The Violet Hour: A Novel (31 page)

He looked at her, stooped to scratch her bug bite again, and then looked down at his own feet, which seemed to have trouble taking straight, normal strides. He veered toward her as she righted herself. Reflexively, she extended a hand, protecting her personal space.

“Watch it,” she said.

They’d forgotten how to avoid collisions. It was something you learned living with a person every day, and they’d been eight years out of practice. He planted his foot and regained his balance. She resumed walking, wearily.

Watching her pull ahead, he realized it wasn’t just the dope. There was something youthful in the way she wore her hair, too. She hadn’t cut it like most women her age, and when he’d seen her the day before, he’d noticed that she hadn’t given up the ponytail either, nor was she afraid to let her ends flip outward like a cheerleader’s. Even today’s sober, funereal updo seemed tentative, as though she were just a little girl playing dress-up, ready to shake out her bun at any minute to try out a different look. He barely stifled a temptation to pull her hair free himself.

She came to a stop ahead of him. The road had ended at a wood; a rusted guardrail parted to reveal a path between the trees. They went down it single file, the world momentarily dimmer and cooler as the pluming branches on either side formed a nave high over their heads. Then just as quickly, the trees fell away and they were outdoors again: a green playing field, a blue sky halfway vacuumed of clouds.

“Well, here we are,” he said. The grass before them sloped up toward a large stone building with a severe white banner proclaiming it the Holy Redeemer Academy. “I guess it’s a Catholic school.”

“All roads in Maryland lead to Catholic schools.”

Four rust-red tennis courts crouched by the school, each set of two encased in a chain-link fence. Floating halfway up the near wall of the first enclosure was the lumpy phrase
SENIORS 06
which, on closer inspection, was formed out of dozens of wads of newspaper that had been stuffed strategically in the fence’s holes. A spirited teenage pointillism.

They walked up to the fence. Abe plucked a ball of paper from the bottom of the first
S
and uncrumpled it: a page from the Metro section of
The Washington Post,
dated sometime last week. He balled the paper back up and returned it to its position. He took out another wad. This one was from a recent news section: “Katrina Pummels Southeastern Fla. with Heavy Rain.” He held the page up.

“Tragic, isn’t it? This hurricane.”

Cassandra was running her fingers along the links and peering into the tennis courts as though awaiting the start of a match. “Hurricane?”

“New Orleans.”

“Oh, God.” She turned. “Of course. I don’t know what I thought you meant.”

They looked at each other, guilt-stricken. Simultaneously, they turned to the fence and began tearing out the wads of paper, uncrumpling them in search of news.

“The last
S
is all comics,” Cassandra said, dropping wad after wad to the ground.

“News from last week,” Abe said, jumping to reach the paper near the top.

“Travel and Style, this week’s Business. Oh!” She waved her hand in his face. “This says something about . . . never mind.”

They continued to open the pages, often tearing them in their haste. They were like pranksters from a rival school, undoing the spirit of Holy Redeemer. They were like revolutionaries, refusing to let false propaganda stand on public walls. Fueled by these fantasies, Abe moved more quickly, tossing crime pages and Beltway gossip,
baseball box scores and crossword puzzles, updates on Iraq and the president’s stand-off in Texas with a dead soldier’s antiwar mom. Opinions, investigations, and analysis piled up around them. A mass of half-crumpled newsprint blanketed the grass at their feet, and still they’d found no breaking news.

“I guess it’s been here for a few days already,” Cassandra said at last.

Abe looked up at the fence and the ravaged word, now gaping with holes and sawed-off edges. He felt a sudden pang for the kids who’d worked so hard to make it—girls, mostly, he assumed. It was the kind of thing Elizabeth and her friends might have done.

“They must have used a ladder,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll able to put it all back. Jesus, look at this mess.”

She turned and walked away from him.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m getting us a paper,” she called over her shoulder. She was moving quickly, already a thin mark of charcoal against the undulating green.

