The Violet Hour: A Novel (43 page)

“Hey, no better time to walk away than when we’re still having fun. We ran a perfect course. No bad aftertaste, no regrets.”

His relentless cheer was no surprise, but his failure to protest was. “Jeez, I’ll miss you, too,” she said, realizing she’d been expecting—even wishing—he’d try to talk her into carrying on.

He laughed. “Are you kidding?” He sprang from the bed and enveloped her with his body. She held her left hand slightly away from him, relieved she was still naked, too. “Look,” he said, pulling back to see her face. “I knew this day would come. What can I do?”

“You’ll miss me?” She was being pathetic, but at least she knew it.

“Hell, yeah. I’m gonna be stroking it to you for a long time. I’ll miss you like crazy.”

He
was
peculiar: his intimacy so casual and uncomplicated, his amorality so oddly kindhearted. She inhaled, soaking up his musk and
as much of his adulation as she could bear. Any more and she might have been in love. She was dangerously close as it was. “You’ll find someone else,” she finally managed to say. “Someone barely legal.”

“True. And you’ve got your someone else already.”

She wished he hadn’t said it, but she couldn’t hold it against him. Her real life wasn’t the secret.

They buttoned their shirts on opposite ends of the room, surrounded by carnival-striped wallpaper and fleur-de-lis throw pillows they themselves had thrown to the floor. There was a question that had dogged her since that first afternoon in his office—or really, if she was being honest with herself, since he first called her up in her studio. Only fear had kept the question unasked, boxed up in the back of her mind. But what the hell, she thought.

“I have to know. Did you ask me for a piece because you wanted to sleep with me?”

He puffed out his lower lip, reminding her, not for the first time, of the wealthy students she used to teach. “Ignoring the awesome double meaning of that question, no. I wanted to sleep with you because of your piece.
And
your piece.”

She still couldn’t quite believe him, but she’d been wrong about him in so many ways that at this point, it was probably best to finally take him at his word.

“Just don’t be a stranger,” he said. Her hand was already on the door handle as he pulled on his boots at the desk. “There’s nothing I hate more than burning a good-looking bridge.” She envisioned the next time she’d see him in public, amid a crush of well-dressed, track-lit bodies holding wine at some occasion. There’d be a broad smile and a friendly word, perhaps a European kiss on the cheek. He tilted his head now, awaiting her assent. In that throne of an armchair, with the herbal sky steeping behind him, he looked every inch the lucky conqueror, the heir to a decadent continent he would rule for decades to come. In another life, she might’ve ruled with him, and it might’ve been a good life, too. She was sorry to go, but she pulled herself together and pulled the door tight behind her.

A
FAITHFUL WOMAN AGAIN
, Cassandra focused her energies on being a supportive partner to Abe. She did every extra errand she could think of, relieving him of any responsibility around the house. She went out of her way to seduce him, wearing cleavage-bearing shirts, sidling up behind him at the mail table, where he stood, contemplating winches and life jackets in glossy sailing-gear catalogs. She licked him behind the ear and went down on him unbidden, and told him she’d do whatever he asked. He responded to this with great enthusiasm, his eyes sparking, his breath heavy. He grinned at her mid-thrust, almost boyishly, as though he couldn’t believe his good luck. Yet somehow, for all that, he seemed less real to her than ever. When she rode him, she felt detached, as though she’d somehow divided in two, and all the cells that were capable of sensation had gone off with her other self. She had to rely on fantasy, or fantasy-memory. Young Abe lifting her onto the desk at the clinic where they met, a chorus of ailing immigrants watching curiously. Vince turning her inside out in the middle of the gallery floor. Only then could she muster the intensity to come. Try as she might to look forward, her past stayed with her. The Abe she married hovered alongside Vince like an ex, each of them suggesting an alternate life, a life without her current husband. She’d broken it off with Vince, but she hadn’t walked away unchanged.

