The Secret Life of Violet Grant (35 page)

P
aris! City of love! Or was it lights? City of lights. Anyway. The lady looked splendid from the window of the airplane, even clothed in November gray, with that shining serpent Seine clutched to her breast and the grand boulevards crisscrossing her skin. You could not witness Paris from the air without a white ball of excitement going ping-pong in your chest. You could not help the
tap tap tap
of your pointy-toed shoe, eager to make tracks around the doo-doo to the nearest café and arrange itself for display with a miniature coffee and a long crisp cigarette.

But. First. Duty called, or rather I called Duty, waking it up at seven a.m. for an update on Aunt Julie's condition and a confession of my own whereabouts.

“For God's sake, Vivian. Paris?” scratched Mums down the line and across the Atlantic Ocean.

“Yes!” I shouted. “The Georges Cinq! You don't mind wiring a girl a franc or two, do you?”

“You are impossible, Vivian. I should have refused the call. I suppose you're continuing with that story of yours.”

“The one you've forbidden me to write? Yes, indeed.”

“You are impossible, Vivian,” she said again.

“What, you're not giving me permission, are you?”

“Obviously it's not going to stop you if I don't.”

In other words,
fine then, Vivian, go ahead with the damned story, ruin us all, see if I care
. I smiled into the receiver.

“Obviously not,” I said. “How's Aunt Julie?”

“Much better. She's coming home tomorrow. Do finish up, Vivian. This is costing me a fortune. When will you be home?”

“That depends. I may stay forever.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Forever!”

Her sigh roiled the oceans. “I'll wire the money to the American Express on the Avenue de l'Opera. And for God's sake, don't sleep with any Frenchmen. You'll catch something hideous.”

“So full of maternal advice. Good-bye, Mums. Give my love to Aunt Julie.”

I lay on the bed for a moment with the telephone at my side. I loved high-ceilinged Paris hotel rooms, the feeling that you were sleeping in the middle of someone else's history. My cubbyhole here wasn't the Imperial suite, not by a grand
étoile
, but I subscribed to the general theory that the worst room in the best hotel was better than the best room in a second-rate hotel. For one thing, you had Pierre-Auguste, the Georges Cinq concierge. I picked up the receiver and dialed him up.

“Mademoiselle Schuyler! What may I do for you this afternoon?”

“My favorite words. Could you find me the address of the Maxwell Institute, please?”

“The Maxwell Institute. Do you perhaps know the quarter in which it is found, this institute?”

“I haven't the least idea, Pierre-Auguste, but I have every confidence you'll be able to find it for me.”

“Right away, Mademoiselle Schuyler.”

My second-favorite words. I thanked him, hung up the receiver, and swung my legs over the side of the bed. I was wearing my best Chanel
suit—quality over quantity, Mums always said—and
naturellement
it suited me perfectly, down to the bracelet sleeves and matching pillbox hat. Look the part, that's what you did in Paris, or anywhere for that matter. But. Especially Paris. I lifted myself across the room to the mirror, where I reapplied my hat and reapplied my velvet pink lipstick. The phone rang.

“Pierre-Auguste?” I said.

“
Non
, mademoiselle. This is the hotel switchboard. You have a call from New York.”

I sank into the chair and propped my feet on the bed. “Put her on.”

But it wasn't Mums. It was . . .

“Hello, Vivs.”

I didn't recognize the voice, all distorted from the overseas connection, all subdued and borne down by conviction. But no one else called me
Vivs
quite like that.

“Gogo! Dear. How are you?” I wrapped my hand around the arm of the chair to steady myself.

“Vivs. Honey. How are
you
?”

“Fine, fine. Having a marvelous time in Paris. Research for my story.”

“Your mother told me where to find you.”

A tremor of a pause. I imagined her winding the telephone cord around her finger, unwinding it again. The image was so vivid, I began to fiddle with my own cord, loop it round and round. Strangling myself.

“Good old Mums,” I said.

“Why didn't you tell me, Vivs? Why didn't you? I thought we were friends.”

“We were friends. We are friends. What's happened, Gogo?”

“David told me everything. Yesterday morning, lunchtime actually, he came by the office and we had coffee and he told me everything. Why didn't you tell me?”

