The Moment of Everything (14 page)

“Why do you read them?” he asked.

I looked down at the cover, which showed a woman with her gown half open in the back.

“You mean romance novels?”

“You seem more…” He shrugged, spinning the back wheel against his hand.

“The literary type?”

He smiled at me from behind the spinning spokes. I set the book down in my lap.

“They’re fun. The heroines are strong-willed, independent, determined. They command pirate ships and fight in duels and spy on heads of state. It’s a good time.”

“And the sex has nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, the sex has a lot to do with it.”

I stood and walked over to my bike, standing barefoot on his expensive floors. The bike and at least three feet were between us, but I still felt my body pull toward him.

“Have you ever been in love?” Rajhit asked.

“That came from nowhere.”

“I’m not saying anything,” he said, eyes still on the back wheel, seeing if it was straight as it spun. “I’m asking. Have you ever been in love?”

“Sure, I guess. Probably.”

“If you were, I’m fairly certain you’d know.”

“There’s absolutely no guarantee of that.”

He stopped the wheel and began freeing the bike from the stand. He sat on the saddle and hooked his arm around my waist, pulling me to him.

“Have you ever told someone you loved him?” he asked.

I thought about the words and how they should feel in my mouth. They should be bigger words, something ungainly and hard to say. Something you have to take a class to learn how to say.

“No,” I said. “You?”

He shrugged, so I had my answer.

“So,” I said, wrapping a slip of his hair around my finger. “My turn. How many other women are riding around town on one of your bikes?”

“What?”

“It’s no big deal. I’m not living with any delusions. I know about Deborah, and I’m assuming there have been others.”

His furrowed his brow. “You’ve been talking to Jason.”

“Well, Jason talked to me.”

“Maggie, we’re grown-ups. We both have a history.”

“I know. That’s what I’m saying.”

“I don’t think it is.”

He closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath.

“This…,” he said, gesturing back and forth between us, “you and me. It’s not been exactly conventional.”

“No, it hasn’t,” I said, hoping this was getting us back to where we were before.

“You know, I’d like to have your number,” he said.

We held out for about ten seconds before we started to laugh. Considering all the things we’d done to each other’s bodies in the last weeks, it really did seem whackadoodle that we were still tethered together only by chance and circumstance. I pulled out my phone from my pocket and started to ask him for his number so I could text him mine, but there was something about having
Rajhit
and
texting
in the same thought that made me stop.

Yeah sure, we could exchange numbers, e-mail addresses, Facebook/Twitter/iChat IDs, and any other numerous account names. But then what? He’d call, we’d make plans. He’d pick me up at an agreed-upon time. I’d spend the hour before getting ready, worrying if I looked okay. We could make small talk over chicken Parmesan, then sit in the dark with the rest of Mountain View and pretend we thought the dialogue in the action movie we were watching was worth losing our hearing for. We could worry about when to call each other (too soon is desperate, too late is rude). We could plan more dates and make more plans and hold hands while we walk through Pottery Barn, and he could try to impress me with how much he knows about Shakespeare. Or we could just…

I leaned into him and slid my hand around the back of his head, pulling his lips down to mine. This. This is what I wanted. The wonder of this. The anticipation of this. The surprise of this. And then his hands were on my arms, holding me just out of kissing range.

“You’re trying to change the subject,” he said.

“I’m trying to get seriously physical with you.”

“Believe me, I appreciate it. It’s just I’d like to move on from the games.”

“Games?”

He shook his head. “I don’t mean bad games, like we’re messing with each other’s heads. I mean the fun and games we’ve been doing. But at some point…”

I stepped away from him. I didn’t go far, just to the other side of the handlebars. I felt like I needed to look at him straight on. I could see mild concern in his face and knew it was reflected in mine.

“I’m not good at this,” I said. “And I’m okay with that. I don’t think everyone has to be. I think it’s okay there are some people who aren’t. I’m making everyone else look good.”

He rolled forward a bit until the front tire was between my knees and he was close enough to kiss me if he wanted to. But he didn’t.

“That’s not the woman I know,” he said.

