The Moment of Everything (10 page)

My phone dinged, and I picked it up to see a text from Dizzy. It was the fourth message in an hour telling me he was at Finnegans Wake, and it was Friday night, and I needed to come over there pronto. Only he didn’t say “pronto” and he used a lot more curse words. I watched the clock on my phone.
At 8:00, I’ll go over,
I told myself. But the top of the hour slid by and the bottom, too, and I was still sitting on my Pier 1 cushion.

Along with worry over my bank account, my last conversation with Dizzy was weighing heavily on me. I knew I should call Avi and ask her to lunch. She’d given me her number, after all. It just felt so tenuous. My life had hinged on Dizzy and ArGoNet. I’d become dependent on expectations that had come to nothing. I didn’t have much to show for my years in Silicon Valley. Not much of a career or any money, a busted relationship, a shabby bookstore I was putting way too much time into. I’d been to too many business meetings thinking all my hard work was going to pay off, only to be denied for some grand reason like some exec didn’t like the blue button.

I picked up
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
from where it lay on the side table and thumbed through it, the pages giving off the smell of used sheets and stale promises. The notes had saved me that day at the book club meeting. Maybe they offered some wisdom now.

Emotion mixed with memory.
Who talked like that? Maybe Hugo. Okay, Hugo and Henry. I thought about that day at Avi’s, the last time when I felt like the world was mine for the taking, even for just a few moments. I took a huge risk that day. Henry was right. It’s not the fear that’s dangerous. It’s not getting what you want because of it.

I wasn’t going back home. If ArGoNet was done for me, so be it. But I wasn’t out yet. I had a network, though it was a network of one. I’d walked away from the SVWEABC with only one business card, but it was
the
card.

I pulled out the bag I’d carried with me to the meeting, with Avi’s card still inside. I popped open my laptop and typed in her e-mail address. Then I stopped. E-mails were too easy to ignore. When you’re climbing the ladder, you answer every message like it’s from Jesus Christ or Steve Jobs. When you’re at the top like Avi is, answering messages right away whiffed of a need to please. It was downright unchic. No, I wasn’t going to wait for an e-mail. On the back, she’d written her home phone number. I was going to call her.

But first, I had to pace around a bit and practice what I was going to say. I was just touching base to see how I might help the team to deliver the best book group experience for my fellow members. Sure, I’d say, I had a lot going on, but when the group was successful, I was successful, no matter the personal sacrifice of time and effort. When I had it just right, I dialed, imagining Avi gliding across the floor in a feather-lined silk robe and slippers like Eva Gabor on
Green Acres
to answer it. And then she did.

“Slutlees.com, Jade? Did you seriously not think I would find out you posted a video of us on Slutlees.com, you stupid little twat? I own this valley. Do you not think I know how to use a computer? Or you think I’m too old for that, too? You know what else I know how to do? Call a lawyer. Jake is going to hunt you down and make you wish you never learned to click a mouse. Now stop calling every thirty seconds to remind me of yet another reason why you’re leaving me!”

The few seconds that passed felt long enough for new galaxies to have formed. I stared into the nighttime shadows of my apartment and listened to the anger-fueled huffing of my one and only VIP contact on the other end of the line. What the hell was I supposed to do now?

“If you’re going to stay on the line, you can at least say something.”

I remembered the picture on Avi’s bookshelf, the one with her arm around a tall blonde about my age. However rich and powerful Avi was, she obviously cared for this Jade. If I hung up now, she’d think it was her ex hanging up. I’d be off the hook, but where would Avi be? I squeezed my eyes shut and took a big breath of air.

“I’m so sorry, Avi,” I said. “This is Maggie Duprés. From the book club? This is an understatement, but I’m guessing this is a bad time.”

There was silence on the other end as I waited for a torrent of swear words. But they didn’t come. Instead, all I heard was Avi Narayan hanging up on me.

I held my cell phone in my lap. I couldn’t seem to get my brain to do anything. It was frozen shut. I just sat there and listened to the party next door. If I’d picked my sorry ass up at 7:30 and gone over there, none of this would have happened. If I’d sent Avi an e-mail like any other sane person would have, this wouldn’t have happened. But no, I had to be fearless. Thanks a lot, Henry.

