The Secret Life of Violet Grant (6 page)

“Never mind,” he said. “I didn't mean to pry.”

I lifted my head. “Didn't you?”

“Not to make any judgments, Vivian. Just to know about you. What makes you—”

“Tick?”

“What makes you
Vivian
.”

I liked the way he said my name, all throaty on the
V
's, all stretched to its rightful three syllables. The diner was quiet, at least for the middle of Manhattan, only half full, giving me the illusion of privacy, the demi-sanctity of confessional. Something clattered onto the Formica before me. The raisin bun. “Thank you,” I said, without looking up.

“Did he hurt you?” asked Doctor Paul, compassionate.

“Did he hurt me.” I snatched the raisin bun. “Do I look like the kind of girl who lets herself get hurt?”

“You tell me.”

I went on with my mouth full, in a way that would have caused my mother to reach for her third vodka gimlet, no ice. “Look, a girl goes away to college, any girl, every girl, and she's alone. No mother and father, especially no father. She meets a lot of boys, if she's lucky, and they're either painfully awkward or awkwardly pushy, and she wonders where all the men have gone, the ones who know how to speak and act and treat a lady. Oh, wait. Look. There's one! Right at the front of the room, an expert in his field, eminent and confident as all get-out, holding the classroom in his chalk-dusted palm, maybe flashing you a smile, maybe holding your gaze a second or two. You find yourself going to his office to ask a question, to talk about your exam, and lo and behold, he can actually hold a
conversation. He pulls out your chair for you and hangs your coat on a hook. He's civilized. He's a grown-up, and he acts as though you're the only woman in the universe.” I reached for my pocketbook and shook out another smoke. Doctor Paul went for his lighter, but I waved him away and used my own. “So that's how it happens. Daddy complex, whatever the shrinks want to call it. You think you're safe with him, until you're not. Until you're losing your virginity on his office sofa, oopsy-daisy.”

“The difference, of course,” said Doctor Paul, in a voice from another century, “is that this Dr. Grant married her afterward.”

“Stand down, Lancelot. God forbid I should have married
him.
Anyway, I could have said no, and I didn't. I was curious. I had my own urges. Don't let any girl tell you she doesn't.” I let the waitress refill my coffee before I exploded my next little bombshell. “And my mother made it look so easy, having affairs. I thought, well, tiddledywinks. I'm her daughter. It's the family business, isn't it, sleeping with married men.”

“He was married?”

“He's not anymore. It turned out he had a thicket of notches on the arm of his office sofa, and eventually the poor wife discovered them while she was plumping the pillows one day. As I said, a rite of passage, and he was more than happy to perform the sacraments.”

Doctor Paul sat back and stubbed out his cigarette. His cheeks were faintly pink; so was the tip of his nose. “I don't know what to say.”

“Look, I don't regret it. I don't think I do, anyway, except that he was married. That was wrong, that was stupid, and I'd never do that again. It seems I don't have the stomach for adultery, genes or no genes.”

“What a relief.”

“But I can see the same thing happening to her, to Violet. Seduction, that is. She would have been much more alone than I was, wouldn't she, with her family across the ocean, and no other women to share her midnight cocoa and a good laugh? She'd burned every bridge, God help her. So either Dr. Grant seduced her, because she was innocent and
vulnerable, and then he married her out of guilt. Or else she seduced him and made him cough up the ring, ex post coitus.”

“Which one do you think it was?”

I licked the sticky from my fingers and finished off the coffee. Half a cigarette remained in the ashtray, burning quietly, but I'd had my fill.

“Maybe a little of both.” I ground out the cigarette with a little more force than strictly necessary.

Doctor Paul studied my fingers at their work. “What are you thinking?”

Perceptive
, I thought. Maybe he couldn't read my mind yet, but at least he knew when it was chewing on a bone. I folded my arms and leaned forward. “Oh, about what you said. If I'd married my professor, instead of scattering two hundred pages or so of his latest research notes over the new-fallen snow one fine February morning . . .”

Doctor Paul grinned. He picked up my hand and kissed my palm. “And?”

“I think I'd probably have ended up murdering him, too.”

V
iolet never could pinpoint the moment in which her immense regard, her gratitude, and even awe for Dr. Grant transformed into romantic desire. For some reason, this disturbs her. Shouldn't erotic love make its nature obvious from the beginning? Wasn't sexual attraction the first basis for attachment between men and women?

