The Secret Life of Violet Grant

Vivian

Doctor 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 tsked. “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.

Violet

Violet knows she had only herself to blame for what happened that day. Walter might have made the invitation, but while the Violet Schuyler of 1911 was still sexually innocent, she was nobody’s fool.

As she walked down the darkened paving stones of Magdalen Street, with Dr. Grant at her side keeping up a reassuring stream of chatter, she knew his suggestion of a private meeting had not been made thoughtlessly. They might have gone to a tea shop on the high street, or even a respectable hotel lobby, some public place, well lit and filled with people. There was no need to rendezvous at his house.

He was speaking of telephones. “I’ve never quite liked the things, to be perfectly honest. As a means of communication, they’re wholly unsatisfying. One can’t hear the other party properly, one hasn’t the assistance of gesture and tone. It has all the disadvantages of communicating by letter, without the advantage of being able to express oneself with any sort of detail or subtlety.”

Violet, who hated telephones, found herself saying, “But at least they’re immediate. If you want a doctor, or the police—”

“Yes, for emergencies, of course. But it’s a disaster for human communication.”

“And you pride yourself on being so very modern.”

Dr. Grant laughed. “Yes. I suppose one’s got to be old-fashioned about something.”

They crossed Broad Street, under the dull orange glow of an arc lamp, and for an instant, as a motor-omnibus rattled near in a jangling chaos of headlamps and petrol fumes, Dr. Grant laid a protective hand at her elbow.

Violet knew the way; her own rooms were not far from Dr. Grant’s imposing house. The buildings slid past the sides of her vision, gray Oxford stone blurred by the settling darkness, illuminated in lurid patches by the arc lamps. People hurried past, buried deep in their overcoats, never looking up, never noticing the pair of them, Violet and Dr. Grant, his hand now permanently affixed to her elbow. The heavy damp chill in the air froze her lungs.

She could have said no. She could still stop and say she had changed her mind, she’d rather go to the tea shop, she’d rather go home and study. Dr. Grant’s limbs struck out confidently next to her, his voice cheered the frosted air. Dr. Walter Grant, taking her to tea in his private residence.

Red-brown and Gothic outside, Dr. Grant’s house surprised Violet on the inside. Its high-ceilinged grace reminded her of home, of the elegantly proportioned rooms over which her mother competently presided, except that these light-colored walls and clean furnishings disdained the cluttered excess of the past. A silent housekeeper took her coat, and Dr. Grant ushered her into a small sitting room at the back, where not a single silver-framed photograph decorated the side table, and a coal fire fizzed comfortably under a mantel nearly bare of objects, except for a pair of small Delftware vases standing at either end. A phonograph horn bellowed upward from a square end table near the wall.

Dr. Grant walked to the fire and spread out his hands. “Ah, that’s better. What a devil of a chill out there today. I shouldn’t be surprised if it snows.”

“It certainly feels like snow.”

He turned to her. He was smiling, quite at ease. He spread out his hands behind him, catching the warmth from the fire. “You, of course, have the advantage of youth. A man of my advanced years feels the cold more acutely every year.”

“You’re hardly that,” Violet said, taking her cue. But she meant it, too. Though Dr. Grant was older than her own father, he existed in a separate category altogether from parents and uncles and middle-aged men, whose waistcoats strained over their comfortable bellies. Dr. Grant’s stance was elastic, his eyes bright and blue, the mind behind those eyes quick and supple. His brilliant mind: it excited her; it had excited her for years, long before she arrived in England. She couldn’t quite believe that she was standing in Dr. Walter Grant’s own private sitting room, waiting for his housekeeper to bring tea. That he had chosen to bring her to his home.

“The tea should be ready directly,” he said, as if he’d read her own mind, “by virtue of that very telephone I’ve just been reviling. Though perhaps a drink of brandy might not come amiss, in this chill?” He raised his eyebrows hopefully.

“Yes, brandy. Of course.”

He poured and offered; Violet sipped hers watchfully. She was not a drinker of brandy. It burned down her throat to her empty stomach. She disguised the shock with a bright smile.

“Drink it down, child,” Dr. Grant said. “All of it. Brandy warms the soul.”

Violet drank obediently. She was surprised to find that the glass trembled slightly in her hand.

Dr. Grant walked to the phonograph and settled a disc on the turntable. “Do you like Stravinsky?” he asked. Before she could think of a reply, a violin zigzagged tinnily from the scalloped edges of the bell.

A knock, and the door opened. The housekeeper arranged the tea things on the side table. Dr. Grant offered Violet a chair and poured her a cup. She sat and drank her tea, trying to think of something clever to say, while Dr. Grant carried another chair from near the sofa and placed it beside hers. He settled himself into it, tea in hand.

“Here we are, quite comfortable,” he said.

Looking back, Violet is never able to pinpoint the moment in which the tenor of the conversation began to change. Perhaps the note had always been there, from the beginning, from the morning she first walked into his office. Perhaps it had only amplified slowly, decibel by decibel, week by week, tea by intimate tea, so that Violet was not quite alarmed when Dr. Grant’s hand found its way to her knee, half an hour after she had entered his house, and he asked her whether she had left any admirers languishing behind her in New York.

“No, none at all. I was far too busy for that.”

“Surely some young man awakened your interest?”

“No. Not one.” She met his gaze honestly. She could feel the pressure of his hand in every nerve of her body, heavy with significance. The music behind her built into an arrhythmic climax, and then fell away again.

His fingers stroked the inside of her knee in languid movements. His other hand reached for his cup, applied it to his lips, and set it back carefully in the saucer. “You were wise, child, not to succumb to your natural physical urges with such unworthy objects. Young men who don’t understand you, as I do.”