“Who else would have done it?”
“The lover, for one.”
A shadow fell over the life, work, and beard of GRANT, Walter, Ph.D. An exasperated shadow, judging by the acute angle of the elbows as hands met hips.
“That was your last warning,” the shadow whispered bitterly. “I must ask you to leave.”
“I WONDER who he was, this lover of Violet’s,” I said. “The encyclopedia didn’t even give his name.”
Doctor Paul stretched out his long legs and fingered the rim of his cup. We were sitting in a booth at an overheated coffee shop on Forty-second Street, a hat toss from Grand Central Terminal, and I, watching the good doctor’s lugubrious hand circle its way into infinity, found myself in the absurd position of envying a hunk of white ceramic. “Some good-looking young fellow, I guess. Closer to her own age. She’d probably examined her future, decades of marriage to a man old enough to be her father, and realized it wasn’t worth it.”
“What wasn’t worth it?”
“Whatever she got from it. Money or security.” He shrugged and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, thank God.” I snatched a cigarette from the pack. “I was hoping you’d ask.”
He laughed and lit me up like a gentleman. I might have lingered overmuch near his outstretched fist, though he didn’t seem to mind. “I’ve told myself I’ll quit when this damned residency is over with,” he said, pulling out one for himself.
“I’ve told myself I’ll quit when I’m good and ready.” I took a sweet long drag, just to drive home my point, and drank my coffee in a reckless gulp. And why not? I couldn’t fault the coffee, hot hot hot; the same went for Doctor Paul’s cigarettes, Winstons, luxurious and masculine. Coffee and tobacco, that fusion of divine creation. I’d ordered a raisin bun some time ago and presumed the kitchen was now sending out to Madagascar for more cinnamon. I didn’t care. “I don’t think she wanted money from him. She wasn’t the type. If she wanted to marry for money, she’d have stayed in New York and done a much better day’s work of it.”
“Fair enough. Security? She was alone in England. She’d left her family behind.”
“Possibly. Or maybe she was in love with him.”
“Really?” His voice was so saturated with doubt, I could have stretched out my two hands, wrung it from the air, and mopped it back up with a napkin.
“Really. It’s a known phenomenon, after all. A rite of passage. Falling in love with your professor.”
“Are you serious? An old man like that?”
“You’re sure you want to hear this, golden boy?”
Just before he answered, he checked himself. His blue eyes did that thing again, that darkening, as if the weight of realization brought about some chemical change in him. He picked through his words more carefully and said: “Is this about Violet, or about you?”
Well, now.
I am not a girl who evades a man’s gaze without good reason, but I dropped mine then, right through the gentle haze of smoke drifting from my fingers and into the hot black pool of coffee, kerplop.
Here we were already, the moment of truth. It usually took a lot longer to arrive, didn’t it? Several dates at a minimum. Sometimes never, if the chemistry wasn’t bubbling enough to make the effort worthwhile. You circled around it as long as you could, until there was no putting it off, until the suitcases had to be dragged out from under the bed and opened, the contents examined. Had you slept with anyone? When? Why? How many? The answers could be elliptical or coded—we were engaged, that was a favorite—and the details left to the imagination, but you had to have your answer ready. Some boys wanted to know you were lily-white; some just wanted to know you weren’t a livid scarlet. You needed to know whether he cared about your particular shade of pink, and what that meant, and whether you cared if he cared. You might even be curious about him—Yes? How many? What kind of girls?—and then it was time for the fork in the road, and whether the two of you would take it. It was a funny time, 1964. An in-betweener, a swirling slack tide.
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