The Book That Matters Most (4 page)

Then she heard herself say, “
From Clare to Here
.”

She hadn't thought about that book since the summer after Lily died, when Ava read it over and over again, as if it had been
written just for her. Someone had delivered it to their house, Ava remembered now, shortly after the first anniversary of Lily's death and just two weeks after her mother left them to jump off the Jamestown Bridge. A woman drove up in a big black Cadillac and handed the book to Ava. “This is for you,” she'd said.

“Isn't ‘From Clare to Here' a song?” Kiki asked Ava, who was grateful to stop the onslaught of memories threatening to be released.

“Nancy Griffith sings it, doesn't she?” Honor asked. “‘From Clare to Here'?”

“A lot of people have recorded it,” Ava said, the song reverberating in her mind.
It almost breaks my heart when I think of my family
. . .

Ava swallowed hard, thinking of Jim and the family she'd lost this year. And thinking too of those other long-ago losses—her sister and mother—that still sat like rocks in her gut.

“But there was a book with the same title,” she said softly. “By Rosalind Arden. That's the one,” she said, her voice stronger now. “That's the book that matters most to me.”

Maggie

When she first arrived in Paris, with the vague notion that she would become a writer, she went to all the cafés that she'd read Hemingway had frequented. Les Deux Magots and Café Flore, La Closerie and La Rotonde in Montparnasse. “No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde,” he wrote in
The Sun Also Rises
. But as far as she could tell, only tourists went there now. Or to any of the other cafés she'd so carefully marked on her Street Wise Paris map, finding the best route by Métro or on foot. She spent most of the afternoon and into the
evening sitting in the cafés, drinking house wine and waiting for her life to begin, for something to happen.

But nothing did.

She managed to leave drunk and disappointed, but not inspired. Not feeling alive, which was what she needed. She had been dead inside for too long, and she had come here with her worn paperbacks of everything Hemingway wrote, and her knapsack, and her little notebook to jot down things she saw and ideas for stories and clever phrases. She'd come here—escaped, really—with all the hope she could muster. Of course, she'd followed a boy. Thomas, a sullen German philosophy student who had never said he would see her if she came to Paris. Thomas, who had promised her nothing and, when she showed up at his apartment in an ugly building on the outskirts of the city, had reminded her of that. “I did not invite you,” he said, though he had let her in and had hurried sex—her bent over his desk, him behind her with his pants around his ankles and the buttons on his shirt scraping against her.

She'd gone back to him again, hopeful. Didn't Paris make people fall in love? Find kindred spirits? Find themselves? But it was more of the same, this time on the scratchy rug. Afterward, as they shared a joint, she tried to remember why she had thought it was a good idea to leave Florence and follow him to Paris. She studied his face—long and narrow and impassive. “Maybe tomorrow we could meet at a bar?” she'd offered. He'd nodded vaguely, lit another joint, talked about a philosopher she'd never heard of. His voice buzzed pleasantly around her, his v's sounding like w's.
Willage
, he said. And
wery
.

When he didn't show up at the bar the next night, she didn't even cry. She would stay in Paris, she decided. She would spend her father's money that he'd deposited into her bank account
for her year studying abroad, as if that could buy her forgiveness and make everything all right. In her small room in the hostel—a hard cot, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a broken chair—she'd taped a black and white postcard of Hemingway and Fitzgerald drinking in the Café Flore on the wall beside her bed, so that when she lay on her left side, she could stare at it, at them. She'd bought the postcard at one of the kiosks that lined the Seine, along with another one of the Eiffel Tower under construction. That one she taped above the bed, so she could see it as she lay on her back, which she did far too often when Paris was waiting for her outside. She liked the idea of looking at something that magnificent when it was only half-finished. Like her, she thought. Half-finished.

