The Moment of Everything (5 page)

When an opening presented itself, Dizzy nudged me over to the bar.

“Holy shit on a Frisbee!” he said. “I don’t know what was in that tea, but holy shit! She loves you. Everyone loves you.” And then he stopped and leaned in close. “You know what this reminds me of? Remember our Microsoft pitch, how they started asking all these questions about user studies and I didn’t even know what they were talking about? Then you started telling them about this study and that study. They were in awe of you. Then we got in the elevator and you turned to me and said, ‘Now I’m going to have to go find studies that back up all that stuff I just made up.’”

I slapped him in the stomach to shut him up.

“This is the greatest day ever,” Dizzy said, downing his wine. I had a feeling I’d be driving us both home.

With that, I nudged him in the direction of his wine buddies, because Avi started coming our way.

“Maggie, why are you here?” Avi asked, pouring me a glass of cabernet.

“Trying to suck up to you, so I can get my job back.”

Avi laughed. Pay dirt.

“Why do you want your old job back?” she asked. “Why not move on? That’s the way of the Valley.”

That pitch at Microsoft with me and Dizzy was still in my head. I remembered what that was like, to be hungry for that big deal and to feel like we could do anything.

“I started that company. Me and Dizzy and some angel funders. I know that software better than anyone alive, even the guys who wrote it. They know how each individual part works, but they don’t know how the whole beast moves and thinks. Ask any coder. There’s no price high enough for a power user like me. And the customers love me. What I did today in your living room? I can do that on any day of the week in any conference room.”

Avi poured a glass for herself and took a sip.

“Dizzy talked like a carnival barker to get you into this book group. Now I see why. Tell me, what have you been doing with yourself since the restructuring at ArGoNet?”

Restructuring
. What a polite way of describing the uprooting of my life. But I pushed aside the petulance and did a quick dig for an answer.

“I’ve been doing some pro bono consulting at a small used bookstore my neighbor owns.”
I’ve been wasting time at the Dragonfly and learning fifteen hundred new ways to describe a man’s privates.
“Sales have been soft with the downturn in the local economy.”
No one gives a flying frog’s butt about the Dragonfly with Apollo across
the street.
“I’m working with him to improve his margin.”
I’m sitting in a dusty window reading trashy novels.

“How interesting. What are some of your ideas?”

Ideas? I didn’t think moving the boxes Jason deposited around the store like air-dropped supplies would count as an idea. My thoughts went back to Henry and Catherine.

“It’s not just a bookstore, it’s a mystery,” I said. My mouth was wandering off without much thought to propel it. But in my mind, Henry’s and Catherine’s notes played like a tune I couldn’t get out of my head. “You never know what you’ll find. Apollo is predictable, like a planned subdivision. The Dragonfly is a medieval city without a map. Each turn brings something unexpected.”

She smiled and reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a business card.

“I’d like to hear more about what you’re doing at this bookstore of yours,” she said, writing a phone number on the back of the card. “And I expect to see you and Dizzy at our next meeting. I like your pluck. It’s a shame ArGoNet lost you. But I would be impressed if you could make a retail outlet like a used book shop profitable in this economy. I like to help people who impress me.”

She gave me the card and told me to call her at home anytime. And then she left me alone with my wine and a heart that was beating out of my chest. I’d done it. Screw the pleading cover letters and dumbed-down résumé. I held the Golden Ticket in my hand. I was going to get my superhero cape back.

My legs were stiff as I set my laptop beside me on my bed and tried to get up. After the SVWEABC meeting, I was wired. But two nights in a row without sleep caught up with me and I finally crashed in the early gray of Sunday morning. I stayed under the covers for the whole day in that heavy kind of sleep that comes only during the day when you don’t want it. It was just past midnight now. I’d thought all that rest would make me feel better. But I still felt an odd brew of adrenaline behind my sternum, bubbling thicker in the dark.

