***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.***
Copyright © 2014 by Beatriz Williams
Vivian, 1964
New York City
I nearly missed that card from the post office, stuck up as it was against the side of the mail slot. Just imagine. Of such little accidents is history made.
I’d moved into the apartment only a week ago, and I didn’t know all the little tricks yet: the way the water collects in a slight depression below the bottom step on rainy days, causing you to slip on the chipped marble tiles if you aren’t careful; the way the butcher’s boy steps inside the superintendent’s apartment at five-fifteen on Wednesday afternoons, when the super’s shift runs late at the cigar factory, and spends twenty minutes jiggling his sausage with the super’s wife while the chops sit unguarded in the vestibule.
And—this is important, now—the way postcards have a habit of sticking to the side of the mail slot, just out of view if you’re bending to retrieve your mail instead of crouching all the way down, as I did that Friday evening after work, not wanting to soil my new coat on the perpetually filthy floor.
But luck or fate or God intervened. My fingers found the postcard, even if my eyes didn’t. And though I tossed the mail on the table when I burst into the apartment and didn’t sort through it all until late Saturday morning, wrapped in my dressing gown, drinking a filthy concoction of tomato juice and the-devil-knew-what to counteract the several martinis and one neat Scotch I’d drunk the night before, not even I, Vivian Schuyler, could elude the wicked ways of the higher powers forever.
Mind you, I’m not here to complain.
“What’s that?” asked my roommate, Sally, from the sofa, such as it was. The dear little tart appeared even more horizontally inclined than I did. My face was merely sallow; hers was chartreuse.
“Card from the post office.” I turned it over in my hand. “There’s a parcel waiting.”
“For you or for me?”
“For me.”
“Well, thank God for that, anyway.”
I looked at the card. I looked at the clock. I had twenty-three minutes until the post office on West Tenth Street closed for the weekend. My hair was unbrushed, my face bare, my mouth still coated in a sticky film of hangover and tomato juice.
On the other hand: a parcel. Who could resist a parcel? A mysterious one, yet. All sorts of brown-paper possibilities danced in my head. Too early for Christmas, too late for my twenty-first birthday (too late for my twenty-second, if you’re going to split hairs), too uncharacteristic to come from my parents. But there it was, misspelled in cheap purple ink: Miss Vivien Schuyler, 52 Christopher Street, apt. 5C, New York City. I’d been here only a week. Who would have mailed me a parcel already? Perhaps my great-aunt Julie, submitting a housewarming gift? In which case I’d have to skedaddle on down to the P.O. hasty-posty before somebody there drank my parcel.
The clock again. Twenty-two minutes.
“If you’re going,” said Sally, hand draped over her eyes, “you’d better go now.”
Of such little choices is history made.
. . .
I DARTED INTO the post office building at eight minutes to twelve— yes, my dears, I have good reason to remember the exact time of arrival— shook off the rain from my umbrella, and caught my sinking heart at the last instant. The place was crammed. not only crammed, but wet. not only wet, but stinking wet: sour wool overlaid by piss overlaid by cigarettes. I folded my umbrella and joined the line behind a blond-haired man in blue surgical scrubs. This was new York, after all: you took the smell and the humanity—oh, the humanity!—as part of the whole sublime package.
Well, all right.
Amendment: You didn’t have to take the smell and the humanity and the ratty Greenwich Village apartment with the horny butcher’s boy on Wednesday afternoons and the beautifully alcoholic roommate who might just pick up the occasional weekend client to keep body and Givenchy together. Not if you were Miss Vivian Schuyler, late of Park Avenue and East Hampton, even later of Bryn Mawr College of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. In fact, you courted astonishment and not a little scorn by so choosing. Picture us all, the affectionate Schuylers, lounging about the breakfast table with our eggs and Bloody Marys at eleven o’clock in the morning, as the summer sun melts like honey through the windows and the uniformed maid delivers a fresh batch of toast to absorb the arsenic.
Mums (lovingly): You aren’t really going to take that filthy job at the magazine, are you?
