A Wife of Noble Character (23 page)

She wrote him back:
What time?
And he responded within seconds:
6:30?
She replied,
Where should we meet?

To which, a moment later, he asked,
Can I come there?
Katherine would be at her bridge group.
Sure
, she replied, and gave him the address.
Okay
, he returned, no smiley face, or
xo
, or even an exclamation point.
Okay
—period.

As the day went on, Vivienne's initial unease dwindled. An outfit would have to be selected, a mood adopted. She would be charming but reserved and then wing it from there, depending on what he had to say. Her mind took on romantic scenarios she wasn't even sure she wanted, but the thought of them pleased her anyway because of the chance they gave her to live out various fantasies. Preston would come over with a bouquet of flowers and reiterate his feelings. Her smile would undo him. But then what would she do? That was the problem with Preston—knowing how to react. What if he'd changed his mind about Paris? And why did this idea devastate her?

The afternoon was long. She heard Katherine come home and leave again. She ate avocado on toast for lunch, standing at the island, mindlessly petting the pages of
Garden & Gun
. She gave in and read Karlie's blog. It had been a few weeks since she'd checked it, but there were sure to be wedding photos. The entry today was the “Sunday Special,” highlighting a special event in Karlie's life. Wedding pictures were there, as Vivienne predicted, and she was conspicuously absent from all of them. There was Preston, though, at the dinner table, looking handsome and serious, his elbow balanced among a gallery of champagne glasses, and Bucky beside him, a beer to his lips. They looked in opposite directions. Blad was there in profile, mid-turn to Preston, grinning.

Last night I was so blessed to serve as a bridesmaid in one of my besties' wedding! It was absolutely dripping in love and so many amazing thoughtful details, from her bouquet to the embossed menu cards to the hand-embroidered napkins to the dark-chocolate fountain. I always obsess over weddings, but there's nothing like the bliss of a girlfriend's wedding, a girl you truly know and love. I was swooning, y'all! As a bridesmaid, I had the opportunity to help the bride select her palette for the bridal party. We went with fuchsia because it's the bride's favorite color, and it has a pop to it that works for any season! For shoes we decided matching heels were best because we didn't want our feet distracting from the full silhouette of the gowns. So we had the heels custom-dyed to match the dresses and it was perfect! Check out the snaps below for more of the look—it was storybook!

Vivienne clicked on the “mood board,” a collection of pictures she and Karlie had found online for inspiration, which Karlie had assembled into a single image to unite the “look” of the bridal party. Scrolling down, Vivienne noticed banner ads for an online boutique flanking the text and, to her surprise, saw that the post had thirty-eight comments, mostly women exclaiming,
Gorg!
Other posts down the page had a few dozen comments too. So people read Karlie's blog. Vivienne wasn't sure what to make of this. There was an out-of-order aspect to it. Karlie already had everything she wanted.

It was four-thirty. The blog had slumped her mood, so she took to puttering in her closet, trying on outfits. What would Preston like? A pair of three-inch red peep-toe heels. He would hate those. Black ballet flats. Unlikely they'd make any impression on him. All the lovely shoes in view—piled on the carpet, hanging in gauzy shoe bags from decorative hooks among dried roses, stacked in built-in cedar shoe cubbies—were unsuited to Preston. A pair of strappy red and orange espadrilles. Too popcorn. Kidskin riding boots. Too formal, too deliberate. She stood in the little universe of her closet as if everything there belonged to a stranger.

Reaching on her toes, the tips of her fingers grasping, she pulled out a canvas bin of old shoes from an upper shelf. Mostly it was full of heels she'd outgrown but still loved or beloved damaged heels she intended to have repaired. At the bottom she spotted a pair of worn-out white sneakers that she'd kept in hiding for years. She'd bought them in college to wear to morning classes, as a cute sneaker to accompany the planned pajama look most of her sorority sisters adopted for eight-
A.M.
lectures. But now they seemed right to actually wear. They still fit, and her big toe peeped out from a hole on the top. They felt like warm hands around her feet. She grabbed her cutoff jean shorts and a soft white T-shirt she liked to wear to sleep. Standing before the mirror, she felt giddy, and laughed at herself for feeling giddy, then had a moment of extreme self-consciousness—she could
not
wear this—but came back around to the fact that she felt comfortable. And that was the thing about Preston: He was always at ease.