I picked up
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, still open at the page with Henry’s note. This was all his doing. Was I so desperate that I was taking advice from a guy who fell in love with a woman by writing to her in a book? Meet me in the park by the fountain at noon? Are you kidding me? It could have been raining that day. Or city workers could have been repaving the sidewalk. Most of all, he made this invitation in the pages of a book in a bookstore. Slather me in honey and call me a biscuit, but there’s always a chance, even in the Dragonfly, that someone may come in and actually buy the book. There were about a hundred million things that could have gone wrong with his plan. A hundred million.

The phone rang. I recognized the number as the one I’d just dialed. Avi. I could see her, winds of wrath stirring her Eva Gabor robe around her as she conjured spells that would turn me into a frog and send lightning bolts through the phone. I didn’t know what to do, so I stuffed the phone under a cushion. This was it. The end of any hope of staying here. I had just pissed on the boots of one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley. I was going to hell. Or even worse, I was going home to my mother.

I pulled the phone out. What the hell? If this was my last stand, at least I was going out all memorable-like.

“I’m the most terrible person alive,” Avi said. “How incredibly rude of me.”

“No it’s my fault—”

“No, no, I should never have answered the phone that way, or should have at least looked at caller ID.”

We continued to stumble over each other, trying to outdo the other one with our apologies, all of which seemed to be completely unnecessary. And when the apologies trailed off, we were left with silence.

“Bad breakup?” I asked.

She laughed, and I heard a sniffle.

“Is there any other kind?” she asked.

Again, I pictured her on the other end, but this time I saw her in baggy sweats (okay, they were cashmere) with drips of Cherry Garcia dried on the front. Her hair was a mess. She was wearing outdated glasses. She had a pimple on her cheek. I wondered if the picture of her and Jade was still there on her bookshelf or if she’d run over it with her Mercedes.

“She really posted a video of you two? How bad is it?”

“You can’t see me,” she said. “Or at least not enough to tell that it’s me. She wasn’t interested in anyone seeing me. Only her.”

“But still…,” I said.

“But still…”

It turned out Dizzy was right. Avi was a someone just like any other someone. So we talked for a little more and made lunch plans for Thai food on Monday. After we hung up, I sat for a while with that little burn of loss and joy. And then I got up and walked over to Finnegans Wake.

The next day, June 27, it rained. I remember this because for months afterward people used the date as a milestone for describing the events in their lives as in, “I know I had my oil changed on June twenty-eighth because it was the day after it rained.” In the Bay Area, we get all our rain in the winter. Rain in early summer, while not unheard of, is rare. And such an occurrence, in Hugo’s world, required a party. But then, the miracles of a sunrise and sunset seemed significant enough for Hugo’s people to break out the cocktail shakers and swizzle sticks.

I had reason to celebrate, too. I’d just set up the Dragonfly’s eBay store that very day and sold our first book online—a signed first edition of Walker Percy’s
Love in the Ruins
, which had been sitting up front with the other first editions for as long as I’d been in the store, and was now on its way to one Miss Winifred Johnson in Wichita. (There’s no love for the Southern gods of letters in the heathen world of Silicon Valley, with distractions such as smart phones and dual-boot operating systems.) Hugo suggested we have the book blessed for Miss Winifred, it being our first online sale and all. So he called his friend Jesse, who was a second-degree Wiccan priest, and asked him to come to the house. Jesse brought over salt water to sprinkle on the invoice (sparing the book), incense to burn in the store, and dried lavender to fold in the pages. Jesse, conveniently, was also a butcher at Andronico’s, so he brought five pounds of lamb shanks, to Hugo’s extreme delight. When the rain started, Hugo got to work on the phone. People came. People brought more food. People brought drinks. My insides were very happy.

