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It was just one week into the new year and the sun was stuck in a
blinding sky, refusing to cease it's boiling glare. By ten in the morning the
thermometers read 95 degrees; the air sat on the streets so thick that it
looked almost as if a very thin haze had drifted down on the city. The
refined and classy women had, at first, refused to take off their winter furs
and warm silk stockings; clothes that had come out of closet drawers in
late October as they did every year, this time purely out of traditional
habit than the need for warmer clothes, since there had yet to be a sign of
the summer ending. Christmas had been miserable for those who had stubbornly
insisted on lighting fires in their homes to sit around gulping hot cider,
but by then most of the population had shruggingly accepted the state of the
weather, leaving their windows wide open all night, and Christmas dinner
was packed into a picnic in the park. Summer clothes that hadn't yet been
placed in boxes were traded back; businessmen loosened their ties or forgot
them altogether and no one said anything. Children, robbed of a season of ice
skating and snowball fights, soon realized this new condition that the
drought brought on was a bargain as a replacement when their mothers started
letting them run barefoot, jacketless, throwing water balloons at each other;
behavior that certainly wouldn't have normally been allowed even in
July.
The Western Hill Social and Sporting Club was piled over with sun
tan lotion and lethargic gossiping. The heater on the swimming pool had been
turned off when the temperatures had first began to rise, and now all the
club manager could do was pray that the newly installed cooling system would
get the better of the weather. A crowd of lawn chairs banked the pool; a
waiter jumbled his way between them, a tray of margaritas on his palm. He
was moving through a splitting headache, his feet were burning inside leather
penny loafers, and to the surprise of really no one, his leg stumbled, the
margaritas skating into the air. The girl who lay in front of him seemed only
mildly taken aback, in truth she didn't want to make a scene. She stared
through her large black sunglasses at the upset little man apologizing in an
increasingly Italian accent, the waiter who must have just dropped his
entire tray on her as it seemed. The girl, named for Shakespeare's Viola,
lowered her foot onto the cement, only to feel the crunch of broken glass
slice into her heel. All she wanted was to get out of there before too big a
deal could be made around her, so she took a paper towel from a pile that had
just appeared by her knee, probably by the other man, pray not the
manager, who was standing next to the flustered waiter, and stuffed it into
her shoe along with her foot. She muttered she was fine to the two men and
drew herself off to the bathroom, grabbing her belongings on the way. Inside
the bathroom marked Dames Viola unflinchingly pulled the glass shard
from her heel and mopped herself up as best as she could. God, the poor
idiot even got the stuff in my hair, she thought. She looked in dismay at her
sopping handbag, rummaged through it for her keys and threw the whole thing
into the trashcan.
Outside the air had only grown more stifling; Viola's foot was
throbbing painfully, her stomach was churning, and she felt a pang of regret
when she recalled the half carton of ice cream she'd had for breakfast
earlier that morning. She walked on the shady side of the street to the where
she could catch the streetcar. The trolley took her straight downtown,
where she headed without thinking into the department store she frequently
visited. The fans and large ferns in the entry hall were soothingly cool, and
past them she settled to sift through her favorite boutique, collecting a
handful of dresses that the sales assistant carried for her, leading Viola
into a spacious dressing room. She gazed at her reflection, wondering how the
girl in the mirror had come to appear so empty. Her dark hair was falling
unevenly from the twist at the back of her head, and she was starting to
notice more thin cuts up her arm from the margarita glasses, irritated by the
salt. The dresses she'd picked out hung expectant on the wall, so she slipped
the first one over her head. It was green silk, and fitted flatteringly,
and she imagined how it could garnish her wardrobe. She unfastened her
wristwatch and laid it out on the dressing room table; she had, after all,
thrown her money in the garbage. The cost of that watch should more than
cover the dress, she thought; she put her sweater on over top of the dress
and left quietly, careful to avoid the saleswoman.
Back in her apartment she lay in her own white, porcelain tub,
soaking in the cool salt water and listening vaguely to the phone ring in the
other room. Viola hadn't slept, really fallen asleep, for a week now, but she
wasn't tired, and the inching time of the last several days was getting to
her head. She would fall into even more of a lazy daze if she didn't spur
it off, so she wrapped herself in a robe and answered the telephone. It was
Alice.
"Hello, darling, I've been trying to reach you all
afternoon, where on earth have you been? You're not the sort to leave a
ringing phone to answer itself." Alice's voice drifted through the phone, her
pouty sweet chattering seeming to fill the entire of Viola's still apartment.
"Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you were coming to the party tonight, the
best crowd will be there and I couldn't bear to see you miss it. Do say
you'll come, Vi." It used to always be Viola calling Alice, calling
everybody, sporting the parties and dinners herself. Now all she could see
for herself tonight was sitting alone by the wall, faintly observing the
guests swaying in the overfilled room. "Vi?"
