The Moment of Everything (11 page)

“What?” I had no idea who he was talking about.

“He’s not exactly Mr. Commitment, you know,” Jason said. “Every time there’s a single woman in the game, he goes all horndog. They mess around for a while, then it’s all ‘I can’t commit to one person because that’ll fuck up my inner pink unicorn.’ Then we’re out a player. The last time I saw Deborah she was in the store looking for
Eat, Pray, Love
and she looked like she already had the
Eat
part worked out for herself. I don’t know why all the women are so into him. He’s not even that good of a player.”

“Whatever there is between me and Rajhit is between me and Rajhit,” I said.

“I just don’t want to be involved with all the drama. Okay? No drama.”

Jason moved over to the minstrels and sat on the floor behind them, leaning against the wall and accepting another beer from the lute player. I lay where I was and tried to figure out exactly how this evening had gone so wrong.

I got up to fill my glass from the pitcher of martinis Jesse had put in the fridge, but there were two twentysomething girls standing between me and my alcohol, lost in Hugo’s set of Magnetic Poetry—Shakespeare Edition. The blond girl, who had a pixie cut and lizard tattoo on her shoulder, had just finished
YOUR PECULIAR PURPLE GROAN
. Then the redheaded harp player scanned the words across Hugo’s freezer door and made
TONGUE GODDESS SATISFY SMOOTH LUST
. Pixie Cut looked at her with a cocked eyebrow. She moved
NIBBLE
to a blank space. Redhead added
QUAKING
. Pixie Cut moved
DESIRE
. They glanced around them and snickered, like they thought they were getting away with something. Redhead reached behind Pixie Cut and tucked the tag in the back of her tank top that had been sticking out. And when her hand ran back along Pixie Cut’s shoulder, she reached for it and kissed it.

I looked around to see if anyone else was seeing this, or if anyone was seeing me see this. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I’d seen them both arrive separately, noticed them being introduced to each other. How long ago was that? An hour? Two? And now they were here—flirting, blushing—and my body started to remember how easy all that used to be.

As I stood there, someone took my hand, which had been resting on Hugo’s counter. It was Mrs. Callahn. She took my other one as well and peered down at them.

“It’s your turn now.”

For a second, my thoughts still so focused on the two girls, I thought she meant it was my turn to find someone. But then she turned my palms up and rotated my thumbs around in their sockets and pressed down on the fleshy parts of my hands, staring down at them through tortoiseshell reading glasses with a beaded chain. She’d meant it was my turn to have my palms read.

She ran her fingertips over the lines in each palm. They felt like cactus spines, and I instinctively jerked my hand, but it only made her hold on tighter. She leaned in, peering at my hands, tilting them toward the light above Hugo’s stove. Then she closed my palms and held them together. She stood straight and let her glasses drop so that they hung between her breasts.

“Your heart is made of paper,” she said. “Water can dissolve it. Earth can bury it. Wind can blow it away.”

I felt my stomach lurch. In the shadows, I could finally see the lines of age in her face, like cracks in hard brown earth that had seen little rain. The vise of her hands pressed mine tighter together. I jerked my hands away.

“That’s a terrible thing to say to someone.”

She reached over the counter and handed me a cocktail glass.

“Protect it. Find another job. Find another boyfriend. Life at the Dragonfly is not for you.”

She toasted me and walked across the room to fill someone else with dread. I stared at my drink and felt I’d had my fill. I stepped over to the sink and poured my drink down the drain. Hugo reached over from his post at the stove and circled his palm on my back in a worried way.

“Too many cocktails,” I said.

I stumbled down the hall to the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. A bit of light came in from outside through the small window over the bathtub. The water made my skin feel brittle. I sat on the edge of the tub and hugged my knees until I could breathe again.

Turning off the light behind me, I saw Rajhit in the hallway. He was near the living room, his back to me, leaning against the wall. I stood in the dark and looked at how his body curved, how he stood just out of the light of the room. I thought of all those boys in my past, the ones with sea salt skin, most of them as eager to please me as much as they were pleased with themselves. How easy it had been, how little it took. A whisper in an ear, a touch on the arm. Before anyone cared what I did for a living or what my life goals were. Before I started calculating how long it would take for a relationship to get tired. Back when I was younger, there were just bodies and need, raw and necessary. Each breathless moment before a first kiss, I’d think,
Please don’t let him be “the one.”
 I’m not ready yet.
 I wasn’t ready to sleep at a prince’s doorstep and lose my voice, like my mother. And with that, I’d clung to my impermanent heart that expected so little and gave so little in return.