C
ASSANDRA CROSSED
the school grounds and emerged on the street opposite the side they’d come in. Perky bungalows and repainted porches radiated out on either side of her, and she hesitated for a moment before deciding which way to walk. There wouldn’t be any newspaper dispensers in this residential neighborhood, not that she had any change. On the other hand, it was the last week of summer, and people with the means to afford such charming first homes would probably have done whatever they could to escape the heat in town. She peered down the street, overhung with old branches and telephone wires. A sprinkler tapped out a rhythm and a kid was practicing skateboard tricks on the sidewalk, the friction of his board against the cement making a sound like ripping paper. The boy’s blond hair hung in his face and he was looking at his feet. She turned the other way, and finding it clear, approached the nearest
house without a car in the drive. Sure enough, several blue-bagged newspapers were scattered around the base of the stoop. Assuming they were regular readers, the people who lived in this house had been gone at least three days. Cassandra looked back at the skateboarding boy, now several hundred feet away, skimming a curb, his spine bent like a question mark. Satisfied he wasn’t watching, she turned back to the empty house and walked casually up the path to the stoop.

She crouched down and peered inside the nearest bag. As luck would have it, it was that morning’s paper. Pleased, she picked it up like a sack, twisting it a few times in the air. By the time she’d turned back around, the kid had glided up to the edge of the lawn.

“Where’re you taking that?” He flipped the board up and stood it on its end. He was about fifteen and meaner than he’d appeared from a distance.

“None of your business.” It wasn’t wrong if she refused to admit it.

“The Hardings have been gone since Saturday,” he said. “I was supposed to gather their newspapers and mail for them, to make sure no one else took them.”

“Then why haven’t you done it?” she asked.

“I was going to, today.”

“You’re lying.”

He shrugged. “Say what you want.” He reminded her of every student she’d ever taught, back when she led introductory classes at a number of middling Bay Area art schools. Her natural inclination was to feel tenderly toward student-aged people. She wanted to inspire them, to heal injuries they didn’t even know they had. She loved making them laugh and seeing them understand something they hadn’t quite understood before. It was why she’d become a teacher. But over the years she’d found that most student-aged people didn’t want inspiration, or healing, or the knowledge she had of the wider world. What they wanted was to win, even in art. The classroom was a war, teacher versus student, and dignity was at stake. All the whines and the cons. I have too much work, my grandfather died, my friend’s
brother died. She knew people died—oh, she knew—but surely not as often as graded projects were due.

Now
her
father had died—actually died!—and maybe hundreds more people in New Orleans. Yet here was this wispy boy, just gliding through a neighborhood of first homes, thinking nothing. He’d probably conned every teacher who’d ever stood in his way, and come fall, he’d try to con a couple more.
There’s a world out there,
she wanted to shout at him,
a world of actual pain! And it doesn’t care about you or your fun.

His face broke into a smile. “I’m just playin’,” he said. “What do I care about these people’s papers?”

“The Hardings,” she said.

“Made it up.”

She narrowed her eyes at him: a total jackass kid, a future ugly drunk or ruthless, know-it-all boss. She stopped herself. She couldn’t know him from one encounter. Though certainly he needed schooling. If nothing else, kids like him reminded her that she was an adult, a person who knew things and had the authority to say them.

“I used to lie, too,” she said. “You ought to watch it—it didn’t work out that well for me.”

“You get caught?”

“I got
divorced,
” she said, succeeding in widening his eyes. “And everyone hated me for it.” She thrilled at the harsh sentence leaving her lips. Sometimes it felt good to acknowledge her misery. Even better to rub people’s faces in it.

“Man,” the boy said, taking a step back. Not knowing what else to say, he threw his board down and wheeled himself down the block.

By the time she returned to the school grounds, Abe had replaced most of the newsprint. “Took you long enough,” he said.

“I got into a confrontation with a neighborhood punk. Scared him off good.”

“Scared him? What did you do?”

“I told him how hard life was going to get, and that no one was immune. Told him how asinine he’d feel when he realized he’d
sneered at people’s pain while he was young and not yet in need of their sympathy.”

Abe blinked in disbelief. “You
told
him that?”

