The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  I lifted my heavy head. “If you had, Doctor Paul, if you’d asked even once, you’d have known that I slept with one man. One. That professor, three years ago.”

  The taxi thrust forward again. Doctor Paul grabbed the door handle.

  “Is that so.”

  “That’s so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have this little problem, you see, that you obviously don’t share. I have a little problem getting attached to the men I sleep with. So. There it is. Not quite as daring as you thought, am I?”

  He tried to take my hand. I snatched it away. We bumped on down Fifth Avenue. I thought about what Mums had said, taking me aside when I went to her bedroom to pick up my coat. Don’t hate me. I asked around a bit. It turns out Uncle Leo’s younger brother knew him at Princeton. He was at the top of his class, Vivian. And dear old Oscar on the hospital board says he’s the most promising young surgeon they’ve got, he’s just naturally gifted, and so good with the children. He’s perfect, honey. Perfect. I’d thought to myself, she must have it bad, he must have really bamboozled her, if she didn’t care about his family and his scholarship and his obscure San Francisco roots. Did she know about the gambling father yet?

  “Vivian,” Doctor Paul said, over Mums’s voice in my head, “listen for a minute. Do you know what happened the other day? Margaux’s father came to the hospital.”

  “You don’t say. S. Barnard Lightfoot III himself?” I whistled sloppily.

  “Himself. He sat down and offered me a million dollars to marry Margaux.”

  “Oh, for the love of Pete.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “A million dollars? To marry Gogo?”

  But even as I said the words, I felt that whoosh in my chest, that sudden vacuum of vital strength that meant I did believe him, I knew this was exactly the kind of thing Lightfoot would do, arrogant and big-balled and not to be denied. Not to be outbid by a third party, in any currency.

  “You don’t have to believe me, I suppose. It shocked the hell out of me, that’s for certain. That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  Possibly I would vomit now. I stared at the cab ceiling and tried to breathe slowly.

  “A million fat ones. That’s a lot of bread, young stud. You must have impressed him.”

  “Half on our engagement, half on our wedding day, he said. Our own apartment on Park when we had our first child.”

  “Classic six?”

  “Seven.”

  “Not playing around, is he? When’s the wedding?”

  “What the hell does that mean? I told him no.”

  “But you must have been tempted. A million dollars.” I lifted my hand and rubbed together my thumb and forefinger.

  “Vivian. Stop it.”

  “So why are you telling me about it?”

  “To show you that I’m sincere.”

  “All you’re showing me, Salisbury, is that you’re willing to make yourself intimate with a pretty girl and break her heart afterward. That you’ll do anything, you’ll turn down a million dollars to avoid making good on what you did to Gogo.”

  “For the last time, I didn’t sleep with her.”

  I turned to him and shouted, “For the last time, it doesn’t matter! It’s how she feels!”

  “What are you saying, Vivian? What do you want? Just tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”

  What do I want. A simple question.

  I fingered my pocketbook, considered the envelopes tucked inside. “Funny little coincidence. As it happens, I had a conference with S. Barnard Lightfoot myself on Tuesday morning. He as good as told me that if I backed off with you, he’d give me carte blanche at the Metropolitan for my story on Violet. He’d make my career.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What do you think I said? I said yes.”

  Somehow, we’d reached my apartment building. Doctor Paul sprang out, opened my door, and handed me out. He reached in his pocket and shoved a couple of dollar bills through the passenger window.

  “You’re not coming in,” I said.

  “You’re not going in alone, the state you’re in.”

  I knew right away I wasn’t going to win this battle. I let him fish my keys out of my pocketbook. “What’s with all the envelopes?” he asked.

  “Violet’s letters to my aunt.”

  “But that’s tremendous! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I didn’t answer. I swept past him and climbed the stairs. I won’t say I didn’t appreciate the steadying hand he put to the small of my back. I was stumbling a little, not at my best. When we reached my apartment, I had to run to the bathroom. He was still there when I came out, tall and imposing in his overcoat. “Don’t you have a hospital to inhabit somewhere?” I asked.

