The Secret Life of Violet Grant (15 page)

All at once Violet becomes conscious of the silence teetering in the space between them, the absolute rock-stillness of Walter's body next to her. She looks back at the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré, whose bright eyes haven't waved a millimeter from Walter's stricken face.

Lionel's laugh fractures the impasse. “Ah! That's the marvelous thing about American women. You're never in any doubt where you stand, are you?”

The comtesse laughs, too. “I'm awfully sorry. Was I too direct? Perhaps you might offer us a seat, Dr. Grant, and I'll promise to be on my best behavior.”

“Of course, of course.” Walter lifts his hand and gestures with relief for the waiter. Chairs are brought, another bottle of wine called for in Lionel's flawless German. Violet crams herself into the corner, making room for Henry's lanky adolescent shoulders. He glances at the clusters of dainty green peas on her plate.

“Oxygen?” he asks quietly.

Violet lets out a breath she hardly knew she was holding. “Yes, oxygen.”

She glances up, sensing observation, and finds Lionel Richardson watching them both with his patient gray eyes.

•   •   •

VIOLET WAITS
until Walter joins her in the bedroom before making her decision. She is already in bed, a book in her lap; the evening is warm, and for the first time since September she wears a summer nightgown, white cotton trimmed with a token bit of lace at the neck and sleeves. She dislikes the itchiness of lace against her skin, the sense of delicate entrapment.

Walter comes from the bathroom in his thick flannel pajamas, smelling of soap and tooth powder. He bathes every night before bed, no matter how late the hour, and again in the morning when he wakes up, bracketing his sleep with cleanliness. Ordinarily Violet is irritated by this ritual, the way she's forced to wait for his attention in the evening, and she resents the lemony dampness of his skin when he climbs at last into bed beside her. Tonight, for some reason, she welcomes it.

“I think you should take him on,” she says.

Walter is swinging his legs under the covers. “What's that?”

“The boy, Henry Mortimer. I think you should take him on.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. I think he's brilliant. I think you should give him a chance.”

“Hmm.”

Violet turns on her side to face him. He has already switched off the lamp on his side of the bed; hers still casts out a gentle incandescent glow. Their Berlin flat is large and quite modern, quite up-to-date, fully wired for electricity and telephone, piping-hot water delivered with casual abundance to every bathroom. There are brand-new Victrola gramophones in the study and here in the bedroom. Violet feels the outline of the electric light along her body and sets the book on the nightstand.

“What did you think of them?” she asks. “The comtesse and her son.”

“I shall take the matter under consideration.” He turns his head to look at her. His eyes are crinkled at the corners, wry or amused. “And you, child? What did you think of my surprise this afternoon?”

“What surprise?”

“Young Richardson.”

“He's not so young. He's older than I am.”

“Ah, but you're very, very young, aren't you, child? Not much older than Mr. Mortimer.”

“I am
several
years older than Mr. Mortimer.”

“Did you find him handsome?”

“What, the boy?”

Walter laughs. “No. Richardson.”

“I suppose so. Not really.”

Another laugh. “Which is it?”

“Well, he's not conventionally handsome, is he? Not an Adonis.” Violet closes her eyes and pictures a silken black head.

“He was quite the most extraordinary student I ever had. Excepting you, of course, little child.” He pulls away abruptly and rises from the bed.

Violet watches him pad across the bare wooden floorboards to the Victrola and sift through the recordings piled up beside the machine. “How so?”

“He murdered his stepfather when he was fifteen.”

Violet starts upward. The blanket falls away from her chest. “What?”

“Oh, it wasn't cold-blooded. His parents divorced when he was quite young—the old earl was a vicious chap, there's the aristocracy for you—and the mother picked another blackguard for her second husband, as these silly women do. Regular beatings, according to the evidence. Bloody threats and knifepoint arguments.” Walter holds up a black disc and examines the label. “And one day Lionel had had enough. Picked up a gun of some sort and shot the old fellow through the heart. The court ruled it was self-defense, but of course none of the other universities would have him. I had to fight like blazes to bring him in.”

