The Book That Matters Most (29 page)

She found a parking place easily, another surprise. Could she take this fall weather and this gift of a parking spot as omens for a better year with Plouff? A better year all around? That PI finding Maggie? Ava hoped so. Like teachers everywhere, she thought of the first day of school as the beginning of the new year. She was a middle-aged woman, and needed to start acting like one. A middle-aged almost officially divorced woman, she reminded herself as she opened the large glass double door of Bagg, the modern languages building.

A single cryptic email had arrived this morning from Maggie: “Paris is always a good idea.” To which Ava replied: “Stop quoting Audrey Hepburn. Dad and I are worried sick. Where exactly are you?” Of course she'd heard exactly nothing back.

Ava walked to the elevator and pressed the Up button, but immediately decided to take the stairs instead. If this was the first day of a new year, then she would climb steps, give up carbohydrates, drink more water and less wine. Maybe she would
even get one of those fitness bracelets that measured steps and calories. Now all she had to do was stick with all her resolutions.

Her mood changed immediately when she saw Plouff standing at the top of the stairs, his arms folded, his hair looking even more Einsteinish than usual. She tried not to let him hear her hard breathing. How many steps were there, anyway?

“You're late,” he said before she even reached him.

Ava stopped, four stairs from Plouff, and looked up at him. From this angle, his hair seemed even Einsteinier.

“Late?” she said. “But my first class isn't until eleven and it's only ten twenty.”

“The ten o'clock faculty meeting?”

Ava frowned. What ten o'clock faculty meeting?

“You are reading your university email, aren't you? You got the memo that all correspondence as of September 1 would be only via the dot.edu account, didn't you?”

Ava moved her heavy tote bag from one shoulder to the other. She didn't even know her university email name or password. How was she ever going to get communications from the department?

“And you probably also didn't get the memo that all correspondence between you and your students must be on Blackboard, did you?” Plouff said. He didn't wait for a reply, but just turned abruptly and headed toward the conference room.

“Blackboard?” Ava asked his retreating back.

She hurried to catch up with him. By the time she entered the conference room, panting and sweaty beneath her new silk blouse, the one she'd bought in an effort to look more professional, Plouff was already talking. Ava slid into the first empty seat she saw. In the center of the table sat a tray of croissants.
Ava took an almond one and bit into it. So much for the no-carbohydrate resolution, she thought, as Plouff droned on about the mission of the French department.

C
ate went all out on the food at the book group that night. The table over which Emma—her hair dyed the color of car taillights—presided had platters of bread smeared with mayonnaise and topped with ham and sliced boiled eggs, bowls of beet chips the color of Emma's hair, sausages with mustard and ketchup, cookies cut into the shapes of houses, and poppyseed cake.

“Emma knows a Czech woman who made all of this traditional food for us,” Cate told them.

John frowned. “Not a fan of beets,” he said, putting three sausages on a paper plate.

“Makovec,”
Emma was saying.
“Pernik. Bramboraky.”

Jennifer beamed at her. “It sounds like poetry,” she said.

“What is it?” John asked.

He had a spot of ketchup on his chin and Ava had to resist the urge to wipe it off.

“Czech,” Cate said. Then she added, “Because of the book?”

John's cheeks reddened, and Cate patted his arm as if to say it was all right.

When Ava caught his eye, she tapped her chin. He looked confused.

“You've got some—”

“Oh!” he said, reddening more. He picked up a napkin and rubbed his chin hard, then looked to Ava.

“Gone,” she said.

Emma was happily handing out bottles of Czech pilsner.

“No wine?” Ava said. “Again?”

Emma shook her head, obviously insulted. “Kundera!” she said.

“Pilsner it is then!” Ava said with false cheer.

Her afternoon had deteriorated after the faculty meeting and she was determined to have a good night.

She took a big swallow of beer. Bitter.

“Mmm,” she said to Emma, who had lost interest in her and was uttering more Czech words to Jennifer.

Monique sidled up next to her. “I don't like Blackboard,” she said right away. “It's just one more way for them to monitor us.”

“It gives me a headache,” Ava agreed. “Why can't we just keep the old-fashioned way? Mimeograph the syllabus. Meet in person during office hours.”

Cate was calling the group to take seats. Ava noticed Luke and Kiki sitting together, their heads bent toward each other, foreheads almost touching. Good, she thought.

Jennifer stood beside Cate. She was dressed in a lumpy hand-knit poncho and parachute pants.

“Jennifer wanted to begin with an explanation of Czech history and politics and how they affected Kundera,” Cate said.

“Appreciated,” Ruth said, nodding and already writing in her Moleskine notebook.

“The promise of socialism with a human face,” Jennifer intoned.

Ava sat up straighter. That was what Jim had said that afternoon in her yard.

“The youthful members of the short-lived Prague Spring wanted to accomplish that promise back in 1968,” Jennifer said.

Was she actually teary-eyed?

“1968,” Jennifer repeated, and yes, she was crying. “Even though that was fifteen years before I was born, it affects me deeply.”

She took a breath to compose herself.

“As you all know, the Prague Spring was a grassroots movement for human rights and freedom, not unlike grassroots movements today in North Korea and Bolivia and Myanmar.”

