The Book That Matters Most (26 page)

As she tried to navigate the clunky mouse, Geneviève ducked her head inside.

“Oh!” she said out loud to herself. “Lentil!”

She noticed Maggie and smiled, showing all her big horsey teeth.

“There you are!” she said, coming into the room and ladling soup into a turquoise bowl. “Someone came in looking for you.”

“For me?” Maggie said. “Are you sure?”

Genevieve nodded. “He asked for Maggie. He said, ‘
Maggie, la petite fille maigre.'”

The soup rose in Maggie's throat, and she had to swallow it back to keep from throwing it up.

“Did he say his name?” she managed to ask. “Was it Julien?”

Geneviève shrugged and sat beside Maggie, squealing when a spring poked her thigh.

Maggie shivered. Images of Julien leering at her, hurting her, filled her brain and she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to erase them.

“Best soup, worst sofa,” Geneviève said with a chuckle.

Julien slapping her. Julien murmuring to her, calling her his ragdoll, his artichoke, his plum. She squeezed her eyes tighter, tried to forget how it felt when he opened the little suede bag and put the needle in her arm, that feeling of floating, of disappearing.

Maggie's heart was racing. She stood abruptly.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have an appointment.”

“Maintenant?”
Genevieve asked, surprised.

Maggie didn't answer. She just hurried to the door.

“So we will meet back here later and go to Patrick Roger?”

“Sure,” Maggie said without stopping.

She didn't say anything to Madame as she walked quickly through the crowded store and out the door into the relentless July heat.

F
or three days Maggie stayed away from the bookstore. If Julien came back, they would tell him they didn't know where she was, they hadn't seen her in days, and maybe he would leave her alone. She stayed in her tiny room in the hostel and tried to pull together her random notes, the descriptions and observations she'd written in her notebook. But she couldn't concentrate. She considered other cities.
Sydney: kangaroos, Opera House (?), southern hemisphere. St. Petersburg: Winter Palace, Nabokov, great art
. She considered the refuge of that needle in her arm, the way it calmed her, made her unafraid, let her float away. She forced herself to not think about that. She wrote:
The girl imagined other cities, cities with icebergs; cities with fjords; cities with castles and bridges; cities with beautiful lights and sparkling rivers and sidewalk cafés
. She reread what she wrote, and smiled. That's here, she thought. That's Paris.

“
W
here have you been?” Geneviève asked as soon as Maggie walked back into the bookstore a few days later.

“Writing,” Maggie said. “I'm working on a novel.”

She picked up a pile of books waiting to be shelved and walked across the crowded store to the far shelves.

“Come on,” Geneviève said to Maggie hours later. “Time to go to Patrick Roger.”

Geneviève was wearing a dress identical to her teapot one, except the pattern was chickens.

“Patrick Roger?” Maggie said.

“The chocolate shop,” Genevieve said. “My mission is to keep you away from those terrible candy bars you eat all the time. I don't even think there's any chocolate at all in them.”

She let Geneviève link an arm with hers, and lead her through the store. It was so much more crowded in summer, and with each day the crowds grew. Today, they had to stand sideways to squeeze past all the tourists browsing and exclaiming over the funny categories or the books they discovered.

Geneviève held Maggie's hand and pulled her along the Impasse Berthaud, where the dolls in the window of the Musée de la Poupée stared out at them. Despite the heat, Maggie shivered. She thought of Julien too, calling her his
poupée de chiffon
.

Geneviève paused.

“Ça va?”
she asked.

“Poupées,”
Maggie said with a shrug, because how could she ever explain.

Geneviève grinned. “Yes! They're creepy!”

As they passed the café across from the doll hospital, Maggie searched the crowded outdoor tables for Noah from the Musée d'Orsay. But she didn't find his face among the tourists there, with their oversized beers and carafes of wine.

“Let's have a beer,” she suggested.

But Geneviève shook her head and turned down Place Georges-Pompidou.

“Chocolate,” she said.

Maggie could feel a hard callus on Geneviève's thumb and
another on her forefinger. She tried to imagine what the girl did to get them. Gardening? Guitar? She would try to remember to ask her.

“Who would come to Paris in summer?” Geneviève said as they crossed the Seine. “It's so crowded you can't even breathe.”

“Americans,” Maggie said.

“You're an American,” Geneviève reminded her.

“I don't feel like one,” she said.

“Ah! But you are writing the Great American Novel, aren't you? Like every American, you have come to Paris to write it.”

Maggie smiled.

At last they were in Saint-Germain-des-Près and walking along boulevard Saint-Germain.

“
Voilà!”
Genevieve announced, coming to a halt.

Maggie stared at the window in front of them. Small perfect chocolates were neatly arranged in geometric patterns. Some had one perfect pistachio in the center, or a sliver of candied orange. A sculpture of an ape dominated the window, as if it were guarding all the chocolates.

“So tiny,” Maggie said, thinking of her big chocolate bars.

“So perfect,” Geneviève said, tugging her inside.

The store felt almost cold after the heat outside, and goosebumps rose up Maggie's arms.

“
On peut gouter?
” Genevieve said to the young woman behind one of the long glass counters.

The woman's hair was in a bun and she wore blue rectangular eyeglasses and very high heels.

She nodded, and began to place chocolates on a small silver tray for them to taste. With each one they tried, she described it in a cool voice.

Praline feuilleté, peppery mint ganache and citronella,
almond paste chocolate walnut, oat ganache, Sichuan peppercorn ganache. Each bite exploded in Maggie's mouth. She tasted vanilla bean, lemon, chestnut, honey. She tasted chocolate like she'd never before tasted.

