The Violet Hour: A Novel (34 page)

He sputtered at the surprise flavor. “What is this?”

“Rum from my grandpa’s liquor cabinet,” she said, holding her bottle aloft. “To his memory.”

“To his memory.”

A few feet beyond them was a veritable tailgate, everyone holding a beer.

“I guess I didn’t have to smuggle it after all,” she said. “But I’m glad I did. Feels like high school again.” Under the giant movie screen, which backed up against a slope, a group of actual high-schoolers—boys and girls both—gabbed, slung their bony arms around one another’s shoulders, and generally pretended they didn’t know or care that everyone could see them.

Toby took another swig from his bottle and rolled onto his stomach next to Elizabeth, his jacket and shirt laid out by his feet. He couldn’t believe he’d actually gotten her here. He’d played it cool and then everything had happened so fast. He closed his eyes and let his leg drift so that a tiny spec of it was touching hers, making a bridge between their two bodies. Seconds passed, and he felt her relax into him.

Everyone around them was talking; insects hummed in the air above. Reflexively, he swatted at a spot on the top of his head.

“I have bug spray,” she said. “If you need it.”

Toby opened his eyes to see her wiping her mouth with the back of her hand after what looked, from the level of liquid in her bottle, like a fairly long drink. He considered the erotic consequences of smelling like deet, and told her, no, he’d be all right; it was probably just the grass.

She shrugged and held her hand out in front of his face. A pink mound the size of a dime stood out near the base of her thumb. He turned on his side, and took her hand, feeling the difference between the swollen and unswollen skin. The bump was warmer to the touch, and textured like a mini rubber ball.

“What does the future dermatologist think?” he asked.

“Looks like your everyday North American mosquito bite.”

A lumpy man in a ponytail was now tapping a microphone under the screen, the teenagers having finally taken their seats. There were raffle winners to announce: dinners for two, concert tickets, a Maryland Terrapins T-shirt.

He lifted her hand to his mouth and held it there, tracing the outline of the bite with his tongue, feeling it to be, in his rapture, like
an entire island in an ocean far away. He really had to restrain himself now, had to keep himself from chomping off her hand. The tiny, invisible hairs of her skin flicked up against his lips. Lightly pulling them with his teeth, he sucked with his entire mouth: on her skin, her pores, and the flesh that lived below them. He felt her body move even closer as she fed him her thumb, then her forefinger, then her thumb again, and palm.

When he next looked up, he saw that the woman adjacent to them was glaring. She was sitting up high in a rainbow beach chair, and she clearly did not approve of people swallowing fingers in public while there was still light enough for her two Uno-playing children to look their way and see.

Chastened, Toby released Elizabeth’s hand. “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered.

He started to gather their things, but she was already standing. “Leave it,” she said, in a tone he knew better than to contradict. They put their heads down and crept away from the quilt. On the aisle that had formed between the moviegoers and the festival booths, they passed people in khaki shorts and striped fabric flip-flops carrying snow cones, tie-dyed T-shirts, and pamphlets about good nutrition. Elizabeth felt the gaze of the crowd on her cheeks, her shoulders, and the backs of her thighs and calves, but each time she looked up, everyone was absorbed in dramas of their own.

They came to the tie-dye booth, where two girls were trying to figure out which was better: an orange-and-pink bandana, or a pair of pink-and-purple shorts. As the merchant bent down to see if she could find some other options, Elizabeth ducked around the booth, pulling Toby by the finger behind her. They emerged in the middle of a sidewalk lined with trees that weren’t quite old enough to shelter anyone from the elements. Beyond the trees a drainage slope joined up with an exposed parking lot at the back end of a laboratory building. There were still several cars in the lot, and a woman in hiking sandals walking toward one with a tote bag on each shoulder.

They followed the sidewalk away from the street, farther onto the campus of the sprawling government research center, which seemed to have been built entirely of fences and glass. A guard was visible in the lobby of every building. Their path was flanked with emergency phones and cameras and hissing light from powerful lamps.

