The White Rose (8 page)

“Tomorrow,” Oliver says.

“Yes.” Bravely. “Whatever you want to do.”

“I'll have to think about that. I'll have to give that long thought. Long and detailed.”

“Good.” She is going to cry again, Marian thinks. She would like him to leave before she does. “I'll call you in the morning.”

Then, finally, he turns to go. She can breathe, but carefully, knowing he is still near, still close enough to rush back in at the sound she is capable of making. Only a few seconds more. He summons the elevator with a buzz. She counts to three and again to three and once again, and then hears the rumble of gears as the door opens, taking Oliver Stern, whom she does love, and deeply, away.

Marian lets her head fall forward into her hands. The hands, she notes from a distance, are wet, and it takes a long, disconnected moment to understand that she herself has provided—is providing—this moisture. So boring! Marian thinks, pausing in her misery to be miserable about that, too. She is so beneath her own standard, her new standard, of what a woman ought to be at her time of life. This is the curse of history, she thinks, weeping. This is why it is not necessarily a good thing to unearth our betters from the lost sands of lost time: they do not necessarily show us ourselves to best advantage. Indeed, she has acquired the habit of imagining Lady Charlotte as her own personal critic and now conjures her on the other sofa, incongruous and yet unassailably at home on Park Avenue and in the year 1997, with her skirts fanned around her, flicking her tongue in disgust at the blubbering madwoman. Truly mad! Marian laments noisily. Mad to send away her lover in the middle of passion—
idiot, idiot.
Just how many twenty-six-year-old lovers does she believe are waiting to take his place?

Marian gets to her feet. Brandy, she has promised herself, and brandy she will have, in a fine crystal glass in front of the blinking lights of the city. Then, fortified, she will go out into the world and try to do some good thing to redeem herself. Some good thing—she can't imagine what it might be, but there must be something she can do. First brandy. No, first water, to shock her tears into retreat.

The only light in the apartment now comes from the kitchen, in a wedge of illumination that crosses the dining room into the room she occupies. It just reaches the small rectangle of paper Oliver left on the coffee table, and when Marian sees this she stops.

The address from Barton. The address Oliver will need for the flowers. The card to remind him of his commission, and its recipient: Sophie Klein, the fiancée.

This is the moment when Marian understands that she will not be seeing Oliver the following day. This is when she knows that she will be sick, or will say she is sick, and unable to come downtown. This is when she knows that the ground of their affair has shifted beneath her, and at her behest, even though it may be against her will.

Which is why she must make sure Oliver does not leave without the card. She moves quickly, forgetting everything else as she tears through the living room and kitchen and snatches up the house phone. There is a clattering sound from the lobby, as a hand fumbles the button to clear the line, and then Hector's voice, finishing his instructions to a delivery man. “Yes, lobby,” he says finally.

“Hector? My guest, the young man who just came down? He left something. Is he in the lobby?”

There is a brief pause. A mumbled consultation. “He's gone. Carlo took him down.”

“Can you catch him?”

“Oh…just a minute,” says Hector. A muffled sound, like a hand over the mouth of the receiver. “Carlo can see him. He's going after him. Just at the end of the block.”

“Oh!” She is thrilled. She is truly so grateful. It is a salvation, to have this piece of evidence gone from her apartment and on its way. “Thank you, Hector! I really appreciate it. Thank Carlo for me.”

“I coming up,” Hector says.

“I'll wait at the elevator,” she tells him, and puts down the receiver.

Then, adjusting her clothing and wiping her hands once more over her face, she exits her own front door to stand in the antechamber and wait.

