The Violet Hour: A Novel (15 page)

Gail and Steve had wandered off somewhere, but Abe was by her side with wine.

“Anything good?” he asked.

“Oh, I guess. We should probably set limits. For instance, I’m not bidding on anything unless I actually want it. No more feeling sorry for people.” She remembered the private magic show she’d almost walked away with the previous year, because the magician—the weird boyfriend of one of the math teachers—was working so hard to drum up bids. There was something embarrassing about the way he thunked around the stage, shoulders hunched, hair glistening and vampiric, looking one parent in the eye and then shifting his kooky gaze to another, that Cassandra could see the crowd growing uncomfortable, all of them wishing they were someplace else or invisible, or at the very least not in any way responsible for the childish delusions this man still held about himself. For a painful moment, no one said a word, until, unable to bear the sight of a performance ignored, she shouted, “Fifty!” The encouraging smile of the emcee and the endless, flat silence that followed were almost as excruciating as the silence that had made her speak up in the first place.
What have I done?
she thought wildly. Fortunately, just before her thoughts had a chance to grow darker, a few other parents, those with younger children who might actually like a magic show, piped up, settling on a modest $300, and she never had to bid on him again.

“How about a dollar limit?” Abe said now, sipping his wine. “Isn’t that more practical?” And he was right. It was about how much they were willing to donate to the school. For Elizabeth. But she could
never think in those terms at an auction. She thought only of the individual transactions. Of having the things that she wanted and avoiding the things she did not.

“Cassandra, hello!” Here from somewhere below was Sheryl, Jessica’s mother, whose diminutive features and height—she couldn’t have been more than five feet tall—surprised Cassandra every time she encountered her. Sheryl was a geographer stationed at Cal, involved in mapping various changes in the San Francisco Bay estuary, and with her short, boyish hair, slender shoulders, and ample, athletic hips, she looked good in her magenta cocktail dress, if not entirely comfortable, or fully grown. She wore sharp black heels to give her a few extra inches, but so did everyone else, and she swayed in them now, unnaturally, like someone experiencing a minor earthquake.

“Good to see you,” Cassandra said, stooping to kiss Sheryl’s cheek. “Big weekend.”

“I guess it is, yes!” Sheryl looked around at the other parents with an expression of bright curiosity, as though they were a species she was tracking for her work. “I had no idea it was such a production. This is the first year we’ve been able to make it. Usually, you know, I’ve got work, but tonight I got to leave a graduate student in charge. Hello, Abe!”

“Sheryl.” Abe raised his glass while Cassandra sipped from hers. Sheryl was never not cheerful, but she regularly spoke in the self-aggrandizing mode of university people, gently undermining even the most innocent of small talk. Cassandra suspected it had something to do with her childish appearance, and with some deep academic insecurity—her husband was a full professor while she was apparently only temporarily on the faculty—but it irritated her nonetheless.

“And then, of course, we have the theater tomorrow,” Cassandra went on, grinning mischievously, determined not to feel defensive. Gail and Steve had rejoined them, each with a glass of wine. Abe was elbowing Steve in the ribs like an old teammate, and Steve was
dancing back and waving his hand. “Hey, Doc,” he said, “I can have one or two, can’t I? We’ll be here all night.”

“What are you seeing?” Gail asked.

“Yes,” Sheryl chimed in. “What?”

Cassandra looked at Sheryl. “I was kidding. The girls are doing their play for us.” She turned to Gail. “It’s this whole big thing.”

“Oh, of course!” Sheryl said. “When you said theater, I thought you meant, you know, theater. But the girls. Right.” She pressed a thatch of hair that was already obediently in place. “Well, you’ve seen the rehearsals—they’ve been doing all this at their house,” she said to Gail before turning back to Cassandra, “—any idea what it’s going to be like?”

“All I know is they’re wearing togas. I took them to Discount Fabric last weekend.”

“These girls,” Sheryl said, beaming and shaking her head. “Where do they come up with this stuff? I swear it’s not from me.”

“Oh no,” Cassandra said. “They’ve got minds of their own.”

