The Moment of Everything (6 page)

For half my life, I’d been aware of my capacity to disappoint the people I loved. Instead of telling my mother I didn’t want to join her sorority, I told her I chickened out before the rush mixer. In the same way, I didn’t know how to tell Hugo that I preferred the company of the J. Crew–clad clients of ArGoNet, who were looking to think outside the box after doing a deep gap analysis to determine the result-driven best practices that would leverage their bandwidth to a more satisfied, strategic fit. I didn’t know how to tell him that working in the Dragonfly would feel like failure, that I would be dealing with people who got angry because the store didn’t have a copy of
Larry’s Guide to Better Knot-Tying.
And then there was the just plain weird. Earlier that week, I’d been told by a little old raisin of a man decked out in a camouflage Utilikilt that, on the advice from the local wizard who lived over on Villa Street, he had invested in a company that made penile implants. He’d just sold off his entire portfolio for a killing. “Forget high tech and real estate,” he told me. “Always invest in technology for better sexual performance. Those stocks never go down.” This was not how I wanted to spend my days.

“Hugo, I—”

He grabbed my hand and pulled it to his lips for a quick, exuberant kiss, absolving me from having to answer him. He was the only person I knew who could get away with such a cheesy move. He was also the only person I knew who seemed incapable of being disappointed in me, and so he was the one I worried about disappointing the most.

“You may change your mind yet,” Hugo said. “In the meantime, you have my permission to do in the Dragonfly anything that will make you happy.” He stood to leave, stretching his arms high above his head. “But start tomorrow. Late in the day tomorrow.”

As he ascended to his apartment, I thought Rajhit would take off as well. But he settled deeper into his chair, smiling at me like he knew something I didn’t.

“I always liked that novel,” he said, nodding toward the
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
I still held against my middle. “Did you know Lawrence’s original title for the book was
Tenderness
?”

I laughed before I could stop myself, thinking of the day before and my performance at the book club. I laughed because he probably remembered this detail from some freshman lit class and had it tucked away in his catalog of factoids that would impress women he met in the middle of the night. And I laughed because it felt good to flirt a little. It’d been too long.

“It doesn’t really fit though, does it?” I said, pulling Catherine’s words through my memory. I was eager to see if they would have the same effect on Rajhit that they had on Henry. “It’s really a book of passion. Lady Chatterley sheds her skin. She is reborn through desire.”

He caught a deep breath through a wide grin, and I knew then these notes were magic.

We lit two more cigars, I grabbed a couple of beers from my apartment, and we drank and talked the kind of nonsense that substitutes for philosophical musings in the early hours of the morning. When the beer was gone, I felt that familiar impulse to invite him in for whatever else I had in the liquor cabinet. For the first time in too long, I felt young and endless.

But then I remembered the dishes piled in the sink and the ring around the tub and the copies of my résumé scattered all over my living room floor. And more than that, I anticipated the simple heartache that I could see if I fast-forwarded through the next few months in my mind. Rajhit was trouble. Possibly the best kind. But it was still time to call it a night.

I held out my hand to shake Rajhit’s and my stomach somersaulted as he held my hand a little longer than was necessary.

“I’m glad to have met you, Maggie,” he said. Then he disappeared into the darkness, leaving me alone still feeling his fingers wrapped around mine.

It all happened at the Dragonfly…

It was the perfect headline. Intrigue? Check. Promise of a good story? Check. Name of the business? Check. Yes, all together, it was quite clickable. And then people could come to the Dragonfly and find their own mystery. At least that was my good intention, path to hell be damned.

It was midnight, and I was alone in Suds and Surf, a Laundromat a few blocks from home in a tiny row of shops that also included a Salvadorian restaurant, a pet-groomer, and a florist who also did taxes in Vietnamese. Thanks to the free WiFi, I’d been working on the Dragonfly’s website for a couple of hours, stretching out the geeky muscles I hadn’t used in way too long. The Dragonfly was like software that had been sitting around for decades that no one wanted to take the time to rewrite. Building a website was just like putting pretty icons on that dated, inefficient code. It might be pretty, but underneath was still disorder, dust, and JavaScript held together with a little chicken wire.

There were no funds for a website hosting service, so I was on my own. I had a spare computer at home, so I set up a Web server and a database and now here I was at Suds and Surf building out the pages with free and awesome open source software. I registered a domain for ten bucks, downloaded a template with a book theme, and within a couple of hours, the Dragonfly had a website. That afternoon, I’d dusted off a scanner I hadn’t used since Mac OS 9 and scanned Henry’s and Catherine’s notes and posted them on the pages of the website. Looking at my work on the screen, I wondered what Henry and Catherine would think of my posting their romance here. How would I feel if I were Catherine? I closed my eyes and tried to put myself in a time when men wore suits and hats to baseball games and women carried clutch purses in gloved hands. I tried to imagine finding Henry’s first note and pulling a pen out of my purse to write a reply. But no words came. Catherine was fluent in a language I couldn’t even pronounce.

