The Violet Hour

by Richard Montanari

  You . . . cannot . . . have . . . me, the swing of her ponytail said as she turned her derriere to him and trotted, fawnlike, up the asphalt path and into the greenery.

  But he could have her if he wanted her. He knew that. While the other runners navigated the paved asphalt trails of the park, he usually attacked the cliffs that bordered the Chagrin River: shale, limestone, granite. City-hard surfaces that made him strong.

  He took off his cap for a moment, fingered his hair. His features were sharply drawn, nearly aristocratic in their symmetry. As often as he had been described as handsome throughout his life, he had been described as plain; as often over six feet as under.

  When he had to, though, he could be small, very small. Add a three-day beard, an unkempt shock of hair, a khaki jacket, and he could blend into any crowd, float unseen through any city. A gray ghost among gray buildings.

  He walked to the river’s edge, found an area near a copse of sycamores. Perfect, he thought. Julia would like this place. He found a hole, dropped in the extra daffodil bulbs, covered them with the rich earth.

  He put his cap on, scanned the immediate area, saw no one, then turned on his heels and began to trot along the all-purpose trail, a hundred or so yards behind the pretty blond jogger.

  Not much of a head start, he thought a few moments later as he entered the canopy of trees, just about hitting his full, smooth stride.

  Not much at all.

  8

  THE IDEA OF a used bookstore had not flourished in Collier Falls at any time in the previous fifty years, nor had an enterprise of any sort managed to prosper for more than three or four years in a row at 3223 Marble Lane, just off Falls Road, the village’s main commercial thoroughfare.

  But still, Paige Wellington had had her sights set on owning a bookstore since she was a little girl, and nothing – not a rotten marriage, nor lousy credit, nor a less-than-supportive family – would deter her from her dream. She’d raised the sixty thousand dollars she’d needed by putting together a consortium of literary types in the area, as well as other contacts she had from her previous employment as a fund-raiser for the Cleveland Orchestra.

  And while it was true that she had unofficially gone back to her maiden name, Paige Wellington, she had married Pete Turner for better or worse. So, as she threw open the doors on that warm autumn day, her stomach could feel no worse than it did, nor could she think of any better name than the corny neon masterpiece that graced the window of 3223 Marble Lane in Collier Falls, Ohio.

  PAIGE TURNER BOOKSwas open for business.

  The handful of patrons who had lined up at the door at nine o’clock proved in short order that they were there mostly for the free refreshments. By the time Amelia showed up at a little after ten, the register had registered the grand total of $56.52. The doughnuts, a good measure of Paige’s confidence in this enterprise, were gone by ten-thirty.

  The coffee held out until two.

  Business picked up before dinnertime; mostly magazine sales, mostly college kids. For a while, Amelia and Paige were hard-pressed to keep up. The small, tri-level space was abuzz with lively chatter and the dulcet sounds of a clicking cash register. For that half hour or so, Paige Turner Books had all the trappings of a bona fide enterprise.

  By six o’clock, closing time – at least until the market-place dictated otherwise – the day’s take was out of the register and laid across the counter. Paige counted it and, after a few clicks of her calculator, she had the good news.

  She’d made $360. On her very first day in business. Ever.

  She turned to Amelia with a look that Amelia knew very well. A look that screamed two words.

  Party time.

  Before going out that night, Amelia called the Swissotel Chicago. She was told that yes Mr St John had checked in, but no, he was not in his room. Would she like his voice mail? the desk man had asked. ‘No, thanks,’ Amelia said, not really knowing why she was calling him. Habit, she supposed. Making sure he got to where he was going. ‘I’ll try later.’

  She hung up the phone and sat down at the computer. She had decided to keep the computer switched on twenty-four hours a day (one of the manuals said it was okay), and whenever she had a book idea, she would just run in and type it up on her Word program.

  She took the mouse in hand but before she could click on Word, she noticed an icon she had not seen before. A small graphic of a computer with a picture of the earth on the screen.

