The Violet Hour: A Novel (18 page)

“Hi, Lizzie. Hi, Cassandra.” He spoke their names slowly and smiled.

“Hello,” they said, not quite in unison.

The skin along her jaw was smooth, but somewhat loose. Her upper lip was thin. She’d aged.
No surprise,
he thought.
People do.

H
e saw her for the first time in December. He was a medical student, dropping by a local free clinic to offer himself as a volunteer. She was the office assistant—competent and full of herself, clearly too big for the job. He fell, not right away, but nearly enough that when he told the story later, he’d say he loved her from the moment she first spoke, when she chided him for being wet.

It was raining that day, and as he stood in the tiled vestibule, shaking water from his sleeve and hair, he became aware of a mildewed smell rising from his wet wool coat. He looked up to see the office assistant staring at him over the front desk, crinkling her nose as though she could smell it, too, even from across the room. He smiled at her and she, in response, tilted her immoderate red head. She seemed ready to school him in some way, as though she were the reigning world champion and he an unknown upstart she didn’t think she should even have to fight.

Once he had discharged himself of enough water to feel satisfied he wouldn’t make puddles all across the floor, he approached her desk. “Hi,” he said, in what he believed to be a friendly manner. “I’m a medical student at UCSF. I was hoping to talk to someone about volunteering.”

She was about his age, give or take a year, with a rather long white neck rendered whiter by the contrast of her hair, which was kept out of her face by only the flimsiest of metal bobby pins. No, she was certainly younger. He could see that now. Still, she was the one in charge. She pursed her lips, assessing him once more. He stood up straighter. He realized it would’ve been smart to have brought a transcript, or some sort of letter of reference—something other than his hospital ID. “It’s been raining all day,” she finally said. “Do you really not have an umbrella?”

The truth was he hadn’t listened to the forecast, had hardly glanced out his window. He’d just returned home from his final overnight shift for many months and was so elated with the work he’d done in helping to repair a severed toe, so not-tired and so ready to take on another challenge, that he’d simply run a comb through his hair and put on civilian clothes and gone back out again, determined finally, at long last, to volunteer at the little corner clinic he passed regularly on his commute. By the time the sky opened and let him have it, pouring water straight into his collar and thoroughly soaking his shoes, he was already so many blocks away that it wouldn’t have been worth it to double back.

The assistant was still awaiting his answer, her eyes bright with color, if not interest. Blue, like a deep pool he’d dropped a coin in, thrilling him with the likelihood that he would never get it back. He straightened his shoulders affably and held out his empty hands. He was, after all, offering to do a difficult thing for free. She seemed a little surprised at this response, or perhaps at her own tone of voice, echoing back at her now in her head. She relented and waved her hand at the room full of sick people slouched in rows of hard plastic chairs.

“Of course,” he said, understanding. “I’ll wait.”

He settled himself in an orange chair between two yellows, holding his elbows close in his lap. Because it was a crowded Tuesday (or was it Monday?—no, he’d spent Monday night on call) there was only the one empty seat. On one side of him sat a huffing, overweight man whose arm pressed into his shoulder; on the other was a little
girl, probably Mexican, who stared up at him like a cat. He’d brought nothing to read, which was just as well. He wouldn’t have been able to comfortably hold a book in that chair, and anyway he was much more interested in watching the redheaded assistant.

She picked up her patient list and called a name, which belonged to a teenage girl with an eye patch and a splash of scaly burns across her cheek. The girl stood abruptly and made her way to the desk, where the assistant received her forms and made a show of reading them over to ensure they were complete. As she read, her forehead wrinkled, almost sorrowfully, but every time she looked up it was to reassure the girl with a smile. The same sorrowful look returned when she bent her head to make a few additional marks on the form, as though there were nothing more poignant than the date and time of this poor girl’s intake. She stapled an additional sheet to the form, which she then handed to another assistant, who stood ready to take the girl down the hall.

