The White Rose (9 page)

He opens his own door now, setting down the shopping bag, hearing the wine bottles clink gently against each other, and then shuts the door behind him with his foot. It is 8:30 and the day has ended with the return of its early fog. The street—which is thinly populated and nearly always empty unless a performance at the Cherry Lane Theatre is beginning, breaking for intermission, or letting out—is very dark and still. Returning his key to his jacket pocket, Oliver's fingers brush the thin card he'd been summoned back to retrieve from Marian's doorman, and it pierces his mood a bit to think of the disagreeable Barton Ochstein, with his heavy hand touching Oliver's thigh through Marian's skirt. The fiancée of a person like Ochstein was hardly likely to care for flowers, herself—beyond, Oliver thought dismissively, the tiresome brand recognition of one dozen sterile blood-red roses in a cheap white cardboard box. Still, he will have to give Ochstein's commission some thought. Because Oliver does not sell ugly flowers, or flowers with their smells removed, or bouquets for the season. He assembles beautiful, living flowers, and he sends them out into the world with hope that they might receive their due in appreciation.

Oliver is aware that he belongs to a distinct occupational segment of his demographic group, set well apart from the officially sanctioned career designations—law, business, medicine—that account for an overwhelming majority of his peers. In addition to this majority, the far smaller yet equally prestigious calling of “artist” in its variant forms, is acknowledged, even afforded bragging rights sometimes exceeding the aforementioned career choices, though only in certain families. Between these extremes, however, there is little in the way of viable career territory. The children of well-to-do Jewish families do not seem to join the police department, become aerobics instructors, drive trucks, or run travel agencies. They are not housekeepers, office managers, landscape designers, or franchise owners. But every now and then, one of them might pop up in an unconventional role, salvaged from suspicion (their parents salvaged from pity) only by the undeniability of a very specific talent.

He imagines the members of his parents' generation at an annual gathering, a holiday open house of sorts, in a venue vast enough to hold the Jewish upper middle class of Manhattan and its more affluent suburbs. In the outer vestibules (the temple grounds, the antechambers to the Holy of Holy) are the younger parents, avidly shaking down the competition on the subjects of SAT scores, GPAs, and, above all, fat letters from the handful of approved colleges.
(Adam Weintraub got in everywhere! Simone Sternbaum was wait-listed at Vassar. Juliane Lieberman doesn't test well. No one can believe Yale took Sarah Gold—just because her older sisters went there and her father is Steven Spielberg's lawyer. It's so unfair!)
Inside, the parents are older, and while there is even more at stake, there is also an air of calm. (Things are now out of their hands, after all—shrugs all around.) Even so, envy courses in myriad subterranean rivers, because here, finally, points are awarded and the children sorted: lawyers to one corner, doctors to another, Wall Street over here, permissible alternate professions (architecture, publishing, academia, journalism, Hollywood, Washington) over there. Then there is a small designated area for the creatives, the artists, the marchers-to-a-different-drummer: the girl dancing with ABT, for example, the two promising novelists, the composer (with a commission already from City Opera! Only twenty-nine!), the girl who won the Yale Series of Younger Poets and teaches at NYU, the
wunderkind
painter who sent his slides right from Harvard and got a show at Andre Emmerich, the guy who directed all the musicals at Fieldston and now does off Broadway.

And then there is the place to which Oliver is directed. It is sparsely populated, indeed.

Hello, hello,
these few greet one another. Everyone shakes hands. They are very interesting people in this little corner, and they are glad to meet. One of them might be a chef, for example. And that does not mean a cook! It means a chef—and not only a good chef but a wildly gifted and ambitious chef, already with a well-reviewed and thriving restaurant (probably teeming with his parents' friends and almost certainly on the Upper East Side). Another might have become a carpenter, but that's all right, because he is not remotely like the guy who comes to your apartment and builds your custom cabinets; he is a “master carpenter” (this is a title deriving prestige from having been in use for centuries) whose exquisite furniture is advertised in the back of
Architectural Digest
and who was featured in a recent
New York Times
piece on the new craftsmen. One might have gone to Japan to learn an obscure form of glaze application for a rare type of pottery, which she now produces from her studio in western Connecticut and sells exclusively at Barneys, and which is so exquisite that all three of the Miller sisters registered for her pieces when they were married! Another might be farming in central Virginia, where he raises free-range, cruelty-free veal and has become a rising star in the post–Alice Waters generation of purveyors and an exemplar of the new green entrepreneur. Then again, some of them might do what Oliver has done, opened a shop or a business in which he or she does a very small specialized thing very, very well. Hence, Oliver is not “Oliver the florist” or even “Oliver who owns a flower shop,” but “Oliver who opened a darling shop in the West Village and is doing terribly well because he was always so gifted with flowers. Did you see that piece on him in
Elle Decor?
”