  “Not for an hour or so.”

  “Just my luck.”

  He walked to the kitchen, found a miraculous tumbler in a cabinet, and poured a glass of water from the tap. “Here. You’ll thank me in the morning.”

  I drank obediently.

  He said softly, “You’re so absolute, Vivian. So ardent, inside that crisp shell of yours. You come on like Ava Gardner . . . no, that’s not it. Like Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, like there’s nothing you wouldn’t dare. But in the end, when the chips are down, when everyone pairs off at midnight, you shy away. You can’t stand the nakedness, can you?”

  “I can stand it, all right. I’m just particular. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Your parents must have done some number on you. Or that professor. Tender Vivian. What did they do to you?”

  I crashed the tumbler onto the tabletop, hard and loud, to shout down the sudden pain in my ribs. “Oh, you’re shrinking my head now, are you? Look, I just think you should try doing the right thing for once. You know the rules. You broke it, you bought it?”

  “I didn’t break Margaux.”

  “I beg to differ.”

  He took the empty glass and poured another one. His face was somber as an abandoned puppy. “You’re drunk. You don’t even know what you’re saying.”

  “You just don’t want to hear what I’m saying. I’m offering you a chance to make amends. To do what’s right for someone else for a change. Not just to suit yourself.”

  He watched as I drank my water. Without realizing it, I had retreated a few paces. In another step or two, I’d have my slinky low-cut back to my bedroom door. Nowhere to go. He moved forward one square.

  “What are you afraid of, Vivian?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  Another square. “Look at you. Your eyes. You are scared to death, Vivian Schuyler. I can tell, because for what I suspect is the first time in your life, you’re not making the littlest bit of sense. Tell the man you love to marry your best friend, will you? To marry her? When he loves you instead? You must really want me safely out of reach, don’t you?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him he was an arrogant son of a gun and I didn’t love him. But the damned old throat clammed up on me. Well, I’m not made of stone! He was standing right there, right there, breathing down the bridge of my nose with his promising lips, staring down the marrow of my bones with his blue-scrubbed Paul Newman eyes. Who was I to say I didn’t love the very darling dickens out of him?

  I took a step backward instead.

  “Margaux’s a big girl, Vivian. She doesn’t need you to take care of her. She has lots of people to do that. She’s got a father who’ll spend a million bucks to buy her a husband. She’ll be just fine. The thing I want to know is, who takes care of Vivian?”

  I wet my lips. My back was touching the door now. I let the water glass slide to the floor with a bump. “Vivian takes care of Vivian.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, she’s letting herself slip a bit at the moment.”
He laid one hand against the door, next to my hair. “I’d think of hiring her an assistant, if I were you.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you’re not me.”

  “I’m close enough. You’re stuck in my head, Vivian. My blood. I can’t shake you.” With his other hand, he found my palm and kissed it, like a goddamned romantic movie, like a man who didn’t know what was good for him.

  I leaned back against my bedroom door.

  “So who takes care of you, Doctor Paul?”

  “You do.”

  Violet

  The party in the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré’s splendid flat in Französischestrasse reaches its riotous zenith just after one o’clock in the morning. By then, the butler has long since given up answering the door, and any unfortunate latecomer is forced to wedge his own path from the packed entry hall to the dining room, where the table and chairs have been pushed back and the enormous tiger-striped rug rolled up for dancing, to the cavernous drawing room, where champagne circulates by the bottle and people lean out the windows, trailing smoke.

  Through the walls, the music jingles and jingles, a bouncy ragtime tune Violet recognizes by sound but not by name. She stands by a wall in the library, cradling a glass of champagne between her palms and staring up at a wall of books. The flat has been rented at an exorbitant price from a newly rich family of Prussian industrialists, away in Monte Carlo for the duration of the summer, and if the titles of their books are any indication, they would be delighted by the use to which their rooms have been put. Violet has already opened one door to reveal a half-dressed woman straddling a man atop a precarious French chair; when she stole into the library a few moments ago, she surprised another couple on the sofa in the final throes of concourse. (Not her own husband, thank God.) The comtesse’s friends have followed her here to Berlin, and are making the most of her champagne and her ragtime and her plentiful rooms.

