The Violet Hour: A Novel (23 page)

“Did you know her grandparents lived in Bethesda?”

“No.”

“That’s funny that she wouldn’t have mentioned it once she knew where you were from.”

“Oh, well, she
did
mention it,” Toby said quickly. “But you know, everyone in New York has relatives in Bethesda and Silver Spring; it’s become so common I almost expect it. I’d actually forgotten about Elizabeth’s grandparents until I saw this.”

Ruth eased the catalogs into a brown paper grocery bag for recycling, then returned to the island counter to sort the rest of her mail. “God, what a week. What a world. Do you think you’ll go to the funeral?”

Sometimes she had brilliant suggestions. “Yes,” Toby said. “I think I will.”

“Ed can lend you a suit.”

Toby swallowed the last of his bagel. “Thank God for Ed.” He wished he didn’t have to sound so mean. Ed wasn’t a bad man. He was openly in love with Ruth, and kind to her; he even asked Toby questions about himself, which showed a legitimate generosity of spirit. But somehow, Ed’s good traits only made Toby more petulant. He needed to hate this man; it was in the nature of things that he should.

Ruth paced to the end of the counter and back. “My therapist says you’ll get over this eventually. But I have to tell you, sweetheart, I’m beginning to wonder.”

Toby stared straight ahead, sullenly, unwilling for the moment to give in to her. “Guess we’ll just have to give it time.”

Ruth bit her lip and added a stack of junk mail to the recycling bag. “This Elizabeth. Is she a friend, or is she more than a friend?”

“She’s a friend! Just a friend! Can’t I have female friends without everyone assuming there’s something romantic going on?”

In fact, there almost never was. Lately, nearly every girl or woman he’d fallen for had been seeing another guy or was otherwise only half-interested in him sexually, happy to sit on his lap and tug at his shirttails but ultimately preferring to be “just friends.” He’d endured that killing phrase more times than anyone should ever have to, and much to his chagrin, he knew the reason. Toby was thin—not just lean, but boyish. His elbows and knees were pointy, his body hair like the soft coating of down that makes a fourteen-year-old feel manly, but a twenty-two-year-old feel cruelly left behind. And it was cruel, for there had been hope when he was younger. Girls had liked his skinny hips and hanging pants in high school; he’d had two serious girlfriends and plenty of sex before the age of eighteen. Since then: a basic drought. Teenage girls still looked at him in shopping malls, giggling together behind their hands. The real women, the ones his own age and older, spoke to him as though to a friend’s precocious younger brother, flirting as a means of teaching him about the world. He knew about the world! He knew that the bookish, shrugging women who might once have appreciated him now wanted rich, superficially manly men. Men like that unpleasant boyfriend of Elizabeth’s: aggressively pally, often intoxicated, hormone-fed cuts of beef.

For a time, Toby tried to combat this injustice. His senior year at NYU, he invested in cartons of power bars and giant canisters of whey protein that lined the shelves above his bed. He carried a bar and thermos with him wherever he went. It was like eating a choco
late dessert at every meal, but with an odd, chalky aftertaste. Before long, he grew to love the flavors, craving them in the morning when he awoke and saw the friendly white canisters circling like guardians above him, their embarrassing macho labels discarded in a weak attempt to hide his vanity.

His efforts were at first modestly rewarded. Toby thickened, if only slightly, and the muscles in his arms and legs appeared to grow more defined. But after a few months of monitoring, he failed to notice any further progress, and his daily weigh-ins suggested that he might even be
losing
weight, the pounds trickling away in twos and threes each month. Thankful not to have any roommates, he often stood naked before his full-length mirror. He examined his shoulder blades protruding like sawed-off wings, his concave chest, his stubbornly sylphlike waist. Turning sideways, he felt himself disappear. And yet he was a man. He had the cock and balls of a man, heavy and proud and as powerful as any he’d seen in porn.

He met Ramona in his protein days. Though he wasn’t fond of exercise, his cursory internet research had suggested that protein alone wouldn’t build a body, so he occasionally lifted dumbbells in his room, and on nice afternoons, ran along the Hudson. Ramona was a runner, too, the kind with black eyeliner and a penchant for skipping meals. Her tiny legs moved in short, quick steps, which created the impression that she was running faster than she actually was. He’d seen her before in the student union, a sullenly beautiful china doll with a tattoo on her upper back like a labyrinth, beckoning him inside. His chance finally came one afternoon when she ran up to the water fountain where he was stretching out his calves. He stepped aside to offer her a drink and she touched her lips down to the stream. After a moment, she righted herself, gratuitously licking her lip. “You’re at NYU,” she said, panting gently.