They know that their parents are proud of them, but it was a close call—it could have gone either way. These Jewish boys and girls toil in uncharted waters and they have a lot to prove, but they are happy, and feel lucky. They are doing precisely what they want to do—in most cases what they have
always
wanted to do—and even if they suffer a lingering sense that they have missed some important opportunity and will now play catch-up for the rest of their lives, trailing their peers who boast retirement accounts and career prestige, they all know it could have been worse. Because their generation is not all accounted for in this room, large as it is. There are the missing ones, the not-mentioned ones, whose positions are no longer tracked by the chattering moms and dads. There is, for example, Jon Levine, sentenced by mandatory drug laws for selling grass at Wesleyan, still in some prison in Connecticut. There is Dana Friedman, who married a Farrakhan follower and moved to Detroit. There is David Rosengarten, presumed still traveling in Asia, presumed still stoned. And perhaps most fearful of all, there is Steven Nathan, who just failed at everything, who is still searching, who has not settled on the right path.
What's Steven doing? What's Steven up to? How old is Steven now?

It could have been worse, Oliver thinks, looking around at his place. My place, he likes to remind himself. Where I live. And where the lilies of the field, though plentiful, do not toil, but I do.

Inside, the light of the refrigerator glows blue on the unsold dahlias, bittersweets, and hydrangeas. Branches fill the spaces between the bright tin containers, because the white plastic of the refrigerator has an ugly, deflating quality, and he likes to obscure it. There are large buckets of Black Magic roses, deeply red, and Spicy, the orange rose he prefers. The population of Hocus Pocus red roses has diminished since he left this morning, and this encourages him; Oliver is fond of the variety, which is red with yellow flecks, and he would like to be able to increase his weekly order from the Argentinean supplier. The room is long from side to side and short from front to back, unpolished and dark with age. It's empty, but turning on the overhead light, Oliver notes the general disarray cast in the wake of Bell, who worked until five this afternoon: frayed ribbons on the floor, cut stems of flowers underfoot, and a fat roll of brown wrapping paper left in a puddle of water on the wooden table Oliver uses for arrangements. Tidiness is not one of Bell's attributes. He is not an orderly person in any sense, but rather a juggler of problems. Having spent his first months with Bell obsessing about what his employee had and hadn't done, and whether he had loaded the Tribeca deliveries before heading to the Upper West Side so he wouldn't have to come back to the shop if the traffic was bad, Oliver has learned to back off and breathe deep. If Bell should decide to cross the George Washington Bridge and drive along the river to Nyack for the purpose of surprising an old friend, if he should consider it pleasant to double back ceaselessly to the shop and deliver one arrangement at a time to its destination, if he should spend a long, lazy afternoon talking about rare varieties of orchid with a woman who has happened in off the street and looks unlikely to purchase a single lousy stem…everything still, somehow, and in defiance of all logic, gets done in good time. In fact, since Bell has come to work for him, no customer has ever called to harangue Oliver over the nonappearance of an order, something that was all too common in the pre-Bell era. Oliver does not understand how it all gets accomplished, but it does.

Still…Oliver bends down to gather the scraps of ribbon and paper from the floor. That he lives over the shop is both the delight of his arrangement and its flaw, as he has been known to confuse work and privacy, professional contact and social contact. Disarray belowstairs has a way of rising, he has discovered, like heat, and Oliver has been known to get up in the middle of the night with a compulsion to tidy things in the wrapping area, or to pick through the stems in the refrigerators, plucking a bruised outer petal or removing a spent stem altogether (an activity that inevitably depresses him). He moves quickly now, his bags forgotten by the door, gathering, tossing, cleaning up. The soaked paper may not be salvageable, but he unfurls the roll in an attempt to dry it, anchoring the end with a pair of wire clippers. He pulls three fading dahlias from the water, cuts them midway up the stem, and inserts them in a pale blue old milk of magnesia bottle to take upstairs. Then, noting the unblinking glow of the office answering machine light, he retrieves his bags and unlocks the door to his apartment stairs.

