“Your parents must have done some number on you. Or that professor. Tender Vivian. What did they do to you?”
I crashed the tumbler onto the tabletop, hard and loud, to shout down the sudden pain in my ribs. “Oh, you’re shrinking my head now, are you? Look, I just think you should try doing the right thing for once. You know the rules. You broke it, you bought it?”
“I didn’t break Margaux.”
“I beg to differ.”
He took the empty glass and poured another one. His face was somber as an abandoned puppy. “You’re drunk. You don’t even know what you’re saying.”
“You just don’t want to hear what I’m saying. I’m offering you a chance to make amends. To do what’s right for someone else for a change. Not just to suit yourself.”
He watched as I drank my water. Without realizing it, I had retreated a few paces. In another step or two, I’d have my slinky low-cut back to my bedroom door. Nowhere to go. He moved forward one square.
“What are you afraid of, Vivian?”
“I’m not afraid of anything.”
Another square. “Look at you. Your eyes. You are scared to death, Vivian Schuyler. I can tell, because for what I suspect is the first time in your life, you’re not making the littlest bit of sense. Tell the man you love to marry your best friend, will you? To marry her? When he loves you instead? You must really want me safely out of reach, don’t you?”
I opened my mouth to tell him he was an arrogant son of a gun and I didn’t love him. But the damned old throat clammed up on me. Well, I’m not made of stone! He was standing right there, right there, breathing down the bridge of my nose with his promising lips, staring down the marrow of my bones with his blue-scrubbed Paul Newman eyes. Who was I to say I didn’t love the very darling dickens out of him?
I took a step backward instead.
“Margaux’s a big girl, Vivian. She doesn’t need you to take care of her. She has lots of people to do that. She’s got a father who’ll spend a million bucks to buy her a husband. She’ll be just fine. The thing I want to know is, who takes care of Vivian?”
I wet my lips. My back was touching the door now. I let the water glass slide to the floor with a bump. “Vivian takes care of Vivian.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, she’s letting herself slip a bit at the moment.” He laid one hand against the door, next to my hair. “I’d think of hiring her an assistant, if I were you.”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re not me.”
“I’m close enough. You’re stuck in my head, Vivian. My blood. I can’t shake you.” With his other hand, he found my palm and kissed it, like a goddamned romantic movie, like a man who didn’t know what was good for him.
I leaned back against my bedroom door.
“So who takes care of you, Doctor Paul?”
“You do.”
Violet
The party in the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré’s splendid flat in Franz?sischestrasse reaches its riotous zenith just after one o’clock in the morning. By then, the butler has long since given up answering the door, and any unfortunate latecomer is forced to wedge his own path from the packed entry hall to the dining room, where the table and chairs have been pushed back and the enormous tiger-striped rug rolled up for dancing, to the cavernous drawing room, where champagne circulates by the bottle and people lean out the windows, trailing smoke.
Through the walls, the music jingles and jingles, a bouncy ragtime tune Violet recognizes by sound but not by name. She stands by a wall in the library, cradling a glass of champagne between her palms and staring up at a wall of books. The flat has been rented at an exorbitant price from a newly rich family of Prussian industrialists, away in Monte Carlo for the duration of the summer, and if the titles of their books are any indication, they would be delighted by the use to which their rooms have been put. Violet has already opened one door to reveal a half-dressed woman straddling a man atop a precarious French chair; when she stole into the library a few moments ago, she surprised another couple on the sofa in the final throes of concourse. (Not her own husband, thank God.) The comtesse’s friends have followed her here to Berlin, and are making the most of her champagne and her ragtime and her plentiful rooms.
Violet waited calmly while the couple straightened their clothes and left the room in fits of giggles, and now she is blessedly alone with the German translations of de Sade and Casanova.