“Probably since 9/11,” Toby observed, as Elizabeth shielded her face with her hand. She dropped behind him half a step to press her thigh into the back of his. It had grown darker, and she felt almost hidden in the spaces between the lights.

A branching footpath led them away from the lamp lit sidewalk and back down toward the dell with the movie screen. They could hear a voice talking into a microphone and the staticky beeps of the standard countdown that used to signal the beginning of a film. People cheered, and all of a sudden, the opening credits had begun.

As they approached the screen from the rear, they could see members of a tech crew relaxing in the open back of a van. The light from the projector was almost blinding, but when Elizabeth ducked down, she was able to see the silhouettes of people sitting in trees, as well as the earthbound audience, bathed in the soapy beam below. They numbered several hundred at least, so densely packed together that Elizabeth couldn’t even tell where she and Toby had been sitting. Cheers rose from the audience at the first appearance of Michael J. Fox, and as her eyes adjusted, Elizabeth was able to make out the faces of the crowd, all of them turned devotionally toward the picture, which flickered back in color across their foreheads. She had never seen a movie audience from quite this angle before. It was like watching a field of strangers sleeping, so private and uninhibited was the expression on every face.

Toby crouched beside her and pointed at a space in the middle of the grass. It was darker than the rest of the night, and it seemed to demarcate some sort of boundary. Bent low, they ran toward it, finding a small, knee-high circle of bushes around a birdbath that had, from where they’d been sitting before, been entirely blocked by the screen. Toby stepped into the circle, surveyed it, and then dropped down out
of sight. Elizabeth slipped in after, barely feeling the branches as they dragged across her legs.

She lay down beside him on her back, and became aware as her eyes adjusted that they were fully enclosed and protected. Any noise they made would be drowned out by the film. She placed her palm on the ground and felt it vibrate with the hum of traffic on a nearby road. Even here in her mother’s hometown, where nothing was hidden because no one had anything to hide, there was a space for things unseen. It had been nearly a decade since she’d first had sex outdoors—the first time she’d ever done it, when she was seventeen, stringy, and sharp. As she grew up, it seemed more reasonable to keep sex indoors, in private, away from the judgments of others. Its place was in the bedroom, on the sofa, or maybe a kitchen countertop, in a moment of sudden, irresistible passion. But she had fewer rules now. Increasingly, her friends were mellowing out and settling down, while she felt, more insistently than ever, that the things worth exploring were only just becoming known. Things like Ferdinand Toby Steinberg, who hadn’t yet turned twenty-three.

She pulled him on top of her, because she wanted to feel the ground beneath her back, the same ground the families with dogs were sitting on, not two hundred feet away. When he pulled down her underpants she already had the condom ready, having tucked it into the pocket of her dress.

The red lights of planes crossed paths overhead, and the glow from the screen seemed to expose her, shoving her up into him for all the moviegoers to see. To her delight, he was a punishing kisser, swallowing her mouth the way he’d earlier swallowed her thumb. “Fuck me,” she said, like a woman in a porno. “Fuck my brains out.” Like she didn’t care who found them; like she wanted to be found. His eyes widened at this, but only for an instant before he was smiling ridiculously, his teeth and the flank of his tongue gleaming, celebrating with each thrust the perfect ugliness of her words. He turned her over and fucked her capably, ground her down into the grass and dirt. This—she thought fleetingly, her face burning with
sweat and glorious shame, her legs practically torn from her hips—this was how you got on with things, how you cleaned up the mess you’d made of your life.

T
HEY HELD ON
to the condom until they came across a trash bin near where they’d left their things. The darkness continued to save them: no one appeared to notice what it was that Toby had thrown in. Sex had made them arrogant and lithe, capable of crawling back into the absorbed and chattering crowd, gathering their blanket and bag, and escaping, all but unobserved. You could kill a person at an outdoor film, Elizabeth thought, as they ran along the aisle to freedom.

They walked back to the Metro, bodies touching at all times. On the long, vertiginous escalator ride down, she sat on her step, and he sat down behind her, pulling her body back between his legs. You were not supposed to do this; you were not supposed to sit on escalators. And yet, they weren’t hurting anyone. They kept the quilt and his jacket away from the moving parts, and they kept their bodies very calm and still. Sex in public, sitting on escalators. She wanted to keep tearing down walls.

