The Violet Hour: A Novel (39 page)

She stopped here because the boy in the Washington T-shirt had run by them once more, this time hollering like a maniac and eliciting a gasp from the rest of the crowd. Elizabeth gripped her father’s arm more tightly. “Oh my god,” she said as the boy approached the edge of the falls, the white rocks fanning mercilessly about him, the water trilling its ecstatic siren song. She flashed forward a moment and saw him tumble, saw his little body flying hopelessly through space. But then, just at what seemed the decisive moment, when danger could’ve too easily and irreversibly become disaster, he stopped, just stopped, having registered the calm, stern sound of his mother’s voice amid the din. He turned and sulked back to her side, as though he’d merely
been refusing to get into bed, entirely unaware of how close he’d come to oblivion. Soon he was swinging himself back and forth from her arm, receiving her corrective with more affection than resistance.

Elizabeth gave a sigh of relief. How well that woman had handled the situation, and yet how reckless to have let it gone that far. She looked at her father, whose expression was so mixed, it seemed to bear the memory of every emotion he’d ever felt. She let her head fall against his arm.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

“I’ve missed you, too, kiddo.”

“I mean, I feel like I never see you anymore.”

He cleared his throat. “This is a busy period in your life. I understand.”

She thought of all the nonsense that filled her free hours: the bars, the restaurants, the TV shows. “I would make time if you came to visit more than once a year. Mom comes a lot. If you lived in New York, I’d see you all the time.” But even as she spoke she wondered if she meant it. Did she really want him dropping by on random weeknights? Did she want to know him that well? It was the curse of parents that they were never wholly satisfying. If not tyrannical, then neglectful: imperfect governments every time.

He let her rest against him a moment longer. Then he stretched his legs out and raised his arms to the sky, cracking his back in the way that they shared. When he spoke his voice cracked, too, but in an upbeat sort of way, as though the boy’s reprieve had somehow extended his life as well. “Sounds like we need to make better use of the phone. What do you say?”

He stood and put a hand out. She took it tentatively. It felt strange to walk away with the falls still rushing, like leaving a performance before it was done. The sound chased after them, teasing them with fading notes from the first of many songs they would miss.

H
e’d planned to drive to the airport from there, then give her Metro fare home, but their hike had gone more quickly than he’d anticipated, and he still had several hours to kill.

“Let’s just go back,” he said. “I really ought to say good-bye to your mom.”

She tried to stifle the meek little hope that rose up in her throat that he might’ve inspired himself with his story. Was he ready to get off his boat at last, and find her mother waiting for him on the dock? She didn’t think he’d be that sentimental. She was pretty sure she was the only one of the three of them who entertained any fantasies of remarriage. Even hers were fleeting—her mom and dad walking her down an aisle—and embarrassing to boot.

They drove, and the roads that were relatively empty that morning had by now begun to fill. They rounded a bend to cross back over the Potomac River, and a phalanx of cars descended from Maryland on the other side, as if to meet them for battle on the bridge.

“You doing all right?” Abe asked her. “Your mom’s worried.”

“Oh.” She sank into her seat. “Yeah, I’m fine. You know, considering.”

“Everything okay with Kyle?”

She sighed, nearly exasperated, as though he’d been pestering her about it all day. “Honestly, Dad, I don’t know.”

He nodded. “That has to be tough,” he said, making her feel a tiny bit ashamed. “I like him. Assuming you do.”

She tried a more contemplative approach. “I just don’t know if I see myself with him. That’s all.”

He took a deep, audible breath, his chest inflating. Even sideways, she saw it. “Well, if you can’t see yourself with him now, don’t marry him,” he said. He struck the wheel with the heel of his hand, suddenly fired up. “Because it’s only going to get harder. You have to at least
start off
in the same place.”

His words stung, like an accusation. “I don’t know, Dad,” she said bitterly. “People change. Maybe I ought to marry someone I hate, so I can grow to love him. Since you’re apparently obsessed with me getting married.”

“That’s not fair. I didn’t say that.”