Possibly the idea of Dr. Grant as a sexual partner simply didn't occur to her. She had been exceptionally innocent when she first came to the institute, for all her air of independence. She'd never been kissed, never even held hands with a man. She'd been too busy, too eager to prove herself, and all the boys she knew in college and in New York were just that: boys, callow and conventional, shallow and unimaginative. She imagined herself proudly as a kind of sexless being, her mind too occupied with complex and abstract thoughts to lower itself to base human instincts. To mere physical titillation. So perhaps all that initial awe and gratitude really was a form of sexual desire, sublimated into something the virginal Violet of September 1911 could recognize and accept.

She has an answer ready, though, in case Walter or anyone else should ask.

This is another of the scenes that remains vivid in her brain, mined frequently for details: Dr. Grant standing in his office, two weeks into the
start of the term, and offering her a chair. He had already called for tea, and it was arriving right now in all its lavish plenty, borne on a large tray by the gray-suited secretary. Violet heard his words in her ears:
I have just finished marking your first paper, and I am stunned by the quality of your thought.

Yes:
stunned,
he said. His exact word. He sat in the chair next to her—not behind his desk but directly next to her, his woolen knee nearly brushing hers—and fixed her with his blue eyes and repeated the word:
stunned.

When Violet rehearses this story for her imaginary audience, she usually tells them that her heart gave a skip when he said this, and it did. Her memory is exact, and she feels the emotion again, simply remembering it. Her blood tingles in her fingertips, and her breath becomes thready in her chest. She recovers that exact sense of her younger self: as if she's an explorer, catching a glimpse of some new and undiscovered territory, just out of reach.

The scene resumed.

“Thank you,” she said.

The secretary left, and the door clicked shut.

Dr. Grant turned to the tea and poured her a cup, asked her if she took cream and sugar. Violet answered him politely, though her nerves were singing.

She had
stunned
Dr. Walter Grant by the quality of her thought.

She watched his elegant hands perform before her. She glanced briefly at his lips, full and rather endearingly pink, framed by his short tabby beard. When he gave her the cup and saucer, the tips of his fingers touched the tips of hers.

“I hope I have not seemed cold, this past fortnight.” He took up his own tea. “I was conscious of your peculiar status among the other fellows, and I had no wish to incur their resentment by any particular notice.”

“Yes, of course. I didn't expect any favorable treatment, not at all. I'm just another fellow here, after all.”

“Not just another fellow, Miss Schuyler. You are by far my most promising student. With your diligence and your elegant mind, you make the others seem like factory drudges.”

Violet looked into her muddy tea. “Thank you.”

“My dear”—his tone shifted, taking on a sympathetic weight—“believe me, I do know how difficult it is for you, surrounded by these men of narrow and conservative attitudes, who don't understand you. Isn't it?”

“I have no cause to complain.” Her eyes stung. She kept them trained on her cup.

He shook his head and leaned in a little. “My dear, dear child. I've seen how they avoid you, how they refuse to include you in any of the usual social activities, lunch and tea and that sort of thing. Did you think I hadn't?”

“I hope you haven't wasted your time with such trivial concerns, Dr. Grant. I'm getting along just fine.”

“Tell me, my dear, has any one of them approached you outside of the institute? Has any one of them perhaps offered you any sort of outstretched hand at all?”

“Nothing of any significance.”

“Something, then?”

“I've received a note or two at my room. Invitations to tea.”

“Have you answered them?”

“No. I thought it improper. I didn't even recognize the names.”

“Ah, Violet.” He placed his tea on the edge of the desk and took her hand. “You must understand, you're an exceptionally attractive woman, young and quite obviously inexperienced. I'm afraid this university has no shortage of cads wishing to take advantage of that inexperience.”

His hand was warm around hers. “I am perfectly capable of understanding the difference, Dr. Grant. As I said, I haven't answered the notes. I don't have the slightest interest that way in any of my colleagues.”

“Good.” He patted their enclosed hands. “Very good. I'm relieved to
hear it. I take a particular interest in you, Violet. I see you as a kind of protégé. I intend to look after your interests with all the zeal in my power.”

His kind voice made her eyes prickle with tears. She wouldn't tell him, she couldn't tell him how lonely she'd been, nobody saying a word to her, cold glances and cold lunches, her cramped and empty rooms at the end of the day. Studying, studying. Her coffee delivered hot in the morning by her landlady, accompanied by the only smile she would receive until her return that evening. The alien voices and vehicles and architecture, the September drizzle parted at intervals by a fickle sun. At least at Radcliffe she knew a few other girls like her, ambitious and clever girls, who were always happy to commiserate over hot cocoa at midnight. Here she had nobody, she had less than nobody: a negative space of openly hostile company.

“You are so kind,” she said.

