Sappho's Overhead Projector Read online

  But it gnawed at her. Did this ugly old phone even work? It must, if it had not been removed. Of course, it might be that the Library preferred not to make its removal a budget priority this year, letting it sit as a silent testament to recent, outmoded technology. Yes, everything was changing, gradually. She had to update her software more and more, change codes, pass-words, retake training, turn in her cell phone for a new model, the skins of modernization shed and regrown. These were the archivist’s tools now: camera, smartphone, laptop, more than the delicate brush restoring a signature or a leather-bound first edition. Everyone younger than Hannah would soon forget, or never know, what it felt like to dial a rotary phone, how long one waited for the nine to roll back, the ridiculous annoyance of trying to dial quickly with a hangnail, with a sprained and splinted finger, with a Band-Aid.

  She worked, tried to save money, thought about history and herstory, and waited for a signal from the Overhead. From Sappho. She eagerly awaited the weekend each month when Isabel visited (leaving the bar in the care of a few trusted members), their passionate reunions at National Airport, the first kisses in that great hall and more stolen on the subway ride back to Hannah’s apartment. Isabel, after that grand year of showing Hannah a whole range of unexpected time-travel experiences, remained cagey and sedate about her powers, rarely introducing them into conversation. But she stocked Hannah’s mini-fridge with specially mixed cocktails that enabled them to pursue astounding flights across history during their best lovemaking. They were in Egypt. They were in the Yucatan. They were in the court of Elizabeth, in the court of Kwan Yin, in a speakeasy with flappers.

  One night, while watching television during Isabel’s late September visit, their legs stretched out on the couch and entwined, toes touching and deliciously stroking one another’s ankles, Hannah spotted her Library of Congress notebook under the table lamp. It had randomly flopped open to the page where she’d jotted down that pay phone number. Curiosity fought with comfort: Why sit up now, or move at all, disturbing her lover? They had so little time together. But Isabel was no ordinary lover, as Hannah had discovered rather late in the game of their long friendship and flirtation: She was a mystic as well as a mixologist, a weaver of women’s communities, a reader of thoughts. Thus Hannah was not terribly startled when Isabel, without removing her eyes from the old X-files rerun on the TV screen, commanded, “Pick up the phone and call that number you’re so obsessed with.”

  Reaching over to her apartment’s land-line phone, Hannah dialed experimentally. The number for the Library of Congress ladies’ room rang and rang, with neither answer nor disconnect. No burblingly cheerful female robot voice interrupted to advise, “You have reached a non-working number.” Huh, thought Hannah. That ladies’ room pay phone is still working. The number’s still active. Weird. She hung up, but oddly, the sound of ringing continued in her ears. Ring. Ring.

  “Happier now?” asked Isabel, turning away from the television and running her soft, expert fingers over Hannah’s cheekbone. They fell back against the temporary cushions of Hannah’s temporary apartment, sofa cushions that obediently sailed out from under them to make space for their lovemaking. Sweat beaded under Hannah’s breasts. Isabel leaned over her, saying ever so quietly, “I will start at your temples, and move down to your altar, if I may.”

  The ringing continued, inside Hannah’s head.

  • • •

  The first time it happened, Hannah was alone in the restroom washing her hands— sticky from a brown bag lunch of avocado and mango salad— when the pay phone on the wall began to ring. It rang insistently, though not loud enough to attract intervening attention, for no one came running in response, and no other patron/tourist/research scholar emerged from a stall with a hastily straightened skirt to take this call. Hannah looked around in all directions, even peeping under the farthest stall when no one emerged. Meanwhile, the phone kept ringing.

  Suddenly, it occurred to Hannah that this call must be for her. It could be from the Overhead Herself. With a final glance around to see if anyone was watching, she reached over to the phone and lifted the heavy black receiver, which rose on a sinewy cord. She could see her own reflection in the metal panels that made up the phone, her face rippling between keypad numbers and printed instructions: Push # for volume. 4 Minutes for $1.00. Worldwide. Hannah put the receiver to her left ear. “Hello, this is the Library of Congress,” she said, for lack of any better salutation, adding, with an uncontrollable snort of nervous laughter, “And you’ve reached the women’s room.”

