Anyway, after that summer in New York I didn’t want to be a singer anymore, I wanted to be a writer. I kept on “taking notes.” Sometimes when I think back to that summer, it seems like all the big things that happened happened not to me but to Valentine, and I suppose in a way they did. But then I remember something that Clover once told us, that afternoon at the Frick, that “a true Romantic knows that the inner life is the thing, the only thing that really matters, in the end.” If that’s true—that the inner life is the only thing that matters—then everything I remember about that summer will always play a big part in mine. I remember Clover telling us that happiness is the most fragile thing in the world.
And as for my sister, Valentine—but how am I to know about Valentine? What started to happen that summer is finally complete. We’re not close anymore. You can still spend time with someone—you can still have a lot of fun with them, even—without being close. Being close is different.
In her will, Aunt Theo left us a modest amount of money, which we can use once we’re twenty-one. It isn’t a lot of money. Clover said she wanted us to think of it as traveling money, for us to go off and have some adventures with. She said Aunt Theo believed in the necessity of women leading “large lives.” Aunt Theo also left me her book collection. She left Valentine that nude portrait of her that was painted one morning in Paris when she was a young woman and the red satin Lanvin ballet pumps she used to do the tango in, after learning from Clover that they wore the same shoe size. And Valentine actually wears them sometimes, not caring if they get ruined. If they were mine, I wouldn’t wear them ever. But that’s the difference between Valentine and me.
Valentine hasn’t gone on the stage. She’s an art history major; she’s doing her thesis on Boucher’s Seasons, which we first saw at the Frick with Clover that summer. Clover? We don’t see or hear much from Clover anymore. After Aunt Theo died she left Clover most of her money, including her apartment in the Village. But last I heard she had sold the apartment and was living abroad, out of her orange Hermes suitcase. She used to send us postcards sometimes, then they petered out. Oh, but I’m lying. We used to write back but then one day we stopped. We got swept up in our own lives.
We got swept back up also into the modern world. It was as if, once we left Aunt Theo’s apartment, we shed some kind of magical golden skin that had protected us. When we left there, the edges of things just never felt quite so soft ever again.
And another thing: I never write real letters to anyone anymore, though I miss them. There was also a time after we went back to San Francisco when Alexander and I wrote postcards, and I kept the ones he sent me and showed them to all my friends. They were very impressed because hardly anybody sends real mail anymore. But then we stopped and all that seems a long time ago now.
And Val? Well, absolutely everybody calls Val Valentine at this point. She always wears her hair pinned up and it isn’t so bright red anymore anyway—it’s more like what you’d call auburn. And another thing is when I look at her now I no longer think that her eyes are violet. I see what Mom means about them being just plain dark blue. Which makes me wonder, actually, about a lot of things, a lot of other things I might have gotten wrong, might have made more otherworldly and fabulous than they actually ever were. Or does it? Was I so very wrong? Because it also makes me think of that incredibly hot, bright green afternoon when Clover and I strolled through Central Park and went to see Calder’s Circus at the Whitney—and how Calder’s Circus freezes some of that preciousness in miniature: how when you look at it you could be a child again, you could believe that your beautiful older sister’s eyes were really and truly the color violet. Violet is still one of my favorite words.
These days, if you saw Valentine on the street, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she was born in Paris; she has something of the Continental air. I don’t know how she did it, but she has turned into the sort of woman who knows how to tie a scarf and understands the allure of silence.
Woman, not girl. She’s the kind of twenty-year-old you’d take for twenty-five.
One day after hanging out in Valentine’s dorm room, we decided to take the subway downtown. We got off in the Village, not far from the building on Lower Fifth where Aunt Theo’s old apartment used to be. It was so strange to think of that apartment existing without her. What had happened to the secret roof-deck, the terra-cotta pots, and the lemon trees? We stopped at Caffe Reggio—we take our coffee black now but can’t resist the opportunity to have it piled high with whipped cream if it’s available—and then decided to go and walk around the Village. It was one of those fall days in Manhattan when everyone is so grateful that the heat has lifted that it’s as if the whole city experiences this brief, collective happiness.
“That summer,” said Valentine. “Can you believe that we actually weren’t allowed to wear jeans that summer? It just seems so incredible to think of now!”
“Trousers,” I said, remembering. “Clover specifically said that Aunt Theo didn’t care for women in trousers.”
“Trousers!” squealed Valentine. “Trousers!” It had been years since we had heard that word. We laughed and laughed just at the thought of it.