She tried to find Ganymede's, arguably the best bookstore in Paris for English-language books, the one her
Lonely Planet
and
Let's Go
said not to miss. But it was in a maze of streets near the Pompidou Center and every time she decided to go, she got lost.
“Où est Ganymede's?”
she'd ask, pointing to the map or the guidebook. Everyone knew the store, and they directed her, pointing and showing with their hands the confusing parts of the route. Still, she'd get lost, and instead of persevering she'd go back to her small room in the hostel.
Don't miss Ganymede's Books, a quirky cluttered bookshop in the hip Marais section. The American owner, who goes simply by Madame, is a mercurial dragon who opens and closes the shop at her whim
, said
Frommer's
. She tore that page from the book someone had left behind at the hostel, with the store's address and phone number on it, and kept it in her pocket. Once she even tried calling, but the number had been disconnected and she thought perhaps the iconic bookstore had actually gone out of business.

Sometimes she met men in the cafés. Germans with architectural
hair and perfect English. Australians on their walkabout, living out of one giant backpack on a heavy metal frame that they hoisted easily onto their backs. Brits who had come for a long weekend, driving through the Chunnel—she loved that word,
chunnel
, and loved how they said it in their Beatles' accents—and staying with friends from school. Skinny Japanese students wearing thick platform shoes. She tried to avoid Americans. She hadn't come to Paris to meet Americans. But out of boredom or loneliness, occasionally she found herself letting an American guy buy her more wine, share his cigarettes, and brag about all the museums he'd visited in a ridiculously short amount of time, as if there were some kind of race on.

She took them back to her tiny room, shushing them on the narrow stairs if it was after the hostel's curfew. They brought a cheap bottle of wine from the market on the corner, drugs if she was lucky, cigarettes, and enough condoms to get them through the night. She liked their tattoos, the intricate dragons and goofy leprechauns and leaping dolphins and quotes from poetry and full sleeves that wrapped up their skinny arms. She liked their smells—sour wine, stale cigarettes, Dr. Bronner's in peppermint, almond, coconut. She liked their foreignness, how they struggled to find a particular English word or called sweaters
jumpers
and hoods
bonnets
, how they liked techno music that made her cringe, how they used too many hair products and needed orthodontia and didn't go to the gym. Except the Americans, of course. The Americans she hated for their familiarity.

When she woke up, usually around noon, the guy gone, she wandered, hungover or still slightly stoned, her
Street Wise Paris
map in her hands. She tried to remember when different museums were free, but she always managed to mix up the days or
times. She walked in the rain, she walked in the sunshine. She walked, searching for inspiration. But late every afternoon she found herself back at one of the cafés filled with tourists, ordering her first
vin maison
of the day. She opened her small notebook and stared at the mostly blank pages there, writing something, anything, just to try and fill it.
Vin maison
, she'd write. Or:
Musée d'Orsay is not free on Thursdays
. Or:
Woman in the purple coat. Possible character for story?

Too much drinking and walking, too many drugs and too much sex, had made her thin and gaunt. Her hipbones jutted pleasantly against her jeans, the outline of her ribs showed through her threadbare sweater. She liked it, liked to trace her hand along the sharpness of her bones. When she looked in a mirror, she didn't recognize herself—the shadow of dark circles beneath her eyes, the tangled bed hair, the sharp cheekbones above hollow cheeks.

Then one night she left Les Deux Magots alone. It had been unusually empty, possibly because of the hard rain falling. The rain was cold and relentless, and she had no umbrella, so she decided to take the Métro. The night stretched hopelessly before her. She would buy a bottle of three-euro wine, and go to her small room, and stare at those postcards until she drank all of it and, hopefully, passed out.

The Métro too was oddly empty. For a moment, as she settled into a seat, dripping rain onto it and the floor, she wondered if something had happened. A terrorist attack or a madman on the loose. How would she ever know?

A man's voice interrupted her rising panic.

“Tu es trempée jusq'au os.”
You are soaked to the bone.

Across from her, the man smiled.

She didn't smile back.