Ramona was a sophomore and nineteen, perhaps the last possible age a woman could be and still find him attractive. Another year and she would’ve plunged into the abyss of burly men and six-figure salaries. Soon they were seeing movies together and she was laughing
pleasurably at his scathing critiques. She was linking her arm through his when they walked down the street. She was getting drunk on vodka and Crystal Light and kissing him sleepily, her hot, anorexic breath sucking him in lip by lip. All of this happened in the space of a few weeks. And then, just as quickly, it ended.

He should’ve known it would. The women who approached him in college were always a little insane. Perhaps they were attracted to his smallness because they wanted someone to push around. A quick conquest: easily won, easily abandoned. In which case they were cruel, unworthy of his love. Or so he tried to tell himself. But moral superiority couldn’t exactly mend a broken heart, nor could it prevent further injury, not if he kept falling for the same kind of off-kilter girls—the ones who talked to him first.

The one thing he learned was never again to tell his mother. He’d made a premature call about Ramona. “Mom, I like this girl.” Pathetic. It was the last time he’d let himself be jinxed.

“All right, I’m sorry,” Ruth said now, backing off, palms out in surrender. “It’s fine for you to have friends who are girls, just fine. Look at me; I have lots of male friends. I only ask because I know how hard it can be to find someone in the city . . .”

He had two options now. He could cut her off, tell her he didn’t want to have this conversation, which really was too embarrassing to be sustained, or he could turn mute, find something else on which to focus to drown out the sound of her poor, misguided voice. He chose the latter, pushing aside the Metro section and returning to the front page, which was so loaded with color pictures of water it was practically leaking blue.

“Okay, Toby, I see.” She’d cut herself off, and was speaking to him now in a deliberately wounded voice. He finished his paragraph—let her squirm a moment longer—before responding with an innocent “What?”

“It’s just that I was
talking
—”

“What, Mom? I’m sorry. I guess I wanted to read more about this hurricane after all.” It was the article that compared New Orleans to a
soup bowl, the one he’d stopped reading before. Chemicals, the article said. Rodents, poison, lizards and snakes, all mixed up together. Toby imagined waters spiced with toxins and serpent bodies, lizards clinging to bayou branches in the rain. Surely the lizards would survive. They seemed that kind of animal: capable of regenerating severed tails, of changing color to match their surroundings.

He wished he had that skill. Three months out of college, he still felt lost, unable to adapt. He lived in a grim studio with six guitars and a yellowish refrigerator that smelled of foods he’d never kept. Nights he didn’t work, he sometimes stayed up late, strumming and getting inspired. He had notebook upon notebook of ideas, enough for a lifetime of work, and he kept at it, because that’s what everyone said to do. Yet so far, he hadn’t managed to find anyone to listen. All of his actions were met with silence, as though his life and music were merely illusions. As though as far as the world was concerned, he wasn’t really there.

He ran his fingers through his hair, which was long and starting to curl in new directions. His mother was talking to him now about the hurricane—“Katrina,” she kept saying, as though the storm were just another girl who’d trashed his unready heart.

E
LIZABETH HAD GONE
to bed on the foldout couch where Kyle was supposed to sleep. After their fight she’d gone to the room she was sharing with her mother, and when she returned she’d found his note. He’d left it for her there, on top of his fluffed-up pillow, where he knew she’d find it right away.
Lizzie, I think it’s best for me to go . . .
She read the sentences in random order, already knowing what each of them would say, and the meaning they conveyed all together. Then she did the only thing she could, which was to fold the note along its creases, slip it under the pillow, and drop her head down on top, hiding the truth from herself. She slept there in her blouse and bunched-up shorts, on top of all the blankets.

The next morning, she found her contact lenses still in her eyes,
and the sounds of relatives in rooms all around her. Her mother somewhere. Her grandma. Maybe even her father, too. Already, she was annoyed with them, for all the things they probably thought about her, and all the ways they’d never change. She was no longer accustomed to family life and it felt unnatural to her now: a brand-new nation-state slapped together out of some idea of a common past. She much preferred the freedom of being her own citizen in New York.

