Violet & Claire

by Francesca Lia Block

  But she told me she was having a housewarming party. I didn’t know she had moved. It felt weird that she hadn’t told me.

  “We would have helped you,” I said, but she said it was all done and that I should come by. She didn’t mention Peter at all.

  I asked her how she was, and she made this hard face and said, “I’m great. I decided I better start enjoying my new life.”

  Then she gave me her address and left.

  All of a sudden this worry hit me. Harder than before. I wondered if she was doing drugs? Or if the pressure was just too much for her. I didn’t get it.

  I asked Peter if we could go to Violet’s thing after the movies. It was in this icy-looking condo above the Sunset strip. Lots of dark glass and cold metal. Lots of hipsters, the new young Hollywoodites and -ettes in all their tattooed glory. Also that idiot Steve from school crashing a few of his friends. I couldn’t believe he’d actually dare to show up after all the things he said. He gave me this big smirk when he saw me. But luckily I was with Peter so I didn’t care.

  Peter and I felt kind of weird. I thought we’d feel better when we saw Violet, but it was worse. She had on this very sexy red dress and her eyes were all glazed, like the surfaces of her apartment. She kept rubbing her skin, like she was trying to remove some invisible substance. On the stereo that song “Girl Satan” by creepy Flint Cassidy was blasting and Violet was dancing around to it. I went over to her and tried to hug her but she just handed me her drink and danced away. Someone pulled her into a room and I followed her. She was on the bed, tangled up with these very beautiful cocaine-colored kids, snorting powder off a mirror, staring at her reflection like she was trying to inhale herself. Then she closed her eyes and ran her tongue over her teeth and lips and smiled. When she opened her eyes they were too bright and almost electric-looking. I asked if I could talk to her for a second and she just started laughing. I told her I was serious and she wiped her nose and just looked at me and I took her hand and pulled her out onto the patio. The light was trippy and poison green. “Dancing Barefoot” by Patti Smith started playing and Violet lifted her arms over her head and spun around like a kid trying to make herself dizzy. Then she sort of started to collapse into the tropical flowering plants. I grabbed her like a tango partner, supporting her in my arms, and told her I was worried.

  She said, “Worried. Why would you be worried? You have Brookman. Besides, worry builds character. It’ll give you something to write about.”

  I said, “Why are you acting this way?”

  And she said, “You could never understand, babe. You are living in your own little world.”

  I asked her what that scene there was.

  “This is the real world,” Violet said. “And I belong to it now.”

  And then, for the first time, she lost me. She was this weird cold power-machine, and I didn’t care anymore. That happens to me sometimes when someone hurts me. I seem all mushy and a crybaby and weak, but when someone hurts me everything changes. My heart shuts like a fortress and nothing can open it. That started when I was old enough to realize that my dad had left. It’s a physical sensation in my chest, a hardening, a heaviness. Wood planks and chains and metal locks. It frightens me. It frightens me as much as anything anyone has ever done to me.

  I should have known that Peter would do what he did. I am used to men going away. Like my dad. So why should Peter be any different? Peter talked about poetry and he talked about our planet, so I thought he was different, but it was all just my lame fantasy.

  The way it happened is so stupid and cliché. I’d had a really bad day at school. One of those days where whenever anyone asked me anything in class my head would pound like a heart, and I felt like there was a heart stuck in my throat. Then I was doing my laps around the track in p.e. and Kaylie Rogers and her friends ran past me, and one of them stuck out her foot and tripped me and I went flailing face-first into the dirt. It brought up memories of the hunt, and I had to lie there for a second, not ’cause I was physically hurt but to keep from letting them see me cry. They saw it anyway, of course. Once, Violet had said it was good that I cried easily; actresses should be able to do that. I knew she said it just to make me feel better; a real actress should have been able to hide the tears, to get up and flip off Kaylie and her friends and strut away like she was going to a movie premiere with her gorgeous boyfriend. Then I missed Violet, remembering that. The way we’d been before. They wouldn’t have touched me if she were around.

