A Wife of Noble Character (20 page)

Vivienne felt something like an interior smile, which conveyed her to the shadows, where she climbed out of the apparatus of her dress and strapless bra and stretched the undershirt over her hair. His shirt was big enough to cover her rear end and tummy-flattening underwear. She felt like a kid swallowed up in a grown-up's T-shirt.

Preston looked at her as if she were a goddess emerging from the clouds.

“I'm only doing this if my hair stays dry, and only for a few minutes.” She stepped in and pushed off; the water was warm and smelled like chemicals that reminded her of summertime. His shirt ballooned off her body like a life jacket. She swam to the side and draped one arm over the tiled lip of the pool. The way he swam toward her, she knew he was going to kiss her again. She braced herself a little. All her thoughts directed toward him, what he was thinking, what he was feeling; her experience of the moment instantly formed to her perceptions of him.

But then this shifted, and she came into her body. She felt her bones light in the water, the resistance of the water between her fingers, the spread of her treading legs, her muscles animating her legs. She swam to the deep end and he followed, bobbing up with a grin, circling her like a cartoon shark. He chased her back to the edge and swam close, gripping the edge on either side of her shoulders. She felt beautiful. She felt in love with being Vivienne.

His neck smelled like sweet, late-nineties' cologne, which made Vivienne want to keep kissing him. He'd probably dug through his tiny bathroom for cologne he hadn't worn in a decade. His breath was all warm coffee, which also made her want to keep kissing him, because he drank coffee like a detective in a movie, and she'd never met a man who drank coffee like that. She wanted to kiss him because he didn't smell like beer. She wanted to kiss him because of the dimple in his chin, which reminded her of a childhood book she loved about a teddy bear who lost a button. The dimple looked like a dot where a button should be. She brought her finger to it—it was soft like cookie dough, and she discovered he was sensitive there.

He laughed and splashed her hand away. “When I was a kid I used to think if I squeezed it, it would turn inside out.”

The pool was shallow enough for him to stand but was too deep for Vivienne. He reached under the water and held her up by her bottom.

“What is this underwear you're wearing?”

She smiled. “It keeps things in place.”

“Everything looks in place to me.”

“It's too dark for you to tell,” she said.

He lifted the T-shirt from her body and ducked beneath it. From the window of the shirt pulling away from her neck, she watched him nibble on her breasts, floating like buoys. “I can't believe I'm getting to kiss your boobs,” he said.

She laughed and tucked one thumb beneath her underwear and rolled it off her hips. He dipped beneath the water and surfaced with it between his teeth. Snatching it, she kissed him through their laughter.

Spreading her arms wide, holding the pool's edge, Vivienne leaned her head back and listened to the lap of the water as he kissed her body—it felt good, but not so good that it seemed bad—and angled herself so he could ease inside her. Preston was gentle yet eager, his eyes disbelieving. She brought her forehead close to his, to calm him, but suddenly he hesitated.

“Should we?” he said.

She hadn't even thought of that word—should. “You don't want to?”

“No, I do want to,” he said. “That's why I'm not sure if we should.”

He was so close she could feel his heavy breath on her lips, his body grazing hers. They hung there in the dark water. He ran his fingers along her cheeks. “What if we were together?” he said quietly, almost rhetorically. “Do you think that's possible?”

His voice was so endearing and assured, his eyelashes so long, the sensation of his arms around her body so intensely warm, it was as if his question burned her. He'd changed into a man she'd never seen—the same man, in a different, closer light. When she imagined saying yes, an abyss opened beneath her feet and instantly she dropped. “No,” she said, startling herself.

His smile froze a moment, then fell. “Why not?”

“Because we just can't.”

“That's not a reason.”

She wiggled her hips out of his grasp. “You and I can't be together. Think about it. How could we be together?” She tried to laugh, but she couldn't make light of the words.

He moved his arms to either side of her shoulders. “What are you talking about? We'd be together by being together.”

