The Book That Matters Most (14 page)

“I didn't get invited,” Ava said, hurt. Lines had been drawn, and other than Cate it appeared people had taken Jim's side.

“Probably so you wouldn't have to interact with him and Delia,” Cate said, thrusting her credit card at the waiter as he passed.

“He brought Delia? To a neighborhood party? He doesn't even live in the neighborhood anymore.”

“I thought you knew,” Cate said, that worried expression returning. “He does live in the neighborhood. On Williams Street.”

Ava thought of his reliable blue Prius parked there with its bumper yarn bombed.

“With Delia Lindstrom?” Ava asked, needing to know.

“So what?” Cate said in her good friend voice. “You've got a new young lover. Right?”

As if on cue, Luke walked past the restaurant, his arm casually flung across Roxy's shoulders.

P
enny approached Ava as soon as she walked into the Athenaeum, as if she'd been waiting for her. Ava noticed immediately that two plastic tubes snaked into her nose, pumping oxygen from a small portable tank. Her face was a map of lines and wrinkles, but her blue eyes twinkled and her hair in its neat silver bob was shiny and thick.

“A touch of emphysema,” Penny said when she saw Ava's eyes follow the path of that tubing.

The heavy gold charm bracelet laden with charms clanged as Penny put her hand on Ava's arm.

“Come sit near me.”

“I'd love to,” Ava said.

From across the room, John gave her a sad smile. Ava took the chair beside Penny's.

“I was struck by the first sentence of the novel,” Cate began.

From memory, she recited it. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The words pierced Ava, so much so that she placed a hand on her chest. She had read the line, of course. But hearing it out loud in this quiet musty room made it sound true. Hadn't she believed that together with Jim they'd created a happy family? Hadn't she believed as a child that her parents had created a happy family too? Yet both of those fell apart, proved themselves to be unhappy after all.

“Arguably,” Cate was saying, “that's one of the best first sentences in literature.”

“I'm afraid I have to respectfully disagree,” Ruth interrupted. “My selection holds that honor, doesn't it?”

“That's why I said arguably,” Cate said. “The first line of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is often cited as one of the best too. But to me, Tolstoy hits on something so human and real, while Márquez creates a beautifully written sentence.”

“Tolstoy is exactly right,” Ava surprised herself by saying, with great passion. “We fool ourselves into believing we're happy, don't we? That our family is as happy as all the other ones we see every day? But honestly, we're all uniquely unhappy. If we'd just admit it.”

Beside her, Penny looked bewildered.

“But the novel's all about the importance of family,” Honor said in her professorial voice.

“Yes,” Diana agreed, standing. She'd chosen
Anna Karenina
, and seemed ready to have her say. “But Tolstoy recognizes the difficulties too.”

“Exactly!” Ava said.

Diana said, “Tolstoy says that if you look for perfection, you'll never be content. Yet isn't that what we do? I sure as hell did,” she added softly. “And then one day your doctor calls with the news you've dreaded your whole life and you wonder why you gave up so much, why you worked so hard, why you needed that idea of perfection.”

“That's what I did,” Ava said. “I did it right here.”

“What do you mean?” Penny asked her.

“I gave you the wrong impression and I should have corrected it. My husband didn't die. He left me. For someone else. And I'm so hurt, yes, but also humiliated, and it seemed better somehow to be a widow than an ex-wife.”

“Why do you think I moved back to Providence? My husband left me and I couldn't bear to stay anywhere near him,” Monique said.

“It's another kind of grief,” John said.

“Yes, it is,” Monique agreed.

“Adultery,” Ava said. “I've given a good segue to that theme.”

Everyone laughed.

“It occurred to me as I reread this novel, that mid-nineteenth-century literature explored adultery quite a bit.
The Scarlet Letter
.
Madame Bovary
,” Honor said.

John cleared his throat. “I didn't get it,” he said. “I mean, Karenin didn't really seem to care that Anna was cheating on him with Vronsky. He cared more how they looked to everyone else. He was like, as long as the neighbors think you're a good
wife and we don't get divorced, this is fine with me. And I just can't imagine that. If my wife fell in love with someone else, it would destroy me.”

