Fiction: Then Things Change

By Candace Lyons

Andrea had been assistant head librarian for five years. It was only logical she'd replace Richard Hadley now that he'd taken a job at the University of Nebraska where his wife had been named Chair of the English Department, so Andrea's colleagues were surprised by her reaction. She seemed stunned, and, before she actually accepted, she asked to take the six weeks’ vacation time that had been accumulating, as if she might otherwise refuse the new position.

"I want to clear my head, start fresh," she said. Nobody protested, Andrea seemed to have a point for her usual enthusiasm and humour had disappeared without a trace.

She and Richard worked long hours his last month to make the transition and tie up all loose ends so the library could run smoothly in both their absences.

"What are you going to do?" Richard asked on one of their late evenings.

"Oh" Andrea answered, distracted, "I'm going to Paris."

"Ah, the Bibliothèque nationale," Richard's eyes gleamed with interest. He was given to bus man's holidays, visiting the principle libraries wherever he travelled.

"Yes," she let that be her excuse and didn't elaborate.

Andrea could only stay for one quick toast at Richard's going away party. She had a plane to catch that evening and hadn't even packed yet. Her goodbye was brief and lost amid the general well-wishing. The last minute rush had been as carefully calculated as the date of departure. She didn't want a moment to think until she was heading far, far away.

Andrea sat back in her plane seat. Her first thought was, “Let this plane crash," not exactly a prayer to God, but an imprecation to the gods in general. She closed her eyes as if waiting until her conscience began to nag her. She wasn't the only passenger, after all. It was hardly fair to take out so many innocent people who weren't in love with Richard Hadley and probably wanted to live.

Andrea had been in love with Richard for twelve years, ever since the day he had interviewed and hired her. But Richard was not just married, he was happily married, and Andrea had scruples that made her feel guilty even about the innocent, vine-covered fantasies she'd infrequently allow herself. Still, he was the love of her life and if that love had to be confined to afar, Andrea had been willing to accept that. They had a marriage of sorts, better than some traditional marriages. They were comfortable with each other as if they'd been born on the same wavelength, and Richard spent more time with her than he did with his family. As far as Andrea was concerned, they had a very satisfying relationship. She realised other people would probably see this as protection against a "real" relationship -- something requited -- as a way of channelling all her emotional energy into a dead end. Andrea couldn't agree. She wasn't avoiding anything. She had never suffered a broken heart. She had never suffered for love at all -- even with Richard. For all their relationship wasn't, it had been enough for her. Still Andrea had felt it wiser not to confide any of this to another living soul.

She had told the truth about a vacation. She did need time to clear her head before starting the new job, before facing Richard's, now her, office that would be too full of their presence and too devoid of his. She'd chosen Paris, not for its libraries, but because she'd been there before and knew it was a city where people existed with their emotions on the surface so they wouldn't be appalled if she suddenly burst into tears in the middle of the street, always a possibility since she still hadn't allowed herself to contemplate life without Richard but, “Cancel that crash," she magnanimously told the gods who were letting the plane fly smoothly along anyway. She was a big girl, she'd take care of her own fate. Paris had its share of tall buildings and there was always the Eiffel Tower. If her mood didn't change, she could enjoy her vacation for five weeks and six days, pick the best spot for a free fall and leave it to the library to name her successor.

Andrea started to grin. Thoughts of spectacular suicide had been the only way she'd found to cheer herself up since the day Richard had come to work beaming and announced, "Congratulations, you're the new head librarian," which had been his way to tell her he was leaving. But she had no need to seriously contemplate suicide because, as far as she was concerned, that was the day her life had ended all of its own accord. She'd never expected or even wanted Richard to abandon his family for her, but she had never expected, and God knows never wanted, things to change. Yet they had. Indulging in her own black humour got her through the pain she couldn't share.

Andrea had been able to sleep on the plane. She didn't feel any jet-lag when she arrived so she left the hotel as soon as she'd unpacked. She went directly to a stationery store and bought herself a notebook then searched for a café‚ that wasn't too crowded where she could find a quiet table. She had something to do. She began to write, confiding to the pages everything she had never been able to confide to anyone else -- her feelings for Richard, the pleasure she'd found in their relationship, her favourite memories, her sudden-death reaction to his going away... She purged, she analysed, she approached then reapproached the whole thing from every angle she could think of. She wrote almost constantly, in cafés, restaurants, gardens, her hotel room, stopping only when her hand ached too much to go on. She wrote for four days until she didn't know another word to express her feelings and the pages of the notebook plus two sheets of hotel stationary were covered front and back with her small, precise handwriting. Then she felt a kind of jet-lag that was emotional rather than physical. She was empty, blank. It was a very nice sensation. On the fifth day, she slept eighteen hours.

