The White Rose (6 page)

He is silent for a moment. “All right. I have one.”

“That's it.” She is breathless with strain. “Bring it out and say good-bye, then we can do a bit more before you have to leave.” She puts down the phone. Expectantly, the other two turn toward the kitchen.

The office door opens and closes. They hear footfalls, Oliver in unaccustomed heels—just as well they aren't high heels—approaching.

Then he is there, her strangely lovely girl, smiling shyly, with the white business card in one hand. Valerie stares, uncharacteristically silent, her lips pursed in concentration. “Oh,” Oliver says. “I didn't know someone else had come.”

“I am Valerie Annis,” says Valerie, staring.

“It's very nice to meet you,” says Oliver politely. “My name is Olivia.”

“Olivia…” Valerie shakes hands, but lets the name linger. She is angling for a surname.

“I work with Professor Kahn.”

“That must be fascinating.”

Oliver smiles but doesn't answer. He has gleaned that Marian wants this cut short. He is helping.

“I understand you have something for me, Olivia,” says Barton.

Oliver extends the card.

“And do you approve of this place?” He glances: “The White Rose?”

“Yes, they do very nice work. Professor Kahn gets flowers from them sometimes.” His pride is now engaged. Marian watches him look past the group to the roses. His roses. “I think…,” he says pointing, “aren't those from the White Rose, Professor Kahn?”

“I think so,” she agrees reluctantly.

“Of course, I don't know anything about flowers,” Olivia continues with becoming modesty, “but I think they're the most beautiful roses I've ever seen.”

Marian gives him a brief look. Brief, but pointed.

“Well, that's quite a recommendation,” says Barton. “Perhaps one day someone might send
you
some flowers from the White Rose.”

“Oh,” Olivia says, “I doubt that.”

“We'll see.” He raises an eyebrow and nods meaningfully. “I'll tell you what. May I put you in charge of this errand for me? I would like to have some flowers sent to a young lady. Some roses I think. And they must be white.”

“Oh,” Oliver gives Marian a brief, uncertain look. “Well, I'd be happy to.”

“You're very sweet,” Barton says. “And, may I say, very charming.”

“And very
busy,
” Marian says pointedly. “Really, Barton, can't you take care of this yourself?”

“No, no,” Oliver smiles. “It's fine. I'm glad to do it.”

“Well, I'd be appreciative,” Barton purrs. “Next Friday will be fine. I'll write down the address.” And he reaches into his jacket for a pen and one of his own cards. Marian watches him write: Sophie Klein, 1109 Fifth Avenue. No apartment number, no zip code. And no instructions about payment, she notes.

“How should Olivia arrange the bill?” Marian says shortly, and he makes a dismissive gesture as he hands over the card.

“Oh. Have it sent to The Retreat. That will be fine.”

Fine for you, she thinks. Bills sent to The Retreat probably all disappear into the same black hole of nonpayment. Perhaps this one will even be absorbed by some trumped up “restoration” project to be delineated as part of Barton's prenuptial agreement. Sophie Klein, in other words, will end up paying for her own flowers. Well, thinks Marian, she'd better get used to that.

Barton's hand lingers for an extra moment in Oliver's hand. Then he leaves his card behind. “You'll take care of it for me?”

“I will,” Oliver says amiably.

Well, what is she worried about? Marian thinks with resignation. This is a good development for Oliver and his shop, possibly even a great one. It's an expensive order, or will be if somebody actually ends up paying for it, and no bad thing to send a beautiful arrangement to the Steiner mansion, where some of the wealthiest people in the city are likely to admire it, not least Mort Klein himself.

Barton turns to Marian, as if abruptly recalling her presence. “I must go. I'm late for the Kleins. Where is my coat?”

Oliver sets down the card on Marian's coffee table. “I'll get it,” he says cheerily, and goes.

“Oh, Barton,” Valerie says, finally breaking off the gaze she has fixated on Oliver, “you're going to the Kleins now? I'm going that way. I'll walk with you.”

It is an announcement, not a request.

“Fine!” says Barton. He is shrugging his broad shoulders into the coat Oliver holds open. “You can walk me as far as the door.”

Valerie flinches a mite at the put-down, but recovers admirably. “Of course. Good-bye, Miss…,” she says to Oliver, who has finished helping Barton on with his coat.

“Olivia,” he says.

“Well, very nice to meet you. Marian?”

Marian steps forward and kisses one bony cheek, then the other bony cheek. She smells some awful cucumber perfume. She pulls back and smiles with a practiced facsimile of fondness, but Valerie, she notes, is staring frankly at her, without a veneer of sociability. Marian watches as her gaze makes a clockwise sweep, from crown to waist and up again. “Who's doing your color now, Marian?” she asks suddenly.

