “So, James,” I said, “a masturbator is loose in the library.” James sighed.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. He licked his lips. “Annie, if you could go anywhere, anywhere for dinner this evening, where would it be?”
I thought for a minute. “Tower Pizza,” I said.
“No.”
“Yes! You said I could choose, James. What’s your problem?”
James was breathing hard and talking strangely. He was making me nervous. “Skip it,” I said. “Mom’s making meat loaf anyway.”
“Fine!” yelled James, jerking the steering wheel and pulling into the parking lot. James didn’t even touch his salad or the double pepperoni with mushrooms. He listened glumly as I told him about the masturbator.
Then, the moment. The moment went like this:
Curtain opens on a young couple in Tower Pizza, an orange-walled restaurant with waxed yellow floors. The couple is smoking cigarettes and eating pizza from small plastic plates. The woman uses a knife and fork and the man uses his hands.
ME: Should we have gotten extra cheese?
JAMES: No. This is fine.
ME: I sort of wish I had caught the masturbator.
JAMES: Why?
ME: At least it would be exciting, you know?
JAMES: Annie, I got a promotion today. I’m leaving produce.
ME: Awesome! I wish we had extra cheese.
JAMES: I’m going to be manager of the meat counter. I almost have enough money to get us out of this place. This fucking place! I’m taking you to New York. We can stay with my cousin in Armonk, and then we’ll move to the city.
ME: Can we get cheesy garlic sticks, babe?
JAMES: Annie, will you marry me?
So I said yes, and we went up to Our Lady of the Rockies and had sex. James fell asleep, but I lay awake and gazed at Our Lady. At night she’s lit up like a Christmas tree, her arms open to us all.
The next day, there are posters all around the library. They say: CAUTION, PLEASE, THIS MAN MAY BE MASTURBATING IN THE PERIODICALS ROOM and then there’s a picture that Pearl drew of a man’s face. It looks like a cartoon pig. I tell Pearl and Rosie the signs might lead people to believe the man should be left alone, but they look at me with their brows furrowed and I zip it. Everyone is very upset about masturbation going on in the library.
Jan and the Morning Crew keep making jokes about us on the radio and repeating the description of the masturbator, down to the penny loafers. All of a sudden everybody wants to hang out at the library, and the books are in disarray. I can’t bear it.
After an hour, Rosie tells me I need a break. I tell her somebody’s got to shelve the damn books. She puts her hand on my shoulder and says, “Honey, the books aren’t going anywhere.”
I call my mother and ask her to have breakfast with me. She wasn’t awake when I left for work, and my father was coughing too hard to notice the ring on my finger. It was a thick gold ring with a diamond the size of a pencil eraser—James’s grandmother’s ring. She was a famous lounge singer who was given the ring by a movie star I