Solsbury Hill A Novel (2 page)

Violet, whose bones were beautiful but who’d grown too thin, liked giving elegant dinner parties so she could watch her food eaten, so she could dress in tiny, sleeveless, backless dresses that displayed the pale scars of cuts along her forearms. It was hard to take your eyes off her when she walked through the room: she was crystalline, sparkled like a clear glass lightbulb. Eleanor could only take small doses of Violet these days. She enjoyed the beluga in soft eggs, also the chilled, modern blend of Pinot noir and Riesling, but it was always good to leave and get home.

Eleanor’s apartment was six floors up a tight stairwell. Wet from walking in the pouring rain, they tumbled up and kissed at every landing.

“It’s great not being your buddy anymore,” he said.

She took his hand and led him around the last curve, up the last step, fumbled for her ring of keys, and let them in.

“So you’re not my buddy?” She unbuttoned the first two buttons of his soaked black cotton shirt. Unbuckled his silver belt buckle and dropped his pants. “Say you’re still my buddy, honey, sweet Miles.”

Miles stepped out of his pants, and Eleanor led him into the kitchen, where she opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of champagne. She popped it open and poured two
flutes. Held his eyes, took a deep breath, and stopped time for a moment.

“Ah, your amazing day.”

She clicked her glass against his. “Barneys bought the collection.” She raised her glass above her head as Miles whooped, howled, picked her up off her feet, and spun her around. “My wunderkind!” he said.

“To you, to me, to us!” She was bubbling over.

He kissed her and his hand slipped up the back of her shirt. He tipped his glass for her to sip and then he took a sip and then he walked her backward and lowered her onto the bed without losing contact, without for a moment letting his eyes slip from hers. He didn’t let her feel the floor but kept her body lifted toward him.

She remembered when she’d fallen from a low limb of the tree in her back garden, a week after her mother had died. She had climbed the tree to get away from the visitors inside the house, and she remembered feeling high and separate from her sadness up there, and then climbing down she slipped on a low branch and somehow Miles had been there to catch her before she hit the bricks below. Now, in the ceiling overhead she saw the face of the boy Miles had been. She looked into his eyes, into this face so familiar.

In the morning, they lay in bed with the blinds cracked enough to watch the rain that had resumed, a wind
so loud they heard it through the window, a rare hurricane warning for New York City. Miles smoked his cigarette at last. Eleanor didn’t mind. She had quit smoking when she was eighteen but loved the smell of it, loved the taste of it on his tongue. She inhaled what he exhaled and it made her woozy, loved it after they’d made love, loved it like she loved licking frosting off cupcakes, eating olives from martinis.

She climbed out of bed. “I’m gonna shower.” She closed the door then opened it again. “I’ve got to sleep alone here tonight, right?” she said. He was going out with guys from work.

“Yeah, is that all right still?”

“Of course.” She closed the door.

The water poured over her body and she squeezed some almond scrub onto a glove to scrape a crust of city dirt, sweat, and sex off her skin. When she shut off the water and pushed the curtain open, the small fan in front of the open window blew a chill across her nakedness. She heard the linen closet open and imagined Miles changing the sweaty sheets, snapping the fresh top sheet till it floated to rest. She wondered if he’d be able to stay for the day or whether he’d hurry away to get some work done at home.

She felt strange and she couldn’t shake it. Everything seemed odd and she didn’t know why, but this happened sometimes. There were days when she didn’t trust what she saw and couldn’t fathom how she felt, but the simplest thing to do, she’d found, was to assume that all was fine.

The bedsprings creaked in the other room. With vigor, she rubbed her hair till it was almost dry, rubbed her scalp and then her face with a rough hemp towel, then ran a thick comb through her hair.

Miles came in and moved the fan to pull the window shut. “You smell so good.” His nose in her neck. “What is that? It’s new,” he said.

“Lavender,” she said.

He shook his head.

“Almond.”

Shook his head again.

“Karma.” A sticky balm of flowers and herbs.

“Ridiculous good,” he said.

Wind rattled the windows and the sky let loose an annihilating downpour. It drew them to the window to look up, to look out.

“Jeez,” he said, watching the storm crash down. “I guess I’m staying.” He smiled.

“You might have to.” Eleanor pulled on her blue kimono but didn’t tie it shut. “I’ve got bear claws in the freezer.”

It wasn’t plain blue, the kimono. There were ivory cream branches and vines with leaves and flowers, all on slippery silk that skimmed her body. Her skin was pale in the winter, almost blue, but in the summer turned to the color of caramel. Eleanor licked the stickiness of bear claw from her
fingers, then from his. Her kimono, draped carelessly, exposed part of her breast, her hip. “I feel kind of weird,” she said.

“How weird?”

“Not very.” She smiled mischievously and sipped the yerba maté she loved. Miles found it too sweet.

“I mean, weird, how?” he asked.

“Don’t know. Uneasy.” She looked outside and thought a bit. “It’s the weather, maybe.”

He kissed the mole on the inside slope of her right breast. Her mother had the same mole. When she was small her father had called it a beauty mark, told her it was a sign of a destined and great love, winked at her as if to let her in on a secret.

Miles licked the scar on her arm that looked like a souvenir from a knife fight but really came from a cookie sheet coming out of the oven, then he scooted down to kiss the circular scar where the engine of a motorcycle had burned the inside of her right calf in high school.