“My…?”

The question takes a moment to sink in. Either Valerie has forgotten that they are not alone, or she is being cruel. So cruel, Marian thinks, frantically avoiding the eyes of her cousin and her lover.

“We can do better. Whoever you're seeing, I'm going to set you up with my person at Fekkai. He's impossible to get, but I'm going to fix it for you. I want to,” she says. “Please, don't say anything. It's done.”

“Oh,” Marian says, burning.

“And I want to take you up to see Peter Davidoff on Madison. He's the biggest whore, you can't imagine! You tell him, ‘I don't like this freckle,' and he says, ‘Don't worry, we'll zap it. It's gone!' ” She laughs, a glasslike laugh. “His office, everyone you know's in the waiting room! It's what La Côte Basque must have been like in the sixties, only we all know what we're doing there. Who cares! Why look older than we have to?” She looks at Barton. “Isn't that right?”

He frowns, baffled, so Valerie tries Oliver.

“Not that you'll need to worry about that for eons, Olivia. You have lovely skin.”

Oliver refuses to thank her aloud. He offers only a half smile.

“Well,” Valerie chirps, “must go. Barton?”

“Yes!” He steps forward, and Oliver grabs the door. “Marian,” Barton says as Valerie stabs the elevator button, “I will be in touch. I want you to meet Mort. And Sophie, of course.”

“Of course,” Marian echoes. Her voice sounds flat.

“Good to see you!” Valerie says. “I'm so glad I stopped in. I hope we didn't interfere too badly,” she says gaily, as if she and Barton are a couple.

“Not at all,” Marian says. Oliver steps back as the elevator door opens. Carlo, the elevator man, doesn't need to see the young man he brought up this morning dressed in women's clothes. “Good-bye,” Marian says as they step into the elevator. “Good-bye,” as it closes. “Good-bye,” as they descend.

And then Oliver is around her, beside her, pressing her arms with his arms, and her face is hot against his face, and he is holding her so tight the strength of his arms is the only thing keeping her from flying to pieces.

“That bitch,” he says, swaying and swaying. “That bitch.”

T
here is a time in each day that is neither afternoon nor evening but something breathless in suspension between them, when every particle of the air is briefly infused with fierce, fierce color, one instant so utterly there, then gone. This time occurs frequently, perhaps even daily, but it is easily missed, and feels, as a result, beyond uncommon. It can be missed by looking in the wrong direction, or by being under an umbrella, or by being indoors or at the movies or the Food Emporium at just that instant. To catch it, then, is rare and not a little glorious, which is why Marian always notes it when she does. She remembers, most clearly of all, the first time she noticed it, coming home from the Fokine School of Dance on Seventy-ninth with her hand in Mary's hand, and finding herself on Park Avenue at just that liminal moment to see a sparkle in the sidewalk beneath her school shoes. And she remembers thinking:
I never noticed that before.

Aubergine Time, she came to call it. (“Aubergine” being a word used by her mother, and meaning a kind of purple, though with exotic overtones.) Aubergine Time passed so quickly that you could barely close your hand around it before it fled between your fingers, and in Marian's life she had never clutched at more than a hundred. There had been four on the front steps of the Brearley School; one slinking out of the park, shivering beneath the arm of her first boyfriend, Roger Frank, one outside the Fairway on Broadway and Seventy-fifth, a rash of them in and around Gramercy Park, where she and Marshall had spent their first married years, and one a month before today on Commerce Street, while she was racing the length of the block to Oliver's door with her arms full of groceries.

And oddly, at this particular moment, even as Marian wrenches herself away from Oliver—from
Olivia
—and walks to the end of the living room, the two large windows begin to beckon with that uncommon but familiar light, and she thinks (even with all of her rage and encroaching depression and also humiliation, because it had happened in front of Oliver, who knew that she thought it was all true, even if he himself did not):
Oh! It's now!

It is now. It is right now, on the great glittering ravine of Park Avenue, and she just has time to wish that she were not here inside, even with Oliver, but outside in that light—even looking as terrible as she does with her puffy face.
I love this,
Marian thinks, which is absurd, because she is actually quite miserable. And yet…the spiky buildings, the rising steam over the East River, and the floating specks of light as planes dispersed, poor things, from this very center of the universe, in a sky thick with aubergine, which makes Marian remember, as she always remembers, the white, white shoulders of her mother, seated at a white dressing table by a window flooded with this exact light.

“Marian?” Oliver says. He is still in the hallway.

And then it is over. Fled. The aubergine called back up to the heavens as evening fills its void.

