The Violet Hour: A Novel (28 page)

“Okay,” she said.

“Look. Sometimes there’s such a thing as too much talking. It can be toxic.”

“But—we haven’t talked at all.”

“You know what I mean.”

She didn’t. “Well,” she said at last, counting her syllables, “if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“Just come to bed soon,” she said, unable to help herself. “You need your sleep, too.”

“I will.” He said it kindly, though it was clear he had no intention of following through. She went upstairs and climbed back into bed, and she couldn’t pretend it didn’t hurt. She felt a warm tear land on the corner of her mouth and tasted her own salt as it soaked into her lip. It had never occurred to her he would ever not want her love, especially at a time like this.

In the light of day, she reasoned with herself. It’s his death; he gets to decide how he mourns. Who was she to make him flail and cry? She stood in the living room doorway and watched him busy himself with a cardboard box of his grandmother’s files. So as not to hover, she went for a drive through the historic downtown, where the grand, National Register houses looked mostly like frosted layer cakes,
though every now and then there was an unrefurbished nightmare, sticking out like a rotten tooth. She couldn’t decide which moved her more, the perfect ones or the ruins. She sat at a stop sign for a long time thinking about this, until someone honked and she lurched forward, leaving the thought behind.

When she returned to the house, Abe was still paging through the box, but now at least he’d thought of something for her to do. He asked her, in the even, professional tone she knew from the clinic, to pass along the flowers they kept receiving at the house. Happily, she stuffed Helen’s Cadillac with sprays of gladioli and delphinium and drove it at low speed, like a parade float, to the nursing home down the road.

At dinner that night, he smiled at her while he chewed the pork chop she’d prepared, as though he tasted some part of her in the food. Perhaps he loved her for her funeral upbringing, because he knew the private pain of death, and thought she knew it, too. She sucked on the tines of her empty fork, tasting not him but metal. It was the opposite, actually, if that mattered. People in mourning had always been inaccessible to her, standing around her parents’ house in their sad, exclusive club. She had no idea what they were going through, and she didn’t really want to find out.

So when he slunk out of bed again that night, she told herself she was doing him a favor in pretending to be asleep. The truth was she was relieved. By the time they got back to San Francisco, she didn’t even have to pretend, never knowing when she came in to breakfast to find him munching corn flakes and reading the paper if he’d merely risen a little before her, or if she’d slept the entire night alone.

Maybe it was for the best. A marriage needed mysteries, even at breakfast. One morning, as the percolator filled her mug with its bright, portentous brew, she realized she couldn’t ever ask him how it felt to lose his parents, no matter what he’d promised her before. Love, she was learning, meant many things, and one of them was making room for solitude. They were separate. He needed his head space, just as she needed hers.

Their last day in Richmond, they had driven the city together, and he’d let her get up close to a ruined house on the outskirts of town. It was so covered in lichen and vines it looked like a traveling carnival that had finally abandoned its tour. She took pictures of every beam and shutter, just the way she saw them. If they were not separate she couldn’t have done that. If they were not separate he couldn’t have pinned her that night, nearly starving, after only a few sexless days.

J
ust after dawn on the day of Howard’s funeral, the air temperature dropped and stilled, as though the summer had paused to respect the passing of Bethesda’s oldest undertaker. Cassandra, who usually slept on her back in the heat, turned onto her side and tucked her hands up to her chest. Down the hall, Eunice dreamed of catching fireflies, one by one in a glass jar. She had counted up to an incredible number, yet every time she felt she was approaching the last, a new brood sprang up, farther out in the darkness. When she went after them, she found Howard in a doorway admonishing her, shaking his head and telling her she’d come too far. She shook him off and flipped scenes, coming to a large library where everything was in its place, rows of books in alphabetical order and on the center table, a pyramid of crisp green apples of equal size and sheen. Cassandra had less control over her dreams. They simply came at her and she endured them until her body had had enough. Deep in a well of color and indecipherable emotion, she pulled her blanket up more snugly around her shoulders, covering Elizabeth’s as well.

Then the coolness passed, and everyone awoke in a deep summer sweat.

