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interesting or important now struck me as an absurd waste of time. I wanted only to be stranded on what I had come to view as an island of possibility.
    Chilling to think he did not even know my name (unless he had taken notice of the letters imprinted upon my gold-tone name tag and I hoped that he hadn’t, so mortified I was to be wearing a magnet affixed to my chest) and there I was (un)planning my career around our next encounter. Yet sometimes it bore the clarity of a mathematical equation. Leave the island equals leave the young man. Stay on the island equals stay with the young man. The choice was simple and clear: proximity or distance. I, who had had my fill of distance and had been sickened by it, chose proximity, chose the island, chose him.
    Meanwhile, he had not appeared at the library in weeks. My hardy optimism was not blighted in the least by this drought. Every day I prepared to meet him, convinced that I would. My interactions with the library staff suffered. I tried, casually, to speak of him. In his absence my failed attempts were not so much perceived as suspect as hardly perceived at all. Siobhan, on the other hand, who was not to be fooled, was losing patience with my inability to speak of anything else. After all, what exactly was there to talk about? I was alone on my marvelous black track, doomed to drive the same loop repeatedly. I alone felt the thrill.
     
    * * *
     
    “You know,” Siobhan remarked one afternoon, “I have to say I did a double take this morning when I saw Var.” I smiled to myself at the mention of double takes. In its utterly singular preoccupation, my mind had become an islet. No matter how far one wandered, one was never far from one’s starting point.
    I was becoming increasingly absentminded. For the third time in as many weeks, I had forgotten my lunch and Var, without coaxing, had agreed to bring it. He was a reader who seemed to pride himself on never setting foot in the library, preferring instead to line the walls of his narrow room with mold-ridden books from the town dump. When, in the early days of my library job, I would ask him if there was anything he’d like me to bring home, he would say:
No. I have my own library.
    “What do you mean?” I asked her. It
had
been kind of Var to bring the lunch, so kind that it caused me to feel suspicious. Could he be checking up on me? My heart convulsed slightly at the thought.
    “I mean my first thought when I saw your husband walk through the front door was: Well, who’s this cutie?”
    “Oh God, don’t say that.” He had given me an odd wink as he’d handed over my cloth bag, as if the two of us shared a secret I had somehow forgotten.
    “And then I realized it was Var!” she laughed. “He’s a pretty good lookin’ guy, that’s all!”
    “I’m afraid I don’t see your point.” My patience for Siobhan was thinning. I had no desire to fritter away our shift together chatting about my husband’s good qualities.
    “Just sayin’,” she slipped into her sunshiney drawl—all the more reason not to take her seriously.
    Clearly, the young man’s protracted absence had disturbed Siobhan’s loyalties. Not only had she begun warning me against the perils of seeking pleasure outside the confines of marriage, she was now blatantly rooting for Var.
    In recent weeks, she had been inserting Var-related comments here and there, (either reframing an anecdote in such a way that it redeemed him or regaling some positive attribute of his come to light), all of which were based on secondhand information whose source was myself. She let slip bits about the severe consequences of extramarital affairs, also based on the flimsiest of hearsay, shoddy bits that in summary reminded that those who committed such reckless offenses often
lost everything in the end
. She must have felt it was her duty as a friend. Then too there was the irrepressible librarian in her who could not stand by and watch a human being in distress