Geneviève was smiling down at her and nodding.

“See?” she said. “Fifty per cent cocoa, minimum.”

“Point taken,” Maggie said, letting the last piece melt on her tongue.

“We'll take the nine-piece assortment,” Geneviève said to the young woman.

On the way out, she cocked her head at the sculpture in the window.

“Too bad we can't take him home,
n'est-ce pas?
”

Maggie did a double-take. The giant ape was carved completely out of chocolate.

“Patrick Roger is an artist, eh?” Geneviève said, taking Maggie's hand again.

G
eneviève lived nearby in a tiny fifth-floor walk-up apartment. On the table in the center was a sewing machine, and piled beside it was fabric and thread in every color.

“Your calluses,” Maggie said, noticing scraps of the chicken material.

“Yes! I sew my dresses,” Geneviève said from the small kitchen where she was putting cold chicken and grapes and radishes on a platter. “I'll make one for you,” she added. “Choose a fabric.”

Maggie began to look through the material on the table, all of it covered with funny prints like the chickens and the teapots. She held up one with smiling toasters on it.

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“I don't know the word in English. Leftovers?” Geneviève said.

“Remnants,” Maggie said.
“Vestiges.”

Geneviève made room on the crowded table for the food, and pulled out a chair for Maggie.

“How do you know Madame?” Maggie asked.

“I was in trouble and I had nowhere to go. One day I walked into the bookstore and the next thing I knew I had a little job and a bowl of hot soup.”

Maggie wondered what kind of trouble she'd been in, but she didn't ask. That would open the way to talk about her own problems, something she did not want to do with Geneviève, or anyone else.

“They say she killed someone,” Geneviève said.

“I almost believe it.”

Geneviève placed another piece of chicken in front of Maggie.

“Who did she kill?”

Genevieve shrugged. “There are so many rumors about her. They say she is hiding someone upstairs. A lover, maybe.”

She rolled a radish in butter and then salt and held it out to Maggie, who took it with a sigh.

“You like the
grille-pains
?”

“They make me laugh,” Maggie said, glancing down at the bright blue fabric with the green and orange smiling toasters on it.

“
Grille-pain
it is,” Geneviève said.

After dinner they sat on the little balcony smoking cigarettes and drinking brandy and watching the people wandering the streets below. The sky turned lavender and then violet. Geneviève opened the box of chocolates, and they bit each one in half so that they could taste all of them.

“Where do you stay?” Geneviève asked her.

“Like all starving American writers in Paris, I stay in a hovel. I sleep on straw on the floor.”

“You don't need to suffer for your art, you could stay here,” Geneviève said. “We would have to share the bedroom, but there are two beds in it.”

“I don't know,” she said. “I'm on a budget. And Madame doesn't actually pay very much.”

“Pay me what you pay now,” Geneviève said. “It is good to have company.”

Sitting out here, the smoke from Geneviève's cigarette curling into the night, Maggie could almost believe she could change everything. Sitting here, she felt almost normal, for the first time in longer than she could remember.

“It is good to have company,” she said softly.

Geneviève reached over and took Maggie's hand in her callused one. The two of them sat like that, without speaking, as the night descended on Paris.

Ava

Now that Ava knew Maggie was all right, looking for Rosalind Arden occupied most of Ava's free time. She still called and emailed Maggie every day, and Maggie still didn't answer, but Will was receiving frequent—if cryptic—messages and forwarding them to Ava. This morning's: If the madre finds out I left school, I'm done for. So shhhh, Wills!!!

White Swan Press, the publisher of
From Clare to Here
, had either gone out of business or been swallowed up by a larger publishing house long ago. Ava tried to find information about it on the Internet, but like the author herself, it seemed to have disappeared
completely. With summer half over, Ava had just four months before she had to produce Rosalind Arden. How do you find someone who seems to never have existed?

Ava picked up the book, as if studying it might reveal Rosalind Arden's whereabouts. She had kept herself from reading anything but the copyright page, afraid that those opening pages would pull her back to the summer she'd first read it. She didn't have the strength to relive those weeks when she first learned of her mother's death. Somehow this book was tied up in all of that. When she finished it, she turned right back to the first page and read it straight through again. She read that book over and over all that summer, and when autumn came and she returned to school, Ava put it away, and never found the same pleasure and comfort in reading again.

Hesitantly, Ava turned to the next page. And read the dedication.

A
va stared at the shelf of air conditioners, considering BTUs and energy efficiency ratings.

“I've been thinking of you,” a man said. She turned to find Hank Bingham standing beside her, a
Consumer Reports
magazine rolled up in his hand. Jim would have consulted
Consumer Reports
too, Ava realized, wishing she had thought to look at one.

“Your daughter show up?” Hank asked.

“Kind of,” she said.

“I'm trying to find someone else now.” Ava said.

His eyes slid toward her again.

“Other than your kid? People keep hiding from you, huh?”

“Yes,” Ava said. “A writer. But she seems to have vanished. Or to never have existed.”

“I'd call the publisher,” he said.

“They've vanished too.”

She watched Hank slide an air conditioner off the shelf and into the oversized cart. Despite his age, he lifted the heavy box easily, his muscles bulging beneath his short sleeves.

“Mine finally died,” he explained, as if that was why she was watching him. “Twenty years. Never a problem.”

Ava didn't care about his air conditioner, new or old. She smiled politely and went back to comparing BTUs and EERs.