“How could I tell you? You had your heart set on him. You were
perfect for each other.” I tightened the cord another notch. “You
are
perfect for each other. I'm just . . . I'm wild oats, Gogo. I'm nobody's true love. I'm a selfish old broad and always will be.”

“Vivs, you're an idiot. You're beautiful and brave and magnificent and he loves you.”

“Sweetie pie, there's love and there's love. If he's confusing the two, he's the idiot.”

“Anyway, I gave him back the ring.”

“You did what?”

“Gave him back the ring.” A laugh came down through the snap crackle pop. She was strengthening now, strengthening and lightening all at once. “And then I marched down to Daddy's office and told him he could take his money and stuff it . . . stuff it in his mattress. And then I went out and got drunk, Vivs, drunk! With Agatha!” Another laugh. “And it felt good, and I called you in London to tell you, but you didn't answer.”

“Jesus, Gogo. Are you all right?”

“I am a-okay, Vivs. Hunky dory. I really am. I am looking down at my finger, and I'm so glad, Vivs, so damned
glad
there's nothing on it.”

“Gogo, listen to me. You need to sit down. You need to . . . to think this through . . . You're not yourself. I'm flying back to New York right now. Don't . . . Jesus, Gogo, don't even leave the apartment.” I stood up, with the receiver caught on my shoulder, and reached for my suitcase against the wall. My hands were all a-flutter.

“No! God, Vivian. You think I'm a child, don't you? A helpless child. That's what all of you think. But I'm not, I'm really not. I'm a grown-up, and I'm not”—laughter again—“
not
going to marry a man my father bribed with a million dollars, a man who's in love with my best friend . . .”

My best friend
. I put my hand on my eyes. “He does care for you, Gogo. It's not just the money.”

“He doesn't care for me like he cares for you. You should have seen his
eyes, Vivs.” The last part was buried under a flurry of copper-wired interference. “He was a wreck.”

“A what?”

“A wreck! Anyway, I gave him back the ring. I made him take it. He told me he'd go through with it if I wanted, but I set him straight. I set him straight as a metal ruler.” The transatlantic static was no match for Gogo's determination, not even close.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my ashen face under my golden-yellow pillbox hat. “What did your father say?”

“What's that, Vivs? Speak up!”

“Your father! What did he say?”

“Oh, Daddy? He swore at me, of course.” Laugh laugh. “And he said he damned well better get his money back from David. But David will give it back, obviously, and then . . . well.”

“Well what?”

“Well. I just want you to know, Vivs, it's the reason I called, really, that the two of you . . . Well. You're free. Don't worry about little old me. I'm a big girl now.”

“Yes, you are. You are the biggest girl I know.” I pressed my fingertip into the mirror until it shone white and free of blood, and a ring of fog circled it on the glass.

Gogo, the only one of us who comes out of this smelling good.

“Well, good-bye, Vivs. Have a lovely time in Paris. I want postcards.”

“You've got them.”

The line clicked. I replaced the receiver and gazed at my pale mug in the mirror, my cat eyes reduced to roundness. My pink lipstick, garish now.

He was a wreck.
Well. Good. He deserved to be. We both deserved it. Wrecks, the two of us. Wreckers. We had our just deserts, our
poires au
Grand Marnier
stuck with bitter cloves. I only hoped Paul really had been
lying about the Vegas racket. I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of Lightfoot's ledger. Not for a million dollars.

The telephone, still in my hands, startled me with a harum-scarum
ringringring
. I let it go until my heart steadied.

“Vivian Schuyler.”

“Mademoiselle Schuyler! This is Pierre-Auguste speaking. I regret I cannot find any record of an institute Maxwell in Paris, or the suburbs. I have tried the telephone directory, the maps. I have asked the manager.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“I can keep looking, mademoiselle, but . . .” He hung his silence expressively.

“No, that's all right. Thank you anyway.”

“I am always happy to be of service, mademoiselle.”

I turned away from the mirror. “Thank you, Pierre-Auguste. Oh! Wait a moment. Perhaps you could send a cable for me.”

“But of course.”

“It's for a Mrs. Julie . . . Oh, damn . . . Hadley, that's it. Mrs. Julie Hadley, the Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.”

