The Moment of Everything (16 page)

“Why did you take it?” I asked.

“This whole Henry and Catherine thing,” he said, looking down at his hand still on the ladder. “It’s just gotten out of control.”

He slid his backpack from his shoulder and handed me the book. It smelled of leather from a new cover he’d given it and all the pages were bound to the spine with fresh glue.

“I was misguided,” he said, handing me the book. “I was going to leave you a note in it. I thought it would be romantic.”

“I don’t want to be them,” I said.

“I know. I get it. I just got carried away with the whole Henry and Catherine thing. It’s like online forums, message boards, gaming. People tell each other all sorts of things. They take on personas and the personas take them over.”

“Like falling in love with a fellow Blood Elf in World of Warcraft?” I asked.

“Yeah, something like that. It can be freeing. You don’t let the world define you. You can be removed from the person the world sees and be your true self.”

“Or your true elf,” I said.

“I don’t want to be Henry and Catherine,” he said. “I want to be Rajhit and Maggie. I want to be in this world. With you.”

I heard my name again from the front of the store and knew that in a few minutes I’d be back among my guests, drinking wine and talking about our book, and this moment with Rajhit would be over. I hooked my fingers into the neck of his T-shirt, pulled him to me, and kissed him. It was a soft thank-you kiss at first, full of a certain compatible comfort. But then there was more. We held each other tighter, leaning back on the ladder, and I felt my cells fly in the air like confetti.

I opened the door to my apartment slowly, not wanting the hinge’s teeth-jarring squeak to wake Rajhit, but the door was silent. Inside I found the dishes from last night’s supper clean and in the drying rack, a pitcher of iced tea next to marinating steaks in the refrigerator, and, most blessedly of all, a clean bathroom. My heart leaped in the joyful abandon of a woman who didn’t have to sponge her own toilet. Mama could keep her three-carat diamonds. Nothing said true love to me like sparkling white porcelain and a whiff of diluted vinegar on the floor. He’d prepped food. He’d cleaned. He’d fixed things. All in a I’m-just-a-normal-guy-who-wants-to-make-my-girlfriend-happy sort of way. With that thought, I froze in the hallway and listened to soft snoring beyond my bedroom door. Was I a girlfriend again?

We hadn’t talked much since he came home with me the night after the SVWEABC meeting. He’d slept for nearly all of the three days since then, and in those small windows of time when he was awake, we were too busy with getting-back-together sex to discuss the inner meaning of our reunion. I hadn’t asked how long he planned to stay. I found the ignorance liberating. No questions, I decided. If I asked, decisions and actions could be required. I was unprepared for such certainty.

I leaned against the doorway to my bedroom and watched Rajhit sleep, his long body curled under the smooth white sheet. I’d never seen him that still before. He’d always seemed in constant motion, never settling, the bed a ravaged nest the morning after he’d been in it. But now he lay in the same place I’d left him nine hours ago. It was hypnotically peaceful. I noticed my own breath matching his, the full lung expansion of slumber, as the long light of the late afternoon stretched across the room.
To breathe you in, to make you essential to me.

His first day here, I’d come home to find two Macy’s shopping bags in the corner of my bedroom holding a few shirts, jeans, shorts, a pair of leather Trek sandals, and boxers. He kept them there, clean clothes in one bag and dirty in another, never asking for a drawer or space in the closet. I didn’t know whether he feared imposing on me or if he wanted to be ready for a fast getaway. He was a traveler with no concern for his missing luggage and who had “gone native” at his destination. Maybe that’s what I was. His destination.

Next to the bed, I slipped out of the thrift store dress I was wearing and slid between what I discovered were fresh sheets. I pressed myself against his back, feeling his sleepy warmth against my breasts. He sighed, swimming to the surface, away from his dreams. I reached around and tickled him along the line of hair that started below his belly button and headed due south.

“You’re home,” he said.

“Just now.”

“I got steaks.”

“I saw. And iced tea.”

“I put sugar in it.”

I squeezed him tight. “As God intended.”

“You have an unnatural relationship with iced tea.”

I kissed him between his shoulder blades and slid my hand farther down, feeling him growing hard beneath my fingers.

“And the bathroom’s clean,” I said.

“Gnomes,” he said. “Noisy little devils. Kept flushing the toilet and giggling.”

He rolled over and kissed me. His kisses were different than they were that first night, richer, fuller, deeper. Different from the way I’d been kissed before. It was like visiting a city where you used to live, where things were familiar but you couldn’t quite figure out the new expressway.

