The Book That Matters Most (19 page)

Ava always served salad after the main course, a mix of greens with herbs and a mustardy vinaigrette. In fact, a salad sat in her big wooden salad bowl on the kitchen counter, waiting to be tossed and served.

“Not tonight,” she said. “The lettuce looked wilty.”

She ignored Luke's frown. Of course he had seen the salad on the counter. She didn't care. She just picked up the dinner plates and went into the kitchen. Cate followed.

“Is this the salad of wilty lettuce?” Cate asked, standing close behind her.

“This is a disaster,” Ava moaned, scraping chicken bones and Cate's capers and someone's prunes into the trash. Was it Luke who hadn't eaten the prunes?

Cate picked lettuce from the bowl with her fingers and nibbled. “You make the best dressing. I've even tried your recipe and it doesn't come out this good.”

“I can't take Luke to work,” Ava whispered. “With Plouff and Monique and Greg and the rest? I'd never live it down.”

“But if you care about him—”

“I do!” Ava said. “I think,” she added.

Cate's eyes met hers.

“You will never be able to give him a daughter named Scout,” Cate said.

Ava laughed. “True.”

Cate ate another fingerful of salad. Her lips glistened with dressing.

“It's okay to just have sex with the guy—” she began.

“He thinks I'm his girlfriend,” Ava said.

Cate's eyes widened. “Why would he think that?”

“Because he asked me and I kind of said yes.”

Cate's lips twitched the way they did when she was trying to stay serious.

“You mean, you're going steady?”

Ava picked up the tongs and put salad on two plates. She handed one to Cate.

“I am,” Ava said.

“Babe?” Luke called.

Ava looked at Cate. “Don't say a word.”

“What?” Cate said, eating her salad.

“Babe?” he called again.

Ava picked up the salad bowl and scraped all of the beautiful lettuce into the trash.

A
s she stood beneath the twinkling lights of a fake Eiffel Tower, Ava couldn't help but wonder if her new role in her own life was to destroy things. Of course Luke had left hurt this morning (true, he'd stayed the night and managed to not be angry as he bent her into shapes her body had forgotten it could make). Of course Gray was also angry with her, even though he was the one who had acted like an ass last night. No, Ava corrected herself. Gray wasn't angry. Worse: he was disappointed in her. She'd let Jim get away and now she was involved with someone only slightly older than her son. No, Ava corrected herself again, taking a big swallow of Plouff's very good burgundy. Gray wasn't disappointed. He thought she was pathetic. So did Monique, who was glaring at her from beneath the fake Arc de Triomphe, a new addition to this year's party.

Madame Levesque pushed her walker to a halt beside Ava and frowned up at her. The woman got smaller and more hunchbacked
every year. Still, she wore two spots of rouge, one smack in the middle of each cheek, dark red lipstick, and enough perfume to last a week.

“Where's Jim?” Madame Levesque shouted up at Ava.

Ava took a deep breath. “He couldn't come,” she said.

“Why not?” Madame Levesque asked, sounding more like a spoiled child than an octogenarian.

“Because he left me, Madame Levesque,” Ava blurted. “He ran off with someone he knew years ago when they had a fling on Mykonos.”

“The Greek island?” Madame Levesque asked, as if that was the detail that mattered.

“She's a yarn bomber,” Ava said. “She takes over things that aren't hers.”

Madame Levesque shrugged. “
C'est la vie
,” she said. “I left my first two husbands. Number one for number two, and number two for number three. They survived.”

“Thanks for understanding,” Ava said.

Greg sidled up to her on the other side, red-faced and smelling garlicky. He loosened his tie, a garish one with multicolored Mona Lisas smiling out from it.

“Came to drag you into the hot debate,” he said, linking an arm through hers.

Ava glanced back to find Madame Levesque dancing with Pierre, one of the adjuncts. Pierre wore his hair like Tintin's, and as he twirled Madame Levesque in his arms, his hair seemed to bow to her.

“I'm sure I'll be able to piss someone off,” Ava said, relaxing into his side. “Topic?”

“Should they get rid of the locks of love on the Pont des Arts?”