She puffed at a stray strand of hair. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, you asked.”

“No,
you
did. I just told you my reservations.”

“Well, maybe you don’t want my advice. But here it is.” They were merging off the highway now. “I told you my imagination has limits, right? Well, that’s no good. You have to be able to imagine yourself changing with a person. You have to be able to see that. Because that’s what it’s mostly about.”

His tone was serious. She felt she was being given an assignment, that she’d be letting him down if she didn’t turn in a good draft. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine, tried to build a little fantasy for herself and Kyle. She felt his hand on hers in a cab, the smell of him in her nose. It smelled like air, not like anything special. She tried again, thinking of his armpit, the back of his neck between his shoulder blades, the curving small of his back: all the familiar nooks and shelves of him where she most liked to rest. Suddenly, she felt the absence of his body quite strongly, as though he’d been a battleship
in her harbor, too massive to get beyond. Now that he was gone, she had the entire ocean. She was virtually floating in all this new space.

She might see him again a few times in New York, to give him back his things: the undershirts and razor that had lived in her apartment. They might reunite for a brief stint, months later, after crossing paths running in Central Park. They might meet up for a casual dinner and drink too much wine while they talked, falling into bed and, for a time, a familiar domestic pattern of bagels and the newspaper, a regular date to weddings, and his razor once again tucked away in the cabinet over her sink. But however it panned out, they wouldn’t last. He had made her world safer and prettier, but he’d also flattened it, made it too simple and therefore less real. It was easy to recognize this now without him there to distract her. Painfully easy. She realized he’d already done the hardest thing: he’d left.

A
BE DROPPED
E
LIZABETH
back at the house, claiming a sudden errand, then backed down the driveway into traffic. She looked at him quizzically from the door, her neck long, her hair scorching, in so many ways just like her mother. He circled the neighborhood once, then gave up and came inside.

He found Cassandra on the sunporch, under the ceiling fan, with netted glass fishing floats nailed in chains of three to the walls, totems of Howard’s ancestry. Abe had always liked Howard, who shook his hand firmly and clapped him on the back whenever they met. He’d made him feel like one of the men—the dependable guys who lifted heavy things and sweated down the centers of their chests. He’d never minded when his father-in-law conscripted him for some task. Even in his forties, he was flattered. His own father, William, was a first-generation law school graduate, a justice seeker in glasses who taught his son to read. Abe was only ten when an armored truck spun into his parents’ car on a rainy highway outside Philadelphia, but he and his father would never have retiled a roof together, even if William had lived.

Cassandra was sitting with her back to him, a glass of iced tea on the floor beside her, condensation shimmering at its base. She didn’t appear to hear him coming, which made him pause, as though the universe were giving him one last chance to disappear from her life forever. Looking at the back of her neck, he considered it.

In their house in Berkeley, he’d often checked in on her in the hours after Elizabeth’s bedtime, the sound of her wheel spinning too loud for her to hear his weight on the attic steps. He’d loved watching the back of her neck bend down over her work, much as it was doing now, like the stalk of a fibrous plant. In those moments, he’d regretted that she no longer had the opportunity to watch him work—and hadn’t for years, since she’d quit the clinic and begun working independently as an artist, devoting herself to her clay. He’d felt that in those glimpses of her private labors—her time spent becoming something, and making something of herself—he was only growing to love her more, while she—who could not witness
him
become, and make something of
him
self—was every day unwittingly risking the possibility of loving him less.

But could he really have been so prophetic? Or was it only in hindsight that explanations came forth, too late to have done any good? As a doctor, it had never been easy for him to say for sure which things he had always known, and which he’d only just learned. Not because he was dishonest, or had anything to hide. It was just the way his mind worked. Knowledge came to him regularly like food, sustaining him in an endless succession of meals that he had, in a sense, been eating all his life.

Suddenly, she became aware of him and swiveled her head around. Her eyes flashed like a living statue’s over the rattan back of her chair.

“Taking off?” she asked him.

“Eight o’clock flight.”

