Beatriz Williams - The Secret Life of Violet Grant

I had no answer ready for Doctor Paul. I had the truth, but what sane person ever wants the truth?

“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.”

Violet 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.”