The Violet Hour Read online

  At that moment Molson decided to break his self-imposed exile under the dinette table. He clicked across the kitchen and parked himself at Amelia’s feet, then raised a paw, à la the closing credits on Lassie. Amelia shook it, wondering exactly what sort of cryptic canine message was being relayed here. Perhaps it was a peace offering for dumping over the ficus plant.

  ‘You’re going to be there tomorrow, right?’ Paige asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Amelia said. ‘Will you relax already?’

  ‘Relax. Right. I need a drink. I need to get laid.’

  ‘Eloquent as always. Can’t imagine why they’re not kicking your door down.’

  ‘I’m serious,’ Paige said. ‘I seem to remember having sex a lot in my twenties. What the hell is going on here?’

  ‘You were married for most of your twenties.’

  ‘Okay, then maybe it was my teens. I just know that I had a lot of sex during one of these decades, and it sure as hell isn’t my thirties.’

  ‘Yeah, well, things will pick up. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Speaking of picking up,’ Paige began, and Amelia immediately sensed that the conversation was shifting to the St John soap opera. And that meant they would shift to their much-practiced verbal shorthand. ‘Is Roger—’

  ‘I don’t think so. Of course, I’m the one who was completely clueless the first time he cheated on me. Big, stupid lap dog. Who’s to say?’

  ‘Have you guys—’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Wow. How long has it—’

  ‘Too long,’ Amelia said. ‘Long enough for me to think about it every time I pick up a gourmet cucumber at Food Fair.’

  ‘Hmmm. A gourmet cucumber.’

  ‘Hey,’ Amelia replied, trying to make light of a feeling that had churned the acid in her stomach for the past two weeks, constantly, an emotion blender set on low. ‘That’s my cheating husband you’re speculating about.’

  Paige laughed. ‘You know, if you need any—’

  ‘I know. Thanks,’ Amelia replied, recalling Paige’s appropriately hued pink vinyl gym bag full of adult sex toys. Roger St John, one of the three lovers in Amelia Randolph’s entire sexual repertory company, had been the one to open her up sexually, the one who had first brought her to orgasm, the one with whom she dared to be free. They had even done a few kinky things over the nine years, had even braved a few public places with their amorous adventures. It was just one of the thousand reasons she was so saddened and outraged at Roger’s indiscretion.

  How could he?

  Paige, having made the offer, returned to her own woes. ‘Be there for me, Sparky,’ she said.

  Sparky. It was a goofy term of endearment they had foisted upon each other ever since they had met at junior college fifteen years earlier. Pre-Roger. Pre-Maddie. Pre-Suburbia. Pre – Roger’s – Midlife – Crisis – Affair – with – the – Blond-Paralegal.

  Pre-Everything.

  ‘Just try and keep me away,’ Amelia said, transferring over to the cordless phone, knowing Paige’s moods about as well as she knew her own.

  This was going to be a long one, she thought.

  Might as well get some dishes done.

  It was nearly an hour later when Amelia got her software loaded, slowly and scrupulously following the manual’s instructions like a cake recipe for an Easy Bake Oven. She was certain she had done something wrong when that little progress bar seemed to take forever moving left to right. But in the end she got a cheerful and satisfying little window that said ‘Installation successful!’

  Maddie, having dutifully held her nose and swallowed a dose of children’s cough syrup, was watching TV. Amelia could hear the sounds of SpongeBob SquarePants drifting down the hall.

  So, as she stood in front of her small desk in the downstairs bedroom, with her steaming mug of Celestial Seasonings Lemon Zinger tea at her side, Amelia took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, opened them, sat down, arranged her weight on the navy blue swivel office chair, and typed:

  This Slow-Gathering Storm

  by Amelia Randolph St John

  She looked up and placed her hand over her mouth, as if she had violated some ancient literary law, titling something before it was written. But it was a start.

  Now she could begin.

  With Andress already dead and the others looking for her, Vesta knew she had no choice. She cocked the pistol and waited for Gaspar to mount the stairs; the sound of his big boots, once so enticing, once a sound that kept pace with her accelerating pulse, would now be the knell that brought him death.

  Her breathing became more labored with each moment that passed, the voice of Gaspar Sencio’s child within her, begging her, imploring her not to pull the trigger, not to take the life of his father, not to—

  ‘How’s it going?’