•   •   •

HER REPLY
arrived two hours later, at four in the afternoon:

NOT
MAXWELL
INSTITUTE
STOP
MORTIMER
STOP
GOD
DAMN
MORPHINE
STOP
LOVE
JULIE

T
he telephone rings at four-forty-five in the afternoon, just as Violet is about to rise from her desk to retire for the day. She doesn't last as long as she used to, but she can forgive herself for that. One does not reach an age when one's joints rattle in their sockets without having earned the privilege of coming and going at will.

She picks up the receiver.
“Oui, j'écoute.”

“Madame, there is a young lady to see you. A Mademoiselle Vivian Schuyler.”

Violet's body stills at the news. She hasn't heard that name in many years, and yet, like a scent from childhood, it awakens an instant chemical reaction inside her. The blood quickens, the ears sharpen. Her eyes fall upon the photograph on her desk, in its molten silver frame, and she studies it for a moment, counting the strikes of her heart, while Mademoiselle Bernard waits knowingly on the other end. Seventy-two beats per minute. “Vivian Schuyler, did you say?”

“Oui, madame.”

Vivian Schuyler. That would be Charles's daughter, the one who went to Bryn Mawr and now works for some sort of fashionable New York magazine. Violet saw her photograph in the paper a few years ago, when she and her parents had been traveling through Europe. An exclusive
party of some kind. She was quite lovely, Vivian. In the photograph, she was smiling, smiling with her black-and-white mouth just parted, as if she were about to say something unfathomably daring.

Violet rises from her chair with the telephone receiver still at her ear. “Make her comfortable, Mademoiselle Bernard, and tell her I shall be downstairs instantly. And could you discover my husband's whereabouts and tell him to join us?”

Well, not instantly. But Violet can still move about with briskness. She credits her active life for that, her years spent on her feet inside the laboratory and chasing her children around outside it. Her husband, who keeps her brain busy, who makes her laugh, who still, when the wind is north by northwest, makes eager love to her in their high four-posted bed on the second floor of what had once, in another age, been the Hôtel de Saint-Honoré, the Paris residence of the aristocratic family of that name.

She smoothes down her dress and looks in the tiny mirror on the wall, next to the door. Her heart beats in great smacks against the wall of her chest. She pinches her cheeks and adds a little lipstick from her pocketbook. This is a grand occasion, after all. She's been expecting it for years, decades, and now that it's here . . . well, she can't quite comprehend why the air still hangs about the furniture in the ordinary way.

Violet opens the door and makes her way down the expansive staircase to the salon on the ground floor.

A young woman in a fashionable golden-yellow tweed suit stands staring at the portrait above the mantel. She turns, and Violet catches her breath in recognition at her eyes, large and Schuyler blue, tilting upward at the corners in a catlike way that she's enhanced with artful black kohl and a thick lashing of mascara. Her wide mouth, slicked with velvet pink. Her brave cheekbones holding it all up. Her chestnut hair beneath her pillbox hat, flipping playfully at the ends to expose her dainty ears. Vivian is iridescent.

“Violet?” Her voice is rich and comes from her chest. Her eyes are shining, brimming over. “Aunt Violet?”

Violet whispers: “Yes. Yes, dear. It's me.”

Vivian makes a movement with her torso, as if she wants to step forward but can't. She gestures to her feet, and for the first time Violet sees the leather valise on the floor next to her. “I've brought your suitcase.”

“My suitcase.”

“The one you left behind . . .” Vivian's voice falters at last. “Left behind in Zurich.”

Violet wavers. “Oh. Oh, my dear girl.”

And then Vivian is holding her up, crying and laughing, and Violet's nose is full of the cosmetic patchouli scent of her, the whiff of cigarettes and life, the soft scratchiness of her golden-yellow tweed shoulder.

“You're taller than I thought,” says Vivian. “You're almost as tall as I am.”

The door creaks, and Violet turns with pride to the salt-and-pepper man who stands with his hand upon the knob, watching the two of them with an expression of well-deserved bemusement.

“Darling,” she says, “this is my great-niece, Vivian Schuyler. Vivian, my dear, I want you to meet my beloved husband. Henry Mortimer.”