The Violet Hour: A Novel (32 page)

“You laughed,” he said.

“I thought of something funny.”

“Well, what?”

She didn’t know how to explain it. “I don’t know. These cobwebs. I wanted to draw them.”

He nodded. “I was thinking about those photos you took of that house in Virginia. Remember, the abandoned house by the side of the road?”

She did remember. The lichen was the most electrifying color she’d ever seen. She’d been desperate to use it, but the photos just lingered on the walls of her studio. Her beautiful ruins, becoming nothing. She’d been working freelance for a small graphic press at the time, designing high-end paper products for educated wives. “In retrospect,” she said, “I probably should have tried to use those photos for a calendar or something, instead of hoarding them for myself.”

“That’s a funny thing to say when you’re doing so well. Malibu mansions aren’t enough for you?”

“I guess word spreads.” She was happy he knew about her success. That meant he had to have thought about her, too. She relaxed
further; she could let go of her deepest fear. He hadn’t completely erased her from his mind.

“I saw the write-up in the
Chronicle,
” he said. “Impressive stuff. You really took that tree motif and ran with it.”

She was surprised at his admiring tone. Her first tree didn’t have the best associations.

“Well,” she said, carefully. “I think I’m done with it for now. On to the next thing.”

“Which is?”

She exhaled like a gauge releasing steam. “Who knows. Maybe I’ll go back to that Virginia house.”

“Oh yeah?” He sounded encouraged.

“Probably not, but maybe.” Cassandra looked back at the sky, flat as her flattest forest mural, a sitting room piece with redwoods she’d created for a Hollywood producer. She’d tried to convince him that her installations worked best when they played with three dimensions, but he would have none of it. He wanted two dimensions or none at all. With those standards, she remembered thinking, he’d have been better off buying wallpaper.

“That was Helen’s funeral, remember?” Cassandra said now. Abe relit the joint and offered it to her again. She accepted, keeping her eyes trained away from his face.

He made a chugging sound, as though searching his mental Rolodex. “I think it was after she died. You took pictures of her grave.”

“Right, because we were in town for her funeral.”

“Mmm. That’s not how I remember it.”

Cassandra shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She took another hit, letting the smoke burn her lungs a little longer this time. When she exhaled, she sighed audibly. She wanted him to hear her. She wanted him to recognize all that he’d suppressed. That he’d been so devastated when his grandmother died that he’d pushed her own comfort away. Her breath cooled the sweat on her upper lip, and she began to cough.

“You okay?” he asked.

She lay there and had it out, a string of coughs in twos and threes, each new series breaking as the last one ebbed. She held out the joint for him to take. “Fine,” she finally managed. She collected herself. “Maybe I will dig out those photos. Maybe Mel still needs a calendar.” She pictured the trollish, impossible-to-please owner of Hampton Papers, who hated almost all her ideas.

A breeze rolled over the playground and rustled a burger wrapper some careless person had left behind. She watched it swivel toward them.

“Were you sleeping with him?” Abe asked out of nowhere.

She sat up on her elbows, only to realize by the time she got there that she wasn’t even offended. “With Mel? God, no. You remember him. He was disgusting. That gut and those scrawny arms? He was always spitting when he talked.” She shuddered and lay back down.

“I just remember things went sour quickly,” he said. “One day you were making the best invitations anyone had ever seen and the next day you were in art school.”

“They weren’t the best invitations. I was criticized on every assignment.”

“But they were
good
. Whatever Mel might have said about the company’s needs, he knew they were good. People change their stories all the time.”

“Sure.”

“So you’re saying you didn’t sleep with him.”

She sighed. Indignation was probably the appropriate response, but the grass was bedding down her mind, and she would’ve had to exert herself terrifically to get there. She decided to explain things to him objectively, in as reasonable a tone as possible. “Abe. Professional relationships are complicated enough. They’re uncomfortable. You can never say exactly what you think, and one person always has authority over the other. He made my blood boil, but that’s not the same thing.”

“Maybe it is.”

