The Moment of Everything (12 page)

I shook my head and fought the sob in my throat that the one cup of wine had paved a path for. I guess I’d known for some time that this would be ArGoNet’s eventual fate. I just couldn’t own up to it.

“Dizzy will land on his feet,” Avi said. “People like Dizzy always do. The buyer will want him and the engineering team. Everyone else, we’ll have to wait and see. But they’ll get good severance packages, Maggie. I’ll see to that.”

I thought about how long ago my own layoff package was kaput.

“And me?”

“You have to move forward, Maggie. There’s no going back. And it’s best you don’t say anything to Dizzy.”

“He knows, doesn’t he? He’s the CTO.”

“Of course. But you probably shouldn’t know. I should have said, it’s best for me that you not say anything. To anyone really.”

We finished the wine, and then I snagged a half bottle of gin from Hugo’s office and mixed it with a can of sugar-free fizzy lemonade that probably belonged to Jason. At the front of the store, we turned the reading chairs away from Castro Street so we could survey all that was Dragonfly Used Books.

“Are you
sure
you don’t love this place?” Avi asked.

“Okay, maybe a little.”

“Give it some time,” she said. “It’s good that the community has a place like this. Keep it going.”

She reached into her Prada handbag, which probably cost as much as my monthly rent, and pulled out a yellowed page from my
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. I recognized Henry’s handwriting in the margin.

I turned it over and there was a reply from Catherine.

“I found it under the chair you sat in at our last book club meeting. I should have given it to you earlier. I just wasn’t ready to let it go.”

When she left, I was still in my chair holding the page from
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
with the notes on it. I grabbed my backpack from behind the chair and reached into the large pocket where I kept Henry and Catherine’s book. But the pocket was empty. The book was gone.

The following Tuesday morning, Hugo and I were alone in the Dragonfly. Jason was out of the store for a rare day off. Now was my chance. It’d taken me two days to put the Romance section back together after Jason’s rainbow connection. At this point, I was sure Jason was lulled into thinking I was just going to roll over and take his abuse. He was wrong.

The Sci-Fi/Fantasy section lined the west wall of the store, stretching all the way to the back corner and to the door of Hugo’s office. While the rest of the store resembled a medieval street grid, Jason’s SF/F section could have been designed by Roman engineers. Trade paperbacks were separated from the mass markets, and the series books—
Star Trek
,
Star Wars
,
Conan the Barbarian
,
Sanctuary
,
Thieves’ World
, and on and on and on—had their own section as well.

I didn’t know much about the SF/F world, but I’d spent enough time in the Dragonfly with Jason to know one thing. You had to respect the series. Books of a series were expected to be found together, which is not a big deal if they were all written by the same author. But some series, like
Star Wars
, were written by many different authors but still grouped together because they were part of the same series. Today I would set them free.

The
Star Wars
books were hugely popular with the Dragonfly clientele, so you’d think Jason would have them displayed right up front. But Jason tucked them away on the bottom row in the farthermost corner of the section from the casual browser’s eyes. If people asked him where they were, Jason would slowly start toward the stacks while asking questions like “What does the TIE stand for in TIE fighter?” or “What was the purpose of the Cloud City?” Answer correctly and he’d take them directly to his treasure and give them a discount. Answer incorrectly and he’d motion in the general direction and ignore their cries for help when they got lost. And then there was Grendel, whose favorite napping place was somewhere along the way, so they had the possibility of losing a limb to look forward to as well.

But I had an advantage as I made my way toward the
Star Wars
books. I knew exactly where Grendel was, napping in a cubbyhole Jason had carved out for him on the fourth row, about shoulder level, just under the
Conan the Barbarian
series. Out of the corner of my eye—it was never a good idea to go eyeball to eyeball with Grendel unless you had your own blood supply—I saw him perk up and roll into a crouch. I was wearing a pair of ski gloves, and just as he was about to swat at me, I grabbed him. There was much screeching as I ran to the back of the store and tossed him out the back door next to the garbage cans.

I loaded up an armful of the
Star Wars
books and looked at the spines. Troy Denning. It took me a while to fit him into the
D
’s in the main Sci-Fi section next to a Cory Doctorow novel. James Luceno, K. W. Jeter, Roger MacBride Allen, Timothy Zahn. All these
Star Wars
authors found new homes among their alphabetical brethren. And when I was done, I moved a few of the
Z
’s down to the empty shelf to camouflage my effort.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Hugo asked.

“More than I want to look like Salma Hayek.”

“And you’re sure this frustration isn’t about losing
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

I’d spent the last twenty-four hours looking everywhere for the book. Hugo and I couldn’t find it anywhere in the Dragonfly or my apartment. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember where I’d had it last. I’d always made a point of putting it in my backpack. And now it was gone, probably after the Meetup, the flush of customers in the store, during which my backpack had been out in the open for anyone to get to. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Now Henry and Catherine were in someone else’s hands, lost to me. I wish the thief had taken my wallet instead.

Hugo had stepped over to Cuppa Joe to fetch us a couple of blended mochas, and I’d started on the
Doctor Who
books when a whiff of expensive perfume drifted in with the afternoon breeze. I turned around and saw a girl of about twenty, whose face glowed with a delighted anticipation you’d expect she reserved for a puppy or a member of Coldplay. She fingered the ends of her straight blond hair, which was held back from her face by a faded bandana. Under the frayed ends of her denim skirt, I noticed a brand-new pair of sandals that, if memory served, I’d seen on Zappos.com for around $400. It took a lot of money and effort to look that granola.

“Do you work here?” she asked.

“
Work
is a rather relative word around here,” I said, struggling to squeeze a book into its new home. “You could say I’m empowered to help you.”

“I’m looking for Jason.”

