The Violet Hour: A Novel (22 page)

She passed him his key card. “Just refurbished,” she said.

The room was nicer than he expected, but it was still a hotel room: rectangular, carpeted, uniformly made beds. He kicked off his sneakers and stretched out on the bed closest to the bathroom, flicking on the television with the remote. A smiling blonde on the hotel channel greeted him, and for a moment he thought it was the clerk from downstairs, checking up on him, though on further reflection, he remembered that her hair had been brown. He flipped past news coverage of Katrina, landing at last on ESPN in the midst of its nightly rundown of baseball highlights, a regular comfort. Finding a hole in the big toe of his sock, he pulled it off, then pulled off the other sock and threw them in a wad at the trash. Standing, he touched his toes and thought about Cassandra’s father, then thought about Cassandra, then thought about his toenails, which were yellowish and gnarly and in need of trimming, not that anyone would care.

If he were a different kind of guy, he’d invite the clerk up for a drink of something strong he’d bought on arrival. He’d have a girlfriend her age back home who wouldn’t know, and an airplane-ready bottle of acrid European cologne. There had been girlfriends once, in the years right after his divorce. A string of sweet, vaguely damaged women who thought him damaged, and fancied themselves his rescuers. But no one lately. Lately it was easier to be alone.

He hoisted his suitcase onto the other bed and opened it, reaching down past a few layers of shirts and shorts, groping for the thing that would get him through the night. When his hand closed upon the object he was looking for—a slim bottle of drugstore-brand sunblock—he closed his eyes and exhaled. Another safe landing.

He uncapped the bottle and sniffed it; its contents smelled, as they should, of coconut, grease, and the beach, a reminder of his recent solo sailing missions, and of countless vacations when Elizabeth was small.
Over the bathroom sink, he reached into the bottle with his index finger. Feeling the tip of a plastic bag, he trapped it against the side of the bottle and slowly dragged it out. The baggie was rolled up like a tiny carpet, airtight and covered with hypoallergenic cream. There were papers and enough herb inside for one joint, maybe two, if he was prudent. Either way, it would have to last him until Thursday, when his package arrived at the house.

For years, Abe had smoked casually: on the weekend, or at the end of an unusually challenging day. It was easy now, so why not? Only recently had the habit become more regular. Since around the same time he’d stopped seeing Amy, the real estate agent and cyclist who’d suddenly craved children, the last woman he’d seriously dated. Since Elizabeth had graduated from college and all of a sudden stopped coming home. Since Ferdinand had died. Somewhere in there. On the bathroom counter, he prepared his joint, careful not to lose the smallest trace of herb. Then, with the joint in his mouth, he set up his towels, flipped the air conditioner fan speed to high, and lit up in front of the TV.

He paced a few more times and picked up the room service menu, which looked adequate if not appetizing. He and Cassandra had eaten room service on their honeymoon, at an inn overlooking the Chesapeake. He was so elated then, watching the boats slice through the water from their little balcony, that he didn’t even regret not sailing them. He picked up the phone now to order, but he must’ve blanked for a moment, because the next thing he knew the dial tone had vanished and the girl clerk’s voice was chirping in his ear. Startled, he hung up, and the whole freshly hatched idea went sour, as hotel living so often can. He thought about the warming covers that decked room service carts like glistening silver crowns, and how once they were lifted, the magic evaporated, as everything hurried on its way to being cold and picked over; how a hotel bed was a gift, a gift he’d messed up the moment he’d laid down; how hotel rooms were both the happiest and the most depressing places in the world.

He remembered the room he’d slept in the Sunday after that sail. It was a Holiday Inn downtown, and after hitching a ride home to pick up his car, he’d driven right up to the door. A flabby-necked truck driver had picked him up near the shore where he’d collapsed and had gotten him as far as the marina. He’d wanted to check to make sure Cassandra and Elizabeth had made it back safely with the boat, and sure enough, it was there, moored to its dock as though it had never been out. Slackened with wet clothes, Abe tried to press a few sodden bills into his samaritan’s hand, but the man refused, embarrassed. Grimly, Abe waved him away and stood staring at the boat, once his baby, now his battlefield. It stared back, like a cat, placid, unconcerned. He knew he might have slept there, in the small cabin underneath the deck, but it felt wrong to revisit the scene so soon, so he hitched another ride to his house, which he entered only to retrieve his keys, feeling a hotel room was now the only place to go. He’d come back the next day for Ferdinand.

