The Book That Matters Most (20 page)

Maggie hesitated, the needle just piercing the skin. What was she doing? What the hell was she doing?

Her legs were jumping, her stomach clenching.

With too much force, she pushed the needle into her vein and released the drug.

She felt her eyes roll back in her head, felt the waves rush over her like an orgasm that doesn't stop. Her body bucked, lifted, and slammed back down, lifted and slammed back down. She'd forgotten that Julien had bought very good heroin so she would forgive him.

“So good,” she said.

Or thought she said, because her body was lifting, lifting, going to that place she loved.

W
hen she came down, it was dark. The needle was still in her arm and there was a tight hard purple ball at her vein. Dried
blood speckled her flesh. She licked her dry lips and tried to stand up. Too soon. Her knees buckled, and she eased back onto the hard, cold porcelain.

But later, she managed to stand, to pull on her long-sleeved pale blue button-down shirt, and make her way out to the pool where Henri and his friends were eating cubes of meat from long skewers. The sight of it made her stomach roll and for a moment she thought she might throw up.

“I didn't want to wake you,” he said politely.

He got up and put a skewer of meat on a plate and handed it to her.

She pretended to eat. She drank a lot of wine. When they brought out the drugs—pot, pills, a little cocaine—she happily joined in. Someone put on music and they all danced, wildly, around the pool. Of course they ended up jumping in, half-dressed, splashing each other and drinking wine straight from the bottle. Henri put his hands around her waist and lifted her so that her legs wrapped around him and they were face to face, kissing.

“You're so light,” he told her. “Like a fairy.”

Maggie smiled at that. She imagined wings, made of gossamer or, better yet, cotton candy.

“When I was a little girl,” she told him, “I was a fairy for Halloween. My mother made me white wings covered in silver glitter.”

She watched Henri trying to translate what she said.

“Paillettes,”
she said.

He laughed, kissed her again.

“Ma fée,”
he whispered.

“Yes,” Maggie whispered back. “I'm your fairy. I can fly.”

When they got out of the pool, their skin pruny, it was dark and they lay on the white chaises staring up at the stars, heads
throbbing pleasantly from drugs and wine. Maggie lifted her arms, let the spins whoosh through her.

“Don't fly away,” Henri whispered.

She didn't remember climbing onto the chaise with him. Maybe she'd done it, half-asleep. Maybe he'd brought her there himself as she slept. But here she was, looking up at him, asking him if he wanted to party. Somewhere, Julien was raging, searching for her. She squeezed her eyes shut hard to block out the thought.

“I think we have used it all up,” Henri was explaining.

Each chaise had a lump under a blanket on it. She saw an arm drooped over the side of one, the top of curly dark hair peeking out above another.

Her gaze drifted back to Henri. They hadn't had sex yet, just kissed and kissed. She couldn't remember the last time she'd kissed like that. Somehow, kissing had become almost perfunctory, the quick prelude to sex. But it had been nice, all that kissing, and she slid up his long body to his lips and kissed his sour mouth.

“I have something,” she said into his mouth, her tongue lazy on his. “Something good.”

“Sure, sure,” he said.

She glanced around. The lumps under the blankets didn't stir.

“I need a plan,” she said softly.

He didn't answer. Maybe he'd drifted off to sleep again.

This was the time when she should fall back asleep too, in his arms. That's what people did. But her gut was clenching. Her mind felt like broken glass. She thought of her pouch, back inside. She could get it and bring it out here. She could show it to him, share it with him.

No. Not out here.

She would wake him, tug him gently inside the house. Share it with him like a gift.

Maggie licked her lips.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” she said.

He opened his eyes, smiled lazily.
“Ma fée,”
he said.

She took his hand.
“Viens avec moi,”
she said, urging him off the chaise.

Henri groaned. “This better be good,” he said.

Night had gone, and the sky was pink and pretty with light now.

Maggie's bare feet rushed across the cool dewy grass, into the dark house, Henri close behind. In the room, she closed the door after him, then sat on the bed where the pouch lay waiting.