  But I remembered what it had been like at her party, so instead of going to see Violet I went home and cleaned myself up and made some food and went over to Peter’s apartment. He came to the door barefoot, with his shirt untucked and his hair standing up on his head. Lord Byron was peeping out from between his legs, wagging. I handed Peter a red rose I’d poached on the way, and told him I had made us a picnic.

  He said, “You should have called, Claire.”

  I told him I wanted to surprise him and he said he couldn’t see me right then. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, and then I felt the bomb ticking in my chest. I looked down—there were two pairs of shoes by the door—Peter’s Oxfords and a pair of high-heeled sandals. Unfortunately for Peter I am a very observant shoe fetishist. I recognized the sandals from the feet of the new girl in class. The one who had read her poem the week before: “I was a Medieval/patient/swollen with/poison/You were the physician/applying leeches/ burning glasses/to my flesh./Freeing me/from myself.” Melanie. I had noticed how Peter stared at her when she read. I had noticed her big breasts and long red hair and leechy lips. I had noticed her sandals. I knew she was in there, languishing on his bed, waiting for him to suck the poison out of her.

  He called my name as I dropped the basket and ran down the stairs. But he didn’t run after me. And I waited for the bomb in my chest to explode.

  It didn’t. If it had, it might have blasted the wall there and I would have been able to feel something, but instead I just got cold. Ice-cube cold, corpse cold.

  I didn’t think I’d go to see Violet, then. But I didn’t know what else to do. I was afraid to go home. If I saw my mom’s weepy eyes and sad skin I was afraid I’d just start turning into that right then. That I’d just get locked up in this house with her, both of us miserable and bitter and pining until we died. So I went toward the person who I knew would never let pain make her ugly or weak or ruined. For Violet, pain is something you can use to make you strong. And it is what I needed, what I need, to believe.

  Also, I love Violet. It hit me for the first time, then. I love her for that strength. I love her for knowing so much about movies, and being able to write like that, and for her style and her brilliant belligerence. I love how we could giggle together like kids, painting each other’s toenails, and how Flint Cassidy had made her turn into a teenybopper and how she is the faerie queen, reminding me of what we had once been and could become. Also, she is the first person that has really believed in me. I thought Peter did, but I guess not.

  It had hurt me to see Violet at the party, that other way, with the cocaine. But I told myself it was just the drugs, and no wonder she needed them. A queen of faerie needed a lot of help to live in a world that had banished all that was true and powerful and truly beautiful. I hadn’t helped her; I’d abandoned her for Peter. I thought maybe I could help her now.

  When I saw her, though, I just started crying.

  My favorite Tori Amos song, “Bells for Her,” was playing: “I’ve got your mind I said she said I’ve your voice I said you don’t need my voice girl you have your own but you never thought it was enough…” I sat down on Violet’s cold black floor and I couldn’t stop; the tears felt thick and hot and red like blood. Finally, I heard Violet’s voice at the periphery and she was saying, “I’m sorry I’m sorry,” over and over again. And her pain sounded worse than mine so I shut up and just listened to her.

  She said, “Claire, you’re my best friend. You’re my only friend. I just went crazy. I can’t e
xplain it.”

  For the first time I heard tears in Violet’s throat. They scared me. How would it be to cry after almost a lifetime of never crying?

  I wiped my eyes and nose with my dress and looked at her. She had sort of crumpled in on herself. I wondered if I was wrong about pain making her stronger. But I loved her anyway. Maybe we could make each other stronger.

  “I don’t know what I did wrong,” I said.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the fucked up one.” She asked what had happened, was it Brookman?

  “Bells and footfalls and soldiers and dolls brothers and lovers she and I were now she seems to be sand under his shoes there’s nothing I can do,” Tori sang.

  I just started crying again so Violet knelt down beside me and put her arms around me. They were thin but strong, Violet’s arms. Clad in sheer black netting. Her hair fell around us, dark and jasmine silk. I could feel the pulse in her throat.

