The Love Book

by Nina Solomon

  All of their flights had been “eventful,” everyone’s except Beatrice’s—she’d flown Swissair. Her flight had not only taken off right on schedule, but she was bumped up to first class and wound up sitting next to one of her college roommates from Holyoke whom she hadn’t seen in over thirty years.

  Max’s plane had mechanical problems and spent eight hours idling on the tarmac; Cathy was waylaid in Atlanta, after missing her connecting flight; and Emily’s bags were lost. If Emily bought into the belief that The Love Book was, as Cathy professed it to be, the Rosetta Stone of the Law of Attraction, and that like attracts like whether you like it or not, it might appear that the universe was just mirroring back what each of them had been expecting. But she didn’t. Lost baggage was nothing more than an inconvenience.

  Emily realized she’d been absently flipping through the copy of The Love Book her mother had sent her. A quote by Marianne Williamson, one of many, dotting the margins like a Rorschach test, caught her eye: It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

  Already she found her mind wandering.

  Like clockwork, at precisely seven fifteen, the telephone rang. She let it ring several times. It was Charles calling to say he’d be swinging by in a taxi to pick Zach up at five thirty that afternoon and could she have him waiting downstairs. Charles took Zach Wednesday nights and alternate weekends. Wednesday was the hardest night of the week especially when it was also Charles’s weekend, as this one was. The distance between Friday and Sunday seemed interminable, a no-man’s-land. How many episodes of What Not to Wear or baths could she take? Nick had known her particular susceptibility to loneliness and used to call hoping this time she’d succumb and invite him over. He hadn’t called since before she left for Normandy. She didn’t know if she felt relieved or rejected.

  “Can I talk to Zach?” Charles asked.

  “He’s not up yet.”

  “But he has to be at school in an hour.”

  “I’m about to wake him. Do you want him to call you?”

  “Just tell him I’m picking him up at five thirty.”

  “Yes, Charles. Like always.”

  “When I say five thirty, I don’t mean five thirty-seven, okay?”

  “Charles—”

  “Because Clarissa thinks—”

  “I know what Clarissa thinks.” She’d heard it enough times. If Zach was five minutes late because he forgot to pack his math homework or had a stomachache, it was her fault; she was being manipulative. She could hear Charles take a deep breath and exhale through clenched teeth, like steam from a sputtering kettle.

  “Do me a favor, just have him ready. That’s what I pay you for.”

  “You didn’t actually just say that, did you?”

  “Emily, don’t start. It would be nice if you could accommodate us once in a while. Clarissa and I babysat while you were off riding a bicycle in Normandy—”

  “Babysat?”

  “You know what I mean. So, do we understand each other?”

  “Don’t worry, Charles, Zach will be downstairs at five thirty.”

  “Alone, okay?”

  “Yes, alone.”

  In the space of a thirty-second phone call, the usual low-grade self-doubt that hovered in her consciousness had multiplied like the fruit flies that circled the overripe bananas on the kitchen counter, too far gone even for banana bread.

  * * *

  Zach was on the bottom bunk of his loft. He’d kicked off the blanket. He was wearing Spider-Man pajamas and a Knicks jersey, just as he’d done every night for the last five years, since the first game Charles had taken him to at Madison Square Garden. His Beanie Babies collection, handed down from an older cousin, was lined up on the top bunk. He’d dressed the squirrel like a road hog, with a leather jacket and bandanna, and put him on Batman’s motorcycle. The cow was wearing a tutu. In a place of honor on Zach’s red beanbag chair was the talking Yoda Charles had bought him when Zach was four and expressed a desire for a three-foot-tall My Size Barbie, which Charles had thought was wrong on so many levels. Emily saw it differently; he was an only child and just wanted a playmate. One night when Zach was in bed, Emily heard him whispering to Yoda, “Will Daddy come back?” But even with her ear pressed to the door and holding her breath, she couldn’t hear the answer.

  For years, Charles had been urging her to donate Zach’s baby toys and clothes. She’d kept his first shoes, the red fleece onesie he wore when he learned to crawl, his snowsuit, the quacking beagle pull toy he used to take for walks in the park. He might want to give it to his children someday. So what if she was a little bit overly nostalgic. Weren’t most parents? It didn’t take up that much space in the closet.