“I loathed Mel—remember? He was like a, like a goddamned lord of the manor. Changing his mind at the last minute, standing in the middle of that shop with his hands on his hips, scowling at me when he was in a bad mood, watching me over my shoulder. He breathed on me. I hated it.”

Abe rolled his head to the side, impishly, and exhaled in her direction. “Like that?” She frowned, prompting an instinctive “Sorry.”

“No,” she said, “he was more like some kind of wild boar sniffing out his lunch. I mean it was just—disgusting.” There was no other word to describe him.

“But if he hadn’t been so gross, you might’ve slept with him,” Abe mused. He was persistent, but not accusing.

“Why—because of Vince?” She hadn’t spoken his name in ages, and to her surprise, it no longer felt sordid. He’d long since moved to Europe, taking his trust fund with him, and relieving her of her most recent punishment of having to make small talk with his girlish, airheaded fiancée every time his gallery celebrated another show. “Because I’d worked with him? That was an isolated situation. It really, truly was. You have to accept that at this point.” Though she had resumed with him later that year, after Abe was gone, after Elizabeth was gone, when there was no one left to care. It had been good for a while, a deep exfoliating cleanse, searing her from the inside out. He seemed to want her more than ever, as though her abandonment had left her more naked, expanding her body’s terrain, offering him places he hadn’t found before. But eventually her finiteness caught up to them, and Cassandra began to approach their assignations in dread, as though visiting an oncologist. She left feeling hopeless, the diagnosis bad every time. In the end, they parted in grim respect, having done all they could to save her.

“That,” Abe said, “and the other one.”

She was still thinking about Vince, how he was, in the end, a good kid. For a brief, sweet moment, she didn’t understand what Abe meant. Then she remembered.

“And you did say you
wished
you’d had more affairs,” he continued.

She snapped her head in his direction, finally indignant. “I never said that.”

His voice wafted under the table, bemused but firm. “You did. That day. You said I was acting like you’d had dozens of lovers the way I was punishing you. And then you said, ‘God knows I’ve wanted to. You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to.’ Those were your exact words. I’ve played them over in my head many times.”

His quotation took her back to the slick deck of the boat, where most of what had transpired had completely faded from her memory, washed away with the changes that had followed. It was possible she’d said something like that. Anything was possible in the past, before she’d become who she was. “Well, those were the only ones. In twenty years,” she added, though it immediately made her feel small.

“How come, though? If you wanted so badly to have others?”

“I guess I must’ve been chicken. I didn’t want to lose you.”

Her tone was more abstract than tender, and when she looked over at her ex-husband, he was smiling goofily through the cobwebs, like a kid waiting to be found in a game of hide-and-seek. “A lot of good that did you!” he cried.

“Endless good,” she said, and they began to laugh, then laugh further, until they were both unmuzzled and feral, rolling around on their benches and shaking the picnic table with their shuddering spasms, completely uncontrolled and free. They had tears in their red-rimmed eyes, and cracks in their voices. They laughed as though no one had ever died, and the seas had never risen, and they went on, until they had no more breath to continue.

I
n the second year of his residency, he was around even less. His hours were long, and there were additional obligations: dinners he had to attend, often without wives, golf games he had to play.

He said, “If I’m ever going to get this fellowship, I have to do these things.” She believed him when he told her where he had to be. It would’ve been faithless not to believe. She tried to channel all the patient housewives of the movies and television of her youth. She went around twitching her nose for her own entertainment like Samantha on
Bewitched
.

She missed him, but she filled the time. She had started art school. She was taking classes in sculpture, but also drawing and printmaking, and was having some difficulty flattening the world into only two dimensions.

“I feel so stupid,” she said, showing him a lithograph she’d done of a female nude, a middle-aged woman with long, supple legs and a mounded pelvis who’d come to sit for her class. She’d done a fine job of rendering the woman’s body, but she’d let her feet taper off, her hands meld helplessly into her sides. It was not artful. It was cowardly.

“I just can’t do hands,” she said.

“Quit saying that,” he told her. “Other people will start to believe you.”

