The Violet Hour: A Novel (42 page)

“Yes,” she said. “Get us dope.” She began to unbuckle his belt and pants, dragging the tips of her fingers across the familiar plain of skin underneath.

He didn’t resist, but he didn’t press into her either. “
I’m sooooo tired
—”

“Tired?” she said, coyly, as his pants fell to the floor.

He sighed and hugged her tightly to him, forcing her to slide her hands out from between them and wrap them around his unfettered waist. “I am,” he confessed. “I’m exhausted.” He cradled her head into his neck and kissed her through her hair, while she waited, in that little burrow he’d made for her, for whatever he planned to do next. They swayed there like that to the White Album, longer than she expected, and gradually, gently, she felt his arms hang down on her more heavily, and more heavily still, until she began to feel her lower back tighten and buckle under the transference of his weight.

“Abe!” she cried, shaking him awake.

He jerked upright, unfazed, his arms twitching but not letting her go. “Because,” he said, answering a question she hadn’t asked. “They wouldn’t take the bait.”

T
HE PIECE WOULD
get its own recess on the main floor, behind an installation of giant pikes sticking straight out from a wall.

“I don’t know,” she said when Vincent showed her the arrangement. “Doesn’t it break the flow to have this one here? You have to walk all the way around it,” she said, demonstrating.

“Sure, it’s unsettling. But then you have this awesome reward!” he said, extending his arm toward her piece, which was on an easel in the middle of the room. She had done the tree in muted, earthy colors that made it look rather real under soft light, then used a series of glitter paints she hadn’t worked with much before to highlight a few of the branches and long streaks of the woman’s hair and legs. She’d been at it all week, feverishly, positively diseased with productivity, racked with ideas and coughing them up because she just had to get them out of her body. Twice she slept in her studio, away from Abe and Elizabeth, though neither time for long. There wasn’t much use in even trying to rest when her brain was infected like that. She yawned now, more at the thought of sleep than out of need. The whole thing had come together so well that somehow, she wasn’t even tired.

Vincent stood back in his jeans and fisherman’s sweater to bite his nails over the meaning of the piece. “It’s just so fucking good,” he finally pronounced, the way another man his age might’ve appraised a batter’s swing. “Because petrified wood really does sparkle.” He stabbed his finger through the air along the trunk. “The chase story is right there on her face, asking for a million different reactions. And in the end, it’s just about the interplay of light in the natural world. You’re doing a little Canova, a little Klimt, a little Koons. It’s got it all. I knew I couldn’t go wrong with you.”

“I’m flattered,” Cassandra said. She had feared it was a little too Klimt, but was secretly hoping people would choose to like the connection instead of sneer at it. She liked it. Though she didn’t quite see the Koons. “You know, it’s unlike anything else I’ve ever done. I don’t know how you knew I had it in me.”

He looked at her fiercely. “I would’ve taken
The Reaching Man
—
seriously!—if you could’ve pried it away from the esquires. But this one is just lights out. Words cannot express.” His pants beeped. “Damn, I’ve got a call,” he said, looking at his phone. He was already scuttling toward the office, pointing a long, Neanderthalish index finger back in her direction. “But I’ll be seeing you next week. Don’t you dare miss it.
This
opening is gonna take it to the house.”

He was her patron, so she tried not to hate his insouciance. It was an art he’d cultivated. She could see that. Cool was his business—most of it at least—and she supposed she ought to appreciate that he didn’t condescend to her by affecting some kind of formal voice he only used with grown-ups. She’d just have to take it as a sign of his integrity that he always was who he was. Even if who he was was somewhat noxious and fake.