“No, I mean practically,” she said, her voice quickening. She felt trapped, but she couldn't dunk her head underwater to swim away because of her hair. “You have different priorities. Don't bring me into it.”

“Bring you into what?” His voice took on a special intensity.

They countenanced each other. The shadows on his face drifted with the water. She felt stupid and helpless and guilty. It made her uneasy the way he was always trying to find her eyes. So many men do that, she thought, and they all probably think they're the only ones who do.

She was cold now; the tile on her back felt like a sheet of ice. “Into your plans,” she said. “We have different plans. It wouldn't work.” Knowing he was appraising her words, she resented his being such a good listener. She wanted him to forget every word she'd ever said. But she didn't know which parts she'd meant and which parts she hadn't.

“It's that I don't have money, right?”

“Don't reduce it to that.”

“What is it, then?” He sounded impatient, as if he'd expected this would come up but had convinced himself otherwise.

In Vivienne's mind, she and Preston were walking together through a hill-country landscape like the Blanks' ranch, except it wasn't the Blanks' ranch; she was barefoot, wearing a loose dress. This scene was her answer to his question, yet she felt compelled to disagree with him in spite of it, or maybe because of it.

She pushed his arm away and swam to the steps. “I'm not after money.”

“But it's not guaranteed with me,” he said. “You think it's too uncertain.”

She sat on the steps and planted her elbows on her knees. His words pissed her off, but she held it in. “Don't pretend to know me so well,” she said, “and then make me out to be some gold digger.”

He replied coolly, “If you were a gold digger, you would have played your cards a lot better with Mr. Buckshot.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

He stared her down. “Look, I don't care what happened with him. It doesn't matter to me. I'm not looking for a girl who'll throw rodeo parties and eat Adderall every morning so she doesn't get fat on the chicken-fried steak she fries for me.”

“Stop it!” She pressed her hands over her eyes. “I know it doesn't matter to you what happened with him.” She dropped her hands, feeling beyond the conversation; it seemed so sad that she and Preston were even talking like this. A sense of time wasted, wasting, yet held down catatonically by something outside her range of understanding. She played his words over and imagined herself preparing chicken-fried steak and burning her hands on skittering oil.

Her mind wheeled around against him. “What kind of girl are you looking for? A girl who will agree with everything you say? You'll judge her if she cooks for you, yet you constantly need to be reading her mind?” She got out of the water, crossing her arms over her body and turning her back so he wouldn't see the shirt suctioned to her sagging breasts.

He sighed. “You're misunderstanding me.”

“How?” she shot back over her shoulder.

“Vivienne, stop—” She heard him slosh out of the water and turned around, her arms still folded. He was dripping wet and covered in goosebumps, his hair flattened over his forehead.

She laughed suddenly, almost deliriously. “We look like wet cats.”

He smiled and wiped his hair back.

“Do I have mascara all over my eyes?” she asked.

He ticked his head. “I'm looking way past that,” he said, then gently slipped one hand behind her neck—it was cold, but she could feel his pulse in his fingertips. “I'm saying I want you to be yourself.” He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her shoulders. “I have a crazy idea, but I think it's a great idea.”

She waited for him to keep talking, her jaw clenched by nerves and cold.

“I have an opportunity to intern at a firm in Paris,” he said. “I just found out the other day. I want you to come with me. It'll only be for a few months. Come with me. Have you ever been to Paris?” He smiled.

“You can't be serious,” she said.

“I'm serious. Don't overthink it. Let's just do it.”

“What? I'm starting a job.”

“What job? You said you wanted to leave the store.”

She pulled out of his arms. “Bracken hired me to help him develop his art collection. For his company.”

“Develop his art collection?”

“Yes,” Vivienne said. “Please don't judge it.”

“I'm not judging it, I'm surprised. And I don't know what that means.”

“You are judging it. And you shouldn't be surprised, you should be happy for me.”