She said the name of each country with its correct pronunciation, like someone who worked at the UN.

“Hear, hear,” Kiki said, and Luke nodded.

“Milan Kundera was one of those young men,” Jennifer said. “The arts flourished under Alexander Dub
ek, who outlawed political persecution and fought for basic human rights.”

“Thank you, Jennifer,” Cate said at last, and everyone burst into applause.

“I do want to say thank you too,” Ruth said. “I remember when those Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. I was watching television with my grandmother and she started to cry. ‘No more war,' she said. She was afraid of another world war.”

“I'd love to talk about the dichotomy between lightness and weight in the novel,” Ava said.

John looked relieved.

“That paradox can't be resolved though, can it?” Luke asked. “At least, none of the four characters in the book resolve it.”

“What about Sabina?” John asked, surprising even himself.

“Sabina is the only one alive at the end, and she doesn't seem exactly happy,” Kiki said.

“Yes, but she's the only one who lived her life in step with her principles, isn't she?” Ava said.

“That's true,” Monique agreed. “She identified kitsch early in
her life. She recognized that sentimental, insistently sunny art is propaganda and she stayed true to her own real art.”

“She was my favorite of the lot,” John said. “Even though I wasn't sure why she didn't understand Tomas's desire to get married.”

“Because he traded his freedom,” Kiki said.

“Let's not forget,” Cate stepped in, using her let's-get-back-on-track voice, “Sabina's own desire for freedom makes her leave Franz, who she loved.”

“Not just Franz,” Ruth added. “She lost contact with everything and everyone from her past, didn't she?”

“Still,” John said thoughtfully, “she's the lightest character. I mean, the way Ava was describing.”

Ava listened as the group discussed lightness and weight. Of course there was no right answer, but as she sat sipping the bitter beer her mind drifted away from
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
and back to that summer and
From Clare to Here
. At the end of the book, the mother chooses to stay with her dead child rather than return to the world of the living. Ava remembered how that decision had kept her awake at night. How could a mother do such a thing? How could a mother leave her living child who still needed her so desperately? Had she known at the time that it was the same choice her own mother had made when she left them and jumped off that bridge? Perhaps on some level she'd realized that, but somehow, sitting here tonight thinking about choices and the dichotomy of weight and lightness, she felt as if she understood it for the first time.

When the discussion finally broke up, Ava put on her coat and tried to slip away unnoticed. She was unhinged. She wanted to go home and crawl into bed and not think about anything at all.

But Cate seemed to be waiting to pounce on her.

“I've been trying to talk to you all night,” Cate said, blocking Ava's path. “About Poppy.”

“Poppy?” Ava said.

“Montgomery. The editor of
From Clare to Here
,” Cate said. “I did some sleuthing and you're never going to believe this. It's why I've left you five messages on your phone. Why didn't you call?”

“Maggie,” Ava said.

“Oh, sweetie,” Cate said. “I thought she was okay.”

“We don't know. She sounds okay in her emails. But—” Ava stopped, unable to tell Cate anything more. “I call the embassy constantly,” she added. “I just want them to find her.”

“They will,” Cate said. “Or she'll just show up at home like she does.”

“What's this about Poppy Montgomery.”

“Poppy Montgomery was Penny's mother,” Cate said. “That's what I found out. Poppy died in 1997 and left two daughters, Penny and Helena, also both dead.”

“That explains why Penny had a copy of the book,” Ava said, more to herself than to Cate.

“You're welcome,” Cate said. But she was smiling.

PART TEN

OCTOBER

But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

—
Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut

The Bookstore Owner

The girl was flopped in the leopard beanbag. It needed to be plumped up somehow, Madame thought. Refilled. She wondered what it was stuffed with and where she could find whatever it was.

The girl was reading
Treasure Island
, a slight smile on her face.

Madame watched her for a minute, then slowly went into the back room. It smelled of the lentil soup warming on the hot plate. And of mildew. Books lined the shelves along one wall. She reached for one on the top shelf. Once it was in her hands, she stared at it as if for the first time. There were over a hundred of them up there, collecting dust.
Thank God
. But sometimes she
met someone who she thought—no, knew—needed to read it. Someone who might read it and understand.

She smoothed the jacket, and ran her fingers up and down the spine.

“Hello, little book,” she said softly. Then scoffed at her own sentimentality.

Out in the store, the girl was still in the beanbag chair, still reading
Treasure Island
.

“Stevenson,” Madame said. “His father and grandfather built lighthouses. Did you know that?”

The girl looked up slowly.

“Here,” Madame said, holding the book out to her. “Read this one.”

The girl hesitated, then took it.

Madame wanted to say so much more, but she didn't. She just walked away.

Ava

The Frost mansion stood regally on Prospect Street behind a row of boxwoods so tall the brick house was completely hidden. Ava drove through the entrance, between the wall of hedges, and down the winding driveway. To the right bloomed an English garden, with a dazzling array of dahlias in pink and purple and yellow and maroon tipped in white, and other flowers Ava couldn't identify. In the center of it all, wearing an enormous straw hat, cropped pants, an oversized chamois shirt and lime green Crocs, stood Helen. She looked up as Ava neared, frowning above oversized sunglasses.