The Violet Hour: A Novel (24 page)

It was the current decade that was rough. How unforgiving her daughter had become, of herself, of everyone else. Cassandra wanted to ask about Kyle, wanted to signal with her eyes that she knew. But Elizabeth was refusing to communicate. She had no sympathy today; her mind was somewhere else.

T
HEY HELD A SMALL
viewing service in the chapel, a prelude to the main event the next day. Howard lay with his hands folded over his abdomen, looking elegant and inevitable; in the corner, Alvin stood by, trim in pinstripes and nearly beaming. He had entrusted his boss to the best of their local colleagues, a glossy, new, almost scientific operation that ran out of Silver Spring, and the results were as lifelike as could be. Even in the heat, the line of Howard’s jaw had the nimble
heft of a man on the brink of responding to a question. His forehead furrowed as if in thought. An ice cream truck passed, emitting its tinkly melody, while old person after old person stooped by the casket to pay respects. Howard received them patiently, as usual doing his best to make everyone feel better about death.

Hurricane news trickled through the house all day. Televisions were on in several rooms, and then off, and then on again when someone needed another fix. They watched the aerials of the watery grid and heaps of people crying outside the Superdome. They forgot, for a moment. They became spectators, people who could lament the terrible things in the wider world instead of the terrible things in their own.

They were all there, even Abe, dressed in a collared shirt and slacks. Cassandra was aware of him in the house, talking cordially with Eunice, sitting to the side during the service, bringing plates of food from the kitchen and leaving them near her, in case she wanted something to eat. Was this penance? Was it showing off? His ease was palpable, and thoroughly maddening. How could anyone be comfortable in this world, in this country, in this situation? She stared on at the floodwaters, refusing to look at him. Yet even that couldn’t prevent the torment she experienced when Abe, still out of sight but suddenly now always in the room, reached into his pocket and absently jangled his keys.

T
he evening Abe Green was to pick her up, she arranged her hair in the bathroom mirror thinking she’d achieved a new summit. Was there anything in the world more powerful than a twenty-two-year-old woman in San Francisco? With the corner of her fingernail, she flicked an eyelash from her cheek. She’d seen the way he looked at her, in barely concealed disarray. He was like a winner who’d just discovered that his race had been fixed, that everything he’d believed in until then had been a lie. She thrilled at the idea of dashing his illusions, of being the one to escort him around the corner of his world to show him the real world behind it.

She’d only just discovered it herself. That summer, not long after her college graduation, she’d moved out west on a lark, surprising everyone back home, her parents most of all.

“What are you going to do in California?” Eunice had demanded, seizing the lid of Cassandra’s unzippered suitcase the day before her plane would depart. “No one knows you there. Why should anyone give you a job?” Her voice took its usual nasty tone but belying it were her eyes, shining frantically, and for the first time she seemed not terrifying but almost unbearably weak. Cassandra had to look away.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. From the pile on her bed, she matched and rolled another pair of cotton socks.

“You’ll be nothing!”

She felt a little sorry to be leaving her father, who drove her to the airport in the hearse while Eunice stayed behind, ironing righteously—but not any more than a little. He had almost never defended her against her mother’s tirades, always finding some excuse to leave the room or to have never been in the room in the first place. He’d made his choice long ago, and now so would Cassandra, though she let him hug her a little longer than was their custom at the gate.

The choice, of course, was right. In San Francisco, people got her. Everyone wanted to be her friend—her roommates at the boardinghouse, her classmates at the art center. It was as though coming here had automatically made her more interesting, more noticeable among the crowds. She had a past now, a thing she’d run from, and though she often found it fun to change it around—to tell men in bars she was from Florida instead of Maryland, that her name was Jeanne instead of Cassandra—the very fact of having had a life before this life in San Francisco seemed enough to give her depth, an impression of being layered and worthy of excavation, that she’d never experienced back home. She was starting over here, finally, as an artist—she rarely lied about that—a vocation that seemed best pursued in a far-off place, in which her mother couldn’t easily turn up.