I lay my fingertips against his back. He turned and held his arms out to me, as one is prone to do after several cocktails, and I slid into his hug. His hands ran up and down my back in a reassuring, friendly sort of way and for a moment I thought that would be the end of it. But we went past the time limit for platonic separation and his hands slowed, resting on the small of my back. I exhaled and felt myself go limp against him.

“What Jason was talking about—” he said.

I cut him off with a shake of my head.

“I want this to happen,” he said. “You and me.”

I reached up and touched his face, touched the Henry-ness of him. His arms tightened, and my body pressed against him. I’d taken one step too many to go back. I brushed my lips against the small triangle of skin above his collar and heard the breath rush out of him. Then he kissed me, more cautiously than I would have expected. My fingers ran along his waist until they found skin beneath his shirt.
I want to know what it’s like for you to feel my hands on you, to hear my voice say your name.

“I thought you weren’t going to sleep with me because I gave you a bike,” he said.

“It’s a pretty nice bike.”

I’d made a deal with myself as I watched the sun peek in through the small window in the Dragonfly’s office. When the edge of the sunlight reached the corner of the desk, I’d roll off the sofa and get back to work. That was half an hour ago. The sun was well past the corner and I was still on the office sofa, my head resting on the store’s earthquake emergency kit, which consisted of a blanket, cat food, and vodka. I couldn’t afford this lying about. I had stacks of books to move, Grendel the deranged cat to avoid, oh, and my lunch with Avi later in the day. I just needed to rest a decade or two and then I’d be fine.

It wasn’t really a hangover. It was sitting in that sunny spot, thinking about the night before, and feeling that warm middle-of-the-cookie feeling every time I thought of Rajhit. He had been the lover I’d imagined him to be, even with the first-time-together fumbling. It was sweet and exciting being with someone new. And afterward, he snuck back over to Hugo’s and returned with cheese, apples, and Belgian beer. With impish dramatics, he replayed his recent dinner at a restaurant up in Napa where all of the menu items were phrased as affirmations, so when he ordered he said things like, “I’d like Radiance Filled with Healing and Light with a side of Endless Joy.” I don’t know if it was Rajhit or the sex, but at that moment, I felt like I could say words like that in all seriousness.

He’d gotten up around four in the morning, and I’d walked him to the door. There was more kissing at the threshold while I imagined how good my bed would smell—full of him and me—when I got back to it. And then he was gone, and I was alone with all the leftover sweetness.

The door to the Dragonfly’s office squeaked open, and Hugo slipped through, walked slowly and deliberately over to me, and set down a highball of light brown liquid.

“Hair of the dog?” I asked.

“Apple cider vinegar and honey in water,” he said. “Best hangover tonic there is.”

“I’m doing pretty good,” I said, stretching and then scratching my belly with both hands like I’d seen him do a hundred times.

Hugo walked over to his desk and leaned back into the chair. Stretching his legs straight out and crossing at the ankles, he started sorting through the mail. I’d sat in a lot of desk chairs in my life, and I can say with no hesitation that the Dragonfly’s desk chair should be branded a crime against humanity. But somehow Hugo looked like he was seated in a hammock between two palm trees.

“I take it we’re talking about Rajhit,” he said.

“I know he’s a friend of yours. Are you weirded out?”

He smiled.

“Maggie,” he said, “if I had a problem with my friends sleeping together now and then, I’d be a very lonely man.”

Hugo opened a letter and spent a moment reading it before stuffing it in his shirt pocket. He rubbed his hand over his beard, his thoughts somewhere else.

I wondered what was in the letter. I’d started handling all the bills and paperwork lately. Robert played it cool, but I could tell he was doing his accountant’s inner happy dance every time we talked. He and I had given up on convincing Hugo and Jason that a used computer and retail sales software would be the way to go. Instead I brought my laptop in every day and totaled up the day’s sales to enter into the online accounting app Robert used. While I was entering the income, Robert was entering the expenses, so I could see the whole money picture for the Dragonfly. And what I was seeing was encouraging. Before my arrival, the balance sheet for the Dragonfly was about as uplifting as
Angela’s Ashes
. But lately, I’d seen an uptick. It was small, but it was definitely there, a tiny tadpole of hope.

I pointed to the envelope. “I can take care of that for you.”