  Roger St John was a man of just over forty years, just over six feet, trim and athletic, collegiately handsome. A perfect salesman specimen, Amelia had thought when they met at a party at Case Western Reserve University so many years ago. But if Roger St John had anything, he had grace. A track star in high school, Roger St John could sneak up on a mongoose.

  ‘Let’s see . . .’Amelia began, ‘except for needing my Huggies changed, I’m okay.’

  ‘Did I scare you?’ he asked, for the three thousandth time since they were married.

  She had caught him in The Big Lie two weeks earlier, a lie that had led to a wine-soaked confessional, a tearful gusher of a Saturday night that had Roger ultimately owning up to a brief, dispassionate, midlife-crisis affair with Michelle Roth, the Fashion Bug bimbo from his office who represented everything Amelia hoped her daughter would not become – loud, garish, always playing stupid and helpless for the boys. Shelley Roth was a pox on womanhood, a viper in cheap shoes.

  But Shelley Roth had fucked her husband, and for that she wanted to gut the little bitch with a rusty Ginsu knife.

  Her initial reaction had been to grab the first bag boy who smiled at her at the Food Fair, taking him back to his parents’ house and banging his brains out for revenge. It was her second and third reaction, too, although she hadn’t acted upon the impulse. Neither had she ruled out the possibility of her own adult indiscretion. Why not? It would be a freebie.

  No guilt!

  As a contract lawyer for Cleveland Clinic, Roger traveled a great deal for his job, but since his disclosure, he had been spending even more time on the road. And when he was home, he seemed to linger endlessly in the garage, suddenly interested in organizing the St John supply of nails, screws, nuts, bolts, and washers.

  Amelia had not yet decided whether she would forgive him.

  When she didn’t answer, Roger leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Whatcha got?’ He jockied for position to get a better look at the computer screen. Amelia leaned back and let him see her non-book.

  She had not gotten past the title. The screen was still blank. For some reason, the thoughts and scenes and words and actions and plots all came to her head so easily, as did the descriptions of the characters and settings, right down to the smallest details, but nothing seemed to come out her fingers. She saw it all. Heard it all. Felt it, at times. So how come she couldn’t write it?

  Because you’re not a real writer, Sparky. See . . . you’re a thirty-four-year-old housewife with two years of college, a couple of adult-ed courses, a cheating husband, and a subscription to Writer’s Digest magazine, as opposed to an actual—

  ‘. . . writer in the house,’ Roger said. ‘I think it’s kind of cool. Kind of sexy, too.’ He stood behind her and cautiously ran his right hand gently under her right breast. Although the desired effect was the actual effect – they had not had sex now in more than a month – Amelia couldn’t let him know that. She shrugged her shoulder to let her husband know that Tits were off-limits.

  ‘I’m gonna grab a few shirts and head back to the airport,’ Roger said, awkwardly, his plan derailed. He looked at his watch, clearly unaware of the emotional eddy he ha
d just narrowly averted. ‘It looks pretty good in Chicago. Should go smoothly. I might even get back in a few days. Only four stops.’ He kissed Amelia on top of her head. ‘Love you.’

  As Amelia watched him move gracefully toward the stairs – the crystal sconces in the hallway highlighting the chestnut in his hair, the silhouette of his broad shoulders stirring a deep need within her – she had no way of knowing how much would happen to her little family by the time she saw her husband again on Halloween night.

  Nor did she know that by that time, everything that made him recognizable to her, everything that made him Roger Alan St John, would already be gone.

  6

  THE VILLA CORELLI Nursing Home was a four-story, stoic brick bear on East 152nd Street near St Clair. It had seen better days when it was known as the Erie Arms hotel, back in the thirties and forties, but for the most part, its sixty rooms were clean and safe and well run. The home was all male, all Italian. Nicky’s grandfather Louis Stella, now ninety-one, lived in a room on the fourth floor. As Nicky passed through the small lobby and signed in, he was immediately accosted by the standard nursing-home scents. Disinfectant, long-boiled meats, flatulence. Geezer smells.

