The Violet Hour: A Novel (2 page)

Suddenly restless, Ferdinand lifted his head from Cassandra’s lap and vigorously shook himself out. He circled a few times, then went straight for Abe’s leg, which he thumped against with a sigh. Cassandra clucked her tongue and retrieved an apple from the snack cooler as Elizabeth reappeared on the boat. Funny the things that bugged her: Elizabeth’s tan, Ferdinand’s loyalty. She felt the onset of a dangerous feeling and, biting into the apple, tried to chew the feeling away.

“Hey, toss me a towel, will you?” Elizabeth stood, shivering, a weed coiled around her ankle, her bathing suit heavy and dark. She pulled the corners of her top down over her goose-bumped breasts.

Cassandra did, and Elizabeth cloaked herself, blotting her limbs
and the seat of her suit. With a twist and a squeeze, water streamed from her hair to the deck.

“How was it?” Cassandra held out Elizabeth’s hooded sweatshirt.

“Cold!” She wrapped the towel around her waist and pulled the sweatshirt over her head, teeth chattering in confirmation, her shoulders hunched, her face now a lavender-gray. “Too cold for you, Mom. But not too cold for Dad!”

“It’s probably too warm for Dad,” Abe said, happy to extend the myth of his stoicism. Like Cassandra’s effortless hair and Elizabeth’s effortless grades, it was part of their sense of themselves as a family, another facet of their specialness. They would never be some great, big powerful clan—the Rosenbergs, the Kerrys, the Poznanski boys who all played football—but in some ways they were more special because they were just the three. A family rendered in its most essential, basic parts: mother, father, child.

Elizabeth pulled up the anchor and joined Cassandra on the bench. She was nearing the limit of her patience with parents. “When do you think we’ll head back?” she asked, once they were under way again.

“An hour maybe,” Abe said. “Too pleasant to turn in just yet.”

Elizabeth sighed. “Not too much longer, okay? I want to meet up with some people tonight.”

“What people?” Cassandra always wanted to know, to imagine the scene.

“The same ones who are always there . . . Rachel, Jessica, Brian . . . Henri.”

“Henri? Do I know him?”

“He’s just this diplomat kid. We’ve been hanging out a few months. He’s friends with the guys.”

“That’s an old-fashioned kind of name.” This was Abe, from the wheel.

“Whatever, so’s Abraham.”

“But I’m a boring, middle-aged dad. I’m supposed to be old-fashioned. How old is this poor Henri?”

“What does
that
matter?” Elizabeth asked, her cheeks a sudden pink.

Abe’s eyes met Cassandra’s. He hadn’t expected this.

“Don’t be running around with older boys, Lizzie,” he said, trying to keep his tone light. “You don’t want that kind of trouble.”

“Dad!” She laughed. “I’m going to college! All the boys will be older in college.”

“Hmm, might want to rethink that, too.”

“Daddy!”

“Just be careful.” He cleared his throat. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Elizabeth flushed again, irritated at her father’s sudden seriousness. “Of course I’m careful. I’m not an idiot. I can handle myself with anyone. Doesn’t matter if he’s eighteen or twenty-three.”

Cassandra winced. “Is that how old he is—twenty-three? Honey.” She leaned forward to look her daughter in the eye. “Are you dating this boy?”

“No! . . . I mean, not necessarily . . .”

“Christ.” Abe swung the boat sharply, getting in line with the wind.

“He’s a really good person! His age doesn’t matter!”

“Easy, Abe!” Cassandra clutched the handrail and her hat.

Elizabeth pulled her orange-and-white striped towel tighter around her hips. She hadn’t intended for it to come out like this, if at all. But now that it had, she couldn’t let them get all worked up, absurdly imagining him to be some kind of predator.

“He’s actually about to start a Ph.D. in French colonial literature,” she told them. “He knows people who have worked in clinics in Africa, and he knows a
lot
about wine. Like, maybe even more than you.”

Abe gave a humorless laugh.

“Not so fast, Abe!” Cassandra’s stomach dropped. “You’re scaring me!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Cassandra, it’s called
sailing
.”

“You guys should meet him,” Elizabeth said. They were all slantwise and speaking louder at their brisk new clip. “I’m not saying I’m going to marry him or anything, but I think you’d both really like him.” She felt mature, idly talking to her parents about a man.