People from around the world sealed their love these days by attaching locks to the railing on the Pont des Arts in Paris, and then throwing the keys into the Seine. Two Americans living in Paris had a petition calling for the locks to be removed, turning the fate of the locks into a hot debate.

“Should I be for or against?” Ava whispered as they approached the small but loud group.

“Definitely for,” Greg whispered back with a warm puff of garlic breath.

“I'll try,” Ava said. “But as one who does not believe love can be sealed, even with heavy ugly locks attached to a bridge, I can't make any promises.”

“L'amour, c'est impossible,”
Greg agreed, steering her toward the debaters.

For a French professor, Ava thought, his accent was terrible.

“What do you think, Ava?” Plouff asked as soon as he saw her. “Surely that bridge is going to drop into the Seine at any moment.”

“Not to mention how ugly all those ridiculous locks are!” Monique added. She was so worked up her eyes bulged slightly and the veins in her neck popped.

“What can I say? I like them. I like the
idea
of them,” Ava said.

Greg beamed at her.

“How can any of you not be for love?” Ava asked them. “Because that's what those locks stand for? Love.” Saying it, it almost seemed true, and she heard her voice catch.

“Love?” Monique practically spit. “Bondage maybe.”

“Hey,” Greg said, “don't put down bondage till you've tried it.”

Everyone, even those against the locks, laughed.

Monique was shouting about locks and love and bridges, and Marie, another adjunct, was shouting the opposite side.

Greg linked his arm through Ava's again and escorted her onto the dance floor. Soon, Plouff's wife would play the can-can and make the entire department stand in line and kick their legs. It was that time of night. But for now, Ava danced with Greg to a few songs she didn't recognize, and to a surprise non-French song—Frank Sinatra singing “Strangers in the Night.” That one was a slow dance, and Greg, with his hand on the small of her back, led her expertly through a foxtrot.

But after “Strangers in the Night,” Greg said, “That's it for me, I'm afraid.
Je suis fatigué
.”

She grimaced at the way he said it, but Greg didn't seem to notice.

“To locks on bridges,” Greg said, tilting an imaginary glass in her direction. “May they never crash into the Seine.”

He said
Seine
like
sane
. The French professor who couldn't even pronounce
Seine
correctly.

Even after he left, Ava stood at the edge of the dance floor watching as Pierre and his Tintin hair twisted wildly with Madame Plouff. Soon enough, the faculty was corralled into the can-can line. Ava joined in half-heartedly. Everything was covered with Jim's fingerprints it seemed, even
Le Fin
. That's when the idea struck her. The semester was over. She had nothing keeping her here. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, she should do something fun, something crazy. Like what? she thought as she kicked her legs into the air. And she answered herself: Visit Maggie in Italy. The music sped up. Legs flew higher. And Ava smiled.

Maggie

“Want to party?” Maggie asked Henri.

They were on a chaise, wrapped together beneath a striped blanket. Mouths sour from wine and sore from kissing. Hair damp from swimming. The smell of chlorine and grilled meat in the air. It was that time just before night became morning, the sky beginning to lighten, the moon still bright.

He looked at her, confused. As if she could read his mind, she knew what he was thinking:
Isn't that what we've been doing?

After they'd left the beach, Henri took Maggie back to the house where he and his friends were staying. It had a big pool and many
bedrooms and a refrigerator full of food. She told him that her father was a horrible person and that she needed to get away from him. “You can stay with us, of course,” Henri said.

It was the hairy friend's family's country house, and Henri opened one of the bedroom doors and told Maggie she could stay there. He went back to the beach, promising to return soon.

Maggie sat on the white iron bed, her bag in her lap, trying to make a plan. She would go back to the apartment for her things. No. Julien might be there waiting for her. This time, he might actually kill her, she thought. She shivered. She could try to find the boy, Noah. But even if she did, then what? She wished she had a pen and some paper so she could write down her plan. Except, of course, there was no plan. How many times had her mother told her:
It helps to write things down, to see them in black and white
. Panic rose in her gut, sending a sour taste to her mouth. She had no plan, and this terrified her.