H
ER PROFESSOR SAID
she had no choice but to practice, so she made a deal with Diane, who she used to sketch carelessly after work and who she missed now that they no longer shared a desk. Diane would come over once a week, and prop her hand up on her elbow for Cassandra to sketch. She had something of the almost-Buddhist in her and she liked practicing being very still. They would often sit like that in silence, Cassandra sketching, Diane absorbing in the pale flank of her forearm the fading shards of light from the windows that looked over the backyard. Those silences were the closest Cassandra had ever come to working continuously in a professional manner, and she found it interesting that Diane should be present for them, as though she needed not just a model, but also a witness, to make her practice real.

Not that the silences lasted long. One of them usually said something after a few minutes, and then the other would respond and soon they’d be chatting, Cassandra still sketching, Diane’s arm still unmoving, the pain of her pose becoming heavy and suspenseful, then even heavier and almost exquisite until she couldn’t bear it anymore and let go. “Jesus! That one was bad!” she’d cry, shaking out her arm. Diane’s limit was Cassandra’s, too—this was their understanding—so that when Diane simply had to move on, Cassandra had to quit her current sketch and start a new one.

Of course there was nothing new about drawing hands. Most budding artists did hand studies in school. Leonardo had done hundreds. But Cassandra still felt she was making an important discovery. As she sketched, she looked closely at the hand, and she thought about it. Not Diane’s particular hand, though it was lovely—slender and strong—but the human hand in general. It could write great books.
It could play complicated concertos on the piano, an instrument she’d never really mastered despite years of painstaking lessons at the upright in her parents’ home. It could make bread and build giant edifices in cities around the world.

It could not, however, hold still for more than several minutes. It was not really, in those minutes, even holding still at all, but rather pulsing, twitching, and fighting passionately against itself. The sketches Cassandra produced of Diane’s hand were each of them a little lie: a flat glimpse of something round and mobile, a frozen moment that, in life, cannot exist.

A
N OLD COLLEGE
classmate moved to the Bay Area that year, a man with whom she’d been friendly. She had dated his roommate briefly, but had always secretly preferred him. His name was Bill, and he was fair-haired and bow-legged, athletic in that vigorous, self-improving manner endemic to small New England towns. Now he was pursuing a doctorate in sociology at Cal.

They met for coffee in the middle of the day, a thing an artist and a graduate student could do.

“Coffee and not much else!” he said, jingling his change. He spoke freely with her, as though they were old friends, former lovers, even.

“You would appreciate this,” he said, showing her a cigarette card he kept in his wallet. It featured a blue-and-green butterfly sidling up to a flowering branch. The butterfly had the body of a woman wearing an orange dress and high heels, and when he tilted the card, she flapped her wings, like magic. “Turns out my old man used to collect them.” As though she knew his father, too. She liked how familiar he was. It made everything easier.

“I had coffee with an old friend today,” she told Abe in bed that night. “Bill Jamison. He’s in Berkeley now, so he looked me up.”

“Never heard of him,” Abe said. “He must be in love with you.” He was lying on his stomach, his voice already dropping off, like a sun-battered, overripe fruit finally letting go of its branch.

“I doubt that.”

Abe shrugged, pressing himself further into his pillow. He was beginning to remind her of Samantha’s husband, Darrin, whose head suddenly got a lot larger in 1969, when Dick Sargent replaced the hobbled Dick York. “Why else would he look you up?”

I don’t know,
she wanted to say,
because he thinks I’m interesting?
But she didn’t. She decided she wouldn’t tell Abe anything more about Bill. Which was obviously fine with Abe, because he was already asleep.

I
N LINE FOR
the next coffee, she stood facing Bill, her back to the cashier. When it was her turn to order, he touched her shoulder and pointed her around.

In the moments that followed, her skin was warm where his finger had been, like a sunburn. She wished he would touch her there again.

After drinking their coffees in the café, they went walking through the city. They stopped at a fancy bakery and peered in the window at all the cakes stacked like sugared hatboxes. In the center was a specialty cake in the shape of a bed on which was drawn a redheaded pinup in a strapless blue one-piece, her legs crossed at the ankles in the air.