Me: Why, yes. I really am.
Dadums (tenderly): Only bitches work, Vivian.
So it was my own fault that I found myself standing there in the piss-scented post office on West Tenth Street, with my elegant Schuyler nose pressed up between the shoulder blades of the blue scrubs in front of me. I just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Could not accept my gilded lot. Could not turn this unearned Schuyler privilege into the least necessary degree of satisfaction.
And less satisfied by the moment, really, as the clock counted down to quitting time and the clerks showed no signs of hurry and the line showed no sign of advancing. The foot-shifting began. The man behind me swore and lit a cigarette. Someone let loose a theatrical sigh. I inched my nose a little deeper toward the olfactory oasis of the blue scrubs, because this man at least smelled of disinfectant instead of piss, and blond was my favorite color.
A customer left the counter. The first man in line launched himself toward the clerk. The rest of us took a united step forward.
Except the man in blue scrubs. His brown leather feet remained planted, but I realized this only after I’d thrust myself into the center of his back and knocked him right smack down to the stained linoleum.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, holding out my hand. He looked up at me and blinked, like my childhood dog Quincy used to do when roused unexpectedly from his after-breakfast beauty snooze. “My word. Were you asleep?”
He ignored my hand and rose to his feet. “Looks that way.”
“I’m very sorry. Are you all right?”
“Yes, thanks.” That was all. He turned and faced front.
Well, I would have dropped it right there, but the man was eye-wateringly handsome, stop-in-your-tracks handsome, Paul Newman handsome, sunny blue eyes and sunny blond hair, and this was New York, where you took your opportunities wherever you found them. “Ah. You must be an intern or a resident, or whatever they are. Saint Vincent’s, is it? I’ve heard they keep you poor boys up three days at a stretch. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes.” Taciturn. But he was blushing, right the way up his sweet sunny neck.
“Unless you’re narcoleptic,” I went on. “It’s fine, really. You can admit it. My second cousin Richard was like that. He fell asleep at his own wedding, right there at the altar. The organist was so rattled she switched from the Wedding March to the death March.”
The old pregnant pause. Someone stifled a laugh behind me. I thought I’d overplayed my hand, and then:
“He did not.”
Nice voice. Sort of Bing Crosby with a bass chord.
“Did too. We had to sprinkle him with holy water to wake him up, and by sprinkle I mean tip-turn the whole basin over his head. He’s the only one in the family to have been baptized twice.”
The counter shed two more people. We were cooking now. I glanced at the lopsided black-and-white clock on the wall: two minutes to twelve. Blue Scrubs still wasn’t looking at me, but I could see from his sturdy jaw—lanterns, psht—he was trying very hard not to smile.
“Hence his nickname, Holy dick,” I said.
“Give it up, lady,” muttered the man behind me.
“And then there’s my aunt Mildred. You can’t wake her up at all. She settled in for an afternoon nap once and didn’t come downstairs again until bridge the next day.”
No answer.
“So, during the night, we switched the furniture in her room with the red bordello set in the attic,” I said, undaunted. “She was so shaken, she led an unsupported ace against a suit contract.”
The neck above the blue scrubs was now as red as tomato bisque, minus the oyster crackers. He lifted one hand to his mouth and coughed delicately.
“We called her Aunt van Winkle.”
The shoulder blades shivered.
“I’m just trying to tell you, you have no cause for embarrassment for your little disorder,” I said. “These things can happen to anyone.”
“Next,” said a counter clerk, eminently bored.
Blue Scrubs leapt forward. My time was up.
I looked regretfully down the row of counter stations and saw, to my dismay, that all except one were now fronted by malicious little engraved signs reading COUNTER CLOSED.
The one man remaining—other than Blue Scrubs, who was having a pair of letters weighed for air mail, not that I was taking note of any details whatsoever—stood fatly at the last open counter, locked in a spirited discussion with the clerk regarding his proficiency with brown paper and Scotch tape.