  Beneath the icon: WORLD ONLINE

  She seemed to recall that World Online was one of those internet services like America Online, something you sent and received e-mail over. Even though this was technically her new computer – Roger had a company laptop – she knew her husband sometimes used it. Maybe Roger had loaded World Online, or maybe it had come with the computer itself. She decided to check into it later, then realized, as she returned to Word, that she’d forgotten her book idea.

  New rule, she decided. Sit down at the desk and immediately write down that brilliant, Pulitzer-worthy, industry-shaking idea that brought you over to the computer in the first place.

  She walked into the kitchen just as the soup she was heating for Maddie’s dinner boiled over.

  ‘Can I go to Aunt Paige’s?’ Maddie asked, already at the counter with spoon in hand.

  ‘I’m going out with Aunt Paige, honey,’ Amelia said, grabbing an oven mitt and removing the pot from the stove. She ladled the too hot soup into Maddie’s favorite blue bowl and placed it on the counter to cool. Then she poured herself some coffee, knowing full well that she should eat something if she was going to drink, but eschewing dinner in favor of finding an outfit that was going to fit. Before drinks, she had her writing class at seven, so whatever she wore couldn’t be too wild, although she felt like dressing up for some reason.

  ‘Oh,’ Maddie said. ‘Is Becky coming over?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Kay, Mom,’ Maddie said. She looked at the ceiling, doing some sort of math in her head. ‘Will Daddy be back for Halloween?’

  ‘Yes,’ Amelia answered. ‘Sure he will. He’ll take you out.’

  ‘Yay,’ Maddie said brightly. ‘Can we go trick-or-treating at Gramma’s?’

  ‘Sure, honey,’ Amelia replied.

  After shoveling the dinner dishes in the sink, Amelia showered and slipped into her black Guess jeans and a Ralph Lauren cashmere V-neck. She ran a brush through her hair, clipped on a pair of pewter earrings, and then, for no reason at all – or none that was apparent to her at that moment – spritzed herself with her most expensive perfume.

  Twice.

  9

  HE HAD RENTED the warehouse at the corner of Euclid Avenue and East Fifty-first Street, a hugely dilapidated yet structurally sound parcel that had been vacant for five years, gathering dust and spiders and pigeons and rats, everything but tenants. He had paid two years’ rent in advance, meeting the building’s owner only once, a chain-smoking Armenian who insisted on meeting at night.

  But the top floor, the tenth floor, his floor, was clean. Spotless. Once a month he sprayed for bugs; the rodent traps were constantly set. He had spent a month glazing all of the windows. Electricity and phone lines had been no problem, but running a gas line up was. So he relied mostly on electricity. When needed, he would fire up the electric space heaters, and in fall and winter, they did just fine.

  Inside, on the first floor, accessible from the alley that cut behind the building, through a corrugated steel door, was space for his car and his van, exceedingly ordinary vehicles that were both as benign and invisible as the man in black who sat in the window of a filthy stone building at which no one ever looked.

  In the northwest corner of the top floor, his space, there sat a card table and chair, a cot, a set of free weights, a portable shower. The only luxury – indeed, at times, the only light in his cavernous home – was his computer.

  The other two corners of the top floor, the ones facing northeast and southwest, were also blocked off by
ten-by-ten-foot sheets of thick canvas, creating small, square rooms at either end, rooms no other living person had ever seen.

  Early evening. He looked at the screen of his laptop computer, at the familiar handwriting, at the four familiar lines of poetry. It was one of those remembrances that still sent a crippling torrent of sadness and loss through him.

  Julia had copied the verse of the poem on a white legal pad and passed it to him during an English composition class in 1988. It had begun to yellow years ago, so he had bought a digital scanner and turned it into a computer file, so that it might live forever.