T
HE OPENING WAS
the first week of December. She wore a simple black dress with a long, clinking necklace of red, orange, and deep pink glass. Abe and Elizabeth humored her the entire night, Elizabeth in one of Cassandra’s old patterned minidresses because, at the last minute, none of her own clothes seemed cool enough for a gallery. She wore the dress happily with tights, whispering from time to time with a waiter in the corner. It appeared as though she knew him, though Cassandra was fairly certain she did not. There were cocktails and tiny sandwiches in addition to the wine and cheese, and throughout the evening, various mouthfuls passed by them on sticks. When Vincent Hersh, dressed this time in pinstripes and purple, took the floor to thank the sponsors and artists, he extended a long, flamboyant arm in Cassandra’s direction, identifying her piece as a particular standout—or, in his phrase, “an absolute trip.” Though her ears warmed and clogged at the sound of her own name, and Abe’s arm around her waist and Elizabeth’s hand upon her arm were just about all she was capable of sensing, she swore she felt the volume of the room rise ever so slightly, as a few hundred pairs of hands clapped a little louder and a few hundred heads turned to smile in agreement
with the compliment the ring master had paid. The piece, which she called
Metamorphosis,
sold that very night.

A
FEW DAYS
after the opening, she dropped by the gallery at lunch to pick up a duplicate book of prints Vincent wanted her to have. “What am I gonna do with two?” he said, having called, once again, on her studio line. “You gotta take it. It’s full of stuff with trees. Your name all over it.”

He said he’d leave it for her in the office, that one of his assistants would let her in since he was likely to be out. But when she arrived, he was there alone, flipping through slides at his desk, his shoes kicked off in the corner, revealing a surprisingly dowdy pair of woolen socks. “Always gotta be cooking up the next one,” he said. He sounded almost sheepish. They chatted for a few minutes about the opening.

“Elizabeth, right? Your daughter?”

“She’s seventeen. Don’t get any ideas,” she said with mock ferocity, still imagining that he was gay.

He held up his freakishly long hands. “Roger that. She your only?”

“My one and only, poor thing. No one else to share the burden of having me for a mom.”

“So sayeth the awesome mom. I see through you. You must’ve been young.”

“Ha! Not that young. What do you take me for?”

He said nothing to this, his eyes drifting back to his open binder, his minuscule attention span having apparently run out.

She couldn’t help feeling awkward, standing there with her free conference tote bag. “Well, I guess I’ll be heading out, then,” she said. “The book?”

“On the table.”

She turned to where he was pointing and picked up the square white oversize volume. It was the work of a Danish painter and printmaker and it was filled with images of forests that gave the illusion of
three dimensions. They were technically proficient but probably not anything special.

“I guess it’s my own fault you associate me with trees,” she said. “Though it’s funny, because I’ve never thought of myself as much of a nature person.”

Once again he said nothing, so she continued to contemplate the image before her, a dark oblong lake ringed with tall, uneven grass, entrancing perhaps in the right light, over the bed in someone’s Palisades home.

He came up behind her so quickly that she couldn’t even drop the book, needing its sturdiness to cling to as his hand bypassed two shirts and a bra to her breast. The other hand came close behind and they stood there that way a moment, Cassandra holding the book down over her thighs, Vincent holding her upright against him by the breasts, breathing deep breaths in tandem like skydivers preparing themselves to fall.

Then she was facing him and he was inside her, flinging her open, the rest of him stretched naked as far as she could see, his body large and lean but undefined, like an abstract figure of a man. Even when his head disappeared between her legs, he loomed, consuming her. “Please!” she cried, when she came again this way, the only word either of them had spoken.

T
HE FIRST TIME
, then, was not her fault. He’d come on to her strong, and in a moment of surprise and weakness and, you could argue, powerlessness, she’d let herself get carried away. The same could not be said for the second time, or the third, which was just before Christmas, or any of the times after she stopped counting because the actual number was too humiliating to know.

There was no romance at least, just sex—two bodies working out their frustrations against each other, like a pair of competitive tennis partners meeting up for a game at the club. He continued to talk at her in his dude voice, sometimes of business, sometimes of the stray
thoughts that seemed to scroll through his mind like items on a cable news ticker. “One lady at a time,” he’d said when, after their second tryst, she asked him if he slept with all his artists. “More than that and shit gets messy.” He was careful with himself, socially, retaining control in his many interactions, always the one to walk away or end the call, so she was tempted to believe him. Even so, she brought a condom the third time, an act of premeditation that sealed her betrayal, though in her foolish heart, she’d convinced herself that she was bringing it to protect Abe.

