The Moment of Everything (4 page)

Thanks to SparkNotes, I knew a bit about Connie Chatterley and Mellors’s goings-on, but for high drama, I was throwing in with Henry and Catherine.

“I’ll get by,” I said. “What about you? You’re looking a little too well rested.”

“Oh, I’m good. Remember that
Lord of the Rings
junkie I dated last year? Dude was fucking obsessed with Sean Bean, who is also in a British
Chatterley
miniseries. I sat through that man showing his vitals about eighteen million times.”

Inside, I was smacking myself for not thinking of BitTorrenting a movie version last night.

“Mingle time,” Dizzy said, shaking out his mane of red hair. “You take the left flank and I’ll go right.”

And before I could stop him, off he went to a group of women examining the labels on wine bottles at the bar. I attempted mingling. It was not successful. All the other women bunched into tight whispering circles of three or four. I’d drift close to one, expecting to be caught in a tractor beam of conversation, but that didn’t happen. All I got were overheard snippets about “finding more blocks of time,” “college admissions coaches,” and “spa-ing in Miraval.” Then there were the ones on their own, in a corner, texting or talking on the phone. I employed the strategy I used to survive my childhood by retreating to a corner and hoping no one would talk to me.

“I saved you a bit of the Silver Needle,” Avi said, reappearing and sitting next to me. She handed me a teacup as delicate as a glass slipper. “Dizzy mentioned you were fond of white tea.”

I looked over at the bar to see Dizzy refilling the wineglass of the woman next to him, then sniffing a canapé before tossing it into his mouth. Fond of white tea? I drank Trader Joe’s chai with Hugo from clog-size coffee mugs. What other stories had Dizzy told her about me?

I took a sip. Silver Needle tasted like tree bark, and I feared I’d forever lost the power of speech.

“They harvest it once a year,” she said. “In the first few days of spring. I think it has a sweet and delicate yet airy fragrance.”

Perhaps on Avi’s home planet tree bark tasted sweet, but here under our sun it had a bitter, woody taste of, well, tree bark.

“Nice tea,” I said.

Avi smiled and looked at me with expectant eyes. I knew that look. She wanted me to dazzle her. But in that room full of employed people, I had nothing but the feeling of not sleeping enough after months of sleeping too much.

“Well,” Avi said with acrylic politeness. “You’ll have to excuse me while I play hostess.”

Whatever grip I was trying to get to pull myself back into the life I wanted felt miles beyond my reach.

I looked over at Dizzy, who was tossing a chocolate truffle into his mouth.

“This is…don’t tell me…these are those truffles they sell at the Clos Pegase Winery in Calistoga.” The woman next to him nodded, and Dizzy laughed. I loved his laugh. Geese flying overhead would soon descend in search of missing gaggle mates. He may have gotten his teeth capped and whitened and become a snotty cork dork who brought his own wine to restaurants, but he would never ever be able to get rid of that laugh I adored.

He refilled the wineglasses of a couple of women around him, then headed tipsily to the chair beside me and plunked himself down.

“So I got the whole scoop on why they needed replacements,” he said. “First there was Harriet. The official story is she was reassigned to the East Coast, but she really had a stress-related breakdown. She went out for a bike ride at lunch, and they found her two days later eating fried chicken and waffles. At a truck stop. In Fresno.”

“Chicken and waffles are about the only thing that could get me to ride a bike for two days,” I said.

“Yeah, me too,” he said. “But let’s keep that to ourselves. Then there was Jill, whose start-up tanked, so she joined a clothing-optional intentional community down in Bonny Doon.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s…wow.”

“We got this, Mags,” Dizzy said. “We are so in here. If the bar for membership were any lower, we could slide over it on our bellies.”

He slapped my knee, then strutted back to the group at the bar like he lived in a house like this instead of a shared rental whose centerpiece was a Carolina Gamecocks blow-up chair and a 340-bottle wine refrigerator. I was left with the word
membership
still lingering and the dread that there would be more of this.