Man (affectionately): YOU WANT I SHOULD JUMP THE COUNTER AND BREAK YOUR KNEECAPS, GOOBER?
Clerk (amused): YOU WANT I SHOULD CALL THE COPS, MORON?
I checked my watch. One minute to go. Behind me, I heard people sighing and breaking away, the weighty doors opening and closing, the snatches of merciless October rain on the sidewalk.
Ahead, the man threw up his hands, grabbed back his ramshackle package, and stormed off.
I took a step. The clerk stared at me, looked at the clock, and took out a silver sign engraved COUNTER CLOSED.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
The clerk smiled, tapped his watch, and walked away.
“Excuse me,” I called out, “I’d like to see the manager. I’ve been waiting here for ages, I have a very urgent parcel—”
The clerk turned his head. “It’s noon, lady. The post office is closed. See you Monday.”
“I will not see you Monday. I demand my parcel.”
“Do you want me to call the manager, lady?”
“Yes. Yes, I should very much like you to call the manager. I should very much—”
Blue Scrubs looked up from his air-mail envelopes. “Excuse me.”
I planted my hands on my hips. “I’m terribly sorry to disturb the serenity of your transaction, sir, but some of us aren’t lucky enough to catch the very last post-office clerk before the gong sounds at noon. Some of us are going to have to wait until Monday morning to receive our rightful parcels—”
“Give it a rest, lady.” said the clerk.
“I’m not going to give it a rest. I pay my taxes. I buy my stamps and lick them myself, God help me. I’m not going to stand for this kind of lousy service, not for a single—”
“That’s it,” said the clerk.
“No, that’s not it. I haven’t even started—”
“Look here,” said Blue Scrubs.
I turned my head. “You stay out of this, Blue Scrubs. I’m trying to conduct a perfectly civilized argument with a perfectly uncivil post office employee—”
He cleared his Bing Crosby throat. His eyes matched his scrubs, too blue to be real. “I was only going to say, it seems there’s been a mistake made here. This young lady was ahead of me in line. I apologize, Miss . . .”
“Schuyler,” I whispered.
“. . . Miss Schuyler, for being so very rude as to jump in front of you.” He stepped back from the counter and waved me in.
And then he smiled, all crinkly and Paul Newman, and I could have sworn a little sparkle flashed out from his white teeth.
“Since you put it that way,” I said.
“I do.”
I drifted past him to the counter and held out my card. “I think I have a parcel.”
“You think you have a parcel?” The clerk smirked.
Yes. Smirked. At me.
Well! I shook the card at his post-office smirk, nice and sassy. “That’s Miss Vivian Schuyler on Christopher Street. Make it snappy.”
“Make it snappy, please,” said Blue Scrubs.
“Please. With whipped cream and a cherry,” I said.
The clerk snatched the card and stalked to the back.
My hero cleared his throat.
“My name isn’t Blue Scrubs, by the way,” he said. “It’s Paul.”
“Paul?” I tested the word on my tongue to make sure I’d really heard it. “You don’t say.”
“Is that a problem?
I liked the way his eyebrows lifted. I liked his eyebrows, a few shades darker than his hair, slashing sturdily above his eyes, ever so blue. “No, no. Actually, it suits you.” Smile, Vivian. I held out my hand. “Vivian Schuyler.”
“Of Christopher Street.” He took my hand and sort of held it there, no shaking allowed.
“Oh, you heard that?”
“Lady, the whole building heard that,” said the clerk, returning to the counter. Well. He might have been the clerk. From my vantage, it seemed as if an enormous brown box had sprouted legs and arms and learned to walk, a square-bellied Mr. Potato Head.
“Great guns,” I said. “Is that for me?”
“No, it’s for the Queen of Sheba.” The parcel landed before me with enough heft to rattle all the little silver COUNTER CLOSED signs for miles around. “Sign here.”
“Just how am I supposed to get this box back to my apartment?”
“Your problem, lady. Sign.”
I maneuvered my hand around Big Bertha and signed the slip of paper. “Do you have one of those little hand trucks for me?”
