The Violet Hour: A Novel (33 page)

Bill looked at the cake, then at her. Strands of hair caught in the corner of his eye.

“Don’t you just want to eat her up?” she said nervously, making the obvious joke.

H
ER PROFESSOR WANTED
her to begin a new series of hand studies, this time of a man’s hand, now that she’d mastered the woman’s.

“Ask your husband,” he said.

“He’s very busy. He’s always going somewhere.”

“Then ask someone who has time to sit still.”

She tried Abe anyway, because he did have lovely hands, the knuckle bones perfectly domed, the fingers long and ductile.

“Come on, babe,” he said. “You don’t need me for everything.”

She didn’t want to be angry with him, but there was a judgment in his voice that wasn’t kind. “Of course I don’t,” she said. “Is that what you think?” As though he were the only one doing anything. As though when he went to the hospital she just sat there where he left her, motionless, until he returned to give her life. Some life. Most nights when he came home he stretched out on the sofa like an automaton. Forget sex. When he reached for her, he made her feel inanimate, like a pillow under his arm while he napped. She used to love to watch him sleep, but now she hated it, felt rejected, unnecessary. Now when he spoke, it was about the hospital, about the significant things that had happened to him.

“Look,” he said, sliding his arms into his lusterless white coat. “It’s just my schedule. Can’t you find another hand?”

“L
IKE THIS
?” Bill asked her. He propped his elbow on the table and clenched his fingers into a dissident fist.

She licked her lip. “I’m warning you. You’re going to get tired.”

“Of this? Never. Viva la revolución!”

When his hand began to shake, she laughed. She laughed even more when he collapsed moments later, hanging his head, massaging his fingers and his wrist.

“I told you it wasn’t easy,” she said, coming over to the table. “Next time you’ll have to start with something a little less ambitious.”

It was then that he reached for her hand, catching it crisply, like a butterfly in a net.

I
T SHOULD’VE FELT WRONG
, but it didn’t. It felt natural. She had, after all, been sleeping with other men when she’d met Abe. This was the woman she was, and the woman he’d fallen in love with, this
woman men wanted, who was unhampered by rules. Why should marriage bury that part of her forever?

She wanted to be loyal to Abe. She had planned to go with him until the end, until their hair lost its color and their hands were so spotted and withered they were indistinguishable when they were clasped. And maybe she still would. Already, they’d been through a lot. But at some point, even grief had to end. Certainly work did. She’d been patient, for a long time she’d been patient, but now her body had grown too insistent. If he no longer needed to touch her, then why shouldn’t somebody else? Wouldn’t that increase happiness—hers, Bill’s, and in some way she was still working on, Abe’s?

It was a wonder, really, that no other man had ever recognized her brewing desire. Even she hadn’t. But Bill was like an ace detective, zeroing in on all the clues the ordinary cops had missed.

She met him in parks on sunny, beatific afternoons. She stretched out on a sheet and felt decadent, like the pinup on the shop window cake. Bill kissed her neck. She imagined it was made of sugar and creamed butter frosting, smoothed around the edges with a thin metal spatula, a sweetness so splendid he couldn’t possibly taste every bite.

“I have to have you,” he told her, straining, as though he’d forgotten how to talk and breathe at the same time.

How could she deny him? She gave in again and again.

“Leave him,” he said soon after. “You deserve to be happy. I’d do anything to make sure you were happy.”

“But I’m happy now,” she said.

And she was. Her ego was on a fantastic trip. It was like being in Paris or London and being dazzled by everything—the breakfasts, the cabs, the snap of foreign flags over rooftops—all things she’d only read about in books. San Francisco was a whole new town. Never in her life had she seen such architecture, smelled such flowers, eaten such toothsome foods. People wore fantastic clothing, too: scarves thrown billowing about their necks, dark glasses, pants that hugged their hips. On afternoons when she couldn’t concentrate and had no
plans with Bill, she went shopping. She brought back treasures: bulbous amber rings, woven hemp belts.

“More shoes?” Abe said when she modeled her new cork wedge heels with orange canvas straps. It was midmorning and he was in bed, having just returned from an overnight shift.