  She took something out of her pocket; it was a little glass vial and she told me it was a flower remedy.

  “Holly for vexations of the heart. Rock rose for states of panic. Sweet chestnut for despair. Star of Bethlehem for grief or trauma.”

  She sounded like Ophelia.

  I said, “Eating flowers? You’re getting as weird as me. I told you you were a faerie.”

  We both laughed, and then she said how she’d gone to this chiropractor who wore a white turban and had eyes with every color of the forest in them. He’d fed her the essence of flowers and was helping her get clean.

  “I told him how I acted at the party,” she said. “I’ve been sick about it. I’m really trying to change things, Claire.”

  I tipped back my head and opened my mouth and she squeezed a few drops of the flower essence under my tongue.

  Then I went to lie on Violet’s bed and write this in my journal. I’m not sure if the flower essences really work or if I am just feeling better from the cry and being held, but suddenly I’m all drowsy. I can feel the faeries beckoning me into the peaceful poppyfields of sleep where boys never betray you or shoot at you and best friends tuck you in the folds of their wings until there is no difference between the two of you, and there is no sorrow and there is no pain.

  Violet & Claire

  When Claire woke up Violet was typing at her computer, with a rigid look to her jaw and her hands like claws. Claire asked her the time and she said eight-thirty and Claire wanted to know if she felt like going out for coffee, but she said she couldn’t, she had work and she had to go to this party later. And that Claire could go with her.

  Claire had thought Violet was trying to get away from all that, but Violet said she just had to finish up this one project, and then they’d be off her back and she could do what she wanted, they could do what they wanted, she corrected herself. Claire told her parties like that made her feel weird and Violet said they made her feel weird, too, but that she had to go. Claire said maybe she’d meet her, that she had to go home first and take care of a few things. The thing she wanted to take care of, really, was seeing Peter Brookman. She wanted to get all dressed up and stop by his house and tell him what she thought of him. It would be a tough Violet thing to do, Claire figured. Then she’d probably feel strong enough to go to the party.

  So she went home and put on dark lipstick, the kind Violet wore; Claire had borrowed it from her. She’d also borrowed a tight black corsetlike dress in case she decided to go the party. She hardly recognized herself dressed up like that. It felt good, though. It felt different from her mom and different from herself. Claire didn’t want to look like anyone who had ever been hurt that badly, or abandoned or betrayed. She wanted to look like the one who did the betraying.

  But, later, Claire thought, I was wrong. The lipstick and the dress weren’t enough to switch things around. And the love she had felt, that wasn’t enough to break any spell.

  After she’d gotten dressed she rode over to Peter’s house on her bicycle. The dress poked her rib cage and made it hard to breathe. There was a weird witchy wind shaking through the eucalyptus leaves and the moon was full and mean-neon-white.

  Claire took her time, circling through the neighborhoods, trying to peek in the lit windows to see people watching their TVs or washing their dishes. She wished she had a little yellow house of her own, with a flower box full of real flowers and herbs—pansies and rosemary—and a sweet lover who would swing dance with her in the evenings and cook pasta and read poetry aloud. She thought that maybe she should try to be more like Violet, and wish instead for money and power and fame, but Violet wasn’t happy either. Maybe we should run away together, Violet and I, Claire thought, go to the desert and try to catch falling stars in our mouths.

  Driving through the night on her way to Peter Brookman’s, Claire’s mouth didn’t taste like stars; it tasted like metal, like when she had braces when she was thirteen. It was a taste like dread.

  One of those Schwarzenegger mobiles, those Desert Storm Hummer things, was parked out in front of Peter’s apartment. Claire thought how funny it would be if Melanie drove one of those horrible things. She’d tell Violet about it and they’d crack up, speeding off past the giant dinosaurs and the windmills, off to the desert in the black Mustang convertible.

