The Moment of Everything (7 page)

“That’s fucking
gold
you’ve got there,” Dizzy said, pointing his spatula at me. “One hundred thousand views in twenty-four hours for a shitty little bookstore? Fucking gold.”

Sitting at my breakfast bar, I yawned in delight as Dizzy stood at the stove and made us the fried bologna sandwiches he’d long ago perfected. Growing up, Dizzy and I would watch his mom, Miss Velda, as she made us these sandwiches—greasy, goopy glorious pokes in the eyeball to every fitness guru who ever insisted we should all give up carbs or examine our poop. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d fed them to us just to piss off Jane Fonda. For years we watched Miss Velda and memorized each step. She’d slather Duke’s mayonnaise onto Sunbeam white bread, sweeter than molasses. She’d press down on the bologna with her spatula when it domed up on the heat of the cast-iron skillet to make sure the center part had that nice scald on it just like the edges. She’d peel off a slice of American cheese and melt it over the bologna until it oozed like lava. Then she’d scoop it all onto the Sunbeam, and we were just a bag full of Lay’s potato chips and a dill pickle away from heaven.

Dizzy and I carried on this tradition in our dorm’s basement kitchen at Carolina. Even the greatest of disappointments had the silver lining of fried bologna sandwiches. A lower-than-expected test grade, a broken heart, or even a bad weather forecast would become an excuse to further Dizzy’s birthright of the best fried bologna sandwiches in all creation. It was then he became an artist at Picasso levels. He’d slice the bologna himself into a thick disk that carpeted the bread even after shrinking up a bit on the skillet. Then he’d double up on the cheese, draping one square angled over the other so the corners fully covered the circle of bologna and left no rounded edges exposed. And after placing all of this on the bottom slice of bread, he revealed the inspiration that is the mark of true genius. He layered potato chips on top of the bologna and cheese before covering it with the second slice of lavishly mayo-ed bread. The result was a Fourth of July explosion of sweet and salty and savory that surfed waves of cholesterol. We could feel our arteries clogging with each bite.

“Jesus wept,” Dizzy said. “Who would have thought you could get those numbers out of a few love letters? Fuck me sideways. Any local retail outfit around would love to have that kind of traffic. Your reporting system must be spinning like a slot machine hitting the jackpot.”

“I had to turn off the tracking app on my phone,” I told him. “Jason hates the sounds a cell phone makes, so I was on vibrate, but it was like walking around with an angry hornet in my pocket.”

Most of the hits were from the Dragonfly’s Facebook page I’d created. But then other traffic came in from different pages, such as other used bookstores, blogs about romance and dating, blogs about books, blogs about the lost art of letter-writing, Twitter feeds from a romance novelist and grad student at Northwestern. The fifty or so people I’d e-mailed the site URL to the night before had shared it with another fifty or so people. But a few of those people had a much wider audience, so the numbers jumped to the hundreds and then the thousands quickly. My in-box for the [email protected] account I’d set up twenty-four hours ago already had more than a hundred e-mails. I scanned the subject lines. People wanted more, lots more. They wanted to know what happened to Henry and Catherine. Did they get married? Are they still together? It was a collective lunge toward a happy ending, and I wished I had one to give them.

“Have you told Avi about these numbers yet?” he asked.

I shook my head. “It’s so new. And I’m not sure what the best approach is.”

“Food is always the best approach,” Dizzy said. “Call her up and ask her to lunch.”

“I don’t think I can just call up someone like Avi and ask her to lunch. Besides, I’m broke. Where am I going to take her to lunch?”

He reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

“Here’s fifty bucks. Chase around that Korean food truck that only tweets its location. She’ll think you’re original. If she likes finding talent in unusual places, wait until she tries the food.”

“And how are we supposed to chase down this mystical food truck? I sold my car, remember?”

Dizzy stopped for a moment and then started digging in his pocket for his keys.

“Dizz, it’s okay. I’ll ask her to meet me someplace near the bookshop. And thanks for the loan.”

“It’s a gift,” he said. “A thank-you for saving that sorry-ass book club the other day. Sugarbritches, I’m already mentally redecorating your office for when you come back.”

