Another work day was over. I sat on the redwood deck behind my house in Walnut Creek sipping a neat Scotch, watching the fog creep over the Oakland hills, and indulging in a good cigar. What a shame you can't get Cubans here, I thought. Canada has them and they're great. I mean hell, if we can have our running shoes made in Viet Nam, why can't we import Cuban cigars? Government is even more fucked up than big corporations and I know a fair amount about big corporations. I have spent a career working for one and selling it's enterprise software to lots of others.
Ah Linda, I thought returning to my lunch time thoughts about a one time lover. But you know, great as Linda was, there were lots of other women, and some of them were very interesting. Very interesting indeed.
For instance there was Louise. Ah yes, Louise the librarian:
I was in my senior year at UC Davis when I met Louise. I was just finishing up a degree in computer science, having learned, first and foremost, that I had no interest whatsoever in spending a lifetime sitting in front of a CRT screen writing code (Remember CRT screens? The rest of the world called them a TV, but nerds have an acronym for everything). I could do it, but god it was boring. You could go days without human contact.
For a lack of a better idea, I was pursuing a minor in English. Maybe it was Lisa that inspired me. I don't recall now, but Dad agreed to pay for an extra year, and I was diligently hacking my way through writing classes and English literature classes—some interesting and some boring. When I got desperate I would go down to Berkeley and get help from Lisa (and usually laid in the bargain).
I was in the library working on a research paper about Dickens' London. Lisa had warned me that Dickens was dreadful stuff, and she was right, but it was better than writing code, and I had all my CS requirements done, the absolute minimum I needed to get my degree. There was a woman working behind the counter, checking out books and occasionally shushing flirting couples that were making too much noise. She was maybe ten years or so older than me. I noticed that she wore essentially the same clothes every day—a dark plaid A-Line skirt that hung loosely from her hips and ended a bit below her knees, flat shoes (black, and polished to a shine that would make an Army drill instructor smile), and a neatly pressed white cotton blouse that buttoned to her neck. Her hair, a thick lustrous brown, was pulled straight back and tied in a serviceable pony tail that reached to the middle of her back. The look was completed by no, or minimal, make-up, no jewelry beyond a pair of simple gold posts in her ear lobes, a pair of reading glasses that hung from a braided gold neck chain when she wasn't wearing them or simply looking over the top of them as they perched on the end of her nose, and a black, library issued, name tag that identified her as Louise.
As I said, the stuff I was working on was just slightly more interesting that writing code in Cobal or C or some other now forgotten language they were teaching in those days, so I paid attention to her every time she came out from behind the counter to shush some errant couple. I couldn't reach much in the way of conclusions about what she was really like beneath those clothes. Her hips were pretty much hidden beneath the loose folds of her skirt as were her thighs. She had very shapely calves below the hem of the skirt, and there seemed to be a bosom that pushed the white blouse out despite her obvious desire to hide it. She had high cheek bones and shapely lips. Her eyes were a grey-blue and not particularly wide, almost cat-like. They reminded me of Lauren Bacall. They moved rapidly as she looked about the room. When we occasionally made eye contact, she always looked quickly away. I suspected that with a bit of make-up her face would have turned heads, but . . . who knew.
As my mind wandered from my efforts to find something intelligent to say about how the culture of Dickens' London had affected his writing (or how his writing had affected London's culture. He was that big a deal), I couldn't keep myself from watching Louise and wondering about her. What kind of person was she? She dressed like an old-maid librarian, but beneath that, was there the beauty of a fashion model? No way to tell. She worked in a library and tried to maintain order amongst college students who were there more for the social potential than for the wisdom of the centuries buried in the books. At least that's how I assumed she viewed her task—casting pearls before swine. As I watched her go about her job I wondered about what her non-work life was like. Did she go home each night to a quiet dinner with her cat and then curl-up with a good book, perhaps Bronte or, god forbid, Dickens, a well-loved tome she had been through numerous times before, but she still re-read to squeeze the last bit of value from it. Yes, I thought. I could see her in her well-worn flannel pajamas and a warm blanket, the purring cat curled in her lap, while she absorbed yet another re-read of Great Expectations. In short, I was obsessing over her.
My old-maid-cat-in-lap assessment couldn't have been more wrong.
Eventually my boredom with what I was working on and my more or less self-generated fantasies about Louise pushed me to the point that I made up an excuse to talk to her.
I approached her work station and, speaking in my best library whisper, said "Excuse me. I'm working on a paper for Professor Smithson's class on Dickens."
"Yes?" she whispered, looking at me over the top of her reading glasses, her grey eyes focused intently on me to the exclusion of all else.
"Well, I was wondering if you could give me a suggestion for some materials describing 19
th
century London. See, the theory I'm trying to pursue is that understanding Dickens' work requires the reader to understand the culture he lived in as he was writing."
Louise pulled her glasses from the end of her nose where they normally resided when she was talking to students. She looked at me long and hard, while chewing on an ear piece of her glasses that dangled from a hand. I've always wondered what was going through her mind. Most likely just debating why she shouldn't tell me how sophomoric my idea was, but ultimately, she leaned forward on her elbows and asked, "Who's your professor again?"
"Smithson," I repeated.
"Hmm," she said, obviously continuing to think.
I waited in silence.
Apparently reaching a decision about me, she drew herself upright, pushing her chest out a bit (yes, she did have a bosom under that white blouse after all) and said, "No that won't do, won't do at all."
"No?" I questioned her.
"It's a thesis Smithson's heard a thousand time before, and critics have hacked it to death. The best you will get, matter how good a job you do, will be a B."
A B sounded fine to me, I thought. My standards for success weren't very high. But I didn't think she would be very impressed with that attitude, so I said, "Oh, I see."
"I have an idea though that might be a more productive approach for you, if you're interested."
"Okay."