She smiled inscrutably and tilted her head and there went his chance to elude her. “All right,” she said. “If I don’t say this now, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”

“So say it.” He felt his neck clench in weird anticipation. The red, blue, and green buoys seemed to bob in closer to hear.

“I have to know why you left. Why you just—never came back.” Her eyes widened, as though she were a surprise to herself. “Is that silly? Is that a ridiculous question to ask?”

She was so forthright that he didn’t even miss a beat. “Because I didn’t want to deal with the pain,” he said. “It’s not a silly question. Why were you unfaithful?”

“Mmm, yes, why was I?” She kicked her leg up over the arm of the chair and seemed to genuinely consider the question. “I have never had a good answer for this. I guess I just wanted to. And I truly didn’t believe I could hurt you.”

“Please.” The word cut through the air with a ferocity he hadn’t thought he still had in him. But here it was again, that charge of aggression, a primal sort of intelligence. It felt nice. “You didn’t care. For God’s sake, will you admit to that at least? You never wanted it to work out.”

Of course he was right. If she had cared, really cared, they might have ended up in helpful therapy sessions, where they obviously belonged. But there was something too delicious about not caring, about being reckless with the one thing she ought to have cared about most of all—her own life. She had never admitted it to anyone, not even to the therapist she finally started seeing after the divorce, but the moment when he swam away from her was the most exhilarating moment of her life.
Finally,
she had thought, so privately that she wasn’t sure her mind had even grasped its own meaning.
Finally, something has happened.

“You changed,” he said. He gave a bitter, giddy laugh, as though it had exhilarated him as well. “You weren’t the person I thought you were.”

“I’d say you changed. You were the one who left.”

Abe flinched, suppressing whatever he was going to say next. He was choosing his words carefully. “I couldn’t look at you after what
you did,” he said at last. “All of a sudden on that boat, I couldn’t even bear to see your face.”

She understood what he meant. By the end of their marriage she’d found it difficult to look at him, too. But what he had discovered in an instant, she’d been learning over the course of several years. How you could keep looking at a person when, like some bewitched, befuddled Darrin, he’d been recast so many times? How could she look—Abe didn’t even have the same face! Not really. It was bloodless and papery with non-emotion, a surgical mask good for nothing but work and sleep.
Her
Abe had been a young medical student with a healthy face to kiss. He’d run through the rain in North Beach to offer her the only shelter he had: a whole universe in that darkly glowing umbrella. He’d have done anything for her. The man she set sail with that final day did most things in life for himself.

His bloodless chin quivered with the stirring of a long-suppressed feeling, and this was perhaps even worse. “I used to love you so much,” he said.

“Don’t,” she said, embarrassed. “I’ll only disappoint you again.”

Far off in another room of her parents’ house, a clock chimed two. In six hours, Abe would be taking off. They used to eat dinner at eight. In later years he spent the hour reading
Alice in Wonderland
and tucking Elizabeth into her bed. They’d seen plays and movies at eight, fallen asleep jet-lagged in East Coast conference hotels, and taken turns waiting for the other to come home from work. These past eights ran together like scenes on a moving diorama, every one of them as real as the approaching one. This eight was yet another they’d spend apart, though perhaps in some way together, each wondering in violet light just where the day had gone.

She shouldn’t have put it like that, in terms of disappointment, even if that was what it was. Thankfully, he was still standing there, waiting for her to go on. “Will you call me later?” she asked. “Back home.”

“Do you want me to?”

The diorama moved in only one direction. It advanced, leaving
old versions of themselves behind. But they were still there on the scroll, just spooled up tight, out of view. She and Abe had made a child together. They’d advanced the scroll, which was probably all the permanence she could ask. On balance, it was more than fair, and anyway, at this point, it wasn’t really permanence she sought, but rather the worldlier, more realistic pace of occasionally, of sometimes, of often. A walk through a park side by side. Here and there a play or a movie and then a drink. A conversation that picks up and drops off and then picks up again, no problem. Forgiveness, really. That was what she wanted. For herself, for him.