"Of course I'll be there, Alice. I wouldn't miss it for,
well..."
"Fabulous, I'll see you then, dear."
Viola mused briefly over what might have happened at the end of the
book she had been reading, a hundred pages short of finishing it when it too
had been tossed in the trashcan at the club. No matter, endings hardly ever
agreed with her.
She got dressed in the new green dress, powder puffs and perfume
clouds, red stiletto heels, dark lipstick. Once outside, she immediately
started to wonder if wearing heels was the best idea, as the pain in her foot
was no less, but it didn't seem worth actually doing anything about. The heat
had cooled since midday, the sky was near completely dark and that alone had
seemed to bring the temperatures down, even if only by ten degrees. Still
hot enough to drive anybody expecting January crazy.
The house where the party was held was nothing special in size,
though decorated artistically. The main room, packed full of people, was
thick with smoke, and the outside air coming in from the open windows was
hardly fresh. A turntable was playing a pulsating Puccini record, the Italian
lyrics rising above the hum of conversation and drink clinking. Alice greeted
her enthusiastically, "There you are, darling, it's so
good to see you," ushering her into the center of the room. Viola recognized
a few of the guests: a young woman wearing a pink flamenco dress leaning on
the arm of a slightly older man smoking a cigar, a middle aged woman in a pin
striped suit, a swaggering boy Viola realized to be Alice's much-grown
nephew. Alice was delighting in telling Viola who just about everyone in
the room was, how she knew them, what they did. "This is George, he and I go
way back, don't we George darling, since before, well who knows. Why don't
you let him fix you a drink, Vi, something besides a plain whisky like you
always have-would you do that George, mix something fun for Viola here? I
think you two will get along fine."
Viola followed the man to the bar through the throng. "What would
you like-Viola, isn't it? -How about a margarita?"
"Oh, please, no margaritas. I got a whole tray of them spilled on me
this afternoon."
"That's no good, then. How about something sweet-a piña colada, or a
white
Russian?"
"Sure, whatever's easy."
"Well now, a piña colada would be my pick; a tropical twist to go
with the weather, but as it is we don't seem to have quite the, hm, proper
ingredients, so a white Russian it is-does that sound okay?"
"That sounds smashing."
With her drink in hand, Viola felt a slight returning of her
once-perfected talent in skimming along the top of socializing, the
unmatchable ability to move between more or less everyone in the room,
keeping up the conversations and entertaining them all. She could make the
crowd admire, adore her, without ever giving the impression that any one
person invited was entirely too low to exchange at least a greeting with.
She drifted between the people, twisting up conversations, testing her weight
at charming her audience, wondering all along if she had ever found this fun.
She hadn't totally lost her crown; she would play the old game with herself,
seeing how fast she could make an hour or two fly.
How many heads am I turning now? I'm not going to sit in the corner,
but I don't know how much more I can take. She sought out Alice, and found
her flirting with the mayor's son. Viola couldn't remember if she had ever
really been introduced to him, but she thought she had at least seen him
around, and she knew his name was Fred.
"There you are Alice, darling. What a smart little gathering this
is; I think you're doing supremely. Wouldn't you agree, Fredrick? Hasn't this
evening been cute? Just charming?" Alice and the man stared at her. " I
really must be going though, I'm afraid, you know how busy my schedule can
get, and at the moment it's simply brimming with, oh you know, important
things."
"Fancy that," Alice twiddled. Viola herself wasn't so sure what she
was talking about. She thought the best solution would be to leave the
spot.
Of course Viola didn't have her watch as she had used it to
generously pay for her dress, but when she got out to the sidewalk and
started walking down the leafy street she guessed it was around two thirty.
The night smelled like citrus and fried food, lit up by a row of neon signs,
blinking for theater marquees and late-night shows. Viola waved down a taxi
and crawled in. The city walls rolled by, parched and dirty looking through
the scratched window of the cab. How much more alone the world felt when you
couldn't at least pretend to have someone else in it with you.
"Rough night?" the cabbie glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She
turned away from the window and pulled her legs up under her on the peeling,
leather seat.
"What makes you say that?" she challenged as politely as she
could.
The balding man shrugged, and stopped the cab in front of Viola's
apartment building. She paid and opened the car door, put her foot out. A
tube of lipstick slipped out of her open purse and clattered onto the street;
as she leaned down to pick it up, Viola saw something else, a water drop,
fall and splash on the cement.
"Is there a problem, Miss?" the driver asked impatiently as Viola
sat doubled over staring at the street. She seemed startled when he spoke and
looked up, her face streaked with the falling tears.
Viola hesitated. "I thought...I thought I saw a rain drop." She let
out a choked laugh. "Imagine that! How silly of me."
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