The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Read online

  Jack smiled. “I do. I know how to waltz; I can do the fox-trot. I even know how to tango.”

  Viviane’s eyes grew wide. “Where did you learn that?”

  “Must have read how somewhere.” Jack opened his door. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  As she stepped from the car, a cold draft of January air ran up Viviane’s bare legs. She wrapped her coat tighter around her.

  Jack grabbed Viviane around the waist and pulled her close, so close that she could feel his breath on her face as he spoke. “It’s believed,” he said, “that the tango was born in the brothels of Buenos Aires.” He moved his right hand to the middle of her back. “I think it stems from the Latin word tangere, which, of course, means ‘to touch.’”

  “Of course.”

  Jack took her left hand and placed it on his shoulder, then took her right hand with his left. In spite of the cold, their palms were slick with sweat. Jack cleared his throat. “Okay, I’m going to take two slow steps forward. Just follow my lead.”

  So they danced as Jack counted out the beat — T-A-N-G-O! — ​until Viviane could move in his arms as naturally as an Argentinean prostituta. It was hardly a fast dance, but perhaps because it came from the Latin word for “to touch,” both Viviane and Jack were soon breathless. They broke away and collapsed onto the grass, watching their breath make clouds above their lips.

  Jack turned to Viviane. “Are you cold?”

  “Freezing,” she lied, and turned to wrap her hands around his neck. She pulled his face to hers, and he met her smiling mouth with his.

  Their kisses grew deeper. Jack moved on top of her, propping himself up with his elbows, his body hovering a few inches above hers. That was where they usually stopped. Then Jack would take Viviane home, her cheeks flushed, her eyes only able to make out a hazy outline of Jack’s face, regardless of what else might be in front of her — a hot stove, a dinner plate, a mother asking, What’s wrong with you?

  But on this night, before Jack could move away, Viviane reached up and let her fingers trip along the buttons of his shirt. With fast fingers, she unbuttoned the top two, then left him to finish the rest while she moved on to her own, watching his face as she revealed the lace hidden under her clothes.

  Jack leaned down and kissed her bare neck. When his mouth passed across her collarbone, she shuddered. Lightly, his fingertips circled her exposed navel. He reached for her waist —

  “Stop!” Viviane yelped, grabbing at his hands.

  Jack sat up, breathless. “Viviane, you’re being silly,” he said. “I’ve known you since you were six. I was there when you were sick. Come to think of it, you threw up on my shoe.”

  When Viviane was nine, she suffered what she remembered as the worst stomachache she’d ever had. She did throw up several times, actually, and once on Jack’s shoe. She was diagnosed with appendicitis and rushed to the operating table, where she received quite a scar. Not just any scar, but a deep crevice about the width of Jack’s ring finger that ran the length of Viviane’s right side. When she was younger, she loved that scar — it was hideous and grotesque and perfect for pretending to be a battle-scarred soldier. But now, at sixteen, Viviane hated it — it was hideous and grotesque.

  Viviane brought her hands to her face. “It’s ugly,” she moaned.

  “It’s not,” Jack said, “but if you want to see something ugly, take a look at this.” Jack held out a hand to display a jagged white line between his thumb and forefinger. “Can opener,” he said.

  Viviane took a closer look at Jack’s tiny scar and smiled. “That’s nothing,” she said, sitting up and pulling off one of her shoes. “I dropped a hot skillet on my foot.” She showed him the mark. “And . . .” Viviane held up her elbow, pointing out a thick pucker of scar tissue. “I was six. Learning to ride a bike and I crashed. I had to pick the rocks out of my skin. I think I missed one, though. Here, feel it.”

  Jack laughed. “I don’t need to feel it. I believe you.”

  “Jack, I need you to feel it,” Viviane said in mock seriousness. “It’s very important that you do.”

  He pressed his fingers gingerly against Viviane’s skin. “Yeah, okay. I think there’s something in there. Or it might just be your bony elbow.”

  Viviane made a face. “Ha-ha.”