W
hen Oliver comes up from the subway on West Fourth there is a fine mist in the night air that seems to come from all directions and is disorienting in its warmth—like, thinks Oliver, a sprayed disinfectant, or the cloud of perfume permanently ambient on the cosmetics floor of Bloomingdale's. He closes his eyes instinctively, but the mist is not unpleasant. Oliver walks north on Sixth Avenue, his hands deep in his jacket pockets. He considers again, and again resists, the notion that he is being sanitized, that the hours of sex and fighting and comedy and grief might be washed from his skin and pass from his thoughts. The truth is, he does not want them gone at all. The truth is that the mess and frustration of his life with Marian—and it is a life, now, despite her terror of admitting it—are part of something that he loves. He doesn't, of course, love her anxieties and self-tormenting, but he knows better than to try to separate the melancholy from her character. He accepts her, in other words. More than that, he wants her.

It isn't, after all, the first time they have turned a corner into such confusion. He remembers one of their early dinners, on a Saturday night at Le Rouge, when she traveled the distance from hilarity to depression in what seemed like a single breath, and could be restrained from leaving the table, the restaurant, and all the elation of their first weeks together, only by his two feet gripping, pincerlike, her ankle under the table. Where it comes from is not a mystery to him. Marian seems programmed to deny herself happiness, and the more she lets pleasure slip past her defenses, the more she seems to beat it back. Since Oliver observes this tendency equally in Marian's relationship with her friends, in her guilt over money, and in her ambivalence toward professional success—which is merited, in her own case, by the most honest of labor—he knows not to take it personally. So the fact that he has just been expelled from her apartment, and from the weekend they had long ago set aside for themselves, does not entirely crush him.

But what a waste,
Oliver thinks, echoing Marian's own sentiment from only an hour earlier. What a waste of their weekend, with its absent spouse and its empty apartment and its tender, athletic, glorious commencement. What a waste of this clear night, which might have found them out walking, or holding hands in a movie, or even scouting last-minute cancellations to hear Bobby Short at the Carlyle—he would have loved that, he thinks sadly. And the lost tomorrow, the rare pleasure of waking up with her and falling back asleep, or getting up, or staying in bed…He has experienced these good things just enough to regret their absence. But perhaps, for tomorrow at any rate, there is still a possibility, as Marian said, and he has no reason to disbelieve her, since her moods have a way of shifting back in his direction. They will talk in the morning, and when they do she will say that she wishes she had not needed to be by herself, but hopes they might…soon…

Tomorrow night, then. Afternoon, if he can coax her from her work, but surely by night, and now the reverie unfolds: what they might do tomorrow night. It unfolds even as he walks, like a carpet stretching down the pavement before him: he will cook for her—he is a skilled cook of limited repertoire—and he will buy a really good bottle of wine, taking the advice of the guy at Christopher Street Wines who can't quite tell that Oliver is straight (and is so hopeful that Oliver does not see how to communicate this without hurting the guy's feelings), and then he will talk to Marian and touch Marian and take Marian to bed and be happy.

Oliver, already happy at the prospect of this future happiness, feels himself grin.

Sixth Avenue is roiling with New Yorkers engaged in the business of getting what they need and going home, and the crowd seems universally bent on Balducci's, where Oliver himself is heading. He has not managed to acquire the habit of regular shopping in small, specialized stores. Bread, vegetables, meat, and fish—weren't you supposed to go from shop to shop, making personal connections with your purveyors and supporting family businesses? Instead, he relies far too heavily on Balducci's, though he dislikes its snobbery, its assumption of affluence, the maddening lack of toilet paper and other similarly nonglamorous items. That he nonetheless finds himself doing the bulk of his shopping there signifies a lack of discipline, Oliver thinks.

