The Violet Hour: A Novel (3 page)

When he washed up on the marshy shore ages later, Abe crawled, insensibly, to higher ground, and slept, his cheek in the mud, sludge filling his ear. A salt marsh harvest mouse and a pair of brown pelicans looked on, a tuft of glasswort in the mouse’s paw, the pelicans’ mouths open wide and empty. Endangered species too, they were no strangers to a sea change. They stood crouched on opposite sides of the shivering man, as if wondering what he was. Beads of water clung to his surface and the grass around him shifted while the pelicans regarded each other with elongated beaks. After a space of time they seemed to reach an agreement and scuttled off. The mouse remained a moment longer, chewing on the last of his glasswort. When he was done, he sniffed the man once more in case he harbored some morsel of food. Finding nothing, he made for the water. A third pelican was not far behind, taking flight in preparation for a dive.

E
lizabeth’s friend Lucie was getting married in Battery Park, at a venue she’d chosen for its geography: the tip-of-the-island panoramic views of New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island looking on. “I mean, it’s only a restaurant,” Lucie had said when she’d settled on the spot, nearly a year before. “Nothing extravagant. But the food is legitimately excellent, plus it’s all bright white and airy, and they’ll do a great big tent on the terrace.”

“I just hope I’m not on call,” Elizabeth had told her, having no idea yet what her fourth year of medical school would be like.

The day had arrived, a muggy Saturday at the end of August, and Elizabeth was available, having arranged her schedule to give herself a little vacation the following week. She had friends who’d recently returned from Turks and Caicos, others from Paris and London. Several of her former Harvard classmates were doing significant things in Beijing and Rio and Mumbai. One poet—a poet!—was even on a Fulbright in Nepal. She herself had done a service trip to South Africa the summer after her first year of medical school, but no glamorous destination awaited her this week. This week, she was taking her boyfriend, Kyle, to Maryland for her grandfather’s eightieth birthday
party. Labor Day weekend they would take off for some cabin in Connecticut that Kyle had found online. Her plans couldn’t have been tamer, but maybe this year tame would be okay.

Kyle showed up at her apartment that afternoon carrying a hiker’s pack and a garment bag and smelling, almost magically through his sweat, of grassy, spring-scented soap. His face was angular, football handsome, and he looked so much like a dozen different celebrities that it seemed inevitable he’d be famous one day, too. An actor, he was constantly in plays, both in New York and on the road. For a long time, his biggest break had been playing a first-time home buyer in a national ad for life insurance, but in a few weeks, he’d be auditioning for a handful of guest roles, most of them cops, on a long-running network crime series. He’d been fired up about it for days.

“Ready for our little adventure?” he asked, dumping his things on the floor.

“Oh, let’s see. I’m half-packed, unshowered, and I have no idea what I’m wearing.”

“I thought you bought a new dress.”

“I did, but the fabric’s a little heavy and with the humidity I’m worried I’ll be miserable.”

“Let me see.” He settled into the couch.

She brought it out, a dusky blue sheath with an embellished bust that shriveled into itself on the hanger. “You have to see it on,” she explained, hurrying out of her shorts and T-shirt. The crisp, shimmery fabric stretched across her body, ruching at the waist and along her thighs. She’d gotten it at a sample sale and had since seen photos of a television actress who was attempting to transition into movies wearing it at a major premiere. It was amusing to think of herself in the same pool with people who lived in the public eye, and yet, why not? After Harvard and all its dead presidents, the center of the world didn’t feel so out of reach. She swam through it every day in New York.

“You can walk in that?”

“That’s the beauty of it, it stretches.” She lunged at him to prove it.

He whistled, and launched into an Appalachian drawl. “Wull awl
be
!” Kyle was a constant actor, regularly answering her in character.

“Don’t tell me:
Deliverance: The Musical
.”

“I wish! Someone is doing a musical of
Caligula,
though. That’s one workshop I would’ve loved to have been in on.”

He spoke with his usual male confidence—as though he’d just catch the next train that came along—and yet in her chest she experienced a little wing flap of despair. In his profession, the missed opportunities were so endless it was almost unbearable. What would work out, what wouldn’t—you could never really tell. She pressed a hand to her breast; she would rather talk about anything else.