  A few months after they separated, Charles stopped by without calling (he still used his key, which enraged her, but not so much that she bothered to change the locks) to collect the rest of his things, like the red Craftsman toolbox filled with brand-new, top-of-the-line tools Emily had given him for their fifth anniversary.

  When Zach discovered the toolbox missing, he said, “How am I going to fix things?”

  Emily took him in her arms and tried to keep from crying. “It’s not your job, Zach. It’s not your job.”

  But there were times she wondered too.

  * * *

  After school that afternoon, Zach was racing down Broadway on his Razor scooter with Emily trailing behind, reminding him to stop at the lights. She’d been at the computer all day and even though she was technically outside, she was still at her desk in her state-of-the-art ergonomic chair—the one Charles had given her on their last Valentine’s Day together. Her friend the editor had liked the piece about the Tour de Flaubert bicycle trip but not quite enough to publish it. With a little work, he told her, maybe. They’d discuss it over lunch tomorrow, already the second lunch they’d rescheduled. She had an idea and stopped to jot down some notes when, in the window of Barnes & Noble, she saw a giant poster for a reading by the author of The Love Book and took it as a sign. She’d write a Valentine’s Day article about soul mates. She might be able to sell it to a major women’s magazine, not just one of the free periodicals printed on recycled paper and dispensed on street corners. She was still scribbling as she stepped off the curb without looking, and bumped into a man on a BMW motorcycle.

  “Hey! Watch where you’re going!” she shouted, grabbing Zach protectively. She’d lived her whole life in Manhattan—in the same zip code, actually—but only since Zach was born had she developed the ability, the chutzpah, to yell at strangers. Charles thought it unbecoming.

  The man on the motorcycle apologized. When she didn’t let up, he told her to take a chill pill.

  “A chill pill? You nearly run over my son and you want me to take a chill pill? You should have your license revoked.”

  “It was my light,” he said. “You were jaywalking.”

  “The pedestrian always has the right of way.”

  “But I wasn’t even moving.”

  Emily noticed Zach had put his hood over his head and taken refuge under an awning.

  “Zach, are you all right? Did this maniac hurt you?”

  “Maniac? You’re the one flying off the handle, lady!” the guy shouted.

  Zach tugged on her jacket. “Come on, Mom, let’s go. I’m going to be late for Dad.”

  His voice quavered. He’d pulled the strings on his hood so tight that only his eyes were visible. He looked like an anteater. She put her arm around him, scowling one last time at the motorcycle guy before walking off.

  “That man was an asshole,” she said. “I’m giving you permission to say that word, but only if the situation calls for it. And you have to say it like you mean it. We’ll practice later. You still can’t use colorful language like that at school or around your father,” she added.

  Zach stopped and glanced behind him. “That was Kenneth, my math teacher.”

  “Are you sure?” Emily asked. “Maybe he just looked like him.”

&n
bsp; “It was Kenneth.”

  Emily had met Kenneth last week, but the biker outfit was a far cry from the chinos and conservative blazer he’d worn to Open School Night. The only thing that seemed to cheer up Zach was her suggestion that they stop at Alice’s Tea Cup for a chocolate chip banana scone and peppermint tea.

  The bells tinkled as they entered and walked down the stairs. Stevie and Justin were behind the counter. Zach was smitten with Stevie, a twenty-four-year-old waitress with sapphire-blue eyes and short dark hair. Alice’s was a magical place where little children dressed up in tulle skirts and angel wings and were sprinkled with fairy dust when they entered, and grown women sat at antique sewing tables having tea and scones and remembering what it was like when everything was pretend.

  Justin scooped up his teacup poodle, Apricot, and led them to a table. Apricot was wearing a miniature camo doggie hoodie and could have been mistaken for one of Zach’s Beanie Babies. A few minutes playing with Apricot and Zach seemed to have forgotten the run-in with his math teacher. Emily was glad Alice’s ignored the “no dogs allowed” policy enforced in most New York City restaurants.