I church-keyed the cap off a Rolling Rock, and sat on my kitchen counter, too awake for sleep, but too tired for anything else. There was something about the blanketed sounds of the night that made me just want to be still for a bit. The whirling of my ceiling fan, the refrigerator clicking, Coltrane playing on KCSC from Hugo’s radio outside, all these whispered sounds you can hear only after the neighborhood turns in. Even the sound of pulling out
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
from my bag was louder than it normally would be.

I paged through the book, watching the notes in the margins shift from Henry’s handwriting to Catherine’s until they came alive like the figures in a flipbook.
In the soft night, I wonder about you
, Henry wrote near the end.
What color are the dishes you eat from? What pictures are on your walls? What books are on your shelf? All these definitions of who you are. But mostly, I want to assure myself that you are in the same world I am, that you aren’t just my hopes appearing on this page.

I tried to remember the dishes Bryan had had at his home, but nothing came to me. Were they white, perhaps? Or maybe blue. I do remember that there were no pictures on the wall. He liked minimalist interfaces. And no books. None.
All these definitions of
who you are.
Bryan had never left anything behind in my apartment. The night after he said good-bye, I’d gone through the ritual of looking for bits of him. But there was nothing. No pictures, no clothes, nothing. Nothing for me to claim I’d never found when he would ask for it later.

I thought about Catherine, sitting in her kitchen on a night like this all those years ago with Henry’s words fresh in her mind. I tried to picture her, thinking she must have looked like her letters, willowy and graceful. How did Henry’s words make her feel? Did her smiles come more easily? Did people wonder what was different about her? The Catherine of my imagination would keep her secret close. She wouldn’t like the way people watched her the way they do when someone is in love, thinking they know you, snickering at your joy. She would know that love makes you conspicuous.

I looked down at Henry’s words and wondered what it was about them that made her trust him with her heart. I wanted to pry open Henry’s notes and see how they worked, try to understand the mingling of passion and longing that compelled Catherine to reply. The two of them had only these fragile marks on a page that formed words and that led them to this. The words that Henry and Catherine wrote to each other were ones I’d heard a thousand times in books, but I never knew people really said such things to each other. At least I’d never said them.

Where were they living when they started writing to each other? The Dragonfly would be little help. Hugo didn’t keep track of where his books came from. Though he and Jason wrote down sales in a large leather ledger at the front counter, if customers asked for a receipt, Hugo gave them a pen and pad so they could write one. It drove his accountant Robert mad, which I suspect was his primary motivation, along with the desire to be a bad capitalist.

Hugo had owned the store since the eighties, but it was a used bookstore long before that. I stared at the “April, 1961” at the top of the page, trying to tell which one of them, Henry or Catherine, had written it there, but there wasn’t enough to go on. Henry’s first notes led me to believe it was his book, so probably him. But then why would Catherine start writing in someone else’s book? No, the book must have been in a place where they both could get to it, i.e., a library or a bookstore, but there wasn’t any sign of the book having belonged to a library. The book could have arrived at the Dragonfly with the notes, or it could have all happened at the Dragonfly.

It could have happened at the Dragonfly. It all happened at the Dragonfly.
It sounded like something that belonged on a sign in the store window, or a tagline on a website. I could see people walking by on the street, looking up at the sign, wandering in to ask, “What? What happened here?” And lost in the haze of Henry and Catherine, they would browse. They would buy books. I thought about my talk with Avi that afternoon. Maybe I had a project after all. I needed to talk to Hugo.

I pulled on a pair of yoga pants, a sweatshirt, and shoes and headed outside with the book. As usual, Hugo was in the backyard, his legs crossed at the ankle and propped up on the patio table, blowing silvery clouds of smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette into the patio umbrella he’d set up next to him. He was bent over a
New York Times
crossword in his lap, lit by a lamp strapped to his head as if he might go mining for ore later in the night. Sharing the table with him was a guy I’d seen around the store buying old bicycle manuals. He, too, had his feet propped up, the index finger of his right hand curled around a cigar.

As I approached them, Hugo looked up from the puzzle, blinding me with his headlamp.

“My Georgia peach.”

“I’m from South Carolina. You know that.”

“There’s a difference? Okay. Six letters. Alabama’s Bear.”

“Bryant, you heathen.”

