The Book That Matters Most (33 page)

“Bravo, Mr. Vonnegut,” Jennifer said. “This book came out in 1969 during the height of the Vietnam War, yet massacres continued in Cambodia and Rwanda and Bosnia. They continue today.”

“But history repeats itself,” Diana said. She stood as if facing an audience from stage. “That's why I'm where I am. My mother and grandmother both had breast cancer. They both died from it, in fact.”

“All these years sitting at the book group together and I didn't know that,” Ruth said.

“As the great George Bernard Shaw said, ‘We learn from history that we learn nothing from history,'” Diana said ruefully.

“Could you say that again?” Monique asked, her pen hovering above a page in her own Moleskine. “I need to write it down.”

Diana repeated the Shaw quote.

“Shaw was one of the great ones,” she said. “Perhaps you saw me in
Major Barbara
two seasons ago? That play was written in 1905, long before the carnage of the world wars. Yet it feels relevant, doesn't it?”

“Shaw is worthy of an entire evening's discussion,” Cate said in her let's-get-back-on-track voice. “But tonight is for Vonnegut. And John.”

At the sound of his name, John startled.

“Did you want to lead the discussion?” Cate asked him. “Or should I maybe give a little more context to the book first?”

“Sure,” John said.

Since it wasn't clear to anyone if he meant
sure, he'd lead the discussion now
or
sure, Cate should keep talking
, Cate kept talking.

Ava tried to concentrate on Cate. She tried to keep
Slaughterhouse-Five
foremost in her mind. But it proved impossible. Tomorrow's trip to Paris, Hank Bingham's belief that her mother was alive and living there after all these years, the memories of that long-ago morning when Lily fell from the tree, the sad year that followed Lily's death, and the hope that she might find Maggie—all
of it kept intruding, pushing at her mind and forcing her backward and forward in time without any warning.

“One of the most striking things about
Slaughterhouse-Five
,” Cate said, “is that Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.”

Unstuck in time. Yes, Ava thought. That was exactly what she was: unstuck in time.

“He travels between different times and places in his life, and can't control which period he lands in,” Cate continued. “Billy Pilgrim travels in and out of the meat locker in Dresden, to his swimming lessons at the Y and his meetings at the Lions Club to his possibly imagined captivity by Tralfamadorians.”

“Favorite part,” Luke interjected.

“But they're hallucinations,” Monique said. “Hallucinations that help him escape a world he cannot understand.”

“A world destroyed by war,” Jennifer said. “This isn't a science fiction novel. It's a moral statement. Billy can't grasp the destructiveness of war, so he makes up something to help him shape the world. Billy Pilgrim can't ignore the catastrophes of war, and neither can we.”

Luke returned the discussion to the Tralfamadorians and their knowledge of the fourth dimension.

“Every moment of time is in it and keeps occurring and reoccurring simultaneously,” he said, shaking his head in awe at the notion.

“Simultaneously and endlessly,” Kiki said.

Ava couldn't speak. The idea of being unstuck in time, and the fourth dimension, seemed to exactly explain what she was feeling, exactly what she was experiencing. And realizing that brought her back to her childhood bedroom, Lily's bed across from hers a year unused, the sheets and thin summer coverlet
still rumpled and turned down, as if she had just leapt from it or was about to climb in again. And Ava with
From Clare to Here
propped up on her lap, reading it and thinking it had been written just for her. Had it? she wondered now.

“I really have to thank John for choosing such an important book,” Cate said.

Ava looked up and saw that the discussion was winding down. People were closing their notebooks and gathering their coats and bags.

“Um, I never got to say anything,” John said.

“Oh no,” Cate said, embarrassed.

No one else seemed to have heard him. They talked with each other on their way back to Emma and the wine and cheese.

“That's okay,” John said. “I'm glad everyone liked it.”

“No, no,” Cate said. “I'll get everyone back in their seats.”

John stood now too, and pulled on his lime green fleece vest.

“Really,” he said. “It's fine. I don't love public speaking. So I kind of got off the hook. And I really liked hearing what everyone had to say.”

Cate hesitated. “Are you sure?”

John grinned at her. With his toothy grin and that deep dimple and sunburned nose, he looked boyish, so unlike the sad middle-aged man who had sat here all year.

“So it goes,” he said.

Cate grinned back. “Well, then. More wine?”

John nodded, but he didn't follow Cate. Instead he lingered by Ava as she slowly tucked the book into her purse and wrapped her polka-dot scarf around her neck for protection against the autumn chill.

“So it goes,” he said again.

“Right,” Ava said.

“I think the Tralfamadorians believed that even though a person is dead in one moment, she's alive in all the other moments that are happening simultaneously, and we can visit those moments over and over,” John said.

Ava paused. “I think so too,” she said.

“You know why I picked this book?” John asked, holding up
Slaughterhouse-Five
. His copy was an old one, dog-eared and wrinkled.

Ava shook her head.

“1978,” he said. “University of Miami. English 101. Me, a marketing major, whatever that is. I was there to be on the sailing team, not to read books or major in anything. The professor assigns
Slaughterhouse-Five
, and I'm telling you, I just don't get it. All the time-shifting and the aliens and the optometrists convention. And the cutest girl in the class, Marjorie Wells, comes up to me one day after I embarrass myself by not being able to answer the question: are the Tralfamadorians real? Marjorie Wells. Strawberry blond hair. Freckles. An Izod shirt the same color as her eyes. Cutoff jeans that show legs that don't seem to stop. And—I still remember this—those rubber flip flops? Orange ones. She says, ‘John, what are you going to write your paper on?' And I say, ‘Not the Tralfamadorians.' And she smiles up at me—she was only this tall—” John holds his hand to his mid-waist. “With this space between her front teeth that was so adorable, she smiles up at me, and says, ‘Okay. Tonight. My room. We'll write that paper on the Tralfamadorians. And you'll get an A because I always get A's.'”