  He had sent out a copy of the poem to all of them by e-mail – most of them were on World Online – then instantly regretted it. Childish. It meant an extra, dangerous step. It meant he would have to get to all of their computers and erase the file, if he wanted to be on the safe side. And he wanted to be on the safe side. For after he had pushed aside those initial thoughts of suicide so many years ago, he discovered that life was still worth living.

  Although he had run right past her, without even a glance, the honey blonde from the park was all the testimony he would ever need on that point.

  Those who read the poem, in Julia’s own handwriting, would remember.

  Those who didn’t would never see him coming.

  He knew that the face he would present to them would not be recognized (he had dealt with that small bit of business years ago, a series of painful surgeries he had explained away with a dozen intricate lies), but he also felt that they had all probably forgotten what happened in that loud, smoky dorm room when Reagan was still in the White House and Guns N’ Roses owned the charts. And that bothered him most of all.

  Because for him, it was a night before which the world had existed on a different plane. He had breathed different air before that night, drank different wine, made different love.

  He looked back at the screen. The passage was from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Preludes,’ one of Julia’s favorites.

  He clicked over to his calendar application, checked their schedules for the evening.

  Geoffrey had nothing. Not surprising.

  Jennifer’s palsied sister Greta had a physical therapy session.

  Dr Crane was probably going to watch his wife disrobe from the comfort of his backyard lounge chair. Again.

  Amelia had her writing class.

  Whose compulsion would he feed this night? he wondered. Who among them would sniff the air, divining his scent?

  He showered and shaved, then slipped on a pair of faded denim jeans. He sat down at the card table, donned a pair of thin rubber gloves, and began to fold more GemPacs, the sage geometry of it second nature to him now.

  Jaguar and marmoset, he thought.

  Suffer no more.

  10

  AMELIA HAD SIGNED up for a four-week-long writing class that met twice a week for ninety minutes, taught by a local newspaper editor who had once gotten something into the Los Angeles Times; a graying teddy bear in his fifties named Lawrence Price.

  At seven-ten, just as Mr Price was handing out the night’s agenda, a man walked into the room where they met, at Mildred Burroughs Middle School, and took a seat directly in front of Amelia. He hadn’t been there the first week, and he drew Amelia’s attention immediately. Youngish, nice-looking, slender, he wore jeans that hugged his narrow hips, a black pullover sweater, black cowboy boots. His hair was dark, lustrous.

  At first Amelia thought: Paige could definitely be interested in a guy like this. Cute and literate. The rarest of breeds.

  Then she thought: I could too. If I was that kind of woman.

  She booted that thought out and tried to zero in on what Mr Price was talking about. Something about dialect, and the wisdom of using it sparingly.

  The class moved along briskly; Amelia took copious notes. More than once, though, she found her eyes wandering to the man sitting in front of her, to his dark curls, the soft ringlets that fell across the ribbed collar of his sweater.

  Later, just as Mr Price began to explain about how one must never write dialogue just to hear characters talk, Amelia cruised the man’s left hand and saw that he was not married. She then cruised her own left hand and discovered that, of course, she was.

  She felt guilty for a few moments, but that soon passed. She reminded herself that she had officially entered the realm of the cheated-upon, the cuckolded, that select group of a billion or so women whose husbands have decided to seek comfort in the fold of another woman’s bosom.

  Amelia made a conscious decision to never feel guilty again.

  At least, not about her harmless fantasies.

  At nine o’clock Mr Price adjourned the class, and while Amelia was gathering her purse and other belongings, the man who had been sitting in front of her managed to slip out of the classroom; unseen, unheard, unmet.

  Of the handful of vehicles in the parking lot, Amelia’s car – a ten-year-old maroon Toyota – was the only one producing a gray cloud of vaporous exhaust.

  Amelia looked at all of the cars, including her own, and saw that they were empty. But her car was running. It took a few moments to register, to seep into that part of her brain reserved for the monumentally stupid things that she managed to do with frightening regularity, but eventually it sank in: She had gotten out of the car, left the keys in it, left it running, locked the doors, and casually sauntered off to class. Not a care or a clue.