  “Yes,” a faint voice acknowledged. A faintly English voice. “Can you help me?”

  “Who is this?” Hannah demanded. And the bathroom temperature dropped, dropped, as the ghost of Virginia Woolf whispered across the line to Hannah, “Save me. Save me. Save me.”

  • • •

  When she came out of the bathroom, her fingers were icy. She touched the elevator button to head back to her office and saw a frosty fingerprint. How could that be? How could that be Virginia Woolf on the phone? Woolf had taken her own life. Hannah couldn’t bring her back. Was that call placed at the hour of Woolf’s drowning? Virginia Woolf had walked into the Ouse River in March of 1941, walked into that cold river with stones in her pockets, leaving behind a suicide note, that made explicit her dread of oncoming madness. Non compos mentis. But she also left behind an enormous body of work, revealing her love affairs with women and her frustration with the limits placed on women writers. She had, in A Room of One’s Own, described the wildly dissimilar privileges accorded male versus female undergraduates at Britain’s elite universities. She described being told that as a woman (though in fact the invited guest lecturer that day) she could not walk on the college paths reserved for men. Woolf argued, then, that no woman could fully develop her talents as a writer without a room of her own and an independent income. And then— and then— she went into that river, her body drowned in March, but not found until April. By children.

  Hannah shut her eyes against the horror of that moment in history, the loss of a great writer. Woolf had written, in the 1920s, “But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends . . .” Woolf had fallen in love with Vita Sackville-West, writing in her diary after their first meeting that Vita was “a pronounced sapphist.” By 1926, Woolf was sending Vita letters in far less reserved language, desire spilling out of her pen:

  Look here Vita— throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads— They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.

  Only by dark on the river . . .

  Riding up, shivering, to her office, somewhere between the third and fourth floors Hannah opened her eyes briefly and saw Woolf standing behind her in the elevator, long pensive face clearly reflected in the shiny panel of buttons. Hannah’s chilled fingerprint was slowly dissolving, reflected backward at Woolf’s breastbone, a fingerprint on Woolf’s heart. “Do not bury my books; they must be saved,” Woolf whispered. “I live on through my body of work now. Can’t have another drowning.” Hannah whirled around, terrified; no one was there. Then, at the fourth floor, the elevator doors opened and a cheerful party of tourists rushed in, all talking at once, showing off their purchases from the Library bookshop, sorting through handbags and purses. Hannah slipped out, sweat trickling down her lower back into her underwear, heat swiftly returning to her fingertips. Hot flash or ghost encounter? Does it show?

  Throw over your man, I say, and come.

  • • •r />
  On the morning of the next day, Hannah thought carefully about how best to use her twenty-minute coffee break. Avoiding the ground-floor bathroom and its pay phone, she took the underground tunnels to reach the Library’s newer Madison Building, which housed the Performing Arts Reading Room. Passing the outer exhibits on blueswomen and American jazz artists, she flashed her ID badge and reader identification card at the desk.

  “Hi. Ah— do you happen to have any recordings of spoken word? Women poets reading their work aloud? Let’s say, oh, how about Virginia Woolf? Anything?”

  The young woman on desk duty gave Hannah a smile. “Hell, yeah! But you want the Recorded Sound Collection. Don’t worry, you don’t need an appointment. I’ll take you over.” She pushed back her motorized wheelchair with one long hand and came around to Hannah’s side of the desk. “Follow me.” They walked and wheeled together, toward the climate-controlled Recorded Sound Reference Center. “You’re Hannah Stern, right? The archivist. Well, I’m Talia. And I looove recorded sound. I do open mic slams.”

