Violet was violet through and through.
She was a proud flower, self-delighted, cool, assured — a little way apart from the others, always hoisted above and ahead in the sunshine. She grew at her own pace. She breathed at her own pace. Violet simply had to smile and she’d have a thousand friends and two marriage proposals and seven puppies at her door. She was incandescent, cool, and alive.
I first met Violet in the summer of 1999. She was only a bare teenager then, but even then you would be hard pressed to detect an inch of enthusiasm or any crack of self confidence in her armour. She’d come in and wrap you up in her skinny arms and white tennis set and look at you with puerile devotion and tell you you’d freed her, that you’d changed her world. She’d get you talking and you’d feel you were talking to someone twenty years older and wiser, and you’d spill your guts out to some teenager — her elegantly wrenching out your thoughts and years of life. Until she’d have enough. Then she’d ignore you at dinner and for many weeks and you’d see her fawn at another guest’s feet and realise you were just material, but every now and then when she came back and held out her little hands and asked you what you thought of Voltaire or whatever flamboyant text she was reading you’d crumble and adore her and the cycle would start again. You were at her mercy. Everyone was.
Yes — with Violet you’re extraordinary one second and useless as an old CD the next. It was her gift, her curse and charm. She was, and has always been, exceptional. Skinny, angular, dark-haired, olive-skinned, divine, there was no one who couldn’t love Violet and envy her at first sight. Except for me, but that’s another story. I was never sure what to think: for me, there was always a shadow cast over her, for all her light and radiance, she drew her light from the shade. Faintly exotic, intoxicating, somewhat unearthly.
I interviewed her for the second time last summer, and got no closer to knowing the truth about Violet than I did the first.
She had the habit of feeding you little momentous titbits about herself — how she killed a man and got engaged after a month, how she fucked three professors and moved to Peru, how Trump had groped her — and then asking you one — momentary — question, one quick and searching ask you just had to answer, innocently, yes — you just couldn’t help yourself,- yes before you knew it you had ended up talking for twenty minutes about yourself - all your well oiled guard rails disabled, useless, the spikes decapitated and lolling at your side. She controlled everything, even your words, even your conversation, even your body — rendered awkward, lilting, cold, limp, small — jutting out at every angle in the engulfing seat that so timidly caressed her thighs. With the sucking gravity of a scintillating black hole she drew the fabric of the/her world into her manicured clasp, and enclosed it in her red-tipped nails, a force so strong as to rupture the fabric of the universe, of thought — as now, the fabric of the room embraced her, pet-like and fond, the art-chic settee curling adoringly around her body like a fond spaniel, the paintings on her walls winking deviously at her, begging for her love, her attention, delighting and drinking just a moment of her stare as a flower gazes longingly at the sun. There is nothing you can do upon encountering Violet; a flash of her cool gaze and a nonchalant flick of her hair, a dismissive mid-conversation smile down at her phone, and you’re in it, in her thick smog, at her service and command, forever at service, forever at war. No one knows how she does it. I wouldn’t have been suprised if some mystic wizard of oz had been her father or found just beyond the door into a dark and musty candle-lit room beyond, pulling the strings of her DNA to some perfect rhythm, one deeper and darker than we could detect - a frequency that only the beautiful and the rich could hear and know and the rest of us drawn to it without true understanding as a moth stumbles defiantly into the cold and sunless bulb. I’d walked in and the air was cool, the room was cool — yes it was as though things just arranged themselves beautifully and coldly around her, as though the house had assumed the shuffling mystical colour-changing qualities of a chameleon, camouflaging to match the texture and mood of her mind; now blue with her calm, now red with the slightest threat of hostility, now amber with rage; each thread of fabric sensitive and attuned to each electric impulse within and the slightest attenuation of her lilting voice in conversation; yet mystical, impenetrable. One had the sense the assurance was embedded in her skin, her genes — handed down by generation after generation of men and women who could command the universe and passed some unknown secret down the chain. I faltered in this attempted penetration; she was well protected, with the furniture quietly breathing and contracting as she moved about her house, as she moved about the world, bending to her touch. It is hardly unusual in her presence; yes once I saw three unsightly crackheads step out of her way into the shadows when she walked past, as though ashamed, wanting suddenly to be good and absent. I saw flea-full stray dogs licking themselves clean when she passed their haunts, whirring their tiny wing-motors away and gathering themselves back into Pandora’s box, yes, I saw a plastic bag blow itself into a garbage can as she swept by. There has been talk of more mysterious things sorting themselves out in their presence, but I feel my metaphors and words becoming overworn and overworked, and yet the words keep spewing — I feel her eyes glaze over and yet I somehow cannot command the conversation to those searching questions I must ask, I stutter, as though she had cast the die for me and lulled the truth from my tongue.
Yes, I was no exception.
The world arranged itself, meticulously, for Violet.
Fulbright scholar, model, socialite, the crowds that mattered always drawn around her, crowing like birds, jostling for her smile and her adoration — and she at the centre, uncaring, throwing out little pieces of bread with a laugh, knowing it was wrong to feed the fish.