  Jack then revealed the place where he’d cut his ankle on the runner of a sled one winter, the circular scar from a childhood vaccination, and the pockmark along his nostril left over from the time everyone in second grade came down with the chicken pox. “So, see? I’m much more scarred than you’ll ever be. Probably always will be.”

  There were other scars — from wounds that leave the skin unmarred. Of those, Jack certainly had many more than Viviane. Each pondered this in their own silent way as they lay side by side, the air around them growing colder still and the moon moving higher in the sky.

  “Sometimes I think my dad must hate me,” Jack said after a moment.

  “He doesn’t hate you,” Viviane whispered, too quickly to be convincing. She didn’t actually believe that John Griffith had the capacity to care about anyone other than himself. Even if he tried. Even if he wanted to. Viviane could count on one hand the number of times she’d heard her own mother say I love you, and she’d still have a few fingers left over. But that didn’t mean Emilienne wasn’t capable of love. It just meant, for a reason Viviane had yet to understand, she preferred to hide it.

  “Sometimes,” Jack started, “I think he wouldn’t hate me as much if only —”

  “If only what?”

  Jack turned and gave her a sad smile. “If only you and I weren’t together.”

  Viviane closed her eyes and pushed down the small ball of panic growing in her stomach. She groaned and gave Jack a nervous, playful jab. “You breaking up with me, Griffith?”

  Jack paused just long enough for the ball of panic to bounce back up into Viviane’s throat. “No,” he finally answered. “That’s something I could never do.”

  He stared into the dark shadows around them. “He thinks I’m useless,” he murmured.

  Viviane pulled him to her. “Shush,” she said. With a sigh of defeat, Jack let his head drop against the lace exposed by her open shirt. His breath grew deep and heavy while Viviane tried to draw comfort from the rhythmic beat of his heart against her pelvic bone.

  JACK AND VIVIANE sat parked on the dirt road at the bottom of the hill on Pinnacle Lane in John Griffith’s 1932 Ford Coupe. It was September and Viviane had just turned seventeen, making her one year and two months younger than Jack.

  Jack tapped his foot in rhythm to a song playing in his head. The cuff of his pants had inched up his leg, exposing his sock and a section of his calf. His socks were navy blue; the hairs on his leg were unusually pale and silky. Viviane couldn’t see them, but she knew what they looked like. The hairs on her own legs stuck out like sharp pins. She didn’t know whether to be self-conscious about this or not — it wasn’t her fault there was a shortage of razor blades — so she pulled her feet away from the humming floor and tucked her legs under the skirt of her dress, just in case. The sole of her left shoe grazed Jack’s thigh.

  Jack got up early every Saturday to wash and wax his father’s Coupe after those Friday nights when he took Viviane out for a movie at the Admiral Theater or for a five-cent bottle of Coca-Cola at the drugstore. Jack’s father watched for his son not on Friday nights but on Saturday mornings, to be sure the car was thoroughly taken care of. Jack never missed a washing. Neither knew what would happen if he did.

  Just like everyone else in the world, Jack and Viviane were both thinking about the war, but each for different reasons. Unbeknownst to Viviane, Jack had been eagerly counting down the days until he turned eighteen. As soon as he did, he went to enlist but was rejected due to his flat feet and poor eyesight.

  When Jack told his father that he’d failed the physical exam for military combat, Jack knew John Griffith would let him know exactly what he thought. And he was right.<
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  John had laughed — a hollow and empty bark — and jeered at Jack. “You never cease to amaze me, Jack. Just when I think you couldn’t disappoint me more, you always seem to find a way.”

  “It’s not my fault,” Jack said.

  “What about the Lavender whore? You’re still screwin’ around with the witch’s daughter, aren’t ya?” John released the laugh again. “Probably cast some spell on you — wouldn’t be hard, weak-minded son of a bitch that you are.”

  “Dad —” Jack started.

  John dismissed him with a wave of his meaty hand. “Whatever you got to say ain’t worth hearing.”

  “Do ya know what kind of fellas go to college these days?” Jack asked Viviane suddenly, hitting the Coupe’s steering wheel with his open palm. “The quacks. The ones with deformities or syphilis. No girl would be caught dead with an F-er.”

