The Violet Hour: A Novel (36 page)

She was a force, perhaps now more than ever. When she’d collapsed into him in the yard, she’d collapsed like a star, infinitely stronger as a black hole than she’d been as her younger, brighter self. He’d stiffened because he knew he had to be careful. He didn’t want to be sucked in by her again.

When he first met her she went around like a giant, crushing by the dozen all the Dianes and Karens and Lindas of the world. Cassandra. He often wondered what her parents had been thinking, and spent many a grating holiday dinner trying to reconcile the name with the namers. But of course they hadn’t heard of Priam’s Cassandra, as Abe had learned when he asked a drunk Howard that first Christmas, and Howard had leaned forward on the bar, wide of eye, and said that Eunice had always loved the name, ever since a woman in her congregation had gone on a television quiz show and won, and her name had
been Cassandra. “Did you know Cassandra was a prophet in Greek mythology?” Abe had said. “Is that right?” Howard asked. “My daughter?” “She was a famous princess of Troy. She knew things no one else knew.” “Eunice will love that,” Howard had said, failing to swallow a burp. “She always wanted the kids to know things. Hey, Eunice! Listen to this—” By which point Cassandra had interrupted, and was leading her dad away by the arm. “Come on, Abe,” she said, her face turning back to him, drained, “you think I haven’t told them this before? It doesn’t stick with them; it doesn’t matter.”

Abe remembered being struck by this incredible coincidence—that no one in her family seemed to listen to what she said and, even more boggling, that no one recognized the irony but him. So his myth of Cassandra grew. “You are a whole other person,” he’d often told her, amazed, while they lay naked, flank to flank. She was, but she also knew what he meant, and this was even more amazing, that a whole other person could somehow live within his thoughts.

He had to stop; it was too painful. He flexed his right calf as the runner had, then his left, returning to his body. In the distance he heard the tinkling of a dog collar and found himself missing Ferdinand, dead now these past three years. It had been ages since he’d had an evening like this. An evening with nothing to do. At one time, such evenings had exhilarated him. Today, it unsettled him and tugged at the high from which he was already starting to come down. He was reminded of an afternoon years before, in his second year of residency, when he found himself suddenly free.

T
HERE HAD BEEN
a scheduling error and his service was, for the first time ever, overbooked. “Go home,” the attending doctor had told him. Sam Upchurch was a stout, grizzled man famous for his diagnostic accuracy. All the residents called him Church, and made regular jokes about worship. Abe didn’t care. He admired the man; Church had spoken to Abe about sailing.

“Dinghy, sloop, I don’t care. It’s worth it to have your own.”

“Well, sir, I’ve always been interested,” Abe had said. “It’s just the matter of the expense.”

Church had exhaled derisively, agitating the outer strands of his vigorous golden bouffant. “That’s not something you should worry about.” He had a confidence in Abe that was tantalizing, as though he’d been granted a sneak preview of Abe’s shining future but had been ordered to keep the details under wraps. In Church’s mind, there didn’t seem to be much that Abe could do to screw things up. He just had to proceed and take the good things that came to him.

But Abe wasn’t built that way. He wanted to relax; he just couldn’t. Not anymore. The shadow inside him was too long. So many of the good things that had come to him—his mother, his father, and now his grandmother—had already been ripped away. What if it happened again? What if he lost Cassandra, or even, one day, a child? Worse—what if
he
died? What if he passed on the shadow to them? It was an awful thing to live with, this shadow, a watchman from the ruthless outer world sent to monitor him from within, regulating his hopes and casting his view of human existence in an ever more negative light. The only thing he could regulate for himself was the effort he brought to his work. He was a man now; he had responsibilities, Cassandra’s happiness most of all. He couldn’t just bail on his shift.

But Church was implacable. “I don’t need you, Green,” he said, practically shoving him out the door. “I’ve got too many men on. Go home to that beautiful wife of yours. Enjoy some productive leisure.” Abe tried again to protest, but Church was already walking away. Under the buzzing fluorescent lights, he actually looked jaunty, swinging his clipboard under his arm like a surfer on vacation. It was possible, just possible, that Abe could learn more than medicine from this man.