Sheryl’s husband, Jeff, a biologist who did something with microbes, appeared, balancing two more glasses. There was nothing wacky or creative about his attire, a tweedy blazer and khakis he no doubt wore to class, but then, there was nothing wacky or creative about Jeff, either. He smiled deferentially, seemed to want to speak, but didn’t.

“Shall we get some food?” Sheryl finally said, and they all made for the buffet.

As they ate they browsed the silent auction. Cassandra watched Gail and Steve giggling—like kids, really, sometimes they were just like kids—and pretended not to notice the cluster of women gathered around her bowls.

By this point, the band had taken up their instruments, a group of graying long-haired slouchy dads and their equally slouchy teenage sons. The female singer now adjusting the microphone taught chorus at the high school. “We’d like to thank the PTA for having us,” she
said in a faint bluegrass drawl. “And we’d like to thank you all for giving a bunch of washed-up musicians a chance to shine on this fine evening.” She herself couldn’t have been much older than thirty but Cassandra knew what she meant. There was, in some ways, no place more washed up, more rinsed out and hung up to dry than a PTA auction on a Saturday night. Everyone in the room had been young and revolutionary once. They’d been human and animal rights activists, actresses and writers and hippies and lovers. People who read big books and had big ideas. They’d looked ravishing on two hours’ sleep and even better with a joint between two fingers. But now they had faces lined like old paint and costumes that disguised nothing, that were the same as their ordinary clothes. They had children who were eleven, twelve, and thirteen years old, and more hopes for them now than they realistically had for themselves.

But the band was good, covering various classics, and before long, Cassandra had drained her second wine.

“I see we’re headed for a real party,” Abe said, collecting it.

“Don’t judge.”

“Who am I to judge?” He held up his own empty glass. “Be right back.”

She watched him go off with the deliberate stride of the long-successful, his butt twitching boyishly to the music, and felt a little sad. Not because he was disappointing in any way, but because he was so damn good. When Elizabeth was younger, he read to her every night before bed. He’d do it now, too, if she’d let him.

Cassandra was still standing there when a dad with puffy gray mutton chops and a red-and-white striped Vaudeville jacket appeared onstage to start the live auction. The Chez Panisse dinner was up first, an instant hit, though there was no one in the room who hadn’t been.

Next was two months of free housekeeping. Cassandra had quit using a maid a few years prior and was beginning to feel musty once again. All those corners she couldn’t quite reach.

“One hundred,” she called, offering the first bid.

“Good choice.” This was Steve, who was suddenly at her elbow.

“Oh no, Steve, will you be fighting me for this?” She was feeling saucy all of a sudden, imagining all the lost earrings and socks her new maid would recover.

“Nah, we’re set. Between our weekly service and Andy. You know he’s become a neat freak? Sometimes I catch him at the bookshelf, lining up all the spines. He’s meticulous about it.”

“Lucky you! Elizabeth does nothing but make messes.” Which wasn’t strictly true. “And every day she loves us less.” Why had she said
that
?

Fortunately, Steve was lost in his own problems. “He insists on separate plates for his food, too. The string beans can’t touch the chicken.” He divided the air with his hands.

At eleven? This didn’t sound right. She tried not to look alarmed. The bidding was already up to $200.

“But,” Steve said, “at least he doesn’t insist on wearing a cape anymore. He made us call him Batman.” Steve worked at Cal, too. Something to do with data systems and information technology.

“Two fifty!” she shouted, thinking, for some reason, of Steve coming into her house with the maids, straightening her books like his son.

Abe returned with more wine, and she won the prize at $500. “Cheers,” he said. “To cleanliness.” When the band started up again, they danced. Cassandra let Abe lead her as she knew he liked to do. He spun her this way and that, pushing her waist with his hand. She looked down at the fringe that swung over her breasts and hips like layers of silky black hair. She had always been a good dancer. Still was. Amid all the grown-up smells—the spiky perfume, the wine-splashed silk, the vaguely sweet, pickled sweat of people slipping past their prime—she caught a whiff of milk carton, that fresh, sterile fragrance of dairy on paperboard that greeted their children every day. She couldn’t understand why she’d felt so out of sorts before. She felt young now in the school cafeteria.