  When he turned the corner in to his grandfather’s room, Nicky had a bag of candy in his hand, a plastic sandwich bag containing a few green jellied spearmint leaves, his grandfather’s favorite. The bag was a lot smaller than the bags they sold at the stores because Nicky made it himself, putting four or five of the spearmint leaves in a Glad bag, then stapling the paper label to the top. He had used the same label for two years, managing to sneak it out of the room every time he visited Villa Corelli. Left to his own devices, Louie Stella would eat five pounds of the shockingly sweet green candies if they were left in front of him, as he once had.

  ‘Hi, Grampa,’ Nicky said. He leaned over and kissed the old man on his stubbled cheek, and immediately winced. Someone had given his grandfather a bottle of cologne, and it appeared that he was wearing the whole thing.

  His grandfather looked up, squinted. ‘Vincent?’

  ‘No, Grampa. It’s Nicky.’ Nothing. Not a glimmer of recognition in the old man’s eyes. Nicky spoke a little louder. ‘Nicky, Grampa. Vincent’s son. Nicky.’

  ‘Vinny?’

  ‘Nicky.’

  Louis Stella gave his grandson the once-over. Slowly. Like he was sizing him up for a spanking. ‘Vincent?’

  Nicky looked to the other side of the room. ‘Hank . . . you want to give this a shot?’

  Hank Piunno was his grandfather’s roommate of ten months, an emaciated, birdlike man in his eighties, a classic anal retentive who always had the items on his night-stand arranged with Euclidean precision. ‘It’s Nicky, Louis,’ Hank said. ‘Your grandson. Nicky. Not Vincent. Nicky.’

  Louie Stella smiled, oblivious. He looked at Nicky. ‘Howsa you family?’

  ‘I don’t have a family, Grampa,’ Nicky said. As always, the stating of that fact chipped away another tiny piece of his heart. Meg. God, how he still missed her. He started talking before his emotions could seize his words. ‘You’re my family.’

  Louie Stella appeared not to have heard. But Nicky knew that he just as likely might have been back in Italy somewhere, adrift in time, a cocky, muscular kid walking his donkey through the crags and cairns of Bari. He looked up. ‘You catch the bad guys?’

  Nicky rolled his eyes. ‘That’s Vincent, Grampa. That’s my father. Your son. He’s the cop.’

  Nicky stood up, took out his iPod, put the headphones over Louie’s head. Like all the rituals in his life, Louie expected this, looked forward to this. Every visit, Nicky would play something from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana for his grandfather. Like all Italian men, Louie Stella misted up and began to drift with the opening strains of the intermezzo.

  Nicky studied the old man for a few moments, seeing his father sitting there in a few years, himself. Three generations of emotionally brittle men. Louie Stella had been a bullworker his whole life, a man who offered the world the intellect of his hands, the strong, unyielding muscles of his back. But now his hands were gnarled into something hardly recognizable as human. It was difficult for Nicky to believe that they were the same hands that used to magically find half-dollars in his ears, the same hands that used to go under the hood on those numbingly cold Cleveland winter mornings, fumble around with a few wires, and miraculously start the ocean blue Buick LeSabre, the only car that Louie Stella had ever purchased new. Now his hands were idle, useless.

  ‘Look at this, Grampa.’ Nicky placed a copy of the Free Times on his grandfather’s lap, an issue that was already ten years old. He had shown his grandfather the article a number of times, and he had had a lot of things published since, but neither of those points mattered. What mattered was that his byline was set in twenty-four-point type.

  After a few moments, Louie’s eyes drifted down to the page, and recognition settled over him like a sunset. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the page, animated by the notion of seeing his own last name unexpectedly. ‘Look, Nicky.’

  Bingo. ‘Yeah, Grampa. That’s me. I wrote that.’

  His grandfather smiled broadly. ‘You?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He held the magazine up to Hank Piunno’s face. ‘My grandson,’ he said.

  ‘I know, Louie. I know,’ Hank said, not looking up from his paper. ‘You showed me last time. You show me every time.’

  Undaunted by the chilly response, Louie Stella looked back at the magazine, marveling at it again for the very first time. Nicky smiled, opened the bag of candy, and put the label into his back pocket.

