The Book That Matters Most (27 page)

“So if you write down this person, this writer's name,” Hank said, “I'll see what I can do. But write it down 'cause I'm a terrible speller and we'll be standing here all night if I have to do it.”

He was holding a pen and notebook out to her. When Ava opened the notebook, she saw the notes he'd taken when she went to him about Maggie.
Left school. Followed boy. Italy/Paris
.

Ava flipped to the next page and printed
Rosalind Arden
, then handed the notebook and pen back to Hank.

He put it in his pocket without even looking at it.

“I'll be in touch,” he said, and gave her a little salute.

T
he problem was how to get the air conditioner out of the car, into the house, and up the steep two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old stairs to the bedroom. The night had become even hotter than the day had been, steamy and humid the way only July nights in New England could be. Ava stood, leaning against her car and sweating as she stared up at her bedroom window.

Long ago, before Jim, she had hauled a VCR to her walk-up on Bleecker Street and installed the thing herself. She'd taken a taxi to Crazy Eddie's somewhere on Fourteenth Street, bought a monstrous desktop computer, and somehow lugged that up all those stairs too. It had taken her almost two weeks to get that computer working, but she'd done it. Why had twenty-five years of marriage rendered her so . . . Ava struggled to come up with the right word. Incompetent? Lazy? Paralyzed?

Goddamn it, she muttered. Ava flung open the door and maneuvered the enormous box out of her car. She dragged it along the side of the house and onto the sidewalk, salty sweat dripping onto her lips. At the front stoop, she paused to wipe it out of her eyes.

“Damn you, Jim,” she said.

She imagined him and Delia Lindstrom in cool Helsinki, drinking chilled vodka under the midnight sun.

Wasting her time thinking about Jim, with or without Delia Lindstrom, was not going to get the air conditioner upstairs, Ava decided. She yanked the box first up the three front steps, then half-pushed, half-kicked it into the front door. The steep stairway was in front of her now. Ava took a deep breath, and continued.

F
inally in her bed in her cool room, Ava couldn't concentrate on the novel. She decided to send yet another email to Maggie. But when she opened email, there, at last, was a reply:

Guess what??? I'm in Paris. Don't be mad. Pleeeeeeassse???

Your darling daughter

Maggie

A
s soon as Ava walked into the library, John came up to her. He held a bottle of beer in his hand, and the tip of his nose was sunburned.

“This one,” he said, “I really didn't like.”

Ava tried to look sympathetic. She murmured a reassuring sound as she made her way to the table where Emma presided over a rectangular silver trough of bottles of beer sitting in shaved ice. Chips and salsa. Chips and onion dip. Popcorn.

“No wine?” Ava asked Emma.

Emma shook her head, which was the color of cotton candy.

“You know,” Emma said in her flat voice, “teenager food.”

Ava sighed and took a beer. When she turned, John was standing right behind her looking miserable.

“This book,” John said, tapping the red cover of
Catcher in the Rye
. “So cynical.”

“Well, lots of teenagers are cynical,” Ava said, Maggie's scowling teenager face appearing in her mind.

“I guess,” John said. “I wasn't. I was an Eagle Scout, the kid who shoveled the neighbors' driveways when it snowed.”

“I'm not surprised,” Ava said.

“I didn't like the kid. Holden Caulfield, you know? He says that people who think they're something they're not, and people who won't acknowledge their own weaknesses, are phonies. But isn't lying a kind of phoniness?”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose it is.”

“Well, then Holden is a phony, isn't he? He doesn't acknowledge his own shortcomings, and he never thinks about how his behavior affects people around him. And he's a liar! So he's just as guilty of being a phony as anyone else.”

“John, that's important to say. You should tell the group,” Ava said.

“You think so?” he said, surprised.

“Absolutely.”

Cate was calling for everyone to take a seat.

“Thank you,” John said, with such sincerity that Ava reached over and patted his arm in a kind of
there there
gesture.

By the time Ava and John sat down, Kiki was already standing nervously beside Cate at the front of the room, holding one of those plastic folders kids used to hand in reports in school.

“I hadn't read
The Catcher in the Rye
in a long time,” Cate began. “Although it was published as an adult novel in 1951, it has become required reading for teenagers and still sells about two hundred and fifty thousand copies a year. One writer said that, along with
Huckleberry Finn
and
The Great Gatsby
, it's one of the three perfect novels of American literature. And the British writer Finlo Rohrer wrote recently that over sixty years after its publication, the book is still the defining work on what it is like to be a teenager.”

“It should be required reading for everybody,” Ruth said. “Not just adolescents.”

“Kiki?” Cate said. “You had something you wanted to say before the discussion got started?”

“Right,” Kiki said.

She cleared her throat and fidgeted with the folder, but didn't open it. Ava tried to remember what the girl did for a job. She seemed so inept up there, so young, that Ava couldn't imagine her actually doing something responsible. Kiki looked like someone Ava had met on the other side of a counter. Maybe she worked at the Coffee Exchange, making cappuccino and grinding fair trade beans. Or at Seven Stars, the good bakery on Hope Street. Yes, Ava could picture her there, slicing bread and dishing out scones.

“I wanted to talk about this idea,” Kiki was saying.

The room had grown quiet.

“The idea of the book that matters most,” Kiki said. “Because I think it's like impossible to pick such a book. When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not. Like if you're unhappy and you read, I don't know,
On the Road
or
The Three Musketeers
, and that book changes how you feel or how you think, then it matters the most. At that time.”