“Prends mon parapluie,”
he said, holding out a black umbrella, folded up neatly like a gift.

The man was a man, not a boy like the ones she picked up in the cafés. He had a full head of longish, dirty blond hair, a hooked nose, a trench coat belted tight around his impressive girth. He looked like Gérard Depardieu, her favorite French actor, Maggie thought. Except not as big and not as old.

“Ah!” he said, smiling again and revealing adorable crooked teeth. “You don't speak French!”

She answered in perfect French that she did, in fact, speak French, but she wasn't in the habit of taking umbrellas from strange men on trains.

He laughed, obviously delighted.

“How did you acquire that accent?” he asked her, sticking to English.

“I went to a
lycée
in the States for eight years,” she told him, sticking to French. “And my mother teaches French.”

“Alors,”
he said, using the word the French used to mean
then
or
so
or a million other things, and nodded appreciatively.

She glanced around. Their car was empty except for the two of them.

“Où est tout le monde ce soir?”
she wondered aloud.

The train was slowing and the man stood, sweeping one arm toward the door as if to invite her to join him.

“Everyone has left tonight so we can have the world to ourselves, perhaps?” he answered.

She could hear her mother's frustrated question,
Do you ever, ever think before you act?
She stood too, without hesitating, and followed him off the train.

T
hey walked silently through the rain, their legs bumping beneath the small umbrella, until they reached a place called Willi's Bar. When he opened the door and stepped aside for her to enter first, she found she couldn't move. Here was a bright, well-lit place, filled with happy people. The room buzzed with life. She felt his hand on her back, urging her inside. She stumbled slightly, and he took hold of her elbow with one hand as he smoothed her wet hair with the other.

The maître d' greeted them, grinning and making small talk. It was clear the man was a regular here, and although she tried to listen to their conversation as they walked to a table, she was too overwhelmed by the light and the noise, by
Paris
, because she had finally, after all these weeks and weeks, landed there.

He ordered a bottle of wine, garnet red and tasting of leather. Steak tartare arrived, and artichokes with morels, and crab croquettes. She was starving, she realized as she ate, shoveling the food in her mouth, hearing her mother again:
You eat like it's your last meal! Slow down!

He ordered a second bottle of wine, a cheese plate.

“How old are you?” he asked her. “Sixteen?”

“Twenty-one,” she lied. She had just turned twenty.

He nodded. “And you are here why?”

“I'm a writer,” she said.

At night, with the strange boys in her bed, she told them the same thing. But the boys just said
Cool
, or nothing at all. This man nodded again, appreciatively.

“Paris is for writers,” he said. “What do you write? Poetry?”

Maggie shook her head. “I'm writing a novel,” she said. Not a lie exactly, she decided. She did want to write a novel. She had ideas for a novel.

“Like Hemigway,
oui?
”

“Hemingway is my hero!” she said. It was as if this man was looking right into her soul.

He smiled at her. “This was his city,” he said.

“Yes,” she told him. “I've been literally walking in his footsteps.”

He raised an eyebrow. “So you've been to the Hôtel d'Angleterre then? In the fifth?”

She shook her head.

“But you must see it!” he insisted. “It is where he and Hadley spent their first night in Paris. December 1921, I believe. Room 14.”

“Wow,” Maggie said. Somehow she had randomly met the perfect man for her. A man who knew where Hemingway spent his first night in Paris, right down to the room number. A man who looked like Gérard Depardieu.

“It was called the Hôtel Jacob back then,” he was saying.

“I've walked by his apartments,” she said. Then, to impress him, she added, “Both of them.”

But he waved his hand dismissively. “Everyone sees those. There are commemorative plaques on the buildings to be sure no tourist misses them. But a writer”—he lowered his voice and placed a hand briefly on her cheek—“a writer needs the whole story,
n'est-ce pas?
”

Maggie reached in her bag and pulled out her notebook.

“What was the address?” she said, holding a pen above a blank page. “I'll go first thing tomorrow.”