  ‘I hate to bring this up, of course. And we usually handle matters like this through the mail. But it’s already over three thousand dollars. I’m afraid his pharmaceutical costs keep going up,’ said Jimmy Corelli. Jimmy – in his early fifties, rotund and prissy – had cornered Nicky in the lobby and asked him to step into the office. Nicky knew this meeting was coming – his grandfather’s MediCare only went so far, and he had long ago exhausted his small pension – he was just hoping it wouldn’t come for a few more weeks. ‘I’m afraid that if it’s not paid, and paid soon, we’ll have to move your grandfather to Villa Paese on 185th Street. It’s not so bad, really.’

  But it was. The two months that his grandfather was there, before a room was available at Villa Corelli, Louie Stella had cried every day. And while that was not at all unusual for Italian men, who, as they got older, cried at the drop of a hat, Nicky knew it was because Villa Paese was one step away from a welfare hotel. Forget the fact that, as Jimmy Corelli was giving him this speech, Nicky could see the back parking lot through the window, a lot that was dotted with late-model luxury cars bearing vanity plates like bcorelli, jcorelli, mcorelli. Business was business.

  ‘Let me talk to my family, okay?’ Nicky said, knowing that his father was tapped out, and that his uncle Chuck in San Diego had recently learned that he had lung cancer, and therefore would not be contributing any longer. ‘Can you give me a week?’

  Jimmy looked at his clipboard, as if the answer might be there. He looked back up. ‘One week, Mr Stella. And then I’m afraid my hands will be tied.’

  Nicky got into his car, started it, flipped on the heater, waited. He tried to push the image of his grandfather warehoused at that scuzzy place on 185th Street out of his mind. The Corellis owned four homes, and of them, Villa Corelli was the best. It was where they put their own aging relatives.

  But where was he going to get three grand? He was already into the gypsy for four.

  When the car was as warm as it was going to get, Nicky pulled out onto East 152nd Street, deciding to drive through the Euclid Creek end of the park, hoping there was still some fall color left in the trees, hoping there was still enough light to see them.

  As he turned in to the park, he thought about the fact that John Angelino – Johnny Angel, his cousin Joseph used to call him – was only a few years older than he. A young man, really, and his fina
l autumn had already come and gone.

  7

  MACAVITY WAS HIS favorite name, although it was not the only name he used. God, no. Over the past twenty years he had been so many people. Still, he liked to keep his aliases in the realm of T.S. Eliot’s poetry, if he could. He liked Mr Mistoffelees, but it wasn’t very practical, as aliases go. He liked Bustopher Jones a lot. Now, that was a kick-the-door-down name, there. Bustopher. You needn’t pack a second day’s worth of charm if you had a name like Bustopher. But it was getting harder to use them, primarily due to that heretical, venus’s-flytrap set for every midwestern rube who dared set foot in midtown Manhattan on a weekend theater package. That desecration of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

  Julia would have hated Cats with a passion.

  Of that, he was certain.

  Thank God the show had finally closed.

  On those occasions when he needed a formal first name, he used Tom. That was Eliot’s first name. Thomas Stearns Eliot. Julia had told him that Tom was what they called T.S. Eliot in his younger years.

  For the most part, though, for him, it was simply Mac. Macavity was the Mystery Cat, see. The Hidden Paw. ‘Hey, Mac,’ the street people would say to him, the only people who saw this keen edge of his life. It was easy for them to remember. ‘Morning, Mac, how are ya?’ they would say. And that suited him fine.

  He got up from the MetroPark bench, stood, stretched, prepared to run. He had changed his clothes. He now wore navy blue sweats, a dark knit watch cap.

  He imagined Julia, barefoot, standing in the lagoon by the art museum . . . Julia cooking spaghetti on her dormroom hot plate . . . Julia crying over Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. He breathed deeply the unsullied air of the MetroPark, eyes closed now, filling his lungs with the scents of the suburban forest.

  He opened his eyes, saw a jogger, a young woman of nineteen or twenty. Julia’s age. She leaned over to sip water at the fountain, the outline of her ass high and firm and inviting. She stood up straight, unzipped her windbreaker, struck a pose. A chill cut across the park, and even from thirty feet away, he could see her nipples fighting the spandex for room. Her hair was a raw honey color, soft, ponytailed, perfect. She scanned the park, the nearby pavilion, looking around slowly, slowly, finally in his direction, then rather quickly away. It was a look that women gave to men when they found them attractive but, with their highly attuned female whiskers, sensed they were dangerous as hell.