ROBERT J. LEVY

JACK STACEY, A.S.B.R.

I was busy alphabetizing books on Milton's punctuation when I looked up from the
card catalog into an imposing pair of horn-rims. It was a woman, and she was
scared. She had the haunted, hunted look of a heroine from 19th-century fiction.
Tess, Anna, or that Bennett girl.

"Jack Stacey?" she whispered.

"Well, it's not Italo Calvino," I said. I like to lead with a joke. It puts
people at ease. But she wasn't having any.

"I was given your name," she continued hesitantly.

I knew what she wanted, of course, but she had to admit it first herself. That
was part of the process.

"I. . . I'm a voracious reader," she said. "At least I was. I used to finish
two, three novels a week. Not your average page-turners either. Solid stuff.
Dickens, Melville, Dostoyevski."

"Interesting," I said, "but how can I help you?"

"A month ago, I picked up The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton's acid-tinged
portrayal of turn-of-the-century New York society. After a few pages I grew
dizzy. My eyes started to close. I. . .I was. . ."

"Bored?" I ventured.

"Yes!" she said excitedly-- and too loudly. A chorus of shushes echoed around
the reading room. She lowered her voice: "Can you help me? My friend said, for a
price, you'll customize a reading list."

I eyed her carefully as she warmed to her story. Her cheeks had flushed red, and
her hair had come undone. A touch of Bronte's Catherine played about her face.
There were fires banked deep down in this bibliophile.

"Yes, in addition to being a librarian here at the Queensborough Branch I am
registered with the A.S.B.R."

She looked confused.

"American Society of Book Recommenders," I said.

"Well," she said, breathless, "Will you?"

"It's not as simple as it sounds," I began. "The first thing is to admit you're
suffering from reader's block. You've already taken that step. But now I'll need
to learn what makes your literary clock tick, what sort of prose style quickens
your pulse, what kind of plot twists give you cold sweats. Finally, I'll write
you a list. My selections may seem odd, even perverse. You may say, He doesn't
understand my whole literary gestalt, I'm going to hate these books. But you
have to put yourself completely in my hands. And even then, there's still no
guarantee."

I paused. "Are you ready to do all that?"

There was a moment of indecision as she rolled her unread copy of The New York
Review of Books into an even tighter tube.

"Yes," she said. "I'm desperate."

I discovered my unique talent early on. A precocious kid, I always had my nose
in print. Anything at all. Dictionaries. Encyclopedias. Comics. Recipes. Laundry
tickets. Ingredients lists on cereal boxes. I loved words. I ate them for
breakfast, lunch and dinner. But it wasn't just that.

I remember the first glimmer of it in the school yard behind P.S. 220. Mikey
Warshawer was sitting near the swings, looking pretty hangdog. So I asked him,
What gives? Mikey coughed up the whole story. Seemed he couldn't find any comics
to read. Said he would open up a Superman or Green Lantern and nothing happened.
He wasn't being transported outside of himself. No magic. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Now I'd known Mikey through three grades. He was a good sort, a little prone to
mischief, but with a notion of the transcendent and a sensitivity to the great
themes. Life. Death. The ultimate meaning of it all.

"Mikey," I said to him, "Ever try reading the Dr. Strange comics?"

He looked up at me, suddenly interested, new life in his expression. "Any good?"

"Well, "I said, "They're not everyone's cup of tea, but I think you'll really go
for the unique melding of stylized adventure and occult symbolism."

And I was right. I've always been right. It's-- for want of a better word-- my
genius. I can size up a person and immediately know what they'll love to read.

Sounds wonderful, right? A great way to win friends and influence people? Sure,
but it's also a way to alienate folks. It frightens them, the second sight.
Maybe they accept you for awhile, but soon they start to act kind of prickly
when you're around. They feel like you're reading their minds. And the thing is,
you are.

I lost some buddies this way in my youth. Gus "Great Books" Wolinsky got so
frustrated with my unerring ability to choose volumes he loved that he purposely
began reading novels I assured him he would hate. The last time I saw him he was
reading all of James Fenimore Cooper. The experience soured him on literature
and learning. He became an embittered elementary school teacher notorious for
forcing his classes to take Evangeline seriously.

I soon realized my abilities made me a pariah in the everyday world. People
objected to my habit of pulling books out of their hands in public and replacing
them with others of my own choosing. Sometimes they became insulted when I saw
through their intellectual pretensions. ("You won't like Nostromo," I'd implore.
"Sure, it's masterpiece. But you won't like it. Try the latest Michener instead.
It's exactly the kind of stuff you'll enjoy!")

