I should’ve remained wary—but it didn’t excuse me for being curt with him. Basic respect was the least he deserved, whether he reminded me of my uncle or not.
“Mighty touchy, aren’t we?” he rhetorically asked with the broad smile still painted on his face.
“Of course I am,” I light-heartedly scoffed. “How would you like it if a stranger disrupted your day, was abrasive and rude, and on top of that called you ‘boy’?”
“That happens to me every day. One learns to get used to it—to see past what people are saying and figure out what they’re doing instead. That way you know what they want before they themselves even know.”
I shot him a look of disbelief.
“No joke. It works, with the correct amount of practice, of course. Take you, for example.”
“Yeah, what about me?” I asked with less venom in my voice.
“You’re trying to tell me you’re annoyed, angered, and anxious with our conversation, but in reality I can see you’re actually starting to enjoy it. How could you not, me being the poignant talker that I am?” I had to hand it to him, he was right—he was articulate. To accent the point, he bowed down with a sweep of his arms and with a grace that was admirable for his size.
Without waiting for a response, Henry chuckled to himself, and with tired habit, he removed the olive-drab beanie from his head, revealing a thinning tuft of hair that was equal parts salt and equal parts pepper. Seeing underneath the cap gave me a small sense of him, a small peep through the curtained window. I saw what he was doing, not just listening to what he had been saying. Going through a routine, sharing a part of himself without expecting anything back, was what he was really doing.
Maybe there was something to his wisdom, I grudgingly admitted.
With this new perspective in mind, my hands found their way onto the table, and they began to idly fiddle with the book as I waited for the moment to pass. I even tried to be polite, wrenching my eyes off him back to the book, but my gaze soon found its way back to him. The wild smile was still on his face.
Uncharacteristically, I broke into a grin that matched his; the exaggerated happiness, the whimsical yet weird nature of Henry’s was too just infectious to fight.
In response, he threw his hands out to his sides with a flourish and bowed again, this time more deeply, more reverently. It no longer felt mocking. While still prostrated before me, he craned his head up, his thin hair rising and falling lazily, and flashed me one of the most sincere smiles I had ever witnessed. It was so heartfelt it pushed my lingering grin into an unfettered chuckle.
Maybe Henry was right; maybe I was starting to enjoy the conversation. But why? Because he was like my uncle? It’s not like I really knew him—he was still a stranger, and I had always found most people pitiful, obnoxious, or depressing; more worthy of avoidance then verbal engagement. Before, I would have never talked to anyone I didn’t know; and my idea of talking was the loosest definition of it—question, answer, statement, disengagement. So how was I in the middle of a conversation with a strange homeless man?
Honestly, it wasn’t the homeless or the stranger part that bothered me. I didn’t talk to most students on campus for more than thirty seconds at a time. I talked to my roommate even less. The hard truth was I had always been introverted and socially inept. The few friends I made in high school went to college on the other side of the state, and I rarely talked to them anymore.
I just didn’t like people when it came down to it. I never had. In my experience, people will let you down if you let them; were inherently selfish, cruel, easily influenced by insignificant things; and were always looking to see what they could get from you. I didn’t blame them. They were only people—plain and simple.
Reality quickly crashed back into my head. “What am I doing?” I asked myself for the third time in three minutes. It was not like me to be so open. Had Henry and I been in one of the student lounges in the dorms, I would have simply found an excuse to get up and leave. So why wasn’t I doing that now? I knew I couldn’t trust this man, so why was I still talking to him?
Anxiety set in, and my heart stopped. I looked around, hoping I could find a familiar face, someone who could give me a reason to break away. Amiable though Henry may have been, I was who I was. I was human and a creature of habit. Talking to people was not what I did. “I need a familiar face,” I thought as I looked around.