“Oh, yeah, lady. And a basket of fruit to welcome home the new arrival. now get this thing off my counter, will you?”
I looped my pocketbook over my elbow and wrapped my arms around the parcel. “Some people.”
“Look, can I help you with that?” asked Paul.
“No, no. I can manage.” I slid the parcel off the counter and staggered backward. “On the other hand, if you’re not busy saving any lives at the moment . . .”
Paul plucked the parcel from my arms, not without brushing my fingers first, almost as if by accident. “After all, I already know where you live. If I’m a homicidal psychopath, it’s too late for regrets.”
“Excellent diagnosis, Dr. Paul. You’ll find the knives in the kitchen drawer next to the icebox, by the way.”
He hoisted the massive box to his shoulder. “Thanks for the tip. Lead on.”
“Just don’t fall asleep on the way.”
GIDDY MIGHT HAVE been too strong a word for my state of mind as I led my spanking new friend home with my spanking new parcel, but not by much. New York complied agreeably with my mood. The crumbling stoops gleamed with rain; the air had taken on that lightening quality of a storm on the point of lifting.
Mind you. I still took care to stand close, so I could hold my umbrella over the good doctor’s glowing blond head.
“Why didn’t you wear a coat, at least?” I tried to sound scolding, but my heart wasn’t in it.
“I just meant to dash out. I didn’t realize it was raining; I hadn’t been outside for a day and a half.”
I whistled. “Nice life you’ve made for yourself.”
“Isn’t it, though.”
We turned the corner of Christopher Street. The door stood open at my favorite delicatessen, sending a friendly matzo-ball welcome into the air. Next door, the Apple Tree stood quiet and shuttered, waiting for Manhattan’s classiest queens to liven it up it by night. My neighborhood. I loved it already; I loved it even more at this moment. I loved the whole damned city. Where else but new York would a Doctor Paul pop up in your post office, packaged in blue scrubs, fully assembled and with high-voltage batteries included free of charge?
By the time we reached my building, the rain had stopped entirely, and the droplets glittered with sunshine on the turning leaves. I whisked my umbrella aside and winked an affectionate hello to the grime in the creases of the front door. The lock gave way with only a rusty minimum of rattling. Doctor Paul ducked below the lintel and paused in the vestibule. A patch of new sunlight shone through the transom onto his hair. I nearly wept.
“This is you?” he said.
“Only good girls live at the Barbizon. did I mention I’m on the fifth floor?”
“Of course you are.” He turned his doughty shoulders to the stairwell and began to climb. I followed his blue-scrubbed derriere upward, marveling anew as we achieved each landing, wondering when my alarm clock would clamor through the rainbows and unicorns and I would open my eyes to the tea-stained ceiling above my bed.
“May I ask what unconscionably heavy apparatus I’m carrying up to your attic? Cast-iron stove? Cadaver?”
Oh! The parcel.
“My money’s on the cadaver.”
“You don’t know?”
“I have no idea. I don’t even know who it’s from.”
He rested his foot on the next step and cocked his head toward the box. “No ticking, anyway. That’s a good sign.”
“No funny smell, either.”
He resumed the climb with a precious little flex of his shoulder. The landscape grew more dismal as we went, until the luxurious rips in the chintz wallpaper and the incandescent nakedness of the lightbulbs announced that we had reached the unsavory entrance to my unsuitable abode. I made a swift calculation of dishes left unwashed and roommates left unclothed.
“You know, you could just leave it right here on the landing,” I said. “I can manage from here.”
“Just open the door, will you?”
“So commanding.” I shoved the key in the lock and opened the door.
Well, it could have been worse. The dishes had disappeared—sink, perhaps?—and so had the roommate. Only the bottle of vodka remained, sitting proudly on the radiator shelf next to the tomato juice and an elegant black lace slip. Sally’s, by my sacred honor. I hurried over and draped my scarf over the shameful tableau.
A thump ensued as doctor Paul laid the parcel to rest on the table. “Whew. I thought I wasn’t going to make it up that last flight.”