In his present room he turned off the light and pressed his forehead against the window. It was important that no one see him smoking. Marijuana was still illegal in Maryland; in this hotel even cigarettes weren’t allowed. There was asphalt below him, a parking lot with numbered spaces and people in shorts cutting through on their way to someplace else. It was good, he decided, that there was always someplace else, even if it was just another hotel room. His country had seen to that. Beyond the parking lot, he saw the towers of the new Bethesda, a squadron of soft red condominiums, anchored by chic, family-friendly restaurants. Earlier that evening, people had parked their cars somewhere out of sight, then converged on the sapling-lined pedestrian promenades, beaming and clinging to each other’s arms, as though they’d been waiting their entire lives to pretend to walk to dinner. Abe knew this town. There were dozens more like it in California. His younger self would have scoffed at their lack of imagination, but time and circumstance had
driven him around on that. His heart soared now every time he saw the steel skeleton of a new building go up—a place not yet ruined for life.

Once, when he and Cassandra were newly married, they were driving somewhere in Virginia. They crossed a small river and came upon a redbrick house that had been destroyed on the side of the road. Its back wall was largely still intact, as were pieces of the sides, but the front had been removed, like a life-size dollhouse, leaving the empty rooms inside to rot. The second floor hung on in chunks, jutting out of the remaining walls, and moss covered every naked edge like cartilage at the end of a bone. Cassandra begged him to stop. “We have to,” she said, already digging in her knapsack for her camera. He’d grown up in Virginia; ruined houses were nothing new to him. But she was insistent, so he pulled over a few hundred feet ahead. Together they walked down the shoulder, stepped over the guardrail, and went right up to the edge of the gutted house. The grass came up to their knees in some places, and the trees around the site were blaringly green and strangled with kudzu. Cassandra finished off a roll of film, then reloaded. She said she would use the photos to kick-start a project; she didn’t know yet what it would be.

“Don’t go inside,” he’d said. “I don’t think the floorboards will hold.”

They’d walked around the back, where they found a rusted wheelbarrow facedown beside the wall. She photographed that, too, then turned it over and photographed the worms that swiveled in the dirt underneath. They continued on around to the front again and speculated on what had happened: a fire, a hurricane, a slow death to abandonment and rain.

“This is just like America,” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t you think America is California? What happens after this. It’s whatever the people who lived here did next. Their children.”

“But it’s the ruin, too. The Indian villages, the Old South, the
rusted factory towns up north. The ghost towns where miners used to live out west.”

She thought about that for a moment, then reached out and squeezed a piece of exposed wood from the staircase. It was wet and her hand left a print that slowly evaporated as she wiped the dampness away on her jeans.

“Well,” she said, her eyes open wide like her lens, “why do you think I’m taking these pictures?” It was clear from the way she said it that she continued to disagree.

“Give it here,” he said.

“What?”

“The camera.” He took it from her and snapped a shot, before she could protest or fix her hair, which was flatter on the side where her head had been resting in the car.

They continued on, eventually, to Richmond, where they were headed. Cassandra continued to snap photos, but more quietly: of the towering statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson that lined Monument Avenue, of white and black men passing one another on the street, of falling fences and rusting cars at a highway gas pump. He remembered her photographing his grandmother’s grave, which made him happy, even if he had to look away and pretend he hadn’t noticed her do it.

The photos came out well, flooded with color and depth—pretty much all of them but the one he’d impulsively taken of her. Her face there was pale, fuzzy, and out of focus, because he’d never learned to use a camera as well as his photogenic wife. It wasn’t fair, he thought, as he looked through the prints at the pharmacy counter, that a rotting house in Cassandra’s hands was vibrant and beautiful, while the breathtaking Cassandra in his hands was smothered out with white.

