The White Rose (7 page)

“Oliver,” she says, leaning forward, “I would never think such a thing. I wouldn't—”
Love
is the word.
Love
is what she means and wants to say, but won't say. She will not burden him with her love, on top of everything else. “I wouldn't feel what I feel for you if you were either of those things. I meant only that to say ‘I know what you're going through' is merely a gesture. We accept that it's the best we can do, but nobody can really know. Look,” she tells him, “I know what Charlotte Wilcox ate for dinner on July seventeenth, 1784, but I'll never know how she really felt about anything. How could I? I mean, even if she were here and I could ask her, and even if she tried to articulate it and really wanted me to understand, I still couldn't understand. It's not just my limitation as a historian, it's my limitation as a human being. I can't know, and you can't know,” she finishes, but Oliver shakes his head.

“You're wrong. If you gave me a chance, if you weren't afraid to reveal what it is, what is so horrible you can't bear for me to get near it, you might be surprised. This could be something that connects us, but you keep it between us. You make it an obstacle.”

She shifts uncomfortably. She would like him to leave now.

“Look,” Oliver says, his voice quiet in the near darkness, “I accept that our situation is unusual, but we're not the first couple to have been born so far apart. In this building alone there are probably a dozen men with wives young enough to be their daughters, and nobody bats an eyelash at them.”

“That's very different,” she snaps.

“It shouldn't be.”

“Well, we can agree on that. But it is.”

He looks at her. “But think about what matters in a relationship. In a marriage! It's companionship, and friendship. And passion. We have those things. There's longevity in what we have.”

“The passion won't last,” she says flatly, but he shakes his head.

“I disagree. Or at least, it has just as much chance of lasting as it would if we were both in our twenties.”

That's what you think,
Marian wants to say.

“Look, maybe this…this haze we're in will burn off, but there's so much between us, of real substance, that when it does”—Oliver, corrects himself—“
if
it does. If it did. There would be something different beneath it. I mean, something of value. Something I'd be happy to live with.”

She looks at him with tenderness. “You shouldn't be. You deserve more.”

“Oh.
Deserve,
” Oliver says dismissively. “I hate that. Everybody
deserves.
It doesn't work like that. We get what we get. Sometimes we get what we go out and make an effort to look for. We don't get what we
deserve.
Besides,” he looks at her, “what do you deserve?”

I've had that,
she thinks.
I've had my chance.

What she wanted back then—and yes, more than likely what she'd deserved—was Marshall, who had paid her the compliment of acknowledging her separateness and refrained from putting her on display. Who had treated her with unassailable courtesy, which included conducting his love affairs at such a remove that they truly did not impinge upon her life. Who had also held her hand during chemotherapy, and had not further punished her for the loss of her reproductive organs by leaving her.

“I'm satisfied,” Marian hears herself say, and she knows that she is, or at least has been.

“That's not enough,” Oliver says.

She closes her eyes. Darkness. The only sound is the traffic far below, the rustle of her own breath.
Go,
she thinks. How much more can she take?

“You're too extraordinary for that to be enough,” he says.

“Ah,” Marian says, truly weary. “That's where you're wrong. I'm very, very ordinary, and very, very lucky. I'm alive. I'm healthy, so far. I have a stable marriage and wealth and even a career that's given me great satisfaction. And right now I have this, which I'm loving. But I can't have it forever and I wish you would stop talking this way because I want to enjoy it now.”

Oliver leans forward, one arm outstretched. Fingers find her face: chin, jaw, ear. “Why not?” he asks, sincerely questioning. “I don't understand: Why
not
forever? Why not take forever if it's offered? And it is, Marian. We'll start from here and we'll just go forward.”

