The Book of V.: A Novel(62)

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5B, the doorman tells her the next day. Then, This way. Then, Ma’am? Lily nods, and moves toward the elevator. She knows she wants to be here. She has made a great effort to be here. But the emptiness is bad today. It climbs into her sternum. It says, Retreat. Slump back down Vivian Barr’s Upper West Side block with its cabbagelike plants blooming between the trees and their little fences. Get back on the train. Go back to bed.

Still, she pushes the buttons. She rises.

“Welcome.”

To Lily’s right, Vivian Barr stands in an open doorway, wearing a belted dress and a pair of orange-velvet pumps, and Lily feels immediate regret at her own choices: a wool skirt and cowl-neck sweater, both nice, but still. One of her friends calls cowl-necks “the new aging woman’s cardigan,” and here Lily is wearing one to visit a woman decades her senior who is pulling off a V-neck dress and heels.

“Come, Georgie,” says Vivian Barr, and for a moment Lily worries she is confused. Then a small dog trots out and begins to sniff at Lily’s boots. “Shall we let her in?” Vivian Barr asks.

And the dog, though it seems impossible, nods.

The apartment is stately, as Lily expected, but not large. High ceilings, substantial moldings. A living room into which they do not go, a hall lined with art, a galley kitchen connected by an archway to a dining room painted in a dark hue that some decorator in Brooklyn would probably call tarnished pewter. Here it does not seem false, though. A mahogany table is set with two woven placemats, each laid with a dessert plate, saucer, and tea cup. A massive plant fills the window, catching what little light reaches a midfloor apartment at noon. Lily understands that it’s a lovely scene, one that in another era of her life would make her feel serene, but in this era, today, she wishes Vivian Barr would turn on the chandelier. She wishes there were lunch instead of tea, music instead of silence. Vivian Barr has gone into the kitchen, where a kettle is boiling, leaving Lily to arrange herself awkwardly in the arch, neither in nor out of the space. She watches as the older woman attends to various tasks, moving with striking efficacy. She dons an apron, seizes tongs from a drawer, shuts the drawer, opens her oven. She is reaching for the lowest rack when she teeters and begins to tip forward.

It’s possible that Lily is wrong about this, that the habit of bracing for Ruth to fall is distorting her perception. But her hand is on Vivian Barr’s shoulder before she can stop herself, and even as she recants internally she continues to hold on, as if she might prevent Vivian Barr from falling headfirst into the oven and at the same time pretend she’s not touching her.

Vivian Barr does not fall. She stands, removes her slight, sharp shoulder from beneath Lily’s palm, and arranges two scones on a dish.

“I pick up Georgie’s doo every day,” she says, without looking at Lily.

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

Vivian Barr hands the dish to Lily, fills a teapot with boiling water, takes a trivet from a drawer, and leaves the room. “It is possibly true that I should wear more sensible shoes,” she says.

“Oh!” Lily cries, following. Her fear has woken her up, shaken the emptiness from her scales. “No! I love your shoes.”

Vivian Barr pours tea. Everything matches, from the teapot to the sugar dish. “I hope you like Darjeeling,” she says, and Lily, feeling certain that she has insulted the woman by seeming obsequious or condescending or both, says, “You know, I found a beautiful pair of heels in my mother’s closet. Black. Gold heels. I had no idea.”

“The Roger Viviers?” asks Vivian Barr, spreading her napkin across her lap.

“I don’t know.”

“I remember a pair of Roger Viviers. You can set the scones down.”

Lily puts down the scones. “They smell delicious.”

“Levain,” says Vivian Barr. “The one I prefer you have to get there at seven if you don’t want to wait, but that’s not difficult for Georgie and me.”

Lily lays her own napkin in her lap, then awaits further instruction. Can she take a scone now? Drink her tea? Vivian Barr is merely sitting, her gaze on the teapot, her hands in her lap. Is she saying grace? Lily doesn’t think so. It is hard to imagine Ruth being drawn to someone so inscrutable, though of course this woman could have changed. Would have. From the few articles Lily was able to track down—using what she could not help but notice were her still excellent research skills—she learned that Vivian Barr may have experimented with drugs when she was younger, and possibly in lesbian sex. She had some kind of breakdown and was hospitalized at the famed Fainwright. Those stories, though, seem to bear no relation to the woman in front of her, who with smaller silver tongs is now transferring a scone from the dish to Lily’s plate. In her formality, at least, she seems older than Ruth. She deposits the tongs onto a tong-shaped dish. Then she looks at Lily, the first time today she has looked at her directly, her irises at this particular angle in this particular, dark room a surprisingly bright green, and says, “I did not sleep with your father. I assume that’s what you’ve come to find out.”

Lily, who is unprepared for this, cannot find her voice to say no—though of course yes would be more honest; this is at least part of why she has come—and merely shake-nods her head like a toy as she butters her scone. Vivian Barr can’t know that Lily would only hate her a tiny bit for having done such a thing, and that she wouldn’t judge her, that some piece of her even wants it to have happened because Lily is now guilty, too. If Jace is not her friend, she is also not a stranger. If Lily did not sleep with Hal, she engaged with him in a kind of mutual molestation. As she left Jace’s house last night with the girls, she looked only at her own feet.