“I did not like that woman,” he says.

“She does not expect to be liked,” Marian says, turning. “She expects to be reckoned with.”

He looks relieved at her apparent recovery.

“What a thrill for her, to find my cousin here. And with his news!”

Oliver frowns. “Why? What's it to her?”

“Well, it's a scoop. It's a big deal, Mort Klein's daughter getting married. Mort Klein may be generous with his house, you see, but not with his private life. I mean, you can see his ballroom if you support the Jewish Museum or the Philharmonic or the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation, but you won't find the family there. They're private people.” Marian sinks onto the couch. “People like Valerie don't understand them. What's the point of being private!”

“‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors,' right?”

“Right,” Marian says. “Actually,” she continues, “I ought to be grateful. If Barton hadn't been here she'd have been a lot more interested in you.”

Oliver crosses over and sits beside Marian on the couch. After a moment, he crosses his legs at the knee.

“Good girl,” Marian says and laughs. “I thought that was a nice touch, before. Who taught you to do that, anyway?”

“Dustin Hoffman in
Tootsie,
” says Oliver.

“Oh, but you're so much prettier than him. I seem to recall some difficulty with five o'clock shadow.”

“Well, it's past five o'clock. I might have a bit of a problem,” Oliver leans close. “Care to feel?”

Marian reclines, with drama, a hand to her chest. “I couldn't.”

He grins. “Scared?”

“Why, no. It's just, you're a very pretty girl.”

“And that frightens you?”

“I can't trust myself!”

“How…provocative.”

His hand, she now observes, is on her knee.

“Mr. Stern!”

“Please,” Oliver entreats, “call me Ms.”

“I've never!” Marian is laughing.

“Then you ought.”

Well, if you put it that way.
Proper English is such an aphrodisiac, Marian thinks, letting his weight pin her back against the cushions. She puts her hands on his back and feels the movement of cashmere over his skin and under her hands. She puts her hands under the cashmere and over his skin, which is warm—no, hot. It's hot like his breath against her neck. She can't see much because the long wig has fallen over her face, and there is just room in this diminished range of vision to be persuaded that a woman—indeed, a
beautiful
woman—is on top of her, moving and touching, pinning her to the couch and persuading her that she is no longer in control of herself. A woman is wanting Marian so fiercely that her desire is escaping in sounds of want, in little sighs at Marian's ear. A woman is putting her fingers in Marian's hair and making her want to bring her thighs together, except that the woman is already between her thighs, so she can't. The woman has narrow hips, a flat chest, shiny chestnut hair, and delicate hands. She is not shy, this woman. She doesn't hold back the way Marian herself might, wanting something so badly but only hoping a finger or a tongue will land in precisely the spot she wants it to, or wanting to put her own finger or tongue in some specific location but waiting to see if it might arrive there accidentally, as if in the course of other events. This woman is everywhere, touching beneath Marian's bra, reaching expertly for the zipper of Marian's wool pants, trailing her feathery hair across Marian's bare skin. It's all beyond her. The woman, this beautiful woman, is in charge, and Marian's only choice is whether just to lie here, and let the woman touch her in all of the places that now want touching, or to touch her back in all of the same places.

She could, for example, move her own hands from where they are on the woman's back over her ribs around to the woman's front. To her chest, in other words. She could put her hands on the woman's chest and, well, touch her. Which is not a thing she has ever done before and not a thing she has ever wanted to do, but it is in fact a thing she would like very much to do right now. She would like to see what this woman's breasts feel like and why shouldn't she, since the woman seems very willing and is moving against her in this provocative and yet oddly affectionate way, with one stockinged leg insinuated between Marian's legs. In fact, it now occurs to Marian that quite apart from putting her hands under this woman's sweater and touching her breasts, she could very easily put her hands under the woman's skirt and touch her between the legs. She could do that, and very easily, by lifting up the skirt or merely burrowing beneath it. Simple! Women make it so simple, don't they, wearing skirts. Do they want to be touched all the time? Is that the point of a skirt? She could put her hands under the skirt right now, right this second, without anything to stop her, and get directly at what she wants, whereas she herself is stuck in pants that need unzipping and peeling off—all that work! She hears the scratch of the woman's stockings as her legs move past each other.

“Don't you hate these horrible things?” Oliver complains.

“Yes,” Marian says. “I do. All women do.”

“Then why not get rid of them?”

“Why not?” She is putting her hands under his sweater. Her sweater. “Get rid of them. Take them off.”

“Take them off for me,” he teases.

He gets up on his knees and looks down at her in open challenge. Marian slides one hand up under the skirt, experimentally. Then, self-consciously, removes it.