In San Francisco, men wore their hair long and liked to be naked with her for hours, regardless of who she claimed to be. Sex was various and unembarrassed and not, as it had largely been back home, the awkward enjambment of clavicles and hidden underparts in the backseat of some wide-bodied car. Back home everything was furtive, lights-off, and not even terribly satisfying, as though being with a boy were a shower, or a multivitamin to swallow, just another secret to staying alive.

Which was sad, really, because
this
was life. Her old friends and parents—especially her parents—knew so little of the world. To
them it had but one direction, which was all about church and business and what other people thought. All you had to do was look at things out here to see how narrow that view was, to see how little local opinions mattered. To the west of San Francisco the great cold ocean stung the air with saline. Enormous, almost infinite, it gnawed at the edge of civilization, and there was at all times the possibility that one day the earth might change just enough to send it swelling up and crashing down upon them. She hated that possibility, and she loved it; it made her life more important than ever, her journey west the bravest thing she’d ever done. She wished she could sit back over the Pacific and look inland at everything—every bay, every feathery redwood branch, every painted house, every layer of fog and mountain—rising at full size in one view. But it was impossible; the human eye couldn’t take in everything at once. Instead, she looked at everything she could see; she took it in piece by piece. She went around the city with her eyes wide open, even in the middle of the night.

“That man is looking for a wife,” her fellow assistant Diane said after Abe had left with a scrap of paper bearing Cassandra’s rooming house address. “And if it’s not you, let me know. I’ll take him.” Diane was only a year older than Cassandra, but already considered herself an old maid, destined to be overlooked. She mentioned her singleness often, and cheerfully, as though it were the funniest thing in the world.

Cassandra tapped a pile of papers into line. “I’m sure he’s just looking for a lay.” But privately, she knew Diane was right. Earlier that week she had watched Abe treat a meaty gash on a construction worker’s cheek, his movements swift and calm as he laid eleven stitches in a perfect railroad track. Such focused men were always moving toward marriage. She pitied him that he had to desire her—Cassandra, who was no wife.

“You’ll see,” Diane said. “He wants to pack you in his suitcase. You were two seconds away from being kidnapped.”

Cassandra grinned and flung her foot at Diane’s leg, flattered but unconcerned. For all the delight she took in San Francisco men, she had yet to feel much for any of them. She enjoyed them as she might
enjoy a good meal, smelling, tasting and savoring each bite but putting her fork down before she found herself too full. None had made her fall in love. In those days, the person she was actually falling in love with was herself.

Abe arrived at the appointed hour in a shirt that was unbuttoned at the collar. They went to an Italian restaurant in North Beach, a place that covered its walls with the signed portraits of celebrities and pseudo-celebrities. They were seated opposite each other at a small table under a window, and while Abe asked the waiter’s advice on wine, Cassandra scanned the walls, picking out the faces she recognized as though each were a dear, old friend.

“So,” Abe said, after the wine had been poured. “I know your name and I know what you do. What else do I need to know?”

It was true he already knew quite a lot, which meant that Cassandra would have to stick to specific lies if she were to think of lying at all.

“Well,” she said, falling back on an old standard. “I have a twin sister.”

“That so?” He sipped his wine, looking her in the eye over the rim, as though to let her know he wasn’t fooled. His dark hair looked soft and dense, like moss, in the restaurant’s dim, greenish light. He put his glass down and leaned forward slightly on his elbows. From neck to shoulders to arms to waist, he had all the right proportions; she was attracted, she realized, by the math of him.

“No,” she said, laughing. “It’s just something I like to tell people.”

“You like to tell people lies?”

“All the time.” She reached for the bread basket and tore off the heel.

He asked her what other lies she’d told, and because he seemed neither judgmental nor dismissive, only interested—perhaps even more so than people usually were—she told him more than she would’ve expected herself to tell.