His lips moved to my neck, and he whispered, “I missed you.”

I wasn’t sure whether he meant today or while we were apart.
Don’t think too much
, I reminded myself,
just let this happen.
I guided one of his hands to my breast and his mouth followed. I encircled his head in my arms and arched into his mouth, feeling I could never get enough of myself inside him. He moved down my body, between my legs. His hair felt like feathers against my inner thighs. I giggled. One of his hands ran up my side and I grasped it, entwining our fingers, squeezing our palms together, and it surprised me that this felt the most intimate of all.

I closed my eyes, sinking into the playful pleasures of his tongue, and tried to ignore the tiny thought, a gnat in my brain, that wondered when all this would end. Then he was on top of me again, kissing me, and I tasted my self, my inner-most self, on his lips.

The single greatest bookstore that has ever existed was called Shakespeare and Company. It was born in Paris just in time for the 1920s and was closed during the German occupation in 1941 when, according to legend, the owner, Sylvia Beach, refused to sell a German officer her last copy of
Finnegans Wake
. Miss Sylvia was the binding of the Lost Generation. Thornton Wilder spent time in Shakespeare and Company, as did F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. Ernest Hemingway wrote about Miss Sylvia and her shop in
A Moveable Feast
. At Shakespeare and Company, books were sold and others borrowed for a modest lending library fee, and writers congregated in its orbit. Miss Sylvia nurtured their egos and their spirits and sometimes provided a roof over their heads in the small room upstairs. She financed the first publication of Joyce’s
Ulysses
by selling pre-orders to her friends and patrons around Europe. And though she declined to take on its publication—she did not think it Lawrence’s best work, and she did not want to be known as a publisher of erotica—Miss Sylvia’s Shakespeare and Company sold
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
when it was banned in England and the United States.

Hugo had hung a framed photograph of Miss Sylvia behind the counter of the Dragonfly, of her standing in the doorway of Shakespeare and Company with James Joyce. Sometimes I wondered what she would think of the Dragonfly. I could see her sitting next to Hugo in the store window, amused at all of my bustling about, trying to make the Dragonfly palatable for the Google generation.

My days at the Dragonfly went much like this. Unlock the store around nine. Drink my cheap drip coffee from Cuppa Joe and put out the tables in the front of the store with the bargain books, the ones that lured the passersby into our stacks. Around ten, when Hugo arrived and made tea, a few customers would trickle in and Hugo would help them while I tried to find places for the books we took in the day before. Hugo usually kept the
New York Times
crossword at the front counter and worked on it throughout the day, with customers offering input along the way. Around noon, Jason would appear and I’d take a long lunch so that I could stretch out my time until ten that night and close. The afternoons were a lot busier, and we’d have a steady stream of people until dinner, when it could get outright crowded. We needed at least two more people to help out in the store, but Robert and I agreed we needed more of a financial cushion before we could bring anyone on. And in the meantime, the books kept coming in and going out.

I wasn’t the only one who was making changes in the store. Since I’d cleared out a space by the window, Grendel had taken to having his afternoon nap there, so Hugo built a display of cat books around him. Jason had a tall pile he refused to move that he was calling his “project.” After I’d done my Romance section makeover for the second time, thanks to Jason, I’d started in on the sloping pile of hardcovers by the cash register. Even Avi contributed, donating an
OPEN
sign, based on one used by her favorite sweet shop in London, which consisted of four lettered tiles that clipped together. Each evening we moved the
N
from
O-P-E-N
to form
N-O-P-E
.

As I sat on the floor and separated Henry James from James Patterson, Miss Sylvia looked down on me with the knowing look of a sharp truth. Miss Sylvia turned down the opportunity to publish
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
for several reasons, but the most basic reason was she lacked the funds. Bookstores are stores, and stores need income to survive. The Dragonfly, like Shakespeare and Company, balanced on an unraveling high wire, and I was the one running around the circus floor with a butterfly net.

“You asked me not to send you furniture,” Mama said.

In the backyard, I sat with my blue Solo cup of bourbon, alone, looking through the window at Rajhit reading a book in my bed.

“Not usually, but this time is different,” I said. “I’d like for you to send me a chair. I know my asking for it takes the fun out of it for you, but you have a need to send me furniture, and I happen to be in need of a new chair.”

“Are you drunk?”

I looked down to the bottom of my Solo cup.

“Not yet. You?”

Ice cubes in a jelly jar were my only reply. My mother was alone again in a silence that needed to be filled. I thought of Rajhit inside, alone in my bed. I knew I should tell her about him. But I wanted to keep him to myself for a while longer.

