Bookworm, page 1
Dedication
To all the writers who made me a reader . . . thank you.
And for my fellow bookworms, with love.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
FRIDAY WAS VICTORIA’S DAY OFF. SHE LIKED HAVING FRIDAYS OFF from the spa because Holly often did too, so they could visit and gossip. But on the days Holly wasn’t free, Victoria went to Café au Lait, an artisanal coffeehouse several blocks from the apartment, and read “her book.” She always had one going.
She liked the café because it was warm, colorful, a little bit cluttered, and noisy. It was around the corner from a private girl’s school, so by late afternoon it was often infused with the noise of teenage voices jockeying for attention, tables laden with backpacks and textbooks. It was run by an Eastern European woman with a beehive hairdo and thick accent. She was always cleaning tabletops, leaning her huge, wrinkled cleavage into the faces of her patrons. The rag she used looked the same every time—gray and specked with crumbs. Victoria was highly suspicious of the cleanliness of the café in general, but the coffee was always hot and the foam on her latte was thick.
Her book propped on her table just so, she passed her Holly-less afternoons here with a rather pathetic regularity.
Victoria was a great reader, thanks to Mrs. Herd, her ninth-grade English teacher, who taught Macbeth and looked a little like one of the weird sisters, with her black hair, prominent rump, and surprising cackle of a laugh. Mrs. Herd had opened the floodgates to the joys of literature with that sharp sparkle in her eye and the beguiling way she led the class into understanding the pages of a story. It was under her witchy instruction that Victoria discovered The Handmaid’s Tale and Siddhartha. Lord of the Flies, too, one of her favorites. It spawned a lifelong love of the words people put on the page. These words had a power—to seduce, enrage, enlighten, in ways that television and movies could not. But a book served another function for Victoria when she was somewhere in public. It was a security blanket. Something to hide behind, a purpose no one would question. People tended to respect the barrier of an opened book, granting an invisibility that Victoria had come to count on.
She could see others, though, and not just physically. She could read people as well as any book. Often, Victoria would look up from her reading and play a little game. She could figure out anyone who walked into the café (or anywhere else, for that matter) in no more than a few seconds.
For example, today, the man at the counter, wearing the beret. Victoria could see at a glance that he was dreaming of a guy with a long, coiffed beard who worked in the ice-cream store on Monkland, fantasizing about his muscular forearms twisting with every scoop of gelato. Just by looking at him, she determined that he lived in the Plateau, in a trendy brownstone walk-up with his best friend and sister, who, vehemently vegan, was sufficiently distracted from her lack of sex life by her urban knitting club and two small chihuahuas, Felix and FrouFrou. The sibling devotion was comforting at the dinner table every night, but also very much stood in the way of a healthy social life, poor things.
There was the elderly woman at a table in the corner, who, once very beautiful, as evidenced by her large, warm brown eyes and elegant profile, now clicked her knitting needles together. In a reverie, Victoria was sure, she fondly remembered days with her husband before their marriage, when he’d been less serious and more interested in discussing art rather than his stock portfolio. He had once been so sensitive that way. She recalled his introducing her to Judith Leyster’s work and the feminist interpretation of The Proposition. Oh, dear Harry.
And that Asian girl with the seven D&G bags, who always looked to be in a rush. Victoria assessed her easily: a clinical counselor, Type-A, who worked as a consultant for government organizations. A former teenage rebel, she’d lived in England during her formative years, in posh boarding schools. Spent that largely unsupervised time experimenting with drugs and men far older than herself—Dog collar, Mom? You don’t understand fashion—before her parents realized that the money they’d spent on giving their child all the advantages wasn’t exactly paying off. Now she redirected her addictive personality into her career and a wicked coffee habit. Sometimes, when she felt alone, she rubbed the spot between her toes where she used to shoot heroin with her tattoo-artist boyfriend. She dropped her shoe and did this now. This made her feel numb, and a little nostalgic at the same time.
Victoria, behind her book, took a sip of her latte. Just bitter enough. Caffeine really put an edge on things.
It was easy to get distracted by the people around her. On this particular Friday, Victoria had an albatross of a novel with her. It was one of the new releases everyone was raving about. Rapturous! Resplendent! Unforgettable! In fact, it was a long, torturous read, and the cover was equally terrible. On it was a picture of a man crying, either in ecstasy or pain, who cared. She couldn’t not finish it, though. That’s the kind of reader Victoria was. She couldn’t release herself from the pain of a bad book until she’d read every last page. She liked to think it was due to an unrelenting optimism, the hope that anything could get better if she hung on just a little longer. But it was hard to say if this was true—hanging on rarely paid off. Often she came to resent the author with a near-lethal ferocity. She still hadn’t forgiven Stephen King for “that scene” at the end of It, or Louisa May Alcott for making Jo marry the creepy old German guy in Little Women.