“I mostly lie to strangers. Sorry. I guess that includes you.” She touched his hand impulsively, fleetingly, then was back to her
wineglass. He hadn’t flinched. He was remarkably easy to be with. “But it’s harmless stuff. I’ll give myself a different name, a different hometown. The biggest is my job. Every week I call my parents and tell them about my research for an anthropologist who’s writing an encyclopedia of San Francisco.”

Abe smiled conspiratorially. “Volunteer thing? Because they think you’re planning on graduate school?”

“No, as far as they know, it’s my nine-to-five. I’ve never told them about the clinic.”

Here his eyebrows arched in faint surprise and a series of thoughts crossed his face, too quickly for her to interpret. He took a piece of bread, buttered it with broad, careless strokes, and let the silence sit with them a moment. “Wouldn’t they be proud?” he finally asked. She couldn’t decide if he was disappointed or merely curious.

“It isn’t that . . .” She felt silly. She sipped her wine, thinking perhaps he wasn’t so easy after all. Perhaps he was actually rather difficult.

“What is it, then?” he pressed. “I’m interested. Truly.”

How to say that she lied, not because the truth was sordid or disgraceful, but because, for the first time in her life, she felt she was making her own decisions? How to say that the less her parents knew, the less they could do to interfere? They’d be just as satisfied to know she was working in the clinic, processing people, many of them children, who couldn’t afford basic care. Eunice, in particular, would’ve been impressed with anything involving children, the only category of people she deemed worthy of charity. But Cassandra’s lies made her feel powerful, and nothing—not even parental approval—could replace the exhilaration of that.

She shrugged, unable to tell him so much so soon, if ever. “I just want to feel that my life is mine. Not theirs.” And then, before he could challenge her further, she rushed on. “I also like to invent trivia.”
Invent
was good. It sounded so much better than
lie
. “Like for instance, did you know that four percent of all cats in Texas have six toes on one of their paws?”

Abe leaned back in his chair, nodding seriously. “The most common cause of accidental death in California is shark attack.”

“Exactly!” she said, poking the air with her finger. “Animals and states are great sources of material.”

“At top speed, a bumblebee can fly faster than a cheetah can run.”

“That one could be true. In Texas it’s against the law to watch television through a window.”

“You have a thing for Texas.”

“It just seems like the craziest place.”

“I’m from Texas.”

“No you’re not. You’re from Richmond and Philadelphia. You told me that already.” Another thing she liked about him. They came from neighboring states.

He smiled. “Got me. I’m not kidding about the shark attacks though. One hundred percent true as a fact.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” He stared directly at her.

“You’re lying.”

He laughed. “You’re right. I’m glad you can tell the difference.”

For some reason, this made her blush.

“But I am one-eighth black.”

Looking at his face, she knew it was the truth, and she was pleased with herself for not caring. Her parents would care, she realized, but that only pleased her more. “Nice segue,” she said. “Not scared.”

The food came, filling the table with soft pastas and tender meats doused in creamy tomato sauces. They ate, moving onto other truths. She told him about the funeral home and her sculpture class, and he told her about medical school and the car accident that had killed his parents when he was ten. His mother’s mother had raised him thereafter, a cautious white woman from Virginia, who told him it was better to say he was Jewish, and only if people asked.

“Someday, when I’m drunk, I’ll tell you about the accident,” he
said. He sipped his wine, then set it down again, bringing his hand back to rest by his plate. “I hate talking about it, but I know I should.”

“You aren’t drunk now?” she asked, slipping her hand toward his a second time. She was drunk, a little. Everything was rising, shifting a half-step up. Under her fingers, his knuckle bones were rounded and substantial, a row of tiny, well-constructed domes, protecting whatever was inside. She felt he must have much to protect. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves when she wasn’t looking and now she could look nowhere but at the hair, skin, bones, and veins that made up the geography of his arm.

“I’ve gotta hold something back,” he said. “Don’t I? If I ever want to see you again.”

“That’s a sad game to play.” The hair on his forearm was dark and moderately dense, like a forest of leafless trees on a stretch of sandy soil. His cheeks and jaw, were they not freshly shaven, would probably look much the same.