“Don’t worry. I would have caught you.”
He was looking at the parcel: one hand on his hip, the other raking through his hair in that way we girls adore. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“It’s my parcel. Can’t a girl have a little privacy?”
“Now, see here. I carried that . . . that object up five flights of Manhattan stairs. Can’t a man have a little curiosity?”
Again with the glittery smile. I pushed myself off the radiator. “Since you put it that way. Make yourself comfortable. Can I take your coat and hat?”
“That hurt.”
I slipped off my wet raincoat and slung it on Sally’s hat tree, a hundred years old at least and undoubtedly purloined. I placed my hat on the hook above my coat, taking care to give my curls an artful little shake. Well, you can’t blame me for that, at least. My hair was my best feature: brown and glossy, a hint of red, falling just so around my ears, a saucy flip. It distracted from my multitude of flaws, Monday to Sunday. Why not shake for all I was worth?
I turned around and sashayed the two steps to the table. Also purloined. Sally had told me the story yesterday, over our second round of martinis: the restaurant owner, the jealous wife, the police raid. I’ll spare you the ugly details. In any case, our table was far more important than either of us had a right to own—solid, square, genuine imitation wood— which was positively providential, because my mysterious gift from the post office (the parcel, not the blond) would have overwhelmed a lesser piece of furniture. As it was, the beast sat brown and hulking in the center, battered in one corner, stained in another, patched with an assortment of foreign stamps.
“Well, well.” I peered over the top. “What have we here?”
Miss Vivien Schuyler, read the label. Of 52 Christopher Street, et cetera, et cetera, except that my misspelled first name appeared over a scribbled-out original, and my building address likewise.
“It looks as if it’s been forwarded,” I said.
“The plot thickens.”
“My mother’s handwriting.” I ran my finger over the jagged remains of Fifth Avenue. “My parents’ address, too.”
“That sounds reasonable.” He remained a few respectful feet away, arms crossed against his blue chest. “Someone must have sent it to your parents’ house.”
“Apparently. Someone from Zurich, Switzerland.”
“Switzerland?” He uncrossed his arms and stepped forward at last. “Really? You have friends in Switzerland?”
“Not that I can remember.” I was trying to read the original name, beneath my mother’s black scribble. V something something. “What do you think that is?”
“It’s not Vivian?”
“No, it ends with a t.”
An instant’s reflection. “Violet? Someone had your name wrong, I guess.”
For a man who’d just walked coatless through the dregs of an October rain, doctor Paul was awfully warm. I wore a cashmere turtleneck sweater over my modest torso, ever so snug, and still I could feel the rampant excess wafting from his skin, an unconscionable waste of thermal energy. Up close, he smelled like a hospital, which bothered me not at all.
I sashayed to the kitchen drawer and withdrew a knife.
“Ah, now the truth comes out. Make it quick.”
“Silly.” I gave the knife a friendly little wave. “It’s just that I don’t have any scissors.”
“Scissors! You really are a professional.”
“Stand aside, if you will.” I examined the parcel before me. Every seam was sealed by multiple layers of Scotch tape, as if the contents were either alive or radioactive, or both. “I don’t know where to start.”
“You know, I am a trained surgeon.”
“So you say.” I sliced along one seam, and another. rather expertly, if you must know; but then I had done the honors of the table at college since my sophomore year. Nobody at Bryn Mawr carved up a noble loin like Vivian Schuyler.
The paper shell gave way, and then the box itself. I stood on a chair and dug through the packing paper.
“Steady, there.” Doctor Paul’s helpful hands closed on the back of the chair, and it ceased its rickety-rocking obediently.
“It’s leather,” I said, from inside the box. “Leather and quite heavy.”
“Do you need any help? A flashlight? Map?”
“No, I’ve got it. Here we are. Head, shoulders, placenta.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Neither.” I grasped with both hands and yanked, propelling myself conveniently backward into Doctor Paul’s alert arms. We tumbled pleasantly, if rather ungracefully, to the disreputable rug. “It’s a suitcase.”