“See what I mean, though, about the fabric?” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to breathe. Stupid Lucie and her outdoor wedding.”

All of a sudden, he stood. He’d alternated between wide receiver and free safety on his college team, and he tackled her now, in that performance-minded way that he had: expressive face, explosive body, a target always in mind. She howled and clutched at the dress.

“Lizzie,” he said, after they’d landed on the couch. “You’re crazy. You have to wear it. You look unbelievably hot.”

He was strong, and he was so certain. He had told her, early on, that he’d always known he wouldn’t play professional football, even before he’d chosen a liberal arts college in Minnesota with thoughtful seminars and Division III sports. It was too much work, and too much punishment for something that was only a game. She believed in him. Of course she did. But she also wondered what he thought acting was.

T
HE AIR-CONDITIONING
wasn’t working in their cab, a defect their driver didn’t admit until they were already moving, when it would’ve been awkward and rude and a waste of time and money to get out. Resigned, they opened their windows, which brought some relief once they got going. Kyle loosened his collar and held his jacket in his lap. Elizabeth propped an elbow in the open window and stretched
her other arm across the seat back, vainly hoping to keep her underarms dry. She got out of the cab readjusting her hair, already feeling a little deflated, her forehead gluey with powder and sweat.

In the entryway, they were greeted by a marble table of tented place cards, bivouacked around a heavy glass tower that erupted with flowers at the top.

“Show me the money,” Kyle whispered.

“So much for not extravagant.” She held up their card, letterpressed in a convoluted script.

He pantomimed a squint. “I can’t entirely make it out, but I think it’s telling me to get a real job.”

She patted his arm in solace, half ironic, half sincere. With the help of the staff standing guard, they meandered through empty dining rooms to the terrace, where the sailcloth tent Lucie had promised stood ready to embark on the evening. On an adjacent green, white folding chairs awaited the ceremony. Elizabeth’s friends were standing around a section of seats in their sunglasses, making good use of the bottled water and paper fans someone had thought to provide. She’d seen almost all of them at the bar the night before, which was fortunate, because sober hugging in such weather was the last thing any of them wanted to do. Friendly but subdued greetings were exchanged all around. They were friends of the couple from Harvard, some married, most not, all of them looking forward to the moment when the drinking could begin.

Seeing the place card in Elizabeth’s hand, Jane Donaughey, more Lucie’s friend than Elizabeth’s, waved her own and exclaimed, “Aren’t they so elegant?” She’d played field hockey in college and had the relentlessly chipper affect of a woman who’d been getting manicures from an early age. Talking to her invariably wore Elizabeth out. “And the table names are really inspired.”

“Oh, I hadn’t even looked.” Elizabeth opened her card. She tried not to wince as she read it:
Table 7, The Great Gatsby
.

“All their favorite novels,” Jane explained. Lucie and Rob were getting doctorates—hers in education, his in comparative literature—
and were fond of recommending books. “Such a nice little touch. Of course,
we
know they love books, but I wouldn’t have guessed
Infinite Jest
!” Jane held up her own card, grinning, and Elizabeth was momentarily relieved they weren’t sitting at the same table. Jane was single. Conventionally pretty, good-humored and talented—yet single. She was rather publicly on the hunt for a husband, and as far as Elizabeth could tell, she never stopped being excited for her happily coupled friends. It distressed Elizabeth to listen to her praise a wedding’s little touches—Jane, who advised multinational health care firms as a well-paid midtown consultant.

Jane turned to the next willing listener just as a small feminine hand clasped Elizabeth’s. “Are you a Gatsby, too?” This was Becca, her closest friend after Lucie. Becca was also single, but proud of it. Bets had already been placed on which cousin she’d be taking home.

“I’m a Gatsby,” Elizabeth said.

“Hooray. Why do you think she gave us that one?”

“Mmm, because our voices are full of money?” The one line she was proud to remember from the book.

Becca threw her head back. “Ha! Hardly.” She wrote for a political magazine in DC, where her bosses regularly encouraged her to get a book deal rather than offering her a raise. “No, now that I think about it, it’s her favorite. After
Invisible Man,
which probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for a wedding.”