Movement along the street caught my attention. The streetlight showed the silhouette of a bike that looked like something from the fifties that Wally and the Beav would have ridden. A rocket-shaped headlight was strapped on top of the handlebars and a wicker basket hung on the front. The rider looked my way and stopped, and I got nervous. Then I saw it was Rajhit, and got nervous for a whole different reason.

He propped the bike against the open glass double doors and stepped into the fluorescent light of the store, his hands in his pockets.

“I was just by your place,” he said.

“Hugo’s got a date tonight,” I said.

“The real estate agent or the antiques dealer?” He stood in front of the washing machine opposite me and lifted himself to sit on it.

“Not sure,” I said. “But I think he was making tofu cheesecake this afternoon.”

“Probably the golf pro then. I think she’s vegan.”

He was in a faded pair of jeans, a white button-up shirt with the tail out, and those green flip-flops. I could see his torso moving under the shirt.

“Actually, I wanted to see you,” he said.

“At this hour?”

“You’re up, aren’t you?”

“You didn’t know that.”

He fiddled with the sweet-gum leaf he’d detached from the bottom of his green flip-flop. I stretched, hoping I came across as someone who entertained here every night. We both seemed to be deciding what to say or not to say.

“I’m glad to see you,” I said. It was true. I was. But he looked a little too happy, and I felt the need to justify what I’d said. “I’d like to know what you think about something.”

He followed me to the table where my laptop was open next to the copy of
Chatterley
. He bent down to look at my screen.

“Is it wrong?” I asked. “Putting the notes out there.”

He looked at me like he wanted to ask me something, and for some reason that made me a little anxious again, the nice kind of nervous that happens when you’re alone with someone you’re attracted to, afraid he will say exactly what you want to hear and then you won’t be able to help yourself. But there was something else, a shiver under my skin from the possibility that anything could happen, as if the slightest breath could topple castles.

“No one knows who they are,” he said. “It’s anonymous. And you’re trying to help Hugo and the Dragonfly.”

“Yes, but I’m mostly trying to help myself.”

“I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

I walked over to his bike to put a little distance between us and climbed onto the leather saddle. It was a little tall for me, and I held the doorframe for balance.

“You know about bikes?” he asked.

“I had a ten-speed in high school.”

He told me how he’d found the frame on Craigslist a few months ago, painted the white lines with a brush intended for model airplanes, ordered the tires special from eBay.

“Is that what you do? Restore bikes?”

“I have no occupation, if that’s what you mean. Other than being a layabout.”

“How does that pay?” I looked down at the candy apple red of the frame.

“Terrible, but it comes with the added bonus of being a consummate disappointment to my parents.” He hopped down and walked toward the bike. I thumbed the bike’s bell like I hadn’t noticed. It sounded like the doorbell in my grandmother’s house. He straddled the front tire and held the bike near the center of the handlebars, balancing me. He told me how his father once paid a thousand people in India to pray for him to get into MIT, how he worked hard in school and grad school, worked his way around the Valley until he landed a chief technology officer position, but how the only time he was happy was riding his bike back and forth to work. “My parents used to send my picture to their friends trying to find me a wife. Now they send my résumé to executive search firms.”

“So you’re going to restore bikes all day instead?”

He started walking backward, pulling the bike with him down a row between the washers and dryers. I rested my feet on the pedals and let myself go with him.

“I like working with something I can touch. Look at her lines, the way she curves just right to sustain you and propel you at the same time. It’s engineering you can touch. I like that. I don’t know if I can make a living with it, but it feels good for now.”

He ran his hands along the handlebars to the edge of the handgrips where I held on. Even though he stopped short a few centimeters away from my skin, I could feel him. “She had qualities no one could see at first. Much like the Dragonfly.”

He let go and stepped away.

“It was good seeing you, Maggie. Tell Hugo I’ll drop by the store later in the week.”

“What about your bike?” I was still on it.

He turned and slid his hands back in his pockets like he was trying to keep them there.

“The bike is for you.”

Harmless flirtation was one thing, but this was something else. I tried to conjure a line using my mother’s finishing school charm or Rosalind Russell’s snappiness.

Instead, I said, “I’m not going to sleep with you because you gave me a bike.”

“It’s a nice bike,” he said.

“Even so.”

I couldn’t tell if the thought had never occurred to him and he was humoring me, or if he was just flat-out busted. Either way, he was enjoying himself. And what worried me more was that I was, too.