She spun around in front of her full-length mirror, still luxuriating in the glorious vacation she was on. The light rushed through the window, making a perfect square for her to stand in on the floor.

She had forgotten it was possible to feel this way. Did that mean she’d been unhappy before? She looked at Abe under the covers, his body shrinking into the mattress already, his features melting into sleep, where there was nothing to distinguish his face from the face of anyone else. These days it was hard enough when he was awake. He was hardly the man she had married. She saw now how defenseless he was, how easy it would be to leave him.

Bill continued to egg her on. “It’s okay to admit you made a mistake,” he’d said. “Admit it and start fresh. Why should you have to live your whole life on the basis of one mistake?”

As Abe’s breathing shifted into full, faraway sleep, the square of light began to distend itself and drift. In her shoes, she shuffled with it, as though it were a raft, carrying her across a body of water, away from her sober husband, and backward toward the door. Now it was shrinking, as something in the weather interfered. A cloud, probably. Some breath of city fog. She shuffled again, centering herself, but the square, now rectangle, now rhombus, continued to collapse. An instant more and it would be gone. She saw she had no choice. She turned and looked at the open door, gauged the distance, and with a sudden, flying flick of her leg, leapt soundlessly into the hall.

S
OME TIME PASSED
and she was at last almost ready to do it, to just leave him for good and be through. Bill was waiting for her. Doting Bill, the ace detective. Everywhere she went, people looked at her curiously, wondering why she hadn’t done it already.

Soon,
she told them wordlessly.
I’ll do it very soon.

But then by chance Abe found them together, picnicking in Golden Gate Park. And to her surprise, that was it. That was all it took.

She sat there in the grass and the look on his face was one of rising dough that had been punched down hard in its bowl. She had done the punching; it had been her body, her fist. Instantly, she was in a panic. She held her finger to her lips as if to shush herself, as if to silence the thing he’d just seen. Not knowing what to do next, she stood and reached out an arm.

She wasn’t surprised when he fled. What surprised her was the way his normally shapeless white coat looked where he’d left it, like a man napping, unconcerned, in the grass. The way the sight of his retreating back had awakened a creature in her stomach. Deep inside her it clawed out a message that meant she could not now or ever leave Abe, nor bear for him to leave her. The way Bill had said, “Let me read you something,” having somehow missed the whole thing.

T
he high spirits in which Elizabeth and Toby had left the house were in some ways too transcendent to be sustained. The moment the sun hit her skin, she felt herself grow shy, like some kind of nocturnal animal, the Xanax at last wearing off. They would not be shagging in the street after all. But that was fine, and Toby seemed to think so, too. His gait was easy, his attitude “I have all day.” It was nice, for a while, just to be outside. They sat together on a bench in front of a public fountain and watched the water exalt and fall back down on itself. They sucked on mints, and when the breeze blew, the smallest sprays of water reached their skin.

The distance between them widened a bit further in the marbled stone plaza, and that was sort of nice, too. Elizabeth didn’t need to touch Toby’s hand to know he was there, offering her something. Truth be told, she liked this new feeling of uncertainty. It wasn’t the sinking doubt she regularly experienced a few days before a big exam, but rather a somewhat pleasurable sensation of suspense. Will we or won’t we, she wondered, feeling the excitement tighten up in her thigh.

Eventually he stood. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom in that hotel,” he said, and pointed across the plaza. “You want anything?”

She shook her head, happy to wait for whatever. Meaning was everywhere in the wide suburban afternoon. As she watched the fountain plume coyly, catching its reflection in the blue glass windows all around, a strange little memory popped into her head: that of a shiny metal canister with a smooth, mirrored surface and a lid that was being twisted and removed by some unknown person’s hand. But what kind of memory was this? She could see it for only an instant before the image fizzled and began to repeat itself, each time less clearly than the last. Utterly mundane, and yet somehow significant. Deeply so. She straightened her back and tried to place it. It seemed like something glimpsed on a billboard in the subway—an ad for moisturizing lotion or a new arthritis pill—ubiquitous, but instantly forgettable, like all the other fragments of suggestion that washed over her each day. But this fragment hadn’t disappeared. It had clung to the floor of her memory, biding its time. And now, drawing on some hidden reserve of strength, it had shaken itself free from the seaweed and risen to the top once again, like a body, demanding to be understood.

