“What the hell does that mean?”
“What does that mean? She’s expecting a ring, you idiot, you son of a bitch, and you were planning to say thanks for the memories, but I’m in love with your friend? Do you know what that would do to her?”
To Gogo. To her delight, like a fizzy pink cloud around her head.
To me. To my career. My beloved battered desk in a Metropolitan corner, my box full of rotten facts, my ambitions poured daily into a coffee cup, sugar, no cream.
“You cannot be suggesting that I propose to her!”
I clenched my hands. “No. But you’re not . . . You can’t—”
“Can’t what, Vivian? What can’t I do?” His eyes weren’t dark anymore; they were incandescent blue, lighter than light, alive enough to burn.
Indeed. What couldn’t he do? What should he do? For once, I couldn’t think. Something messy had spilled in my brain, short-circuiting the orderly hum of logic. I had lain naked in bed with this man, I had taken him inside me, I had known every inch of him. Except this inch, the Gogo inch, the most important inch of all. Gogo and Doctor Paul. I couldn’t bear it.
“Just have lunch,” I said. “Tell her how sweet she is.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this.”
“Believe it.”
“Vivian, I’m in love with you.”
My hands. Cold.
“No, you’re not. We spent twelve hours together. We had a little fun.”
“Don’t tell me what I’m feeling or not feeling. Don’t tell me that was just a little fun. Margaux is a sweet girl, a wonderful girl, but it wouldn’t be fair to her, it wouldn’t be right to continue things with her after—”
“If you break her heart, Paul Salisbury, I’ll never speak to you again. Never.”
As if the air shattered into pieces. We stood in a vacuum, Doctor Paul and I, staring at each other, unable to breathe. Never speak to you again. It had the weight of a death sentence.
“Go. Go to lunch.”
“We will discuss this later.”
“Take her to lunch, Paul.”
The door crashed open. Gogo. “Oh, my goodness! Everyone thought you’d run off together!”
I turned, shiny-bright as a counterfeit new penny. “I was only administering the Vivian test.”
“Ooh!” She gazed at my Doctor Paul with a look of such tremulous and unadulterated adoration, I had to glance away. “Did he pass?”
I stepped forward and took her hand, and I hooked it over Doctor Paul’s strong and competent right arm, the arm that saved the lives of dying children, the arm that had stripped away my old leathery skin and held me in place while his body filled mine.
“I’ll let you know.”
? ? ?
I STAYED in the library after they left. I didn’t want to think about the two of them sharing an intimate table at 21 or the Peninsula, leaning into each other, Doctor Paul telling beautiful Gogo how sweet she was, as I had instructed. The bottle of chilled wine—champagne, perhaps. The trout meunière, the new potatoes gleaming with butter. A salad to cleanse the palate. Dessert: something chocolate. Gogo loved chocolate. Gogo, I’m sorry I haven’t been attentive lately. I’ve been busy. It isn’t you. You’re a sweet girl, a darling girl. The perfect emerald-eyed girl. Look at your heart face, your blistering blondness. As good as gold. He takes her hand. She blushes, she’s so happy, she’s so in love with the handsome young doctor sitting across the table.
I trudged through the stacks. I followed every possible lead, I scoured the index of every book the Metropolitan owned on the subjects of chemistry and physics (for the record, there were three) but I could find no mention of Violet Grant. Even the paragraphs devoted to Dr. Walter Grant never once referred to her. She was invisible. If it weren’t for her wedding announcement in the Times, she might never have existed.
I closed my last hope and reshelved it next to the Einstein biography. I checked my watch. One-forty-five. Gogo and Doctor Paul would be back from lunch any minute.
Time to secure a strategic alliance.
I straightened out my snug little suit, girded my sleek little loins, and prowled like a lioness into Tibby’s office.
He was delighted to see me, as ever. “Make it quick, Miss Schuyler. I’m busy.”
I came to a dramatic stop before his desk, placed my manicured fingertips on the august battered wood, and leaned forward. A shame he wouldn’t appreciate the view. “I have a story,” I said.
The skeptical eyebrow. “A story.”
“A humdinger, Mr. Tibbs. Murder, sex, high society.”
“Been done a million times.”
“It never gets old.”
He acknowledged this truth with a minute twitch of his lips and a lowering of the skeptical eyebrow. He set down his black Cross fountain pen next to the blotter—a gentleman of the old school, Edmund Tibbs—and leaned back in his chair. “Pitch me.”