There were a few patrons close to us, skimming the nonfiction section; a librarian bent over, putting away DVDs; a mother desperately attempting to hush her young child; and an elderly gentleman arguing about late fees with a desk attendant. Everyone was busy with his or her own lives, not sparing a second thought for Henry or me. There was no one I knew—no one to help me.
But then again, what had I expected? I pushed away everyone who tried to befriend me, so why would anyone be there when I needed them? I accepted the defeat and let out the worried breath I was holding in. Closing my eyes, I attempted to relax, to clear my mind of all worry and push down my social angst.
“You’re probably asking yourself right now,” Henry responded to my sudden skittishness as he put his hole-ridden beanie back on. “What am I doing talking to someone I don’t know, someone I can’t trust?”
He was more right then he could have ever guessed.
“It’s not in your DNA to be an extrovert,” he continued. “Or you might really be worried that someone you know might see us conversing.” He whistled wistfully. “It’s probably both, though you won’t admit it to yourself. Face it—talking to me is a risk, one way or the other. Either you risk revealing something about yourself to a total stranger or you risk being seen with me.”
His face lost its mirth, and I felt a stab of melancholy.
He quickly replaced his smile. “I can tell ya two things. One—you should never worry about revealing yourself. You’ll always be at the mercy of other people no matter how hard you try not to be.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “And two—we’re in a library. No one cares who you’re talking with. Why? Most of us come to the library to break from reality. We come here to forget what’s good or bad in our lives, what we can or can’t do to change it. No one truly comes here and worries about other people. ’Cept maybe the staff,” he added as an afterthought.
He shook himself as if waking from a drunken stupor.
“Only when someone makes a scene,” he blithely continued, taking a step closer, “say reads Joyce aloud, do people break from their own little worlds and rejoin reality. Making a scene also helps draw the extrovert out of the introvert, I’ve found.”
I was shocked.
Plain and unassuming, Joyce’s Ulysses sat closed on the table. It was, as many scholars said, “the single greatest work of twentieth-century literature,” and my professor wanted our term papers written on it. Having spent days upon days reading the novel from cover to cover while drinking unhealthy amounts of caffeine and visiting untold numbers of blogs explaining it in layman’s terms, it had left me confused, sleep-deprived, and bitter.
But I was mostly frustrated—frustrated because I needed to understand the novel to pass my lit class. It might as well have been written in Gaelic for all that I understood it. Not understanding the language would at least have given me a legitimate excuse for not comprehending more than ten pages at a time!
So—was it a stroke of good luck that Henry spoke of Joyce like an old friend, as if he had just got done sharing a pint with him while critiquing his newest work? Could he know something about the Irish author or—praise be to God—something about the book? Was it even possible that someone living on the street had any true interest in classic literature?
It didn’t matter. I wanted to know, I needed to know, and I was willing to fight all of my misgivings and social phobias to find out. A small part of me (probably my pride) still found it hard to believe he knew anything about James Joyce. I had always considered myself smart, yet I couldn’t even understand the bo
ok’s style, its flow, its subtleties, or its critical meanings. How could Henry understand it but not me?
With no warning, Henry climbed up onto the other seat in the cubby. I fidgeted once more as I tried to control my anxiety and tried to figure out what he was attempting. Okay, so talking to a stranger was out of my comfort zone, but sitting at a table with a homeless man standing up on the other seat was too much.
I made as if to tell him that when—
—he threw his hands up in a magnanimous gesture, reminding me of a narrator drawing the crowd’s attention. The ad-hoc actor cleared his throat and harrumphed twice, sounding like a dog would as it greeted the return of its loving master. The mischievous twinkle was back in his eyes.
“No, wait, what are you doing?” I blurted out. As soon as it left my throat, I knew it was a pointless question, instinctively knew what he was trying to do. I leaned over to grab him, to pull him off the chair and stop him. But my reflexes were slow. Slipping out of my grasp, he began reciting Ulysses in a boisterously loud voice, breaking the quiet of the library-come-cemetery.
I was mortified.
“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring? Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas! The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into