The archivist, p.22
The Archivist, page 22
Jean and Helena were skirmishing loudly when I made my way into Special Collections. Catching snippets of conversation, I gleaned they were embroiled in a contentious argument over something to do with one of Jean’s new software organizational tools and Helena’s Luddite disdain for the introduction of any new system promising to disrupt the old one. I tuned them out as I settled into my office, a smile creasing my face as I looked up at my bulletin board and saw Raymond’s picture pinned to it. I had to hear about the Helena/Jean fracas from an intrusive Chloe, who always came by to say good morning, but Chloe’s gossip was deflected away by her suspicion of loyalties in the department and whom to trust. I debated telling Chloe that West was coming in for a visit, float by her what Helena or Jean would think of such an unceremoniously, last-minute planned appointment. Would Helena think I was going behind her back if she discovered we had already emailed each other without cc’ing her? She may have been reluctant to accept the changing times, instead adhering to old protocols like a barnacle to its treasured hull.
Concluding there was no choice, I knocked lightly on the frame to Helena’s open door. My eyes swept the floor and the visitors’ chairs. They were littered with piles of papers and folder files spilling documents in the disorganization that was Helena’s signature rebuke to the organization that typically characterized the profession. She wasn’t an archivist by profession, I sneered to myself, she was an administrator, the self-appointed head of a department, and a discipline, that had outrun her intellectual grasp of it. But her power at Memorial was daunting, and her office bore witness to the fact she lived and breathed Special Collections & Archives, with the emphasis on lived.
“Can I have a word with you, Helena?” I asked.
Helena raised her eyes from the clutter that obscured her desk. “Come in, Nadia,” she said affably, because she liked me, because she knew I had one foot in her world where we both still believed in the value of archiving with the meticulous eye of a philologist, and the human touch of someone trained in the ways that still valued the instinctual in an archivist. Helena half stood, then sat back down, realizing she would have to thread her way through books and hillocks of folders to reach me for a proper greeting.
I wordlessly cleared folders from a chair, neatly set them on the floor, and sat down. I worked up a smile. “It was good to see Professor West the other night,” I began.
“Yes. I was glad you could make it,” Helena said, ignoring the salient fact that she had deliberately, I suspected, not informed about the dinner. Was she jealous of my youth? my looks? the scuttlebutt that I was tapped to assume her position as director of Special Collections when retirement or a catastrophic event crowbarred her from the only world she had ever known?
“Yes. I’m glad I found out about it,” I said, my sarcasm undetected, still rankled by her passive-aggressive attempt to keep me from meeting Raymond West in the flesh. “I shouldn’t have to go online to find out that the donor whose papers I’m processing is speaking here at the university,” I said, to awaken her to my hurt.
“It slipped my mind. I didn’t think you’d be interested. Besides, I thought you didn’t like university functions.”
“Helena. I’m the archivist on this project. Have been for six months. And I’m a SAA fellow now,” I reminded her.
“I know! Congratulations on becoming a fellow.” She had a shifty, practiced way of sidestepping the uncomfortable.
“Anyway. Water under the bridge. The reason I came in was to alert you to the fact that West said he might stop by for a visit.”
“When?” Helena inquired, leaning forward, mildly alarmed.
I knew damn well when, but instead I shrugged. “Just said he might drop by sometime. I know you like to know about these things.”
“How did you find out?”
“I introduced myself to him last night as his archivist,” I said defiantly. “He casually mentioned he would be interested in seeing the work I’ve done.” I swallowed hard and cast my eyes to the windowed wall. “He emailed me directly,” I confessed.
When I looked back, Helena was staring at me with frozen green eyes. My announcement had unsettled her. “Well, I wish he would tell me these things.”
“I’m sure he’s very busy. And he probably assumed I would tell you.” I stood. “And I just did.”
“Thank you,” Helena bristled.
“I think he’s curious what we do down here. Plus, I have a few questions for him.”
“What?” Helena barked.
“Just some clarification on a few items in the collection.”
I turned and left Helena to chew over this piece of information as I returned to my cubicle down the hall, a tingling of excitement mounting inside me. I sat down and brought up a video of Raymond’s Faculty Club dinner that had already been posted on the staff website and watched it for a few minutes before deciding that I didn’t want to be caught in the act of reveling in my burgeoning infatuation.
The hours crawled by in anticipation of Raymond’s visit. I buried myself in his collection, paying overzealous attention to an early handwritten manuscript I had already read, an abandoned book chronicling his university years’ romantic exploits. Deliciously titillating. Engrossing afternoon reading after a morning of answering departmental emails.
Sometime after lunch, Jean poked her micromanaging head into my cubicle. “I hear West might be coming in for a visit.”