At the store, he joins a crowd of hypercritical foodies, weighing the merits of basil- or chili-infused oils and upsetting pyramids of exotic teas as they reach for the strategically weight-bearing box they must, above all others, examine. There's a crush two bodies deep at the meat counter, so Oliver takes a number and drifts through the cramped aisles, checking the countdown numeral each time he passes by and accumulating orzo, still-spectacular tomatoes (where they get them he can't imagine), olives, bread, and the aforementioned basil-infused extra virgin olive oil, as well as an expensive prepared beet and chèvre salad for his own dinner tonight and a wooden box of Burdick chocolates, which Marian loves. By the time his number's barked, he has assembled a hearty but elegant menu for the two of them, featuring short ribs, orzo, frisée, and artichokes, to be followed, after a decent interval, by the chocolates. If it's warm, he thinks, ordering the short ribs, they can eat on the roof, though he has a gardener's perpetual regret about the state of his plants. If not, they will eat in the bedroom, which has a table and, just as important, a fireplace. He does not cook for Marian nearly enough, he thinks merrily, maneuvering his basket before him into the chutelike checkout, where the actress or artist or novelist on duty piles his seventy-odd dollars' worth of merchandise into a single bag and extends an elegant hand for his credit card. There are flowers in French tin pots and large steel vats against the door, and he frowns at them, critical but admiring. Here is his real competition, he reflects, signing his name to the slip. Not the little groceries with their well-worn blooms wrapped in patterned plastic, but these exotic stems and bunches tied in raffia, so easy to add to the already obscene contents of the cart. They look good, these flowers, and will last fairly well, it seems to him. That is possibly bad news for the very elegant and very expensive flower shop only a few blocks away, and for his own flowers, Oliver thinks, so much lovelier, so much more deserving than these.

He remembers, then, suddenly and quite viscerally, this very morning, early, with fog over the cobblestones in front of the shop, reaching into the truck while the engine was still running and Bell was hauling out the containers, lifting out those Boule de Neige roses, long-stemmed, dripping, and alive. He had known as soon as he saw them, not only that they were beautiful roses, but that they were the right roses. The exactly perfect roses, for her.

For the lady love,
Bell had said then, and laughed, clairvoyant, shaking his dreadlocks.

Now Oliver thinks:
Yes, exactly. For the lady love.

The cashier hands him his receipt and his credit card.

Then he remembers something else, back before the shopping and the subway and the tears and the sex and the surprising hoot of his pantomime with Barton Ochstein to the moment he was above Marian and inside her and he stopped—stopped still—to look: he remembers how she turned her head away from him, to the side, and how she is self-conscious about her neck, and how she has even admitted that she thinks of having it “done,” whatever that means. He can never risk saying that this is ridiculous, but it is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with her neck, and it does not make her look old as she thinks it does, though he catches her now and then pushing the loose skin this way and that with her fingertips, frowning at a stray reflection. Besides, she isn't old. She isn't even as old as his mother (who isn't old, either) though they were once classmates—Marian so clever they moved her ahead, one year, two years, what does it matter? Besides, what does a young neck look like, anyway?

He looks at the cashier's neck. That is what a young neck looks like.

Oliver hands her the signed receipt, hoists the bag onto his hip, and leans against the door to leave. There are other things he needs, other stops he ought to make before going home, and he rejoins the evening crowd.

A block west on Christopher Street, just past the leather men mannequins of the drag boutique, Transformations, Oliver pushes open the door to Christopher Wines and resignedly notes that his winebuddy, his would-be friend, is already grinning at him from the merlots. Oliver waves briefly and heads for the aisle where they keep the perfectly respectable but not-for-the-cognoscenti California reds, and there he chooses, purely for its name (Clos des Fleurs) two bottles of middling price, which he takes to the register.

“Nice choice!” says the assistant, sauntering over to him.

“Oh,” Oliver says noncommittally. “Is it? I just liked the name.”

“Right. You and your flowers.”

Have I talked about flowers with this guy? Oliver thinks. Christ, what a jerk I am.

“I guess.” Oliver sighs and sets down his grocery bag on a ledge.

“So, is this for a special dinner, or what?”

Oliver shrugs. “Not really.” He is wondering if there is another wine store nearby he ought to be patronizing.

“Thirty-six forty-eight with the tax,” says the assistant. “So, what are you doing this weekend?”

Oliver hands over his card. “Oh…not much.” This is an attempt to avoid conversation, but as he says it Oliver realizes that it sounds downright receptive. Sure enough, the assistant nods eagerly.