Without knowing quite how or why, she suddenly reminded herself of herself. An idea came: She wouldn't straighten her hair.

The time was approaching. She dallied around downstairs, opening the French doors to the sunken living room, spreading the curtains for light, so the place didn't look so untouched. She sat on the couch, feeling like a visitor in a museum of sixties-era furniture and color schemes. Placards detailing the name and date of each piece seemed appropriate. The room was rarely entered. It was the kind of space where one felt compelled to sit on the edge of things with a straight spine. The couch was salmon colored and stitched with white Oriental koi fish, a relic from Katherine's travels. The springs were coiled tight. Sunlight hit the lush pistachio carpet and gave the room a greenness.

What would Preston say about it when he arrived? He'd probably make a joke that would defuse all its dark insinuation. Here was the chamber in which the shadowy pathology of her family slept, which held the frozen objects acquired by fortune, and she wanted to open it to him, so he would see it and want her anyway. She needed to see him in this room. Preston judged from the outside and thought it was all so black and white, rich girls and their rich husbands, but it was tradition. It was people marrying the people they lived among, as people do, creating a thread over time.

She sat as her mom must have, on the same couch, clumsy with the thread yet centered by an interior glimmer, a pinhole of light. The thing Karlie called weird. The thing Bucky called easy. The light Katherine darkened. The thing Preston wanted. He wanted in her what she most disdained in herself. Hitting this conclusion was brief; it bounced off the walls of her brain and landed in Paris, on the bank of a wide old river, with Preston.

She waited.

The time came and the house was quiet. The couch springs creaked. The longer she waited, the more she regretted how she'd acted the night before. He was right—she was scared. Of course she was scared. Much as she resented all this stuff, it was safe. It was what she knew. That Preston stood for the unknown was both terrifying and sublime—it was his willingness to take a chance, a deep yet simple sense of how much she liked talking to him.

Waiting here felt wrong. She moved to the big leather chair in the den and obsessively checked her phone, forgetting when she checked it that she'd just checked it two minutes earlier. Twenty minutes later, its silence was like a scream. She typed a message to him—
Are you lost?
—and instantly regretted it. He'd know she was waiting and wondering. Ten minutes later she was at the window, peering down the street. She walked the footpath to the curb and opened the mailbox, even though she knew it would be empty. Funny the idea that going outside would somehow make him appear.

Her phone pulled her back. The brief distance from it made her feel saner, but there were still no messages. It was too soon to be angry, so she grew worried and surer of what she would say—if only he would get there. That's all he needed to do. Her house wasn't difficult to find. If he was lost, he would have called. She imagined his mangled car on I-59; it would be her fault if he died. If she'd only given them a moment last night, he wouldn't have needed to text her and come here. Maybe he would already have been here. Outside, a thunderstorm gathered, but no rain fell, just wind spinning through oaks. The clouds were dark with sunset and storm.
Seven-thirty
. Katherine would be home in half an hour.

She ran upstairs and checked the traffic reports online. This felt like an insane thing to do, but she had to do something. The maps were confusing, red and purple lines over green lines crosscutting a map that was apparently Houston. She didn't have the patience for it. There were no flashing banners reading:
THE MAN YOU MIGHT GO TO PARIS WITH IS DEAD.

Call Blad! Her energy spiked.

He picked up, his voice tired. “Hi, sweetie. How are you feeling today?”

“Fine. Do you know where Preston is?”

His tone changed. “No, I'm at work. Some wifey wants a candlelight massage, which technically could happen anytime during the day, because the room is dark, but she insists it actually has to be nighttime. What's up?”

“Have you talked to him today?”

“No, why? I don't talk to Preston every day. Is everything okay?”