“He’s not here today. Is there something I can do for you?”

“No,” she said, still gazing around the store. “I just wanted to see Jason.”

I took a good look at her. Toned arms and a flat stomach from what I assumed to be years of dance lessons. A tan too deep for the Bay Area, where the beaches saw more fog than sun, so I guessed a recent trip with the parents to Mexico or the Caribbean. The soft hands and new manicure with sparkle pink nail polish led me to conclude the trip wasn’t to build homes for the poor. Even the
Che
T-shirt knotted just above her pierced navel couldn’t hide the smell of money. How did Jason get on the radar of a girl like this?

“I can give him a message,” I said.

“I’ll leave him a note,” she said.

She pulled out a small pad from a drooping canvas bag proclaiming
Free Tibet
in graffiti lettering. As she held the pad up against the wall to write, I tried not to look over her shoulder. Well, I actually didn’t try that hard.

Frederick? Kingdom? Riches?

When she was done, she folded the note once, twice, and then she continued to fold it into an origami swan. Setting the creature in her palm, she held it out to me, like a princess bestowing a gift on a peasant.

“You want me to give this to Jason, right?” I asked.

“Yes, Jason.”

“Short guy. Bit of a limp.”

“That’s him.”

I took the swan and she fluttered her fingers at me in a wave good-bye, and then out the door she went, almost knocking over Hugo, who was returning with our drinks. I followed her with my eyes as she walked by Cuppa Joe, where the Overly Tattooed & Pierced parked in front nearly fell out of their seats.

“Hugo!
She
was looking for Jason.”

“Our Jason?” Hugo replied. “Short, bit of a limp?”

“Yep.”

“The universe is miraculous.”

What peculiar formulas of the universe had brought her and Jason together? I wondered. Were they dating? I couldn’t imagine Jason dating anyone. He might have to stop being snarky for five minutes and his whole being would implode. Now I considered what it must be like for someone like Jason to impress a girl. I’d never asked about his limp or his hands. Nor the odd shape of his head. I’d told myself it would be intrusive to ask, but the truth was I feared his answer. I didn’t want to know his tale of woe. I needed him to remain my evil nemesis. But whatever it was that shrank his body and twisted his right leg inward, it couldn’t have made any part of his life easy, least of all finding love. And even he deserved that. I tried to imagine Jason in love, smiling, happy. Was it possible? What was Henry like outside of his notes to Catherine? Was he an ogre under the bridge? Was that why he started writing the notes, because he wanted to show someone what was beautiful about him? Maybe this Nimue was a princess after all, here in the Dragonfly looking for her frog. I hoped he would be her prince. And more than that, I hoped she would be worth the defrogging.

I thought about this as I pulled out all the books I’d moved and put them back where Jason had them to begin with, back where they belonged.

That evening, Hugo and I hovered in Apollo’s stacks, near the space in the middle of the store that had been cleared out for a reading by a local writer. Her memoir had just been published by a small Berkeley press, and Apollo had set up nearly twenty rows of chairs, but only a dozen or so women dressed in the latest from last month’s Arts & Crap festival were gathered.

“So I sat, stranded in the desert, alone with the body that had betrayed me, away from the husband who had deserted me, the children who now ignored me, and reminders of the fulfilling career that had gone to a more youthful and vibrant woman. It was then that I first thought of suicide.”

I felt a little funny applauding suicide, but the enthusiasm of Hugo and the others got to me and I joined in.

“How long have you known her?” I asked Hugo over the applause.

“Portia? Since the late eighties, I think. We met in a Five Ways to Delay Your Orgasm class at the Humanist Center. I was dating the instructor and was needed for a demonstration. I got to know Portia and the other students quite well in that class.”

I’d asked Hugo many times to please convey certain events in his life using the PG-rated version. He often forgot. Or maybe this
was
the PG version.

“And you lost touch?” I asked.

“As people do,” he said. “When I saw that she was going to be here…well…all those memories.”

We waited for the line of people wanting their book signed disappeared before we walked up to the table to greet Miss Portia. She was well over six feet tall, and while not heavy, she was round like a fertility idol, with a cotton candy cloud of hair dyed a color of red found nowhere in nature. She buried Hugo in a hug that would have suffocated a small child.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you set foot in this store,” she said, holding him by the shoulders, looking him over like she’d found a designer shirt in the bargain bin. “Your aura hygiene is so much better than in the old days. You’ve been purging your toxins, haven’t you?”

Hugo introduced me and she placed her hands on the sides of my face as if anointing me for some office.

“My dear,” she said. “I hope you find as much wisdom in Hugo’s lovemaking as I did when I was your age.”

“Portia,” Hugo said. “Maggie’s not—”

“Oh Hugo, she’s lovely,” said Portia, squeezing my cheeks into a blowfish face. “You will grow, my girl. You will blossom as you never thought you could. The goddess will awaken in you and all your future lovers will rejoice in your special time with Hugo.”

“Oh, Portia,” Hugo said, suddenly quite chipper. “That’s so kind of you to say.”

“It’s true,” she said, squeezing a little harder on my cheeks. “She’s a very lucky young woman. Very lucky and very, very young. Exactly how young is she?”

“Portia,” Hugo said, gently pulling her hands from my face. “Maggie and I aren’t…”

I think Hugo went on to set her straight but I’m not sure because I had some kind of catatonic break for about two minutes, either from the thought of Hugo and me as lovers or from lack of oxygen. It was a toss-up.

The next thing I remember was Portia reading a poem from her book to Hugo as the Apollo employees snapped the chairs shut around us. “‘I nibbled the nimble nectar of our music / And danced with love’s ghost / Our sugar-coated courtship sang ripe / With passion’s dazzling pleasure.’”