The scene repeated itself many times, each with a different patient—first a sweating, oscillating junkie with spots of missing hair, then the large, increasingly wheezy man to his left. As each of them went down the corridor to be seen, another patient came along to take the now-empty chair. People coughed and cleared their phlegmy throats. Babies in laps began to cry. Soon there were no empty chairs at all, and Abe found himself standing in the corner near a blighted fern so that all the patients could have seats. All around him, people held cheap plastic pens and concentrated on their forms; at the desk, the redheaded assistant answered the phone and spoke brusquely, though not without warmth, seemingly oblivious to his gaze.

It was possible he was being tested. Could he be patient and respectful in a place so packed with need? He shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to keep from nodding off, his post-call euphoria at last beginning to wane. Only the beautiful assistant—yes, he could admit it now, she was beautiful—kept his eyes open. Several times she stood up—she was not short—and walked to the back of the reception area to confer with one of the doctors or to move a stack of forms
into a bin. In his pockets, he dug at the cuticles of his thumbs. He could leave and come back another time, not that he wanted to leave. He was beginning to feel like the fool she obviously took him for.

At long last she caught his eye. “You can go on back,” she said from across the room. Several heads turned to see who she was addressing, their indifferent faces wavering slightly when they saw he was not one of them. He nodded and moved swiftly past her desk, hearing the crunch of typewriters in the office space beyond.

The chief doctor met him in the corridor and ushered him into his office. Young and jittery, with dark curly hair encircling his head like a massive wreath, he spoke at an urgent volume and wore a pink T-shirt under his white coat and stethoscope. He clicked on a desk lamp and told Abe he could really use his help, having been understaffed since the summer opening, as he was sure that Abe could tell. He produced a waiver from a drawer, and while he waited for Abe to read and sign it, he bounced among the piles of paper and medical supplies that cluttered his windowless office, telling him they treated the people no one else would treat. “Druggies, immigrants, the poor—you name it!” His voice nearly cracked. Leaning against the wall was a framed diploma in Latin. On his desk was the largest mug of coffee that Abe had ever seen.

After a quick tour of the facility, Abe returned to the waiting room. Through the storefront window he could see the brightness of sudden, late afternoon sun, a definite absence of rain. He stopped by the desk where the assistant sat collating papers, licking the tip of her index finger to make sure she’d separated each sheet. He felt good standing near her, knowing he’d be back again the next day to work.

“I’m not asking you to dinner,” he murmured, though he hadn’t planned to say anything at all. The background noise of typewriters, coughing, and chairs scraping linoleum seemed momentarily suppressed. She looked up, eyes blank, and he nearly panicked—what had he done? it was so
unlike
him to speak without thinking—but then a smile crept across her face, as she took in the full implications of his line.

“And I’m not giving you an answer.”

They had a game now, a bit of suspense. For the next two weeks, whenever he showed up to work, he knew that Cassandra would wonder. (For that was her name—Cassandra—even better than he could’ve hoped.) Would this be the day he would ask her? And he would wonder, too, because he had no idea when he’d finally buckle and blurt it out, nor could he be fully certain what she’d say in reply. They hardly looked at each other, ducking their heads as they politely shuffled past each other in the corridor, or handed over forms in triplicate.

And yet, the slightest fraction of a glimpse of her flipped his stomach. Even when she was completely out of sight, he often felt he could see her hair, warming the edges of his peripheral vision. On the rare occasions when she did look him in the eye, it was with an almost asphyxiating force. That blue—he was drowning! Once, he swore he saw her blush, a moment he replayed in his mind over and over on the walk home and again that night while he boiled rice, allowing himself to hope that she was falling for him, too.

But the next day, when he attempted to stand close beside her chair for a longer and weightier stretch than he’d permitted himself in the past, she abruptly stood and moved to the back of the office, where she busied herself with a set of files. He didn’t think he had ever known disappointment until that day, when he saw the back of her head more times than on any other day he could recall. It had become his enemy, that beautiful head, the way it kept turning and hiding her face.