  Jack was right. Most girls wouldn’t be caught with a boy deemed unfit for combat. Lucky for Jack, though, Viviane wasn’t most girls. The idea of Jack fighting in the war had always terrified her — she’d barely slept the week before his birthday. She’d never tell him, but she thanked God every morning for blessing Jack with lovely flat feet. Instead of going to war, the next morning Jack would be leaving to attend Whitman College in Walla Walla. Even if it was two hundred seventy miles away, at least it wasn’t across a whole ocean.

  Viviane grabbed Jack’s hand and pressed it to her lips. “You looking to meet some girls in between your studies, college man? Because if that’s the case, you won’t find me waiting here for you to come back.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jack smiled, revealing the slight gap beside one of his incisors. “What’re you gonna do instead?”

  “I’ll follow you,” Viviane answered simply.

  For a very long time, Viviane and Jack lived in that world people inhabit before love. Some people called that place friendship; others called it confusing. Viviane found it a pleasant place with an altitude that only occasionally made her nauseous.

  The light from the windows of the Lavender house cast a soft glow across the front seat of the Coupe. Jack brushed his thumb along the hollowed dimple in Viviane’s left cheek. “You don’t have anything to worry about,” he said. “I love you, you know.”

  Viviane let the words hang in the air between them for a moment, like a sweet pink cloud. Then she inhaled the words in whole, turned them over in her mouth, relished their solidity on her tongue.

  Viviane raced up the hill to her house. Before she went inside, she turned back toward Jack and the idling Coupe and yelled, “We’re in love! We’re in love! We’re in love!” Even her neighbor, the sourly Marigold Pie, awakened by Viviane’s declaration, had to smile at that.

  THE MORNING OF THE SUMMER SOLSTICE found Viviane in the bathtub, her arms wrapped around her knees. The water splashing from the silver faucet was scalding hot. She filled the bathtub as high as she could, nonetheless, watching her breasts and the rounded points of her knees turn bright pink in the steam.

  She let herself slip under the water and opened her mouth, thinking she might swallow the bathwater in one gulp and sink to the bottom. It was a weak moment and only lasted until her cheeks filled. She sat up, choking on mouthfuls of hot, body-soiled water.

  It had taken only two dismal months for Jack’s promised daily letters to falter to three a week, and then two, and then none at all. By June Viviane hadn’t heard from Jack in five months, one week, and three days. The one time Viviane tried phoning him, she was told Jack Griffith was out, but the dorm mother swore to tell him she’d called. Whether she actually did, Viviane never got the chance to ask. Jack never called.

  She spent her days trying to forget the sound of his voice, and her nights trying to remember. She spent her hours standing by the mailbox waiting for letters that did not come, sitting by a telephone that would not ring. Her mother banned her from the bakery — everything Viviane touched made the customers weep.

  Yet in spite of the circumstances, Viviane was optimistic. Jack had to leave in order to come back, didn’t he? And she knew he would be back, just as she knew that some of the stars that shone bright in the sky were already dead and that she was beautiful, if only to Jack. And that’s just the way it was.

  Viviane pulled the plug from the drain and wrapped the chain around the faucet, counting in her mother’s French with each turn.

  “Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six.” Viviane could only count to ten, but no matter; it didn’t take so many turns. She stepped out of the bathtub. As she wrapped a towel around her hair, Viviane glanced through the bathroom’s small window to where her mother’s newest houseguest was busy working in the yard.

  Emilienne had started taking in houseguests just after the start of the war. It was the only patriotic thing she ever did. The house on the hill became a carousel of everchanging men, women, children, and animals, all needing a place to rest, sometimes for the night, sometimes longer. The longest to stay was a family of black cats. It was later rumored that these cats and their ancestors had inhabited the rooms and hallways of our house for thirty years, which only further supported speculations that my grandmother was a witch in pâtissier clothing. The longest-staying resident of the human variety, however, was Gabe.

  Gabe was unusually tall, so had to be careful where he stood, for if he blocked the sun, his shadow could cause flowers to wither and old women to send their grandchildren inside to fetch their sweaters. Because of his height, many thought Gabe to be much older than he was. This was both a blessing and a curse.