“Mama, do you still love Daddy?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.

“Of course I do,” she said. “He married me, didn’t he? Gave me a child, a beautiful house, everything I wanted.”

“Yes, ma’am. He sure did.”

“What a question to ask you mother,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m sorry. That was rude.”

I wondered if she was in the blue cotton housedress that snapped up the front, the one she wore only when Daddy wasn’t home.

“What kind of chair do you need?”

“One that’s good for reading,” I said. “And won’t show much dirt. And a floor lamp if it’s not too much trouble. I’ll give you the address.”

“I know your address, Margaret Victoria.”

“It’s not for my place.”

“What have you done now?”

Jason stood in the platform window of the Dragonfly, staring at the new chair sitting between the two older ones. He bent over and sniffed the fabric, which still smelled like the plastic wrap the deliverymen had removed that morning. It was the perfect reading chair. Wide enough to curl up into, but still narrow enough to provide easy access to armrests so you could hold your book at the right angle. The fabric was a warm wheat color with a faint pattern that would hide drips from teacups and ICEEs. It really was a beautiful chair. Mama did good.

When Hugo told me he would talk to Jason about my becoming a partner in the store, I did no short amount of fretting. Though Jason and I were getting along, our truce was a delicate thing. It was one thing to be his peer. It was another to be his boss. Then I got the idea to enlist Mama’s help. We’d finally have three chairs in the store, and Mama got to send me some furniture. Make Jason happy; make Mama happy. This chair was the stone with the names of two birds on it.

After the ArGoNet sale, my stock wasn’t worth a ton, but it was enough to satisfy both Hugo and Robert, the superhero accountant. I didn’t tell Rajhit about this. I didn’t talk to Avi or Dizzy. It felt good to make a decision on my own. Ever since I decided to become Hugo’s partner, I felt like I’d slid into a groove cut out for me. My days felt crisp and new. I was in motion again.

After giving the chair another good sniff, Jason turned and slowly lowered his skinny backside into the seat. He bounced up and down a bit and then slid back into its cushioned depths, trying not to look too pleased.

“So Hugo talked to you,” I said, sitting next to him. “About my partnership in the store.”

He shrugged. “Are you seeking my blessing or something?”

“No, I’m a partner here, whether you like it or not.”

“So this chair isn’t a bribe?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s a bribe, all right,” I said. “I don’t expect you to be happy about this. I’m just trying to reduce the amount of violence.”

He slouched down a bit and pulled his knees up so he sat cross-legged in the chair. He stretched his hands out over the armrest. Grendel appeared and rubbed up against it, purring savagely.

“Can I have a raise?” he asked.

“If we increase sales ten percent over the next three months, we can talk.”

He seemed satisfied with that. He opened a book and started to read while I went to the counter to run over some numbers to give to Robert when he came in the next day. I would give Jason a raise. He was worth it. Sci-Fi/Fantasy kept this place afloat. Someday, I might even give myself a raise, but until then, Jason’s $12.50 an hour would make his paycheck bigger than mine.

The bell over the door rang out, and I looked up to see Gloria’s familiar fusilli curls. On this particular Tuesday, though, she wasn’t alone. A man followed her. He was not much taller than her, his hair a little grayer, his eyes nearly shut and looking at nothing. He was blind. She pushed open the door with her right hand while holding his hand with her left. He carried her NPR tote bag for her.

“Good morning,” I said, hoping to be introduced, but she gave me the same ill-humored look she always did. She bent her arm to lock her and her companion’s entwined fingers close to her body, like their joined hands were a football, and trudged back into the stacks.

I looked around. Jason was still breaking in the new chair. The front of the store was quiet. I followed Gloria into the stacks.

It was Tuesday, so Mysteries was her target. I kept my distance, pulling a few books off the shelf here and there and taking a look at them. I told myself I was doing as Hugo liked and touching the books, but I could only think about Gloria and her husband—for I was certain he was her husband.

As she scanned the shelves, she said something to him loud enough for only him to hear. He laughed. I couldn’t remember ever hearing Gloria say much of anything, and I certainly couldn’t imagine her saying anything funny. But perhaps we are our truest selves with the ones who love us. And there was something about the laugh, the muffled quality, the way his eyes warmed. This was
their
laugh, their alone laugh. When she stood, two books in hand, he reached for her face. When his fingers found her cheek, she patted them against her skin, in that absent way of habit. The small tenderness was like breathing or eating, necessary and essential.