I watched him walk down Calderon Avenue through the circles of light from the streetlamps. Two houses away, he turned and waved, knowing I would still be watching him.

“What the hell is this?”

I looked up from the bottom shelf of the Dragonfly’s Romance section to see Jason standing over me with a box of books. He hadn’t expected to find me here. He especially hadn’t expected to see me next to empty shelves with a bottle of Windex and a handful of paper towels.

“This section’s a disaster,” I said, continuing to wipe down a shelf.

“This section was fine the way it was,” Jason said, glaring at me as if I’d suggested we turn the place into a Walmart. He’d complained loudly the day before as I posted signs in the store window announcing,
VISIT US ONLINE AT 
W
WW.DRAGONFLYUSEDBOOKS.COM
.

“It was a rat’s nest the way it was. Relax.” I thought it best not to mention that Hugo had given me a key. Knowing I had free access to his domain would probably send Jason into catatonic shock. But then again, maybe that wasn’t so bad. “I talked to Hugo about it. He said I could do what I liked.”

I knew Jason cared only about the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section, and it showed. It was a mosaic of perfectly ordered book spines. The mass-market paperbacks were housed separately from the trade paperbacks, which were merged with the hardbacks. British editions sat in their own section—apparently a Sci-Fi/Fantasy book sold better if it was the same version that Douglas Adams had had on his shelf. But Romance was stuffed in the back corner of the store, where the books looked as if they’d been shot out of a cannon to lie where they fell. I knew the Romance section ranked nowhere on Jason’s very short list of important things, and that this outrage of his was just dick-wagging. I was on his turf, even if it was the part of his lawn he hadn’t watered in weeks.

“Hugo said you could do this?” he asked. “Hugo?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Remember him? Balding? Beard? Pays you?”

His eyes became slits. Veins poked out of his neck. He made Khan in
Star Trek II
look like the Dalai Lama.

“Hugo!” He turned away from me and disappeared around the corner. “She’s changing shit!”

I jumped up after him. “Jason, it’s okay. Hugo’s cool with it.”

“Bullshit!” He pushed his way past a couple of browsing customers. “Hugo!”

A man examining a biography of Churchill pointed to the men’s room. “I just saw him go in there.”

Jason pushed the restroom door and stood there, holding the door open. The Churchill reader did a double take and then headed toward the door of the Dragonfly, leaving the book behind. I halted my pursuit of Jason, but not before I caught a glimpse of Hugo’s feet under the first of two stalls.

“Hugo, do you know what she’s done?”

“Jason,” I heard Hugo say, his voice bouncing off the tiles. “I’m imagining my Place of Peace, where the grass is green and soft and birds sing and all the bathrooms have padlocks.”

“What’s next? Flowered wallpaper? Doilies? You gotta be honest with me, man. This place is going to start smelling lemony fresh, isn’t it?”

“Negative energy, Jason. We’ve talked about this.”

“She’s got Windex. Books are supposed to be dusty. They smell good when they’re dusty.”

“Hugo!” I kept myself at a safe distance, about halfway down the aisle from the open door. “I tried to explain to him!”

Something rubbed against my leg and I was hit with a stench that could curl steel. I looked down to see Grendel, the Dragonfly’s cat, walking by me. He was long-haired and black, with a bite taken out of his right ear, and he looked more like a runty bear cub than a cat. Usually, Grendel perched on top of the stacks and swatted at customer’s heads as they passed by. This was a rare ground appearance. I wondered if he always smelled this bad and if the stench just usually drifted upward, which might explain why the office space above the Dragonfly had been empty for two months. You can blame only so much on the recession. Grendel sauntered past me, carrying something in his mouth, and headed toward the open men’s room door.

“I had that section just the way I wanted it,” Jason said. “She doesn’t have any experience with this. We haven’t trained her. What’s she doing messing with our stuff?”

“Grendel’s here,” Hugo said. “Grendel smells like last year’s garbage. Grendel’s dropping a bird carcass on my foot. I’m in my Place of Peace. I’m in my Place of Peace.”

“I quit!” Jason slammed the door shut. A moment later, I heard the bell over the front door ring and the commotion of Jason trying to maneuver his bike out of the store. The few customers left in the stacks all looked at me.

“I don’t actually work here. I’m just helping.”

I scurried back to the Romance section and sat on the floor, hiding from the scene up front. The thing about the Dragonfly, to pile onto its load of idiosyncrasies, was that there were only two places in the whole store where I got decent cell phone coverage, near the window in the chairs and in the very back, where I was now. So as soon as I sat down, my phone started to vibrate in my pocket, signaling an alert from an app I’d installed to track how many views the website got and how many times the Facebook and Twitter posts had been shared. When I saw the numbers, I nearly dropped the phone. Henry and Catherine had gone viral.