All of Us and Everything (15 page)

Ru's book signing wasn't held at a bookstore after all. It was a book talk at the local library where Ru had once spent a summer checking out books about espionage.

When Maska Gravitz called to tell her about the venue—just hours after Augusta had come clean about Ru's father—she pretended to have misspoken. “Did I say bookstore? No, no. I meant the gig was in a library. In French, the word for ‘bookstore' is something like
library.
”

“Really?” Ru said. “
That
was the confusion.”

Gravitz only gave her a two-day lead-up to the event. “So you don't have time to make an escape plan.” She was referring to her months in Vietnam, which had entailed calling off three highly visible readings, one of which came with an award of some kind.

“I'm not making any escape plans,” she said and she meant it. She was tired. She had family to deal with. They'd all been struck by the news and were walking around with unusual politeness. She was bracing herself for the real reaction—a blowup of some sort.

“Remember to be nice to the people,” Maska said.

“I'm always nice to people,” Ru said.

“Yes, but don't slouch. Don't look so pained by it all.”

“Right. Okay. I'll try not to.”

As indebted as Ru was to libraries—they had allowed her to track down her father—she found the talks she gave in them were usually poorly attended and, although she hated herself for it, libraries sometimes made her feel like a stripper wearing a bikini on a beach—giving away for free what she hoped to sell in order to make a living. Then again, she felt conflicted in bookstores, too, which sometimes felt like visiting an animal shelter—all those books gazing at you with sad doggy eyes; you can't save them all, and you know what's going to happen to them.

She was conflicted about her career in
most
ways. She felt guilty about killing trees and about the exploitative mining process necessary to make wiring for e-readers. She didn't like criticism—who does?—but she also found praise paralyzing. If a bookstore had a lot of copies of her books, she assumed they couldn't move them, and if they had too few, she assumed they hadn't ordered many to begin with. She got nervous about a reading only after it was over, but the nervousness was the physical sensation of her bones wanting to get out of her body. Sometimes she threw up.

All in all, publishing a book felt like an exercise in public failure even when it seemed like a success. Ru's editor, Hanby Popper, though delighted by Ru's success, had said—more than once—that they just couldn't figure out why the books hadn't sold 20 percent more. And the look-at-me that authorship demanded made her feel like both hawker and product, both pimp and whore. There was no deeper sense of self-loathing for Ru than sitting behind a table, trying to talk people into buying a book she'd written. More than once, a bookstore didn't really advertise she was coming and no one showed up so she'd left her post and, being mistaken for store personnel, had walked people around the aisles, making fun of her own book and suggesting others instead.

No matter how well things were going, she was self-assured about only one thing—the persistent and, by now, comforting sense of her own personal failure.

It was raining. Ru and Atty left their umbrellas propped in the lobby of the library with the other umbrellas, all pooling. Atty had insisted they stop by an antiques/secondhand shop on the way there to see if they had any new arrivals of old Nancy Drews. The woman behind the counter knew Atty well, and had set aside twelve books—not first editions and not mint condition, but still the old-fashioned hardbacks that Ru remembered from her youth. Atty found five that were missing from the collection she was restoring.

“How many more until you have the complete set?” Ru asked.

“I'm only missing twenty-four through twenty-six, forty-eight, forty-nine, and seventeen.”

She paid for the books from a wallet kept in a black fanny pack hooked around her waist. The fanny pack was inexplicable on a girl Atty's age, but Ru let it go.

Atty was the only one to come with her. Liv had bowed out: “I've heard you speak a million times.”

“I don't remember you ever coming to a reading I've given,” Ru said.

“No, but you've been speaking all your life. I mean, am I going to hear something new?”

Esme shrugged off the invite and ate ice cream straight from a Häagen-Dazs container, and Augusta pulled Ru aside. “I'm keeping an eye on everyone,” she said. “Otherwise I'd be there.”

Atty invited Jessamine, who was yanking the plastic bag of innards from the cavity of a chicken she intended to roast. “Me?” she said. “Oh, no. I couldn't.” Ru assumed that she meant that it would break some rule she and Augusta had set up ages ago in order to create a healthy necessary distance.

Ru saw small announcements of her reading, photocopies taped up on the library's various bulletin boards. They each had thumbnails of the movie poster, not her book, and an old photo of Ru, staring into a small fishbowl—a shot that Maska Gravitz told her would be memorable. “Gary Shteyngart has that photo of him with that bear on a leash. So bears are out and hard to acquire anyway. I looked into your typical big cats too—tigers, lions, leopards. All kinds of permits required by state law. But a fish—who doesn't like a fish?”

Ru didn't recognize any of the staff.

But as the woman running the event ushered her through the stacks to the place where she was going to read, the smells brought back full-body memory. Ru's memory was so precise, this rush made her feel off-kilter. Her breathing ran shallow.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Just a minute.” She veered down an aisle and then took another turn and found herself in a nonfiction section where she'd spent hours uncovering books on the CIA, FBI, NSA, and international espionage. She recognized certain spines but didn't touch them. She just breathed the dusty air.