“I don't like forward,” she says, losing her reserve. “I don't like thinking about it, and I certainly won't be responsible for dragging you down. If you're so empathetic, if you're so sure you understand me, why is this so hard for you to get? I'm forty-eight. If this is the best time of my life—and it is, Oliver, in many ways it is—then where do you think we go from here? I'm not going back to my girlish figure, I can tell you that. I'm not going back to wild abandon. I won't be trekking in Nepal anytime soon, and I'm not going to have any kids. It's a different country I'm going to, do you get that?” She is louder, more shrill than she can remember being, at least with him. “Oliver,” Marian says sternly. “Enjoy your youth. Enjoy me, by all means, as much as you want and as often as you want. But please don't humiliate me by trying to make me fit into your life. I won't fit.”

“You're afraid to get old,” he says with unbearable starkness. She herself has managed to avoid the word “old.” “That's all it is. I don't get it. I'm not afraid of it.”

“Well, it's a long way off for you.” She is harsh.

“No, I mean I'm not afraid of
your
getting old. I know you were beautiful as a young woman. You're beautiful now. I have every reason to believe that when you're an old woman, you'll be beautiful then, so what's the big deal? It's not why I love you today, so why would it matter in the future?”

Marian lurches off the couch, wounded, clutching at her pants. She has never, she thinks wildly, understood the phrase “arrogance of youth” until this moment. Even Valerie Annis did not cut her so deeply. He tries to grab for her as she leans down to yank at the fabric: “Hey!” It sounds like a bark. She hates him. Then she hates herself for thinking that. “Marian, let's talk about it!”

“Why, so you can patronize me even more?” Marian chokes through new tears. This is getting tiresome. She has always cried too easily. Her classmates at Brearley knew how to achieve the effect: a comment about her looks, her money, her odd pedigree, at once snobbish and deficient with Jewishness.
Warburg weeps again!
she thinks, fumbling with the zipper. She steals a look at him and finds him injured on the couch in his now ridiculous skirt and wig. A wig he stole from her personal cupboards in her personal office. How dare he go into her things! And hasn't he been laughing at her ever since? “You're just being selfish!” she cries. “You're not really interested in understanding. It flatters you to think I might love you so much I would leave my husband and my life and go live with you. Or marry you! But that isn't what you want, really. You want to have your affair with an older woman and then go back to your own life. Which includes things I couldn't give you even if I wanted to.”

“No!” He jumps to his feet and makes a grab for her.

“You feed me some line about how it doesn't matter that I'm getting old, but you belittle me by ignoring the fact that it matters to me, and you patronize me by implying that it's because of my vanity. It isn't vanity, Oliver, it's time.”

He shakes his head, barely visible. “Time.”

“Time! Which is no longer on my side, to quote the music of my youth. I'm losing it, every day. It's running past me, it's going faster than it used to, I swear.”

She can just make him out. He is shaking his head.

“No, of course you don't believe me. You're just…you're settling into your life now. You're out of school, so you don't have that artificial calendar anymore that says the year is beginning, it's halfway over, it's ending, and now it's beginning again, so time feels different to you,” she barely recognizes her own voice, but she keeps on. “And of course none of your friends are having heart attacks or getting cancer and you all feel like it will go on forever. But it won't. Sometimes I still feel twenty-six and I wonder why I'm so tired and a couple of my friends are dead and everybody else is coloring their hair and getting their eyes done or having injections in their foreheads, and then I remember:
that was twenty years ago.
But it wasn't. I mean, it feels like it wasn't. It feels like…” She trails off. She despises cliché and won't say what it feels like. “You know,” Marian hears herself say, “what I hate most of all these days? You're going to think this is absurd.”

“I won't,” says Oliver, who is straining, she can tell, to understand.

“I hate daylight savings time. I hate having to give up that hour in the spring. I hate setting all the clocks forward. I resent it so much now.”

The smallest laugh escapes him. But then he remembers that he is not to think her absurd.

“But you get the hour back, Marian. In the fall.”

“Not really.” She shakes her head, genuinely saddened. “I never feel it come back. I always feel I've been tricked out of an hour of my life. It all goes so fast.” She stands for a moment in the darkness and is grateful for his silence. How she will ever face him again she does not know. She feels ridiculous, painfully neurotic. Ship me off, she thinks, like all of the other middle-aged lady intellectuals who didn't bother having kids to keep themselves sane. Her best book is behind her anyway, so what's the harm?