  On the way out, Stevie was talking on the phone, giggling and blushing. Young love, Emily thought, but she could barely remember.

  When they were almost home, Emily saw Charles standing out front, arms crossed. He beckoned to Zach, who sped ahead. Charles walked out into the street and hailed a cab. She barely had time to kiss Zach goodbye before Charles slammed the taxi door. But she’d be getting a call soon—she was still holding his backpack.

  She was at her desk, staring out the window, when the phone rang. It was Clarissa. Emily didn’t even have a chance to say hello.

  “I know how difficult it is for you to have Zach ready when Charles comes to pick him up, especially since you’re so, so busy. But some of us have real jobs.”

  Emily had just read a poem by Rumi in Cathy’s copy of The Love Book, which she’d opened at random. If I love myself I love you. If I love you I love myself. She’d never really understood this notion. It seemed like a tautology. A chicken-and-egg situation. In any case, she took a breath and tried to remain poised and receptive.

  “I’m sorry, Clarissa, but we were only five minutes late. Charles should have called. We were just around the corner.”

  “No, you should have had him ready. Emily, you’re not pretty enough or thin enough to be a prima donna, so stop acting like one. And nobody likes you.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that,” Emily said. “Put Charles on,” but the line was dead.

  Rumi had obviously never met Clarissa.

  Emily closed the book. Her fingertips were stained magenta, a hint of which remained for days, leaving traces like rose petals on everything she touched. Across the courtyard, a fat naked man was staring at her from his window. She pulled down the shade and prayed that Nick would not call tonight.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PLAYING WITH FIRE

  ENGINE COMPANY SIX of the Bayonne Fire Department breaking down her door at 3 a.m. was not how Cathy had envisioned her soul mate arriving. If she had, she would have changed out of her flannel nightshirt and pink Uggs into something a little more je ne sais quoi. But with her house burning down, she had no time to ponder the specifics. The firefighters, their faces streaked with black, sledge-hammered their way inside. Glass splintered across the carpet. She ran from room to room gathering what valuables she could and trying to wrangle her cat, but every time she was within striking distance the cat would dart away and whatever possessions she’d collected slipped from her grasp. The firemen told her to leave the premises but she paid them no heed. She’d go to the ends of Hades to save Mrs. Beasley.

  The last thing she’d done before going to bed were the bonus exercises for Day Seven in The Love Book: Cutting Toxic Ties. She’d followed the directions to the letter, compiled a comprehensive list of all the chi-sucking people and situations in her life, and done the meditation on letting go, but rather than burn the list as instructed in order to sever the energetic cords, she’d flushed it. She’d never been one to take unnecessary risks and was especially careful with fire, ever since putting a flaming pot holder into the utility drawer last Thanksgiving. A septic issue she might have expected, but not a fire!

  She’d been kneeling in front of her soul mate altar, a low marble bench positioned in the feng shui relationship sector of her house beneath a painting of lovebirds, doing her affirmations. I was born to be loved. I deserve to be cherished. My soul mate adores me. She’d spent hours agonizing over her Toxic Ties list. Whenever she turned out the light, another chi sucker would spring to mind. By the time she finished, the list was three pages long. The only thing she’d forgotten to do was blow out the candles.

  Mrs. Beasley shot out from under the dining room table as the bulbs in the crystal chandelier exploded like fireworks. In closets and cabinets, dusty keepsakes, heirlooms, hand-me-downs, all the treasured relics Cathy had been charged with preserving after her mother died, were devoured by flames. The emulsion on her grandparents’ wedding photo melted off the paper, the image changing from positive to negative until wisping into nothing.

  Then she felt herself scooped up into a firefighter’s sturdy embrace.

  “You’re coming with me,” he said.

  Cathy shouted, “Mrs. Beasley!” at the top of her lungs, but he ignored her, charging through the smoke and carrying her a safe distance from the house, before dropping her on the grass. He disappeared into the smoke and returned a few minutes later with Mrs. Beasley howling, but unharmed, in her cat carrier.