Andrea did not come through the process feeling cured, but she did feel at peace with herself. She played tourist for a couple of days. She went to the top of the Eiffel Tower to take aerial photos and didn't even think to see how easy it would be to throw herself off. She didn't need the joke anymore.

Usually Andrea shot rolls of film when she went anywhere, but before she'd finished the first one this time, she stopped in an art supply store and bought a pad of watercolour paper, an indelible ink pen, paints and brushes. Art had been an abandoned passion in high school. She hadn't been half bad and passing an artist on the street one day had made her remember the pleasure of reproducing what she saw by her own hand. She re-toured all her favourite spots, spending hours sketching and painting what she found most lovely in the city.

She'd had to let a painting of Notre Dame dry overnight so she could add the dappled shadows of leaves on the facade. She was dabbing brown-grey here and there with so much concentration, she didn't even notice the elderly couple who'd stopped to watch over her shoulder. The man considerately waited until she paused before asking, " Combien?" with the flat consonants of the American mid-west. Andrea laughed, "This? It's not professional. I mean, I'm not a professional. I mean, it's just for me," she fumbled, embarrassed and ridiculously flattered.

"Would you be willing to sell it? It's very good."

"Oh," Andrea sat back and inspected what she'd done. The man was right. Andrea was surprised. Her notebook was filling up, but she considered her work as therapy and had never looked at it critically. "Sure," she told him off-handedly and was relieved when he offered her fifty francs. She wouldn't have known what price to ask. She was carefully tearing the sheet from the spiral when the man's wife said,

"But you haven't signed it."

"Oh," Andrea repeated, still too surprised to expand her vocabulary. She let the pen circle above the painting a moment, wondering whether to do a kind of logo of initials, then deciding, since this was likely to be her one bid for art immortality, to let the world know who she was. She carefully put her first and last names in the corner with the date.

The encounter cheered Andrea up enormously. "That was easy," she thought. She amused herself with the idea of becoming an artist and never going back. But, even though she kept painting, the event never repeated itself and, considering original watercolours were hardly a rarity in Paris, Andrea just let the idea replace exotic suicide when she needed to lift her spirits.

She was sitting in a café‚, taking a break, one afternoon when the couple walked by. They didn't notice her. She didn't try to get their attention. But as she watched them pass she suddenly realised something for when they had run into her, they had seen an artist, not a librarian, nor someone whose world had just gone to pieces. They saw an Andrea she had never even known existed. She'd been so wrapped up in one aspect of her life, she hadn't needed to explore others. She hadn't even considered there were others to explore.

Briefly, but very briefly, she resented Richard. "If it hadn't been for him...," she began to tell herself, only she was too much of a realist to continue. Richard would probably be horrified if he knew how much of herself she'd invested in him. For the first time in twelve years, she was feeling vaguely horrified herself. There was no one else to blame. It had been her choice, she'd made it willingly.

She caught sight of herself in one of the cafe’s many mirrors. What did she see now? The crowded café‚ was hardly the place to try to figure this out, but once back in her hotel room, Andrea stood in front of the full-length mirror and tried to look at herself as if she was a stranger. She began to play. She thought painter and posed artistically, librarian and posed literarily, heart-broken woman and posed tragically. She was getting carried away -- doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. She could be anybody. She kept at it until she was laughing too hard to go on. As much as she had hated the idea of change when Richard had announced his departure, she was now excited by the possibilities the change might bring. Her old enthusiasm began to resurface. All of a sudden, she was anxious to get back. She wanted to let whatever was going to flourish do so in familiar soil. If it turned out that she was not destined to be the world's most innovative librarian, she'd take it from there. The future was wide-open, a huge, lovely question mark. It made her feel giddy.

Andrea did one more painting before she left Paris. She was sitting in the Luxembourg Garden but she didn't even bother to look around. She was doing a portrait of Richard sitting at his desk amid the usual clutter of books and papers. He was looking up and smiling the way he would when she'd walk in. When she was done, she inspected it as objectively as possible and decided, yes, it was good. The expression on Richard's face gave her a twinge of nostalgia. She had managed to capture something of his personality. Satisfied, she let the portrait dry then removed the thick cardboard covers from the pad of paper and sandwiched it between them. She mailed it to Richard. It was his belated going away present. She wanted to say goodbye.