The Book That Matters Most (5 page)

“Nonsense!” he said, getting to his feet. “We'll go immediately.”

“Now?” Maggie said.

“Of course now,” he said.

Hadn't she come here for adventures? For experiences that she could write about in stories or even a novel? What was
grander than an older French man who looked like a movie star taking her to see the very place Hemingway stayed on his first night in Paris?

“Je m'appelle Julien,”
the man said softly.

“Maggie,” she said, her mouth stuffed with cheese made from the milk of cows in the Pyrenées.

O
n Sunday he took her to Marché Mouffetard. They nibbled freshly baked bread as they walked through the crowded market past fruit and cheese and charcuterie vendors.

“It's still just like he described it in
A Moveable Feast
,” Maggie said, taking in all of the grocers and the rich smells of ripe cheese and meats. How many weeks had she wasted in her tiny room? And smoky bars? Now she was discovering Paris. Hemingway's Paris, she added.

Julien took her hand in his and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“I'm so happy to show you these things,” he said. He didn't let go of her hand until they reached Marché Monge, where he bought her a
pain au chocolat
.

“My favorite!” she said. “How could you know?”

Still, he didn't kiss her when he left her at the hostel. He just touched her cheek lightly, and asked if she would meet him on Wednesday at the Jardin du Luxembourg.

“I don't believe your Monsieur Hemingway really strangled pigeons for food there and hid them in his baby's pram, do you?”

“Did he claim to have done that?” Maggie asked, delighted.

“So he did,” Julien said. “He said he had to since there was no food from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard.”

Maggie laughed. “Was he right about that?”

“I'm afraid so,” Julien said with a sigh. He raised that eyebrow and asked again, “Wednesday?”

Maggie agreed, wondering how she could possibly wait three whole days before she saw him again.

F
inally Wednesday arrived. The entire way to the Luxembourg Gardens, Maggie wondered if today would be the day he would finally kiss her. Or perhaps she should kiss him first? She imagined leaning in to him beneath the eyes of the statues of the queens of France. Or perhaps at the Medici Fountain. Maggie smiled imagining it—the kiss, his surprise.

By the time she reached him she had a severe case of butterflies in her stomach at the anticipation of that perfect kiss. When he spotted her walking toward him, he dropped the cigarette he was smoking and crushed it beneath his heel, then opened his arms wide. Without hesitating, Maggie rushed into them.

“
W
hat do you like? Besides Monsieur Hemingway?” he asked her later, after he'd kissed her beside what seemed like all one hundred and six of the gardens' statues and then pleaded with her to come to bed with him. He didn't need to plead with her. After the very first kiss, coincidentally by the small model of the Statue of Liberty, Maggie was hoping they would become lovers. By the time he'd pressed her against the statue of Baudelaire, his hands running along her ribs, his tongue deep in her mouth, she was almost certain she had fallen in love with him

Now they were naked, on a large bed in an apartment on
rue Saint-Antoine in the Marais. They had climbed one hundred steps to reach this apartment. Maggie had counted them,
“Quatre-vingt-dix-huit, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, cent!”

The last—
cent!—
she'd announced out of breath as she half fell through the door.

Julien caught her, and laughed, and said, “I never counted them.”

They drank a bottle of champagne on the big pink couch, kissing and kissing until her lips felt swollen. Julien opened a second bottle, his long hair tangled and wild.

“Shall we take this one to bed with us?” he asked her, almost shyly.

The bed was up a ladder like the kind on boats, steep and narrow, and he guided her up it from behind, his hands on her waist. She had the spins, and when she reached the top of the stairs, she threw herself onto the bed with its white pillows and white duvet, miles of white. Ever since the first time she got drunk, back when she was only what—thirteen? fourteen? before Outward Bound and the farm camp in Vermont and all the things her parents had tried to fix her—she'd loved the spins, loved being drunk or high, feeling the world fall out from beneath her.

The sex was sloppy and fast, a drunk girl and an older man too excited by having sex with someone half his age to do it any other way.

But now he traced her ribs, one by one, and whispered again, “What do you like?”

“Do you have cigarettes?” she asked him.

He did.

“Drugs?”

He hesitated, his fingers pausing halfway down her ribs.

“What sort?” he asked.

She named her favorites. Oxycontin. Vicodin. Adderall. Coke. Pot.

“My parents spent thousands of dollars protecting me from myself,” she said, “but I'm just a bad seed, I guess.”

She meant to sound flirty, sassy, but somehow the words came out wrong.

Without replying, Julien got out of bed.

She closed her eyes, and let the room spin around her.

“You fell asleep,” she heard him say, a minute or an hour or many hours later.

There was a skylight above her, and rain still pounded it.

Julien offered her a cigarette and cognac in a snifter. She sat up, took them both from him.

“I want to make you a proposition,” he said. Then he said her name, not Maggie but Marguerite, like it was the most delicious thing.

The cigarette was a Gitane, one of the strong types, and she coughed.

“You may stay here—”

“Here?” she repeated, unable to believe her good luck. Maybe he loved her too.

“And I will bring you food, and cigarettes, and even drugs, if you like.”

Maggie took a big swallow of the very good cognac, enjoying the feeling of it burning inside her.

“You want me to be like a kept woman. Your mistress?”

“But you must be here whenever I want you,” he said.

He took the cognac from her, and sipped.

He began giving her details. He would get her a cell phone, keys, some clothes for when he took her out to dinner.

