The Toynbee Convector

“Don’t! You’ll hurt it.”

“It’s mine now.” He gave it another shove.

“I’m glad you’re not running the main library,” she said.

“Here’s Gogol, boring, Saul Bellow, boring, John Updike, nice style but no ideas. Boring, Frank O’Connor? Okay, but you can keep him. Henry James? Boring, Tolstoy, never could figure out the names, not boring, just confusing, keep him. Aldous Huxley? Hey, wait! You know I think his essays are better than his novels!”

“You can’t break the set!”

“Like heck I can’t. We split this baby down the middle. You get the novels, I get his ideas.”

He grabbed three of the books and shoved them, skittering across the carpet. She stepped over and began to examine the piles she had put aside for him.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Just rethinking what I gave you. I think I’ll take back John Cheever.”

“Christ! What gives? I take this, you grab that? Put Cheever back. Here’s Pushkin. Boring, Robbe-Grillet, French boring. Knut Hamsun. Scandinavian boring.”

“Cut the critiques. You make me feel like I just foiled my lit. exam. You think you’re taking all the good books and leaving me the dimwits?”

“Could be. All those Connecticut writers picking lint out of each other’s navels, logrolling down Fifth Avenue, firing blanks all the way!”

“I don’t suppose you find Charlie Dickens a dud?”

“Dickens!? We haven’t had anyone like him in this century!”

“Thank God! You’ll notice I gave you all the Thomas Love Peacock novels. Asimov’s science fiction. Kafka? Banal.”

“Now who’s busy burning books?” He bent furiously to study first her stack, then his. “Peacock, by God, one of the great humorists of all time. Kafka? Deep. Crazy, brilliant. Asimov? A genius!”

“Ho-hum! Jesus.” She sat down and put her hands in her lap and leaned forward, nodding at the hills of literature. “I think I begin to see where everything fell apart. The books you read, flotsam to me. The books I read, jetsam to you. Junk. Why didn’t we realize that ten years back?”

“Lots of things you don’t notice when you’re—” he slowed—“in love.”

The word had been spoken. She moved back in her chair, uneasily, and folded her hands and put her feet primly together. She stared at him with a peculiar bright ness m her eyes.

He looked away and began to prowl the room. “Ah, hell,” he said, kicking one stack, and moved across to kick the other, quietly, easily. “I don’t give a damn what’s in this bunch or that, I don’t care, I just don’t—”

“Do you have room in your car for most of these?” she said, quietly, still looking at him.

“I think so.”

“Want me to help you carry them out?”

“No.” There was another long moment of silence.

“I can manage.” “You sure?”

“Sure.” With a great sigh he began to carry a few books over near the door.

“I’ve got some boxes in the car. I’ll bring them up.”

“Don’t you want to look over the rest of the books to be sure they’re ones you want?”

“Naw,” he said. You know my taste. Looks like you did it all right It’s like you just peeled two pieces of paper away from each other, and there they are, I can’t believe it.”

He stopped piling the books by the door and stood looking at first one fortress of volumes on one side and then the opposing castles and towers of literature, and then at his wife, seated stranded in the valley between. It seemed a long way down the valley, across the room to where she was.