It would be silly to say that she loved Toby, or was even falling in love with him. But on the escalator he did things that felt a lot like love. He brushed her hair away from her face, draped and stroked it across his knee. He squeezed her, just a little, with the insides of his bony legs. For a moment she felt this was the purest form of love—unburdened by time and the complication of knowing a person too well. Whatever it was, it was better.

At the bottom, they passed the card machines, and took another short escalator ride to the almost-empty platform. A funereal figure paced at the end, and closer in, a woman sat on a stone bench, facing the track that ran away from the city. Elizabeth and Toby found a space on the other side of the platform, keeping their distance from the bench, the map, and the garbage—anything that might attract
another soul. She wrapped her arm around his trunk and rested her cheek against his shoulder blade. It was damp and smelled of grass and dirt, though she’d been the one on the ground.

The station was still for a moment, and then the platform lights began to flash. A soft light grew in the mouth of the tunnel until it became two headlamps, and then a train heading in the opposite direction, discharging passengers from downtown. Elizabeth and Toby watched those who’d remained on the train, each one lost in private waiting, their lives a little closer through the idling open doors. A man in headphones and a standard-issue oxford shirt stood just inside the opening closest to them. At the last second, he came to and jumped out, having only just realized he’d arrived. “Doors closing,” the automated voice repeated. He barely cleared them, lurching into the path of another man, who was wearing a hat and had been walking quickly down the platform toward the exit.

“Watch it!” he said. The man with headphones shrugged in apology and stepped aside to let him pass. But the other man just stared, his profile tightening into what might have as easily been a smile as a frown. Uncertainly, the first man raised a hand in submission and moved past him for the escalator, taking it two steps at a time.

“I guess he had a bad day,” Elizabeth said.

There was something so frank and endearing in these words that Toby couldn’t suppress a spastic laugh. His Elizabeth—she was his now—saw the world plainly, in elements that mattered. A day was good or bad. She looked at him quizzically, the whites of her eyes sparking at the corners near her ducts, her nose a proud line from her forehead to her lip. She was adorable, and she didn’t even know it. He took her in his arms and pressed her hip bones into his. A continent of warmth spread across his waist.

“You think that’s funny?”

Toby released her and turned to see the hatted man behind them. He stood, legs wide and wavering, as though the platform were the subway car and he was riding without holding on. The brim of his fisherman’s hat cast a shadow over his eyes but couldn’t hide his
hanging, unshaven lip or the raw pink of his lower gum. He wore a wrinkled ringer tee and camouflage pants, the kind generally worn by people who’d never served—but in this man’s case, Toby couldn’t be sure. He was droopy and drunk but also perceptibly strong. He might have been any age between twenty and forty-five, and Toby realized now he was the figure they’d first seen at the end of the platform, moving slowly, methodically, as though counting out his steps.

“Just laughing at something she said,” Toby said, taking care not to sound too glib. He was relieved to see the platform lights on their side flashing, announcing an incoming train.

“You think that’s
funny
?” the man repeated, more insistently this time.

“Yeah,” Toby said, somewhat taken aback. “I mean. What she said was funny.”

“Toby.” Elizabeth placed her hands on his waist. Her eyes were wary.

“It’s cool,” he told her.

“What did she say that was so fucking funny?”

“Well, she said . . .” Toby caught himself, not wanting to give him the slightest excuse to go on. “You really had to be there. I’m sorry, man. We were just talking to each other. We didn’t mean to bother anybody else.”

The train was slowing to a halt, and Elizabeth was tugging at his shirt.

“Have a good one,” Toby said as cheerfully as he could manage, before Elizabeth pulled him away. They walked alongside the train until it stopped, and when the doors opened, they kept going, slipping in through the middle doors of the next car up.

“That was a little scary,” Elizabeth whispered as they took a pair of orange cushioned seats behind a transparent plastic divider. The car was mostly empty.