A Wife of Noble Character (24 page)

The stillness of the afternoon prophesied the storm; the sun pierced through the clouds hanging heavy over the city. Vivienne was restless. In her heart's self-absorption, she believed her private waiting to be far more agonizing than the collective waiting beyond her window. Eight hundred miles off their shared coast, barreling toward them, was a grinding, unstoppable storm—surely Preston would call.

Sunset lit the sky a fiery, unsettled orange. The trees stood still. Katherine came upstairs and told Vivienne she was going to bed early. If the storm was bad, they'd meet in the hallway while it passed. Night fell without wind or rain. Around nine, the doorbell announced itself through the house. Vivienne put on her robe and rushed downstairs, calling to Katherine it was for her. She discovered Randal Stanley, bearing a large cardboard box. Her disappointment wasn't lost on him.

“Surprised to see me?” he said. “Can I come in? Special delivery here.”

He walked in like the UPS man, dropping the box in the foyer, looking up and around, down the hallway leading to the kitchen. “Something tells me if you'da decorated this place, it'd look different,” he said.

“This is my aunt's house,” Vivienne replied, enclosing herself in the full collar of her robe.

Randal nodded. “I figure your house would be all white with lotsa flowers. I think it would smell good.”

As usual, Vivienne was repelled. It occurred to her that Randal might have felt permitted to come over by the same thinking that permitted her to think Preston might still turn up: The usual rules didn't apply when disaster was impending. Didn't this make Preston's silence even worse?

“How did you know where I live?”

“Oh, we know enough of the same people, don't we? I brought you some supplies in case this guy turns out to be a doozy.” He knelt over the box and, with a paternal air, explained the function of each thing, even though it was obvious. A hefty flashlight. Two cartons of canned tuna. Band-Aids. Batteries. Three gallons of water.

Vivienne couldn't help noting the kindness of the gesture. In the midst of her indignation, she realized it was probably the nicest thing a man had ever done for her.

“In Delaware, we got some hurricanes too,” Randal said, pushing off his knees and standing. He was sweaty, in a black T-shirt, jeans, and old boots. His beard was trimmed, uncovering a landscape of old pockmarks, a sort of connect-the-dots game over his cheeks. Somehow, the scars made him seem less deserving of her attitude. “Back east, they're usually pretty weak by the time they hit the coast, because the Atlantic's not as warm. But, hell, with this humidity in the Gulf…” He signaled toward the open door. “You're gonna get misquitas in here.”

Vivienne held herself in her robe, not sure what to say. She didn't want to be mean anymore, but she didn't want to be too friendly either. “The storms are never as bad as the news says. I think everyone just wants something to talk about.”

“It's good to be prepared anyhow, right?” He ran his palm over his greasy hair and smiled like a black Labrador. Vivienne felt a little bad for him. Preston was rejecting her, and she was rejecting Randal. Everyone was having a hard time. There was nothing easy about anything.

“My aunt is sleeping, so … thanks for all this. It was thoughtful of you to stop by.” She turned to the door. He took the hint and went outside but stopped at the landing.

“Look, you make this hard for a guy,” he said, rubbing his brow. “I'm not saying I came here under the guise of dropping off supplies just to ask, but I gotta ask: I want to take you to dinner. I want to take you out and discuss how I can help you out.”

The wind flurried up and sent the treetops swirling, taking the entirety of her budding goodwill with it. “What do you mean, ‘help me out'?”

“Come on. This is what I mean, how you make things hard. I know you're in a tough spot, and I want to—I want to take care of you. I don't like thinking you might be in—any uncomfortable positions. Let me take you out for a good time.”

“I'm not in any uncomfortable positions,” she said.

“I think I've caught you in a couple,” he said. “I'm happy for you that job is coming through. I want all that to work out, but maybe it's not a stable situation, and you don't wanna invest yourself in an unstable situation.”

“What does that mean?” The words left her mouth without passing through her head. “If I don't go out with you, you'll find a way to mess up my job with Bracken?”

He paused. “Let's not go slinging mud. Let's level. I'm new to all this. I'm trying to fit in. And I think in your own way you're trying to fit in too. We both want to make friends—”

“I have friends.”

