The Violet Hour: A Novel (25 page)

“Ah, but it’s working,” he said, his knuckles rising slightly under her hand.

She watched his dark eyes swell and brighten as the headlights of a passing car crossed his face. It was as though something had plunged into his pupil, sending a ripple through the tawny water of his eyes. This was more than a change of light; something was happening inside his head. “You
are
drunk!” she exclaimed. “Or getting there.”

“Maybe so.”

“Well, what if I told you you’ll definitely see me again? If you didn’t have to worry about that. Would you tell me then? I’m
interested
.”

He pulled his hand back and folded his arms across his chest. “But how can I trust you?” he asked slyly. “I know how you love to lie.”

She pursed her lips and stamped her foot under the table. “Oh, you’re cruel,” she said, her hands suddenly cold without his touch.

“Yes,
I’m
cruel.” His smile enfolded the edges of his eyes. “You’re the one who’s prying. You’re morbidly curious.”

Her cheeks grew warm, and then her ears the instant she was
aware of her cheeks, and then her forehead the instant she was aware of her ears. She’d always been an extravagant, chain-reaction blusher, even when the discomfort she was experiencing inside was rather mild, which this was not.

“I promise you I’m not,” she blurted, in spite of the splotches cascading across her chest, in spite of the dangerously scrambled thoughts she was about to put into words. “I have absolutely no interest in death.” She flung a hand at the window as if showing him something outside. “My dad’s an undertaker, remember? I grew up in a funeral home. And if you knew me better, you’d know I’d never make up something like that. It’s creepy and awful.”

He was laughing. “Calm down, funeral girl. I’m kidding. I brought it up, remember? I’m going to tell you eventually.”

She felt a little faint hearing him address her so intimately as
you
. On the table once more his hands looked unusually strong, almost too big for his body. It was clear that she had underestimated him. Back at the clinic where he’d looked bedraggled and smitten, a onetime hero who had swum up on the wrong shore and, in his confusion, believed her to be some kind of nymph, she ought to have recognized that he was still, underneath that confusion, the hero, still very much in command. She saw now that he was serious and purposeful—not just about stitches, but about life, and about love. He knew what it meant to have something and lose it, which made him careful having anything at all.

“Look,” he said, when she said nothing. “There’s no one in the world I’d rather tell.” He said this, and then his face went gently blank. It was a blank she’d seen before, in some form or other, on all the mourning faces that had passed through her house growing up. She looked at his ungainly hands resting there on the table and was moved. To think of all that had slipped through those fingers—fingers that could otherwise fix any wound.

“That’s good,” she said, softly, afraid of disappointing him by saying too much. But then her words just hung there, inadequate, so she hurried on to add, “I’m glad.”

Whatever he heard in her answer, it was good enough for him. The blank look evaporated and he withdrew his hands, settling into himself once more. “Not tonight, though,” he said. “Tonight is about bad jokes.”

“Like the guy walks into a bar?”

“Well, steal my thunder, why don’t you!”

Relieved, she laughed, and the sudden sound of it surprised and somewhat embarrassed her, which made her laugh even more foolishly, at which point she couldn’t do anything to make herself stop.

“That wasn’t it, you know.” He joined in, his own laugh jolly and percussive. “That wasn’t actually a joke.”

They lingered over amaretto cookies and coffee until they were the last patrons at the restaurant and the waiters had started stripping the other tables of their linens and flipping the chairs over on top. Abe paid the bill while Cassandra was in the bathroom. At some point toward the end of their meal it had begun to rain, and now it was coming down in fat, indulgent droplets that broke against the restaurant windows. She’d forgotten her umbrella, but this time—he jangled his keys—he had one in the car, so she stood in the recessed doorway while he ran, holding his jacket like a glider over his head, to where they’d parked his grayish Buick halfway down the block. He opened the passenger door and bent in, his dark back all but vanished in the rain. For a moment she thought he’d be better off if he just crawled on through to the driver’s side and went on his way without her. For a moment she wished he would, that this would be the last she’d see of him, that she’d have no opportunity to cause him further pain. She worried she wasn’t kind enough for this man; she knew she had grown somewhat cruel.

