The Quietest Shelf

I closed the salon at two on a Thursday, which I never do. Shoshana asked me twice if everything was okay and I told her the landlord wanted to inspect the plumbing, which was a lie, and I'm not a good liar, so I'm sure she knew. I was Elsa, fifty-three years old, standing in my own salon with wet hands and a story that wouldn't hold. She let it go though. She's seen me lie about worse.

Here's why I closed early. Back in March a man named Daniel, forty-seven, who drives a truck for the regional book distributor, brought a box into the salon. He's been making deliveries to our building for about a year, always to the nail place downstairs, and our packages come with theirs. We've traded small talk about weather and parking. That's all we've ever had, small talk.

But that day he lingered while I signed, and he saw the book I keep behind the front desk, the old photography survey with the torn spine, and he asked about it, and I told him the truth, which is that I love it and I've worn it out and there's a book by the same photographer that I've wanted for fifteen years and never found. A book of erotic portraiture from the seventies. Out of print, expensive when you can find it, and I always felt a little silly paying that kind of money for something I'd have to hide from my clients anyway.

He nodded and left. I forgot about it completely.

Then last Friday he came in on his way out, not with a box, just walked in, and set a paper bag on my counter and said, "I found it at an estate sale in March. I've been waiting for it to come around to your route so I'd have an excuse." And he left before I could even say anything.

You have to understand, I have not been given a gift like that by a man who wasn't sleeping with me in over a decade. Maybe ever. I sat on my stool and looked at that bag for a good five minutes before I opened it. The book was in there, real, heavy, the dust jacket still crisp. I read it cover to cover over the weekend, twice.

And I could not figure out how to say thank you. A card felt small. Flowers felt wrong. Buying him lunch felt like turning it into nothing. So I did something I have not done in a long time, which is trust my gut about a man.

The library annex stays open late. The main building closes at six but the annex has a processing crew until nine, and Daniel's last drop of the day is there at eight forty. I know this because I asked him, a week ago, very casually, what his route looked like on Thursdays, and he told me, and then went quiet, and then said, "Why do you ask?" And I said, "I want to thank you for the book in person." And he said okay. Just like that. Okay.

So Thursday evening I'm standing in the back receiving room of a university library annex, and it smells like old paper and floor wax, and there's a fluorescent light overhead that buzzes, and a clock on the wall that says eight thirty-one, and I'm watching it like it owes me money. I told no one why I closed early. I told no one where I was. I'm Elsa, fifty-three, single my whole life except for one intense affair with a fellow stylist when I was forty-two, and when he moved away I chose solitude and stayed in it.

The book is in my bag. I brought it back because it felt right. You'll see why.

Eight forty. The roll-up door at the loading dock rattled up and I heard the truck and I heard Kenji, the assistant manager, twenty-nine, always in a hurry to leave, call out something about the manifest. And then Daniel's voice, and then footsteps, and then he came around the shelving into the back room and stopped dead.

"Elsa." He had a box of returns on his hip. "What are you doing here?"

"Closing time at the salon," I said. "I told you I wanted to thank you properly."

"In the library?"

"The library is where you are on Thursdays at eight forty. Seemed like the only place I could find you without it being a whole thing."

He set the box down on the table slow, like he needed something to do with his hands. "You didn't have to do that. The book was nothing. I found it, I bought it, it cost me forty dollars."

"It wasn't forty dollars and it wasn't nothing and you know it." I took a step toward him. "You drove an hour out of your way in March. You waited two months. You've never once asked me for anything or even tried anything, and I've noticed, Daniel. I notice things like that."

Kenji went past the doorway with a cart and said, "Night, Daniel," without looking in, and the outer door clanged, and then it was just us and the buzz of the light.

"I'll walk you out," he said. "It's late, you shouldn't be here alone."

"I'm not alone. You're here." I reached down and lifted the book out of my bag and held it up between us. "And I brought this."

He looked at the cover and then at me. "You brought it to show me?"

"To show you that I read it. All of it. Cover to cover, twice, over the weekend." I turned it over in my hands. "Do you know what's in this book?"

"I've never opened it. It felt like opening someone's mail."

"That's very polite of you." I set it on the table between us, facing up. The jacket has a photograph on it, a woman from the shoulders up, lit from one side, nothing showing but everything suggested. "It's portraits. Nudes, mostly. But it's not dirty, it's not porn, it's people being looked at honestly by someone who knew how to look. And there's an essay in the back, and I want to tell you the part that got me."

"Okay," he said. He was standing very still.

"There's a line where the photographer says that the gift of being looked at is the one nobody gives anymore. That people spend their whole lives arranging themselves to be seen a certain way and never once let somebody see them plain. That being looked at, really looked at, is a kind of mercy." I looked at him. He was watching my face and not the book, which told me something about him. "And I thought, that's what you gave me. Not the book. The being seen. You listened to me ramble about some out of print thing for ninety seconds on a Tuesday and you remembered, and you did the work, and you expected nothing. So I'm here to give you something, freely."

He swallowed. "You don't owe me anything."

"I know. That's the point entirely. I don't owe you, and this isn't payment for anything. I want to."

"Then it isn't a trade, and if it ever starts to feel like one, either of us can stop it." He nodded slowly. "Want to what?" His voice had gone down some. Quieter. Careful.

I'll be honest with you, reader, I had rehearsed this in my car for twenty minutes in the annex parking lot and the rehearsal fell apart the second his eyes were on me. So I just said it.

"I want you to watch me."

"Watch you." He repeated it flat, as if checking the words for wires.

"Watch me touch myself. Right here, under this light, with the book open on the table between us. That's my thank you. That's what I've got and it's what I want to give." I held my hands out. "I'm fifty-three years old, I've been alone on purpose for eleven years, and nobody has looked at me plain since before my hair went gray at the temples. You look at me plain every Thursday and you don't even know you're doing it. I want to let you do it on purpose, once, and then whatever happens after that happens or doesn't."

For a second he didn't move. Then he pulled out one of the metal folding chairs from against the wall and set it down a few feet from the table, facing me, and sat in it, and put his hands on his knees.

"Like that," he said. "If you want. If you don't, we can talk about the essay instead. I'd like that too."

"I know you would. That's why I'm here and not somewhere else." I unzipped my bag all the way and laid it open and looked at him one more time. "Last chance to be a gentleman and drive me home."

"I'm not going to be a gentleman," he said. "I'm going to stay right here, if you're sure."

"I'm sure," I said.

The clock on the wall said eight forty-six. I reached over and opened the book to the center spread, the one I'd marked with a receipt from my own shop, and the light buzzed above both of us, and I