Clearly I had to hide myself from the prying eyes of the world, and the best
camouflage was the library. There I could recommend books to my heart's content,
and nobody would be the wiser.

Following the initial meeting with my client, I conducted an intensive series of
interviews and phone conversations with the distressed woman. I formed a pretty
good picture of her pathology. Language itself had become an anathema to her. It
began to affect her work. She couldn't bring herself to look at the briefest
memos. She would surreptitiously throw away correspondence rather than read it.
When she typed letters she left out every other word.

I knew what had to be done, and I knew it was going to be tough on her. I called
her one evening. "I want you to buy a copy of the revised version of Stephen
King's The Stand, and read the whole thing."

There was dead quiet on the other end of the line. Finally, a small voice
whispered: "You can't be serious. It's 1,400 pages of. . . of schlock."

"Call me back when you've finished," I replied, and hung up.

Textual immersion therapy. Force the blocked patient to read something,
anything, and make any subsequent interaction with the book recommender
contingent on completion of the assigned material. This compels the blocked
reader to renew contact with words in order to continue contact with the
recommender.

She phoned a few days later.

"I can't believe you made me read that. . . thing!" she said. "I thought you
were supposed to recommend books I would like."

"All part of the treatment. But you're forgetting something."

"What?"

"You did, in fact, actually read it!"

There was a stunned silence, and then a sob of relief.

From this point on it was largely mop-up work. I soon presented her with my
reading list. It was a wildly divergent assortment, but, then again, she was a
woman of sharp contrasts: Molloy, Samuel BeckettClan of the Cave Bear, Jean
AuelThe Once and Future King, T.H. WhitePippi Longstocking, Astrid
LindgrenTractatus Logico Philosophicus, Ludwig WittgensteinThe Color Me
Beautiful Make-Up Book, Carole JacksonDr. Faustus, Thomas MannDestiny, Sally
BeaumanMonadology, Gottfried LeibnitzBill, the Galactic Hero, Harry Harrison

Perplexed by my choices, she nonetheless plowed through each of these texts over
the next few weeks. Soon enough a marvelous transformation had taken place. Her
pallor had given way to a ruddy glow. There was a new spring in her step, and,
on one occasion, I even detected an attempt at flirtation. Her outlook on life
improved. She showed renewed interest in ideas and herself. For example, while
Monadology went a long way toward convincing her that the universe was composed
of discrete particles, The Color Me Beautiful Make- Up Book made her realize she
had been employing far too muted a color palette for her skin tone.

Our final meeting took place where it all began-- in the library. I was in the
suspense section shelving books; I'd just finished the G's, my arms aching as I
tucked away the last Grisham. I heard footsteps behind me.

"Jack," she said breathily.

I turned to face her. She looked...how to describe it? Alluring, certainly. But
more than that. Like a new woman. A reader reborn. I motioned her to a secluded
cartel.

Her moist lips glistened in the soft glow of the reading lamp. A copy of Duras'
The Lover peeked seductively from her partially opened handbag. I sensed
something more than the usual reader-recommender relationship. There was a
tremor in her voice that I recognized: She had fallen for me. And hard. It was
common enough in my line of work. Restore the love of literature to enough young
women and you're bound to come across a few who want to remunerate you with a
little skin candy. Still, I was a professional.

"I don't know where I would be without you, Jack," she said, her voice smooth as
Updike's prose.

"Me? I was merely your guide, kid. Your Virgil in a journey through one woman's
personal hell. But, ultimately, you did it yourself. It took real guts."

"Oh Jack," she implored. "I'm scared. I'll feel lost without you. You're so
well. . .read."

She pressed my hand. The reader-recommender bond was always a hard one to break;
the truth was, I wasn't so sure I wanted to this time. Just then, I noticed she
had borrowed some books from the library's collection. I couldn't help observe
that several titles were all wrong for her. I started to gesture towards them.
She looked deep into my eyes.

"No," I said, perhaps as much to myself as to her. "My work is done. There are
books out there, sweetheart, thousands of them-- hardbound, soft-cover,
mass-market, trade -- and they're waiting for you. And there are other poor saps
who've lost the love of literature. They need me."

"You're. . . such a lonely man, Jack."

"It goes with the territory."

She stood abruptly, a single tear brimming her eyelid. She gave me a final,
lingering glance -- one that spoke, well, volumes. Then she turned on her heels
and walked out of my life forever.