  Kinda distracted these days, lady?

  ‘I can see it now. The Mystery of the Idling Car. It’ll be a best-seller.’

  The voice came from behind her. Just a few feet away. She spun around, startled.

  It was Dark Curls.

  ‘I decided to keep the car warm while I was in class,’ she said. How had he managed to walk up to her so quietly?

  ‘And you don’t have a spare key . . .’

  Amelia buried her head in her hands, her face beginning to redden. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That would make life far too easy.’

  Dark Curls laughed. ‘Hey. Don’t be embarrassed,’ he said, circling the car, looking in the windows. ‘I was late for a class once. Parked my car quickly, locked it, ran off to class, even though the engine was doing that pre-ignition thing it was so fond of – popata-popata-popata-popata . . .’

  ‘You mean, like, where it won’t shut off for a while?’ Amelia asked. ‘Then it does a big wheeze when it’s finished?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. Forty-five minutes later I came back and the car was still at it – coughing and sputtering and belching exhaust. The parking lot attendant, who sat there the whole time, told me it sounded like a forty-five-minute drum solo. So you’re not the only one that stuff like this happens to.’

  Amelia laughed. ‘Okay. I guess I’m not so embarrassed now. I think.’ She began to rummage through her purse. ‘But I also guess that it’s time to call Triple A.’ I also guess? Amelia thought. Who the hell says I also guess?

  ‘Hang on a sec.’ He walked around to the far side of Amelia’s car. In addition to his jeans and cowboy boots, he wore an Indiana Jones-type brown leather flight jacket; scuffed, of course, in all the right places. ‘Don’t waste the call. You’ve got the window down a little here. Let me go back inside the school and get a coat hanger. I’ll get you inside in no time.’

  ‘You can do that?’ Amelia asked.

  ‘Just anudder vestige of me misspent yoot,’ he said with a rakish smile, then turned and trotted back to the school.

  Amelia glanced into the window of her car, at her fun-house reflection. She poked at her hair, smoothed her cheeks, thought about freshening her lipstick, but she didn’t think she would have enough time or light to do a proper job.

  Wow, she thought. Am I flirting? Is this how it all started with Roger and Shelley Roth? Did Roger do something really gallant for Shelley Roth in a parking lot one night and then they talked for a while and then they laughed for a while and then they had a drink and then One Thing led to the proverbial Other? Is this how people who are
allegedly happily married—

  ‘Nice sweater,’ Dark Curls said from behind her, nearly making her jump. Again.

  ‘Oh, uh . . . thanks,’ Amelia said, wondering: Did he see me primping? Shit.

  He walked to the passenger side of her car and, within seconds, said: ‘Got it!’ He opened the passenger door, unlocked the driver door, got out. ‘Score one for the criminal mind.’

  ‘Wow,’ Amelia said. ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘I draw the line at safes, though,’ he said, folding the coat hanger and dropping it into a nearby trash can. ‘Well, big safes, that is.’

  ‘Damn,’ Amelia said, playing along. ‘There goes the National City Bank job I was going to invite you on.’ Jesus. She was flirting.

  Dark Curls laughed and walked around the back of the car. ‘There’ll be other burglaries,’ he said. ‘Just keep me in mind.’

  ‘I will,’ Amelia said, sliding into the driver’s seat. She had left the heat on and it felt like slipping into a toaster oven. Her glasses instantly fogged over and she whipped them off and dropped them on the passenger seat. ‘I guess I’ll see you at the next class then.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ he said. ‘Have a nice evening.’

  ‘You too,’ Amelia replied. As she reached for the door handle she looked up. The streetlamp behind him created a halo of light around his head.

  He smiled.

  A single butterfly loosed itself in Amelia’s stomach.

  She slammed the door on her seat belt and drove off.