Maggie smiled. She would do it, live in this apartment high above the Marais and she would fill her little notebook with keen observations and pithy remarks. At the edge of her brain, her mother's voice threatened to intrude with logic or warnings or both. But Maggie wouldn't let it. I'm in Paris and I'm in love, she told herself, and a shiver of excitement spread through her.

“Alors,”
he said. “You look happy.”

“Oui,”
she said.
“Très heureuse.”

Maggie got on her knees and inched her way across the vast ocean of the bed. When she reached him, she kissed him full on the mouth.

PART TWO

JANUARY

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

—
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen

Ava

“Your mother was here last night,” Ava's father said over their sad Christmas dinner in the dining room of Aged Oaks, the assisted living facility where he'd moved that summer.

Soon enough, Ava realized, her father would take the next step down in this system. He'd already moved from independent living to assisted living at breakneck speed. With his dementia growing worse, in no time he would be sent off to the Memory Ward, as they called it here, even though no one in the Memory Ward had their memory anymore.

“She looked good,” her father said, nodding and gumming his
turkey. Lately, he'd stopped wearing his false teeth, which made him look like the dolls her kids had made out of dried apples. “Boy, has she gotten old!”

Even though the doctors had told Ava that she should go along with his confusion rather than challenge it, she said, “Dad, Mom died a long time ago.” The doctors had instructed her to gently remind her father of facts, so she added, “Remember? Lily died in 1970, and then Mom in 1971?”

He laughed. “But she came in last night, Ava! ‘Merry Christmas, Teddy,' she said. And she kissed me right here.” He pointed to his cheek, also sunken and spotted with stray gray whiskers from a hasty shave by a nurse that morning.

“Sometimes,” Ava said, moving her mashed potatoes around on her plate, “sometimes I dream about her too. And it seems real.”

“Me too!” he agreed, finally swallowing his turkey and putting a forkful of gelatinous cranberry sauce into his mouth. “That's why this was so remarkable. Not a dream.
Her
.”

Ava put her fork down. The food was not terrible, just basic institutional food. Could it have been just last Christmas that she was with Jim and Maggie and Will, making a vegetarian lasagna—Maggie had been in yet another phase, vegan this time—and drinking champagne and dancing to “Build Me Up Buttercup” and “Jingle Bell Rock”? How had Jim managed to seem so happy? He'd already begun seeing Delia Lindstrom, though of course Ava didn't know that.
Seeing
. That made it sound like he was casually dating her, when in fact he was having an affair.

“I told her too,” her father was saying. “I said, ‘God, it's good to see you, but you've gotten so old.' And she said, ‘You don't look so good yourself, Teddy.'”

Ava tried to think of what to say.

“Where's Jim?” her father asked suddenly, as if he'd just noticed Jim wasn't there.

“He left me. Remember?”

Her father nodded and speared more turkey. “That's right. Like your mother left me.”

“Well,” Ava said, “if you call dying leaving.”

“No, she left us.”

“Okay,” Ava said.

“Everyone left us,” he said, turning teary eyes to Ava. “Didn't they?”

“Yes,” she said, covering his hand with hers, and those memories she tried so hard to keep at bay flooded her. The angle of Lily's neck. Sirens. The face of that policeman.

“Where's Jim?” her father asked her again.

“Gone,” Ava answered.

A
November night, thirteen months ago. Ava hated herself for being able to point to how many months and weeks and days and even goddamn hours it had been since that night when everything changed. She and Jim had been sitting together after dinner, watching the local news on TV. Ava had her feet in Jim's lap as she corrected student papers. She'd been teaching French at the university for years now, a job she loved. Years earlier, when she was a French major with dreams of working at the UN or perhaps at a publishing house where she would translate novels into French, she would have never believed that she'd be happy teaching students French grammar and conjugations, listening to them stumble as they awkwardly read newspaper articles
aloud or recited poetry. But she was happy doing it. She loved how their faces brightened when they actually understood what they read or when they had conversations with one another in French.

That night, Ava graded their French 101 quizzes on conjugating
-er, -ir
, and
-re
verbs while Jim reviewed college essays for Pathways to Success, the nonprofit company he ran. Pathways to Success helped underprivileged students in the lowest-performing high schools gain academic success and get scholarships to college. Periodically he blurted things like, “You nailed it, Thida!” Or: “Way to go, Felipe!” She liked this too, their quiet nights together. Sometimes they played backgammon, or spirited games of Pitch, the card game that the whole family used to play together, splitting into two very competitive teams.

They didn't usually watch the local news, but yet another snowstorm was predicted for the next day, and they both had become obsessed with storm tracking this snowy winter. Ava tried to concentrate on
parler, finir
, and
admettre
.

If Cate or anyone had asked, Ava would have said they were in an especially good phase. Maggie, who had given them plenty of trouble as a teenager, seemed to have finally turned herself around. That's why Ava had felt confident about sending her to Florence. And Will, who had inherited Jim's do-gooder gene, was happily working for a nonprofit in Africa. Ava and Jim had even been making love again, more than they had in years. That too had ebbed and then returned, albeit without its former gusto.

They'd been making plans for the summer just that morning. She'd sent in the deposit on a beach house in Westport, Massachusetts.
For one glorious month, they'd leave the heat of Providence and spend their days on the beach.

“I wish it was already July,” Ava said, putting down her red pen and the last paper she'd corrected, which had a plethora of red Xs on it. “No conjugating verbs. No correcting papers. Just beach and sunshine and thou.”