She was slowly forcing her way through another unbearable scene of apology and tears when she looked up.
That’s when she saw Him. Light brown hair, dark blue eyes shaded by thick lashes. A laptop was open at his table, a shabby man-bag discarded by his feet, which were clad in scuffed work boots. These were all secondary observations, though. What drew her eyes to him in the first place was the book: the same book she was reading, the one with the crying man, was open in his hands.
Her world stopped.
She stared as though a dark Medusa charm had turned her to stone. Even if he had noticed her mouth-dropped gaze, she doubted she would have been able to pull herself away. She drank him in greedily in an attempt to memorize his features. Her heart hammered and then paused, then restarted vigorously, in a new, erratic rhythm. She realized this was a recognition. This was Him, He, with a capital H. This was the answer to her question, the filler for the emptiness. A color to provide the contrast. Her soul’s counterpoint.
She watched him read. It felt very intimate, almost erotic, as she followed his eyes moving over the words, the page, perhaps the very same paragraphs she herself had moved over in moments recently passed. His minute expressions—she interpreted them to be disbelief or disgust; they had to be disgust, like she felt—manifested as a small creasing between his brows, as a light tightening at the corners of his mouth. He hates the book, too, she decided, as though this were confirmation of their cosmic connection.
He crossed his feet at the ankles. Every so often he reached for his coffee, without taking his eyes from his book. Perfectly, his hand reached the mug. His mug—it wasn’t a generic one from the café. It had black lettering that could have been a Shakespeare quote, but she couldn’t quite make out the words.
He wore a dark-blue pullover with two buttons at the top, and jeans. His chest looked substantial. Not muscles, exactly, but substance, strength. He had a little stubble on his face, which she liked. It was patchy in areas on his cheeks. She loved that too.
He turned pages, his eyes scanned the words, he sipped from his mug. Once, as he ran his hand through his hair, she let out an audible sigh and shifted conspicuously in her chair as she tried to pretend to read.
He didn’t notice any of this, of course. Now he was looking through his bag and produced a phone. It was buzzing. “Yes,” he said. “I’m on my way.” Hung up without saying goodbye. She wanted to imprint his words on her memory, to have his voice with her, but it all happened too quickly, disappearing into the ambient noise of the café clatter.
Her heart leapt as he rose to his feet and she saw the length of him—tall and handsome—while he put on a jacket, sheathed his laptop in the bag, and took a last, deep drink from his mug. The book was under his arm, the h
Look at me, she willed him telepathically. I’m here. But he didn’t. He was already facing the other way, then was out the door, gone.
At that moment she became aware that her heart had been racing, was still racing, that her hands were trembling. Her eyes were wet with the threat of tears.
That whole afternoon she felt charged, as though something wonderful had happened, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She moved through her usually mundane trip to the grocery store with an optimism she normally lacked. She took care with small things. She selected a more pricey sheep’s milk feta, decided to try fresh orecchiette, aka “pig’s ear” pasta. She made an effort to speak French with the woman at the checkout. When she had finished shopping, she gave her cart to an older man struggling to pull one free from the tangle, with a deliberately kind smile. In the car, she applied lipstick, something she rarely wore. It was a pinky nude color that Holly swore looked good on “anyone,” during an overwhelming visit to Sephora some months ago. Victoria hadn’t agreed at the time. She felt like an impostor with chalky, creamy lips. She had only bought the lipstick to appease Holly and to make the whole experience feel like a successful girls’ shopping trip. But today she carefully, lovingly, traced the bows of her mouth with pleasure, deciding that it wasn’t bad at all to take care of oneself like this. She should do it more often.
She closed her eyes and replayed the entire drama in the coffee shop, recalled all the details, rejoiced as each one appeared in her mind. She lingered on the memory of him, marveled at how content she had been just to have him in her line of vision, how she wouldn’t change a thing about him.
She realized two things: she needed to see him again, and she loved him.
Two
VICTORIA’S FACE WAS HOT, CONSPICUOUSLY SO, THAT EVENING. Her cheeks felt afire, radiated heat that had never resided there before. Her thoughts on Him, she went through the motions of making dinner. She poured vinegar into the rice instead of chicken stock and had to start over—dammit—the sour smell alerting her and shocking her back into the moment. Eric was home, with seven minutes cooking time left. She hated to make him wait.
“Cinderelli, Cinderelli,” he said in a mocking tone when he entered the kitchen. His lips twitched slightly as he watched her hurry around, mopping up chicken drippings with a dishrag that she left unrinsed on the counter. She cursed as a few broccoli florets tumbled out of the steamer and onto the floor.
Her bottom faced him as she bent over to pick them up and toss them into the compost bin. She rose with prim modesty when she saw in a backwards glance that he was focusing on her backside with a bemused look on his face.
He watched her, curious. “Tough day at the office?” he asked.