I reached into the tote for my book, but I didn’t feel the sharp pages of the Penguin Classic edition that Dizzy had bought me. Instead, there was only the stiff worn cover of Hugo’s dilapidated version. Panicked, I dug around, practically sticking my whole head in the bag like it was Sylvia Plath’s oven, finding only its nylon-lined insides. Two hours of sleep had given me not only rings under my eyes big enough to start my own circus, but also an impressive level of idiocy. I’d brought the wrong book. I looked around the room at all the Penguin Classics clutched in hands and resting on chairs. Not only had I not read the novel, I’d never used
spa
as a verb, and I’d brought a copy of the book that I had to hold together like an overstuffed sandwich.

“Ladies, please, shall we get started?” Avi said, calling the room to order, before sitting gracefully in the chair next to me. Dizzy, sitting on my other side, gave me a look that said,
Maybe you could spend the rest of the afternoon hiding in the trunk of my car
when he looked down at my tote bag and saw the book I’d brought.

“I think I speak for all of us,” Avi said, “when I say we’ll miss Harriet and wish her well on her reassignment back to the East Coast. And the same to Jill, who has decided to take a leave of absence to pursue new opportunities.”

I looked over at Dizzy, who hid a laugh behind a cough.

“Some of you have met our guests and potential new members. I think we’re all especially happy to welcome our first
male
guest, Dizzy Gordon. Dizzy is the CTO at ArGoNet. I recently spent a lot of time in a conference room with him and the rest of the exec staff going over strategy, and with Dizzy in the room it was a lot more entertaining than that sounds. I can’t wait to hear what he has to say about this book.”

There was a little applause, mostly from Dizzy’s barmates, but to Dizzy it might as well have been a standing ovation. He stood and gave an exaggerated bow while rolling his arm in front of him until it dropped toward the floor.

“And this is Maggie Duprés,” Avi went on, resting her freshly manicured hand on my arm. I curled my fingers to hide my ragged cuticles.

“Maggie was recently the director of information architecture at ArGoNet. But what impressed me most about Maggie was her life before Silicon Valley. She has a master’s in library science and studied English literature as an undergraduate. I’m sure you will all understand why I have her sitting next to me. I need someone who can help me make sense of this book!”

They all laughed. I’m sure everyone in the room knew this was the first time anyone had professed awe at my English degree. It was a trick I’d noticed most successful people used. Make yourself the joke, and the little people will love you all the more.

“Since we have two new guests, I want to take a moment to remind everyone of our process,” Avi continued. “We go around the circle and everyone takes a turn telling us what you think of the book. Remember, one at a time.”

“The novel is a paradox,” began a woman in a pink sweater set on the other side of Avi. “Simultaneously progressive and reactionary, modern and Victorian.”

Everyone else had their books neatly in their laps, while mine was locked up in my bag like Rochester’s wife in the attic. When the woman in pink regurgitated the main analysis from SparkNotes.com, the one I had planned to use, any notions I still held on to of pulling off this little caper without embarrassing myself disappeared.

My mind scrambled back to the freshman English literature survey course where I’d first encountered
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. What was it? Something about the class system in English society?

“It’s all about class,” said the next woman. “The whole affair of Lady Chatterley and the gamekeeper is a microcosm for the British class system.”

Strike two. I tried to remember other things the professor had said. It wasn’t Lawrence’s best novel. It was problematic. It was a prosy thumbing of one’s nose at society rather than a thoughtful work of literary merit. Lawrence was pushing boundaries to see what he could get away with, just because he could.

“Mellors overwhelms her in the woods,” said the next woman. “He’s always the dominant partner. This is women’s liberation?”

“There are no sympathetic characters,” said the next woman in the circle. “I didn’t like any of them.”

“The profanity got old.”

I remembered Dizzy whispering passages to me in the library study tables, while I tried not to giggle at the absurdity of a stuffy, bearded, old man trying to shock people by using four-letter words we used every day for dismay at having our bikes stolen to elation about pancakes for breakfast in our dorm. Yes, the novel was sorely outdated by modern standards. I could use that.

