The Book That Matters Most (9 page)

The mother nodded, clearly the one in charge of her little brood.

“Who's the man there?” she asked, pointing to the sole male in the painting.

“The ballet master,” the tour guide told her. “He's beating time on the floor with his baton.”

The tour guide glanced at Maggie and winked, as if they were in cahoots. He was American too, with a slight hint of a New England accent and an unruly shock of brown hair that kept falling into his eyes, which were a startling blue. He looked as if he were in prep school.

She pretended she hadn't been eavesdropping and focused on a vague point in the painting,
The Ballet Class
.

“The girls look . . . well . . .” the mother stammered. “Streetwise?”

“They are,” the tour guide said. “Some of the city's poorest young girls struggled to become the fairies, nymphs, and queens of the stage. At the ballet, you see, Degas found a world that excited both his taste for classical beauty and his eye for modern realism.”

“Stop twirling,” the father said sternly to the little girl, who kept twirling.

“Sophie, you'll like this bronze sculpture over here,” the tour
guide said, taking the little girl's hand and leading her to
Small Dancer at Fourteen
.

Maggie followed too, trying to keep a safe distance. But the tour guide was on to her. He grinned in her direction, flashing one deep dimple.

“Originally, she had real hair, a real tutu and real dancing slippers,” he explained.

“I have to peepee,” the little girl said.

After some negotiating—“Can't you hold it? We're almost done, aren't we, Noah?”—the mother took the little girl to the bathroom. Relieved, the father and brother plopped onto a bench, both of them pulling out their phones.

The tour guide—Noah—walked over to Maggie.

“You got caught in the rain,” he said.

“Brilliant deduction,” she said.

“And I'm guessing you're not a tourist? You live here?”

“More brilliant still.”

“I'm always happy to hang with fellow expats,” he said. He took a card from his shirt pocket. “I live over near the Pompidou,” he added.

She shoved the card into her coat pocket.

“Near the doll hospital? And that little bookstore?” he said.

Maggie wished she could smoke in here. Her body needed something—nicotine, caffeine, anything.

“There's a café in that same alley. It's the only one there,” he said. “If you want to have a coffee, trade expat secrets.”

“Maybe,” Maggie said, knowing she would lose the card, or throw it away.

“I go there every morning,” he said.

In her pocket, her phone buzzed. She took it out, saw the blocked number light up.

“I have to go,” she said, turning, already answering the telephone.

“I'm at the apartment,” Julien said. “I want you.”

“Maybe I'll see you there tomorrow,” Noah called to her.

“Did you know it's January?” she asked Julien, her voice trembling. “I mean, how can it be January?”

“Ah! Ma petite camée,”
he said. “I shall remind you of December.”

Maggie didn't know the word
camée
. Some exotic fruit, no doubt. She thought of kumquats and rambutans and mangosteens. Perhaps he had brought her some. She loved biting into the tart skins of kumquats.

The same woman was at the desk, looking officious.

“Qu'est-ce que c'est une camée?”
Maggie asked her.

The woman looked her up and down slowly.

“Mademoiselle,”
she said, “I would think you would know the word. In English, it is junkie.”

PART THREE

FEBRUARY

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here
and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

—
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ava

After the monthly faculty meeting, all of the teachers went to the Ground Round for burgers and beer, and to complain about whatever new rules or policies had been discussed at the meeting. Ava used to enjoy these evenings, lost in the bureaucracy of the French department. She liked coming home and telling Jim who was sleeping with whom, who wasn't getting tenure, who was secretly applying for jobs elsewhere. Her colleagues had taken on the stock roles of the characters in commedia dell'arte, the traditional Italian theater. She'd met Jim when she was in graduate school studying French at NYU and he was performing in a
commedia troupe on the Lower East Side of New York. Through the years, they'd used the characters from it as a secret code. Even Jim referred to Xavier Plouff, her department chair, as Brighella, the coarse, scheming, low-level merchant who was mean-spirited and occasionally violent to characters whose station was lower than his.

She should join them at the Ground Round tonight, Ava knew. But as they filed out of Plouff's stuffy conference room, she hesitated. As yet another form of torture for the faculty, Plouff insisted on meeting in the smaller room adjacent to his office instead of the larger department one, forcing them to sit shoulder to shoulder at odd angles to fit into the tight space.

“How are your classes this semester?” Plouff asked her.

“Great!” Ava said, because that was what you always said to Plouff. He didn't take criticism or complaints well.

“One more thing,” he continued, even though Ava was halfway out the door. “I saw your husband on television the other night.”

It wasn't unusual for Jim to show up on TV, talking about high school dropout rates or highlighting one of his success stories.

Ava murmured something noncommittal.

“Yes, yes,” Plouff was saying, “something about putting a coat on the Independent Man?”

The Independent Man, an eleven-foot-tall gilded bronze statue, stood on top of the dome of the statehouse in Providence, a symbol of freedom.

“Excuse me?” Ava asked, confused, although she shouldn't have been.

“I guess he didn't mention to you that some friend of his climbed two hundred and seventy-eight feet to the dome and actually placed a knitted coat on the Independent Man?”

Ava groaned.

Plouff was grinning at her. “Do you know her? The friend? Delia somebody?”

“Lindstrom,” Ava said.