But he was running back now, under the umbrella, a tall black stork of a thing with an old-fashioned wooden handle, and when he handed it to her, his head still under its cover, the raindrops on his forehead and cheek were like sweat from the labor he’d performed for her.

She took his arm and her place in his car, and they rolled over hilltops to her rooming house, the city lights rising up through the rain
to meet them with each descent, like the waves of the ocean behind them. He parked the car with its flashers on in front of a hydrant, and walked her to the door, which she fumbled to unlock as she did whenever it was dark and she’d had a few drinks.

His arm pulled her around to face him, and tucked her tight into his chest. There was a kiss so deep and forgetful that she had to reorient herself when she reopened her eyes. I’m in San Francisco. This is my house. This is the man I’m with; his name is Abe.

“I don’t ever go to bed on the first date,” she said. Across the street, the car flashed out a yellow rhythm for her breath.

“Ahhh.” His sound was moist and strangely familiar on her cheek. “So whatever happens,” he said, “we’ll have to say it all started with a lie.”

A
T WORK THE
following Monday, they were both there, and she was aware of his every movement. Even when he wasn’t looking at her, he somehow was. His shoulder would be near her head, his footsteps telling her stories as they receded down the hall. Each minute that passed put her a minute closer to the possibility of seeing him alone. It was mid-December, one of the shortest days of the year. Outside the storefront windows the light took off early, the pavement growing violet in the dusk.

“Somebody’s happy,” Diane teased. “That’s quite a grin.”

Cassandra caught herself; she couldn’t believe she’d been smiling. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to sound casual as she moved some papers around on the desk. “There might be something there.”

A
FTER THEIR NEXT
dinner, Chinese food, they went back to his place, a tiny ground-floor efficiency near the university. He had a framed sketch of a nineteenth-century sailboat, a wooden bowl filled with citrus fruit, and hunter-green flannel sheets. The entire place smelled of shower soap with an undertone of rust.

Abe undressed her with confidence, and she put herself in his charge; her one contribution was to unhook her bra.

“I have a tattoo of a cross on my ass,” she said, turning to show him she didn’t.

He sat down on the bed to inspect. “So you do,” he said, palming her with his hands. “Is it always a cross?”

It was more titillating, somehow, to play doctor with a medical student; it was as though she’d become part of his training, doing something of great consequence for the world. She pushed back into his hands until she was sitting in his lap, lightly rocking. “No. Sometimes it’s a big purple elephant.”

He held her hips, then her breasts. “I think you should get a sailboat on the back of your neck.” He kissed the spot he had in mind. “Like that one up there.”

She looked at the framed sketch again, imagining its lines sewn into her skin, imagining it sailing there always, even under the cover of her hair. Every man she’d ever known was obsessed with something in the world she’d barely noticed. This man—this man who was now flipping her onto her back—liked boats. He liked boats and he wasn’t afraid to hold her arms down when the desire to do so possessed him. She strained back against him, wishing he would tighten his hold, then gasped in surprise when he did, as though he’d read her mind. She felt her arm muscles burn in his grip, smelled soap and rust in their fresh sweat. The next thing she knew, she was kneeling over him and holding him down in return. With his head against the flannel he looked as if he could barely breathe, and that alone was enough to make her come.

Afterward, they smoked grass together, just the right amount. In her life until then there had been secret sex and there had been open sex, but this was something else altogether; it was both and it was more.

A
T HER MOTHER’S INSISTENCE
, she spent Christmas in Maryland, but was hardly present, her mind and all her capacity for sensation remaining in California with Abe. She answered when spoken to, helped her mother and sister peel potatoes by the pound, watched as her brother walked ahead of her up the stairs, and understood that he was gay.
Poor Howie,
she thought.
What a tough road he has ahead
. And yet nothing could truly upset her; she saw her life moving onward, like a train. What was the use of being upset about something that was happening back at the station? Howie would find his way. He was resourceful.