  Violet waited calmly while the couple straightened their clothes and left the room in fits of giggles, and now she is blessedly alone with the German translations of de Sade and Casanova.

  Violet has read de Sade, in the original French. Walter gave her the book soon after they began their affair; she was too reserved, he said, too inhibited, and needed shocking. As if carrying on a clandestine sexual relationship with her decades-older professor, with the renowned Dr. Grant, hadn’t been shocking enough already for a Fifth Avenue debutante from a sedate Knickerbocker family.

  Violet reaches out her hand and runs her finger along the spine. Walter is somewhere in that merry cloud of noise, smoking his pungent pipe. The comtesse drew him away at the moment of their arrival, there was someone she must introduce him to, Oh, my dear Mrs. Grant, you don’t mind my borrowing your husband for just a short, short minute?

  No, Violet had not minded.

  A faint squeak of hinges announces a newcomer, and an instant later Violet hears the heaviness of Lionel Richardson’s voice from the doorway: “I thought I’d find you here.”

  He was looking for her. She extinguishes the thought at once and keeps her gaze trained to the shelves before her, her head canted at the same two o’clock angle to read the titles. She presses her fingers into her champagne glass and says, “It wasn’t much of a stretch, was it? Did you expect to find me dancing ragtime?”

  He doesn’t reply. His footsteps cross the room in authoritative clicks of his well-polished shoes, until he arrives directly behind her, so close she can feel the warmth of his body through his clothing and hers, she can smell his cigarettes and the familiar flavor of his shaving soap beneath, the I, Lionel to which her nerves are now attuned. The tip of his chin, she judges, is within an inch of the crown of her head, and he’s gazing up at the books, matching her own line of vision.

  “Wholesome,” he says, amused.

  “The Prussians are the worst. The strict ones always are.”

  “Don’t I know it.” He moves away, toward one of the giant twelve-paned sash windows, which he opens a few inches. He takes a plain silver case from his jacket pocket and opens it to reveal a neat line of white-papered cigarettes. He doesn’t offer her one; he knows she doesn’t smoke.

  “What are you drinking?” She nods at his glass.

  “Whiskey, in fact. A fine old single-malt Scotch whiskey, hiding amongst the cognac and champagne and schnapps. Would you believe it?” He lifts his glass to her and takes a drink. “Why are you here, Violet? It was the devil of a shock to see you waltz in on your husband’s arm. Not your sort of go at all, is it?”

  “I don’t know. Restless, I suppose. I came home early from the lab and . . .” She lets her voice drift off, leaving it all unsaid: the limpid June air outside, fragrant with promise; Walter, straightening his tie in the mirror and looking at her in surprise, the alarmed sort of surprise. The alternative rising before her eyes, the waiting for him to return, waiting and waiting, pretending to sleep, the late-night click of the door and the rush of the bath water, the old lemony dampness again as he slides noiselessly into the bed beside her. She had accepted their routine long ago. It was part of his job, Walter told her. Part of his job, to discuss ideas into the night, to make connections with the right people. All part of the process of scientific collaboration.

  But tonight she had yearned to go out, too. To meet and connect, to collaborate in the promising June air.

  Except that she was not collaborating, after all, was she? She was hiding away in the study with her champagne, listening to distant ragtime while Walter talked and smiled somewhere inside the music, his trim beard parting for his laugh.

  “It’s that sort of evening, isn’t it?” Lionel lights his cigarette in a rapid flare. The study is dusky and still, lit by a single lamp next to the sofa on which the previous couple had been so joyfully collaborating, disturbed only by the gaiety behind the wall and the occasional shout or blast of horn from the street outside, four stories down. “Anything could happen.”