“Alabama has a bear named Bryant? Whatever do they do with him?”

“He was a football coach,” said Hugo’s friend. “In the sixties. They called him Bear.”

“Really?” Hugo said. “Never heard of him.”

Hugo’s friend grinned, clamping his teeth around his cigar. Even though he was sitting, I guessed him to be a little taller than me. He had skin the color of nutmeg, and his dark hair fell in small curls that brushed the shoulders of a linen saffron kurta that had faded and softened with years and wear. Frayed jeans half covered the green rubber flip-flops, and I noticed little tufts of black hair on the tops of his feet and his big toes. His smile made me self-conscious about not having put on a bra.

“How is it possible,” he asked, “that the Indian guy and the chick know more about football than you do?”

“Incredible luck, I suppose.” Hugo turned to me. “You know Rajhit, don’t you?”

“Mary, right?” Rajhit asked.

“Maggie,” I said, dropping down in the chair next to Hugo.

“Would you like one?” Over the table, Rajhit held up a leather case housing three cigars. I slid one out and took a whiff of the tobacco’s burned candy scent. The last time I smoked a cigar was the night we’d gotten the first round of funding from Wander Fish and Dizzy took the entire company to La Bodeguita del Medio in Palo Alto. I drank too many mojitos and ended up draped over a system architect at PayPal on one of the oaky leather couches in the humidor room in back, passing a cigar back and forth as I listened to Dizzy go on about how all our lives would change now. He talked of value position, return on investment, and new paradigms. I didn’t care. We were drinking single malt scotch, warm and aged with sin as if we’d stolen it from Daddy’s liquor cabinet, and I sipped away, sinking into the warm pool of Dizzy’s certainty about our future.

As I slid a cigar out of Rajhit’s case, he handed me a clip. I snipped off the cigar’s end and leaned over the table while he held a lighter for me. I placed my hand on his to steady it, and circled the end of my cigar in the flame for an even burn. I looked up to see him looking at me instead of the lighter.

“Good?” he asked.

I nodded and leaned back, puffing, feeling the earthy smoke tickle the back of my throat, hugging
Lady Chatterley
and the secret lovers against me.

“Hugo, I have an idea,” I said.

“You’ve decided to become a Navy SEAL,” he said, writing in another answer to his puzzle. “No, no, I’ve got it. You’re going to move to Nepal and herd yaks.”

“Close. I think I’m going to try to make the Dragonfly profitable. Pro bono, of course.”

Hugo looked up and turned his headlamp off. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rajhit trying not to laugh.

“Well, there goes my opportunity for yak butter. Why would you want to ruin my perfectly unprofitable enterprise?”

I told him about Avi and the book group meeting. He listened, nodding his head, looking as serious as he did when he examined the ginger at the Chinese market down the street for freshness. I trusted that he’d get the weirdness of my plan. Hugo had never gone anywhere on a straight path. At nineteen, he’d left his family’s Idaho farm with
On the Road
tucked under his arm like a counterculture Baedeker and hitchhiked to San Francisco. But he soon deserted the flophouse on Haight Street were he’d crashed. “The sex and drugs were as advertised,” he told me once, “but the personal hygiene was nonexistent.” So he hovered around the city docks in a navy surplus jacket, unloading ships and reading Jack London, until he followed a blonde across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley. There he followed a former prom queen from Texas into a physics classroom and an Asian activist into political science. After years of following women around campus, he had several degrees, including a master’s in math and in comparative religion. He had several patents and had attended Le Cordon Bleu in three countries. So, of course, he owned a used bookstore.

“So this profitability thing is just temporary?” he asked.

“After I’m employed again, you can go back to losing money by the fistfuls.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Hugo said, taking another drag from his cigarette.

“Does it involve crystals and the sacrifice of a small animal?” Rajhit asked.

“Small animal? Really? I’m a Buddhist.”

“You’re a Buddhist who wraps his asparagus in prosciutto,” I said.

“Why don’t you forget about the start-up world and work for me at the shop? Then you don’t have to worry about profits and such. You could just spend time doing what you’ve been doing. You’ve seemed happy enough with that.”