But he mistook her intention. Grinning he said, “Yes, the bed is better,
n'est-ce pas?
”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But let's get high first?”

She noticed that his underwear was still wet from the pool.

Henri waited.

Maggie opened the pouch, her throat and mouth dry with wanting it. Her brain felt so jagged, so sharp. She thought again of broken glass.

He was watching her as she pulled out the little bag of white powder, then the syringe. She felt him watching her.

“Qu'est-ce que c'est?”
he asked.

Maggie looked at him then, her hands trembling, the syringe and needle and powder in them. He was frowning.

“No, no,” she said quickly. “If you take just a little there's no problem. Really. Just a little doesn't change anything.”

That wasn't what she meant to say, but he was moving away from her, a look of disgust on his face.

“Really,” she said again, “it's not what you think.”

But of course it was. It was exactly what he thought, and he was repulsed by it. By her. She couldn't let him walk out. He was the one good thing that had happened in a long time.

“It's fun,” she said, hearing the desperation in her voice. “That's all. You want to have a little fun, don't you?”

She dropped everything back into the pouch, and patted the bed beside her.

“It's okay,” she said. “I thought it might be fun, but it's okay.”

He was at the door now, studying her face as if he had just seen her for the first time.

“I don't need to do it,” she said.
“Viens ici?”

He hesitated.

“I liked kissing you so much,” Maggie said.

At that he shook his head.

“Je suis désolé,”
he said.

“You're sorry?”

“I can't,” he said.

She was crying again. Her brain, glass against glass. Her stomach hurting.

“Please,” she said, feeling the tears and snot on her face.

“I will get you back to Paris,” he was saying. “To your father.”

Maggie nodded. She had ruined this. She had ruined everything. She heard the door close, and she lay back on the bed, and she thought: Go to Paris and fix your life.

She got up, opened drawers until she found a small notebook with an orange cover and paper covered with grids on it.

Number 1
, she wrote.
Go to Paris
.

Maggie took a breath, tried not to think about the fact that she had no place to live there anymore.

From somewhere in her bag, her phone rang.

Julien, she thought.

She wrote,
Number 2
.

The phone rang again. She dug it out, stared at the number. Not Julien. Her mother. Maggie put the phone back in her bag.

Fix your life
, she wrote beside Number 2.

Her mother was right. It felt better to see things in black and white. It made them seem possible.

She sat listening to the phone ring. When it finally stopped, she reread what she'd written. Then she tore the paper from the notebook and folded it and put it in the little pouch.

Henri knocked on the door, then said, “There's a train in an hour. I'll drive you to the station.”

He didn't come inside, just spoke through the closed door.

She nodded as if he could see her.

“Just a little,” she said to herself. “Last time.”

As if to make it true, she took the paper out of the pouch, unfolded it, and wrote:
Just a little. Last time
. Then she folded the paper again and put it away.

She didn't bother to go into the bathroom. She just rolled up her sleeve and lay back on the bed again. She took a deep breath full of anticipation and that feeling, that beautiful feeling that came just before the rush of the drug through her body. If she could capture that feeling, if she could feel that all the time, Maggie would be happy. She licked her lips and pressed the needle into her vein. The pieces of glass tinkled softly, fell into place, quieted. By the time she climbed into the car beside Henri, she was stoned enough not to care that he wouldn't even look at her.

Hank

Even when he used to misbehave, even when he was in love with a woman who wasn't his wife, even drunk as hell, Hank Bingham always slept through the night without waking.
Like a log
. That's what Nadine used to say, frustrated or surprised or even angry at him for sleeping so well.
You didn't even roll over once
. Hank used to feel almost proud of this singular achievement. He was, if nothing else, a good sleeper.

