Love & Lies: Marisol's Story (13 page)

“I think I’m going to like Birdie,” she said. “I used to be a Dumpster diver myself, you know.”

“Really? What was your best find?” I asked.

“Well, let’s see, I found a hula girl lamp one time, but it didn’t work anymore, so I used it to hold my baseball caps. And I found an excellent comic book collection, which I’m sure someone’s mother threw out when they weren’t looking. I made a nice little wad of cash selling those on eBay.”

“Wow, you got better stuff than Birdie does!”

“Yeah, until the time I brought home this nice fleecy blanket and put it on my bed without washing it first—”

“Oh, this is going to have a bad ending, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah. Apparently the blanket was infested with some kind of horrible bedbug creatures—”

“No!”

“I got bitten to pieces, and we ended up having to throw out my mattress and wash every sheet and curtain and piece of clothing in the room. Actually, my mother ended up calling an exterminator.”

“She must have freaked out.”

“Oh, my God. I was the one covered with bug bites, but she was scratching at herself for weeks. That was my last Dumpster dive.”

“Very sad.”

“Tragic,” she said, laughing. It was so nice to see her leaning back in her chair, looking relaxed and happy. I knew I could have spent the rest of the day with Lee and enjoyed myself. I might have suggested we go to the Brattle Theatre for a matinee of one of those Tennessee Williams movies she loved. It wouldn’t have been a sacrifice at all. Except I kept thinking that Olivia could already be sitting at a table in Starbucks, and I wasn’t there with her.

I glanced at the clock; it was almost noon. Jeez, we’d been sitting here for hours already! I stacked the plates one on the other and stood to put them in the sink.

“You didn’t want more coffee, did you?” I asked Lee.

“No, I’ve had plenty. Let me wash the dishes for you,” she said.

I waved her off as I threw the napkins in the trash and flicked off the coffeepot. “No need. I’ll do them later, when I get back.”

“You have plans for the day?” she asked.

“Yeah, well, I have that writing course, you know? And I need to work on my assignment for this week’s class.”

“Right! I hope I didn’t hold you up.”

“No, you didn’t. It was fun. But, you know, I should get started on it.”

“Okay. Well, thanks for breakfast,” she said, her mood much improved from when she entered the apartment.

“Any time you’re in the neighborhood,” I said, following her from the kitchen to the front door.

“I might take you up on that,” she said. Then, after a
slight hesitation, she leaned forward and gave me a quick hug. The long bones of her arms held me as lightly as if they were shadows, and my face rested briefly against her lemony-soap-smelling neck.

“See you soon!” she called as she flew down the stairs.

I made her no promises, even though the hug, invisible as it was, had left a surprising imprint.

O
LIVIA WAS THERE
. At one of the really small tables near the door. Barely room for one laptop—certainly not two.

She looked up and smiled the minute I walked in, as though she’d been expecting me. “Look who’s here,” she said.

As I got near the table, she closed her laptop, and I couldn’t help feeling a tiny bit insulted. Like she thought I was going to read over her shoulder or steal her work or something. Not that I wasn’t awfully curious about what was on her hard drive. And I had to admit, it bugged the hell out of me when Birdie came into my room and stood there looking at my screen over my shoulder.

“I got so much work done here last time, I thought I’d try it again,” I said.

She nodded. “You mean you got work done until I sat down next to you.”

“No! Well, I mean . . .”

“It’s hard for two writers to work in the same space,” Olivia said, smiling. “As soon as one types something, the other one panics. ‘She’s writing and I’m not!’” She pointed to a small empty table across the room. “Sit over there. We’ll
work for an hour or two and then you can join me, okay?”

“Good idea,” I said, wondering how I was going to keep my eyes on the monitor and not her soft blue sweater. But, I retreated to my table, got a large coffee, and settled in to work. It actually was much easier to work with Olivia too far away to touch or speak to. In no time the buzz of the place surrounded me, and I went into my cocoon, just me and my Mac.