“Elizabeth,” Abe said. “I’m not making any judgments about him. I just don’t want you to have any illusions. Don’t be thinking you’re going to lose your virginity to some romantic Frenchman.”

He had never mentioned her virginity before. The word on his lips was mortifying.

“Well,” she said, as everything flapped, the sails above them full. “That’s not going to happen.”

It wasn’t going to happen because it had already happened, at a party the previous fall. Zach Lando: white rapper, baggy shorts, large nipples. Flat on her back on a blanket in the woods, dead beetles crunching dirt underneath. Afterward, they’d smoked a joint, and she’d pretended nothing had hurt. “You’ll hate me in a few days,” he’d said. He was right.

“Good,” Abe said, feeling even more unsettled than before.

Cassandra had grown silent. Her daughter was having sex. There was a moment in the recent past when it had begun, and somehow, in her selfishness, she’d looked away and missed it. She reached for Elizabeth’s hand. “You’re being safe, of course?”

“Mom!” Elizabeth cried. “Of course!”

Abe’s brow grew moist and hot. His lip twitched, and he suddenly felt he couldn’t control the muscles of his face. His glass was already empty, his throat constricted and dry. They were all crowded so close to one another, and he needed something to drink.

He left the wheel with Elizabeth and went below to the galley. Over the aluminum sink, he measured out a generous portion of gin, adding ice and only a splash of tonic. He sipped, allowing it to burn slowly down his throat. Through the porthole, he could see Elizabeth at the wheel: a sweatshirt with two legs, her towel
having dropped to the deck. Cassandra stood beside her, an arm around their daughter’s waist. She leaned in and whispered something in Elizabeth’s ear. They laughed, like schoolgirls conspiring. His beautiful redheads. He remembered a time when he thought it dangerous to have a wife this beautiful. Like opening your wallet on the street, you were just asking for someone to rob you. In the old days, when he took her to bed at the end of a long day apart, he was reckless, sometimes tearing buttons from her shirts. If he wanted her so badly, he could only imagine how other men felt, who couldn’t have her at all.

This was the last of the gin, and still, he needed more. He had not yet begun to feel light.

“Cass!” he called from the hatch. “Where’s the—wine?” He shuddered, thinking again of Elizabeth’s Frenchman.

“Just have some gin!”

“None left!”

“What?” Her voice was small and resonant as though she were speaking from inside a tunnel.

“None left!” He stepped up for her to hear.

“
None?
Abe, I was saving that!” She came toward him, tentatively, bracing herself on the rails.

“Then don’t tell me to drink it.” He held up the empty bottle for her to see.

“Where’d it go?” The wind rushed past her ears, whipping her hair into her mouth, forcing her to continue shouting, though she was now face-to-face with him at the hatch.

“I think we
drank it,
” he said, growing impatient with her refusal to comprehend.

“But it was half full. God, are you really such a
pig
?”

She was teasing, and didn’t mean the word in anger. But her body, which had betrayed her before, betrayed her yet again. With the gin, and the wind, and the faintest hint of seasickness rising, Cassandra’s mouth had been growing drier and phlegmier all day, and though she had not quite realized it before, it became apparent to them both in
that moment, when, on the sharp, punchy syllable “pig,” she accidentally spat in his face.

“Well,” he said, wiping the bubbles of saliva from his cheek, even as they evaporated.

“Oh, Jesus.” She touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry.” Cassandra was expert at apologies. They often leapt off her tongue before she fully knew what she’d done wrong.

“Well,” he said again, more acutely this time, suddenly aware of everything. “Why don’t you just go fuck Vincent Hersh.”

She was stunned. “Who?” she asked, instinctively, withdrawing her hand, hoping she’d somehow misheard.

The wind slowed and Abe found himself wanting to strangle her. She’d been sleeping with the kid. He’d known this, he realized, for weeks. The way he’d singled her out at the opening. How happy she’d been. He’d had all the clues, yet remained somehow stumped, like a foggy-brained Scrabble player unable to unscramble his letters. He’d kept himself in the fog, making nonwords, not wanting to believe her betrayal. But with the spit, it was as though the fog had lifted and the tiles finally clicked into place. He felt he could squeeze her throat until her face turned blue.

“Don’t deny it,” he said. “I know.”