“Good God.” Violet's pulse bangs against the skin of her neck. She recalls Lionel's measured movements, his thick arms, his predatory grace. His silvery gray eyes, vivid in her memory. “Why did you? Bring him in?”

“He's ferociously intelligent. And not a rote thinker at all; he has a way of looking at every problem in a new way. An original way. Often wrong, of course, but sometimes startlingly right.” Walter lays a black disc upon the Victrola's plate and turns the switch. He bends over to place the needle just so. “And yet he was absolutely conventional in his habits. Rode to bloody hounds all winter, boxing and shooting and every last thing. Built like a prizefighter, as you saw. I expect he votes Conservative.”

“Good God.”

Walter laughs. “Don't be afraid, child. It was years ago. He's a soldier now. Gets all that barbarism out of his system by legitimate means.”

The opening notes of the Pastorale explore the room in scratches and pops. Violet's muscles clench in response, her arms and legs and jaws, her heart. As if to bolt. She forces herself to breathe. “I suppose I'm not surprised. I know his sort.”

“He's not a bad chap. Only unenlightened.”

“Did you hear what he said?” Violet deepens her voice into a mocking English cadence. “
I'd expect I would be her life's work.
I wanted to smack him.”

Her husband turns to lean against the dresser and folds his arms across his chest. His teeth flash yellow-white in the glow of Violet's lamp. “He might have liked that.”

“Brute,” she whispers.

“Ah, child.” Walter, smiling, approaches the bed and opens the nightstand drawer, where his tissue-thin made-to-order sheepskin condoms wait in their ivory case. The violins swell into a tinny chorus through the Victrola's curving horn. “All men are brutes.”

G
ogo was already wearing her carnation polka-dot pajamas when I arrived for visiting hours at a quarter to seven, or maybe she'd never dressed to begin with. Her eyes were rabbity pink, and her long hair was wrapped up in an improbably cheerful green-and-yellow Hermès headscarf.

“You look like an Easter egg.” I kissed her cheeks.

She managed a giggle. “I've eaten nothing but chocolate all day. I even drank chocolate. Mummy calls it her cure.”

“Mummy should know,” I said. Gogo lived with her mother, the original Mrs. S. Barnard Lightfoot III, who had about as much luck with her next two husbands as she had with her first. She was now engaged to an aging bon vivant who was probably homosexual. Hope springeth eternal, as the gentle rain from heaven.

Or maybe that was mercy. Droppeth.

“Poor Mummy. Do you think it runs in the family?” Gogo didn't wait for an answer, but took me by the hand and led me past fluffy pastel furniture and Mummy's antique doll collection until we arrived at her bedroom, decorated abundantly in Early American Princess.

“It's just possible.” I sat down delicately on my usual gingham
armchair while Gogo threw herself on her usual tissue-strewn bed. “You know, this is all feeling strangely familiar.”

Gogo clutched Rufus to her chest and stared at the ceiling. “It's different this time, Vivs. I really loved him. I really did.”

“He's a handsome one, that's for sure. A shiny specimen. Naturally you're snowed. But—”

“It wasn't just that. It was the way he looked at me, Vivs. As if he understood me. As if he could see past all
this
”—she waved a hand dismissively up and down her fashion-plate figure—“and saw everything inside. Do you know what it was like?”

“I can't imagine.”

She turned her head to look at me. Her eyes were brimming with teary goodness. “Like the way you look at me. As if I'm a human being.”

“Oh, honey.” I leaned forward and propped my elbows on the mattress. “How can you be the way you are, Gogo? The way you trust people. The way you see the beauty in everything. I don't understand you, not a bit.”