“We don’t really know each other,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“I think we do,” he said, worry gathering on his face. “After everything.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m a big fan of people falling in love. Huge. I say, good for them. I wish I knew how it worked. I really do. When Hugo found me that book, when I saw all those notes between Henry and Catherine. I don’t know. I just kept reading them over and over, trying to figure it out. I mean, here it was, right? The process. Not a made-up story. A real story. It was right in my hands. And I look at those notes all the time and I try to figure it out. But I can’t. Everyone seems to get it. But I don’t. And you know? I’m okay with that. Maybe that book disappeared for a reason. Maybe it found its way back to Henry and Catherine. It should be with them. It felt a little wrong that it was with me, the one who couldn’t understand it.”

I realized he hadn’t tried to interrupt me or to argue with me and I’d been too wrapped up in my own rant to pay attention. But now that I was paying attention, I saw what I’d done. He was silent, still, vacant. He didn’t argue or try to convince me. He’d gone someplace I didn’t exist.

My eyes started to burn and I knew what was coming. I muttered something about having to go to the bathroom and ran upstairs. I stayed there for a while, leaning against the sink. I wasn’t really sure what had just happened, but there had to be a way to stop it from going so very wrong. But I’d already started feeling the absence of him.

I walked back into the hall, where the door to his bedroom was open. Like the rest of the place, there wasn’t much in there—a bed I’d never been in, an alarm clock next to it, and a battered old book. The book. My book. Henry and Catherine’s book.

It sat at an angle on the bedside table, half hanging off the edge as if he’d placed it there after reading it one night. He’d had it this whole time. He’d taken it. Didn’t even ask me. Just took it. And right then, I’d wished I’d just left things after that first night, just left them the way they were, all sweet and tender and pure. But no. I had to get greedy. I wanted more of him and I sank my teeth into that desire until I hit the bitter core.

There was a price for passion. I heard it in my mother’s voice every time she called me when she was alone in that big house. I wondered what she felt like at the first betrayal. Maybe it wasn’t even a woman at first, maybe something small like lying about working late when he went out drinking with his friends. When did she first know? And when did she know that it had gone further?

I grabbed the book and went downstairs.

Back in the living room, it didn’t look like he’d moved since I left. I didn’t care.

“
This
was in your bedroom,” I said, holding the book out to him, grasping the pages together with both hands.

He looked up at me like he hadn’t realized I’d left the room.

“The book. Henry and Catherine’s book. You took it. I’ve been going crazy trying to find it. And you’ve had it all along. You just took it. Stole it.”

As recognition of what I was saying filled his face, he started to speak several times. His hands moved toward me but stopped.

“Maggie, I just wanted…,” he said. “The notes, I just wanted us to be…”

“What? You wanted us to be them? Henry and Catherine? Well, we aren’t. They probably never met and good for them if they didn’t. They’ll never have to have a moment like this one.”

I waited for him to say something, anything. But he just stared at me, his mouth slightly open.

“Keep the damn thing,” I said and shoved the book at him. Though he tried to grab for it, his efforts just flung it into the air.

I grabbed my bike from the stand and tried to turn the bike in the direction of the door, but my foot got caught in the canvas tarp he’d put down underneath it to protect the floor. I tumbled onto the floor, surrounded by the pages covered in Henry’s and Catherine’s notes. Rajhit held me from behind by my shoulders and asked me if I was okay. I looked down at the floor. I could see a scratch, a deep groove in the beautiful wood. I rubbed my hand over it as if I could erase it. He held my wrist, moving it away, moving me away.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

“Believe it or not, someday,” Jason said, rattling a pair of dice in his hand, “George Lucas will die and someone with dump trucks full of money will pull up in front of the houses of his heirs and say, ‘Here, take all of this money and remake Episodes I, II, and III. We’re begging you. They just suck. There are no words for how badly they suck.’”