Her eyes watered; she was guilty. She couldn’t have looked guiltier if he’d caught the two of them in bed. “Abe. I didn’t—”

“Jesus Christ, Cassandra, I know you did!”

“Listen, Abe—”

“No,
you
listen,” he roared. “Fuck. You. Really, Cassandra.
Fuck. You
.”

“Daddy!” Elizabeth reproved him, her voice breaking in panic.

A moment ago, she hadn’t known a thing, and now she knew too much, as though she’d grown up in a matter of seconds. She wanted to rewind, to stuff all she’d learned back in its bottle and toss it overboard and never have to see it again. She wanted that, but she knew it was impossible. Her father had unleashed the
fuck
. For her family, saying
fuck
was less like opening a bottle than like turning
on a broken faucet. The
fuck
s would continue to pour out, limitless, insensible to the damage they caused.

“No, fuck
you
!” Cassandra cried, suddenly enraged. “Fuck you for always making me feel like
shit
!”

Worse things were said, things that might have been funny in another situation, but in this moment meant the end of the world. Abe was dead inside; Cassandra was an unrepentant whore. They hated each other and pronounced it with glee. They flung their words violently, ungrammatically. They scrunched their faces like babies, tears spilling down their noses and cheeks, their voices oscillating wildly, covering every decibel of rage. Elizabeth stood clutching the wheel, watching her parents completely break down. They’d been known to shout, but this was worse than any shouting they’d ever done before. This was practically unrealistic. People wouldn’t believe it had happened this way if she tried to tell the story later; they’d say she had forgotten something, left a crucial detail out. Perhaps they’d be right; perhaps she would; perhaps she was already erasing it as it occurred, saying no to a life of hysteria, turning their insanity away at the door.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Was she even there? Could they even see her? Elizabeth steered deaf through the tempest, heading for the marina as if for safety, as if she believed their fury, like a fish, couldn’t survive on land.

And then, suddenly, her mother was sitting, gripping the bench with her fingertips, and her father was standing, purposefully, on the very edge of the starboard gunwale. They were silent under the noise of the wind. And then her mother stood and started to say something, and her father turned his back and dove. His body was in the air for an instant over the water, and then, as if by some camera trick, there was nothing but water and air. They rushed to the sides, looking everywhere, until a moment later he surfaced, already behind them, his head bobbing up and down in the waves, his arms stretching in sequence, one after the other, pulling for the shore.

“Stop the boat!” her mother cried. “Turn it around!”

Elizabeth ran back to the wheel. The wind seemed to be coming from all directions; she didn’t know which way to turn.

“I have to think!” she yelled. “I’ve never done this alone!” She looked at the horizon and at the other boats for help. Ferdinand was barking at the water on the side where her dad had jumped and her mother continued to shout at her, or maybe at her dad, though he wasn’t responding in any case. He was swimming away from them, and making it look ordinary, growing smaller and smaller against the rumpled sheet of blue.

Which left her mother, barefoot and stricken on the deck, and herself, a sudden grown-up, in charge of getting them home.

A moment passed. Maybe a year. Maybe she’d already graduated from Harvard and these weren’t her parents at all.

Remembering the motor, she turned it on, and the horizon steadied itself into recognizable layers of sky, land, and water. There: something to hold on to. She clung with every particle of her eye. In her ears was an awful empty sound where the wind had been. Even Ferdinand no longer barked.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Cassandra said finally, having come to stand by her side.

“It’s okay,” Elizabeth told her, because it wasn’t worth it to say much else. “Do you think Dad’s going to swim the whole way?”

“He’ll make it.”

“Are you sure?”

“He’s an excellent swimmer.”

“Then I guess we ought to head back.”

“Yes,” Cassandra said. “Thank you. I love you.”

“Sure, Mom. I love you, too.”

I
N THE BAY
, Abe swam full on toward the trees. He wasn’t far from the coast—a mile maybe, no more. There were small sharks in these waters. He’d seen them when they surfaced, but he didn’t care. They could eat his legs if they wanted. In his rage, he’d outswim
them anyway. With each stroke he felt he was shedding an atom of his accumulated anger, replacing it with an icy atom of the sea. He breathed in brine: it seeped through his pores. His eyes became silty pebbles; bay grass overtook the straining bands of muscle in his arms; his heart became the heart of a halibut: flattened, bottom-dwelling, varying its color in vibration with the earth.