“Chicken,” Oliver says and grins.

“I can't. It's too weird.”

He kisses her again. The evening crashes down around them. The couch, which is covered with expensive Scalamandré silk, gives a disquieting ping somewhere in the region of her bottom. She puts her hands under Oliver's skirt and, avoiding his crotch, fishes for the waistband. It fights her as she pulls it down.

“Dr. Kahn!” Oliver gasps, theatrically. “What do you think you're doing?”

“Just relax,” Marian says, laughing. “I'm not going to hurt you.”

He whispers something she doesn't quite hear, and rocks his hips against her, pressing his advantage, and after that, she finds herself both borne away from and then back to the whisper, which was unintelligible but is somehow charged with deeper meaning, so that the farther they travel from it, the more she also returns to it, first idly curious, then aroused, then inescapably anxious, until finally he slips inside her and Marian feels her chest contract in panic.

“What did you say?” she hisses.

“Mmm?” Oliver does not open his eyes. He is deeply inside her, one hand on the small of her back, the other caught in her hair.

“What did you say?” Marian cries. “Before. What did you say when you whispered?”

“What?” He opens his eyes, so reluctant, so knowing what this means, not only to the sex, which is about to wither, but to the evening, which has had too many wrenches already to easily withstand another. “Shh,” he tries, optimistically closing his eyes again. He presses his face against hers. “I love you.”

“No,” Marian insists. “No, you need to tell me. What did you
say
?”

So he stops where he is, which is nowhere she can place, the physical sensations having fled the scene, taking everything of value with them. Even the light, she thinks dully, has gone plain and flat, the Aubergine Time so far in the past it might be embedded in childhood. It is good, Marian thinks, that she can't see Oliver's face very clearly. This is all too pitiful to see clearly. Besides, doesn't she know exactly what there is to see? Isn't she a middle-aged woman on an expensive couch with pants bunched at her ankles under a beautiful boy in a wig?

“It was dumb,” says Oliver, her beautiful boy.

“Tell me.” She is going to cry. Any second, she is going to cry. She is pathetic.

He pulls the rest of the way back out of her. “I said you can hurt me.”

Marian sits up. Her knees snap together. “What?” She is choking back tears now.

Oliver shrugs. “You said, ‘I'm not going to hurt you.' And I said, ‘You can hurt me.' It's meaningless. We were
playing,
Marian!”

She knows, she knows, but that's all gone, now, and she is sobbing into her hands, because out of the mouth of a babe it has come, this ultimate truth, and she wonders if she actually heard him in the first place and only tried, tried not to give it meaning.
You can hurt me.
She doesn't want that, she doesn't want to hurt him! That is exactly what she has wanted to avoid, from the start. But how can they avoid it?

“Marian,” Oliver says softly. He sits back on his heels at the end of the couch. His skirt has come down and covered him. His wig is askew. He gazes at her, helpless and wounded. “Please, why are you crying?”

But she won't say. She is only crying still, and now it feels as if her life is not punctuated by these fits of tears but that her life itself has turned into a long fit of tears, punctuated only by periods in which she forgets that she is a forty-eight-year-old woman terribly in love with a man who does not understand that he is twenty-six and what that means. She curls tightly forward against her knees, gripping them, and wetly, loudly, sloppily sobbing. For the first time all day, including when she was pushing him toward the door, she truly would like him to be gone.

“Marian, can I help?” Oliver says. But of course he can't. Still, she is grateful. A lesser man might have asked, “Are you having your period?” or something equally asinine, but Oliver has not, and a good thing, too, since that might have caused a fresh assault of tears. Marian has not had her period in years.

“Look,” she manages to say, finally, between gulps, “I think…maybe it would be a good idea if I had some time to myself right now. It just isn't fair to inflict my presence on anyone else.”

She sees but does not hear his sigh.

“Sweetie, I'm just…I just feel done in.” Her voice sounds ragged, clumsily patched together. “It's better I'm alone.”

“It's better you're with me,” he says tersely. “It's better you don't shut me out the minute you think you're not in top form. It's better you figure out that we're in this together, and I am actually capable of understanding what you're going through.”

“But you're not,” she says. “No one's capable. I mean, really capable of really understanding. We get other people around the edges, maybe, but we don't get inside. We can't.”

“I completely disagree.” He moves back, putting more space between them, more air. “You think a man can't know a woman? Or is it that a young person can't know an older one?” He waits for a response. “Or just that
I'm
not capable. You think I'm too simple to understand this big”—he shakes his head in frustration—“
soup
of anxiety you're carting around all the time. You think I'm too insensitive to get it. Or just too stupid.”