  “It’s her voice I’m looking for,” Hannah blurted. “Just a feeling that I need to check— to check out the sound of Virginia Woolf’s voice. But do we have it here? Anywhere?”

  “We have over 3.6 million items— the oldest is about 120 years old, from the earliest moment of recorded sound. Here.” Talia pushed herself into the Recorded Sound Research Center, waving her ID. “Today’s your lucky day, Hannah. There’s just one surviving recording of Woolf’s voice, you know. The BBC broadcast it on April 29, 1937, quite a good speech really; it was just one part of a radio series called Words Fail Me.”

  “Brrrr.” Hannah shivered now, and it wasn’t from the climate control of the archive. “Words did fail her, in the end— failed to comfort her, or give her reason to keep on battling whatever mental illness exhausted her so.” She watched in fascination as Talia briskly pulled up the call number of the BBC broadcast and connected fresh headphones to a computer terminal for Hannah. “Damn! We don’t have the original here, do we?”

  “Oh no, no, it’s in Britain, and of course we primarily collect American composers’ works. But here, I’ve brought up the audio file you want right on this computer, so go ahead and have a listen.” Seeing the strange angst on Hannah’s face, Talia paused. “There’s a transcript, too, so you can read along as you hear Woolf talk. I’ll just leave you alone with Woolf now,” and she backed tactfully away with a brisk wave.

  Alone with Woolf. In a few seconds I’ll know. I’ll know if that really was Woolf’s voice I heard on the pay phone and in the elevator. Hannah carefully adjusted the audio headphones, pushed the volume to high, and cued the pages of transcript Talia had loaded for her. There. As soon as I hear this, I’ll know.

  “Words,” the voice of Virginia Woolf undulated right into her head.

  “Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations— naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries . . .” The speech continued, but Hannah’s entire body was now pounding with excitement. It is her voice! This was Woolf on the phone! She called me! She called me! She called me!

  Then, this line:

  “Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is,” Woolf declared. “How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?”

  Yes. Save the old words, put them in order, archive the beauty that tells our truths as women who loved women. Was that what she, Hannah, was supposed to do?

  • • •

  That weekend, Hannah exhausted herself combing through Woolf’s diaries and letters to find more clues or directives. But the following Monday, as soon as she entered the Library bathroom the pay phone rang and it was Audre Lorde, saying, “Uh huh. What are you doing? You know, poetry is not a luxury.”

  Every video clip she had access to confirmed the identity of Audre Lorde’s voice. Films, conference recordings, speeches: yes, Lorde. Hannah walked in a daze to the Metro, past cafes and coffeeshops where Washingtonians of all stripes looked so normal, so unaware, latte on their lips, the Post in their laps, while she, Hannah, played the interior tape loop of that call: What are you doing?

  The week after that, Hannah answered the buzzing bathroom phone with a panicked outstretched hand and it was Adrienne Rich, whose mere “Hello” dried her mouth into parchment and who instructed, as Hannah’s eyes darted around the bathroom (full of women, that day, at the lunch hour), “…the image isn’t responsible for our uses of it/it is intentionless/A long strand of dark hair in the washbasin. . . .” A poem from 1969. Hannah had, in fact, heard and met Rich at a poetry conference way, way back in her first year of graduate school, and she knew that poem: “The Photograph of the Unmade Bed,” from the collection The Will to Change. There wasn’t any need to verify that this was Adrienne Rich’s voice. When she replaced the phone in its rusting holder, though, she turned around and saw exactly what Rich had described: one long strand of dark hair in the first bathroom sink. Whose? It had not been there before. When the bathroom emptied of tourists for a moment, she wrapped the strand of hair in a paper towel and stuffed it into her briefcase. Get it tested. But if some scientist tells me it contains Adrienne Rich’s own DNA, I’m going to carry goosebumps on my goosebumps for months on end!

  Every week for six weeks a different lost lesbian author called and, it seemed, ordered Hannah to do something . . . but what?