“He was supposed to come over at six-thirty, but he never showed.”

Blad cleared his throat. “Well, he's probably at the studio, or studying. This is how architects are. They work all hours and forget about everything else.”

He was right. His voice shifted her world back into perspective. Time, which had wrapped itself into a knot in her belly, stretched free again. But then the minutes kept passing, and passing. The house got heavy with quiet. She recognized the whir of the Cadillac pulling into the driveway—Katherine. She began to hate her phone, the way it baited her to look, to worry, and, worst of all, to hope. Finally, she flung it across her room. It smacked the old bulletin board and hit the carpet, taking a handful of tacks with it. As it set in that Preston may not show up at all, that he wouldn't be there to listen, that the words would need to be swallowed, she curled up on the bed and blinked at the moon rising behind her tree.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT WEEK
marked the arrival of the first hurricane of the season. Vivienne spent it in a haze of willing Preston to call and willing herself not to call him. Her mood charged up, empowered against him, or withered, helpless before him. All she felt in those days was in reaction to what he might be feeling. And still she expected he would call. Though their time together at the wedding had been short, the events in her memory evolved to magnificence, more radiant for the fact of their brevity and their blossoming, as the days passed, in proportion to the bitter realization of her desires.

His disappearance produced wretched swings from anger to regret. In romantic moods, Vivienne felt as if she were reassembling her heart from a pile of dust. All along, she'd taken for granted that she held the power in their flirtation. And all along it was Preston who had held her. She felt used to no purpose but his own amusement, foolish for thinking she was anything more. Somehow she'd assumed that by critiquing her he'd invited her into the safety of his confidence. Without realizing it, she'd come to trust him totally.

Vivienne watched the rain, and listened to the television blare about the imminence of Hurricane Henry, wondering whose job it was to name hurricanes, and unable to decide whether she should thank Preston for shattering her pride so much that her heart had opened or hate him for revealing to her the splendor of her heart, only to turn his back and disappear. She felt like a little creature scratching at a wall, believing in a door that didn't exist.

The lawn crew crossed the windows with tape. Rain fell from the watercolor green-and-gray sky. Bracken's secretary called to postpone her start date at the firm by ten days, in case Henry was earnest. Blad refused her invitation to stay over and drove to Austin to stay with friends. The three-hour drive took him seven hours, but he insisted the traffic was enjoyable compared to being under the same roof as Katherine during a hurricane. Karlie called to fret and complain about Timmy's general lousiness in stressful situations, without uttering a word of the wedding. In her state, Vivienne both resented and appreciated Karlie's silence. It was the hindrance to any authentic intimacy and thus the source of her distrust, as well as the necessary element that kept their friendship afloat on the peppy surface of things. Sissy pressed Vivienne to come to the ranch, but she refused. To Sissy's eyes, Vivienne had taken on an unpleasant willfulness in remaining at home, but Katherine herself agreed with her niece's decision to remain in Houston instead of fleeing with the masses. It hadn't even occurred to Vivienne to leave. Preston might call, might still arrive. She felt him like the storm itself—invisible, yet leaving its mark on everything in sight. The empty roads and green calm reflected her mind and gave her impressions a dark unreality. Despite the determined fluttering of Katherine, and the troop of workmen slicing bad branches from the trees, she felt alone. She thought of her mother. If only it was May. May, when the crepe myrtles awakened and brightened the streets with their pink and white popcorn flowers. She threw her old white sneakers in the trash.

Houston, her roads relieved of so many cars, seemed to sigh and flatten herself more deeply against the Gulf. The city took on a feverish, hyper dread. The probability of destruction produced stories from every person Vivienne encountered; those who stayed became comrades. Would Henry join the ranks of Carla and Alicia, or would he be a big anticlimax like Gilbert and Andrew? Most every hurricane in Vivienne's life had failed to live up to its anticipation, except for Ike, and she'd missed Ike. She was in Colorado with the Blanks. She wanted this one to be the real thing. She wanted the distraction, even the chaos.