The Book of Air and Shadows

so was able to observe the quick intake of breath and the slight whitening around the nostrils that signaled…what? Spinning wheels, hatching plots? He’d seen it before when he’d called her on her current scam about the books and now here it was again.
    She shrugged. “Do what you want, but I think it’s unlikely you’re going to find a world-class expert on Jacobean secretary hand in the New York Public Library. Ninety percent of their holdings are American, mostly the paper of local writers and prominent families.”
    “Well, it looks like you know everything, Carolyn. I guess I’m just a big asshole, who will now”-here he made a show of stacking the manuscript sheets-“get out of your hair, and take my pathetic manuscript to my low-end pathetic expert who will
obviously
tell me that it’s a letter from some Jacobean pissant about his case of gout.”
    He strode over to her workbench and snatched up the brown paper that had wrapped the
Voyages
yesterday and began to secure the manuscript in it, using the jerky, clumsy motions that indicate irritation.
    “Oh, don’t,” she said from behind him in an uncharacteristically high voice. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to behave. You were so excited about it and I just…”
    He turned around. Her mouth was turned down into an amusing inverted U like many of the indeterminate bumps that made Jacobean secretary hand so confusing. It looked like the start of another wailing session. But she continued in the same strangled voice: “I never see anyone. I haven’t got a life. The only person I’ve talked to in years is Sidney, and he just wants to be like my
mentor
, which means mainly he gets to paw me and…”
    “Sidney paws?”
    “Oh, he’s harmless. He thinks he’s some kind of big-time rake, but all he does is take me to expensive lunches and squeeze my leg under the tablecloth and sometimes in the shop, if we make a big sale he’ll grab my ass and hold on for a little too long, and he’ll kiss me semi-quasi-paternally on the mouth. He’s the last man in New York who chews SenSens. That’s the extent of my whoredom. I need the job and the food. You’re the only one I ever told this to. Talk about pathetic. I have no friends, no money, no place to live…”
    “You live here.”
    “Illegally, as you guessed. This building is condemned for human habitation. They used to store DDT here and it’s totally contaminated. The guy who owns the building thinks I just work here. He’d like to paw me too. You’re the first person my own age I’ve been with in, I don’t know…
years.
”
    Who is also dying to paw you, thought Crosetti, but said only, “Gosh, that’s sad.”
    “Yes, pitiable. And you’re decent to me and I treat you like shit. So typical! If you were a complete shithead I’d probably be slavering at your feet.”
    “I could
try
to be a shithead, Carolyn. I could write away to the Famous Shitheads School and take a course.”
    She stared at him and after a moment laughed. It was an odd barking sound not too distant from a sob. “But you hate me now, right?”
    “No, I don’t,” said Crosetti with as much sincerity as he could cram into the phrase. He was thinking about why she should have chosen to isolate herself so. She was not a fatty, not disfigured, presentable, “classy” as his mother had observed, no reason for someone like that to skulk in the shadows of the city. And she was, if not actually a beauty, a…what was the word? A fetching woman. When her face was together, as now, when she was not scowling or scarily vacant, she could have fetched him from Zanzibar.
    “On the contrary,” he added. “Really.”
    “No? But I’ve treated you so badly.”
    “Yes, and now I’ll give you a minute to think how you’re going to make it up to me.” He hummed and looked at his watch, and tapped his foot.
    “I know what I’ll do,” she said after a moment. “I will introduce you to a
real
expert on Jacobean manuscripts, one of the best in the world. I’ll call him and set it up. And you can come with me on my errands and be bored stiff while I talk about split calf and marbled endpapers and then we’ll go see Andrew.”
    “Andrew?”
    “Yes. Andrew Bulstrode. Sidney introduced us. That was who I took that course on English manuscripts and incunabula from.”
    “Does he want to feel you up too?”
    “No. You, maybe.”
    “I can’t wait.”
    “You’ll have to, a little. I need to visit the bathroom