  Their voices were authentic, that was certain. She marched steadily back and forth in her upscale desert boots to the Recorded Sound Research Center, puzzling the young man there with her weekly requests for live recordings by one lesbian author after another. Through the audio headphones she heard again the tones of Lorde and Rich, and went back to Woolf, all of them contained now on tape. Yet not bound by any conventions of death or time, it seemed.

  At home, at night, she jumped out of her skin every time her own phone rang, wondering if the voices would pursue her from her place of work to her cozy little temporary home— but they did not. It was always Isabel on the other end of the line, or, occasionally, her mother. She told neither of them what was happening in her day job.

  In a burst of inspiration, however, Hannah did contact the telephone company serving the Mid-Atlantic, hoping to establish when the pay phone had first been installed at the Library of Congress and how long the number had been operational. She had one very important question, though she felt rather frightened to ask it: who had owned that phone number before it was assigned to a pay phone? Could a phone number itself have a history? (A woman’s history?) But no one seemed to have any information. Three times she was put on hold or disconnected; when she finally reached a recorded message that was in fact comedian Lily Tomlin’s voice, snorting, “We don’t care, we don’t have to care, we’re the phone company,” she realized the Overhead had cut in, gently reminding her to get back to work. A trail of lesbian voices wound like a protective pearl necklace around her search, and she was not meant to hunt for answers yet. She was meant to save books.

  Her work was at risk of drowning, Woolf had said. Were her books being thrown into water? Washed away? Buried? Jewish holy books are buried in sites called a Gineza . . . the Cairo Gineza was the most famous. If lesbian books are sacred to the community I live in, where is our Gineza? Is it the Lesbian Herstory Archives? What happens to our oldest old books? Is Woolf afraid of burial, being buried alive, after drowning?

  This task, this sleuth work, this mission— it was never meant to be “just” a job. The Overhead had not really prepared her. And apparently it wasn’t Isabel’s role to help her. Hannah was alone, inside the Beltway, inside the Library, inside a bathroom, yet somehow outside time. She’d have to spend the year connecting all the clues, keeping watch while doing her job well, so that no one ever suspected the secret mission that kept her running to the bathroom.

 
; Chapter Two

  Very Remote Storage

  The first Monday in October, both Washington insiders and alert queers nationwide held their collective breath as the Supreme Court returned to hear cases on LGBT rights and women’s reproductive rights, rights that might determine the rest of their lives.

  But Hannah’s desk at work was piled with folders demanding her full attention. Her little photograph of Isabel had long been knocked askew. “How’s it going?” asked Aurora, hurrying by with yet another donor file for Hannah. “Would you mind terribly looking at this one right away? It seems a good collection, and right in your area of expertise. There’s some duplication of texts we already own— just indicate where we might sort that out.” Hannah sighed, unintentionally blowing an old sheet of onionskin paper into the aisle, and rallied a forced smile for her supervisor as she reached up to accept the bulging folio of documents.

  This was a morning of hot flashes, cold coffee, and never-ending assignments. In her former incarnation as a lecturer, life had been simpler, if exhausting: do research for lectures, write the lectures, give the lectures; assign history papers, assist students with rough drafts of papers, grade the finished papers; and meet with students, mentor students, applaud graduating students.

  Now her days were filled with the unpredictable: she’d be halfway through one task and abruptly summoned to another, or on her way to take books to one department and then be redirected to a different hall because the First Lady wanted to drop by with an entourage of Chinese dignitaries. The thrill of seeing political celebrities had quickly faded, and the unreliability of the Metro, with its single-tracking repair delays, had made her late for work more than once. She wanted to be a shining star in this universe of protecting women’s writings, but was functioning more like a sputtering streetlight. And she missed Isabel, her community, her friends. She finally had a lover and now they were hundreds of miles apart. Moreover, there was that bathroom pay phone to worry about. Had those calls really happened? What, or who, was she supposed to save?