“Yes, you do. I'm not complicated, like you are. I'm as simple as simple can be. All I want is someone to love me, a family to take care of, a house to fill up. The way things were when I was a little girl. I . . .” Her eyes filled anew. “That's it, isn't it? I'm boring.”

“You're not boring.”

“I wish I were more like you, Vivs. I wish I had your . . . I don't know what it is. That spirit of yours. You're so modern and brave.”

“I'm not brave at all. Brash, maybe.”

“Yes, you
are
brave.” She took my hand and pulled me onto the bed next to her and put her polka-dot arms around me. She smelled like Johnson's baby powder, pink and perfect. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“You can tell me anything.”

“The moment I knew I was in love with him.”

I breathed carefully around the knot of building pressure in my chest.
I found it helped to dig my fingernails into my palms, as hard as I could bear.

She went on in her soft voice: “It was at the end of vacation. He was going home in a few days. We went out to dinner and drinks and I had . . . well, I had a little too much champagne. I guess he did, too.”

“That's my girl.”

“And we went back to my room—Mummy was still out with Gilbert—and we . . . we were kissing and . . . things . . . and I decided I would do it. I would . . . you know . . . with him.”

There was no breathing now. I was suffocating on the hard knot lodged in my lungs, I was sinking irretrievably into the squish of Gogo's mattress.

Gogo was stroking my arm. Her fingers found the skin beneath the elbow-length sleeves of my black-and-white checked jacket, my snug little wonder of a female business suit. “So we took off our clothes and we were on the bed and . . . well, it felt so good, Vivs, the way he touched me. Really, really good. Is that bad of me?”

“No. It's not bad of you.”

“Because Mummy always said . . .” She hesitated. “But it felt
so
good, Vivs. He was so gentle. And we were about to . . . you know . . . and I told him . . . I told him I'd never done this before. And he . . . he . . . Oh, Vivs.”

“What did he do, honey?” I whispered. My eyes were watering from the cut of my fingernails into my palms. My body was too hot in its wool suit and silk stockings. I toed off my shoes and let them tumble to the fluffy pink carpet. “Did he hurt you?”

She moved us both with her sigh. “He stopped.”

“He stopped.”

“He stopped. He said we should wait. He said it should be special, my first time. Well, I told him that it
was
special, that it was, you know, perfect. I told him I really wanted to do it. And I did! I really did! But he said no, we should wait.” She made a sad little giggle, a brokenhearted noise.
“I thought that meant he wanted to wait until we were married. That it was a sign, you know, that the reason I'd always been disappointed, the reason I'd been saving myself all this time, was for him.”

“You'd think.”

“Anyway, that was when I knew it was real. That he was a true gentleman and I loved him.”

“Of course it was.”

“Do you think it was wrong of me? Going to bed with him like that?”

I withdrew my claws from my palms and curled my fingers around hers. “No, Gogo. You were in love with him. You wanted to show him. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“I thought he loved me. I really did. Why else would he stop like that?”

Why, indeed.

I stared across the room at the gigantic antique dollhouse against the wall, a relic of Victorian girlhood, flawless in every gingerbread detail. It had been Gogo's mother's dollhouse, and she had given it to Gogo for her eighth birthday. Gogo once told me that she, Gogo, wanted to put it away in storage somewhere—she was twenty-two years old, for heaven's sake—but she didn't want to hurt her mother's feelings. She had been reclining on this very bed at the time, staring at the ceiling, dressed in a white nightie and fluffy white slippers, which she propped up against the wall, one slender ankle twined around the other. She'd just wait until she got married, she said, and give it to her own daughter. She'd name her daughter Vivian, she said, and then the little girl would be just like me.

Well, in that case, her little girl might not have much to do with dollhouses, I'd pointed out. Gogo had laughed and said yes, but she'd play with it anyway, just to humor her mummy.

I wondered, sometimes, if Gogo didn't understand me better than anyone.

“Can you stay with me tonight?” Gogo asked.

“I'm sorry, hon. I have a lot of work to do. I'm working on a gig for the magazine.”