The scene I wanted to write for class was the one in which Christina meets Natalie—the name I’d decided on—for the first time in a used-book store in Harvard Square. I knew the setting would play a very important part in it. I started slowly, but I seemed to know where it was going.

Christina had sought out the used-book store in Harvard Square in hopes of finding a book of short stories she could read during her breaks and lunch hour at Dr. Hester’s office. She had always enjoyed short stories because of the way the best ones surprised you at the end and made you rethink everything you’d just read. They were like perfect worlds without a word out of place—everything worked together. Christina’s own life was not such an orderly world, which might have been why she craved them in her reading.


The bookstore was housed in what was supposed to be one of the oldest buildings in Harvard Square. It was not on the main thoroughfare, Massachusetts Avenue, but on a side
street, where it was overshadowed by the stately architecture of Harvard University. Although the building was red brick, like the Harvard edifices across the street, it lay outside the protective gates of the college itself.


As Christina entered the front door, she saw a large sign in the window announcing THIS BUILDING SOON TO BE AN OFF-PRICE MEGASTORE. She sighed regretfully. Why did things have to change? She hated change, and she almost wished she hadn’t even discovered the place if it was already on its way to demolition. There could be no future for her here.


Steuben’s Used Books was located in the basement of the building. There was an elevator she could have taken, but Christina put her hand on the beautifully carved newel and climbed down the wooden staircase. The treads were scuffed and scarred by the thousands of shoes that had gone before hers, searching for a Shakespeare play or a book of poetry. What would happen to all the old books once Steuben’s was closed?


Christina walked the narrow, musty-smelling aisles until she found the section for short stories. There were so many to choose from, but she selected a book by Grace Paley, someone she’d always meant to read, and one by Flannery O’Connor, who she already knew she
liked, and took them up to the cashier, who sat on a high stool in back of an old cash register.


“Find what you wanted?” the cashier asked. When Christina looked up at the woman’s face, she was amazed at how beautiful she was. This was not the sort of woman you expected to find in a basement full of old books. Her hair was dark and shiny and swept around her shoulders as if a wind had blown in through the leaky casements for just that purpose.


At first Christina could hardly speak, but finally she forced herself to say, “Yes, thank you. I’m sorry to hear the store is closing. It must be so upsetting.”


The woman shrugged. “A little, but things change.”


“What will happen to all the books?”


“I’ll put them into storage and sell them online,” she said. “Most people want to shop that way now, anyway.”


Christina made a face. “They do? You can’t make a surprise discovery online! You can’t see if someone has written notes on the pages! You can’t find the book you wanted fallen on the floor between the bookcases! Where’s the joy?”


The cashier smiled at Christina. “That’s true, but most people don’t want to spend time
on the possibility of finding joy. They’re too busy for joy. My name is Natalie, by the way. It’s nice to meet you.”


“I’m Christina.” They shook hands.


“Oh,” Natalie said. “You’ve chosen two of my favorite books.”


“I have?”


Natalie slipped the books into a small bag. “No charge,” she said. “Maybe when you’re through reading them, we can talk about how much we liked them.”


“What if I don’t like them?” Christina said, daring to be flirtatious.


“Oh, you will,” Natalie said. “I can tell already.”


Christina took the bag and laughed. Through the high window behind Natalie she could see an enormous maple tree bending in the wind, its skirt of yellow leaves brushing the ground, then lifting into the air.
Surely
, she thought,
the builders won’t have to cut that down too.
But maybe they would. As Natalie said, things changed—that seemed to be the only certainty in life.


The words had begun slowly and then flooded out of me. That was the only way to put it. The story was beginning to sound almost mystical, the two women kind of old-fashioned. I wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted for them
or not, but it interested me, and I couldn’t see a reason not to follow the idea at least a little further.

I loved who Christina was becoming, a person who saw omens in a bending tree, and Natalie wasn’t turning out to be as much like Olivia as I’d thought she would. The character had immediately begun to go in her own direction, pulling me along behind. It was the most exciting piece of writing I’d ever done, because it seemed to me it was something new—new for me, at least—and I had no idea where it would take me.