“There, now. If you have any trouble, Violet, you're to come to my office immediately. You may ring me at any time, day or night. You're to think of me as an uncle, Violet, a very dear uncle who admires you greatly.”

If his words were a little more fulsome than avuncular, Violet was too grateful to notice. She blinked back her tears and returned the squeeze of his warm hands. She looked up into his face—the face of Dr. Grant, brilliant and renowned
Dr. Walter Grant
, gazing at her with such tenderness! She was overcome with gratitude; she was melting with it. “Thank you, sir.”

He shook his head, smiling. “You must call me Walter, in these rooms. I'm your uncle, remember? Your nearest relation here.”

“Yes, of course.” But she couldn't quite bring herself to say
Walter
, not yet.

He gave her hand a last pat and picked up his cup. “You'll come to me every week like this, Violet. You're looking rather thin, rather pale; you must eat better. I shall stuff you with cake and sandwiches and send you on your way. Does that sound agreeable?”

She smiled. “Yes, very much.”

And so she and Dr. Grant came to take tea in his sumptuous offices every week, served without comment by his own personal secretary, talking and laughing and calling each other
Dr. Grant
and
Violet
, while the leaves changed color and fell from the trees, and the afternoon sky grew darker and darker, until it began to turn quite black by four o'clock, when she knocked punctually on his door. It was then a week before Christmas, and the air smelled of snow. Dr. Grant stood in his office with a pair of workmen, his white shirtsleeves glowing in the lamplight, wires and plaster everywhere; he was having a new telephone installed, he told her, shaking his head, and the case was hopeless.

Perhaps they should take tea at his house in Norham Gardens instead?

D
octor Paul's living room had potential, and I told him so.

“Your living room has potential, if you'd consider unpacking the moving boxes.” I waved my chopsticks at said boxes, which were clustered in haphazard stacks about the room, like some sort of ironic modernist furniture set. “Maybe a lick of paint, too. White is so sterile.”

“Agreed. It's like being in a hospital.”

“How can you stand it?”

“I'm not here often. I usually sleep in an empty examining room.”

I
tsk
ed. “And you've lived here four weeks. If I were a shrink, I'd suggest you were having second thoughts.”

“About the apartment?”

“About the apartment. About New York.”

“Maybe I was.”

In the absence of furniture, we were lying on the floor in an exact perpendicular relationship: fully clothed, I hasten to add. Our heads were propped up by a single upholstered cushion, provenance unknown, and the little white boxes of Chinese takeout sat agape between us, like a row of teeth awaiting root canals. I picked up one of them now and dug my chopsticks deep into a shiny tangle of chow mein. “What, the charms of our humble town have worn thin already?”

“I don't mean to offend—”

“Which means you're about to do just that.”

“—but I haven't seen much charm to begin with. I work in a hospital, Vivian. All I see is New York's greasy gray underbelly. Do you know what my first patient said to me? My first patient, a little kid of eight years old, in for an appendix—”

I put down my chopsticks. “You're a
kid
surgeon?”

“Yes. He said to me—”

“This is just too much. Perfect Doctor Paul is so perfectly perfect, he saves the lives of nature's little angels.”

“I am not perfect.”

I rolled my head against the cushion and looked at him, inches away. He was staring at the ceiling, chopsticks idling in one hand, chicken chop suey balanced on his ribs. His adorable hair flopped toward the cushion, a little disordered, close enough to taste. The expression on his face wrecked my chest. I said softly: “From where I'm sitting, you're close enough to divine.”

“Don't say that.” He sat up, catching the chicken just in time. “My dad. Pops. He's a gambler.”

“That's a shame, but it's not your fault.”

“No, I mean he really gambles. Deep. Drinks, too. I was lucky, I got out when I could, went to Princeton on scholarship. I have to send him money sometimes.”

“What about your mother?”

“Died when I was ten. Cancer. But I just want you to know, my family's not like yours. We're nobody special.”

“For God's sake, why would I care about that? My special family's a mess.” I removed the white box from his hand and replaced it with my fingers. “Lie down again, will you? You're making me anxious.”

He laughed at that and settled back against the cushion, a tiny fraction closer to me. I felt his hair against mine, his mouth disturbing the air as he spoke. “You've never been anxious in your life, Vivian.”

“Oh, haven't I? I'm anxious now.”

“You shouldn't be.”

I let that sit for a moment in perfect tranquility, because I liked the way it sounded.
You shouldn't be.
Shouldn't be anxious, Vivian, because I am the real deal, I am your Doctor Paul, and we two have an understanding, now, don't we.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Yes?”

“Yes, we have an understanding, don't we?”