“You do, but you don't. Because you got a situation that makes life feel like trying to fit a circle in a square. I can tell by the way you are. That's why I noticed you. That's what makes you a cut above. You have real things on your mind. I know we're not on the same page now, but I see you, and I see movement. I see things happening. I think you and I can be”—he hesitated on the word—“powerful together. The cream of the crop. Just give me a chance to take you out. That's all I'm asking.”

Vivienne took a delicate tone. “Let's talk about this another time, when a hurricane isn't coming.”

“But you catch my drift? We can help each other?”

The wind stilled as lightning illuminated the sky and bled into the fat gray clouds. Thunder followed close, loud and low. Randal took a loose toothpick from his pocket and began chewing it between his front teeth. Sweat beaded on his forearms, flattening the hair there. His small eyes waited for her with a satisfied patience, gleamed with the suggestion of a shared goal. She lost patience.

“So you think,” Vivienne said, leaning against the doorjamb, “that we can help each other because we both want to fit in? You want me to help you make the right friends, and in exchange I won't have to worry about money?”

“That's one way to put it.”

She shook her head. “That's gross.”

“The higher you climb, the farther you fall, ain't that right? What strikes me as unfair these days is that women have to climb two ladders”—here he mimed climbing a ladder—“but you can't climb two ladders at once. Some point you're gonna fall. One of 'em's gonna tip back, and then you'll be stuck”—here he mimed a frozen fallen body—“but if there was just the set one, things'd be easier.”

He thought a moment before tapping his temple and shaking a finger at her. “Thing is, I like women with opinions. So my only winning strategy is the exact kinda strategy that'd probably never work on the kinda woman I want. But you—you're some other kinda woman. You're like a whirlpool spinning around.”

Even though she didn't really know what he was talking about, this made Vivienne smile. “Why do you want to be friends with the Blanks so much?”

He answered without hesitation. “I like being at the top of whatever heap is in sight. I don't settle for less. Settling is a bunny slope. You're going downhill, but you don't hardly realize it because you're going so slow. Then suddenly you're stuck at the bottom.”

Lightning lit the sky silver. Now the thunder was immediate, a crack. “None of that will matter if we all die in a hurricane tonight,” Vivienne said.

“That's the spirit,” Randal said. “But I'm not gonna die in this storm, and you're not either.”

“Did you come to Texas to get away from something?”

The deeper she pried, the fuller his confidence grew. “You bet I did. You wanna leave Texas to get away from something?”

“No,” she said.

“Well, good. The key to unhappiness—always wantin' to be somewhere else instead of where you are. See, right here at your doorstep, this is where I want to be. No place else.”

“Please go home, Randal.”

Nodding, he tipped her his figurative hat. “Fair enough,” he said. “I'll take this conversation as a maybe.”

*   *   *

V
IVIENNE FELL ASLEEP
to the streaming of the wind. She dreamed she missed a bullet train to a European city she'd never heard of. Randal was the conductor, wearing overalls and a floppy striped hat. Reis and Bucky were there, laying pennies on the tracks and collecting the pressed ones after the trains passed. Vivienne missed the train because she was looking for her luggage, only to remember right before she awoke that she hadn't brought any.

Morning heralded the passing of Hurricane Henry, a storm for the book of disappointments. She woke to the sight of skinny tree limbs strewn over the street.

And still he did not call.

 

Walk as children
of light.

—EPHESIANS 5:8

 

I

ONE YEAR LATER

Preston found a bench in the square and sat, rolling a cigarette on his knee. People passed, shuttered in their light coats, eyes toward home. He hunched forward and licked the paper, cradled a match, and leaned back as he exhaled. His head felt thick, out of time. It was a Thursday afternoon, but the crowds swarming around his bench seemed of a different, busier world. They were retreating to their own warm apartments, and he was emerging, his brain full of sludge, into their midst. He needed a shower, but it was a long walk home, and he wasn't quite ready for it. He wanted to beam himself to his own shower, just be there instantly. The other possibilities available to him—the Metro or a cab—would also have to wait. No decision would be made until he finished this cigarette.

He sniffed his shoulder. Grease and perfume and smoke.

