The Book That Matters Most (8 page)

W
hen Ava stepped outside into the cold January night, she paused to look up at the clear sky. Despite the lights from the city below, stars cluttered it.

“Pretty,” came a voice from behind her.

Ava turned to find John standing, hands in pockets, also looking up.

“Do you ever think maybe they're up there looking down at us?” he asked.

“Who?” Ava asked, then quickly realized what he meant: his wife and her husband.

“Maybe,” she said. She tried to think of how to explain about Jim. But she couldn't embarrass herself twice in the same night, could she? Next time, she decided.

John stayed quiet, staring up at the sky.

“Well,” Ava said finally, “goodnight.”

“Wait,” he said, taking a step toward her. “There was a quote in the book that I really liked. So much, I wrote it down.”

She waited as he retrieved one of those Moleskine notebooks from his inside pocket and carefully tore out a page.

“Here,” he said.

Before she could read it or even respond, he nodded a goodnight and walked off.

Ava stepped under the one light beaming above the door and read what John had written.

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure
.

“John?” she called into the darkness.

But he was gone. She folded the paper in half, and placed it in her coat pocket.

Maggie

Of course, he was married.

Although she didn't learn it that first night, it became clear soon enough. The apartment on rue Saint-Antoine was a second flat, the one that Julien kept for his work, which involved art installations. He represented artists, and the loft was full of oversized masks and paintings in vivid Caribbean colors or bold abstract images. Julien told her that he kept it for his work, but she never saw him actually work there. Sometimes he arrived, out of breath from the one-hundred-step climb, carrying a canvas. Sometimes he left with a piece of the art from
the apartment. But he never spoke on the phone or looked at papers or brought artists inside. Once, he went out on the small balcony and called down to someone standing near the Saint-Paul Métro stop across the street. “He could come up,” she'd offered. And Julien had laughed and tousled her hair and said, “Impossible.”

She decided she loved him more than she'd ever loved anyone before.

She lay on the hot pink sofa that formed a large U in the center of the loft, stoned, watching him want her, watching his desire grow, become fierce. His wife must be older, like him. Of course he couldn't get enough of Maggie, who never refused him, who let him do anything he wanted to her. He brought her such good-quality drugs that sometimes they knocked her flat for days. When that happened, everything turned soft and gauzy. His voice sounded as if he were at the other end of a tunnel, his body moving on her felt like they were underwater. One afternoon, whatever he gave her to smoke, cooking it so carefully in a tiny pipe for her, holding it so gently to her lips, cupping her chin in his large callused hand as she inhaled, whatever it was, it produced a halo around him, a golden light so beautiful that she believed he was truly sent from heaven.

That was when she knew for certain she loved him.

She told him so too.

She said, “I love you I love you I love you,” and he grinned, showing all of his adorable crooked teeth.

“Ma petite chatte,”
he murmured, nuzzling her neck. “Tell me again.”

“Je t'aime,”
she whispered, holding onto him as tight as she could, as if he was an anchor, holding her in place.

“
M
ore of that,” she'd told him as he left. “
J'en reprends.”

He did bring her more of that, and she began to lose track of time.

“You've been gone so long,” she'd say to him, and he would laugh and say, “But I was just here last night.”

“What day is it?” she asked him one morning in the big white bed.

“Sunday,” he said. “And I can stay all day today.”

“Which Sunday?” she asked him.

“What does it matter,
mon petit pamplemousse
?” he said, tenderly stroking her cheek. “Everything you need is right here.”

When he left to go to the bakery for fresh croissants, Maggie tried to think, tried to make her brain land on something concrete. She remembered that he'd cooked a baked pasta. Yesterday? Last week? She'd watched him as he boiled the tiny shells in milk and garlic. Her mother had just boiled them in water, but not Julien. She remembered how sometimes he looked like he was under a strobe light when he moved, how she'd watched from the hot pink sofa as he moved around the kitchen leaving those streaks of light as he did. She remembered that one afternoon, alone, she'd written a very good sentence in her notebook. A brilliant one. She'd used green ink.