“No, no,” Hugo said, patting his pocket. “This one’s just for me.”

From the sofa, I could make out the logo for our building management company. I let it go. We were fine on the basics: rent, utilities, and such. Paychecks were always iffy, but the money was always there somehow, appearing from an owner’s equity account. I asked Hugo about it once, and he told me that was from income he received for some patents he’d gotten back in his student days at Cal. He wasn’t crazy rich or anything, but he wasn’t depending on the Dragonfly to keep him afloat. But I also didn’t want the Dragonfly to bleed him dry. I now had another reason to turn the store around.

“Maggie,” Hugo said. “About Rajhit…”

“Jason told me,” I said.

“Jason? About what?”

“About Deborah and the others,” I said. “So he’s a lothario. I think I might try that for a while. What’s the female version? Lotharia? I like it.”

“Maggie.”

“What?” I asked. “An uncommitted lifestyle seems to have worked out well for you. You seem happy.”

His eyes widened for a second as if he seemed surprised that I would think that, and that, in turn, surprised me. If you asked me, or practically anyone who had ever stepped foot in the Dragonfly, Hugo was quite possibly the most well-contented person in existence. But now his face softened and looked a little distant and I realized how foolish it was to think you understood anyone else’s state of being.

“Better drink your tonic,” Hugo said, patting the envelope in his shirt pocket. “Jason’s going to need you.”

When he left, I sat up on the sofa and looked at his vacant chair. The room had felt quiet before he came in, but now it felt empty.

“So, how does this work?” Avi asked. “I cry a bit, tell you what a bitch she is, that sort of thing.”

We sat at one of the sidewalk tables in front of Avi’s favorite Thai restaurant on Castro Street.

“That’s what they do in the movies,” I said.

I didn’t really know what to expect from this lunch. But Avi seemed revved up and ready to go. She’d even ordered for us before I got there, saying that the panang curry here was the best on the peninsula.

“Don’t you do this kind of thing all the time? Girl time?” she asked.

I took a long sip from my water glass and wished it were vodka.

“My best friend is
Dizzy
. He looks at relationships like an intramural sport, so there’s not a lot of ‘that bastard’ and ‘you deserve better.’ There’s just a lot of moving on.”

“So, the other night’s supportive woman thing…”

“You’re my first,” I said.

Avi’s finger tapped her upper lip.

“God, I wished I still smoked.”

“So not a lot of women friends for you either?”

She told me women friends were always difficult. They always wanted something from her. Having seen the crew at the SVWEABC, I could understand why she felt that way.

“I’m not any different,” I said. “I want something from you, too.”

“Yes, but you’re honest about it. That makes you different.”

We asked for the wine list and soon a cabernet arrived. Avi pulled out a small bottle of hot sauce she carried in her bag for the extra spicy catfish curry she’d just ordered.

“You know what I don’t understand about all of these movies about women’s friendships?” she said. “How do they have time to spend that much time together?”

“I know,” I said. “They have time for all those brunches and cocktails. Don’t they ever have to do the laundry?”

“Or go to the grocery store?”

“Or scrub the toilet?”

“Exactly,” she said, in a way that made me think Avi hadn’t seen a toilet brush in years, if ever.

“To real women,” she said, holding up her wineglass for a toast.

And then the bonding began. I filled her in on Rajhit.

“So no phone numbers, no texting? He just shows up? And the sex was great?” she asked.

“Well, yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“I don’t think I could ever get a woman to do that,” she said. She didn’t elaborate beyond, “I really need to stop dating such young women.” But that was fine with me. We were eating curry and drinking wine under an umbrella instead of slaving away in an office. And then my office came to find me.

We were on our second glass of cabernet when I looked up to see Jason.

“What the hell? You’re still here?” he started.

“Keep it down,” I said. People at other tables turned to look at us.

“You were out most of the morning, and now you’re thirty minutes past your lunch break.”

Hugo had taken the afternoon off, and I’d told Jason I’d be back at the store in time for him to meet friends for a marathon of the original
Battlestar Galactica
on the Syfy channel.

“Just lock up and take off. I’ll be done soon.”