He squeezed my hand against the bare parquet floor of his sterile white apartment. “We do.”

Doctor Paul evidently had a clock somewhere, buried in his boxes or else on an unseen shelf, because I could hear it ticking methodically as we lay there in perpendicular quietude, absorbing the force of our understanding. If I could see that clock, I guessed it would read somewhere between seven and eight o'clock in the evening, which meant that I had now known him for just over seven hours.

I traveled through them all again: the post office, my apartment, the walk to the library, the library itself, the coffee shop. Wandering up the dull weekend stretch of Madison Avenue, bending our way to the park, not caring where we went as long as we remained linked by this pulsing thread, this shimmering ribbon of you-and-me. How we talked. Not of ourselves, of course. We stuck to the things that mattered: books read, places traveled, friends met, ideas discarded. An hour had passed in a minute, and another hour in a few electric seconds, until we'd looked up to a lowering sky in blind amazement. “Where are we?” Doctor Paul asked.

“I think that's the Guggenheim, through the trees over there. The museum.”

“I know the Guggenheim. My apartment's only a few blocks away.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

“Imagine that. Are you hungry?”

“Enough to eat you alive.”

“Will Chinese do?”

We ordered takeout from a tiny storefront on Eighty-ninth Street—
THE PEKING DELIGHT
, promised the sign above the window, in bright gold letters on a lucky red background—and Doctor Paul led me to his apartment on Lexington Avenue, on the third floor of an anodyne white-brick apartment block, the primary virtue of which was its close proximity to the express subway stop on Eighty-sixth Street. “It's only fair,” he told me, “since I handed you such a gilded opportunity to have your psychopathic way with me this morning.”

He had opened a bottle of cheap red wine, not a good match for the Chinese, but we drank it anyway in paper Dixie cups, ounce by tannic ounce.

I listened to the clock, the irreplaceable tick of seconds and minutes.

“I should head home,” I said. “You need a few hours of sleep before you go back to the hospital.”

“I suppose I do.”

Neither of us moved.

“I don't like it,” he said. “It's dark out, and that neighborhood of yours—”

I laughed. “Oh, nuts. It's the city that never sleeps, remember? I'll be just fine. Anyway, my parents live around here. I could always sleep there.”

“You could sleep here.”

Our hands were still entangled, his right and my left, clinging on for dear life. Not a muscle twitched in either.

Doctor Paul cleared his throat. “For the record, I meant
sleep
sleep. Real sleep. I'll take the sofa.”

“You have a sofa?”

“Somewhere underneath all these boxes.”

“These boxes you won't unpack.”

“I will now.” Again, he gave his words time to settle in and sink to the
bone. I listened to the cadence of his breath and stared at the nubby white ceiling.
I will now
. I will unpack for you, Vivian, because if New York is your home, it must be mine, too.

He spoke softly. “I don't want you to go, Vivian.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“But I'd love to hear you say it.”

He turned on his side to face me. “I'm afraid that if you go, we'll lose it. This.” He held up our combined hands. “What happened today.”

“No, we won't. We couldn't if we tried.” I detached his hand and rose to my feet. “Go to bed. I'll clean up.”

He rose, too. “Vivian.”

“Go to bed.”

“Like hell I will.”

We cleaned up together, because he wouldn't hear of anything else, finishing off the wine as we went along. I made him unpack the box marked
KITCHEN
so we could drink from genuine glassware next time. His kitchen was even smaller than mine, an L cut short by an old wooden table wedged against the wall, and a stack of plates had to be stored atop the asthmatic Frigidaire.

“I have an idea.” Doctor Paul folded his dish towel and placed both hands on my shoulders. “I'll nap on the sofa while you take the bed, and when it's time for me to go to work, I can drop you off at your own apartment. For one thing, your roommate will be wondering where you are.”

“Sally will be wondering no such thing. Sally will be out earning herself a new pair of shoes, maybe a nice new bracelet if she puts in a little elbow grease. She wouldn't notice if I didn't come home until Monday morning.”

Doctor Paul looked stricken. I patted his cheek. “But it's a lovely plan. Where do I sign?”

A look came into his eyes, perilously close to mine: a look that said he
knew exactly where I should sign on to his plan. His hands sank into my shoulders. He blinked his blue eyes slowly, like a cat readying for naptime, and I knew by the prickling of my skin that he was about to kiss me.

I've already explained that I'm not a shy girl, but some impulse overcame me as Doctor Paul's warm breath bathed my face in chop suey promise. I wanted to kiss him, I wanted to make a meal of him; I most thoroughly wanted him to make a meal of
me
, and yet, at the last perilous instant, I dodged him.