“Oh, what? No, it was my day off.” His irony was lost on her.
He continued to stare, irritated by her flitting movements, unusual for his calm wife, his spa girl. “Well, my day was fine, thanks for asking.”
She stopped. Lifted her gaze. Her eyes met his as though only seeing him for the first time. “I’m sorry, Eric. So thoughtless of me. Can I get you a glass of wine?”
“You can, and may.”
She made a quick move to the fridge and caught her hip on the corner of the white quartz countertop, a corner she had always thought was too sharp. “Shit.” She held her hip as the pain pulsed and radiated in angry waves.
Eric’s brows furrowed. “How about I get my own drink,” he said. Opting not to watch her wincing, he poured them both the chardonnay he routinely ordered from a reserve winery in the Okanagan. “Something leather, cherries, and oak,” he said superciliously, sniffing the bottle. He always described the wine in this manner before drinking it. It was one of the things that had annoyed Victoria early on in their relationship.
“Sorry,” Victoria said, taking the glass. She was always apologizing. The pulsing was easing now, but she knew she was going to ache with a bruise.
“What did you do today, anyway?” he asked. He rarely asked, but today the question seemed warranted.
“Oh, you know . . .” She cleared her throat. “I went to the gym. I got some groceries. I went to the café and read my book. Not necessarily in that order.”
She always called it “my book,” after he had labeled it as such, regardless of which one she happened to be reading at the moment. “There goes Victoria with her book,” he was wont to say. Eric never asked about details—books were all one and the same to him. That was fine with her. Reading was pleasurable for her precisely because it was solitary. She didn’t need to discuss her reading with Eric—or anyone else. He had once suggested she join a book club, mainly because he wanted her to socialize with his colleagues’ wives. She had attended only once. The evening was a test of Victoria’s endurance. How long can you talk about a Nicholas Sparks novel and trade recipes?
Victoria belonged to a virtual “book of the month” club that sent emails with reading suggestions, which was about as communal as her reading life went. She was questioning even that now, as they were responsible for the latest crying-man door stopper.
“Did you talk to your mother?” Eric eyed her with suspicion after a prolonged taste of the wine.
“My mother? No. Why?”
“You seem . . . jittery.”
She felt her cheeks, felt them licked red from inner flames, and wondered if he’d noticed. She stopped, took a breath, tried to smile. “Sorry. I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have had that second latte.”
“Maybe not,” he said, disengaging her by looking at his phone in response to an email notification, announced by a British voice saying “Gentlemen, start your engines” with that Sean Connery–like pronunciation of “shtart.” It was one of Eric’s hobbies to collect ringtones and notification sounds that he found amusing or original. He’d had this one for at least a month.
Relieved that his attention was elsewhere, Victoria continued making dinner, but kept the man in the café in her every thought. He was with her in each movement. She felt as though she was suddenly repurposed, energized. Every other moment, she was hit with happiness but couldn’t quite explain to herself why. There was something to anticipate, but what?
This is what hope feels like, she thought, just as the rice timer went off. Hope. It shimmered down her, from the top of her head to her steaming cheeks, giving her a tingly feeling. A giggle wanted to bubble in her throat, but she kept it a delicious secret, focusing instead on setting the table and plating the food.
And then the high took a dip, a slight one, as it occurred to her that she had no idea how to see Him again, this man she had recognized in the deepest way possible. This man, who had not even looked at her, or spoken to her.
Her whole being pulsed with the knowledge and the urge that she had to see him again.
She experienced this all silently amid small bites of tasteless chicken, rice, and broccoli. She was thankful that Eric didn’t demand much in terms of conversation, because her thoughts were so huge, they took up her entire brain. I love him, I love him, I LOVE HIM . . . The words marched through her thoughts, which both shocked and enlivened her.
She went through the motions of the meal like a robot: fork to mouth, napkin to lips, plates to sink. She tidied up after dinner—she always cleaned up in the kitchen. The kitchen was her domain. Then, feeling aimless, she brought her book to her usual place on the couch.
“You’re biting your nails again. God, Victoria, it’s disgusting. Like you’re eating your fingers.”
Eric said it quietly, but with repulsion on his face.
She whipped her hand from her mouth. “Sorry.”
She had been thinking about Him again and hadn’t even noticed what she was doing.
“I can see you, you know,” he said, his face a sneer. “I just ate. A little mercy, please.”
Victoria pushed her hand down so far out of his sight she was practically sitting on it. She daren’t apologize again; it made things worse. She stayed quiet and stared at the words on the page. He was in a bad mood. He normally didn’t pay attention to her while he was watching television.
Eric hated it when she bit her nails. God forbid that she have a cold—nose blowing was akin to picking a zit or passing a big wet fart. Any bodily function was almost beyond his comfort level, and he expected her to attend to those things so they had no sensory impact on him.