She returned to San Francisco before the new year, which she toasted with Abe at a party in a rambling Victorian. The house was filled with medical students, journalists, and activist law students; one of the hosts worked for a local congressman. There were plenty of reasons to be distressed about the state of the world—Cassandra followed the news as much as the next person—but no one that night could do anything but sprawl across futons, toss hair from their eyes, and smile. They were the people who would be in charge one day, and they saw things differently than anyone who had ever come before. In the living room, someone had draped a blue scarf over the shade of a swing-arm lamp. Cassandra kissed Abe in its dim, lunar light and saw in his face how delightful she was, how very important it was to give herself over to the serious fun of being in love.

Then, trouble. Just a few days later, she grew furious with him when he failed to pick her up from work. Back in his apartment, she yelled at him for the first time, then calmed herself to tears, then calmed herself again to explain how small it had made her feel, and though he stiffened at first, somewhat shut himself down, he stood there through it all and eventually nodded, and told her he was sorry and that she was right.

Three months later, he gave her his mother’s engagement ring while they lay naked together in bed. In his large hand, the tiny diamond shone like the tip of a laser. She’d never before seen anything
so small emit such a sharp and powerful light. Her own mother’s ring was dark, almost black, a sapphire, as though her parents had wanted to signal from the start that their commitment to marriage was also a commitment to funerals.

“Well, put it on,” he said, laughing. “I’ll give you a hint: it goes on your
finger
.”

She covered it with her hand, then uncovered it. Each time, it shocked her to see it there. She looked at Abe, his fuzzy curls, his thinking eyes, and felt wiser than she’d ever felt when she’d earned a high mark on an exam or discovered, without instruction, a new technique on the pottery wheel. All of that just seemed like training for the real test, which was this. Against all odds, they had found each other and made each other giddy. Now it seemed to Cassandra that marriage meant securing their improbable feat, not just taking the plunge but making the plunge her life, a constant act of diving forward, into the better and better days ahead.

B
Y THE END
of the year her last name was Green and they had moved to a larger apartment. She had never expected herself to marry so young—she was all of twenty-three, the same age her mother had been when she had Cassandra—but now she took to it with an evangelical zeal. “My husband,” she said, whenever she could: to the bank teller, to friends who had known him before as Abe. She liked the succinct way it communicated so much. Just a few short syllables and people knew what you were about.

She rode the high straight into 1976. “I don’t understand how you can stay out there,” her mother wailed on the phone. “So far away from your own parents, as though we didn’t even exist. Now your brother’s talking about the West Coast. All of a sudden he cares about the forests and working to conserve the land—land he’s never even seen! You’re setting a bad example.”

Even a year earlier, Cassandra’s blood would’ve boiled at this accusation. Now it merely passed her by, like a garish billboard she’d seen
many times from her car. She cradled the receiver against her shoulder and flipped through an art supplies catalog at the kitchen table. “Ever wonder if it’s your footsteps he’s following, and not mine?”

Eunice was born and raised in Colorado Springs, where she’d been a champion public speaker. As a young woman, she’d gone to Washington, DC, for one of the thousands of secretarial jobs that were exploding throughout the cabinet departments after the war. Hers was in Interior, and she’d maintained files on all the tracts of land that had been set aside as preserves in Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas.

“Don’t be cute,” Eunice said. “He knows I don’t want him so far away. Why can’t Abe get a job at one of the hospitals here? Your father can call around.”

“Oh, well,” Cassandra said. “You know my husband. He wants to get the best possible training. And UCSF really is one of the most prestigious hospitals.”

On the other end of the line Eunice fell silent. Cassandra joyfully flipped through her catalog, letting each page make its little snapping sound as it turned. “What are you doing?” Eunice finally asked. “Are you lifting something?” Cassandra imagined her mother, her blouse ironed and her hair tightly styled in that way she’d always had of making herself look much older than she really was. It was afternoon in Bethesda, and the light this time of year—January—would be the grayish kind that meant it was already too late to do anything with the day. But Cassandra still had her morning. Three time zones and now a marriage. It was all just enough to make a world of her own, a world her mother finally couldn’t penetrate.