Yes, you heard that right.

I dodged him.

Instead of tilting my face conveniently upward, parted of lips, closed of eyes, trip-hammer of pulse, I stepped into his chest and crushed my nose into his windpipe. His startled arms wrapped around me. A hearty consolation prize of an embrace.

We stood there in awkward disappointment. I felt the need to explain myself. “If we start now, we'll never stop,” I said, next to his ear.

“And we can't have that.”

He owned a terribly comfortable chest, my Doctor Paul. Solid and clean-smelling, his breath flavored with wine and dinner. He stroked my hair until I wanted to stretch like a cat.

He whispered to me, “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking about Violet again.”

“She's on your mind, isn't she?”

“I can't stop wondering. What she was like, what happened to her. How she lost that suitcase.” I pulled a little more Doctor Paul into my lungs. “I was thinking that maybe she was miserable with her professor. Maybe she had finally found someone to love. Someone to trust.”

“Do you think that excuses what she did?”

“I don't know. We don't know what he was like, do we? What he did to
her
. This Dr. Grant of hers.”

Doctor Paul kissed my hair. “Time to sleep, Vivian.”

“Please take the bed. You won't be able to excavate the sofa in time.”

“Where will you sleep?”

“
If
I sleep—which I doubt—I'll just curl up on the cushion.”

He pulled back. “It's not very gentlemanly of me.”

“Nuts to that. Go put on your pajamas.”

We looked at each other for a moment longer, goofy with infatuation, and then he leaned forward to kiss me on the forehead like a good brother.

•   •   •

I AWOKE
on the cushion an hour later, one arm stiff beneath my face, one head exploding with bizarre disconnected dreams in which I was my great-aunt Violet, and my chemistry lab was full of jars of old curiosities like two-headed snakes and rabbit fetuses in formaldehyde, and a naked professor chased me around the counter of a post office in Istanbul. And those were just the scenes I remembered.

In case you were wondering, I knew it was an hour later because I had located the source of all that thunderous ticking and discovered a battery alarm clock in a box marked
BEDROOM
, still set to California time. I had wound the hands ahead three hours and set it next to me so neither I nor Doctor Paul would oversleep. Eight-twenty-two, it said, and in my Violettinged confusion I thought perhaps this was morning, and we were doomed.

But the cracks between the metal blinds were still black, and my brain, returning bit by broken bit to the sanity of consciousness, knew an immense and bone-rattling craving to see how my good doctor was faring alone in his bedroom.

I didn't even remember him going to bed. I remembered watching him drink down a few glasses of water to flush the wine out; I remembered taking in an eyeful of Doctor Paul as he opened the bathroom door, half dressed, and slipped away from me. Then the screen turned black and Violet stepped out with her embryonic tortoises and her naked professor.

I rose to my feet, also numb, and padded to the bedroom.

It was a tiny space, just large enough for the metal mattress frame he called a bed, blanketed in an uninspiring white, and a bent metal chair stacked with books. In the glow from the sleepless city outside, I saw Doctor Paul sprawled on his back in the center. He had flung one arm up on the pillow beside him, and his head was turned toward it, as if he were whispering secrets to his elbow. I watched the rise and fall of his white-blanket chest. Even in sleep, his hair achieved a perfect flop that ached to be set right by a loving hand.

I had to turn away.

I had drunk a couple of glasses of water, too. I stopped in the bathroom for relief, and as I stood at Doctor Paul's sink and washed my hands with Doctor Paul's soap and stared into Doctor Paul's mirror, I caught a glimpse not of myself but of Violet: her beauty, her ravenous ambition, her newborn self standing, as I did, on the brink of a jaw-dropping precipice.

I shed my shoes and dress and stockings and folded them neatly. I was surprised to see that my hands were a little shaky. I looked at myself in my shining silk slip, my cat on a hot tin roof. I kissed my finger and touched it to the mirror.

He came awake the instant I slid under the warm white blanket, or maybe he'd never fallen asleep. At any rate, he seemed remarkably lucid. “You again.”

“Like a bad penny.”

He found the edge of my shining silk slip. He lifted it up and over my head.

I whispered: “I'm not scaring you off, am I?”

“Not even close,” he said, that was all, and his skilled surgeon's hands wrapped around me and took me apart, piece by piece, from my face to my throat, to my breasts and hungry young thighs. I took his face and kissed his sweet mouth, his salty skin, the lovely burnished belly of my dear new Doctor Paul, and there was no stopping us now. It was like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: no sooner had we finished, salt-licked and panting, than we had to start all over again from the beginning.