In his attempt to avoid recollecting the evening prior and feeling anything about it, his mood darted among various animal urges: eat, piss, call someone—that girl Celine? Every desire that surfaced he wanted gratified immediately. If only he could piss right there without anyone thinking it inappropriate. Why couldn't a pepper steak
avec haricots verts
just materialize on his lap?

He smoked and thought of the girls he'd been seeing lately—their wide-set eyes, their tentative English, all starstruck with vague artistic ambitions, little Jane Birkin wannabes who needed tutoring in how to give head—and continued to feel nothing about them, aware of his feeling nothing, aware of the coldness of this deliberate choice to feel nothing, which was exactly how he wanted it, despite it filling him with terrible feelings. The minutes were ticking toward his favorite time of day, when the lights of the cars cast colors across the faces of the gray buildings. In their narrowness, the streets looked to him like tunnels of light, winding alleys charged with mystery. Having grown up in Houston, a city with streets as wide as the Seine with none of the grandeur, he appreciated the power of attenuated spaces. There was history in it, the old proportion of things, a sense of romance, all the things he tried not to buy into about old Paris but, in truth, did completely.

Paris seemed to human scale. He thought of the freeways in Houston, of driving across a twelve-laner, one in a four-story pile of other freeways, beneath towering billboards, all of that, and it made him feel anxious, like an insect in a gargantuan world. Here—this was good. This triangular cobblestone park, with two benches, three mature plane trees preparing for autumn, little cars honking in disorganized traffic, and the dome of the Panthéon rounding out the near distance.

These scenes reminded him why he came to Paris and stayed; when he was otherwise steeped in aimlessness, soaked in the film of meaningless sex, tired of redesigning toilet closets—
this
—this air, this view, pushed him on.

An elderly man with a small dog came and sat on the bench across from him. He was wearing a brown suit and holding the dog under his arm. His face was long, his eyes kindly sagging. He moved the dog to his lap and sat watching the traffic. He looked loved but lonely.

The dog kept glancing up at the man.

Preston wondered where the man had come from and where he was going. The thought made him antsy. He wanted somewhere to be, someone to be waiting for him. There were places he could go; he saw his friends scattered around the city, faces that would smile on seeing him, women who wanted a call. Yet this awareness just clenched him up where he wanted to open, folded him inward when he wanted expansion—joy, simplicity, a widening circle. The apartment anticipating him was empty and quiet, making its dark sounds without him, dripping and ticking.

He reached for his phone to text a friend but resisted. Company would only drag him down when he was already out of sorts. The thing about this familiar sickness was that its sole cure was solitude, a return to himself, only achieved by wading through gloom. Once again he would have to wade. The aspect he most deplored in men was greed, men who gorged and boasted. And yet here he was, a gorged man, taking in the show of Paris's lights flickering on, as if he was so special, as if hundreds of men hadn't sat in that very spot, full of ennui, smoking and thinking of women and getting old. A sudden ardor pulled him to his feet and he left the park, watching the little dog's black marble eyes follow him away.

He wound around like he always did, taking the darkest streets possible, making the city a labyrinth. The sky was still dusk blue, but in the narrowest lanes, named after accomplished dead men, full night had already fallen. He listened to his shoes scuff the cobblestones. Each step carried him away from his mood. When he reached the river, the beauty slowed him down. Notre Dame—underlit, tremendous, its gargoyles charging in early moonlight. He'd never tire of the place, no matter how many tourists clogged its archways.

Tonight he paused to take his hundredth picture of it with his phone, but he didn't linger. He crossed the bridge, the river sparkling and split by boats, a floating party shining a spotlight into the luxury riverside flats. He crossed off the island and came upon a pudgy man wearing a worn black tuxedo and playing a violin; nearby, a group of teenagers performed break-dancing tricks. The world smelled like melting ice cream and wet dog, and down on the quay, where he descended to take the long way home, like old water and urine. He raised his head to get a better sense of the sky, and a gust of wind rose and took off his hat. This beloved straw hat, made custom for his head, a Parisian splurge that he'd purchased when he first moved to the city, flew into the Seine and landed upright on the water's surface, as if it had found itself a new head.