By a quirk of his schedule, three more days had to pass before he was able to work again. Determined to wait it out, he filled his mornings, afternoons, and evenings with tedious laboratory trials and his nights with bourbon in the company of friends. When he finally came in for his clinic shift, his eyeballs were buzzing, his palms made of mush. He hadn’t slept. He’d barely combed his hair, and his was clumpy, the kind that needed to be combed. He was ready to surrender, whatever she said.

“I want to take you out Saturday night.” He was standing across the desk from her. It was just like the first time they met, only this time, he was dry.

She looked at him the way she did. Blue eyes. She really was like a painting, one of those idyllic scenes of a woman with a pitcher in a room. Or a sea nymph on a half shell, disorder spiraling the waters beneath. That flaming hair, that icy skin. She looked like no one looked anymore. The world couldn’t sustain such people. Such people could hardly sustain themselves.

“Okay,” she said. “What time?”

T
hey stood in the front hall—Elizabeth and her mother at the top of the stairs, her father on the carpet down below—and for an excruciating moment no one spoke. Did they expect her to mediate—she, who’d been speaking to them both with undramatic normalcy all these intervening years? She, it occurred to her now, the only real adult in the room? Her mother sucked in the corners of her mouth, faintly pouting, so that she looked at once defiantly adolescent and withered with sudden middle age. Her father pressed his feet into the floor, his shins tensing visibly, like slats on a blind drawn closed. She looked from one to the other, relishing their awkwardness, feeling that their discomfort was somewhat deserved. Let them wait, she told herself. Let them wonder just how the hell this is going to go.

When the moment passed and still no one spoke, Elizabeth became aware of an unusual current passing between her parents, a tacit agreement of some kind. She experienced with surprise a feeling she was used to having with Lucie and Rob, but that she’d forgotten could extend to her parents, a feeling of intruding on their privacy, of being somehow in the way. They’d had no qualms about dissolving their union right in front of her, but this negotiation—this they seemed to
want to conduct between the two of them alone. They weren’t each waiting for the other one to speak. They were both waiting for her to leave.

Well, if that was what they wanted, they could have it. She felt suffocated enough as it was, in close proximity to so many kindred genes, white-haired visitors dribbling constantly through the house—and the funeral not until Thursday! What she needed most just then was an escape. She grazed her mother’s hand, darted down the stairs, and kissed her dad on the cheek. “I’ll talk to you later,” she whispered, having no idea if he’d heard, and burst out of the past into the day.

C
ASSANDRA HAD ALWAYS
assumed she’d see Abe again. She spent the first year after their divorce haunted by the possibility of stumbling upon him unprepared. She took to scanning crowded rooms and movie theaters, on the lookout for his distinct posture, his eggish, overeducated head. On the freeway she tried to avoid ever coming directly in line with the car in the next lane, on the off-chance it was driven by Abe; at lights, she checked her rearview mirror. On sidewalks and in supermarket aisles, she took her corners wide, to protect herself from a sudden collision, the most painful of all ways she could imagine running into him—violently, with bags of onions in her cart. For a long time, even as she took these neurotic precautions, she felt trapped, as though she were steeling herself against the inevitable.

And yet the inevitable never occurred. She saw him, or a man very like him, only twice—once in the first year at a play in Berkeley and once more recently at the Ferry Plaza farmers market. In both instances, the crowd kept them comfortably apart. As the years passed, each one an incredible new record—four years without seeing her ex-husband,
five
years,
six!
—she began to wonder if she’d unconsciously made it over a definitive hump, something akin to the hurdle addicts have to clear to ensure they won’t relapse. The longer life went on, the more certain it seemed that the danger had truly passed.
These days, she rarely lost her breath at the sight of tall men with tanned skin, mossy hair, and well-proportioned shoulders, because she’d discovered, through innumerable losses of breath in the past, that there were many men in the world like Abe, and especially in San Francisco. These days, she could hardly remember his face.

Until, out of nowhere, he reappeared, in her very own childhood home. She looked down at him, grateful to have been peeing in the second-floor bathroom when he arrived, feeling her upstairs vantage somehow gave her the upper hand in whatever negotiation was to come.