So he was out in the city with nothing to do. Early October and surprisingly warm. The trees that lined Parnassus Avenue fanned upward to shield the concrete medical campus, doing their best to
hide its chunkiness, to make it feel better about itself, less like an alien space colony and more like something that actually belonged on Earth. He recalled how many parks there were in San Francisco, normally good as deserts to him, all the time he spent indoors.

He could hardly feel the shadow as he walked to the nearest intersection, which looked downhill in two directions. From there he could see the tops of several parks, lying about the city like the contents of a scattered bag. The city offered itself beneath a gaping blue sky, urging him downhill, past staircases wedged like sandbags against the flood of land, past streetlamps riding high upon the waves. In the sun, every house seemed newly painted in whites whiter than his coat, which he removed and slung over his arm, the other colors—the mints and slates and saffrons and plums—shivering in the light as though they’d just emerged from the surf, salt-washed and freshly wet.

The terrain began to climb, and he climbed with it, then turned at a dead end and descended once more. He let the slope pull his body until he arrived at an extended breach of green—the Panhandle—which, recognizing it, he followed, doubling back toward Golden Gate Park.

He never came up here anymore. He never had the time, or, worse, the inclination. How could he have grown dead to this? It was so abundant, so achingly green. He ambled along the asphalt paths, inhaling eucalyptus, passing densely fisted shrubs and ducking under beckoning branches. Here were parked cars and fellow citizens with time on their hands, women in shorts holding children upright against their knees and men in tennis whites with chummy voices, tossing scorching blurs into the sky. It was as though they’d all been here all along, while he in his space colony had been as good as an alien, so separate from all this leisure and all this life, he might not have existed at all.

Well, he existed now. Church had faith in him. He had a beautiful wife. Maybe the shadow wouldn’t rule him after all. Maybe shaking its stranglehold was as simple as charging headfirst into the day. The sky shifted its weight and the treetops threw themselves into motion,
clasping and unclasping their branches, throwing their heads back in laughter, like guests at a lavish gala. For a moment, he stood marveling at their easy society, their lively concourse against the blue. Then the breeze that had awakened them made its way to ground level. It caught him, too, and urged him onward, down the path to the botanical gardens.

He found himself a seat under a tree and watched a blond man recline on a patchwork quilt across the meadow, his chesty body propped on an elbow as he read from a black hardbound book. Beside him, a woman lay on her back. Even at that flattened perspective, he could tell that she was beautiful. She was very still and she looked straight up, her thoughts swirling in the suddenly swirling sky, her hair and body cleaving to the ground. He felt dizzy just imagining her divide herself like that.

The man took a bite of a fruit that appeared out of nowhere in his hand. The woman raised a lazy arm as if to examine it, to make sure it really was her arm. They were oblivious to each other, yet together. He thought of Cassandra, and how much he wanted her lying there beside him, just looking up at her arm. He wished he hadn’t walked out of the hospital so brainlessly. He wished he’d gone home to get her first. Their wedding anniversary was just a few weeks away.

When the man lowered himself to kiss the woman, it felt so natural and expected, so like a love scene in a movie, that Abe continued, like a filmgoer, to watch.

Even when the woman, having just been happily kissed, sat up and hugged her knees into her chest, and even when she turned her face for some unknown reason toward Abe, and even when he saw that her face—oval, quizzical, and framed with sudden, naked red hair—was not the face of an actress or even a character, but unmistakably the face of his wife, still he watched, as though if he looked away the reel would go on without him, the shadow would return, scornful and taunting, and he himself would disappear.

L
ATER, IN THEIR HOUSE
, Abe held his coat in his hands. She’d gathered it up from where he’d dropped it on the grass, and even though he now hated her, he’d taken it. It had seemed, at that moment, the sturdiest thing in the universe.

The shadow was back, clasping him tighter than ever. Anyone could hurt him. Anyone.

“But don’t you see?” she was saying. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because I love you.”

“Never,” he said, the word catching on the dry slab of his tongue. Like a block of powder, that tongue. Like something freeze-dried for an astronaut.