“Apparently they think he assisted her in this prank,” Plouff went on, still grinning. “I never saw Jim as the criminal type.”

“He's full of surprises,” Ava said.

Plouff nodded. “Indeed. Well,
à demain
.”

With that, he shut the door, satisfied no doubt that he'd embarrassed her.

With relief, Ava saw that Monique was waiting for her at the end of the hall.

“Coming?” Monique asked, holding the door open for her.

Ava nodded. A burger and beer and gossip sounded like just what she needed after all.

A
light snow fell as Ava made her way up Benefit Street to the Athenaeum for the book group. She had done it again. She'd started the book, read the first three or four pages, and put it down. There didn't seem to be any plot or setting or character yet, which made Ava think
The Great Gatsby
was going to be a very slow read, just as when she'd had to read it in college years ago. And of course she hadn't picked it up until the day before the book group, her plan being to spend the entire night reading. To her relief, there were actually two movies of
The Great Gatsby
, and she watched them both. She preferred the older one, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, but of course she had to keep her opinions on the movies to herself.

Instead, she copied her favorite lines into her own Moleskine notebook, bought to show the others how serious she was about being part of the book group. Daisy said,
All the bright precious
things fade so fast . . . and they don't come back
. This seemed to Ava one of the wisest things she'd ever heard. But she couldn't find the quote in the book, so she also jotted down
that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool
, from page 21. It seemed like a provocative thing to say. Otherwise, Ava intended to keep quiet.

At Williams Street, Ava stopped. There, again, sat Jim's Prius, the bumper wrapped in pink yarn but this time with red hearts knit into it.

Ava glanced around her. The streets were empty, quiet.

She turned the corner onto Williams Street and walked over to Jim's car. How she wished she could do something, something awful, like scrape her key across the door or smash a window. But she felt as impotent standing there as she had the night she'd woken him, thrusting that phone with the text message—
miss u babe
—in his face. He'd admitted everything that night, and even as Ava saw her life begin to unravel, she'd heard herself saying that if he stopped the affair, they could work this out, stay together, do better. As a younger woman, she had believed that such a betrayal would destroy a marriage. But standing squarely in middle age, faced with her husband's infidelity, she saw things differently. Couples rebuilt from such wreckage, didn't they? Jim had held her hand then, as if they were on a first date, light and careful. “Just end it and we'll get back on track,” she told him. “Oh God, Ava,” he'd said, “I love her. I'm in love with her.”

Remembering that night now, Ava felt tears well up. She saw, in the glow of the streetlight, a short tail of pink yarn at the end of the bumper. Glancing around again, finding the streets still empty, Ava reached down and took that soft strand in her hand, tugging and tugging until the knitting unraveled, the yarn falling
in a pink tangle to the snow. When the bumper was bare again, Ava collected the yarn and shoved it into her bag. There was so much of it that she couldn't close the zipper.

“Take that,” she muttered, and then kicked the nearest tire, twice. “Babe.”

H
er unraveling had taken her long enough to make her late. Cate was already talking when Ava walked in, her coat and hair dusted with snow.

“Sorry,” Ava said.

Luke smiled and tapped the empty seat beside him. Ava scurried over to it and sat.

By the time Ava got her coat off and opened her Moleskine notebook—hoping the others saw it—Penny was standing.

“We all know the wonderful Twain quote, ‘A classic is a book everyone's heard of but no one reads,'” she said. “But in the case of
The Great Gatsby
, I would offer the Italo Calvino quote, ‘A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.' For I have read
The Great Gatsby
numerous times, and always discover new things in each reading.”

“I couldn't agree more,” Cate said. “I was delighted when Luke chose it, and I wonder if he might tell us why this is the book that matters most to him?”

Luke not only got up, but he walked with his long-legged stride to the front of the circle, where Cate stood. He adjusted his hat, then began to speak.

“I remember the first time I read
The Great Gatsby
,” he said. “Eleventh-grade English. I was that kid who spent all his time in the art room, an okay student, but mostly unremarkable. I was
secretly in love with Molly Jenkins, who was not only totally hot, but she practically ran the school. Editor of the newspaper and the yearbook, you know the type. I even contributed drawings to the newspaper just so I could see her more. I spent an awful lot of energy trying to figure out a way to ask her out. But she had this boyfriend, and this aura, you know? Then I read
The Great Gatsby
and I felt like the book was talking to me. The unattainable woman. The green light. The first time we see that light, it's described as ‘minute and far away,' which makes it appear impossible to reach. But then Nick says at the end, ‘It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.' And that gave me this crazy hope, this decision to run faster and stretch out my arms farther. It gave me this belief or this confidence that anything is possible.”

Luke looked at each of them in turn.

“It changed my life,” he said quietly.

Everyone, including Ava, burst into applause.

It took a few minutes to get back to discussing the book, but then Honor brought up the same quote Ava had decided to mention—
that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool
—which led to a lively discussion of women in the 1920s and now.

John brought up the theme of the American dream in
The Great Gatsby
.

“All those shirts,” John said, holding the book close to his chest like a precious thing.

Jennifer nodded. “Such excess.”

“I wonder if Gatsby would have even loved Daisy if she wasn't so rich,” Kiki said. “Remember when he says, ‘Her voice is full of
money'?”

“Fitzgerald once said that you don't write because you want to say something,” Penny said. “You write because you have something to say.”