I CALLED MY MOTHER FIRST . “What is this suitcase you sent me?”
“This is not how ladies greet one another on the telephone, darling.”
“Each other, not one another. One another means three or more people. Chicago Manual of Style, chapter eight, verse eleven.”
A merry clink of ice cubes against glass. “You’re so droll, darling. Is that what you do at your magazine every day?”
“Tell me about the suitcase.”
“I don’t know about any suitcase.”
“You sent me a package.”
“Did I?” Another clink, prolonged, as of swirling. “Oh, that’s right. It arrived last week.”
“And you had no idea what was inside?”
“Not the faintest curiosity.”
“Who’s it from?”
“From whom, darling.” Oh, the ring of triumph.
“From whom is the package, Mums?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Do you know anybody in Zurich, Switzerland?”
“Nobody to you. Vivian, I’m dreadfully bored by this conversation. Can’t you simply open the damned thing and find out yourself ?”
“I already told you. It’s a suitcase. It was sent to Miss Violet Schuyler on Fifth Avenue from somebody in Zurich, Switzerland. If it’s not mine—”
“It is yours. I don’t know any Violet Schuyler.”
“Violet is not nearly the same as Vivian. Doctor Paul agrees with me. There’s been a mistake.”
A gratifying pause, as Mums was set back on her vodka-drenched heels. “Who is Doctor Paul?”
I swiveled and fastened my eyes on the good doctor. He was leaning against the wall next to the window, smiling at the corner of his mouth, blue scrubs revealed as charmingly rumpled now that the full force of sunlight was upon them. “Oh, just the doctor I met in the post office. The one who carried the parcel back for me.”
“You met a doctor at the post office, Vivian?” As she might say, the gay bathhouse on Bleecker Street.
I leaned my hip against the table, right next to the battered brown valise, trusting the whole works wouldn’t give way beneath me. I was wearing slacks, unbelted, as befitted a dull Saturday morning, but doctor Paul deserved to know that my waist-to-hip ratio wasn’t all that bad, really. I couldn’t have said that his expression changed, except that I imagined his eyes took on a deeper shade of blue. I treated him to a slow wink and wound the telephone cord around my fingers. “Oh, you’d adore Doctor Paul, Mums. He’s a surgeon, very handsome, taller than me, seems to have all his teeth. Perfectly eligible, really, unless he’s married.” I put the phone to my shoulder. “Doctor Paul, are you married?”
“Not yet.”
Phone back to ear. “nope, not married, or so he claims. He’s your dream come true, Mums.”
“He’s not standing right there, is he?”
“Oh, but he is. Would you like to speak to Mums, Doctor Paul?”
He grinned, straightened from the wall, and held out his hand.
“Oh, Vivian, no . . .” But her last words escaped me as I placed the receiver in Doctor Paul’s palm. His palm: wide, firm, lightly lined. I liked it already.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Schuyler. . . . Yes, she’s behaving herself. . . . Yes, I carried the parcel all the way up those wretched stairs. That’s the sort of gentleman I am, Mrs. Schuyler.” He returned my wink. “As I matter of fact, I do think there’s been some mistake. Are you certain there’s no one named Violet in your family? . . . Quite certain? . . . Well, I am a Doctor, Mrs. Schuyler. I’m accustomed to making a diagnosis based on the symptoms presented by the subject.” A hint of a blush began to climb up his neck. “Hard to say, Mrs. Schuyler, but—”
I snatched the receiver back. “That will be enough of that, Mums. I won’t have you embarrassing my Doctor Paul with your remarks. He isn’t used to them.”
“He is a dream, Vivian. My hat’s off to you.” Clink, clink, rattle. The glass must be almost empty. “Try not to sleep with him right away, will you? It scares them off.”
“You would know, Mums.”
A deep sigh. Swallowed by the familiar crash of empty vodka glass on bedside table. “You’re coming for lunch tomorrow, aren’t you?”
“Not
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