When he first arrived in the city five years earlier, it was with a largely irrelevant degree from Brown and a far more pertinent bequest from his late father, the use of which Oliver had determined in advance and in some detail. This use involved the purchase of a building in which he would live while he established his business, the preemptively named White Rose, and for the first weeks of his city life he walked the neighborhoods, looking for the right building with the right sign affixed—a sign that he imagined would read
FOR SALE.
His naïveté over matters of real estate, over matters of Manhattan real estate in particular, has given him much retroactive amusement over the past years, and quite rightly, but in fact this method did yield the final result of 22 Commerce Street, even if the sign in question did not read
FOR SALE
but
CONDEMNED BY THE CITY OF NEW YORK
.

Oliver remembers the first time he saw it, having passed by the little street many, many times, mooning over a gorgeous, expensive (and, incidentally, fully inhabited) brownstone on Barrow. Commerce Street, after all, is easy to miss, and it goes nowhere that Barrow Street does not, so it was weeks into the steamy summer of 1992 when the emerging crowd of the Saturday matinee caught his eye and made him take what he imagined would be a pointless digression. And there, a few doors up from the Cherry Lane Theatre, was his place: tattered, pink-bricked, the size of a modest suburban home in an older suburb. There were planks of wood in the windows and the front steps had been hacked away (for what? he wondered), and he saw, when he peered into the alley alongside the building, the ominous scurry of a fat city rat.

It was the right place, and he felt first a flood of relief, as if its appearance confirmed every assumption he'd made.

That
CONDEMNED
sign would mean a delay for his project of many months, so he rented a sterile studio in a new building on Perry Street from which to do battle with the city and gain the abandoned building. There followed months of further delay as he asked permission to make improvements to his newly acquired, formally uninhabitable building. (This was a bureaucracy that only New Yorkers could create, he thought. It featured applications endlessly lost, and paid expeditors who promised to whittle years of roadblocks down to mere seasons. And when his applications were at last approved, he faced the final indignity of another two months wasted before anyone bothered to inform him of the approval.) Additional months passed as he dealt with an entirely different array of Kafkaesque city agencies, this time to obtain a zoning easement so that he could operate a business on the ground floor of his new address. Lastly, there were the months of renovation limbo as he waited in vain for contractors to call him back, contractors to materialize for appointments, contractors to do the work he had finally managed to contract them to do.

All through this period, Oliver's mother, Caroline, rent her garments and phoned regularly to ask,
Was he sure
…and,
Did he understand
…and,
Wouldn't he at least consider
…? Oliver kept his cool. He regretted that his mother did not share his sense of adventure about what he was coaxing from the glorious ruin on Commerce Street, but he wasted no effort trying to convince her. Instead, he placated her with frequent visits to Greenwich and fed her the encouraging news of his growing business, which had indeed taken root in the temporary and unlovely soil of his little Perry Street flat.

Already, Oliver was spending a few mornings a week on West Twenty-eighth Street, arriving early with the other dawn risers of the flower world, poking his fingers and nose into the crates and tubs of inventory as it got hauled off the trucks. The owners of Dutch Line and Fischer & Page got used to the sight of the kid in the old corduroys and fancy leather shoes who turned up in the darkness and stamped his feet for warmth like everyone else, puffing hot breath into the cold, blowing steam off the terrible coffee sold by the only vendor willing to sell it at that hour on that street. He spoke enough to show he knew what he was talking about, but mostly he kept quiet and listened, and he noted how many of the buckets of tulips went to the man with the shop on East Sixty-first, and how many of those buckets were red, how many yellow. He followed the famous—and famously cantankerous—florist from SoHo as he trawled the street and pointed out the white ranunculus and hot pink Daladier he wanted with a gesture so subtle it might have belonged to a bidder at an auction, yet clear enough that his assistant, a slender woman in black, always lifted the right flowers from the water. He watched with raw fascination the huge man who arrived draped in a sort of sheepskin cape and moved among the dealers, chatting, chatting, but never raising an arm, let alone a finger. Yet, when he moved on, the wholesalers would direct that very specific buckets of viburnum and hydrangea be put aside for him. The best buckets, Oliver saw, awed.