Violet has read de Sade, in the original French. Walter gave her the book soon after they began their affair; she was too reserved, he said, too inhibited, and needed shocking. As if carrying on a clandestine sexual relationship with her decades-older professor, with the renowned Dr. Grant, hadn’t been shocking enough already for a Fifth Avenue debutante from a sedate Knickerbocker family.
Violet reaches out her hand and runs her finger along the spine. Walter is somewhere in that merry cloud of noise, smoking his pungent pipe. The comtesse drew him away at the moment of their arrival, there was someone she must introduce him to, Oh, my dear Mrs. Grant, you don’t mind my borrowing your husband for just a short, short minute?
No, Violet had not minded.
A faint squeak of hinges announces a newcomer, and an instant later Violet hears the heaviness of Lionel Richardson’s voice from the doorway: “I thought I’d find you here.”
He was looking for her. She extinguishes the thought at once and keeps her gaze trained to the shelves before her, her head canted at the same two o’clock angle to read the titles. She presses her fingers into her champagne glass and says, “It wasn’t much of a stretch, was it? Did you expect to find me dancing ragtime?”
He doesn’t reply. His footsteps cross the room in authoritative clicks of his well-polished shoes, until he arrives directly behind her, so close she can feel the warmth of his body through his clothing and hers, she can smell his cigarettes and the familiar flavor of his shaving soap beneath, the I, Lionel to which her nerves are now attuned. The tip of his chin, she judges, is within an inch of the crown of her head, and he’s gazing up at the books, matching her own line of vision.
“Wholesome,” he says, amused.
“The Prussians are the worst. The strict ones always are.”
“Don’t I know it.” He moves away, toward one of the giant twelve-paned sash windows, which he opens a few inches. He takes a plain silver case from his jacket pocket and opens it to reveal a neat line of white-papered cigarettes. He doesn’t offer her one; he knows she doesn’t smoke.
“What are you drinking?” She nods at his glass.
“Whiskey, in fact. A fine old single-malt Scotch whiskey, hiding amongst the cognac and champagne and schnapps. Would you believe it?” He lifts his glass to her and takes a drink. “Why are you here, Violet? It was the devil of a shock to see you waltz in on your husband’s arm. Not your sort of go at all, is it?”
“I don’t know. Restless, I suppose. I came home early from the lab and . . .” She lets her voice drift off, leaving it all unsaid: the limpid June air outside, fragrant with promise; Walter, straightening his tie in the mirror and looking at her in surprise, the alarmed sort of surprise. The alternative rising before her eyes, the waiting for him to return, waiting and waiting, pretending to sleep, the late-night click of the door and the rush of the bath water, the old lemony dampness again as he slides noiselessly into the bed beside her. She had accepted their routine long ago. It was part of his job, Walter told her. Part of his job, to discuss ideas into the night, to make connections with the right people. All part of the process of scientific collaboration.
But tonight she had yearned to go out, too. To meet and connect, to collaborate in the promising June air.
Except that she was not collaborating, after all, was she? She was hiding away in the study with her champagne, listening to distant ragtime while Walter talked and smiled somewhere inside the music, his trim beard parting for his laugh.
“It’s that sort of evening, isn’t it?” Lionel lights his cigarette in a rapid flare. The study is dusky and still, lit by a single lamp next to the sofa on which the previous couple had been so joyfully collaborating, disturbed only by the gaiety behind the wall and the occasional shout or blast of horn from the street outside, four stories down. “Anything could happen.”
Violet swallows the rest of her champagne and sets the glass on an empty patch of shelf. She has always disliked gloves, and the bowl is smudged with her fingerprints, making her think, rather absurdly, of detective novels. “That’s a rather melodramatic thought, coming from you.”
“What can I say? I’m a romantic at heart, beneath all my carefully cultivated cynicism. Hence the cavalry, rather than a foot regiment.”
“Yes, Walter said something like that, the evening we met. That he couldn’t quite make you out.”
“And you? Have you made me out yet?”
“No. Other than that you’re what you said you were that first night, a barbarian.”