A Wife of Noble Character Read Online Free Page A

straight and shiny, the hair Vivienne longed for. Now she was standing at Preston’s door, knocking. Annoyed afresh, Vivienne crossed the street and went to find her car, without turning back. The thought that another girl was coming over to his little apartment seconds after she’d left it, to occupy the same chair, the only chair, and probably to talk about books, which Vivienne wasn’t good at talking about, was exceptionally annoying, because it made her feel less special, less set apart from the rest. It was as if all her efforts to charm Preston had been for naught. Surely he found books more charming than her own brand of charm, and the girl had an armful of them.
    Her mind felt ablaze. It might have been the cigarette, but it was probably Preston. He was always jabbing her, questioning her, finding fault with her desires. It was the same last time she ran into him, a few weeks ago, at Bladimir’s birthday party. They were at a poorly lit bar, sitting around a sticky wooden table with a bunch of people she didn’t know. It wasn’t her kind of place, and it hadn’t been clear to her if it was a gay bar, despite the fact that Blad was gay. She didn’t ask Blad or Preston about it, because she was embarrassed that she didn’t know.
    She and Preston had had a conversational wrangle about reality television, Preston declaring it yet another terrible thing about the world. He’d been a little drunk and was endearing because he got so passionate about his arguments, but Vivienne mainly remembered feeling stomped. She’d only been arguing that reality television was entertaining. Preston had wanted her to justify her position . All she could say, over and over, was that she personally found it entertaining. Preston claimed this was insufficient justification . She tried to get drunk, but the men weren’t offering to buy drinks, and no one had seemed impressed with her, except for Preston, but she never could tell with him.
    Preston probably didn’t remember that night, which didn’t come as a shock, because one of her most firmly held convictions was that men never remember anything, and if they do, they remember very little and always the wrong or unimportant things. Sometimes she felt this worked to her benefit, but mostly it impeded her. If she was in the mood to hear Bucky, whom she was currently dating, tell the story of when they first met, she was forced to ask, “And did you think I was beautiful?” To which he would reply, “Of course I did, baby.” All he really remembered was what he ate for dinner that night. It wasn’t such a romantic story; Karlie introduced them at a Prayerwood church benefit three months earlier and they exchanged soft conversation over barbecued quail, but she thought he should indulge her in a little exaggeration.
    Vivienne’s dreams were full of men who remembered. They remembered their eyes falling upon her in bountiful detail; they remembered exactly the words they’d spoken regarding marriage and children, even years out; they remembered in juicy specificity stories about other women they had dated. They even asked Vivienne about things they hoped she remembered, and in her dreams she’d luxuriate in not remembering anything at all.
    Preston only seemed to remember the things about her that he disagreed with, which she responded to with her charm, a technique that hardly worked on him, she thought now. This woolly feeling in her brain—was she the one who’d been charmed? The way he looked at her with lifted brows and sideways smiles set her flirting all off course. The apartment with its handmade quilt, and Preston with that curious glint in his eyes and the messy way he rolled up his shirtsleeves. He was the gear around which the whole place worked. It had all been so disarming that she’d had to raise a white flag and leave immediately.
    She oriented herself from the Menil and was