It was almost two hours before I came up for air. I jumped out of my chair and went over to Olivia’s table, being careful to stand behind her screen so she wouldn’t think I was trying to see her work.

“You finished for the day?” Olivia asked, looking up.

“I just had the most amazing writing experience! I was like, in the
zone
or something. I did the assignment, and I think it’s the second chapter of my novel, too!”

“That’s great,” Olivia said, clicking off her laptop and closing it. “I’ve been making a few breakthroughs myself. We must be good for each other. Sit down.”

“Are you sure you’re through? I don’t want to interrupt you if you aren’t ready to stop working. I could wait over there—”

“Don’t be silly. I’m eager to hear what you have to say about your work.”

So I told her everything—well, not the part about how one of my characters was partly based on her, but everything else. About how the writing had flowed and how the characters had seemed to grow as I wrote them.

“I’m so happy for you,” Olivia said, reaching across to
squeeze my hand. “It’s wonderful when the writing comes easily. But don’t take it for granted; for every day it’s easy there are ten when it’s hard.”

“Do you want to hear it? I could read it to you!” If Noodles could talk, he would have sounded like me; I was practically panting.

Olivia’s face closed up, and I knew I’d made a mistake.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess your students accost you all the time, begging you to listen to their work right this minute. I’ll wait until class. It’s no problem.”

“It’s not that, Marisol. I’m sure I’ll love what you’ve written. It’s just that I’m still in the heads of my own characters at the moment, and it’s hard for me to leap from one story to another. I don’t think I could give you my best attention right now. I’ll be ready to hear it tomorrow.”

“Sure, that’s fine. But I’d be happy to listen to some of your book, if you wanted to read a little bit to me.” In fact I would have been happy to listen to Olivia read the entire novel, right there, just to me. But she shook her head emphatically.

“Sorry, nobody gets a preview. If I read it out loud, or even let you read it to yourself, somehow the air goes out of it. I have to keep it to myself, my big secret, until the whole thing is finished. It keeps my energy in the book instead of worrying about what people think of it.”

I was disappointed, but I understood. I just wished I were special enough to be the one person she’d let see it early.

“Do you have a title? Can you tell me that much?” I don’t give up easily.

Olivia laughed. “Well, I do have a title. Must you know what it is?”

“I must.”

She cleared her throat dramatically. “It is:
Lillian, Who Says She Loves You.”

I repeated it out loud. “That’s a great title,” I said. “It’s so mysterious. Who’s Lillian?”

“No more clues! That’s all you get for now.” She started gathering up her possessions, and I felt a little desperate. Was she going to leave?

I looked at my watch. “Wow, it’s late. I didn’t even have lunch. Do you want to go somewhere, or . . . ?” God, I couldn’t really ask her out, could I?

“Too late for lunch,” she said. “How about dinner? As it turns out, I’m not going to be able to meet you for breakfast tomorrow—there’s a Harvard faculty thing I can’t skip—so let me take you someplace nice tonight. We can go home and change first. You can put on your pendant.”

My hand went automatically to my neck. “Oh, I almost put it on this morning—I usually wear it—but . . . I didn’t.” Should I be apologizing for that?

Olivia herded me toward the door. “Well, let’s go get it! My car is just down the block. The white Miata.”

*  *  *

Olivia already looked great—what she really meant was that I should go home and change. When we walked into the apartment, Birdie and Damon were ensconced on the couch watching reruns of
The Gilmore Girls
, and I suddenly saw my living accommodations through Olivia’s eyes. And they were
appalling. The few measly pieces of furniture we’d gotten from Birdie’s parents were cat-clawed to pieces, and the apartment was primarily accessorized by extension cords, which connected two televisions, a computer, a printer, and several lamps to the one wall socket in the room. There were hair-balls and dust bunnies big enough to be live animals.

Speaking of which, Noodles scratched at Olivia’s leg and Peaches attempted to leap into her unwilling arms.