“Do you want to have your eyes done?” Oliver says, surprisingly. “I mean, is that what you're saying? Because if you do, I wouldn't necessarily like it, and I certainly don't think you need it, but if something like that would make you happy, then I want you to know I'd support it.”

This, to her own amazement, lightens everything, and she smiles. “That's sweet. That's lovely of you. But no, I wouldn't do it. I won't try to slow time down, because that's arrogant. And I'm too grateful for what I've had.”

“Your health,” he says tersely. “Your career. And Marshall. I know, you told me.”

“Yes! I am! And I wouldn't…I don't know, get a face-lift or something to try to pretend I'm not as old as I am. And I wouldn't marry a man who's twenty-six to try to pretend I'm not too old to be married to a man who's twenty-six. This might be some kind of important life experience for you, but it doesn't work that way for me.”

This she regrets instantly, but of course it is too late, and he is too proud not to take offense.

“Jesus, Marian, how can you say that? You know how I feel about you! Why are you trying to reduce my feelings, which are genuine, to a…a…rite of passage? Is that how you push me away?”

“No,” she says, but he is unstoppable.

“I didn't need a sexual awakening from you, and I didn't get one,” he says. “I'm with you because I love you and I want to be with you. It isn't about our ages. We're just two people who came together. It's true we didn't start at the same time, but can't we finish together?”

She stares at him, weary. Of course it is right, what he says, essentially right, though there is a certain element of drama, undeniable even to Oliver, connected to falling passionately in love with his mother's childhood friend. She knows—truly, soberly, she knows—that his passion for her is real, that it comes from the planet of all sexual passion and all romantic love. That he loves her and even believes he wants to be with her and marry her. She does not want that love to end on this evening, in this dark, sad, and oddly disconnected scene.

“I could never be with a man who has better legs than I do.”

This throws him. He takes a moment to regroup.

“That's not an answer.”

“No,” Marian says, reaching for his hand. “But it's the best I can do. I'm tired and I'm sad, and I'm worried about what Valerie Annis would do if she found out. Not to mention Marshall. Or your mother. I want to go back to the day we were having, Oliver, but it's gone and I'm just too wrecked right now to pull myself together. So I'm thinking, maybe, if I just hang out by myself for a while, and sleep, and do a little work in the morning, I might be able to get back on track with myself and we can meet tomorrow. We could…I don't know, I could come downtown. We could do something there.”

Oliver contemplates. Then one hand comes up to his head and pulls off the wig. This is a gesture of resignation. “Fine,” he says, but not harshly.

“Thank you.”

“For what?” There is a note of anger. “For leaving you?”

“For not making it harder than it is. For understanding that it's just an off night, not the whole space-time continuum.”

After a moment, he smiles. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Marian says. Now that it is settled, now that he is leaving, she has lost her bravado, her will to be alone. Suddenly, she finds herself anticipating the vacuum
whoosh
of the front door shutting behind him, the creaking of the elevator gears.
Oliver,
she nearly says.
Don't go.

Oliver walks over to the other couch, kneels down on the rug, and hunts beneath the fringe for his lost clothing. Then he leaves the room, walking uncomfortably in his hastily pulled-up tights. It is true about his legs, she thinks sadly, watching them crisscross beneath the skirt. They are indeed better than her own: skinny and muscled with fine, smooth knees. Too pretty for her, she thinks. Also too handsome. Christ—had she actually said that about daylight savings time? How sad, Marian thinks. How truly gone I am.

It is going to be a long and unhappy night.

Out in the kitchen, there is a shuffle and then the final click of the office door. Oliver comes back in, dressed in his clothes from the prehistory of that morning. She can barely remember them now: black pullover, olive corduroy pants, the brown leather shoes he inherited from his father and cherishes so much that he will not wear them if it looks like rain. Marian puts on a smile so strained it threatens to break. She forces herself to hug him, then she forces herself to stop.