  Like most other new arrivals, Gabe’s first stop in the neighborhood was the bakery. He was drawn by the sharp scent of sourdough bread, but also by the girl standing in the shop’s open doors, the wind swirling her brown hair around her head. Viviane hadn’t been blessed with her mother’s thick black hair or green eyes. She was hardly the obvious beauty her mother was. To think Viviane was beautiful required a certain acquired taste. It was the kind of beauty perceived only through the eyes of love.

  When Gabe learned that the girl from the bakery lived in the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane, he walked right up to that house with every intention of offering up his soul in return for a room. Fortunately, he didn’t have to make the offer. Emilienne took one long look at Gabe and easily decided she needed a tall handyman who could reach the light fixture on the front porch when the bulb needed changing.

  He quickly proved himself to be more than just a tall man able to reach things in high places. At Emilienne’s request, he fixed the broken banister on the front porch and retiled the kitchen counters. He spent a full month sanding and waxing the wood floors — he had welts on his knees to prove it. He was told to leave the third floor as it was; no one went up there anyway.

  During the first few months Gabe lived with the Lavenders, he could barely manage to be in the same room as Viviane without knocking the butter dish to the floor or breaking out in itchy red hives.

  If asked, he would have shyly admitted that every improvement he made to the house he made for Viviane. Fortunately for Gabe, no one asked.

  Gabe’s mother had come from a long-removed line of Romanian monarchs. She was an olive-skinned beauty with thinly fashioned eyebrows and a sturdy, hooked nose. She told her young son lavish tales about their ancestry while sitting at her vanity table and applying careful circles of rouge to her cheeks and thick swipes of blue to her eyelids.

  She had moved to Hollywood with dreams of acting for Paramount Pictures alongside Clara Bow and Estelle Taylor. Instead, she found herself living near Los Angeles in a tiny studio apartment with a black widow spider infestation. How Gabe had come into the picture he never knew. On the nights she went out, she would remind Gabe to chain the door, then leave him to his empty dreams amid a fog of her velvety black perfume. When she returned, she’d rap on the door three times and Gabe would smooth his imprint from the sheets of her bed and place a sultry jazz recording on the turntable that sat in the corner of the room.

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p; On those nights she came home, Gabe slept in the closet on a bed of moth-ridden coats and shawls, his long legs curled to his chin. He knew it was okay to come out when she switched the record to a more melancholy song. He’d emerge to find his mother sitting at her vanity, painting a red-lipsticked smile on her face before leaving again.

  “Just remember, inima˘ mea, my heart,” she would say, “royal blood flows from our wounds.”

  In the morning they’d go down to the diner on the corner, where she’d smile at the waitress and order Gabe the biggest stack of pancakes, and a coffee — black — for herself. These breakfasts always made Gabe sick, but he always managed to choke them all down. Every last bite.

  Then one night the turntable never switched its tune. When Gabe finally crawled out from the closet, he found his mother in a broken heap, her royal blood in congealed pools around her head. A handful of dollar bills had been thrown to the floor, half of them sticky and red. The room filled with static as the needle on the turntable bumped again and again into the end of the record.

  Gabe wrapped his mother in his arms and lifted her onto the bed. He had to swallow the vomit that rose in his throat when her head lolled unnaturally to one side. He tucked her between the sheets, propped her neck with a pillow, and curled up beside her.

  He stayed with her for days. When the corpse began to smell and the putrid air of the apartment wafted out into the hallway, the other tenants started complaining and covering their noses with handkerchiefs when they passed by. After a final glance at his dead mother, Gabe finally left one night, taking nothing with him but the resolve to remember her only as she looked when she was alive. He ignored the money on the floor. He was ten years old.

  Over the next few years, Gabe moved around a lot. His incredible height made people believe he was fifteen when he was ten and eighteen when he was twelve. As such, he was able to easily find work and spent a few months at a goat farm in Florida, loading grand pieces of art for a gallery in Queens, and collecting pond samples in central Oregon. For an entire year, Gabe worked as an assistant to a carpenter in New Hampshire. He lived with the carpenter and his family — two young children, a dog, and a wife.