What was it? The answer gnawed at the edge of her brain. She looked around for billboards, seeing one for
The Washington Post
on a cab and another, on a bus stop, for a fashion designer famous for his handbags. Her eyes came to rest on her own designer purse, which lay beside her on the bench, its mouth falling open like someone asleep. Her phone was inside, her phone with Kyle’s text. She could see it there, a little silver sandwich tucked into its pouch. She stared at it; second upon second went by. The canister fled from her mind. She was a coward. Only a coward would contemplate an unread text, go to bed without reading it, and then continue to avoid it for two more days.

At last she reached for the phone. The screen lit up and she pressed the button that led to her in-box of unread messages. She read the oldest one first: Lucie, sending “love and support!” Next was a college friend she hadn’t seen in a few years, a guy named Patrick who taught high school in Japan. He was in New York for the night—two nights ago now—and wondered if she was free to meet up. Perversely, it
made her feel better to learn that Kyle wasn’t the only kind person she’d ignored.

His text was not one, but two.

come home. I love you. I want you to live with me.

I know you’re angry with me. You have every right to be. But i got the sense that you needed your space—needed to be with your family not me. When you’re ready

The words were disorienting. They were like messages from two different relationships. The first one just beginning, the second about to end. When I’m ready, what? She read them again, searching for the missing word. Then, suddenly, she understood. They were backward. She’d looked at them out of order. First the pseudo-apology,
then
the plea to come home. They were sent at the same time: one extralong message broken in two by the cruel limitations of technology. But why send that last bit at all? Was he really asking her to move in with him? After all their discussions? She saw him nodding, his forehead cleaving in sympathy when she told him, not six months ago in his galley kitchen, that she loved him, but had reason to be cautious. “I just have to take my time,” she’d said, tearing involuntarily. “With everything else, I’m fast. But with this, I have to go slow.” He’d held her tight to his chest, his heart beating steadily as if to prove he was comfortable with her pace. Had it all been an act, her moment of genuine communication nothing but an improv workshop to him?

I want you to live with me.

Why had he humored her all this time if in the end he still wanted what he wanted? She shuddered, flipped the offending phone shut, and dropped it back into her purse. The front screen flashed 5:59 then softly faded to black.

She looked up to see Toby crossing toward her, a newspaper swinging in his hand. For a moment she was afraid he really was going to make her read about that awful hurricane, pull her even deeper
into her well of despair. But when he sat down beside her again and opened the paper to the page he’d been marking with his finger, she saw nothing but ads filled with smiling celebrity faces and giant words in quotes. “How about a movie?” he said, pointing to a timetable that ran underneath. “This thing looks fun. It’s outdoors.”

W
HEN THEY STEPPED
off the escalator from the Metro, the setting sun was blazing in the windows of the nearby science institute, making it appear on fire. They paused together at the entrance to the lawn while a formidable woman in uniform peered into Elizabeth’s bag. Preteen kids handed out flyers advertising the sponsors, merchants, and remaining films of the weeklong festival. On-screen that night was
Back to the Future
.

Once through, Elizabeth impulsively took Toby’s hand and they walked together into the dell where couples, families, and collared dogs had already begun to gather with their well-worn bedsheets and collapsible concert chairs, their thermoses and assorted cheese, all of which had apparently passed the security checkpoint. They wore madras shorts and diamond engagement rings, hemp sundresses and loafers without socks. Music and commercials from the oldies radio station projected from a set of speakers atop a cheerful white promotional van.

Elizabeth and Toby found a spot off to the side, where they weren’t as likely to be crowded by others. She’d grabbed one of her grandmother’s quilts on the way over, and once they’d gotten themselves situated, she produced two plastic bottles of Diet Coke, one of which she uncapped and handed to him.