Beatriz Williams - The Secret Life of Violet Grant

“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.