The Violet Hour: A Novel (37 page)

She arrived exactly on time, absent the blazer, which she explained she had to leave in the staff room whenever she wasn’t on duty. Her name was April. She accepted a joint and reclined on the bed closest to the curtained window.

“It was the book that did it,” she said. “I wouldn’t be up here right now if I hadn’t just finished it.”

“Which one was that?” he asked from his seat at the little table, the grass already separating his mind once again.

“
Persuasion,
silly,” she said, kicking a stockinged foot in his direction. She was, after all, rather young. She reminded him now of one of Elizabeth’s childhood friends, the one she did plays with, the little know-it-all one with the eyes. “You had all kinds of things to say about it when you checked in. It was just as beautiful the second time around, in case you were wondering.”

“Ahh,” he said, remembering. “Of course. So who’s the Captain Wentworth in your life, April?”

She stuck out her tongue. “Nobody I know of.”

“No? A beautiful woman like you? With all the lonely men who pass through town?”

“Watch yourself. It might turn out to be you.”

“Wouldn’t that be something . . .” He rolled his head in her direction, taking in the dark curve of her hair, the white drape of her blouse, her length. She was like a mermaid with two legs, washed up on the shore. Behind her on the wall hung her backdrop: a framed watercolor rendering of a beach. He looked for her in the painting, a supple slash of brown somewhere amid the wide umber field of sand.

“Come here,” she said. So he went, sitting first on the edge of the bed, then dropping his head back to rest in her lap, which was warm. The overhead light blazed in his brain, forcing him to shut his eyes.

“We don’t have to do anything,” she said, combing her fingers through his hair. “But I do have to be back in half an hour.”

“I have a daughter,” he blurted.

“That’s wonderful,” she said, not even sounding disappointed. She was humoring him. She really was professional. She smelled of almonds and vanilla cream. “How old is she?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Fair enough.” She began stroking his eyebrows, almost maternally. “I bet she’s beautiful. I bet that’s tough on you.”

She
was
beautiful, or at least he thought she was. Not that he was that kind of father—the kind who was obsessed with his daughter’s
chastity. What was the point? She was probably basically living with Kyle, who wasn’t a scholar, but seemed decent and reliable enough when Abe had met him in New York. Whatever had happened between them this week, Kyle was undoubtedly still in love with her. Of course he was. By the time she’d turned thirteen, every male she ever met was at least a little bit in love with her—even, Abe suspected, her teachers. When she was in high school, he always knew the summer was coming to an end when the senior boys on their way to college began coming around the house to say good-bye, as though college were the new Vietnam, and Elizabeth was the girl they hoped to marry. She offered them Cokes and sat with them on the back porch, which he passed through a few times, just to check on a loose step or to let Ferdinand do his business in the yard. Ferdinand greeted each boy with a wet muzzle, wiggling, being generally unsuspicious. Abe was more sedate, a watcher, inspiring a few of the suitors, if that’s what they were, to throw in a “sir” when encountering him in the house. “Yes, sir. I’ll be going to Cal, sir,” they would say, which Abe would sternly pronounce a fine school. They scared easily, those kids, which was disappointing; he was hardly the menacing type. What had happened to the swagger of youth? Well, Elizabeth was too smart for them, anyway, too smart for Kyle, and too smart for the haunted, callow one who kept following her around the reception. Really, she was too smart for every boy, but in this world, what could you do?

“She’s going to be a doctor.”

“Just like her dad.”

He rolled his head back and forth under her hand and squeezed his eyes further shut. “Not really.”

“Her mom, then.” April was saying, having very generously given up on whatever she’d come to his room to get. He couldn’t imagine it was this. “Maybe she takes after her?”

“Maybe,” he said, turning the suggestion over in his mind, as though it were something he hadn’t considered before. “I guess I’ll never know.”

“I’m sorry.” April’s voice softened. “Is she—?”

“Oh no,” Abe said. “I left her. But don’t worry. I think it was probably the best thing for everyone.”