So I was not surprised when my editor called me and told me the article was a dud. I had hardly got past the facade, the home, the interior — hardly knew what happened that summer that everything changed. That I’d screwed up my last shot at reporting. One last shot. After I’d called him and said she’d tell me, that I was an old friend, begged him to give me one more chance. I knew what perfume she wore (Le Labo Sandal) and what skincare she used (La Mer and the latest Korean brand that cost a nose and breast), but knew little about the person beneath the flawless glassy pores and glossy locks. I knew what paintings and wedding photos she adored and how she met her perfect partner but not if she loved them, I knew how nonchalantly she’d spent thirty seconds assembling her living room wall, how she’d painted it herself in her bristling dungarees, I knew what furniture she was returning (unfortunately for my taste, it was the very set of antique tables I complimented), but not the heart of the matter. Not what happened at the party the summer previous. Not where she always was, where she was going, no I hardly knew anything at all. I knew all of the dust on the photographs and all of the gloss — but the subjects beneath were faceless to me. Like the brick wall, she’d left a perfect dash across each shape; It was as though I had the setting with perfect clarity, every thread on every cushion accurately rendered, and yet some elegant and uncouth modernist had deftly and decisively palette knives some paint stroke protectively across their faces.
See, she’d attained something of the legend of celebrities and gangsters round here without exactly doing anything to deserve it. Violet dripped gold; bangles, to the golden diamonds in her irises, the Cartier rings and bracelets, the bronze of her skin, the shimmering streaks in her coils of hair. She pranced coolly and beautifully by the water, lounged in her appartment, and was talked about at every cafe and in every little appartment in the city. She was talked about from Pittsburgh to San Diego, famous for her supple body and her subtlety — that quality of never quite being there, of always being somewhere better or more mysterious — even when she was just in front of you she was always out of reach.
After half an hour of the interview, I realized I was being interviewed — not her. I’d spewed out my life like I was in some dumb therapy session, in thirty seconds telling her my deepest secrets and low points and loves and I watched her twiddle them around her thumbs, twisting my memories into her own, like the bread she so artfully was kneading and plaiting as I arrived at her apartment on Cervantes Hill. She was this beautiful, glittering spider, made of gold and glass, and I watched her brain whirling — thoughts of those in her web to connect me to — to lure me in, to make me indebted, to make me love her (too late). Her lair was unassuming, graceful — tactful — millions of dollars spent to look rugged and natural, or perhaps the other way round — the style bled out from her eyeliner to the carpets. I felt cooler just for being there - in the antique and the brick walls and the big glass windows with the bleeding sunlight smudged like her eyeshadow across the room leaving a gradient - a little snail trail of clarity. A personal church and a home. Who would have dared suspect it was anything other than a church and home, that anything other quiet ice coffees and milky teas had ever dared disturb the peace.
The party had been here. Right here. I felt its shadows lingering somewhere in the atmosphere, honeyed bodies caught in the midsummer glow and never released from that golden air. Delicious, backless gowns in reds and greens had flounced across the polished oak floor — flashes of tanned skin and the occasional glint of Roman letter tattoos and rich açai red shimmering cascading twirls of sweet air and pealing husky laughter and freshly blown dried brunette hair swirling and glamorous and fresh. The room, now quiet and still, was once on that night tousled and brimming with glorious energy and champagne towers and bottle after bottle of artful dom Perignon and endless platters of sushi people would take with too much fear to eat inelegantly, and so balanced it gingerly on little plywood plates - the sustainable kind, the ecofriendly one.
Tell me about the party, I asked Violet. She cast a subtle eye roll to some imaginary and delighted audience - and commenced falteringly, leaning forward as though to whisper, as though the phantom guests I was picturing might just hear. ‘My darling,’ she said, purring and low, stressing the aaaaar of darling — catching in her voice an accent undetected and unknown, with all the spirit and seduction of Cleopatra, ‘if I told you, I’d have to kill you.’ She laughed, got up, and without saying a word I knew it was time to leave — she offered me a coffee but I knew the only words I could say was no, no I don’t want your perfect cold brew, no I know it is time to leave, I have overstayed, I wish I could have followed your command and disappeared instantaneously. Do not dare judge me, for you could not help it, not if you knew her, not if you were there. If you think you can control yourself there, it is as though you’ve trekked across the mountains to see the violets blossom and the season has past. You missed the hunt, you missed the bloom.
There were rumours, whispers, gossip in the columns and the streets, rumours in the tweets and subtle looks and glances. But there were those who’d been there and those who weren’t, and that subtle unsuspected distinction somehow qualified the city in two between those who knew and those who didn’t, those who were there and those forever on the other side of some unknown truth, some untold story. I looked at the emptied champagne flutes and cupboards, and the smug furniture which sat there all knowing and all smiling — all that had witnessed that great crime forever unpunished, that lost moment and lost soul. The open secret of San Francisco.
I let myself out, slinking out smiling and silent. She was preoccupied. Maybe tomorrow, I called my editor, maybe tomorrow, I’ll know.