“That's why I see the novel as social criticism,” Honor said. “It's not a love story, per se. Instead, it illuminates the restrictions of society on women.”

Diana opened the book and read, “‘Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. But if you don't love me, it would be better and more honest to say so.' ”

“But respect isn't the opposite of love,” Ava said. “Or a substitute for it.”

Diana nodded. “Then what is it that covers that empty place where love should be?”

“That's what I'm trying to figure out,” Ava said.

As the discussion turned to Anna as she got off at the station in Obrazovka, deciding to throw herself in front of the approaching train, Ava found herself thinking again of that long-ago summer day when her sister died. And of her mother jumping off that bridge a year later. Like everyone after a loss, life seemed divided into Before and After. Her family had been happy Before, hadn't they? Or had they? Ava wondered. Could a happy family fall apart that fast?

E
veryone started to move toward the snack table, where the smoked salmon with sour cream and dill lay on cucumber rounds beside small red new potato halves topped with caviar.

Awkwardly, Ava stood and cleared her throat, hoping to get the group's attention.

Honor and Kiki paused, and Monique looked up at her.

“Excuse me?” Ava said.

She paused until the room grew quiet.

“I just want to say,” Ava said, “thank you all for letting me into the book group. I haven't read, I mean, really read, in such a long time.”

A sharp memory of her mother's small bookstore came to her. She could see the little girl she was, sitting in a worn easy chair, happily reading.

“It used to bring me such pleasure,” Ava said softly. “And then things happened in my life, and books lost the magic they once held for me. I feel like I'm rediscovering that.”

Penny nodded knowingly.

“You've added a lot to the group,” Luke said.

“And you're bringing Rosalind Arden,” Kiki said. “Which is awesome.”

“How did you find her?” Jennifer asked, excited.

Ava swallowed hard. A perfunctory search on Google had turned up nothing on Rosalind Arden, and Ava hadn't yet made a plan B.

They were all looking at her now, waiting.

“It wasn't easy,” Ava said.

Hank

Hank Bingham stared at the green chile tamales spinning in the microwave. Dinner. He tried not to think about the dinners he and Nadine used to have, just six months ago, the two of them sitting at the table overlooking the patio, containers overflowing with purple flowers. Nadine loved her purple flowers. She grew herbs too, thick branches of rosemary and sweet basil and parsley and cilantro, their scent filling the warm air. She'd be standing at the stove cooking and say, “Hank, stir this,” and she'd hand him the long wooden spoon so that she could go outside and pluck a sprig of this, a handful of that.

He tried not to think of Nadine in her funny aprons. She had the one with sparkly skulls on it from her friend Amy in New Mexico; the one with the bottom half of the famous painting of Venus standing in an open oyster shell from Amy's trip to Italy; the frilly one with lemons on it that she sewed in a class she took with her lady friends. But the more Hank tried to not think about Nadine, the more all he could do was think about her.

Nadine
.

He had not always been a good husband. He liked to go out with the guys for a few beers after work. And some Jameson's, neat, when the bars were closing. He liked reviewing clues, tips, theories, with his pals. He liked the feel of the wood of a well-worn bar. The smell of beer from the tap, of whiskey, of night.

He had fooled around on her too. Hank wasn't proud of that, but he'd done it. Women liked men in uniform. Clichéd but true. More than one woman had asked him to keep his uniform jacket on, the shiny silver badge, the gleaming buttons, all a turn-on. Quickies during his lunch break. Or back at someone's house after the bars closed, the woman as hammered as Hank. Mostly, it was meaningless. Mostly. There had been one that mattered, one that was wrong for every possible reason. At first, she was just married. With little kids. And then later, he was investigating the death of her daughter. He should have stopped seeing her, of course. Or recused himself from the case. But he couldn't do either. He couldn't stop seeing her because he was crazy in love with her. And he couldn't resign because he had to help her, to figure out what had happened that morning. And he failed.