Cassandra and Elizabeth stood together before the upstairs mirror, soaking the night grease from their faces with astringent-dipped cotton balls. They had survived yesterday’s wake. Only one more day of ritual awaited.

Cassandra turned and looked deeply into her daughter’s ear. “How are you?” It was important to keep checking now that it was clear Kyle was gone.

“Same as yesterday.”

“And how is that?”

“Sad!” Elizabeth’s voice ricocheted off the vanity lights that lined the top of the mirror, ping ping ping like a series of misfired rounds. It was like that whenever she gave voice to her distress; a battlefield in her mother’s ear.

Cassandra opened her travel case. “I think you should take a Xanax today, before the service.” She held out a small white oval.

“Jesus, Mom, where did you get that?”

“It’s only for emergencies. Look, I’m taking one, and I bet Mary is, too. It’ll be easier, trust me, talking to all those people.”

“What about Grandma?”

Cassandra waved her hand, still pinching the pill. “She’s never even taken an aspirin, if you believe her. Anyway, she knows how to behave at a funeral. We’re not like her.” Xanax was the only thing that had gotten her through those first few miserable weeks after Abe had driven off with Ferdinand. She’d felt like an empty suitcase, as though when he’d left, he’d packed up all her insides, all the viscera and emotions that made her feel like herself, and taken them with him in a cardboard box. Except they weren’t even with him anymore, because he’d dumped them somewhere, somewhere cold and dying, like the fossil ground at the bottom of the bay. That summer, it was all she could do to drag herself to the kitchen each day and pour herself a glass of wine, a Sisyphean attempt to refill herself. Her father’s death brought back an ugly shadow of that old feeling and she could only assume Elizabeth felt worse. The Xanax would do her good.

“Well, when you put it that way . . .” Elizabeth took the pill between her index finger and thumb. “You’re not supposed to drink with this, you know. That might be a problem.”

“It’s one day, Lizzie. Just one day. Don’t tell me you’ve never made that calculation before.”

Elizabeth examined the pill. Medicines had always worked too well on her body. Antihistamines scorched out her sinuses and put her deep into a well of Technicolor sleep. Xanax might completely erase her mind. If she needed it, she reasoned, it would’ve looked friendlier, a promise of relief. She would’ve been taken with its beauty or tasted its sugar already on her lips. Instead, it was alien, threatening, irresponsible. It rolled dully to the center of her hand, leaving a chalky wake, a reminder of all the ways the mind and body can crumble.

“We’re so vulnerable!” she cried.

“I know, sweetie. I know. Sometimes, we just need a little help.” Cassandra squeezed her daughter’s shoulder. “Take it before the service. It works quickly, and it’ll wear off right around the time people expect you to have had enough. Then you can crawl into bed or go out for a drink—or do whatever you want for the rest of the day.”

“I hate people.”

Cassandra’s chest swelled. “I know. I hate them, too.”

“Either they won’t leave you alone or they leave you.”

“That’s why it’s better to leave them first.”

Elizabeth’s eyes filled. Instantly, Cassandra wished she could take it back. What an insanely insensitive thing to have said! Elizabeth was torn in two: her eyes crying, her nose and mouth twisted in shame. “Well,” she managed to say as Cassandra hugged her to avoid looking at her anguished face. “Next time, I guess.”

I
T WAS HALF
past nine when Toby entered the parlor, and already the room was buzzing. Elizabeth was standing in front of the open casket where her grandfather lay, receiving condolences. She was wearing a
sleeveless black-and-white patterned dress and an attractive middle-aged woman was standing next to her—no doubt her mother, an older version of the same long-limbed, pale-skinned, redheaded girl. People milled around, eating nuts out of scattered bowls.

