The Secret Life of Violet Grant

  “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 deta
il 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.”

  “I don’t remember feeling any such urges.”

  The stroking continued, an inch farther up her leg. “Nonsense, dear child. It’s perfectly natural, the sexual instinct. You should never feel ashamed of your desires; you should never feel as if you must deny the existence of these inclinations. Of what you want with me.”

  Another inch.

  Violet was dizzy with disbelief. She had half expected this moment, had at some level determined to accept it, and now that it had arrived, now that the impossible invitation had quite clearly been made, she found that her heart, her presumably logical and scientific heart, was beating too frantically to allow words.

  Dr. Grant picked up her hand and kissed it. His beard scratched her fingers. “Have I frightened you, child?”

  Violet wanted to sound worldly. “No.”

  “You are very beautiful. It’s natural that men should desire you.”

  “I . . . I suppose so.”

  He kissed her hand again, and then leaned his face to hers and kissed her very gently on the lips. His beard tickled her chin; his mouth was soft and tasted like tea. His other hand still lay on her thigh, palpating, gathering the fine wool of her skirt between his fingers. His thumb crawled upward, an astonishingly long thumb. “Let me show you, child. Let me give you what you’re longing for. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  Dr. Grant took her right hand and guided it to the apex of his trousers.

  Violet’s memory, usually so clear and precise, turns blurry at this point. She remembers her surprise at the bony hardness of Dr. Grant’s flesh beneath her fingers; she knew the theoretical concept of the male erection, of course, but it was another thing to experience it by touch. But she can never afterward remember the true sequence of events after that: whether he kissed her again or led her to the sofa; whether he removed his own clothes first or hers. Hers, probably. He was so eager to uncover her, so explicit in his approval of her sleek newborn skin, her firm breasts, her bottom, the pretty triangle between her legs, which she attempted at first to keep closed in a vestigial show of virgin modesty.

  But Dr. Grant ridiculed her clenched muscles. He drew away the fig leaf of her right hand with a murmured, Come, now, child. Don’t be silly. Let me see you. He climbed on top of her and gripped her round young bottom, and for all Violet’s fearful anticipation, the act itself was over quickly: a shove, a stab of pain, the intimate shock of penetration. He heaved once, twice, and went rigid, stretched upward in an arc of ecst
asy while the violins shrieked across the room. A groan emerged from between his clenched teeth, and then Dr. Grant collapsed like a dead man atop her chest, vanquished, his tabby beard stabbing her cheek.

  She lay beneath him, equally motionless, a little stunned, and observed the pattern of the ceiling plaster above her, the curtains still drawn wide against the darkness of the back garden. The music finished, and the phonograph bell released a steady cyclical scratch into the still air.

  She wondered how the two of them might look to any intruder peeping through the glass: Dr. Grant’s white back covering her chest, his buttocks fixed in the cradle of her hips; her left knee raised against the cushions and her right leg slipping inexorably down the sofa’s narrow edge. The deed done, her shining virginity consigned to the past, like an unneeded relic, like the bric-a-brac on her parents’ mantel. A quarter hour ago she had been sipping tea.

  Her parents. How horrified they would be, how prostrate with musty horror at her actions, her willing participation in her own seduction. Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Perhaps they would simply shake their heads and say, You see? We knew she would come to a bad end, we knew nothing good would come of all this scientific nonsense.

  Dr. Grant lifted his head and looked at her with affection. His face was flushed, the tip of his nose the color of candied cherries. “Good girl.” He kissed her breast. “Brave girl. You did well. At last. God, that was splendid.”

  What should she say to that? Thank you? She smiled instead and touched his damp temple.

  Dr. Grant rose and drew on his trousers. He poured her another glass of brandy and returned, balancing himself on the strip of damask next to her naked hip. “Drink.”

  She sat up and drank the brandy. It burned less this time, spreading instead a comfortable warmth through her middle.

  “How do you feel, child?”

  “Quite well.”

  “Good girl.” He put his fingertip to the bottom of the brandy glass and nudged it to her lips. When she was finished, he rearranged the sofa cushions at her back, he added coals to the fire and brought her cake and sandwiches from the table, which he shared with her, sitting close, his body actually touching hers, and told her how well she had pleased him, how long he had been imagining this, how he had felt when he was inside her. He spoke with total candor, a complete freedom of vocabulary.