“That's a good point, Kiki,” Cate said in her let's-move-on voice.

“When I was a teenager my parents got divorced and it really messed me up,” Kiki continued.

Ava sat up a little straighter. She thought of Maggie. “You can't get divorced!” she'd yelled at Ava and Jim. “You can't!”

“I mean, I thought we were, not necessarily the happiest family but, you know, a regular family. A normal family. And then, boom! They sit us down one night after dinner and make this announcement and just fill the air with clichés. How they still loved us, and we had nothing to do with it.”

Ava felt her throat tighten. Is that what she and Jim had done? Filled the air with clichés? They had certainly told Will and Maggie how much they both loved them. She grimaced, remembering Jim saying, “Your mother and I love each other, we just aren't
in
love.” When he said it, she'd been surprised. Was it true? They weren't in love anymore? He certainly wasn't; he'd made that clear. But were middle-aged couples who'd been together for over two decades even supposed to be
in
love? Whatever that meant?

She tried to concentrate on what Kiki was saying.

“So when Holden Caulfield calls everyone out on being phonies, I was like, yes! That's right! Every adult I knew at that point was a phony, a liar. Holden Caulfield stated exactly how I felt, and so that book kind of saved me.”

“Thank you, Kiki,” Cate said firmly. “I think you've perfectly captured why this book is regarded as the defining work on being a teenager. It speaks to the angst and alienation and rebellion of adolescents.”

Cate was right, of course. But Ava couldn't stop thinking about how Holden told Mr. Spencer that he was
trapped on the other side of life
. How he kept trying to find his way in a world where he doesn't feel like he belongs. That was why the scene in the Museum of Natural History was so important. Holden was afraid of change, and at the museum everything stayed the same forever, didn't it? Those statues of the Eskimos and the Native Americans stayed fixed in time and place. Wasn't this Maggie's problem too? And, like Holden Caulfield, Maggie resisted understanding this about herself. She preferred to jump from boy to boy, to keep herself isolated emotionally, to just behave badly without caring why she did what she did. Like running away to Paris.

“Right,” Kiki was saying, “but what I want to say, or what I'm trying to say, is that I could have chosen
The Lord of the Rings
because a boy I loved in college not only gave me a copy, but he read me a chapter every night.”

“Or
The Golden Notebook
,” Monique said. “I could have chosen that.”

“I understand what you mean,” Honor interrupted. “When I read
Wide Sargasso Sea
I was absolutely transformed. It mattered most to me then because of where I was in my life. So in a way, there isn't just one book that matters most, there might be several, or even a dozen.”

Ruth got to her feet. “I still remember the effect
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
had on me.”

“You know what?” Cate said, her smile returning. “I'm going to
start a list. I'll put all of these titles on it, and any other ones you think of, and I'll email everyone copies at the end of the year.”

Everyone seemed pleased with Cate's idea. Still more were being called out.
The Leopard
and
Dr. Zhivago
and
The House of Mirth
.

“Don't forget Rabbit,” Luke said.

“How could I?” Cate said. “Let's get back to Holden and Phoebe and Stradlater and the rest.”

Hesitantly, John got to his feet. “Here's the thing that bothers me about the book,” he began.

As the group listened, and then debated John's point about Holden being a phony, Ava looked at Kiki, who was sitting now, her folder in her lap. What Kiki had said about her own experience with the book had opened something up for Ava. That had been Maggie's problem all along, this sense of superficiality in the world, this phoniness. And Jim leaving had helped confirm everything Maggie had suspected about the adult world.

“Let's not forget his name,” Honor was saying. “A caul is the membrane that covers the head of a fetus during birth, isn't it? Therefore, the
caul
in his name might symbolize the blindness, the innocence of childhood.”

“Jesus,” John muttered.

“Hold on Caul field,” Honor said. “Hold on to your innocence.”

Innocence? Blindness was a better word. Wasn't that what Maggie felt now? The blindness she'd turned toward Ava and Jim's marriage, and maybe her own childhood? Another thought lodged in Ava's mind then. She'd also turned a blind eye on her marriage. No wonder
The Catcher in the Rye
still sold so many copies. Adults got something from it too. She imagined Maggie, somewhere in Paris, pictured her in front of an illuminated Eiffel Tower. Was she safe? Was she, maybe, a little happy?

PART NINE

SEPTEMBER

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak,
the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

—The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera

Ava

Ava's father gripped her arm tight as they walked down the corridor to the family room. He had grown so old and shaky, she realized.

Her father stopped walking but held her arm even tighter.

“I wasn't there, you know,” he said, his blue eyes huge above his sunken cheeks.

“Where, Dad?” Ava asked, thinking,
where are you now?

He stared at her, his gaze fierce.

“That day that Lily died I was at work.”

That day that Lily died
.

The bright sun and blue blue sky. Her sister, blond hair tangled, blue eyes so much like their mother's, her purple shorts and pink shirt, climbing that tree. “Too high, Lily!” Ava had called to her. Had she really warned her? Or was this a trick of memory? Because if she had said, “Too high, Lily!” then wasn't she exonerated?

“I got a call from your aunt,” her father said. “She said, ‘Something terrible has happened and you need to get to the hospital immediately.' And I asked her if Charlotte was okay, because I had been worried about her, about your mother. So moody, so depressed. ‘Just meet us at the hospital,' she said. And hung up. I kept wondering who
us
was. And then, the strangest thing, instead of going to the hospital I drove straight home. And I passed the ambulance coming down our street. No siren. No flashing light. That's when I knew. Someone had died.”