“The one you told me about on the telephone?”

“That's the one.” I swallowed and went on. “You know what? I found out today that Aunt Violet knew all the most eminent physicists of her time. They were all there together at this scientific institute in Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, before the war. Einstein was there. Max Planck. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. They used to get together at Planck's house for musical evenings, after they left the laboratory for the day. Einstein played the violin.”

“Einstein. Really.”

“Can you imagine? All those brilliant minds in one place. A real bash.”

“Like college all over again. Don't you miss college, Vivs? We had such laughs. Do you remember that time we stayed up late, talking about that book, what was it . . . the heiress whose husband had to take her name, except his family wouldn't let him . . .”

“Cecilia.
Fanny Burney.
”

“I liked that book.” She picked at her pajamas. “Sometimes I wish we didn't have to grow up like this. Daddy used to say that to me, all the time, you know that?” She deepened her voice into the Lightfoot growl. “
Don't grow up, sweetie. Stay just the way you are.
And he was dead right, wasn't he, like he always is. Being a grown-up is the pits.”

I gave her hands a little squeeze and sat up. “I should really be going.”

“Do you have to?”

“Yes, I really do. I brought a couple of biographies with me. Einstein and Meitner. I'll read them tonight.”

She padded after me through the ghostly Easter-egg rooms of her mother's apartment. I found my pocketbook and briefcase in the hall and turned around to hug her good-bye. “You'll be all right, won't you? I can stay if you want.”

“I'll be fine. Daddy's calling every half hour.”

“Good. I'll call you at bedtime.”

Gogo's blue eyes went round. “Oh, Vivs, I completely forgot! I'm such a selfish little thing. Your boy, the one you met over the weekend. I never even asked about him!”

I picked up my briefcase. “Oh, it was nothing, really. I woke up Monday and realized I could live without him. End of story. Fun while it lasted.”

“Really, Vivs?” Her soulful look, searching me out.

“Really, Gogo.”

She shook her head. “Gosh, Vivs. I wish I could be you.”

That one, I had no answer for.

•   •   •

A LETTER
in the mail slot. I almost didn't open it, I almost chucked it into the bin right there in the vestibule, but I am who I am. A curious animal.

I read it at the table in the living room. I tend to get too sentimental in the bedroom. Too much like Gogo.

Dear Vivian,

I'm writing this between surgeries, so excuse my haste. I just wanted to let you know that I'm thinking of you all the time, you're like a low and constant hum at the back of my brain, even when I'm working, and when I have a moment to myself with a cup of coffee, you rise up and stand before me in electric Vivian color with that smile on your face, the one that got me in the chest right from the start. I try not to waste a second, so I pick some scene from the weekend—the coffee shop, or the library, or when we stood in front
of the Balto statue in the park and read the inscription together, and you wouldn't look at me afterward, and I knew you were crying. Well, that brave old dog made me tear up, too, just so you know. I try not to think about what happened afterward, at my apartment. How perfect it was. I'm saving that for when I'm really down.

Not giving up, Vivian. Ever.

Yours,

Paul

 

Oh, Jesus. Oh, my ever-loving Christ.

Here's what I would do: I would think about Gogo and Doctor Paul in that Los Angeles hotel bed together. I would think about Gogo naked and him naked, and fuse the two images into one entwined whole, and the nausea that followed this thought would work like a reverse Pavlovian response, until every time I remembered Doctor Paul, I'd feel that same curl of nausea. I would be cured.

A little fun, he'd said. A few kisses, maybe a little more.

Liar, liar. Pants on fire.

I crumpled the letter into a ball and tossed it into the basket. I thought about making dinner, but I wasn't hungry, still had that ball of nausea in my stomach, so instead I carried my briefcase into my bedroom and changed into my favorite blue-stripe pajamas. I took out the Einstein biography, propped myself on the pillow, and focused my eyes on the dry words before me.