Vince, as he now insisted she call him, turned out to be the passionate sort of man she might’ve expected to want her at twenty-two. Why he’d chosen her now remained a mystery. He was charismatic, of an age and position at which he should’ve been dating squeaky models and jewel-encrusted socialites barely old enough to drink. She was, she soon discovered from his driver’s license, a full fourteen years his senior. Yet in the heat of sex, she never doubted him. He was ravenous for her, unfailingly generous, and eager to show off the pleasure she gave him. A maker of bodies, she didn’t find his terribly beautiful. It was exaggerated and, like his face and hair, vaguely comic: his bones large, his flesh lean, so that without the cover of his crisp modern fashions, he resembled an earlier species of man, the hairy kind that hunted with spears and crouched around fire pits in caves. But he also had the energy of a caveman, never less ardent than he’d been the first time, with the strength and cunning to hold her looser, older body at many ecstatic angles when they fucked. It was this, above all, that kept her coming back—to his office, to a glamorously kitschy hotel room he often arranged in downtown Oakland, where they made good use of the mirrors she now understood were meant for sex—once or twice a week throughout the winter.

It wasn’t until the third time, the time she brought the condom, that she realized she’d been here before.
Never,
Abe had said.
Never never again
. She was tugging her underwear back on in Vince’s office when the memory hit her. That had been ages ago. She’d been another person then, or so she thought. She’d forgotten she was capable of this,
forgotten she needed to be on guard. Yet here she was, carrying on an affair. Another one. Apparently, she was a person who carried on affairs. If only she’d remembered, she might’ve seen the whole thing coming.

“What?” Vince asked when he saw her face. He was still completely naked, sacked out across a Barcelona chair.

“This is so bad” was all she could manage.

“Don’t think of it that way.”

“But I made a promise.”

His eyes drooped. He looked genuinely mournful. “Shit. I know. I’m sorry.”

She rushed from his office to the grocery store and filled a basket with Abe’s favorite things. Christmas carols shoveled her down the aisles and she felt a bunched-up sensation between her legs, as though she’d put herself back together too hastily, and not everything had settled into place. At the end of one aisle was a giant holiday-themed cathedral of Hershey Bars and Hershey cocoa powder. She stopped before it, wanting it. The very word, so like his name, licked her all over with warmth.

Why? she wondered. Why was her body responding like this? She supposed it had something to do with loving herself, either too much or not quite enough, but the distinction there was too frightening to explore. After so many years of partnership and motherhood, could she really be this self-involved? She hurried to the checkout lane and drove home under an invisible sunset, shrouded by the thick winter sky.

She knew it was perverse that she grew to admire Abe more during that time. She’d been irritated with him before Vince appeared, but now she could find no fault. He was devoted to his patients. He was well-read and wise. He would certainly never cheat. They made conjugal love every other week or so, and each time, she followed his lead, striving to be the exact woman she thought he loved. She quickly gave in on the boat.

Rainy winter became rainy spring, and though she continued
to look forward to her afternoons with Vince, she began to tire of putting on her clothes again when they were done. Everything had stretched in the rush to undress, and she went back to her studio feeling balloony and unaligned, a constant warning of the physical evidence against her. The days had lengthened, too. Now, when she left him, a sturdy, elastic light looked on. It had gone on long enough. Any longer and she was asking to get caught.

“I think this has to be the last time,” she told Vince one hotel date in March, after he’d overwhelmed her so totally that his scent—an even but heady herbal cologne—seemed to have carried beyond the walls, rendering the sky through their bay-view window a felted and streaky sage.

He sat up on his sturdy elbows, spread naked on the wine-red coverlet like a game hunter’s shaggy bear rug. He nodded studiously. “Sure, yeah, I can see why you’d say that.”

She slipped her wedding and engagement rings back on, as she always did once she sensed their encounter was complete. She hated taking them off, but hated even more the idea of them pressing into his skin, fearing they might somehow pick up his scent. “You don’t mind?”