The Book of Someday (3 page)

Spontaneity is new to Livvi. And in its presence she’d been caught completely off guard, overtaken by an eager, childlike excitement. But now. Now that she’s alone with a man she doesn’t know. In this empty, tucked-away room. She’s feeling insecure and slightly embarrassed.

“Should I bother to tell you how beautiful your eyes are? How they’re the color of French coffee and Belgian chocolate?” he’s asking. “Or would I lose points for too many food references?”

His question has been delivered with a delightful lightness. It’s making Livvi laugh and momentarily forget how nervous she is.

He’s laughing with her—holding his hands out in a gesture of comic pleading. “I’m giving you some of my best stuff here and I’m getting nothing back. Come on. Cut me some slack. Give me
something
.” His expression is open, full of fun.

Livvi’s smiling. Liking him. As she asks: “What kind of something?”

He thinks for a minute, then says: “Your favorite guilty pleasure. In summertime.”

She glances away, suddenly feeling shy again. “Peach ice cream,” she tells him. “Where I live has a little courtyard garden, and I like being there in the evening, watching the sun set and eating peach ice cream—right out of the carton.”

After a lingering pause, he says: “And in the winter?”

There’s something in his voice, something about the way he asked the question, that’s making it easy for Livvi to get past her usual reticence. “In the winter, the very first time it rains, I like to stay home, by myself. I light a fire in the fireplace. And then I get this incredibly soft white woolen throw that I keep on my bed, and I take it into the living room and cuddle up in it—in a chair near the fireplace. And I read a book—one that I’ve been dying to read, but have been saving for winter—for that first rainy day.”

“I like that,” he says. He pauses for a beat, gives her a slow smile. “But I’m still waiting to hear your life story. Come on, keep talking to me. I want to know you.” He’s looking at her with an expression of rapt attention.

Livvi is captivated. For a heartbeat. Then she realizes that what he’s actually saying is:
“Tell me where you grew up. Where you went to school. What life was like when you were a little girl.”
The thought of it is tying her stomach in knots.

She rarely talks about her childhood. She’s wondering if it would be all right to tell him a white lie about having grown up beside a vineyard. In a rose-covered house.

But he’s already letting her off the hook, saying: “Never mind about giving me your personal history. I’ll do it for you.”

He has moved his chair so close to hers that she can feel the heat from his body and smell his scent, cool and clean like a night breeze. He’s opening her hand, tracing the lines on her palm, his fingertips firm and steady on her skin.

His touch is sending a tingle through Livvi.

“Just for the record,” he’s telling her, “I’m not a pro at this, I own a public relations agency. The palm reading I learned from my gypsy godmother. And by the way I can’t start until I know your name.”

“Livvi.” The tingle he has caused is making her voice the slightest bit unsteady.

“Livvi?”

“It used to be Olivia. I like Livvi better.”

“And I like Olivia.” He brings her hand close to his lips. “I’m Andrew.” His breath is moving softly across Livvi’s fingers as he’s murmuring: “I want you to say it.”

“What?”

“My name.”

“Andrew.” Livvi’s eyes dart away from his; she knows she’s blushing again.

When she looks back at him she sees amusement and playful indulgence.

“It’s all here in your hand,” Andrew is saying. “The story of who you are.” He pauses, studying Livvi’s palm. “You’re the youngest of three. Your parents were poets, who worshipped you. After graduating from a big-name college—where you were on a full scholarship and still managed to be the hottest thing on campus—you had a brief, sex-fuelled marriage to a good-looking parolee you met while buying a used car and then you went on to become who you are today, the designer of an award-winning line of can openers.”

He lets go of her hand—with a mischievous smile. “So. How close did I come?”

There’s wistfulness in Livvi’s voice as she says: “Not very close.”

“You were only right about one thing,” she tells him. “I did go to college on a scholarship. But I was home-schooled right up until the first day of my freshman year, and I wasn’t the coolest thing on campus—I was more like an Amish hermit dropped into the middle of a rave. Most of the time I was hiding out in the library.”

Andrew looks at Livvi for a long beat, then says: “I was wrong about the adoring parents too. Wasn’t I?”

Livvi nods.