John looked away from Ava, somewhere off in the distance, maybe all the way back to the University of Miami, 1978.

“I went to her room that night, and she explained the book to me, and I got an A on the paper,” he said softly.

“And you married her?” Ava asked.

“Three weeks after graduation. We were together from that night in 1978 until she died last year.”

Ava took John's hand and squeezed it.

His eyes were wet with tears. “I never thought a book could help with, you know, life. But honestly, when I reread this one for tonight, and I thought about time travel and stuff, it actually made me feel better. Or maybe understand something?”

Ava realized she was still holding his hand. It felt awkward to drop it now, so she held on. That's when she saw that everyone else had been listening.

“I was hoping maybe it helped you too?” John asked. “All of you.”

PART ELEVEN

NOVEMBER

What the mother knew was that she couldn't go back home.
She would save her surviving daughter by staying away, and letting
her guilt over what had happened be hers alone. Maybe someday
they would be reunited, here, in Clare . . .

—From Clare to Here
by Rosalind Arden

Maggie

“So,” Noah said to Maggie over fondue at Le Refuge des Fondus in Montmartre, “do you know anything about art?”

“It's only my major,” Maggie told him.

They were seated at a long wooden communal table and drinking red wine out of silly baby bottles. Surely, Maggie thought when they first sat down, Hemingway never ate here. But she found herself giving in to the fun of it—the dramatic waiter slamming their fondue pot onto the table, the tourists snapping pictures of one another drinking from baby bottles, and the convivial crowded atmosphere.

“Painting?” Noah asked her.

“Art history,” Maggie said.

She thought of Florence, her brief time there feeling like she didn't belong. The other girls with their little pails to carry their toiletries down the long hall to the bathroom. The way they shared makeup and stories about high school and crushes on boys. Everything Maggie said seemed to be the wrong thing. One night she got drunk and threw up and said all kinds of stupid things. That was the night she met the guy she followed to France.

“Are you even listening?” Noah was asking.

“Sorry. No,” she said.

“The company I work for is hiring,” he said. “Your French is excellent, your English is passable—”

“Ha ha,” she said as the waiter slammed two fresh baby bottles of wine in front of them.

“And apparently you know something about art?”

“I guess,” Maggie said.

Noah dipped a piece of bread into the fondue and held it out to Maggie.

She hesitated, then bit it off the fondue fork. Noah smiled at her.

“I'm not good with people,” Maggie said, remembering him with the little bratty kid that day in the Musée d'Orsay. “I repel them.”

“You didn't repel me,” he said.

Maggie frowned. Was Noah flirting with her? It felt nice to have a friend, someone fun and smart. Someone normal. Someone who didn't really want anything from her. But maybe he did?

“Look, think about it,” Noah said. “It's a pretty easy job. And the tips are good.”

Later, when they got off the Métro and were about to go off in opposite directions, Noah wiped some flyaway strands of hair off her face.

“I like you,” he said.

Before Maggie could tell him “Don't,” he turned and walked off, waving to her without even looking back.

U
pstairs in Geneviève's apartment, Maggie looked through the pile of clothes on the floor until she found the book Madame had given her.
From Clare to Here
. She tossed it on the bed, made herself a cup of tea and then brought it with her back to bed. She picked up the book, and began to read.

She didn't stop until she'd read the last words.

Maggie closed the book and lay back on her pillows.

The mother in the book chooses to stay behind with her dead child instead of returning to her family. Beneath those stones it's dark and frightening. Above, the rain has stopped and light is shining. But still she chooses not to come back.

Maggie stayed very still for a long time. The book on her chest, her head on her pillows, staring up at the ceiling.

She heard Geneviève come home, but she did not call out to her or get up to greet her.

Much later, after Geneviève had gone to bed and a light rain had begun to fall, Maggie got up and went to the computer.

The first email she wrote was to Noah:

So yeah, I could take rich American families around the Louvre and impress them with my vast knowledge of Art History. #threewholesemesters! Wanna drink wine from baby bottles and discuss????

Almost immediately, Noah wrote back. Consider the job yours, he said. He'd fill her in over fondue.

She smiled as she read it, and sent him back an emoticon of clapping hands, a round face with eyes popping, a baby bottle, and then she added one of a face with hearts for eyes.

The second email she wrote was to her brother, who had stopped reprimanding her long enough to tell her he'd fallen in love with an Australian zoologist.

Will the Pill? In love? My heart be still! (Hey! I just wrote a poem!)

Lots of exciting things going on in the life of your sister. So here's the scoop. I've decided to stay in Paris and work as a museum guide for this tour company that charges Americans too much moula to go see the Mona Lisa and The Thinker and all of the Impressionists. Using my great education! Maybe I will even write that novel I always say I want to write. I mean, that's why writers come to Paris, isn't it????

Email me details of this woman so I can properly vet her, k? U are a poor judge of women, bro. Oh wait. You actually only had one girlfriend!!! And she was . . . well . . .

And by the way. Speaking of love. I love u. Mags

Maggie paused, made herself another cup of tea, and then sat back at the computer. The third email was the hardest one to write.

Dear Mom,

You already know that I dropped out of the Florence thing, and I've really really made a lot of bad mistakes. I'm so sorry. For wasting your money. For ruining your trust. For being such a bad daughter.