  Because Claire was thinking that, she felt confused when she got closer. She saw Peter first, and that made sense. Even though it did seem weird that Melanie could afford a Hummer. But it wasn’t Melanie at all. The girl driving the car, the girl Peter was saying good-bye to, was Violet.

  Claire saw her hair, glossy and dark in the streetlamp light, and she saw the side of her face and she saw Peter standing there, the silhouette of his shoulders against the trees, neither of them real to her, like two characters in a film, suddenly. Because she couldn’t feel any emotion like loss or betrayal or pain because she was dead. She was a Hummer. She was steel-toed boots and bullets and knives. She was hard cold metal.

  The faeries fear anything metal, Claire remembered. If you want to curse them, keep them away from you, you have to do spells with metal. And now Claire was that very thing, the very thing that would kill her. The wings were disintegrating. The petals were furling up. The leaves were burning. Claire stepped from the fire transformed, heartless, her whole body a weapon against itself.

  When Violet saw Claire’s face peeking at them from the darkness like some kind of peaked tree spirit, she changed, too. The change had started when Claire came to her, earlier that evening, crying, and Violet had known that Richter and Hollywood didn’t matter now. She would go to this last party and turn in the rewrite he and the producer wanted and get paid, and after that, she and Claire would go away. Suddenly all she cared about was her friend, and the desert where they could buy an adobe house with Joshua trees all around and barbecue corn over an open fire and swim in the moon and maybe make their own films. It was such a relief to see Claire’s face. It was like she had been floating through outer space, landed on a desolate planet, and found, among the craters and dunes of nothingness, her lost astro-sister.

  The thought of Brookman hurting Claire in any way had made Violet taste something liver-green. She had to go tell him. Maybe it was a way to chastise herself, too, for pulling away from Claire the way she had. The things she planned to say to Brookman were words she needed to say to herself. And also, going to him might have been a way for Violet to get close to something Claire loved, for one last time, to understand what it was Claire had needed so much.

  She wasn’t really aware of any of this, though, when she stopped at Brookman’s apartment on the way to the party. All she knew was that she hated him and she wanted to tell him that he had hurt her friend, and to never come near Claire again. It felt like being inside the script again, like none of it was quite real but that she couldn’t stop herself from it.

  What she hadn’t expected was that her anger would have turned into something else. Because they were both furious with themselves and because they both loved the same girl and because she
frustrated them with her innocence, as if she were too pure for the world. They had argued for a while and he had admitted to being a shithead and when Violet had tried to leave, he had asked her to stay for some coffee. He was worried about her, too, he said. Ever since this whole Hollywood thing. Then, suddenly, Violet had wanted to confide in Peter Brookman. He seemed strong enough to take it, the whole story, the reveal, as they said in town. And he was crazy enough himself that he wouldn’t have judged her, she felt. And he might even comfort her, this man whom Claire had loved, and who still (she really believed) loved Claire. She had to tell someone.

  Instead, she had let him kiss her.

  Before it happened they had been talking for a while and she had started to say what had happened but she couldn’t do it. He had asked why she was so sad and she had mumbled something about this scene she was caught up in and he had said she should just walk away.

  “Yeah, just say no, right? What do you know about it?”

  Then he had rolled up his sleeve and showed her the track marks on his forearm—marks he had never shown Claire, thinking they would frighten her, that she wouldn’t understand—and Violet had wanted to touch them and show him her own scars from where she had cut herself. She had thought about the cocaine and asked if it was hard for him to quit.

  “Easier than nicotine, honestly. But you are a tough girl.”

  “I need a cigarette.”

  “You just had one. They’re not good for you.”

  “Oh, excuse me, Mr. Cub Scout.”

  “I can’t help it,” Peter had said, smiling, almost wincing, the way someone in pain smiles, and she had told him how much he reminded her of Claire right then, and how fucked it was that he had blown it with her.

  “You’re right, Violet, about it being fucked of me. But I think I’m more like you than like Claire.”