The last funeral he’d attended had been his own father’s, when he was just six. He remembered holding his mother’s hand tightly. He remembered being even more scared than he’d been of thunderstorms. What scared him most was the way the grown-ups were crying and talking to one another, moving more slowly than he’d ever seen them move. His father had died suddenly, a quiet brain seizure at his basement desk while he and his mother were upstairs in the kitchen. All he remembered from that day was his mother pouring steaming pasta into a colander and the perfect red Duplo tower he’d made at the table. The next thing he knew, his mother was hugging him, heavily, and then his grandmother was there, making him pancakes and holding his head to her chest, which smelled, as it always had, like breakfast and a closet full of coats. Then his mother was sitting with him on his bed looking tired and explaining that Daddy was gone and never coming back, and then he was drinking a milkshake and crying, and then he was at the funeral, wearing itchy socks and holding his breath. “You have to stop that,” his aunt Carol had told him, crouching down to look him in the eye. “Your mommy wants you to try your hardest to breathe normally. She wants you to know that everything’s going to be okay.” Carol had a thin streak of dark ink under her eye, but her hair was soft and black, like a princess’s. She was so pretty that he took her at her word. He knew he wasn’t going to have a daddy anymore, and he knew this made his mother sad, but apparently none of that mattered in the end, because everything was going to be okay. He breathed for Carol and believed her.

In his memory, everyone at his father’s funeral had worn black. But looking around now at the maroon dresses and navy ties interspersed with charcoal jackets and shawls, he realized that he must’ve been mistaking cinema for life. Even the widow, a short, unflinching woman
who, he understood from the obituary, had lived in the funeral home for more than fifty years, was wearing a lavender scarf over her plain black dress.

Beside her, Elizabeth seemed to be barely holding it together. Her eyes were pink and she kept looking past him at the doorway, failing to recognize him. Toby looked around, uncertain how to proceed. He could join the receiving line, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone but her. Deep in his pants pocket, he ran his finger over the pebble from his mother’s orchid bed. He wished he’d brought flowers, or wine—anything—to make up for his miserable appearance. He had relented and was wearing Ed’s sport coat, a fairly exquisite jacket made of a supple green wool somewhere on its way to becoming black. It fit him surprisingly well across the shoulders—he had no idea he and Ed wore the same size—and he had to admit when he looked in his bedroom mirror that he cut a fine figure, even sideways at his skinniest. But now, wearing it out in the world, the jacket just depressed him. Layered over his black waiter shirt and pants, which he’d previously thought rather smart, in a corporate, uniformed sort of way, it made the rest of his clothes look cheap and drab. Only his Lenox Lounge silkscreened T-shirt was worthy of the jacket, but it was buried, relegated to the role of undershirt.

Elizabeth continued to look past him at the open doorway, her posture rigid and unwelcoming. It would be easy to leave unnoticed. But he hadn’t showered and come all this way just to see her across a room and go home. She was grieving and could use his sympathy, and after all, he knew what it was like. He fell into line, and in a matter of seconds, found himself before her. Her lips parted; she remembered him.

“Toby . . . ?” she said. The waiter from Lucie’s wedding, and from the line at Starbucks down the road. His hair looked almost wet, slicked back with gel and tucked in behind his ears. He came forward swiftly and took her in his arms. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he whispered into her hair.

She had no idea what was going on. The wedding waiter—really?
She struggled for a moment to grip the rug with her feet, but he was too determined to comfort her. His shampoo smelled coconutty, like a woman’s, and before she knew it, she’d surrendered to his weird embrace.

“Thank you,” she replied, trying not to cause a scene. Her pelvis pressed awkwardly into his hip; her arms and legs sort of dangled in space. He was bony, but surprisingly strong.

Eventually, he released her, and they parted; Elizabeth took an extra step back.

“I saw the obituary,” he said. “And after seeing you so upset, I knew I had to come.” He held her gaze and appeared to be holding his breath even as he spoke.

He liked her, she realized. At that moment, the truth was so palpable that she almost said it out loud.

“That’s so nice of you,” she said instead. “I think you’re the only person who came here just for me.”

“You don’t have any other friends in the area?” he asked. His voice was low and vaguely excited, and he seemed unaware of all the people waiting to be received behind him.

“I didn’t really tell anyone,” she lied, suddenly wishing she’d asked Becca to come.

“Well. You have me. We’ll talk.”

She frowned. He spoke to her the way you spoke to someone you’d known your whole life. “What would we talk about?”

He blinked. “Anything. The world. Have you read about the hurricane? We can talk about that.”