Even on ordinary days, Hugo’s apartment had a mellow, day-spa-waiting-area vibe to it. But tonight, there was an undertow of enchantment. His friends draped themselves around his place with the leg-dangling lethargy of Tennessee Williams characters. When Hugo lifted the lid of a deep skillet on his stove to stir something he was calling Hugo’s Mysterious Moroccan Dish, the room filled with the scent of saffron and apricots. A young redhead in a cowboy-patterned sundress strummed a harp and sang something in Gaelic. A man with a lute—an honest to God lute—joined her, along with a woman with flowers in her hair tapping lightly on a bodhran drum. Somewhere, a Renaissance festival was in want of minstrels.

Hugo didn’t own anything you could actually sit on like a normal human being. Pillows of all shapes and sizes were strewn about his floor so that his apartment looked much like the fifty-nine-year-old male version of the bottle in
I Dream of Jeannie
. Half buzzed from Jesse’s Lower Chakra Martinis, I laid myself out flat, molded to a series of huge ruby-colored pillows, feeling like I was in that place you go to when you fall asleep on the beach listening to the waves. That’s when I heard Rajhit’s whisper in my ear.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

I opened my eyes and found myself staring up at his smile, that corner of his mouth turned up just like the night he gave me the bike. He hovered over me, his hair loose around his shoulders. I reached up and flicked one of his ringlets behind his ear. The party had just gotten a thousand times better.

He sat on the pillows at my feet, took my bare right foot in his hands, and started rubbing my sole. Two martinis earlier, I might have been able to keep a stone face and ignore the fact that my nether regions were going all Madame Bovary–like. Instead, my head fell into the pillows and my eyes rolled back into my head. I can’t say absolutely, but I’m fairly certain there may have been moaning. I was all fine with the world.

“Nice foot,” he said. “Attached to a nice ankle at the bottom of what I believe would be a very attractive leg if I ever got a look at it.”

“Am I merely a sum of my parts?”

“‘We have never met, yet I do not believe there is any part of you I do not want.’”

I laughed at hearing Henry’s words quoted back to me. Rajhit smiled and slid his hand under the hem of my jeans, running his warm palm up my leg. For the second time in two days, I started thinking about wearing skirts.

And then I heard a
woooo
sound and opened my eyes to see Jason standing over Rajhit and blowing softly into a beer bottle. I tried to shoo him away but he wasn’t paying any attention to me.

“Yes, Jason?” Rajhit asked without looking up.

“Dude, you’re Dungeon Master for next week and you haven’t even sent out the invitation yet. No one knows where we’re meeting. Is Deborah even coming anymore? We don’t even know if there’s a snack theme.”

Rajhit’s hand slid out from the leg of my jeans and he sat up straight.

“Can we talk about this later?” Rajhit asked, turning to look up at Jason.

“Dude, we let you be Dungeon Master this time because you’ve been begging us ever since you joined. It’s a lot of responsibility. Don’t let us down.”

My vodka-soaked brain was swimming with any number of questions. I settled on “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Dungeons and Dragons night,” Jason said.

I lifted myself up on my elbows to look down the length of my body at Rajhit, who was holding his head in his hands. Now, I’d never partaken of D&D myself, but I’d known enough gamers in my day to understand that only a very few matched the stereotype of pasty-faced losers with long stringy hair, bad skin, and refrigerator privileges that came with renting their parents’ basement. Most were completely cool people. But even so, I was a bit shocked. Not about Jason, that was a no-brainer, or even Hugo. But Rajhit?

“What’s the big deal?” Jason asked. “Me, Hugo, Rajhit, Mrs. Callahn, and a few other dudes on Monday nights.”

“All of you? Really? I never knew that. Great. Exhibit number 746 that you hate me.”

“Like we’d let you play.”

“Like I’d want to play.”

“First of all,” Jason said. “I bet you’ve never even played D&D. Second, when did you turn twelve?”

“Three drinks ago,” I said.

Jason bent one knee to poke Rajhit in the back. “So what’s the deal for Monday?”

“I need a drink.” Rajhit stood and walked into the kitchen. I rolled over, my eyes following him. He stood next to Hugo, facing me but not looking at me.

Jason bent down, his elbows on his knees, hulking over me.

“Don’t you want to know about Deborah? From our group?” Jason asked.