He closed the curtains and lay down. On the floor by the desk he could see where his socks had missed the trash. His chest ached with the thought of Cassandra’s hair and the carapace of that house, glowing and bacterially alive. She’d had the pictures tacked to the walls of
her workroom for months, like culture slides in a laboratory. It was so lurid in his memory now that he could hardly breathe. He had to think of something else. He inhaled again, letting his lungs burn, and looked at the TV, which had somehow drifted back to the hurricane. A male reporter in a bright red slicker was crying in a flooded street. Abe stared. The man’s hair was soft as money and still it rained. He stared harder, trying to find some hope in this paradox, some evidence that there’d been no disaster, that it was all just a terrible joke.

In the end, though, he gave in. He picked up the phone and asked for the club sandwich with fries. It was not the girl who took his order, but someone else—a man, which was just as well.

T
he obituary ran in
The Washington Post
the next day.

Howard Johannes Fabricant, beloved father, husband, grandfather, and funeral director, died Sunday at his Bethesda home. He was 79 years old.

Mr. Fabricant was born August 29, 1925, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of Finnish and German immigrants. In 1943, he enlisted in the Navy, serving in the South Pacific theater of World War II. He moved to the Washington area after the war, and in 1952, he opened the Fabricant Funeral Home in Bethesda, where he also lived with his family.

A member of the Bethesda Lions Club and a parishioner of St. Eccles Episcopal Church, Mr. Fabricant enjoyed military history and carpentry. He had been building a sauna when he died.

Survivors include his widow, Eunice Fabricant; three grown children: Cassandra Fabricant Green of Berkeley, California, Howard John Fabricant of Bainbridge Island, Washington, and Mary Fabricant Shubin of Pittsburgh; and three grandchildren.

A funeral service will be held at St. Eccles on Thursday at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the American Red Cross.

Toby read the notice at his mother’s breakfast table while eating a toasted bagel with a thick layer of cream cheese and lox. For two days now, he’d been reading about the awful hurricane in New Orleans—the way the city was like a soup bowl just waiting to be filled with liquid, the way people had to stand stranded on their roofs in ninety-degree temperatures as corpses floated in a procession down the street. He thought about all the jazz musicians there, the legends about them, and how he’d always hoped he’d play there one day himself. He felt a pressure on his lungs, as though some of the water from the Gulf had spilled over into him, a sensation that embarrassed him and made him push the front page aside. He turned instead to the local section, and there was the notice about Howard Fabricant, calling out to him from the bottom of page ten.

“What are you reading, sweetie?” Ruth asked, tidying up the counters around him. “More New Orleans?”

He shook his head and swallowed. “I’ve moved on to the Obituaries.” He gave a bitter laugh.

“Oh God, don’t do that. Where are the Comics? Or Sports.” She rustled through the sections on the table.

Toby paused before taking another bite and looked down at Howard Fabricant’s angular but rather bemused face. “It’s okay. I kind of like the stories. Homemaker, retired intelligence officer, amateur photographer. You know. Lived in the same house for forty-six years.”

“A whole life in AP style. Yes, there is beauty in that.” As an editor for the State Department, she appreciated sentences the way jewelers appreciate gems: for their color, for their clarity, for their cut.

“And actually, there’s someone I know today,” Toby said. “Well, the grandfather of someone I know.”

“Who’s that?” Ruth came over to look at the page with a stack of catalogs under one arm.

“Howard Fabricant. I’m pretty sure that’s my friend Elizabeth’s grandfather.” The obituary held all the clues. The grown child who lived in California had the last name Green, same as Elizabeth’s. The date of the death made sense. And the family home was just a few
blocks from the Starbucks where Toby had seen Elizabeth the day before. Surely this was her grandfather.

“How sad,” Ruth said, reading through zebra-striped glasses. “The day before his birthday. He was building a sauna. And a funeral director! Such irony. How do you know his granddaughter? From school?”

“From New York. I met her through Laura, Keith’s girlfriend. She’s a musician, too.” He allowed the lies to pile up like laundry. He didn’t know why he was telling them, but it didn’t really matter. His mother would probably never meet Elizabeth, unless he somehow managed to marry her, in which case he’d be so insanely happy that he couldn’t imagine caring about anything that had happened before.