Even though Miles’ place was uptown and grander, an apartment his parents had kept in the city since she could remember, they liked to stay at her place. She could count on one hand the times they’d been at his place. All day they stayed in. They wandered about half-dressed, listened to music, sat side by side and read the papers to each other. Miles ordered Thai food as Eleanor went through pictures of a red-haired beauty modeling Eleanor’s sweaters on street corners all over Manhattan. They curled into each other on
her deep couch and ate tom kha soup and red devil noodles. Suddenly, he stepped out of the bedroom in a smart-looking jacket and tie.

“I forgot you were going,” she said, feeling disheveled.

“Wish I didn’t have to. You okay?”

“Go.” She extended her leg, touched his thigh with her toe. “It’s okay, go.”

“I’ll be running in the morning, if the storm lets up.”

“I know.”

He turned from the door and leaned over the couch to kiss her. She dropped her head back and took his face in her hands. “See you,” she said.

When the door closed behind him, the strange feeling swept through her again.

She had just pulled a pint of mocha chip ice cream from the freezer when the princess phone rang. It startled her. Her home phone almost never rang and she had no idea who’d be calling. The sweet blue vintage phone didn’t identify the caller.

“Hello?” Eleanor’s tone was uncertain.

“May I speak to Eleanor Abbott, please?” An Englishwoman’s voice.

“This is she.”

“Eleanor, this is Gwen, Gwendolyn Angle. I
am
glad to have reached you. You probably don’t remember me, but I’m a friend of your aunt Alice and, well, I have rather bad news, I’m afraid.”

Eleanor hardly knew Aunt Alice, who sent her birthday
and holiday cards and recently, on her twenty-seventh birthday, a ring: a striking jet cameo, which Eleanor always wore.

“She’s quite ill, and she asked me to call you.”

“I had no idea . . .”

“No, no, you wouldn’t have. It’s been recent and terribly sudden.”

Eleanor had written a thank-you note on a beautiful card, but she hadn’t given it another thought. She remembered meeting Alice only once. Eleanor dragged herself back to the quiet voice from far away.

“. . . Alice would be so pleased if you could come. The doctor thinks she won’t be with us for long, and, well, I have the sense she’s in some way almost desperate for you to come.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I hate to impose, my dear. I know you must be busy.”

“No, not at all.” Hesitant. “I mean, I could come . . .”

“Could you?” There was measurable relief in Ms. Angle’s voice. “We’d arrange a ticket—I can do that right now.”

“Umm. I think I should be able to come . . .” Her mother’s sister, an aunt she’d forgotten. It was inconceivable. She’d had no family for so many years.

“I’m sure you have things to arrange. Your job . . .”

“I work for myself. I could come.”

“If you would, it would be wonderful. I’ll tell her, then, shall I? Thank you, Eleanor.” She waited. “No, I won’t tell her yet, but she’ll be so pleased if you come. Do you think you really will?”

Eleanor ran through the plans she had for the next few days and realized she was, for the first time in a long time—free. She’d need to speak with Gladys and maybe it would be possible for Miles to arrange things. “I absolutely will. I’ll come.”

They exchanged information and Eleanor put the phone back in its cradle. It was stifling inside the house, and she wanted to get out. She called Miles, but he didn’t answer his phone, and she didn’t leave a message. She opened the kitchen window and climbed onto the tiny balcony there, thought about what she knew of her aunt.

Alice lived on the Yorkshire moors, in the home where Eleanor’s mother had been a girl. Eleanor had never been to visit, for some reason her mother had never taken her, but she knew a bit of the story, knew that her mother left England when she was fourteen or so, that her sister, Alice, was fifteen years older and had stayed on. Already a professor at Cambridge when their parents decided to take their young daughter Anne to the United States, Alice had stayed in England on her own.

In the front hall her mother’s trunk had sat for years. On it was a Chinese bowl Eleanor dropped her keys into at the end of every day. Now she took the bowl off the trunk and opened it. She pulled things out one at a time. As she unwrapped tissue from pieces of a silver tea set, she grew curious. She’d lived her life without cousins or siblings, the last ten years without a mother or father, and suddenly she was part of a family. She took a box of letters her mother had
saved, letters she’d once started to read when she was thirteen but hadn’t been able to finish, and put them in the bottom of her suitcase beside her old brown Uggs and wool sweaters.

She called Miles again. There was no answer.

She found her mother’s copy of
Wuthering Heights
in the trunk and flipped through it. She was just twelve years old when her mother died in a car crash on a visit to England. The afternoon the news had come, Eleanor had just closed the book, which her mother had loaned her, when her father knocked on the door. Happy to think he’d learned to respect her privacy, she called for him to come in.

His face was gray, the muscles limp, but the hall phone rang again, that day, and he turned to answer it before he had a chance to say anything. Still, she knew the worst possible thing had happened. She looked at the small book, whose spine she’d broken as she listened to her father’s conversation.

She hadn’t wanted to be there. It was the kind of gray day that wells with rain but never yields release. She had offered good reasons for not going to the memorial—her mother’s body was still far away in England, where she’d died—but her father insisted that Eleanor go and Miles had stood beside her all day until the moment she slipped away, tucked herself behind a nearby tree, and wished she were little again, wished she were small at the park with her mother on the swings, wished she were quiet at the edge of a battered picnic blanket as her mother unpacked chicken, then potato salad, then fresh corn on the cob. She wished she were small again and
would be prepared to make any pact with God. And then the sky opened up and the sun shone through so that suddenly everything had color and contrast and shape. Eleanor had looked up through the branches above her and hoped that when she looked down again, everyone would be gone and she’d be alone there leaning against the tree with her mother waiting at home for her, as always.