The Violet Hour: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

which brought some relief once they got going. Kyle loosened his collar and held his jacket in his lap. Elizabeth propped an elbow in the open window and stretchedher other arm across the seat back, vainly hoping to keep her underarms dry. She got out of the cab readjusting her hair, already feeling a little deflated, her forehead gluey with powder and sweat.
    In the entryway, they were greeted by a marble table of tented place cards, bivouacked around a heavy glass tower that erupted with flowers at the top.
    “Show me the money,” Kyle whispered.
    “So much for not extravagant.” She held up their card, letterpressed in a convoluted script.
    He pantomimed a squint. “I can’t entirely make it out, but I think it’s telling me to get a real job.”
    She patted his arm in solace, half ironic, half sincere. With the help of the staff standing guard, they meandered through empty dining rooms to the terrace, where the sailcloth tent Lucie had promised stood ready to embark on the evening. On an adjacent green, white folding chairs awaited the ceremony. Elizabeth’s friends were standing around a section of seats in their sunglasses, making good use of the bottled water and paper fans someone had thought to provide. She’d seen almost all of them at the bar the night before, which was fortunate, because sober hugging in such weather was the last thing any of them wanted to do. Friendly but subdued greetings were exchanged all around. They were friends of the couple from Harvard, some married, most not, all of them looking forward to the moment when the drinking could begin.
    Seeing the place card in Elizabeth’s hand, Jane Donaughey, more Lucie’s friend than Elizabeth’s, waved her own and exclaimed, “Aren’t they so elegant?” She’d played field hockey in college and had the relentlessly chipper affect of a woman who’d been getting manicures from an early age. Talking to her invariably wore Elizabeth out. “And the table names are really inspired.”
    “Oh, I hadn’t even looked.” Elizabeth opened her card. She tried not to wince as she read it: Table 7, The Great Gatsby .
    “All their favorite novels,” Jane explained. Lucie and Rob were getting doctorates—hers in education, his in comparative literature—and were fond of recommending books. “Such a nice little touch. Of course, we know they love books, but I wouldn’t have guessed Infinite Jest !” Jane held up her own card, grinning, and Elizabeth was momentarily relieved they weren’t sitting at the same table. Jane was single. Conventionally pretty, good-humored and talented—yet single. She was rather publicly on the hunt for a husband, and as far as Elizabeth could tell, she never stopped being excited for her happily coupled friends. It distressed Elizabeth to listen to her praise a wedding’s little touches—Jane, who advised multinational health care firms as a well-paid midtown consultant.
    Jane turned to the next willing listener just as a small feminine hand clasped Elizabeth’s. “Are you a Gatsby, too?” This was Becca, her closest friend after Lucie. Becca was also single, but proud of it. Bets had already been placed on which cousin she’d be taking home.
    “I’m a Gatsby,” Elizabeth said.
    “Hooray. Why do you think she gave us that one?”
    “Mmm, because our voices are full of money?” The one line she was proud to remember from the book.
    Becca threw her head back. “Ha! Hardly.” She wrote for a political magazine in DC, where her bosses regularly encouraged her to get a book deal rather than offering her a raise. “No, now that I think about it, it’s her favorite. After Invisible Man, which probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for a wedding.”
    “Oh, and Gatsby’s appropriate? The desperate mansion-builder?”
    “Well. Lucie’s nothing if not self-aware.”
    Elizabeth tried to remember this about her friend as the women in headsets came around to ask them to take their seats. They sat, all two