“I'm going to a Violet Quill retrospective tomorrow night. At Three Lives. You know the Violet Quill?”

“Um,” Oliver says while he signs with a very un-Quillish Bic pen, “no.”

“It was a group of writers in the seventies who started meeting in the Village. Most of them became important novelists. Felice Picano. Robert Ferro. Edmund White?” The assistant is frowning now. He has evidently not expected such a level of ignorance. And he is very definitely
not
putting the wine into a bag and handing that bag to Oliver.

Come on,
thinks Oliver.

“I'm a writer, you know,” he says instead.

“Oh,” Oliver says, wild to get away. “I didn't know. Well, it sounds interesting. Have a good time.” He makes a grab for the unbagged bottles, and the assistant frowns and tells him to wait. He reaches below the counter and hands Oliver a small paper bag, still folded flat: their romance is over, and moreover it has ended badly. How much simpler, thinks Oliver, it would have been to merely tell the guy many visits ago that he was a poor prospect for a pickup, and spared themselves this. Oliver puts the bottles into the bag. “See you,” he says sheepishly.

“Yeah,” the man says. “Enjoy yourself.”

Now that you've cruelly spurned my advances,
thinks Oliver, leaving.

The thing is, it doesn't actually bother Oliver that the guy assumes he's gay. It would have once, Oliver considers, walking now with the wine and groceries each in one hand. There was a time, certainly, in his teens, when he was preoccupied with the subject, a tangent—he thought at the time—to the subject of his medical status. He would have minded it then. Only a few years ago he might have been rattled, even by such an innocuous, friendly proposition. But now, for some reason, he is untroubled. The questioning, Oliver has come to think, has little to do with him, in the end. In his case, it is not a comment on his voice or his mannerisms or his clothing; it is a form of prejudice—occupational prejudice. Because he is a man and he loves flowers. Apparently, only homosexual men are allowed to love flowers.

His response to this is offense on behalf of flowers.

Music is supposed to be the food of love, he knows, but Oliver has never had any special feeling for music. Classical, folk, jazz, or blues—it's all a buzz to him, and more than one girlfriend has shaken her head at his imperviousness. He's not even tone-deaf; he just doesn't care, and would rather have silence. Oliver possesses, as a result, perhaps the smallest collection of music on the island of Manhattan (one CD of Carole King's
Tapestry,
two Devo albums left over from high school, and a cassette tape of
Madame Butterfly
given to him by his stepfather, who adores opera, in a long-ago attempt to make a point of contact between them). For Oliver it has always been flowers, the food not only of love but of life. Flowers to look at, to smell, to be alive with in their brief life spans—they are their own seat of pleasure, endlessly giving. He does not understand people who do not love flowers, or who consider them merely ornamental for the home, like an accent pillow or a Hummel figurine. He does not understand people who assault flowers for their essence, which they rub over their skin like a spoil of war, leaving carcasses of slaughtered blossoms in their wake. He knows that these are extreme, dramatic views, which is why he does not often share them, but it does baffle him that in a world so bereft of pleasure people fail to see that flowers are a part of the solution, that the unlearned lesson of their loveliness bears on the great disconnect between people and other people, between people and the earth, between people and the eternal.

Every now and then, Oliver will catch a glimpse of this passion in someone else, and the recognition will fill him with gratification. He will be in Greenwich, or at the Botanical Garden, or in the flower district, and a woman or a man will catch his eye and they will nod and speak silently in their own language of flowers. Once he smiled at a woman tending the most common of geraniums in her window box on Jane Street. The geraniums were ravishing, and the woman, who was old and spent, was ravishing too, and smiled back. Once it was a man in Central Park who was taking eggshells out of a plastic bag he'd brought from home and placing them tenderly around a bank of daffodils beside Sheep Meadow. And—satisfyingly—sometimes it happened in his own shop, when a person entered and was lit with delight at the same thing that made Oliver so happy when he opened his own door.