The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
. . .
by 6:40 the sun had set, the air had turned sharp and smoky, and I had
paced a marathon in my apartment. I couldn’t think of a productive way to fill
that afternoon, so I resorted to the time-honored practice of throwing a tennis
ball against a wall until my landlady pounded back. Then I watched the news.
Small-town television news seemed purposefully arranged to refute the proposition
that journalism chronicled a changing world; after I’d lived two months
in Lincoln and its environs, the evening news for me became an exercise in
combinatorialism: fire, councilman in trouble, high-school football team wins,
weather; high-school football player in trouble, councilman proposes a new
way to pay municipal taxes, fire, weather; snowstorm, high-school hockey
news, judge fired for groping his secretary, fire, weather. Tonight the lead story
was the opening of a fancy new grocery two towns over, which meant that
weekenders no longer had to bring their quinoa, frisée, and coffee-chocolatemyrtleberry
stout with them. When they showed the high-school basketball
team advancing to state quarterfinals, I switched the television off. I put on a
sport jacket for the first time since graduation (it seemed to have shrunk around
the midsection from sitting in my closet untouched for so long), brushed my
unbrushable hair into semiobedient clumps, and headed out the door, tossing
my keys to myself, missing, and fishing them out of a puddle.
Talcott’s long horseshoe driveway shone with its own private harvest
moons, yellow lamps on either side, stretching from the entryway to the
grand front, winding past the floodlit athletic fields and the dorms in a variety
of styles—Olde New Englande Rusticke, ivy-covered redbrick, 1970s Hartford
housing projects—to the plain glass-and-steel back doors. Hannah
stood just inside, emerging when I waved and flashed my brights (why did I
do that? I never do that; that’s not one of my gestures—the evening was filled
with silent recriminations issued against self by self). In the pooled warm
light, with her green woolen cape, honey-colored hair, and long silver earrings,
she looked timeless, enchanted, like some sort of liquid gazelle.
“You’re very prompt,” she said, climbing into the car. “I’m glad; I had just
finished looking over some papers five minutes ago.”
“What on?”
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