In April, Elizabeth got into Harvard. She had rushed home from school to find the large white-and-crimson packet waiting for her behind the door, calling Cassandra shrieking before she’d even read the cover letter in full. Ferdinand was barking in the background and Cassandra had to hold the studio phone away from her ear to make out what Elizabeth was saying. It was the most excited she’d heard her daughter sound in a long time, and Cassandra grasped only then how badly Elizabeth had wanted to go.

They celebrated as a family with repeated dinners out—Harvard was their excuse for sushi, then for pizza, then for fancy meals in San Francisco. Less than a month later, Abe had signed the papers on
the sailboat, a year-old sloop he bought secondhand from a venture capitalist who was relocating to Vail. Abe spent his first few weeks of ownership washing it, purging it of all traces of its original name and having its new name emblazoned on the transom:
Cassandra,
in a slanted purple hand she wouldn’t have expected him to choose.

When she saw it, she wanted to cry. “Oh, baby,” she said, slipping her arm through his on the dock. “You didn’t have to name it after me.”

“No other name would do.” He had driven her out to the marina to see it in what he believed were the best conditions, in the pale yellow of early morning, under the meshy veil of fog. “This is the start of something new for us,” he said. “Empty nesters on a boat.”

“I almost can’t believe it,” she said, thinking of Elizabeth, still tangled in her covers at home, not likely to stir much before eleven. She would graduate in June.

They stood watching the boat dip back and forth on the current, its body groaning against the dock whenever it was nudged too close. The water beyond was all but hidden by the fog, though they could feel it dissipating, even then, through the tiniest of perforations.

“You’ve been happier,” he said toward the water they couldn’t see.

She pulled her cable-knit cardigan more tightly around her body, looking where he looked, and leaned into him, not fully comprehending. “When?”

“No, you have,” he insisted. “Ever since that Oakland show.”

“Oh. Well. It was a big moment for me.”

“And you deserved it. I just wish you could get that feeling from sculpting alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you made the work. Even if no one ever praised or bought it, you made it. You make art every day and that’s what should matter. It’s all that’s ever mattered to me.”

She pursed her lips as the urge to cry returned. How could she tell him it wasn’t enough just to make it? She knew what a fine thing he thought that was—maybe the finest in the world. He wouldn’t
understand how insignificant it made her feel. She imagined explaining it in terms of medicine. Could a person legitimately and happily be a doctor without ever having helped a patient? Of course not; it was a ludicrous idea. You had to confirm your talents. You had to have success. Though it wasn’t a perfect parallel. She knew he’d have something to say to that. He had something to say to everything when he was arguing her into happiness.

“I’ve got some champagne in there,” he said now. “Two bottles, actually. One for the christening, and one good one for us.”

She watched a shadowy form come into focus through the fog screen. There was a plaintive horn and then a peal of wings as several white gulls flapped into sight from above. Farther on, down low against the increasingly visible surface of the water, a blazing red prow advanced into view. A lone tugboat, making its passage up the bay to escort tankers in and out of busy harbors. She thought of Vince’s buoyancy, his comfort in a crowd, and wondered, with a pang of regret, if she was truly done with him.

“Come on, Cass. What do you say?”

“Do you think we’ll have time? Elizabeth’s going to wake up eventually.”

“Which is why we left her a note. Come on.”

Abe stepped aboard and helped her after him, directing her to sit in the stern while he ducked into the kitchen for the pair of plastic flutes and the two bottles he’d stashed in the refrigerator. “You’re supposed to do this in front of everyone you know,” he said when he emerged. “But I say screw it. This is about the two of us.”

With an uncharacteristically exuberant yelp, he fired the cork of the first bottle into the water. She looked around to see if his outburst had alarmed anyone, but there was no one in sight but an older man in nautical stripes, walking away from them on the dock.

“We’re not actually taking it out, are we?” she asked him when she turned back. “You would’ve warned me if we were going to do that.”

Abe shook his head and handed her a flute and a folded slip of
paper. “These are your lines,” he said, growing more animated with each instruction. “Now, I’ll give the three toasts and after each one, we’ll say these choruses together in unison. In this order here. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Now, raise your glass.” She complied, no longer able to resist his infectious energy.

