The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
weekends a year to barrel through town in their SUVs. Manton’s General
Store now stocked chèvre, five kinds of olives, and took the New York Times,
the Wall Street Journal, and Crain’s. Of course, I was a newcomer myself,
but I had a rickety little compact, no life elsewhere, and—rarest of all honors—I
was a Friend of Townies (the Rolens). Anyway, I’m temperamentally
inclined to talk about the Good (or at least Better) Old Days; I feel nostalgic
for every era that preceded my birth.
As I walked into the newsroom—a kind and self-conscious exaggeration
for what was essentially an insulated garden shed with four desks and four
computers—that afternoon at one, Art was at his desk smoking and reading
the Times: glance, puff, turn the page; puff, glance, puff, turn the page, puff.
“There he is,” he said, not even looking up when I shut the door behind me.
“Bright and early.” Now he looked pointedly at me over the tops of his reading
glasses.
The room smelled like cigarettes and perfume; Art was responsible for
the first, but the last belonged to Nancy Llewelyn, who sold our ads and
ensured, as best she could, that we didn’t go broke. Like Art, she was a lifelong
townie, and according to Mrs. Rolen, she had nurtured a low-level,
harmless crush on Art since the seventh grade. I sniffed ostentatiously, and
Art laughed.
“She stopped by earlier to pick up some reading, she said, for her vacation.
You imagine that? Taking work from the Carrier with her? Dedication.”
He puffed, closed the front section, and reached for the sports. “Got a call
from the Panda a little earlier.”
“Who’s the Panda?”
He laced his hands behind his head and looked out the long window
toward Lake Massapaug, cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I loved the way
Art smoked, with a quiet, straightforward satisfaction instead of either the
furtive guilt so common among older smokers or the forced, noisy, almost
defensive pleasure of teenage and Californian smokers. He smoked because
he smoked, not to prove a point and not shamefully, but because it somehow
completed him.
His thick white eyebrows, deep-set dark eyes, long jaw, and white beard
gave his face a perpetually mournful cast; he looked like a cross between an
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