She did not, however. Instead, she backed away and closed the door with a numb hand. She found herself a taxi and went to bed, thinking that she had dreamed all this before, that this new picture in her head was exactly as she had imagined it. This shock she felt, it was recognition.
The next morning, she found Walter lying next to her in bed, in remorseless slumber. Over breakfast, he reminded her that their marriage was a modern one, a new model of partnership, in which they placed no restrictions on the freedom of the other person to pursue whatever interests gave him or her happiness and pleasure. He had brought her to Berlin with him, he had given her her place at the institute; she had everything she wanted, and all because of his untiring efforts on her behalf, his unflagging ambition for her. She understood that, of course?
She did.
He reached across the breakfast table and squeezed her hand, where it lay next to her steaming coffee. He was so very glad he had married her, the only woman in the world he could have made his wife, always first in his heart. She was no narrow-minded bourgeois. She was clear-headed and scientific, thank God; she understood men were subject to physical urges from time to time, simple transactions of the body, but she, Violet, was his wife. He would always support and encourage her interests, as long as she supported and encouraged his. She understood that, too, of course?
Violet picked up her coffee, drank it scalding hot, and said that of course she understood.
After all, a mutual pursuit of happiness was the foundation of a marriage of equals.
PART TWO
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part; Nay, I have done, you get no more out of me And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows, And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath, When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies, When faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.
—Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
Vivian
I walked into the Metropolitan lobby Tuesday morning with considerably less joie de travailler than I had danced through the day before, but I wasn’t about to let anyone know it.
“Good morning, Agatha! Where on earth have you been hiding that feathered comb? It sets off your hair to perfection.” I kissed the tips of my fingers.
She moved her nail file from ring finger to pinkie. “Mr. Lightfoot wants to see you.” Like a sentence of lethal injection.
“Why, thank you, Agatha. I’ll just drop my pocketbook and briefcase at my desk and be with him—”
“Now, he says.” She snapped her Wrigley’s, set down the nail file, and picked up her magazine.
I leaned over her desk. “Agatha, you have such a way with words. Why aren’t you writing for the magazine, that’s what I’ve always wondered.”
“Get lost,” she said.
“You see? Concise, to the point.” I gave my briefcase a joyous little swing as I set off down the corridor to the hallowed Lightfoot wing. “Brevity is the soul of rudeness, my mother always says.”
Outside Mr. Lightfoot’s double doors, Gogo’s desk overflowed with silver-framed photos and crystal candy dishes. The only item missing was Gogo herself. His lordship’s secretary looked up from her own Spartan empire on the left-hand side, dressed impeccably in neutral colors, lipstick immaculate, eyelashes extravagant. “Miss Schuyler. I’ll just announce you.”
She picked up the Lightfoot Hotline and murmured a few words. I swallowed back a gum wad of anxiety and shifted my pocketbook to the same hand as my briefcase.
The secretary rose in hourglass splendor from her desk and opened the right-hand door. “You can go in, Miss Schuyler.”
I sallied forth with hips swinging. “Good morning, Mr. Lightfoot. What a charming way to start the day. We should do this more often.”
He looked up from the starched pages of The Wall Street Journal, spread like a rectangle of sanity atop the liquid brown of his desk, and removed his reading glasses, the better to strip me naked with.
Now. A word about S. Barnard Lightfoot III. He had three houses and four ex-wives, and the only thing he loved more than first editions and hourglass secretaries was his daughter, Margaux. (Of S. Barnard Lightfoot IV, the less said the merrier.) Having, as I’ve said, an agreeable waist-to-hip ratio myself, I’d found myself on the receiving end of a Lightfoot proposition within a week of my employment here at the Metropolitan. I’d refused it gracefully, no feelings hurt, no careers destroyed, and I hadn’t entered the inner sanctum since.