Her fingers touched the words, as if she were reading Braille. Physical injury. Post-traumatic stress. David, she knew, could have suffered either. Vivien thought of that April morning, how she had run into the street, Fu Jing screaming at her in Chinese. After that first shock, Vivien had climbed out of her bed and crawled under it. She couldn’t remember what a person should do in an earthquake, even though she had read it somewhere.
When she heard the heavy front door slam, she had been certain it was David coming home to rescue her. Vivien had slid from beneath the bed and run downstairs, calling his name. She could still smell sex on her, and taste him on her lips. Barefoot, her ice blue silk nightgown tangled around her, she’d found not David, but her maid Fu Jing, wild-eyed and covered in dust, speaking in rapid-fire Chinese. What has happened? Vivien said, taking hold of the woman’s shoulders and shaking her roughly. Zai nan, Fu Jing had said. She said it over and over. Zai nan. Later, Vivien would learn that zai nan meant catastrophe.
A hand on her arm startled her and Vivien let out a little yelp.
“I’m sorry,” Kay Pendleton said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Vivien, eye to eye with Kay’s breasts rising above her lemon yellow silk blouse, got to her feet. “No, no,” she sputtered. “I apologize for overreacting.”
Kay was holding out a newspaper. The Denver Post. “I thought something in here might be of interest to you,” she said. She was a person who looked you right in the eye when she spoke, another unnerving trait of hers.
“Oh?” Vivien said.
“Page nine,” Kay said. She placed the newspaper on the table and sashayed back to her desk in the other room.
Without sitting again, Vivien opened the paper, flipping the pages impatiently until she got to page nine. Her Friday morning routines were a comfort to her, and she didn’t like them interrupted. She glanced at an article on mountain lions, and another on a disease affecting cattle in Colorado and New Mexico. From where she stood, she could clearly see Kay adding books to her shelf of oddities and curiosities, her body a curvy figure eight, her bun lopsided. Vivien sighed. Sick cattle? She shook her head, trying to think of a polite comment to give Kay when she asked what she’d thought of the article. But then a smaller headline caught her eye. Man Found Wandering Down Colfax Avenue; Claims He Has No Memory of His Past.
Sinking into her chair again, Vivien lifted the paper closer to her face, as if it would bring the man himself closer to her. Phrases leaped out. No identification . . . Utterly confused . . . Otherwise healthy . . . And then: Doctors confirm that the man is suffering from amnesia.
Vivien glanced over at Kay, who had paused to watch her.
“How did you know this was my particular interest?” Vivien asked her.
“I see what’s in that book,” Kay said. “I don’t ask questions.”
Vivian nodded and returned her attention to the newspaper article. The man was estimated to be fifty to sixty years old, in good health except for his lack of memory, and had in his pocket a key to a room at the Hotel Majestic on Sutter Street in San Francisco. The Hotel Majestic, the article continued, opened in 1902, and was one of the few hotels to survive the devastating earthquake of 1906. Vivien’s heart beat faster. She and David had spent a weekend at the Hotel Majestic. Not just any weekend, but their first weekend together. Despite Lotte’s warnings, Vivien had met him for dinner that night. He was older than she’d remembered, ten years older than her.
They’d finished dinner before she’d blurted, “What about this wife of yours?”
“We’re unhappy,” he’d said matter-of-factly. He sipped his cognac, then stared into the glass. “But she won’t give me a divorce.”
“So you seduce young women to stay happy?” Vivien asked.
He’d smiled up at her. “Have I seduced you?”
She blushed.
“It is my intention,” he admitted, which made her blush deepen.
“I don’t go out with married men,” Vivien said. It was what Lotte had told her to say.
“But you’re out with me now.”
He was teasing her, she saw that. But it angered her enough to bring her to her feet and pull on the jacket she’d draped over the back of her chair. How she wished that she’d kept it on instead of revealing her collarbone and flesh below it to him. Had she intended to reveal so much of herself so readily?
David stood too. He reached over and very carefully buttoned her jacket for her.
“There,” he said. “Now I’ll call a taxi to take you home.”