Jason glared at me with a look that said that I was ruining his life. He’d hardly had any time in the reading chair since I’d started working in the Dragonfly and he really hated that. But now we were peers, comrades in the great adventure of turning the Unwanted books into the Wanted. Damn it, I’d dusted the entire History section in the short time I’d spent in the store that morning. That earned me the right to whichever springless sinkhole of a reading chair Hugo wasn’t planted in, and I wasn’t giving that up for anyone. As for today, so what if Jason was going to miss the initial Cylon attack and disco scenes from a seventies sci-fi show? Life was hard.

“I can’t leave now, dumbass. My whole freaking day just blew up. There’s too many people in the store,” Jason said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Customers! You know, people who buy things. The store is packed. And it’s
your
fault. I had to get the CIA Bathroom to watch over things just so I could come here.”

Indignant, he headed back toward the Dragonfly, yanked open the door, and disappeared inside. I watched as half a dozen people followed behind him. Half a dozen.

“Avi, I think I need to go.”

“I think I need to go with you.”

She tossed some money onto the table next to our unfinished plates and we hurried down the block and a half to the Dragonfly. My jaw dropped when I stepped inside. The Dragonfly was abuzz with business. John of the CIA Bathroom emerged from the stacks carrying an armload of books and trailing behind two high-heeled, overly perfumed women I’d seen pictures of on real estate ads in the
Mountain View Voice
. The two Mikes were adding up purchases and putting cash in the till. And for each person they were helping there was a line of three or four more customers with at least a dozen or so books.

“I thought you said this store was failing,” Avi said. “This isn’t what failure looks like.”

It was like that for another two hours. Customers came and came and books disappeared and cash stacked up. Jason’s recruits manned the cash register. Avi walked through the store taking pictures of happy customers with her cell phone. “Good for the Facebook page,” she said. Jason and I scurried all over the store trying to find people’s requests. In Jason’s perfectly ordered Sci-Fi/Fantasy section, this was no problem. But for the rest of the store, it was just me and lots and lots and lots of boxes. I’d never worked so hard. My brain was fried from trying to find the books people asked for, and my body ached from moving boxes to be able to uncover these treasures.

And then, just two hours after it began, it was over. The store was quiet again. I added credit to the CIA Bathroom’s store accounts for their help and then settled into the chair across from Avi with a paper cup of wine that had appeared from nowhere.

“I made a dash to the market across the street,” she said. “I thought maybe you could use it.”

Jason appeared from the stacks, walking his bike toward the front door.

“I
hate
Meetups,” he said, pushing his bike out the door. “Some over-forty singles group saw the store’s website and got all gooey and decided to blow up my afternoon.”

“So you’re working in the shop now, not just volunteering time?” Avi asked after he left.

“Yeah, that was an accident.”

“This is marvelous. I wish I’d done something like this in my thirties. You’re taking this time to do what you love.”

“I don’t
love
this. Seriously, look at this place. It’s…it’s exhausting.”

“Maggie,” she said, leaning in toward me. “It’s a book shop. Who wouldn’t want to spend their days in a book shop?”

“Someone who understands what hard work it is. I love reading. I love Hugo. But I don’t love the Dragonfly.”

I told her about how people would carry in boxes of books that I suspected had been rejected by the local landfill. These boxes had been sitting in their garages on top of motor oil stains and soaking up the leaks from the water heater. There was one box that provided a home for a silverfish colony and another that was the last earthly stop for a possum. The books held the smell of cheap cigars, broken liquor bottles, and even residues of the family barbecue. Their owners wanted top trade-in value, which we weren’t giving, and they wanted it in cash, which we didn’t provide. And I had the honor of running frantically to the Chinese herb store for Fire Dragon incense sticks that were guaranteed to cover any smell.

“And then there’s the books,” I said. “There’s no way to describe to you the mountains of books here. And they just keep coming.”

“The more customers you have, the more books will walk out the door.”

I drained my cup of wine and dropped my head in my hands.

“And I am all kinds of broke,” I said. “You saw what it was like today. I’m doing this for ten dollars an hour. Avi, I need my ArGoNet job back. I’ll take a salary cut. I don’t care. I just can’t do this.”

Avi slipped the wine bottle from my fingers and set it down on the table.

“The board is looking for a buyer for ArGoNet,” she said. “This last infusion of funding is just to keep it going until someone comes along to buy it.”

So it was over. ArGoNet was just like all the companies I’d worked at before. Only I hadn’t started the others, just jumped on the merry-go-round when it was already turning. With ArGoNet, I put the ride together, picked out the horses and the music, and flipped the On switch. Me and Dizz.

“I’m sorry if I’ve given you a shock,” she said.