  A million droplets of water sprayed into the sky. Tiny bits of ash fluttered like parched petals. Even from where she was standing, the heat from the fire was like a blast from a hot oven. The whole pajama-clad neighborhood had assembled around her house. Lawrence Weiner was leaning against the pumper truck talking to the fire chief, using words like deflagration and pyrolysis. He had a PX Series helmet with TrakLite and was wearing his volunteer fireman windbreaker over the standard uniform he’d worn all through high school: parachute pants, a patterned sweater vest, and those stupid tasseled loafers. When she looked carefully, she saw that today they didn’t even match: one was black, the other brown. He was already in the process of narrating his timely rescue, bragging about how he’d been the first responder on the scene. Of course he was! He lived next door! All he had to do was slip on his mismatched loafers. When he swaggered away, Cathy met eyes with one of the firefighters who muttered, “Gear queer.”

  Luckily, she’d managed, despite all the chaos and commotion, to grab her purse, car keys, and, at the last minute, The Love Book. This was the third copy she’d bought since forgetting hers at Charles de Gaulle. The first replacement, she’d doused with coffee in the teachers’ lounge. The second, she’d accidentally returned to the library with a stack of Harlequins, never to be found again, although one might have detected a rosier glow in the librarian’s visage. And this, the third in the succession of replacements, had only just barely escaped annihilation by incineration.

  Until Emily emailed to tell her The Love Book was safe and sound, Cathy had believed it irretrievably lost. For all she knew it was the only copy in the Western Hemisphere, maybe even the world. The book seemed to have been typed on a Smith Corona, though Cathy wouldn’t have been surprised if it had appeared spontaneously out of the ether. The information contained between the red leather binding was priceless, so priceless she had been willing to risk copyright infringement—when she returned to the States she’d planned to make several photocopies to distribute to all her single cousins. The secret to finding true and lasting love needed to be shared. And then poof! Just as quickly as this magical book had come into her life, it vanished.

  The other day, she was browsing in the Human Growth and Potential section at her local bookstore, though her heart wasn’t really in it, when suddenly there it was, The Love Book, if not in the flesh, then at least in black and white. Somehow it
had miraculously “jumped” into her bag. Cathy didn’t even bother to speculate. There are no answers to certain questions. Ours is not to reason why, her favorite and most misused Tennyson quote. She’d gone back to pay for it, but the irony of a book on the law of attraction finding her was not lost on Cathy. Now she could lose as many copies as she wanted, the only consequence a spike in Amazon ratings.

  Every self-help book on relationships she’d ever read (and there were few that she hadn’t) recommended putting oneself in a target-rich environment. So, like a Navy SEAL, she self-deployed on carefully planned search-and-destroy missions, more search, less destroy, in free-fire zones, recklessly diving into sports bars and happy hours, comic book and Star Trek conventions; she worked out at the YMCA during peak times near the basketball court; and she shopped at Trader Joe’s, the mecca of convenience food for suburban bachelors. But she hadn’t met a single man, at least not one with any “potential.” Still, she tried to remain open. As her mother used to say: Mr. Right doesn’t have to be Mr. Perfect. But Mr. Right was definitely not going to be wearing parachute pants and a fireproof, environmentally controlled, shock-resistant, overpriced plastic helmet, PX Series or not.

  As plumes of smoke and copper flames poured out of her second-floor window, she thought that if she couldn’t find a man here, in this mother lode of men, an entire squadron of sexy firefighters delivered by the universe right to her doorstep, a fundraiser calendar come to life, maybe she was beyond self-help.

  The sun came up and finally the fire was contained. The crowd dwindled to just a few stragglers. Lawrence hovered nearby like a stubborn patch of pigweed.

  She was hugging The Love Book when the fireman who’d so unceremoniously deposited her on the lawn walked toward her. His suit was covered in mud and his hair was matted down with sweat from his helmet. At the time, Cathy hadn’t noticed how clear and bright his eyes were, the kind of eyes that cut through fog. He was carrying the pretty pink glass thing she’d found in the attic when she’d first moved in, embalmed in cobwebs. It was shaped like a hollow glass pomegranate and filled with some sort of liquid. She’d dusted it off and hung it by its metal bracket in the kitchen.