“How about the brothers and sisters?”

Andrew’s inquiries are probing at vulnerable places in Livvi. Her throat is tight, crowded with old, unexplored sorrow while she’s explaining: “I almost had a half brother once…but he was stillborn.”

For a short while, both Andrew and Livvi are silent. The only sound is the steady dripping of a faucet, into a limestone sink, near the door.

The mood of playfulness has disappeared.

Livvi is certain she has made a fool of herself.

“I should go,” she’s whispering.

“Wrong. That’s exactly what you shouldn’t do.”

Andrew is looking directly into Livvi’s eyes. His gaze is so assured, so seductively commanding, it’s setting off a visceral reaction in Livvi. A sensuous desire to belong to him. The craving to be, most willingly, owned by him.

Which is why Livvi is offering no resistance as Andrew, with tender care, is sliding her out of her chair. Bringing her to her feet. And pulling her close. Leaving not a millimeter of space between them.

Andrew is tilting her face upward, preparing to kiss her. And Livvi’s hands are coming to rest on the smooth coolness of his shirtfront.

She is closing her eyes. While Andrew’s lips are settling against hers in a way that is possessive. And deliberate. And full of desire.

It’s a kiss so complete. So deep. It is haunting. Mesmerizing.

Under its spell Livvi’s breathing is beginning to slow and take on the steady rhythm of the water dripping into the stone sink. It’s the same hushed, deliberate rhythm in which her heart has begun to beat.

And in that broken place—the place where Livvi is starving to be wanted and to be loved—there is an exquisite moment of soaring, perfect peace.

And then.

Out of nowhere.

Livvi’s heart is banging. Skipping, pounding, like a runaway jackhammer.

Andrew has left her.

Abruptly. Unceremoniously. The way a man might leave a cup of airport coffee after he’s heard his flight being called.

Andrew is already halfway across the room, his concentration riveted on the phone he’s pulling from his pocket. He’s opening the door and saying something, but the noise from the party on the other side is drowning it out.

The door is swinging shut—and the only sound in the room is the splash of water falling into the stone sink.

Livvi is mute. Stunned. With hurt. And humiliation.

For several minutes she’s motionless.

While her mind is whirling.

She’s trying to sort out what has just happened. Trying to make sense of it. But the noise of the dripping water—its steady, relentless echo—is making it impossible.

It’s when Livvi goes to the other side of the room, to shut the faucet off, that she sees the windowsill above the sink. The sill is coated in a fine layer of dust. And for the first time since Andrew’s departure, a sound comes out of Livvi. A sharp, startled laugh: a gut-sick realization. Tonight’s humiliation isn’t new. She has experienced it before…

…In a dusty basement room. Where she is about to lose her virginity. To one of her college professors. A man who has said “Trust me. I’ll be gentle.” An old man. With hair that smells like cigarettes and hands as cold as ice. The minute their clothes come off, he’s grabbing them and leaving Livvi—without saying a word—leaving her alone. On the floor. Naked and humiliated. She’s watching him hurry to his desk and turn his back on her, taking the time to fold their clothes into two separate stacks arranged in ascending order of smallness. Jeans on the bottom. Socks on the top. The bones of his spine poking up like a string of burrs under his skin. His butt-cheeks, sallow and creased. Hanging. Swaying a little. Like a pair of empty pockets.

And Livvi, standing alone in this gleaming butler’s pantry, is remembering that that peculiar man was able to have her, there, on the dusty floor of his basement office, simply because he’d asked. And no one else had. And she assumed no one would.

The memory of this has Livvi frozen in place. Astounded. Wondering where to go from here.

***

“After all the years of aimless needing and hoping she knew exactly what she was going to do. She would never again wait to be chosen. From this point forward she’d be the one doing the choosing, and she’d settle for nothing less than precisely what she wanted.” Livvi pauses. And closes the book from which she has been reading aloud.

The applause is instantaneous.

She’s thrilled, and a little overwhelmed. This is one of the most important stops on the book tour promoting her debut novel—the moment feels surreal.

Livvi is in upstate New York, thousands of miles away from California, and the city of Pasadena, and the little guest cottage she rents there. She’s behind a microphone on the second floor of a truly gorgeous bookstore. A place with high ceilings, wood-paneled walls, and silk-shaded lamps.

