"Lisa Goldstein - Lilyanna" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldstein Lisa)

she was still standing in front of the fiction shelves when we closed. I sent the aides
and the children’s librarian home and talked to her a bit about the bestseller list; then
it turned out that she didn’t have a library card and I had to process one for her.
It was ten minutes after closing when I finally shut down the computer and
made my rounds through the empty rooms. My footsteps echoed back to me,
muffled by the rows of books; when I accidentally dropped a pen the sound lingered
for a while, suspended in the silence. This was the way libraries used to sound, I
thought, like nothing else in the world.
I picked up books from when they had been left (or thrown—one of them lay
open on its back, looking disturbingly helpless, like a dead body). As I carried them
to the bin a scrap of paper fell out and drifted to the floor.
I grabbed it on its way down. It was a ticket stub, an old one, pre-printed
instead of spat out from a computer. It had been torn in half; the part I held read
“Para” and, on the next line, “Thea.”
That sparked a vague memory. I put the books down and went to the local
history section (979.46). I found it in the third book I checked: a brief history of the
Paramount theater in Oakland. The place had been a movie palace from 1931 to
1970, though it had had to shut down once during the Depression. I studied the
angular gold and green lights of the main entrance, the statues of golden women
marching toward a great gold fountain, and as I did so a strange notion took hold of
me: that the woman in the photograph had held this ticket, had gone to this
performance.
 It was crazy, delusional. And yet the idea wouldn’t leave me. I saw her
striding through the front door in a short jacket and a long slim skirt, a mannish hat
with a feather on her head, looking up at her companion from under the brim. At the
intermission she took out a cigarette and went to the women’s lounge (amazingly,
according to the book, women were not allowed to smoke in public then) and
discussed the movie with the other smokers. If my guess was right and she was an
actress, perhaps she would have known something about the stars. The other
women might even have recognized her, might have listened intently as she gossiped
about the leading man.
I re-shelved the history and went back to the pile of books I’d collected
earlier. This time I’d seen the one the ticket had come from, and I checked the title; it
was The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. The books
themselves weren’t relevant, then, just the messages they contained.
I put the ticket in my drawer, together with the photograph, and left. When I
got home I made dinner and then settled down with a book I’d checked out. The
quiet at the end of the day was welcome, but even as I read I was aware that it
wasn’t the same as the hushed silence of the library. It didn’t have the weight of
history behind it, the great edifice built of kings and explorers, poets and
philosophers, books about carpentry and cat care and trains and when to plant
dahlias, all the knowledge and wisdom of the world.
The next day crept by slowly. I was eager to be left alone (like Garbo) and see
if the books would yield up something new. I kept seeing vague glimmers out of the
corner of my eye, a blur of white like the sway of a skirt or the turning of a page, but
when I looked there would be nothing there. Finally everyone left; I shut the door
behind them and turned the sign to Closed.
“Are you doing anything tonight?” someone said behind me.
I jumped. It was only the children’s librarian, Amy, coming out of the back. I
muttered something about a dinner meeting, and she shrugged and left.