The Secret Life of Violet Grant. Beatriz Williams
in some discreet Alpine resort of which Violet had never heard. He would want to say good-bye to his scientific friends, to perhaps share a last drink. She took off her clothes and hung them in the wardrobe and readied herself for the night.
But the minutes had ticked by, and still Violet waited in Walter’s bed, counting the repeats in the floral wallpaper by the streak of brown light from the crack in the curtains, dozing off only to jolt back awake, until the door had at last squeaked open at three o’clock in the morning. She pretended to be sleeping. Walter went to the bathroom and opened the tap in the tub, and after he had bathed and brushed his teeth, he slipped into the sheets beside her.
“Are you awake, child?” he asked gently.
She didn’t reply, but when morning arrived, and after Walter’s reassuring body had found hers in the early spring sunshine, she bent her forehead into his damp shoulder and told him that despite the diligent applications of vinegar each time they were together, she thought she might be pregnant.
Monday morning! Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always relished the idea of a new week, and never more than when it contained the prospect of a Doctor Paul ringing my doorbell right smack at the beginning.
But first. Work. And even work had its charms today! I whistled my way up the Lexington Avenue subway and sang my way through the brass-framed revolving doors into the musty lobby of the Metropolitan building on Forty-ninth Street. My great-aunt Violet lurked somewhere in the holy sanctity of the archives here. I was sure of it! And I would find her!
“Good morning, Agatha!” I trilled to the receptionist, the instant the elevator doors staggered open on the eleventh floor.
“Miss Schuyler,” she said, in that charming voice of hers, somewhere between a rasp and a mutter. She didn’t so much as raise her shellacked gray head from her magazine, which, by the way, was not the Metropolitan, not even close, unless you took a big black permanent marker and scrawled Metro over the Cosmo. She took a long draw of her cigarette and—again, without looking, the modern miracle of her!—tipped it into the ashtray just before a long crumb tumbled from the end.
And this was the storied magazine’s face to visitors.
The switchboard rang as I swished past the desk. “Metropolitan!” Agatha snapped, like an accusation of manslaughter.
But don’t you worry. Things got better as I went along, past the industrious typing pool (to which, thank God and Gogo, I had leapfrogged membership), past secretaries with scarlet nails and towering nests of hair, past secretaries with bitten nails and limp heads of hair, past office doors and distracted editors and clench-jawed columnists pecking wit at typewriters, until I reached my own humble corner and humbler desk, of which the only redeeming features were its convenient proximity to the office of Edmund Tibbs, managing editor, and its exclusion from the incessant clacking of the typing pool.
I dropped my pocketbook into the bottom desk drawer and headed to the kitchenette.
Tibby hadn’t been kidding around about sugar, no cream. He liked a single teaspoon of the white stuff, not a grain more, and it had better be hot and it had better be brimming, and if so much as a precious drop spilled over the edge and into the saucer below, I would make it up in my own crimson blood: with sugar, no cream.
Still, regardless of that anomaly before heading into Doctor Paul’s bedroom Saturday night, I was not of the trembly-handy tribe, and this Monday morning, as every morning, I delivered Tibby his medicine intact and stood before his desk, smiling my best smile, curving my best hip, even though I knew for a fact that Tibby liked his coffee black and sweet and his chromosomes strictly XY.
He winced at the first sip, but he always did.
“Good morning, Mr. Tibbs,” I said.
“Miss Schuyler.”
“Is there anything I can do for you this morning? Any facts to check?”
If looks could growl. “Check your desk.”
“Right away, Mr. Tibbs.”
I turned heel smartly and checked said desk, where two new articles had found their way into the wire tray that controlled my fact-checking inflow. Yes, I was a fact-checker. That was my official duty, anyway; Tibby’s coffee was for free and for the understanding that a year or two of perfectly delivered joe might lead to bigger and better things.
Not that fact-checking constituted a minor patch of sand on the sunny Metropolitan beach. No no no. Our writers were brilliant wordsmiths, elegant stylists, provocative storytellers, but they rarely let an inconvenient fact get in the way of a good exposez-vous. My job was to check these baser impulses—note the double meaning—and level the Metropolitan’s chances of a messy libel lawsuit from an embarrassed husband, a shamed politician, a misbehaving starlet.
And as it turned out, I had a truffle pig’s nose for a rotten fact. Jocular reference to a Napoleonic princess giving birth to an heir and a spare? Hardly apropos, when Consuelo Vanderbilt bitterly coined the term in 1895. Andover graduate claims he gave Jack Kennedy a concussion at the Choate game in 1934? Must have occurred in an alternative universe in which pigs took wing and Andover played Choate that season.
This particular Monday morning, however, I was having an itty-bitty problem with the fact-checking, at least of the sort that I was being paid so unhandsomely to do. As I stood in the Metropolitan’s private library, poring over an encyclopedia entry for P. G. Wodehouse, my eyes kept darting to the volume that contained the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, known in imperial bygones as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut.
And a few minutes later, as I made notes about varieties of Indian tea versus those from China, I closed my eyes quite out of the blue and recalled how my fingers had traced along Doctor Paul’s interesting clavicle on Saturday night, how he had turned me onto my belly and stretched me long and wide and bit my shoulder very gently …
“Vivs! There you are.”
“Gogo. You shouldn’t sneak up on a girl.”
She turned me around. “Why, you’re flushed! Do you have a fever? Can I get you some water?”
“No, honey. Just a passing whatever. You’re looking particularly perfect this morning.”
“Do you think so?” She fluffed her pale hair and leaned forward, woman to woman. “He’s coming today, Vivs.”
“Who’s coming? Your honey bun?”
“Yes!” Gogo darted a look around my shoulder, grabbed my hand, and made like a bandit for the corner of the library. “I didn’t want to say anything. I had just about given up on him.”
“What, Mr. Perfect? I thought you were madly in love.”
“We were. I thought we were. And then … well, you know what it’s like. That feeling when he’s losing interest.” She sighed.
“But you’ve had new flowers on your desk every week.”
“Most weeks.”
“And … and you’ve gone out on dates every Saturday night.”
“Most Saturday nights.”
“And he moved to New York to be with you, didn’t he? After all your reckless passion over the summer?”
Now the blush. “Well, I don’t know about reckless passion …”
I chucked her flawless chin. “You were madly in love. Admit it.”
“Madly, Vivs.” She took my hands. “He’s the handsomest, smartest, kindest, most gentlemanly—”
“Et cetera, et cetera, ne plus ultra, to the ends of terra firma—”