She hadn’t heard him. She was too absorbed in her defense.

“My mistake was in not telling you. Because I think you would’ve understood if I could’ve figured out how to say it. That I have needs that have nothing to do with love, or that do, but not
our
love. At first I didn’t tell you because I thought it was over between us, but now I realize that the real reason I didn’t tell you was because I love you and I didn’t want to hurt you. And actually it’s precisely
because
I love you that I was able to do it at all.” Here she laughed, a sound like a punch landing clean to the head. “See, I still haven’t figured out how to say it. So I didn’t even try. I should’ve tried.”

She went on like that, so many words, each one a barb that sliced and nicked at his protective astronaut suit. He’d lose all his oxygen if she kept on this way. Didn’t she know she was killing him?

“Stop talking. Just stop.”

She jerked toward him suddenly. He took a half-step back.

“But you’re my husband,” she said. “Don’t you know I will
always
love you?” She was crying now. She was scared.

“Never,” he tried again, louder than before.

“Always,” she repeated at the same time. The word came to a halt on the edge of her lips and bounced there like a diver on a springboard over a suddenly empty pool. She seemed more scared than ever as the word kept bouncing, echoing across the room.

H
E TOOK HIS DINNER
at the hotel bar, fully surrendering himself to cliché. He sipped a whiskey neat with his burger and thought of all the other men who had ever sipped a whiskey, and what a much harder time most of them had had, dying in gruesome battles and mine shafts. In contrast, he was relatively free: he was going home tomorrow. He was so taken with this idea that he hardly noticed the person who came to stand beside him. First she wasn’t there, and then all of a sudden she was, talking to the bartender about sending a bottle of wine up to a room. Feeling suddenly exposed, he stared deeply into the liquid that remained in his glass, and waited for the transaction to end.

“Dr. Green?” she said, just when he thought it had. Her head tilted into his peripheral vision. She was the pretty, cricket-voiced desk attendant from the evening he’d first checked in. “Still with us, I see.” She pressed her lips into an encouraging smile, like a teacher before a big test.

“It’s only my—” He counted on his hand. “Third night. Jesus, only my third?”

She drummed her fingertips against the bar. “I know how you feel. I’m in a hotel every day of my life.”

He looked at her more consciously. She was a dark brunette and her eyes were disproportionately large, like a cartoon’s. Yet there was a steadiness and a sense of discretion about her that made her seem mature. She worked in a hotel, after all; she had seen the world in its rooms.

Until that moment, he hadn’t understood how men his age could sleep with women their daughters’ age. But looking at this gorgeous clerk—for he could see now that her face was actually well beyond pretty—he realized that the daughters had nothing to do with it. They were grown-ups, off living lives of their own. And sometimes grown-ups got lonely.

“I guess you can’t have a drink with me,” he said, lamely. He’d known it would sound lame, but had chosen to say it anyway. What was he now if he couldn’t be honest?

She laughed flirtatiously, acknowledging her power, his weakness. “They do frown on fraternizing with the guests.”

“Fraternizing.” He repeated her dull, corporate word into his glass. “Of course.”

“But if we happened to run into each other at, say, that noodle place across the street, or some other bar not in this hotel, they couldn’t exactly stop us.”

He looked up in shock. The bartender had reappeared with the wine and the desk attendant was now standing in patient profile as though she hadn’t said a word, the consummate hospitality professional. “Thanks,” she told the bartender. She exuded nonchalance in her unglamorous blue blazer: a Bond girl in the perfect disguise. With his one question—so pathetic, he almost hadn’t asked it—he’d accidentally, unbelievably gained access to her underworld. What incredible luck! It occurred to him that she’d probably done this kind of thing before. Maybe hundreds of times, which only intrigued him more.

“Could you come to my room from there?” he whispered after the bartender had wandered off.

“You know what. Forget the noodle house. I’m about to go on break. I can come in fifteen minutes.”

It was extraordinary—no other way to describe it. The kind of thing that never happened in real life. Back in his room, he was relieved to find that his bed had been made. He drew the curtains, which made everything dark, so he turned on the light, and waited.