Dizzy dropped another slice of bologna in the hot skillet on my stove and tipped his spatula in the direction of my bike, which was parked in the living room.

“That really is a nice bike. Hell, I’d sleep with him for that bike. So you think this Rajhit guy is the next ex–Mr. Right Now?”

“Is your pessimism meant to be reverse psychology?”

“Nah, it’s pretty much genuine. What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know. There’s just something so kind of earnest about him.”

“Yeah, we don’t want any of that. No fucking forthrightness either. And that honesty bullshit is just asswipe for the lame-minded and gullible.”

“Do you have a point here?”

“My point is this,” Dizzy said. “If you’re going to rule someone out, it’s got to be for a bigger flippin’ reason than he’s got some exceptional quality that requires a nineteenth-century adjective to describe it. Look, I know Bryan messed you up a bit when he went to Austin…”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“Bullshit it’s not that,” he said.

“I mean it’s not that he left. It’s what it was like when he was here.”

Dizzy shrugged. “You were with him for two years and he still introduced you as ‘my friend Maggie.’ You don’t get heartbroken over a guy like that.”

“It just all seems like more trouble than it’s worth,” I said.

“Then you’re not doing it right.”

“I’m not talking about sex.”

“Neither am I,” he said. “Mayo the bread.”

“What about you?” I asked, taking the bread out of the bag. “The Apple guy didn’t work out?”

“He wanted to order Philadelphia rolls. At Sushi Maru. Can you believe that? You’re in this palace of authentic…
authentic
…sushi and you order a fucking Philadelphia roll. Let’s just go to South Legend and order lemon chicken while we’re at it. And you know the goddamn heathen cut his linguini with a knife. A knife!”

“I take it I can read up on the details online?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all over Urbanspoon,” Dizzy said, sliding the cheese-carpeted bologna onto the bread. “Fuck ’em. We’ll stay single forever and shack up in a nursing home for gay gods and their favorite fruit flies.”

“To wiping drool off each other’s chins,” I said and held my beer bottle out for him to clink, but he left me hanging as an explosion went off in his pocket.

“Shit,” Dizzy said. He dug around for his phone and looked at the text message. “It’s after lunch in New Delhi. I’ve got to get into the office. Wander Fish has the whole company by the balls. We’ve got to put together a demo for them by Monday.”

Demos meant hours and hours of late nights knitting together parts of the product to give the impression the software did more than it could. They were brutal, like running a marathon at a full sprint. They would need him tonight in the worst way.

“You know what? I’ll come with you.”

“What was that?” Dizzy asked, getting up.

“Give me a minute.”

I slid past him and waded through the flood of clothes on my bedroom floor to the corner, where I was sure there was a reasonably clean pair of jeans I could trade in for my sweats.

“You don’t work there anymore,” he called from the kitchen.

“Maybe not, but I’m still a stockholder. What are they going to do? Throw me out?”

I was tingling at the thought of the night ahead. The adrenaline of a deadline, the dull ache behind my eyes, the self-inflated sense of importance, the primal joy of seeing the Starbucks across the street open at five o’clock tomorrow morning. I’d gotten a hundred thousand views of the Dragonfly’s website in twenty-four hours. I was a goddess. ArGoNet so deserved me.

“It’ll be great. Just like it used to be,” I said, sniffing sweatshirts and pulling on the least offensive one. “You’ll see. I’m the empress of demos, remember? You used to say that all the time. They laid me off because they couldn’t afford me, right? Okay, I’m not asking for money. I’m just helping.”

Dizzy stood, leaning against my bedroom door with his arms folded.

“You want me to come with you, right?” I asked.

“You know I do.”

“Okay, so, what’s the problem?”

He just stood there and waited for me to answer my own question. I could feel the corners of my eyes heat up with traitorous tears. He wrapped his arms around me. For a long moment, one of those that lasts longer than others, I thought he would say it. If they didn’t want me, then he didn’t want them. But from the living room, I heard his phone announce another text message.

“We’re going to get you back,” he said. “Call Avi. Go have lunch. It’s going to be just like before.”

