The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [10]
Or he could skip lunch. He often thought that he was probably taking in from the Aegean sufficient calories through his lungs, mainly fat. Crosetti was not an exerciser, and he enjoyed his mother’s cooking: a bit of a spare tire hung around his waist, a face more jowly than he liked stared back at him from the mirror when he shaved. He considered asking the upstairs clerk to join him, assuming that Carolyn Rolly lived upon substances grosser than air scented by old books. She occasionally ate with Glaser, he knew; they would close up the upstairs and go out, leaving Crosetti laboring below. He allowed this fantasy a brief bubble of life, then shrugged it away. Rolly was a book person, and he was, at bottom, not, even though he had learned a good deal about the book business (prices and conditions and so on) as part of his work with the computer. She was not a beauty by the prevailing standards of meat magazines or movies, being tall enough but somewhat more solidly built than was the current fashion. Crosetti had read somewhere about women who looked better out of clothes than in them, and he thought Rolly was one of these. Clothed, certainly, she was undistinguished: she wore black like everyone else.
But there was something about her that drew the eye. The shiny, smooth dark hair hung neck length, held away from her face with a silver clasp. The nose was sharp and seemed to have more than the usual number of component bones making odd little corrugations all over it. Her lips were unfashionably thin and pale, and when she spoke you could see that her teeth were odd too, the incisors especially long and dangerous looking. Her eyes were ridiculously blue, like (duh!) the sky in summer with, he thought, unnaturally tiny pupils. If not a book person, Crosetti was still a reader, his tastes in novels running largely to fantasy and science fiction, and sometimes he entertained the notion that Ms. Rolly was a vampire: it would explain the dark clothes, the physical presence, those teeth—although a vampire who came out in the day.
Perhaps he would invite her to lunch and ask her. It would be a conversation starter; he could not imagine what else they might have to talk about. She had been working for the shop when Crosetti started there, and over the course of several years they had yet to share more than a few formal sentences at a time. She came to work on a bicycle, which suggested that she lived more or less in the neighborhood. The neighborhood being Murray Hill, this meant she had money, because one could not afford to live locally on what Glaser paid. In Crosetti’s experience, young, attractive, and wealthy Manhattan women did not yearn for semihefty Italian guys who lived with their mothers in Queens. Rolly might be an exception, though; one never could tell…
Crosetti was working on a particularly tricky bit of hypertext markup language at the same time as he was thinking these amusing thoughts. He was thinking about Rolly’s eyes, the element of the electric in her glance that made him wish for more eye contact than he ordinarily got. His mind was so thoroughly occupied with those eyes and the computer work that it took a good while before he noticed that the frying smell had waxed unusually strong, was more than a mere odor, was actual smoke. He rose, coughing a little now, and made his way to the back of the basement so that he faced the party wall that divided the bookshop basement from that of the restaurant. The smoke was thicker here, he could actually see the sooty tendrils creeping from cracks in the old brick. And the wall was warm under his hand when he touched it.
Quickly he clattered up the wooden stairs to the shop proper—deserted, and the sign with its paper back-at clock hung in the door, for it