He stood by the mast and began to speak in his best showman voice. “
Hear hear! For thousands of years, we have gone to sea. We have crafted vessels to carry us and we have called them by name. These ships care for us through perilous waters, and so we affectionately call them ‘she.’ To them we toast, and ask to celebrate
Cassandra.” He paused to give her the cue.

It had startled her at first, hearing him hurl her name to the sky. She had to remind herself that she wasn’t being scolded, or mocked, or called upon to speak before a crowd. It was just the two of them there with their future, aboard the vessel he’d wanted the most. The vessel she’d finally been able to give him.

“TO THE SAILORS OF OLD . . . TO
CASSANDRA
!” she cried along with him. They clinked their plastics and drank, the breakfast bubbles tickling her nose.

“
The moods of the sea are many,
” he went on, “
from tranquil to playful to violent. We ask that this ship be given the strength to carry on. May her keel be strong against the hazards of the sea.
”

“TO THE SAILORS OF OLD . . . TO THE SEA!”

“
Today we come to name this lady
Cassandra.
We send her to sea to be cared for, and to care for the Green family aboard. We ask the sailors of old and the god of the sea to accept
Cassandra
as her name, to help her through her passages, and to allow her to return safely to this shore with her crew.
”

“TO THE SEA . . . TO THE SAILORS BEFORE US . . . TO
CASSANDRA
!”

Sipping once more and feeling the rush of alcohol in her chest, she was grateful to have had her morning grapefruit. She opened her ears to the sound of her name, which still knocked about in her head.
The more it had been repeated, the more comforting it had come to sound and the more genuine her wish for safe passage and protection—for herself, yes, but also for all of them, for the whole Green family aboard.

Abe refilled their glasses and then opened the second, cheaper bottle, which he poured out in doses around the perimeter of the vessel, chanting nonsense syllables as he went. She sipped again, watching him through the curved plastic of her flute, his steady, contained body rippling and doubling like a swimmer’s, somersaulting through a current in the sea.

They’d be back here again all summer. She would have to prepare herself for that. She’d discovered, in her life, that she had to prepare herself for many things to which others gave no second thought. Doctor’s appointments and all the questions she needed to ask. The packing required for simple overnight trips. Not to mention pregnancy and parenthood: the body that had formed inside her, the stranger she had somehow made.

Even marriage had become a preparation. She was only twenty-two when she’d met Abe. Back then, she’d had no problem plunging right into things. It was only now that she’d known him so long that she had to prepare herself, each day, to be his wife.

He stood at the opposite end of the boat. The morning fog had all but parted, leaving a sandy blue sky washed with a thin, bumpy layer of cloud. A low-tide sky, from which it could sometimes be difficult to tell if it was early morning or late afternoon. Beneath it, he seemed like the tide himself, retreating somewhere alone, leaving her an uncertain beach, strewn with cryptic shells and exposed, wondering who she was without him. Perhaps he’d always been this way; perhaps she was the one who’d changed. She stretched her legs and tried to take comfort in the tides: the low waters, the medium waters, the high waters. The eventual inevitable return.

I
t was nearly dark when Abe’s flight took off, and it would be fully dark by the time he landed in San Francisco. Even so, he would come out ahead, something he’d always loved about returning home from the east. Three extra hours. He clicked himself into his seat and looked down the aisle toward the cockpit, where the crew was busying itself with controls. A book on Thomas Jefferson sat open in his lap. He was still a little wired from the week, but he intended to make good use of his time.

He put the book aside on takeoff, and once they were airborne and climbing, he leaned over the shoulder of the woman next to him to look out the window. They tilted over green Virginia countryside scattered with blocky shopping centers, gray cul-de-sacs and highway cloverleafs, and thousands of roving, insectile cars trundling along to their hives. The land rose and fell beneath a gathering breath of cloud, and soon they were clear above the world, every bit of it out of view while they sat suspended on a shelf of sturdy, well-worn white, the sun setting for hours straight ahead.

His seatmate, who’d been watching the ascent as well, turned to him now and smiled. “Do you want to switch?” she asked him.