She reached for her phone, still waiting on the floor where she’d left it. There was a text message from Kyle, which she ignored. She thought about calling Lucie, before remembering she was on her honeymoon in Greece. That left Becca. “My grandfather died,” Elizabeth blurted when Becca picked up, “and Kyle went back to New York.”

There was a delay of perhaps half a beat, and for a moment, Elizabeth feared the connection had been lost. But in the next instant Becca was there, an expert comforter. Her words were so right, they were virtually without meaning, like the random winds and droplets of a tranquil sleep machine. Elizabeth cried a little, apologized, then cried some more, while Becca chirped and whooshed her despair into abeyance. “Oh, Lizzie,” she said. “Of course it’s okay to cry.” Which seemed to give her permission to stop.

“When’s the funeral? Do you need me to come? I have a meeting at ten but I can hop on the Metro right after.”

She really had chosen wisely in Becca—a friend who would go out of her way. She didn’t need her to come, but she loved her for asking.

“No,” Elizabeth said, feeling calmer already. “But thanks, really. It’s better for me to spend this time with my mom. And my dad, I guess. My dad’s here.”

“Whoa.” Becca’s voice acknowledged everything. “How’s
that
?”

“It’s unusual.”

A knock came at the door. “Elizabeth. Are you awake?”

Elizabeth squeezed the phone tighter against her ear and lowered her voice. “It’s my mother,” she told Becca. “I think I have to go.”

She closed her phone and dug herself a tunnel under the bedcovers, feeling for Kyle’s note. The knit cotton blanket came over her head like a shroud, turning her skin dark and the rest of the world pink. She felt calmer immediately, and tried to ignore the nagging notion that she’d just made herself a womb. “Come in!” she called.

Her mother opened the door just wide enough to lean against the jamb. Elizabeth watched through the many tiny holes in her blanket as Cassandra tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“I see you,” Cassandra said.

“I’m not hiding.”

“Everyone else has been up for hours.”

“Everyone? Even Dad?” The blanket brushed her lip, giving her a taste of 1960.

“Abe stayed at a hotel. I’m sure you know his plans better than I do. The twins are up. Alvin’s here. We’ve got the viewing all afternoon.” She was trying her best to sound fresh and sympathetic, but she couldn’t entirely keep her voice from curdling with disdain.

“Is it going to be like this every day?” Elizabeth asked.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I don’t either.” She rolled over and gripped the big toe of her right foot, which suddenly felt missing. “I get the idea that people used to care a lot less. Grandpa’s Vikings would’ve sent him out to sea yesterday. They would’ve already sung their songs and pulled their hair out and now they’d be back to building boats.”

“Or plotting revenge. Forget plotting. The Vikings would’ve killed someone in retribution by now.”

“There’s no one to kill,” Elizabeth said, almost mournfully, as though this were the real tragedy. It felt good to speak so brutally.

“There was the bird. Grandma said a pigeon was sitting by him when she found him. I would’ve killed that bird.”

“Right. With what?”

Cassandra clenched her fists around an imaginary pigeon. “With my bare hands.”

Elizabeth sat up and pulled the blanket off her head, meeting her mother’s bloodshot eyes. The left one seemed to be gliding slightly to the side, like a stray grape in a holiday Jell-O. For a moment, she appeared almost insane.

“Mom, for Christ’s sake, don’t say things like that.”

“Oh, come on. I’m speaking figuratively. I’m saying what I
feel,
not what I’d actually
do
. Give me a break, will you?” Her lower lip puffed out, and for a moment she was a grown child, a metamorphosis Elizabeth found grotesque.

She frowned. She couldn’t help herself. “Well, I guess my feelings aren’t that colorful. I’m sorry.”

Cassandra was used to fearing her daughter—her seriousness, the sharpness with which she sometimes gave her opinion. As a child, she’d been almost censorious on learning that Santa Claus didn’t exist. “But why did you lie to me?” she’d wanted to know. “Why are all the adults lying to all the kids?” Conventional wisdom had trained Cassandra to believe that the teenage years would be worse. Door-slamming, rule-breaking, shrill and erratic retorts. But as it turned out, the worst was not so bad. Elizabeth did well in school. She never got arrested or caught with drugs; even her driving record was flawless.