Just like fucking April was now. Her hands were so soft, like felt, and her lap was so warm, and Abe had been punished enough. As he climbed on top of his little hotel nymph, he pictured Cassandra on her blanket in the park. All those years in between and he’d been faithful. Nothing after Hersh even counted as revenge, because by then, their marriage was over. Not the first woman from the yacht club, the frizzy-haired waitress who was probably much younger than she looked. Not Cynthia or Suzanne. Not even Amy. They were just company, and maybe casualties of science—the natural law that man, in the absence of other ideas, will eventually take a woman to bed. But now, seeing Cassandra blaze with helplessness and grief had done something to him, something strange. Far from awakening his compassion or forgiveness, she had awakened in him something scarier, an offspring of that old nasty shadow, a beast he thought he’d put to sleep years before. It was his remorselessness, his own preening vanity and need. This was a creature he’d have to battle to find forgiveness, which was hiding behind it like a scared little rabbit, hoping to survive another day. For now, though, the beast was all. He looked at April’s pellucid face, plainly enjoying him. He gripped her cheerful, coltish breast, felt her grip him back with all the athleticism of youth.

This, after all, was why he’d come. Finally, he’d have his revenge.

H
e awoke the next morning aching, as though he’d swum a great distance overnight. April was gone, her break having long since ended. He recalled her stooping to gather her clothes in the light from the bathroom while he pretended to have fallen asleep. He assumed her shift had ended, too, and was grateful she never returned.

He showered and packed his bag, carefully resealing the last of his grass into the still mostly full bottle of suntan lotion. The Lady Liberty M&M, with all her melted, cracked chocolate, still stood in the corner in Cassandra’s room, where Eunice would probably find it. The thought pleased him, that she’d hold it in her hand one day, maybe shake it a little, or eat a piece of the chocolate and feel off. He stopped at the breakfast bar with an extra spring in his step. A man in rimless glasses was staffing the concierge. Abe pocketed a bagel and gave him a merry, straight-armed salute as he backed his way out the door.

M
ARY EXPECTED TO
see her brother-in-law again that day, but she did not expect him to look so cheerful. She used to like him, had liked him instantly in fact, from the moment Cassandra brought him through
the door that first, revolutionary time, her finger exploding with his mother’s diamond ring, improbably banishing all her parents’ fears. Whatever his complicated background, this was a man with means. He’d even helped her father carry wood around. A perfect catch. A saint. Though as the years had passed and he began to reveal his true self, she found she liked him considerably less. He was arrogant, for one. For another, he was terrible at small talk. Mary prided herself on her small talk. To most people, it was the only way you really
could
talk, and she didn’t want to live without people.

She was standing at the counter organizing a breakfast tray for her kids when he came barreling into the kitchen.

“And what adventures did
you
have last night?”

Her question was met with silence.

“Everything okay?” she tried.

This time he gave a twitch of comprehension. “Fine.”

She was tempted to go on asking softball questions, just to see how many more she could toss off before she finally got one in return. But eight years had passed, and whatever her sister had said, it was clearer now than ever that Abe was no more than a visitor in her life. She’d seen them the night before, embracing awkwardly in the yard. These were not people who knew each other anymore. The effort was hardly worth it.

Abe smiled and shoved his hands deep in his pockets, as though waiting for her to continue. Despite his politics (or had they changed?), he reminded Mary now of the president. He had that same self-confident stride, the same trail of destruction in his wake. For a man at a funeral whose family had long since fallen apart, he seemed remarkably undisturbed.

“Elizabeth up?” he finally asked.

“Think so. Check upstairs.”

Mary watched him saunter out, and couldn’t help pitying her sister a little. She wouldn’t have made the same choices. Certainly, she wouldn’t have cheated. But it was hard to look at Abe and not appreciate the possibility for distance between two people. The same dreamy
eyes he’d once reserved for her sister were now focused on something inside him, and at the same time something much farther off.

In the other room, her children and husband had already begun the week’s third game of Scrabble. She set the tray down on a side table and collapsed on the sofa beside Vlad, overjoyed to have made the right choices in her own life, in the parts of it she could control.

