Love and Demotion Read Free Page B

white marble hallway, its Franco-Roman design always reminding her of the photographs of the great buildings in Europe. But Regina’s father had often told Regina that there was no point in comparing the main branch of the New York Public Library to anything; as a piece of architecture, it stood on its own.
“And this is the Public Catalogue Room,” said Sloan.
The grand room, officially called the Bill Blass Public Catalogue Room, was lined with low, dark wood tables dotted with the library’s signature bronze lamps with metal shades finished in dark bronze. The computers seemed out of place in a room that otherwise seemed reminiscent of the early twentieth century. “These computers do not access the internet,” said Sloan, clearly bored with the speech she had no doubt given countless time. “Their only purpose is to enable visitors to look up the books they need, and find out if they are circulating or non-circulating material, if they are available, and so forth.”
Regina, of course, knew this system better than she knew her way through anything else in life. (If there was anything Regina loved, it was a good system. She craved order above all else): After the visitor looked up their books, they wrote down the titles and call numbers on little slips of paper with the small pencils provided in cups on either end of the long tables. Regina was comforted by the fact that in the age of texting and emailing everything, the New York Public Library was the one place people had to actually take pencil to paper.
Sloan kept walking, her high, wing-tipped heels clicking on the marble floor. She wore her straight hair pulled into a neat, low ponytail, and dressed in head-to-toe Ralph Lauren. Like Regina’s roommate, Sloan Caldwell looked her up and down and could barely conceal her verdict: wrong, wrong all wrong. Regina wondered if there was some secret Manhattan dress code that everyone was privy to except her. Ever since she moved to the city, she felt like one of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers — she almost passed as a person who belonged, but something told anyone who looked closely enough otherwise.
“And here we have the heart of the library, the Main Reading Room.”
Regina’s father had often traveled to New York on business and he would bring Regina along. They rode the Amtrak train together, a ritual of bonding that included lunch at Serendipity, and a visit to the New York Public Library main branch on Fifth Avenue. To this day, the faintly musty smell of the Rose Main Reading Room brought back memories of her father so quick and sharp, it always took her a minute to recover.
Regina paused to read the inscription over the door, a 1644 protest against censorship from Milton’s “Areopagitica”: A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.
The room was breathtaking; the sheer size of it never failed to dazzle her. The ceiling was over 51 feet high – only about ten feet shorter than a brownstone house. The room was 78 feet wide and 297 feet long – about the length of a city block. The enormous, round-arched windows were filled with sunlight, and then there was the ceiling, a canvas of sky and clouds painted by Yohannes Aynalem, surrounded by ornate wood and gold-colored carvings of cherubs, dolphins, and scrolls. But her favorite part of the room was the four-tiered chandeliers, dark wood and brass, carved with satyr masks between the bulbs.
Sloan paused in front of the deliver desk at the front of the room. It was more than a desk: the ornate, dark wood fixture ran half the length of the room, and was essentially the command center. It was divided into eleven bays with round arched windows, each bay separated by Roman Doric columns.
Sloan leaned on one of the bays.
“Here it is – your new home,” she said. Regina was confused.
“I’m working at the delivery desk?”
“Yes,” said Sloan.
“But…I have my