“Everything is dated. What relevance is this to our lives today?”

I could
not
catch a break.

“Clifford’s a bastard. I hate her for marrying him,” said the next woman. “She’s an idiot.”

Avi sat stoic in her chair, her face impassive as she nodded with each comment, before patiently directing the next participant to speak.

Even Dizzy got into the mix when it was his turn.

“The coal pits sucked,” he said. “Reminded me of my first job in the Valley.”

By the time we reached him, no one had had anything positive to say. It was only because I was sitting next to Avi that I heard her sigh. It was a sigh filled with frustration and anxiety, much like the one that seeped out of me every day when I checked my in-box to find it empty of interview requests. I looked past her to the bookshelves that lined the opposite wall. They were inlaid oak shelves with carvings of vines and leaves winding around the edges. And on those shelves were thick mass-market paperbacks with spines cracked like an old crone’s face and hardbacks with dust jackets worn white on the edges. I’d seen the shelves of people who did not love books. Avi’s books, though, were nearly broken from being loved. Avi was a book geek. She wanted everyone to like
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. She was waiting to hear how it moved them, how it got under their skin. But everyone hated it, and Avi was taking it personally. I decided then that I liked Avi Narayan very much.

As Dizzy clipped along about coal pits being a metaphor for choking despair of being matched with the wrong CEO, I reached into my bag and pulled out my book. The notes had all sorts of tidbits about the book. I’m not sure the SVWEABC would have approved of Henry and Catherine, but I was also pretty sure Henry and Catherine would not have approved of the SVWEABC. H and C loved this book.

“And so later when…”

“Dizzy, I’m sorry, can I interrupt for a moment?”

Dizzy screeched to a halt and glared at me, while the rest of the group stared at me like I’d just grown a second head. Avi looked at me with polite quiet. I held her gaze for another second, and smiled at the surprise on her face when I gave her a wink. I was going to save this meeting for Avi Narayan.

“I think everything everyone has said here today is exactly on target,” I said, “except that we’re not talking about what we should be talking about. No one has talked about the sex. The good, old-fashioned, in-the-woods, in-front-of-God-and-everybody sex.”

Wineglasses stopped in midair. Avi nearly spit out her tea. I had their attention. I felt Dizzy staring at me, willing me to shut up. I didn’t dare turn back now. My heart spun like a hyperactive third-grader without his Ritalin.

“I’ve been sitting here listening to all of you,” I continued. “And I’m so impressed with all the well-read and thoughtful opinions. And I can’t disagree with a single point any of you’ve made about the society and the social order and the book’s place in literary history. But I don’t think that’s why anyone reads this book, do you? It’s about the sex. I don’t think people were particularly worried about the social order when they banned it. They banned it because of the sex.”

I looked down at Catherine’s note again. I placed my hand over it, as if shielding it from the plagiarism I was about to commit.

“It’s about shedding one’s skin and being reborn through desire. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think that’s really something. Don’t you?”

The room was still. But no one was looking at me. They were looking to Avi for direction.

“That’s an excellent and insightful observation, Maggie,” Avi said. “Thank you. It’s a perfect lead-in to some discussion questions I’d like to pose to the group.”

I turned to look at Dizzy, who was straining to hold in a laugh. His leg bounced like a jackhammer with the effort and the grin on his face threatened to burst open into actual guffawing at any moment.

Just as she did before the meeting, Avi reached over and laid her hand on my arm. And she was smiling. I felt anointed. The Indian goddess of the SVWEABC had blessed me and accepted my offering. I would live a life of enlightened goodness and go forth and read the classics.

Avi asked her book group questions and the responses were more positive this time around. I will have to say one thing for the members of the SVWEABC. They adjusted their trajectory in response to market conditions.

After the meeting, Avi guided me through the room, introducing me to people who actually wanted to talk to me now. Everything I said invoked sparkling splashes of laughter, and I again floated on the current of a charmed life. It’d been a long time, and it felt like a thousand Christmases. Best of all, I’d somehow managed to misplace my cup of tree bark tea.