Julien was climbing back up the ladder, a tray with café au laits and the chocolate croissants she liked so much in his hands.

“I'm writing a wonderful story,” she told him.

He fed her a croissant, wiped the flakes of pastry from her collarbone.

“Like Hemingway?” he asked her.

Her heart sped up. He was taking that pipe from the tray; she hadn't even seen it there, and now he was holding a match to it.

“In the minimalist style,” she said, feeling her body tremble ever so slightly.

“Sit up,
coccinelle
,” he said.

Grapefruit. Ladybug. He called her so many pet names.

“I love you,” she said, lifting her face up, opening her mouth, eager.

H
e bought her clothes too. Even though she told him that her father had put enough money in a bank account for her to live for a year abroad, he insisted. He arrived, huffing from the one hundred steps, with shopping bags from Agnès B. filled with striped shirts and soft V-neck t-shirts, high-waisted black bell-bottoms in a fluid jersey material, Mary Janes with little straps and chunky heels. If he decided to take her out to dinner, he chose her outfit. The snug black dress with the flowered Peter Pan collar or the navy blue and white checked.

He called her his little artichoke, his plum, his tulip. He brought
macarons
from Pierre Hermé, and bread from Poilâne, and cheese from Laurent Dubois.

“This Roquefort,” he said, opening the wax paper on the cheese and releasing a pungent stink, “is a very old cheese, dating from before the Roman conquest of Gaul. It ripens for three months in the Combalou caves below Roquefort-sur-Soulzon.”

She nibbled the cracker smeared with it that he handed her.

“I'll take you there sometime,” Julien said. “Would you like that? To go to the Combalou caves with me?”

She put down the cracker, one tiny corner eaten.

“Yes,” she told him. “Take me there. When can we go?”

He held the cracker to her lips. “Eat,” he said softly. “You're too thin.”

She forced herself to eat it, but the taste made her gag.

“And the ocean,” she said, after she drank some wine. “Take me to the ocean. To Nice.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “We should go to Nice and you will lie in the sun and turn golden brown.”

“I'll lie in the sun topless,” she said. She closed her eyes, as if she could feel the warm sun beating down on her.

Julien opened another package, broke off a piece of hard cheese.

“This is from Monbéliarde cows. They are known for their sweet milk.”

He told her to taste it.

“What does it remind you of?” he asked her.

“Butterscotch,” she said, and he smiled and kissed her, his hands stinking from cheese grabbing her face and holding it hard.

“My brilliant
pomme de terre
,” he whispered.

S
he didn't know when his visits became less frequent. When the weather turned colder? When the hard rain began to fall almost daily? Maggie lay on the hot pink sofa, waiting, staring out at the gray sky, the rain on the tiled rooftops of the Marais. She realized then that although he could call her any time, she had no number for him. On her phone, it showed up as blocked. One day, she noticed that Christmas lights had been strung up on the buildings opposite. She went out onto the balcony and watched people with large bouquets of flowers and fresh baguettes moving
quickly through the rain. She wrapped her arms around her thin body, shivering out there, watching everyone pass by.

Back inside, she pulled on the black bell-bottoms and a long-sleeved striped top, not even bothering to put on underwear first. She poured a big glass of wine, and drank it down with a handful of pills. Then she grabbed a trench coat, the tags still hanging from it, and an umbrella, and went quietly down the one hundred steps. Julien had warned her that she must never make noise outside the apartment, in the stairs or hallways of the building. He said a cantankerous old woman lived in one of the apartments, and reported noise to the landlord. Later, Maggie realized there was probably no neighbor; Julien wanted her to remain unnoticed.

Outside, the rain fell as heavily as it had that first night she'd met Julien. A cold horizontal siege. Despite the expensive coat, the large umbrella, she was soon drenched. Maggie closed the umbrella and dropped it into a trashcan. She was already wet, what did it matter? Besides, the pills had kicked in and she felt like she was skimming the sidewalk, not really walking on it, even though her shoes were quickly wet and water sloshed inside them as she moved.