“Well, put it on hold.” He rubbed the top of his head. He didn't look happy. “Tell him you can't start for six months.”

“I need to dry off,” she said, and went off to the dark behind a magnolia tree. She peeled off the sopping shirt and wiped her eyes with it, covering it in mascara. Her body trembled even wrapped in the towel. The tummy-flattening underwear was floating in the pool, so she put on the dress without it. The bra felt sealed to her body, but the dress drooped off her chest even more. The torn hem was probably noticeable, but this fact hardly registered. When she came back around to the pool, he was dressed, drying his feet.

“I can't drop everything and leave,” she said. Her voice in her ears sounded like the voice of a woman she didn't recognize.

“Why not?” he said. “Don't tell me it's because you're scared. That doesn't count. Everyone is scared all the time. I already know you're scared.”

“It's too sudden,” was all she could rally in reply. “It's not what people do.”

“It's not what people do,” he repeated. He paused to absorb her words and then, in no rush, put on and tied his shoes. Vivienne stood there silently rupturing, galled by his diligence with the shoes of all things after what he'd asked her. She closed her eyes; there was the scent of magnolia mingled with chlorine, the cry of a car alarm, and the distant bellow of an eighties' dance anthem, now inextricable from this moment. When he finished with his shoes, he knelt at the pool's edge and grabbed her underwear. He wrung it out and handed it back to her. “And working for Bracken is what people do?”

“Just throw it away,” she said.

He went to the fence line and pitched it into the bayou. He helped her back over the gate; they walked in together, through the labyrinth, which seemed a very different set of halls than the ones they'd walked an hour before. She wanted to look at him but he kept looking straight ahead, maybe waiting for her to say something, she didn't know. At the foyer leading to the ballroom, he stopped.

“I'm parked out here,” he said. Still so calm.

“Preston—” she said.

He held up his hands. “I'm not going to argue with you, Vivienne Cally. You know the answer. You have your plan.” He stood beneath the brushed-copper chandelier—an ornate latticed star, afire at its tips—and said to her, “I believe in you.”

 

IV

Vivienne went straight to the bathroom to check herself in the light. Within a few minutes she restored herself to the sweetly disheveled maid of honor who'd danced her bouffant away. By now everyone was drunk enough not to notice that her dress was torn, or they chalked it up to her own drunkenness. To this crowd, there was nothing more hilarious than debauched indifference to extravagance.

When she returned to the ballroom, the crowd had dispersed. She took a seat to settle into the scene as if she'd been there all along. She waved to guests, stood to kiss their cheeks goodbye, made halfhearted assurances of lunch to former sorority sisters, while behind her twinkling eyes there budded the certainty that she had to see Preston tomorrow. Her response to him already felt reactionary, and she didn't like having answered without taking time to think.

A woman approached her, a housekeeper in a black uniform dress. “Miss?” she said, and handed Vivienne a folded sheet of yellow legal paper.

Vivienne took it. “What's this?”

The woman shook her head. She was a little out of breath. “By the pool.”

Vivienne opened the paper and beheld the words
Dear Preston
. Instantly, she recognized Karlie's bubbly writing and skipped to the signature:
xo, k

The blood fell from her face. She folded up the paper. “Right, thank you.”

But the woman wouldn't go away. “It was on the ground,” she said. “I saw you leaving.”

“Thank you,” Vivienne said again. “I really appreciate it.”

“Someone else could have—”

She wanted a tip. Cash, the Bayouside Club's heartbeat, upon which everything depended but which no one ever saw or spoke of by name.

Vivienne didn't have her purse. She had no idea where her purse was. For a moment she felt indignant—she didn't care whether this woman told anyone or where a note from Karlie ended up—but then, Preston.

“What's your name?” Vivienne said. “I'll leave something at the front desk.”

“June.” June didn't look convinced. She'd probably heard this before. The club's hard devotion to money left little belief in generosity, especially toward staff.

“Thank you,” she said. “I will leave something.”