That summer, after her kid died, she told him she was writing a book. He'd arrive to find her in the back office, at her messy
desk, pounding on an old manual typewriter. “This book is going to matter, Hank,” she'd tell him. It was summer, hot, no air conditioning. Hell, no air at all back there. He'd wait until she finished the page or the paragraph or the chapter, watching her type, watching the way her front teeth worried her bottom lip as she wrote. He could sit there and watch her forever. Even like that, ravaged with grief, her eyes flat and glassy.

Finally she would look up and say his name, say
Hank
like no one had ever said it before. She'd unbutton her dress, slowly. She had what seemed like a million of the same kind of dresses, longish, sheer, buttons down the front. She had them in floral prints and checks and plain soft colors like rose and moss green. Beneath them, an old-fashioned ivory silk slip. Beneath that, just beautiful her.

The microwave beeped.

Hank opened the door, touched the tamales. Still not hot. He punched in another minute.

Nadine would be so mad at him for living on microwaved food. She'd be angry that her plants were brown and shriveled in their terra cotta containers. Angry that he'd grown so old and sad in these past six months without her. “Well,” she'd said when the doctor gave them her diagnosis, “this is a surprise. I thought Hank would die first.” That's how it usually happened, wasn't it? The hard-drinking, hard-living husband dropped dead, leaving the spry wife who took spinning classes and morning walks and ate grilled fish instead of steak. Nadine allowed herself only one drink a day, a martini before dinner, vodka, with a twist.

The cat moved in and out of his legs, purring.

Nadine would really be angry that he'd gone to Petco on adoption day and brought home this cat. She hated cats. She thought
they were not to be trusted. But he was so damn lonely, and he saw that big sign—CATS! TODAY!—and went in and immediately fell for this one. She would be good company, he'd decided, and he was right. She slept on the bed with him, putting her orange face right on Nadine's pillow and blinking at him. She sat on his lap while he watched TV. He hadn't known what to name her, having never had to name anything before, so he called her Miss Kitty, after the character in
Gunsmoke
.

The microwave beeped again. Now the tamales were too hot. But Hank took the plate and another cold beer and followed Miss Kitty to the den. The TV was already on; he never remembered to turn it off. Or maybe he left it that way on purpose, just to have some noise in the house. Nadine would not approve. Together, they sat at the table and ate dinner. She used linen napkins. She lit candles. He'd stopped playing around a long time ago. Most nights he came straight home. If you wait long enough, someone had told him once, you settle into being married.

Miss Kitty played with a ball of yarn. Nadine would kill him if she knew he'd taken all of her yarn and given it to the cat. But, Hank thought, she'd never know. Just as the doctor predicted, she died, swiftly and horribly.

Nadine
.

Hank opened a tamale, steam burning his fingertips.

He'd loved two women, and they'd both died.

Maggie

Maggie paced the loft, nervous energy building in her with every step. Back and forth, across the cold cement floor, until she heard the sound of Julien's key in the door. She stopped pacing and stood, her back to the tall window that overlooked the street below. The silvery late afternoon light would soften her face, she hoped. The window was open to let in the cool almost-spring air and the smell of the hyacinths that had burst into bloom just that morning. She wore long sleeves to hide the light bruises on the insides of her arms, but a short black skirt, flared and pleated like a schoolgirl's, with no stockings and her Mary Janes, hoping the sight of her long
bare legs would turn him on, make him so eager that she could leave the lacy white blouse on and keep her secret.

When she returned from the bookstore yesterday, she'd found a note from Julien waiting for her, hastily scrawled on the back of the electric bill.
Where are you? Why aren't you answering the phone? I am very very upset with you. J
. Beneath that he'd added in a different pen,
Be here tomorrow at noon
. She'd been waiting since then, pacing and smoking and worrying about what he might do if he knew where she had been, what she'd been doing. And now, at half past four, the key in the lock turned and the heavy door swung open.