“Oh, and Gatsby’s appropriate? The desperate mansion-builder?”

“Well. Lucie’s nothing if not self-aware.”

Elizabeth tried to remember this about her friend as the women in headsets came around to ask them to take their seats. They sat, all two hundred of them, Elizabeth and Kyle on the coveted aisle. Silent cheers went up from their section as Chris, a Google programmer and the previous night’s sloppiest drunk, scuttled in at the last possible moment, miming headache and taking a solo seat in the rear. Bystanders had gathered in the neighboring park, and soon the quartet began to play, pulling the wedding party out of the restaurant and down the aisle in turn. First, with the assistance of cousins, came her
tiny, turtle grandparents, then his, astonishingly all still alive, a complete generation that Elizabeth’s family tree had never known. Then the siblings, bridesmaids and groomsmen, the girls dressed tastefully—maybe too tastefully—in long black satin with cowls draping at their backs. Then Rob, escorted by his parents, who were divorced, but smiled amiably as they processed.

Finally, they all rose, the skin on Elizabeth’s thighs pulling painfully from her seat, as the bride and her parents made their way toward the crowd of well-wishers and digital cameras. Lucie looked taller, and it wasn’t from her shoes. She’d always known how to treat an occasion. The dress, which Elizabeth had seen at an early fitting, was structured at the bodice, flowing in the skirt, and not what she would have chosen, though she could see now in its fully tailored state how well it suited her long-torsoed friend.

The reception tent billowed expectantly in the hot breeze as the congregation turned to face the wedding party. Elizabeth’s mind tended to wander whenever things got serious and ritualistic, but she tried her best to pay attention now. She clicked her heels together and stared straight ahead, while Kyle, the romantic, reached over to take her hand. In the harbor, a pair of bright white sails sidled up as if they’d been paid to complete the scene.

Though she hadn’t said so to anyone, not even Kyle, Elizabeth was hurt not to be a more intimate part of her best friend’s ceremony. Family bonds were strong, she knew, but the sight, from ten rows back, of Lucie’s stately family and Rob’s fractured but good-humored one coming together for this one event only made her feel even further away from the most important moments in life.

How could her own parents ever walk her down an aisle? It was unthinkable. They led entirely separate lives. Even from the other side of the country, she now knew things about them both that they, who still lived in the same metro area, couldn’t possibly know about each other. How her mother had begun eating bananas instead of grapefruit in the morning because of the high-blood-pressure medication she was taking. How her father still kept Ferdinand’s leash by
the door, long after the dog had died. These were things a husband or a wife would know, but they hadn’t been married for years.

The judge was taking advantage of the easy crowd to make everyone laugh, even as several people had begun to hold their programs over their heads to block out the pestilent sun. One of the grandmothers—Rob’s—rose to read a poem. “From the beginning of my life I have been looking for your face, but
today
I have seen it,” she pronounced. She had a long, bohemian braid, and as she read, she continued to hold the paper in both hands, which shook a little, either from nervousness or a tremor, or both, though her voice remained steady and triumphant, her figure like a flood marker before the retreating sea.

E
LIZABETH HAD ONLY
one set of grandparents, the pair on her father’s side having died long before she was born. But even from a young age, she knew they weren’t like other grandparents—that she called their home
the funeral home,
and not
Grandma and Grandpa’s house,
was just one of many indicators that there was something uncommon going on. Something that centered itself in their basement. Something secret and exciting that she desperately wanted to see.

Her grandpa, it was clear, knew everything. His forehead was creased like an accordion and he gave off a spicy-oily musk that Elizabeth at first thought originated in the cushion of his chair, but soon came to understand was actually the smell of old man. His eyes, on the other hand, were young. Bright blue and sloshing, they looked like tiny portholes on the sea, and when she was brave enough to hold his gaze for more than an instant, Elizabeth often thought she could make out the shape of a little steamship on their waters, passing from one eye to the next, on its way to France, or perhaps Finland, that ancestral land she’d so often heard mentioned. Her grandfather wore a hat in all seasons and carried a ruler with him wherever he went, which was convenient, because Elizabeth frequently wanted to know the size of things.