On the desk across the room, a computer glowed at her. She thought of all those emails piling up in there. She thought of her brother and his gorillas, how he'd loved them since he was a kid and read some book by a guy who'd discovered them or something. Even in middle school he'd spent summers volunteering at the zoo, and then he'd gone to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest every summer during college, observing the mountain gorillas in their natural habitat. Will, Maggie thought, always had a plan.

She walked over to the computer and went to Gmail, wincing when she saw her brother's emails there, stacked up one on top of the other.

First she wrote a quick breezy one to her mother, pausing only to choose which city to tell her she'd visited. Amsterdam, she decided.
The van Goghs are crazy cool
, Maggie wrote.
I'll post pictures soonest
. She ended with dozens of Xs and Os.

Next, Maggie thought, and typed:

Dear Wills,

It's impossible to hide anything from you, Bro. Let's just say that I got involved in an intense relationship that maybe is turning out to be a bad idea. (Add emoticon of shocked face here! Maggie? Having a bad idea???) Let's just say I've had an existential crisis (again) about what I'm doing and why and how and generally WTF? (Wills, WTF means What the Fuck, BTW) (BTW means By the Way, BTW) (It's so hard having a brother who lives in the wrong century!!!!!) Also. I've been pretty sick.

But I'm OK! Really!!!!! Please please please don't mention any of this to the madre, who will just freak out. And if you speak to the padre, tell him to go fuck himself. Or his girlfriend. Or himself and his girlfriend. (and did I tell you her stupid art or whatever it is she does with fucking yarn was actually in the International Herald Tribune??? Apparently she bombed a phone booth in London or something. I mean WTF????)

But.

That spaghetti! Sigh. So purple and wine-y and yummy. (and that you were probably saving for breakfast...WAIT!!! I'm quoting or should I say misquoting poetry!!! Get the poetry police!!!) Remember when I asked for grated cheese and they practically threw me out? The first of my many crimes. Parmesan on drunken spaghetti. It has been downhill from there, I'm afraid.

I hope your gorillas are swell.

I luv u. Maggie

She clicked out of Gmail, sat back, and stared at the dark screen. Now what? She licked her lips. A humming started, somewhere deep inside. A humming that grew steadily.

Maggie sat back down on the bed, her brain all sharp and jagged.

Her fingers played with the zipper on her bag, sliding it open and shut. Open and shut. Henri had said he'd be back soon, but it seemed like hours and hours had passed. Maggie slid the zipper open and rested her hand inside the bag. Maybe just a little, she thought, to calm her down. To take the edge off.

She pulled the suede pouch from the bag and opened it, her heart quickening at the sight of everything inside: matches, needles, syringe, the white powder.

“Just a little,” she said out loud, her voice quavering.

Maggie had never shot herself up. She had convinced herself that if someone else did it, she wasn't a junkie. But now she argued with her own logic. If she did it herself, she was in control of it, wasn't she?

She got off the bed quickly, sending the rest of the contents of her bag onto the floor. The small tube of fennel toothpaste and a pair of delicate silver hoop earrings, pomegranate-flavored lip balm and a pink and green tube of mascara. Without pausing to pick anything up, she went into the adjoining bathroom, locked the door, and climbed into the bathtub, like Gavin had taught her. Gavin! The sight of him under that sheet, on the gurney, flashed through her mind, and she tried to replace it with other images of him. But they were all sad, every one of them. She pressed her fingers to her eyelids, hard, until little starbursts flashed there.

Then, as slowly as she could manage—and it was difficult to go slowly because now that it was so close she realized how much she craved it—she went through the steps, saying each one out loud to steady herself.

“Now,” Maggie said, “find a good vein.”

She licked her lips. She turned over her left arm, and found only two small bruises.

“Find a good vein,” she said out loud again, tapping a pale blue line.

It took a while to respond—forever, Maggie thought—but then she could see it clearly, finally bulging ever so slightly.

“Draw back the syringe,” she said, lying back in the tub. “Now insert the needle.”

She had a brief memory of herself as a little girl screaming in the pediatrician's office as he prepared to give her a shot. She remembered her mother's lap, how safe it had felt there. She remembered her mother's arms around her, her mother's voice in her ear soothing her.
It will be over so fast, and then you'll get a lollipop!