But not tonight. Tonight Hank woke up, not in the groggy way that sometimes happened these days when he woke up having to piss and stumbled to the bathroom, only to drop right back to
sleep as soon as he got back in bed. No, this time Hank was fully awake. Outside his window, only darkness. The nightlight he'd bought at Home Depot when this nighttime need to piss started was the only light in the house, small and white in the hallway. Ever since Nadine died, Hank had slept on her side of the bed. But in the darkness, that too felt disconcerting, like he was seeing the world from the wrong angle.

What did people do when they had insomnia? Watch television? Call friends in other time zones?

Hank sighed, closed his eyes, waited for sleep.

No luck.

He got out of bed and followed that nightlight down the hall to the bathroom. Something had woken him up. For the first time in his life, something had actually interrupted his sleep, the one thing he did perfectly.

Miss Kitty appeared in the bathroom doorway, looking confused.

“No,” he told her. “It is not time for breakfast.”

He went into the smallest bedroom, the one that would have been a nursery if they'd ever had kids. Instead, it was an office of sorts, the room where their hulking desktop computer sat and file cabinets held their tax returns and important papers.

When Nadine got her diagnosis, she'd insisted they get passports. Neither of them had ever been out of the country, or wanted to go out of the country as far as Hank knew. But she got it in her head that they were going to Paris. “The City of Light,” she'd told him. He had always thought Paris was the city of love, not lights. But what did he know? He didn't want to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, that was for sure. He didn't want to go where people didn't speak English. He didn't want to go to Paris. At all. “Paris,” he'd
said to her. “What a great idea.” “Really?” she'd asked him, her eyes bright. “Why not?” he'd said, trying not to list all the reasons why not.

For their honeymoon they'd driven to Key West. Sometimes they would stop along the road and grab the blanket from the trunk and find a secluded spot and make love. In Key West they watched the sun set every night. Hank had heard about the Green Flash, the sudden appearance of bright green above the horizon at sunset. He'd watched intently, waiting for it, wanting desperately to see it. He never did, though. They never went to Paris either. Nadine got too sick too fast. But they had those stiff blank passports in the file cabinet anyway.

Hank turned on the desk lamp and looked around the room. Nadine always called it his office, but he'd never needed an office. His office was down at the station. The slightly larger third bedroom was Nadine's sewing room. She'd fixed that one up nice. Her sewing machine was in there, sure. But she had a rocking chair and shelves with plastic see-through bins that held her yarn and fabric and whatnot. That's what Nadine called everything else, the buttons and needles and threads and measuring tapes. Her whatnot. She had a nice hooked rug on the floor in there, one she'd made out of fabric scraps. Not scraps, he corrected himself. Remnants. He could almost hear Nadine reminding him. She'd hung a framed poster of irises on the wall too. “Van Gogh's
Irises
,” she'd explained to him in that voice she used when she couldn't believe what a dope he was.

This room, his
office
, had no personality. Just stuff. Cardboard boxes against one wall, filled with the files he'd brought from his real office after he retired. The desk and the file cabinet and a yellow director's chair from Nadine's apartment before they got
married. She'd had two of them, this yellow one and a blue one, and she'd used them as her kitchen chairs. The first time he went to her apartment for dinner, he'd been impressed by her eye for style, how creative she was. The chairs stood around a small round bright red table that she'd painted herself. On one wall, a big red capital N hung; across from it, a framed poster of Monet's
Water Lilies
. Of course, he hadn't known they were Monet's
Water Lilies
until she told him that the next morning.

That night, she'd served him chicken Kiev and a salad with mandarin oranges and sugary slivered almonds. He couldn't believe how sophisticated she was, or why someone like her would even go out with a guy like him, a cop with a high school education who had never heard of Monet or chicken Kiev. Later, after they got married, he'd watch her make recipes from that hardcover red Betty Crocker cookbook, her head bent over it, her hair tucked behind her ears, a pencil in her hand. But that night he thought she'd produced that fine dinner by magic, by her special powers. The same special powers that bewitched him and led him to propose before the cherries jubilee appeared, surprising both of them when he dropped on one knee and blurted, “Will you please please marry me, Nadine?”