“The reading's going to be held in one of our discussion rooms,” the librarian added.

“Right,” Ru said. To get to Guadeloupe, she'd talked a guy in a cruise ship band into letting her tag along as a kind of roadie. The targets of his impersonations ranged from Elvis to Hall, but not Oates. She fooled around with him naked in his bunk, trying to erase the image of Virgil Pedestro's penis as the sole penis she'd ever seen live.

She arrived in Guadeloupe two days before she was to meet her father and staked out the bar and its environs. It was possible that her father was already in town too, but she had no way to recognize him.

When the time came, she did recognize him, of course.

He was the white guy in the back corner, facing the door, and as she got closer she saw that he was wearing a pin sold at the concession stands of her private high school.

She walked to his table, sat down, and pointed at the pin. “Is that some kind of a joke?”

“No,” he said. “Of course not. How could it be a joke?” He recounted a few of her field hockey matches with exacting detail. He was proud of her and eventually he said, “I'm impressed, Ru. I mean, you're a lot like me, you know? Tracking down a mystery, seeking adventure. I wouldn't pursue it as a career. That would be my bit of advice, if you don't mind.” He kept sweeping the place casually with his eyes, the habit of a spy.

“I do mind. I mind a lot,” Ru said. “Don't come to my field hockey games anymore unless you tell me you're there. Don't act like my father unless you're willing to announce it. You're either in my life with full transparency. Or out. For good. Okay?” She was fierce for her age or maybe because of it.

“I can't be fully in, Ru. That ship has sailed.”

“Then stay out. Completely.”

He agreed.

Augusta would know all about this trip if she'd read Ru's college entrance essay. It was the only time Ru had written memoiristically. She didn't get into her top picks either and vowed to never reveal too much of herself in writing again.

As Ru and Atty followed the librarian down a flight of stairs, Atty asked her about their Nancy Drew collection. “Do you have all the books in the original series?”

“We do.”

“But no actual original hardbacks, right?”

“Ah, no. They've all been reordered dozens of times by now.”

She ushered them into an anteroom filled with a modest arrangement of twelve folding chairs.

“Do you want a mike?” she asked.

“Did Jesus need a mike while speaking to the apostles?” Ru said, and then remembering Maska Gravitz's advice, she stood up straight and smiled.

“That's a joke,” the librarian said, and Ru noticed her small cross necklace. “I guess I'm not partial to religious humor.”

“It was really humor about the lack of a need for a mike while speaking to only twelve people, potentially,” Ru said, smiling some more. “I don't need one. Thank you.”

Atty laughed a little and when Ru shot her a look, she noticed that Atty was clutching a Nancy Drew mystery that she must have dug out of the bag from the secondhand shop. “What's with the book?”

“Just in case I get bored,” Atty said.

“But I'm going to be reading…from a book.”

“I know. I brought a
different
book.”

Ru said, “Why is someone your age wearing a fanny pack? It seems like a desperate act of social suicide.”

“It's ironic,” Atty said. “I'm wearing it
ironically.
”

“I see.” Ru did not see.

As the audience members arrived, the librarian introduced them to Ru. There was a sum total of five, not including Atty. Three were bloggers, as Maska had suggested. They wore baggy T-shirts. Two were pale and one was bright pink and freshly blistered by the sun. Two older women were members of a book club that had been around since 1973. They shook hands with Ru, explaining that their first book had been
Fear of Flying
by Erica Jong.

“Luckily it's a rainy day! That's why we've gotten such a good turnout,” the librarian said. “When it's sunny, almost no one comes.”

Ru had the desire to slap someone.

Atty muttered, “This is my definition of almost no one. What's yours, sister?” And Ru was glad she'd brought the kid. Ru had heard from Liv that Atty had almost been arrested for carrying an antique gun around on campus. From Liv's description, Atty had left the boarding school in disgrace.
People treated her and Esme like mother–daughter Unabombers.

“Okay,” the librarian said. “If you need anything, just wander back to the help desk.”

“You're not staying?” Ru asked.

“We can't leave the help desk unstaffed,” the librarian said and then she wished Ru luck and left.

“Hey,” Atty said. “Look. I can at least live-tweet this so it's not just all wasted on this minuscule audience.”

“Oh, good,” Ru said, trying not to sound insulted and jaded.

As Atty held her iPhone, her thumbs flitting madly, Ru read a small portion from her novel and then gave a talk. She could only stomach reading to strangers as if they were children for so long. Ru's mini lecture was on the creative process and the adaptation of the novel for the screen, and of course all of the questions were about meeting the various leads in the film.

Atty never did open her mystery. In fact, for a good bit of the talk she wasn't tweeting at all, but eyed Ru with a grave expression as if Ru were suddenly foreign. Her aunt was actually a little brilliant and obviously undervalued, and this was news that Atty took to heart. Because she was pretty sure that she herself was a little brilliant and undervalued.

After twenty minutes, Ru was trying to wrap up the Q and A. “One more question?”

A man in a yellow slicker stepped into the room and found a chair, and for a second Ru thought it was her father finally ready to announce that he was her father. But that made no sense.