Abe didn’t even make it upstairs. He found Elizabeth as though she’d been waiting for him, loitering in the hall. She was wearing a tank top and microscopic shorts, and her hair was held back with an elastic that pulled one side flat and pouffed the other like a solar flare. He glanced at his watch: nine o’clock. She had clearly just woken up.

“Drive me to the airport?” he asked her. They’d hardly spoken all week.

Her face fell, nearly breaking his heart. “Oh,” she said. “You’re leaving?” She slouched against the damask wallpaper. Somewhere along the way, he’d allowed Cassandra and the Fabricants to claim her. As though he’d gotten to keep the dog in exchange for them keeping the daughter. But it didn’t work that way. She belonged to him just as much.

“Tonight,” he said. “But I thought we could take a detour first. Spend some time in the natural world.”

T
HEY TOOK
A
BE’S RENTAL
, a plastic-scented Ford, Abe at the wheel, Elizabeth watching the storefronts go by, talking little. Before long, the main drag had turned into highway, then river crossing, then science park Virginia suburb, then genuine farm. White three-rail horse fences loped along beside them, and then, startlingly, an actual horse, galloping, with sweat gathering like a stole around its neck. Elizabeth let her window down and the horse turned away, uphill, toward his friends. Flat, warm air and the smell of hay and dried manure filled the car.

As they drove on, the land rose almost unperceivably, while the air seemed striated with different kinds of heat: the heat of rain coming,
maybe, the heat of many hot days in a row, the heat of people making decisions they’d never dare make in their right, temperate minds. They were out of horse country now and into woodier terrain. Narrow, windy drives led to houses on higher ground that couldn’t be seen from the road. Trees banded closer and closer together until they began to resemble an endless double pipe organ, cresting and falling along the curves of the road, with their car scaling the ridge in between. A blue-bellied bird burst free from the leaves and came to rest on a gatepost on the right. It looked directly at their approaching car, neck pulsing, and an instant later had already darted past Elizabeth’s window, wings flapping like a lawn ornament in the wind. She turned around in her seat to watch it dip and veer wildly before shooting back into the trees.

When she faced forward again, Abe was looking at her in that screwy, embarrassing way he had when he wanted to hold on to a moment, his eyes ringed with red and almost watering. Both her parents had taken to doing this. They hoarded time with her, as though it might come in handy in a storm. After years of throwing away plenty of perfectly good moments, whether through absentmindedness or just plain absence, it was as though they were no longer willing to count on life to give them too many more. They had to store their memories while they could. It was embarrassing, and a bit too little too late, but in a way, it was also sweet. Elizabeth squeezed her father’s hand, giving him the moment, if this was one he wanted to save.

Abe pulled the car into a lot, gravel spraying beneath their wheels. They parked near a wooden trail information sign, alongside a few other cars. Abe pressed the button to raise the windows, then surprised Elizabeth by handing her a tube of sunscreen, which he never used. She uncapped it and out of nowhere came the pungent, unmistakable smell of weed. Elizabeth sniffed audibly. Was it on her hands?

“Don’t worry about it,” Abe said. He was looking at her carefully, his eyes a little bloodshot and pleading.

“Oh my god.
Dad
.”

“It’s just for storage. Just in case.”

She shook her head. “I guess I don’t want to know.”

“I don’t mind. It’s just not very interesting.”

“Oh, I’m sure it
is
interesting. But really, whatever.” She rubbed a pat of lotion into her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. “Shall we?”

Looking relieved, he got out and took a pamphlet from the dispenser, which he folded and shoved in his pocket. Then they headed for the main trail. It sloped down initially before beginning its slow, steady climb. They walked single file, Abe in front, following the yellow paint that marked tree trunks at regular intervals and was supposed to lead them to an inspiring view. What natural wonders Elizabeth had seen on the East Coast were quaint, majestic only in detail: the wrinkles in a fallen walnut, the gradations of green on a grassy hillside in Massachusetts. Well, there were the leaves in autumn. But this was not that time of year, and this was not that kind of walk. She stepped over a piece of fallen tree that jutted across their path. It was covered in lurid moss and was rotting on its belly like a forgotten cucumber in the fridge.