“Word gets around,” I needled her. “Yeah. He mentioned something to that effect,” I added nonchalantly, without looking up immediately from a draft of his book of erotica. I set the Moleskine on my lap and raised my head to Jean. I wasn’t fond of her, and she knew it. Nobody was. She was devoid of the soul of a pure archivist and instead had the gnat-like qualities of a hovering micromanager. As the Supervisory Archivist she was senior to me, but as an employee of the university for a longer stretch, I knew things that could quickly put Jean in her place, and Jean didn’t test those waters. Technically, we were both archivists, but we came from different spheres, graduated with different undergraduate degrees, and improbably intersected at the junction of the same profession. Worse, she harbored ambitions to succeed Helena and sized me up as an obstruction to her goal.
“I like your blouse,” Jean complimented. “Miyake?”
“I don’t know, Jean. I don’t look at labels.”
“I don’t see you get dressed up that often.”
I studied her for a moment, ferreting for the subtextual in her expressionless face. Was she being snarky? “I have an early dinner date,” I lied. I forced a smile to let her know that was all the information she was going to get.
Jean pointed at my corkboard. With her index finger she sketched in the air the way it once was, the way she remembered it. “You took some pictures down.”
“Did I?” I threw an obligatory backward glance. “I don’t remember.”
“You used to have pictures of your wedding up there.”
I glowered at her, eyes burning through hers, silently seething, letting her know she shouldn’t cross into my personal space. She must have gotten the message because she unfastened her gaze from my board.
“How’s West coming?” she asked.
“Right on schedule, Jean,” I answered with histrionic buoyancy, annoyed at the oft-repeated question. “Wrapping up. If it wasn’t for all the interruptions, I would probably be done.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Is Helena still here?” I asked.
“No. She’s left for the day.”
“Another one of her fabulous Town and Gowns?” I said, impersonating Helena’s high-pitched voice. Mirthless Jean barely cracked a smile. Even when I tried to lighten the mood it was futile. “I hope she raises more money so we can all get a raise,” I joked, in a conscious attempt to slacken the wires of tension that were always drawn taut when we interacted.
“I hope so too.” Jean slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “I’m going. Got to pick up my kids.”
I exhaled with relief at Jean’s departure. Her retreating footsteps were like the melody of a song I loved to hear over and over again. A glance at the clock indicated that I was now mostly alone in Special Collections. Occupational fatalist that I am, I obsessively checked my cell for emails, momentarily depressed that Raymond might not honor his appointment with me. I put pen to my personal file and scribbled some notes that had been lurking on the penumbra of my mind before Jean’s interruption me. I obsessed for a few moments over Jean’s noticing that I had taken down my wedding photo. Happier times best left to the dustbin of memories was my reasoning. And, guiltily, I wanted my life to be tabula rasa when Raymond came calling.
It was freezing in Special Collections. I shivered and pulled my black cashmere cardigan over my designer blouse. Jean had noticed what I was wearing. Yeah, it was fucking Miyake, so what? Was she fashioning an incriminating narrative too?
I was so intent on what I was reading that I reared back like a startled horse, threw a hand to my breast, and exhaled air when I saw Raymond West standing in the open entrance to my cubicle, Deborah smiling beside him, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulders. “I have a guest for you,” Deborah said in hushed tones.
I blushed and caught my breath. “You scared me.”
“Didn’t mean to,” Raymond said in his sonorous baritone where each word was enunciated as if chiseled from marble. A warm smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. He was wearing a long-sleeve black T-shirt that clung to his flat stomach and fell to his trademark faded blue jeans. Beige Clarks boots lent the impression he’d prefer adventuring in some remote corner of the earth time had forgotten instead of parking himself behind a desk and baring his soul over another Pulitzer Prize winner.
“I’ll leave the two of you,” Deborah said softly, her eyes widened conspiratorially at me behind his shoulder as she backed away.
An indescribable excitation trembled in me as I rose, reached for the back of a visitor’s chair, and rolled it in front of him. “Sit down,” I said. “I’m glad you came.”
Raymond eased himself into the chair. “I would always keep a promise to my archivist,” he said, winking one eye. Pausing for dramatic impact, he added, “Now that I know who she is.”
Our narrowed eyes coupled with mutually interpretative looks, burning into each other, flashing with flirtation while suppressing smiles, gleaming viscid with palpable desire. Last night’s sparks were not an aberration, I thought, relieved. I could still feel his warm breath in my ear when he said, “You’re my eavesdropping angel, aren’t you?” The immediate, tectonic, attraction foundered all the professional barriers I had come to erect after nearly a dozen years in Special Collections. We had just met and we were already out of the harbor, sails billowing, I wildly fantasized, and could glimpse the white-capped oceans beckoning to us. “I wasn’t assigned your papers,” I broke the silence. “I requested it,” I finished definitively, never once losing eye contact with him.
He held my gaze. “I’m glad you did. But I believe, if I have my story straight, my wife asked for you.”
The mention of his wife momentarily bled the mystery from my fantasy, and I worked up a smile in response. Was he trying to dampen the mood, or was he just summoning up the reality that we would inevitably have to face?
“But of course, I didn’t tell her I was coming to meet you,” he added, tugging me playfully back down into the romantic fantasy and eliciting an embarrassed smile.
“Oh? Why not?” I asked in my most sultry of voices.