Seated behind the counter, verifying the shipping address for an eBay buyer of a first edition of
Valley of the Dolls
, I glanced up at the roar of dismay and joy at Jason’s roll. It was the second Friday of the month, which meant it was Jason’s board game all-nighter at the Dragonfly. Tonight it was Axis & Allies, and Jason had furnished half a dozen bags of artery-clogging snacks and enough caffeinated sodas to light up San Francisco. His friends were a mishmash of IT guys, coders, an intellectual property lawyer, a financial advisor, the Nimue girl, other booksellers, and, oddly enough, Dizzy. Apparently he and Jason bonded over a game of Magic: The Gathering at Cuppa Joe, and Jason invited him to game night at the Dragonfly. “He’s like tournament level,” Jason told me. “How could you possibly be friends with someone so cool?”

They had all appeared at closing, already jacked up on vindaloo and pearl iced teas and looking for a book fix before hitting the down-and-dirty with the Third Reich. I’d never admitted this to Jason, but these were the customers I loved. They rarely traded in anything and bought books by the truckload, burning through their acquisitions with the heat of a Viking 18,000 BTU range, a rate that made my bag-a-week romance novel habit look like an Easy-Bake Oven. How in the world they found time to read between watching all those reruns of
Doctor Who
, igniting online message board wars about which doctor was the best, and still working sixty-hour weeks in the cubicle farms around the Valley was a mystery to me. Because they actually did read the books they bought, instead of skimming over the trivial stuff and getting to the good parts like I did. They remembered impossibly complex names, alliances, languages, cultures, and family trees. And they liked only about a quarter of what they read. They were in a constant search for that one, that special book that would satisfy their desire for mind-blowing plots, jaw-dropping wizardry, and emotional knife-twisting all at once. And when they found it, they treated the author like a god, traveling across the country and sometimes oceans to attend conventions to meet anyone attached to the stories they loved. They lived in fear of sequels being scrapped by the nonbelievers running the publishing houses, or the author dying before finishing the series. Laugh if you like. Call them pathetic even. But I’d like to see Jonathan Franzen inspire that kind of passion.

In this culture, knowledge was everything, and Jason was the grand pooh-bah, an interplanetary, multidimensional, dragon-slaying, Celtic-punk-rocking Harold Bloom of all things involving swords and lasers. They all came to Jason. I’d sat in that very same spot two days before and watched him pull a title out of the air for a customer with only “there’s a man in a wheelchair in a chateau” and “the cover has a picture of a big house on a hill and a girl and boy running away from it” to go on. In less than two minutes, the customer had the book in her hands. As I rang her up, her eyes glistened as she kept saying over and over, “I loved this book as a kid. I never thought I’d find it.” At ArGoNet, I saved my customers millions of dollars. But I never made one of them cry from the joy of it.

“I always thought Luke should have gone to the dark side,” said Sasha, the redhead from Hugo’s party, who I’d discovered worked in the Children’s section at Apollo. “Then Leia could be the one who would save the Republic.”

“I always thought Luke should have put all those Ewoks in a row, then taken one of those gliders and rammed down the line of them,” said Dizzy, lying on his back by the game board, taunting Grendel with his hand.

Jason started to squeal, mimicking the cries of perishing Ewoks in their death throes. His knobby little body shook and he rolled over on his side, holding his stomach.

“Even better,” said Doug, the tall IT guy with a Louis XIV mullet who kept telling his anxious cell phone to fuck off. “You could strap each foot to an Ewok and then you’d have slippers that could walk for you.”

“Ewalkers,” said Jason.

“Esocks,” said Dizzy.

Dizzy Frankenstein-walked around the front of the store like he had Ewoks on his feet. Everyone laughed. Everyone except Dae-Jung, the custodian of Apollo’s Sci-Fi section.

“I like the Ewoks,” Dae-Jung said, rubbing the front of his brown T-shirt over the printed words
Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me
. Only I was close enough to hear him, as he was browsing through a table of Connie Willis novels near me. He had a habit of getting up and walking around until it was his turn to roll instead of sitting with the others.

“I like the Ewoks, too,” I said, even though it was mostly untrue. But I liked Dae-Jung. I didn’t want him to feel all Pluto-ed out in this solar system. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders a little as he turned back to the book he was perusing.