She is in a cathedral of books, suspended in a strange sort of splintered reality. The forty people seated in front of her are seeing Livvi Gray, a new critically acclaimed voice in literary fiction, a self-confident woman in an ivory silk shirt and well-tailored black pants. And the person looking back at those forty people is the same bewildered individual who, two months ago, in a yellow-gold dress, was seduced and discarded. In a butler’s pantry.

It always worries Livvi a little to know that many of the men and women who come to her book signings assume she’s special because she’s written a novel and gotten it published, when all she really did was pour her pain onto paper. Then get lucky enough to have someone put it between the covers of a book.

She’s experiencing the same shyness, the same concern about measuring up to people’s expectations, that has been with her at every bookstore appearance she’s made so far.

All over the room, people are raising their hands, ready to ask questions. The serene old lady in the third row. The pair of impeccably dressed blond men nestled together, their shoulders lightly touching. The fresh-faced group of teenage girls leaning against the back wall. The pretty woman sitting near the front of the room, her left hand ringed in diamonds.

And for an instant, the sight of these people is dropping Livvi into a flash of remembered panic…

…She’s surrounded by strangers. Staring. Curious. A rare trip to town. And she has stumbled, fallen. In new sandals. Onto a summer sidewalk. Blistering hot. An open doorway. A blast of music and air-conditioned air: yeasty, whiskey-sweet. Dirt-covered work boots. And cowboy boots. Hurrying out of the doorway. “Little girl…you all right?” She’s trying to say she’s hurt, needs help, but she can’t catch her breath. The boots. Backing away. Making room. For the angry tap of scuffed blue clogs. “Don’t pay her any mind. She just wants attention.” Lying on the sidewalk: the feeling of tumbling into a bottomless hole. Calista’s lips brushing her ear. “No wonder you’re never taken out in public. You can’t even walk down the street without making a spectacle of yourself…”

This old, ingrained panic—its embarrassment—is, for the briefest flick of time, keeping Livvi speechless. Tonight’s book-signing event has been so lovely, so perfect. Now she’s nervous that she’ll stumble, do something clumsy, and spoil it.

Several more people in the room are indicating they have questions—Livvi is worrying that she has let too much time pass without responding. But whatever awkwardness was created by her momentary silence seems to have passed.

A middle-aged woman, pale and plump as a marshmallow, is rising from her chair, beaming at Livvi. “I want you to know I stayed up all night last night reading your novel. What an incredibly moving story!”

Someone else is calling out: “I loved it, I really loved it!”

Livvi’s nervousness is lessening. She’s taking a slow, deep breath.

While a thick-necked man in a leather jacket is saying: “A woman who has no idea how to get what she wants…to me that feels like a period piece. How did you make the decision to set the story in 2011 instead of, let’s say, 1911?”

“It wasn’t a conscious decision,” Livvi tells him. “I guess I just wrote what I know about, the here and now.”

Then Livvi sees the glimmer of disappointment. The man was hoping for something deeper, more dynamic. And for the space of a breath she feels, on some tiny level, that she’s failed, because she hasn’t met his expectations.

The pretty woman with the diamonds is informing Livvi: “You write beautifully, but your main character’s backstory is a little unbelievable. Having her grow up in almost total isolation is something I simply don’t think would happen. Why wouldn’t she find a way to get out and make friends—find somebody she could get a reality check from? Excuse me for putting it like this, but she comes off as either mentally ill or completely retarded.”

This isn’t the first time this question has been asked, and Livvi still hasn’t found the right way to deal with it. The simplest thing would be to admit that the facts in her book are actually the facts of her life, but she can’t—in the same way some veterans can’t talk about the horrors of war and some Holocaust survivors couldn’t talk about the tortures they endured.

Livvi’s history has left her haunted, disoriented. And she isn’t sure how to find her way out of that.

But the thick-necked man is already turning around in his chair, explaining to the diamond-draped woman: “The kid in the book wasn’t retarded. From the time she was a baby, she was raised pretty much as a prisoner. The only thing she understood was being a hostage.”