Raymond made a gesture with his hand as if stating the obvious. “A woman as preternaturally beautiful as you? Delving deep into my writings?” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Inhabiting my soul?” His eyes leveled on me until I had to pry mine away for fear of spontaneous combustion.
I fleetingly debated telling him Helena already knew he had planned to come, but I didn’t want to douse the flames of my excitement with the extinguisher of my reality. When I looked back at him, he was still leaning forward and staring fixedly at me. “I’m married too,” I found myself confiding.
“Well, then, good,” he said. “We have nothing to worry about.”
We shared a mordant laugh that erupted spontaneously and seemed to break the ice.
“Marriage is a tough gig,” he said.
I lifted my eyes to his. Like mourning doves, who mate for life, we seemed to know something that no one else knew by locking eyes. His life’s work and my profession had auspiciously collided, I wanted to believe in my heart, in a kind of strange but humanly bound synchronicity. Where it intersected was instantaneously profound, heightened not by its serendipity but by whom we both were at that moment in space and time. I could feel him drawing toward me and he wasn’t even moving. I could feel him hypnotized by my longing, and I hadn’t even voiced it. If I closed my eyes, I could feel my hands pressed against his chest and my lips pressing against his full mouth, his hands clutching my ass and hoisting me up in the air and toward him like a dream I had dreamed in another life.
He glanced at the pile of Moleskines that he clearly recognized on my auxiliary desk. “How deep have you gone into my work?” he asked.
“As deep and dark as one could go,” I said, enunciating each word. I let my eyes linger on his as my words throbbed in the silence that ensued.
Raymond smiled sheepishly. “I imagine that others in your profession wouldn’t have taken such a . . . personal interest.”
I bit my lip and slowly shook my head from side to side, an invitation not to stop.
“All those journals?” he asked.
I nodded up and down a couple times for emphasis, smiling knowingly. “You were a bad, bad boy, Raymond.” I lifted the Moleskine next to my keyboard and shook it at him. “An Ocean of True Feeling?”
Raymond smiled self-consciously at the embarrassingly trite title and closed his eyes as if traveling back in time. “One of those youthful indiscretions.” When he opened them, he came face to face with me, this woman who had chronicled his life’s work, and he tried to reconstruct the journey I had taken, the islands where I had harbored, the turbulent storms I must have weathered. “I had no conception of how deep an archivist dived into a collection,” he admitted.
“I took a special interest in this one,” I said unhesitatingly. “Was getting fucking sick of the Language Poets.”
He laughed and then looked at me warmly. Was it my imagination or were tears blurring his eyes? “I meant what I said the other night.” He waited until my eyes had adjusted to his. “You really are my eavesdropping angel.”
My heart disintegrated at his words. They were like a christening, acknowledging my role in the work I had done on his papers, his life work, and conferring on me a gratitude an archivist rarely experiences. It made me feel appreciated, wanted, needed, by a man who presumably didn’t need anyone, his talent the solid foundation on which his whole life rested and successfully revolved.
I stirred impatiently in my chair. “Would you like to see your sarcophagi? What your eavesdropping angel has done with your life’s work?”
Raymond smiled wearily. He wanted to go with me, he would follow me anywhere, but maybe just then he didn’t want to be presented with the corporeal image of his life’s work ensconced in archival boxes, his soul reduced to the heavy solidity of paper, sectioned by folders, cataloged by abstruse codes, chronologically and categorically dismantled so the world could now find him at any given place in his artistic trajectory. I sensed that he wanted to go with me, just not where I was offering to take him. But he hadn’t yet surrendered to the paradise where I really wanted to take the both of us.
We rose together from our chairs out of a lacuna of nascent desire and profanely forming dreams. Raymond stepped aside, outstretched his hand, and let me turn and slip past him. I shifted unavoidably toward him on the way out, and my sweater brushed his T-shirt, and I smelled the faint odor of a scent I had never encountered, and I suddenly wanted to burrow into him, the closeness was that intense. In the corridor I threw him a backward glance, but I had to angle my head to the ceiling to meet his eyes boring downward into mine. “This way,” I instructed, leading the way.
In two strides he caught up with me, before slowing his pace and matching mine half-stride for stride. His head towered over me. A glance brought back his face from the countless photos of him I had cataloged in the collection—but it was alive with moving expressions now.
“What was it like to win the Pulitzer?” I found myself asking, as we approached the locked door to the stacks.
“It was surreal,” he said. “I didn’t believe it when they called.”
I dropped my eyes. “I was at Columbia when you gave your speech.”
“You were?” he said, surprised.
I nodded. “I was doing my PhD in comparative lit.”
“Didn’t want to teach?”
I shook my head. “Loathe departmental politics.”
Raymond laughed sardonically and shook his head. “Boy, do I know.”
“I wanted to meet you, but I was too intimidated to initiate anything, not knowing . . .” I trailed off and looked up at him, seeking reassurance. His eyes were riveted on mine. My pulse accelerated.
I keyed in a number, then pressed down on a lever and pushed open the door. “Welcome to the final resting place of the Raymond West Papers.”