She walked down the rue de Rivoli, through crowds coming or going from important places. She walked and she walked, but she felt like she was swimming now. Her hands made small motions, as if they were helping part the water. Deep inside her, there was a constant roller coaster feeling, as if she were poised at the top of a hill, about to go flying down. She crossed streets, walked along the Seine, lost track of time. Lost track of place for a while, too.

The rain slowed to a steady drizzle. Maggie found herself shivering
in front of the Musée d'Orsay, the high that had propelled her outside now faded, leaving a dull headache in its place. All these months in Paris and she'd never been inside this museum. The former railway station was itself considered a work of art, and inside were three hundred paintings and sculptures, mostly by the Impressionists. Maggie patted her wet hair. Where was her umbrella? She remembered taking it with her when she walked out. But somehow it was gone.

“C'est combien, l'admission?”
she asked at the entrance.

Despite Maggie's near perfect accent, the woman replied in English, “You're in luck. It's the first Sunday of the month. Admission is free.”

Maggie frowned. “The first Sunday?” she repeated.

The woman did not hide her disdain. “
Oui, mademoiselle
. Today is the first Sunday of January.”

“But that's impossible!” Maggie said.

She stood, struggling to remember the past weeks. The cheese that tasted like butterscotch. The tender way he'd lifted the pipe to her lips. Vaguely, she could remember speaking to her mother on the telephone. She could remember that golden halo around Julien.

“You going in or what?” a gruff voice said behind Maggie.

She nodded, frightened. Her head throbbed.

Even the vast beauty of the museum, with its large windows and row after row of paintings that seemed familiar, even that could not calm the fear rising in her. How could she have forgotten Christmas? Had there been a present from Julien? A special dinner? She could remember the baked pasta, how carefully he'd measured the milk, how thinly he'd cut the garlic. Had that been their Christmas dinner? He called her his
coccinelle
, his
pamplemousse
.
She chewed her lip hard enough to make it bleed, and sucked back the metallic taste.

In a gallery of Monets, Maggie paused. They cast a soothing light across the room, and she remembered how much her mother loved Monet. When Maggie was young, her mother had taken her to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see a special Monet exhibition. She'd tried to explain the beauty of his work, but Maggie had refused to listen to her, or to be kind. She'd discovered boys by then, and drinking and smoking pot in the backseats of their cars. It was what had consumed her, those boys. Sex and drugs, shoplifting gum and candy bars, drinking warm Pabst Blue Ribbons and gobbling pills stolen from parents' medicine cabinets. Standing in front of those Monets, though, her mother hadn't known yet what Maggie was up to.

And now, standing here in front of these Monets, she missed her mother with a sharp pain in her gut that made her hurry out of the room. She considered calling her, and telling her that she was here, at the Musée d'Orsay, that the Monets were lovely.

But she didn't. She couldn't. She was supposed to be in Florence, studying Renaissance art.

In front of a Degas—it had to be a Degas, she knew, it was ballet dancers rehearsing—she stopped. Her breath caught. Unlike the way she imagined Degas's dancers in her mind, up close Maggie saw that they looked tired, their faces hard and set, weary. They slumped and stretched and held their aching backs. She wondered if she looked that way too?

She hadn't noticed the family standing beside her. They were American. A blonde mother in a navy blue sweater set; a father and son both dressed in khakis and V-neck sweaters, the father's lemon yellow, the son's baby blue; the little girl, maybe only six
or seven years old, wore an improbably frilly dress, and imitated the poses of the dancers in the painting. The mother eyed Maggie, and herded the family away from her slightly.

She hadn't noticed the tour guide either, until he spoke.

“As Paul Valéry said, ‘Degas is one of the very few painters who gave the ground its true importance. He has some admirable floors.'”

The family laughed.

“Of course,” the tour guide continued, “this is all the more appropriate for dancers in that the parquet is their main work tool.”