“Well, not in so many words. Anyway.” She held up the blue plastic sack. “I have the paper. We can read all we want about New Orleans now.”

They settled themselves at a picnic table at the edge of the soccer field. Cassandra spread the paper across the table, separating all the sections that ran Katrina stories from the sections that did not. On the opposite bench, Abe pulled his cigar case from his pocket and calmly prepared a joint.

His competence with the drug alarmed her, which was in turn mortifying, a reminder that she’d grown judgmental and old. She tugged at her blouse to cool her chest and asked him if he used a dispensary or if he grew his own, though she didn’t really care either way. He told her, and she immediately forgot, bobbing her head and scanning the newspaper, reading headlines, leads, and pieces of captions all at once. He’d gone on to talk about something else—was it chocolate? She watched his eyes, waiting for them to grow dull, the first sign of a speech winding down.

Most of their conversations had been like this, after a while.

He lit the joint, took a drag, and passed it to her. She did the same and passed it back. This, at least, was a rhythm she hadn’t forgotten. Belonging once depended on taking just the right kind of breath, the right squint and position of the fingers. As a teenager, she’d practiced her posture in front of the mirror, and as she fell asleep at night, she’d practiced the breath, like some forbidden form of yoga. In those early years, she never had any idea if she’d done it right; she suspected she hadn’t. But it
looked
right, and she’d always gotten high, and she figured that was all that really mattered.

“I can’t read this anymore,” she said, suddenly. She was staring at a full-color timeline that made the cessation of ordinary life—the mail delivery, the bus routes—not to mention the leveling of neighborhoods and the deaths of hundreds, into yet another digestible
chunk of information. “It makes me too upset. When did it become okay for the government to just completely betray its own citizens? I mean we’re supposed to be a model democracy.”

“But it’s always been like this,” Abe said. “You shouldn’t be surprised. Remember Vietnam?” He spoke mildly, as though he hadn’t noticed her tone, which had the pleasant effect of calming her down.

“Mmm, Vietnam,” she agreed, for some reason unable to say anything about it.

“Or the Red Scare. McCarthyism.”

“Terrible,” she finally managed.

“Internment, the Trail of Tears—and don’t forget
slavery
.” He was getting really energized now.

Cassandra unbuttoned her blouse and pulled at it briskly. “Terrible, terrible, terrible,” she answered, almost enjoying the sound of the word.

“And now what have we got: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Iraq. That goddamned Patriot Act?”

“Don’t forget Gitmo,” she offered.

He practically collapsed on the table. “Terrible.”

She smiled ruefully, feeling the shy knock of a rare sensation she hadn’t entertained in ages. She cracked the door and there it was, convivial and bearing gorgeous drugs. It was communion, that rushing, happy collision of understanding with being understood. Had she really gone so long without it? Had she gotten it from no one else? Suddenly heady, she lay back on her bench and looked at the flat, bleached-out blue above her. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to fashion a worthy state in her mind—a body politic, a golden dome, a palace of marble and justice!—but it was difficult to maintain her focus on something so grand and abstract. Her own body was right there, demanding attention. Trickles of sweat were forming under her arms and running, winding their way toward the center of the earth. She turned her head to the side, and when she opened her eyes again, she was facing Abe, who was reclining on his bench as well.

Rather than look at him, she looked at the scattered lumps of pink and white chewing gum and the ragged cobwebs that clung to the underside of the table. They were noticeably imperfect, the cobwebs. She didn’t even have to study them closely to see the extrawide channels between the threads or the corners that snagged too sharply on the wood. The threads themselves looked inelastic and frail, and she considered the possibility that they were old cobwebs, abandoned to disintegration by an impatient spider in search of a better corner, with an ampler harvest of flies. She liked the idea so much that she wished she had her sketch pad: the sagging, abandoned cobweb, which so often grows in abandoned places. It was terribly pathetic, the ultimate symbol of forfeiture. Not just humans throwing in the towel, but spiders giving up, too.

Abe was looking at her. She saw his brown eye through the web.