His eyes smiled before his mouth. Of course I knew who Daniel G was. He had debuted his first couture collection when he was twenty-three and in the ten years since continued to prove how precocious and rare his taste was.
Our eyes connected. “Excuse me,” he said to his interviewer. “I have somewhere to be.”
I turned quickly away from him and stuffed another hors d’oeuvre in my mouth, half-afraid and half-hoping he was coming toward me. A moment later, a deep cinnamony cologne enveloped me, and I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Hello?” he said.
“Yes,” I croaked. The crinkly lines around his eyes suggested he could eat girls like me for breakfast—and probably did.
“I noticed you were interested in my interview.” It was not a question. Such staggering confidence was more intoxicating than the three glasses of cheap Pinot I’d had on an empty stomach. Empty before all the tarts, that is.
“I . . . um . . . I was just reflecting that you have it even worse than I do,” I blurted.
He raised one dark eyebrow in amusement. “Really? And how is that?” Daniel G probably wasn’t used to being told that he was less fortunate than anyone else.
“You see, my name is Dodie Fairisle.” I managed a smile, willing him to understand.
He looked at me in anticipation. Shoot. I was sort of hoping he would pick up on my meaning.
“Uh . . . your last name is Gargamel . . . ?” I backed away. My pajamas beckoned. And a brown paper bag for my head.
He laughed—a practiced, throaty bark that was neither warm nor cool. “I’m giving you a hard time. I knew what you meant.”
I exhaled. “Okaygoodnicetomeetyoubye!”
As I turned to flee, he slipped his hand around my wrist and gently tugged me back to face him. “Wait a second. You are charming. Let me take you to dinner,” he ordered.
I reflected for a moment. Most of his face was expressionless, but there was an eager gleam in his eye.
“All right,” I agreed. Why bother living in New York if not to take a few chances?
In the early days, dating Daniel G meant I had to get used to half-clad models swanning around his apartment, crashing on his couch, borrowing clothes from the showroom, and cozying up to him in restaurants or clubs whenever I went to the bathroom.
However, after Daniel and I had been out on a few dates, the models disappeared. I wasn’t sure how he was sending a signal that he wasn’t interested in playing the field anymore, but everyone in New York besides me seemed to have gotten the message. Daniel seemed to revel in having an aspiring artist on his arm at events, and the press ate it up.
As brilliant and funny and charming as he was, something wasn’t quite right. I began to notice that when I told him a story, he’d always swing the conversation back around to something that had happened to him. If I mentioned an exciting event or big deadline I had coming up, he never asked how it had gone afterward. If I said I’d had a bad day, I rarely got so far as to tell him why before I was commiserating over one of his problems with a supplier or another designer or an account. And he never remembered to find out whether the next day was better. The reality was Daniel G was very interested in me but not as interested as he was in Daniel G.
“He’s a narcissist,” Coco claimed. That word always sounded so lovely that it was hard to believe it meant such an unpleasant thing. Ultimately, when I needed him most, he hadn’t been there for me. And to add insult to injury after our painful breakup, he’d asked me not to speak to the press.
I pushed those thoughts away. For now, my hands would be full setting up the new lending library. First I had to figure out how the Hatshepsut to do that.
I decided to focus on what was most important: the experience of the library. I had to set aside what other people did in their libraries and forget about what I didn’t know. Instead, I would try to think as someone who had been an attentive (okay, compulsive) patron of libraries for my whole life. I wanted to make it a place where I would feel comfortable and happy so that other people would too.
The front entrance of my house faced west, and the back sunroom sat on the east-facing side. Light streaming from the southern window crossed the whole space all the way to the window on the north side. It could get warm in there with the full sun; I would need to set up some shelves in a way that created shade without risking damage to the books by putting them in the path of blazing heat. Some transparent curtains maybe—heavy enough to block the glare but thin enough for sunshine to suffuse the room. The door connected to the house was at the southwest corner three steps up into my kitchen and living room. I sat down on the stairs with a little sketch pad and drew out my vision. I knew I’d have to get in there with an actual tape measure at some point, but tape measures are scary. Like mayonnaise or Rodents of Unusual Size. So for now, I drew.
I knew from all my library visits that the shelves were usually about six feet tall, and I could fit five of them in the center of the room with comfortable aisle space between them, maybe six if I squeezed them in. Then I could have low bookcases lining each wall below the windows except the solid west wall attached to the house and the left half of the north wall, which was also solid and windowless. The circulation desk would go in the middle of the west wall, and I hoped I could snug in a round table on the other side of it, in the northwest corner, for a few readers to sit at. In the south corner of the opposite wall were the french doors leading to the outside, and they were fortunately wide enough that I was sure I could fit the shelves and other furniture through. Well, pretty sure.
I set my sketch pad down and wiped my brow. Beads of sweat came off on my fingers. I was breathing heavily, the blood pounding through my veins. The way the library needed to look was clear to me now, so close that I could practically smell the books.
On Monday afternoon, a few of my closest friends met me at school to ferry some books back to my place. My massive furniture order materialized right as we got home. Actually, the delivery truck was there waiting for us. Oops.
“How long have you guys been here?” I asked, concerned.
“About twenty minutes,” the head guy, whose name tag read DANA, said.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Nah, that’s okay. It’s not every day we get to deliver the contents of a library!” Dana gestured at the bookcases lined up in the back of the truck. My palms started sweating.
“Are you going to have self-help books? Like The Secret? Or How to Win Friends and Influence People?” a teen-looking delivery guy asked as he headed up the ramp.
“Sure,” I said, biting my lip. “We’re going to have a little bit of everything, hopefully.”
The guys unloaded the shelves, and fortunately—with a little grunting and rotating and probably some swearing that I pretended not to hear—everything ended up inside the sunroom exactly where I’d drawn it. I thanked the delivery guys and tipped them generously, telling them to come back in the New Year after we opened.
When they left, we ordered pizza, and Kendra mixed up a bunch of Bellinis to keep us buzzing along. So some thrillers might get mixed in with the romance section . . . no big deal.
“You look really happy,” Kendra said, handing me another Bellini after we’d shelved the last of the books.
“I am.”