He looked at me expectantly. Had he said the right words? Was I okay? Could he leave now?

“Helping out at the Dragonfly is temporary,” I said. “I just need something to impress Avi. You know that, right?”

“Of course,” he said, heading for the door. “We’re getting you back. You’ll see.”

I watched from the doorway as he drove away in his French-fry-grease convertible with a wave. I looked over at Hugo’s windows. They were dark and his old Volvo was absent from the driveway. I’d have to wait for him and our chai tea from Trader Joe’s. I was now in the business of waiting.

The next day, Hugo stood at the window of the Dragonfly, arms folded, glaring across the street at the sign in front of Apollo Books & Music:
ASK US ABOUT OUR USED BOOKS
.

“Fascists,” Hugo muttered, pacing around the reading chairs. He yelped when Grendel swatted at his ankle. Jason scooped up the cat in his arms, scratching him behind his ear, the one with the bite taken out of it. He bent over and whispered to the cat, probably something along the lines of, “Be patient, we’ll get them when they’re sleeping.”

“It’s not just across the street,” Jason said. “They’re all over.”

I’d seen them myself. Big beautiful signs in minimalist font announcing Apollo had one other way to sell books on the cheap.

“Robert, can we sue them?” Hugo asked the man behind the counter. Robert was Hugo’s accountant, a friend from his Berkeley days. He appeared each month to mumble new curse words over Hugo’s bookkeeping. I’d always thought of accountants as hobbits in short-sleeve dress shirts, fat ties, and Buddy Holly glasses. But Robert looked like Shaft in a Hawaiian shirt. He’d been married to the same woman for twenty-five years, had a son starting at MIT in the fall, and had just bought a vacation home in Tahoe. Hugo would never say either way, but there was a lingering suspicion in the Dragonfly that Robert could be a Republican.

“Sue them? You break your neck on their wet bathroom floor? Sure,” Robert said. “But I think Apollo can sell some damn books.”

“Can we talk about this again, please?” I tugged on Hugo’s sleeve and held
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
out to him. “You’re absolutely sure you have no idea where this came from?”

Hugo looked at me over the rims of his reading glasses.

“Maggie, I’m old. I have a double-decker pill case. I drink martinis made with pot-infused vodka. It’s Tuesday, right?”

“Monday.”

“You see my point.”

“You’re not old.”

Hugo grinned and rubbed his belly.

“I went by Henry for a while,” he said. “In college, I think. A young lady I was seeing at the time thought Hugo sounded like a communist’s name.”

“She was right,” Jason said.

I stood in front of Hugo and pointed to
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.

“Comrade, please. Focus,” I said.

I told him about the e-mails and Facebook posts and the questions on Twitter from people wanting to know what had happened.

“Everyone wants answers,” I said.

“Sometimes it’s the questions that are a lot more interesting,” Hugo said, sliding the book from my hands and giving it to Jason. “Jason, what about you? Do you know anything about this?”

Jason took the book from me, held it to his head, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes, I see something. It’s becoming clearer. There it is. It’s a snowball being thrown through the gates of hell.”

“You’re not helping,” I said, taking the book back.

“Wasn’t trying to.” He got up and hoisted himself onto the counter to sit next to Robert’s laptop, which Robert then moved away from him with an annoyed sigh. “Look, people write all kinds of crap in books. Doodles, reminder lists, the names of slutty girlfriends crossed out and replaced by the names of other slutty girlfriends.”

“Negative energy, Jason,” Hugo said.

Jason reached for a stack of books in front of the counter. He thumbed through the first one, put it aside, and then riffled through a second, Lonely Planet’s
Paris
, stopping every few pages.

“Check it out,” he said. “All the best places to kiss underlined with little hearts as a ranking system. It doesn’t mean shit. It’s just people using books for things that they can’t fit on a highway overpass. Go ahead. Pick one.”

I lifted
Wild Orchids and Trotsky
from the stack near the counter. On the back of the softcover was a note starting just above the bar code and written diagonally across, the lines getting shorter the closer the writer worked toward the corner of the book.