The Violet Hour A Novel by Katherine Hill

Author:Katherine Hill
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

10

The evening Abe Green was to pick her up, she arranged her hair in the bathroom mirror thinking she’d achieved a new summit. Was there anything in the world more powerful than a twenty-two-year-old woman in San Francisco? With the corner of her fingernail, she flicked an eyelash from her cheek. She’d seen the way he looked at her, in barely concealed disarray. He was like a winner who’d just discovered that his race had been fixed, that everything he’d believed in until then had been a lie. She thrilled at the idea of dashing his illusions, of being the one to escort him around the corner of his world to show him the real world behind it.

She’d only just discovered it herself. That summer, not long after her college graduation, she’d moved out west on a lark, surprising everyone back home, her parents most of all.

“What are you going to do in California?” Eunice had demanded, seizing the lid of Cassandra’s unzippered suitcase the day before her plane would depart. “No one knows you there. Why should anyone give you a job?” Her voice took its usual nasty tone but belying it were her eyes, shining frantically, and for the first time she seemed not terrifying but almost unbearably weak. Cassandra had to look away.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. From the pile on her bed, she matched and rolled another pair of cotton socks.

“You’ll be nothing!”

She felt a little sorry to be leaving her father, who drove her to the airport in the hearse while Eunice stayed behind, ironing righteously—but not any more than a little. He had almost never defended her against her mother’s tirades, always finding some excuse to leave the room or to have never been in the room in the first place. He’d made his choice long ago, and now so would Cassandra, though she let him hug her a little longer than was their custom at the gate.

The choice, of course, was right. In San Francisco, people got her. Everyone wanted to be her friend—her roommates at the boardinghouse, her classmates at the art center. It was as though coming here had automatically made her more interesting, more noticeable among the crowds. She had a past now, a thing she’d run from, and though she often found it fun to change it around—to tell men in bars she was from Florida instead of Maryland, that her name was Jeanne instead of Cassandra—the very fact of having had a life before this life in San Francisco seemed enough to give her depth, an impression of being layered and worthy of excavation, that she’d never experienced back home. She was starting over here, finally, as an artist—she rarely lied about that—a vocation that seemed best pursued in a far-off place, in which her mother couldn’t easily turn up.

In San Francisco, men wore their hair long and liked to be naked with her for hours, regardless of who she claimed to be. Sex was various and unembarrassed

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.