Then the emcee was back, auctioning off more luxuries to an ever more enthusiastic crowd. A bidding war erupted over the helicopter ride, the band drum-rolling along in encouragement, the emcee offering a wheezing push-up for each improbable new bid.

Cassandra felt light. She shouted like a football fan for the fiftieth push-up, everyone shouting right along with her, for they all had a stake in the school. They loved their children. Though sometimes their children were unlovable, they loved them so much it hurt. Or maybe that was why it hurt. Their voices lifted and mixed together amid the lanterns, closer in air than they ever could be on the ground, even within the intimacy of marriage and friendship, even brushing up against one another’s shoulders as they did now, in their community, with their people, their crowd.

She leaned into the shoulder she thought was Abe’s, but it was not. It was lower down and solid like a gymnast’s. It was Steve’s. Somehow Abe had slipped away. She looked around for him, but her vision was slightly blurred, and all she saw were middle-aged heads and shoulders facing toward the stage. And Steve. She looked at him tenderly. They were just the same height. Brave Steve, father of Batman. His eyes widened like,
Oh, Christ, what the hell,
and all at once she smelled his aftershave.

“Don’t tease me,” he mumbled.

“What?” She turned to glance at nothing. And suddenly there it was, that old familiar feeling at the back of her neck, where she imagined Steve was looking. That warm, tingly feeling, as though the outermost cells of her skin there, the ones that were by all accounts nearly dead, had suddenly raged back to life, wanting more. It was the feeling of being noticed by someone. Of having powers without even trying. It was the feeling of being herself.

“You’re too amazing,” Steve said. “It isn’t fair.”

She didn’t know what she said after that. She fell into him. She nearly kissed him.

She didn’t, though. She didn’t kiss him. That part was important. There were so many things a person
might
do when drunk, when
among other people, when in costume, when lost in any powerful feeling or thought. But it was what you
did
that actually mattered. And she had promised Abe that there would never be another slipup. She’d promised him in such formal, unambiguous words—“I will never, ever do it again”—that she swore she could still hear them knocking around inside her head, resonating in the dry roof of her throat, meaning exactly the same thing all these tired years later.

Did he know that, though? Would he trust her? No sooner had she felt the rise of Steve’s gymnast chest against hers, and pulled back to see the tremulous hesitation in his face, did she see Abe crossing toward her bearing a plate of dessert in each hand.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Cassandra took the dog for a walk, something Abe usually liked to do, but he had gone to the store to collect fixings for an East Coast breakfast: bagels, cream cheese, capers, lox. He’d woken with a craving, he said. A college-morning taste in his mouth after their college-style night. He gave her a wink, as though he’d been the wild one. Ferdinand trotted a few feet ahead of her, turning his head every now and then to make sure she was still with him. “I’m here,” she told him, crabbily. The cool morning sky spread above them, cavernous and blue with a reef of blotchy white clouds that tacked it to the highest recesses of its dome. An East Coast sky. A sky that promised a change of seasons.

She still wasn’t sure what Abe had seen. She’d been drunk, and her first instinct had been to act even drunker, save her ass. She sat down extra heavily at one of the tables and made a show of digging through her purse for a pen to make her closing bid. When she finally found one, she stood and made her way to the silent auction table, where she took great care in printing an extravagant number next to the tidy, unequivocal letters of her name.
Cassandra Green.
She was going for the mouse dissection she’d suddenly realized was brilliant, and was exactly the kind of crazy thing Elizabeth would want to have. When Gail appeared, she hugged her. “I love you,”
she said, breathlessly, resting her chin on Gail’s shoulder. “Thank God you’re here.” Which she meant. She thought it all the time. What the hell did Steve think he was doing? He had the Princess of Monaco right there.

When they got home she made an effort to wobble out of her shoes, and when Abe shushed her, she shushed him back, giggling, with a finger to her lips. It was easy playing drunk, especially when she already kind of was. The headlights of Gail and Steve’s car flashed like a camera as they drove on around the block, and she must have looked nice in the light, because out of nowhere, Abe swooped toward her, semideranged, and hoisted her up over his shoulder. The gray-knit mouse, with its red-knit heart, hung by his butt in her hand.