“I am at the Crown,” she said numbly.
He made a small black note on the paper before him. “I will see to it at once. A quiet, discreet pair of rooms. You have no companion, I take it?”
“No. I am independent.”
“Very good.”
Very good. Violet absorbed the note of rich satisfaction in his voice, above the glacial white of his collar, the symmetrical dark knot of his necktie. He was wearing a tweed jacket and matching waistcoat, and when he rose to bid her a tidy good afternoon, he unfastened the top button in an absent gesture to let the sides fall apart across his flat stomach.
Violet looked directly into his eyes, at that unsettlingly clear blue in his polished face, but her attention remained at his periphery, at that unfastened horn button, from which the tiny end of a thread dangled perhaps a quarter inch.
Now, as she pauses once more outside her husband’s office door, she remembers longing, quite irrationally and against her finest principles, to mend it for him.
Vivian
By the time we reached Twenty-first Street, we were holding hands. I know, I know. I don’t consider myself the hand-holding kind of girl, either, but Doctor Paul reached for me when a checker cab screamed illegally around the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twentieth, against the light, and what would you have me do? Shrug the sweet man off?
So I let it stay.
Doctor Paul had suggested walking instead of the subway, once he emerged from the hospital locker room, shiny and soapy and shaven, hair damp, body encased in a light suit of sober gray wool with a dark blue sweater-vest underneath. I would have said yes to anything at that particular instant, so here we were, trudging up Fifth Avenue, linked hands swinging between us, sun fighting to emerge above our heads.
“You’re unexpectedly quiet,” he said.
“Just taking it all in. I suppose you’re used to bringing home blondes from the post office, but I’m all thumbs.”
He laughed. “I’ve never brought home a blonde from the post office, and I never will.”
“Promises, promises.”
“I happen to prefer brunettes.”
“Since when?”
“Since noon today.”
“And what did you prefer before that?”
“Hmm. The details are strangely hazy now.”
I gave his hand a thankful squeeze. “Stunned you with my cosmic ray gun, did I?”
He peered up at the sun. “I said to myself, Paul Salisbury, any girl who can say Holy Dick in the middle of a crowded post office in Greenwich Village, that girl is for keeps.”
“Nothing to do with my irresistible face, then? My tempting figure?”
“The thought never crossed my mind.”
I couldn’t see for the galloping unicorns. The Empire State Building lay somewhere ahead, over the rainbow. “The blue scrubs did it for me. I’ve had a doctor complex since I was thirteen. Just ask my shrink.”
“And to think my pops didn’t want me to go to medical school.”
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to him. “You’re having me on, aren’t you?”
He shook his head.
“But everyone wants his son to be a doctor. No one brags about his son the banker, his son the lawyer.”
“Not mine.”
I squinted suspiciously. “Are you from earth?”
“I’m from California.”
I nodded with understanding and turned us back up the sidewalk. “Aha. That explains everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. The golden glow, the naive willingness to follow a strange girl upstairs to her squalid Village apartment. I knew you couldn’t be a native New Yorker.”
“As you are.”
“As I eminently am. Tell me about California. I’ve never been there.”
He told me about cliffs and beaches and the cold Pacific current, about his family’s house in the East Bay, about the fog that rolled in during the summer afternoons, you could almost set your watch by it, and the bright red-orange of the Golden Gate Bridge against the scrubbed blue sky. Did I know that they never stopped painting that bridge? By the time they had finished the last stroke, they had to start all over again from the beginning. We were just escaping from Alcatraz when the stone lions of the New York Public Library clawed up before us.
“After you,” said Doctor Paul.
? ? ?
“SO. I suppose we should start with Violet Schuyler,” said Doctor Paul, in his best hushed library whisper.
“How you joke.”
“No?”
“My dear boy, don’t you know? It’s much easier to find out about men. Even if my aunt Violet were the most talented scientist in the Western world, she would probably only rate a small paragraph in the E.B. Either no one would have paid her any attention, or some man would have jumped in to take credit for her work.”
“Really?” The old lifting eyebrow.
“Really.”
“What about Marie Curie?’
“The exception that proves the rule. And she worked with her husband.”
“All right, then. So what was Violet’s husband’s name?”
“That I don’t know.”