To make you essential to me.

I was intruding. I turned away, a bit ashamed for spying, a bit happier seeing them, knowing that even silent, sour Gloria could be someone’s great love.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my bed next to Rajhit, listening to his soft snores. Headlights from a passing car scampered across the walls through the sheer curtains. I rolled to my side, finding again the arrangement of my body when it’d been only an hour or so ago when my back was curved against him, his arms reaching around me, his teeth gently pressing on that bone where my shoulders met, our limbs entwined like jasmine branches swaying in the wind.

We were becoming familiar with each other now, building on the repertoires we’d learned from other lovers, still in that tender phase before maybe-if-we-start-I’ll-get-in-the-mood sex or well-I-am-awake sex or I-guess-we-haven’t-done-this-in-a-while sex. Sex with Rajhit was fun and joyous and lying there pressed against him again, just for a moment, I curled up under the illusion that it would always be like this. And, at the same time, I was battening down my emotional hatches. This would end. It had to. The alternative was even more unthinkable.

But it was the moment after the sex that was keeping me awake. We were lying facing each other. He had pillowed his head on his bent arm and was stroking the side of my thigh with the other. And then there were his eyes, looking straight into mine. I pushed back the instinct to say something, to make a joke, to break the silence, to break our gaze. We were looking at each other. Not watching, not glancing up between bites of dinner, not listening, not thinking of what we would say next. Looking at each other, vacant and full at the same time. And then I felt a word on my tongue.

Love. The word seemed to unroll itself through my limbs. Love. I could say it. Right at that moment. I could. It didn’t mean forever. People fall in love, they fall out of love. This wasn’t any different. There would be an unspoken “for now” on the end of it. He would understand that. I could taste the words, flavored with sea salt from the distances they’d traveled through other people’s lives to finally be in mine. But I pressed my lips together, knowing that even the smallest of sighs would give it enough room to come tumbling out.
You cannot put the glass back in the pane after it is broken,
Catherine had written back to Henry. What is said cannot be unsaid. So I said nothing. And then the desire to say it came back again. I would this time. But his hand stilled and fell between us. And that’s how I ended up wide awake and listening to him snore.

I slid out of bed and walked into my dark kitchen. I poured myself a glass of bourbon. I downed it and poured myself another. My phone buzzed on the counter and the screen lit up with a text message. It was from a budgeting app I’d downloaded. “We love you! Do you love us? Rate us on the App Store.” Great. Anonymous engineers could say it, and I couldn’t. I gave them one star.

I felt it. I was pretty sure I felt it. You’d think with all the novels I’d read in my life, with all those people falling in love, I’d be more certain of the symptoms in myself. But maybe that was the problem. Maybe I wasn’t really in love. Maybe I was just going through the motions, trying something everyone else already had tried, like going to a Chili’s.

In the dark and the quiet, I mouthed the words. I. Love. You. That wasn’t so hard. I did it again. Nothing happened. It was still dark and quiet and the bourbon bottle was still mostly full. So far, so good. I snuck down the hall to peek in the bedroom door. He was still asleep. I went back to the kitchen and tried again, this time with sound. “I love you,” I said to the night. Then I ran down the hall again to be sure he was still asleep.

Back in the kitchen, I practiced some more. This was getting easier. The words picked up momentum, racing out of my mouth like a toddler finding his legs. I felt proud of myself. I went back to the App Store and changed my rating of the budgeting app to five stars.

I reached for
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
on the edge of the counter. I held the book shut, cupped in my hands like a Magic 8 Ball, closed my eyes, said “I love you,” and dropped the book on the counter.

I heard low voices outside. Peeking out the kitchen window, I saw Hugo sitting on the top steps between our apartments. Mrs. Callahn was in the yard, leaning against the tree, her voice quiet in the dark. Then she walked up to him and took a sip from the mug he was holding. I started to leave the window, thinking I would get dressed and join them. But there was something about the way Hugo looked up at her, desperate and weary, like a knight who had traveled too far on his quest and couldn’t remember the way home. After a few words I couldn’t make out, she reached out and tenderly placed her hand on his bent head. I felt as though I’d never seen two people be truly alone together before.

I let the curtain drop and went back to bed. Even after the bourbon, I felt a current of nerves just beneath my skin. In my mind, I turned the picture of Hugo and Mrs. Callahn over and over, trying to understand what I’d seen.

I lay next to Rajhit, propped up on my elbow. I leaned over and whispered in his ear everything I wanted him to know.