  Violet swallows the rest of her champagne and sets the glass on an empty patch of shelf. She has always disliked gloves, and the bowl is smudged with her fingerprints, making her think, rather absurdly, of detective novels. “That’s a rather melodramatic thought, coming from you.”

  “What can I say? I’m a romantic at heart, beneath all my carefully cultivated cynicism. Hence the cavalry, rather than a foot regiment.”

  “Yes, Walter said something like that, the evening we met. That he couldn’t quite make you out.”

  “And you? Have you made me out yet?”

  “No. Other than that you’re what you said you were that first night, a barbarian.”

  He laughs. “Not a civilized socialist, like you and Walter? I admit it freely. Though of course I understand your point of view, far better than you understand mine.”

  Violet turns to him, bracing her fingers against the shelf behind her. She’s wearing her best dress, one given to her by Walter a month or two ago, fashionably narrow and high-waisted, a gossamer amethyst purple that suits her pale skin and dark auburn hair. A silver band sparkles around her ribs, just below her breasts, and her shoes are silvery, too. The effect, she suspects, is one of ethereal virginity. She looks now at Lionel Richardson, leaning his laconic body against the windowsill, cigarette dangling between his fingers, lowball glass glinting at his side, eyes regarding her thoughtfully, and wishes she had something like what the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré is wearing tonight: a red silk dress the same color as wine in candlelight, cut low across her bosom, baring her shoulders. “I don’t think that’s true at all,” she says.

  “Of course you don’t.” He uncrosses his legs and tilts his head toward the window. “Do you know what they’re shouting about, out there?”

  “No.”

  “The Hapsburg heir was assassinated yesterday, in Serbia. Shot with his wife in their motorcar, on a state visit.”

  “How dreadful.”

  “You needn
’t pretend with me. I’m sure you’re crowing inside. Down with the ancient empires, isn’t it? They had it coming.” He slips his hand through the opening in the window and knocks the ash from his cigarette onto the sidewalk below.

  “That’s not true. I deplore any sort of violence.”

  “Ah. Not a Bolshevik, then? Not quite so far as that.”

  “Not at all. I believe it will all evolve naturally, the equality of man and the just distribution of property. I don’t think we need a revolution.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Lionel says. His face begins to take on weight, as if the air has grown heavy upon him. “Men want to fight, don’t they? We’ve gone a hundred years without a general European war. England, Germany, France. They’re like horses at the hunt, milling about, waiting for the first hound to scent. Then bloody mayhem.”

  “That’s nonsense. We’re far too rational to fall into that trap again. The workers will never agree to fight.”

  “Won’t they? We’re all nationalists, deep down, Violet. Your average German hates a Slav far more than he hates his factory foreman, and vice versa. It’s human instinct.”

  Violet thrusts herself away from the shelves. “Anyway, it’s all theoretical, isn’t it? There’s no reason to fight.”

  “They’ll find something eventually.”

  “War is never inevitable.”

  “Eventually, it is. Maybe not tonight, maybe not this year. But eventually.”

  “God, I thought I was a pessimist.” The champagne is hitting her brain now, making her fidgety and dreamlike all at once. She circles the room. “Why are we even discussing this? War.”

  “I don’t know. Don’t mind me. Whenever this sort of thing happens, these international crises, Agadir and all that, I get in a funk. Wondering if this is it, if this is the spark that sets everything ablaze.” He stubs out his cigarette against the windowsill and lifts his glass.

  Violet picks up a small Chinese vase and turns it over in her hands. Her blood is beating pleasantly, her nerves alive and tingling. She has done her best to avoid Lionel Richardson since the night in Walter’s study, to avoid this odd understanding that runs like an electromagnetic current between them whenever they collide: at dinner parties in her flat, at Herr Planck’s musical evenings, in the halls of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut. This unexpected intersection of their orbits (or perhaps it is expected, perhaps she has planned it like this) together in this room, without Walter or the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré or Henry Mortimer or anyone else, feels rare and precious, not to be handled roughly, not to be taken for granted. “I suppose it’s your job, to wonder about war,” she says. “I suppose you’d be the first in the fight.”