The White Rose Read online

  “I’ve never understood the appeal of shooting things,” Oliver muses. “I think it’s an I’m-a-man-and-I’m-getting-old thing.”

  Marian turns abruptly. “Well, perhaps when you’re getting old, you’ll understand it better.”

  He recoils. “Marian.”

  “Look. I’m sorry. But there’s no point attacking Marshall. His life is a very big house with lots of rooms and I don’t go into all of them. I’m happy with that.” She softens. “After all, I wouldn’t want him in all of my rooms, either, would I?”

  Oliver, looking hard but not quite fierce, says nothing.

  “But look how we’re wasting the moment, Oliver. We’re here. He’s there. When have we ever had this?”

  “And what,” he says archly, “is this?”

  The very question, thinks Marian. She would like him to be quiet now, and kiss her.

  Marian considers him as if seeing him for the first time: man on the street, man through a restaurant window, man with flowers. There is a bloom on him that breaks her heart, and hair so richly brown it makes her think of fertile earth. Each cheek bears a brushstroke of pink, fading at the jaw line, as if he has just come in from a run on some spiky peak in New Hampshire. Oliver is twenty-six, elated, connected, utterly alive. She is forty-eight.

  Again, that purr as the phone makes its transapartment statement. It can be nothing important enough to wrest her from her bed, her lover, even her petulant lover. Increasingly, these past months, it has been Lady Charlotte groupies on the line, wanting to touch her telephonic hem, so to speak, so much so it now seems to Marian that it’s time to change the number altogether. She holds her breath: the phone stops.

  “I’m not trying to ruin things,” he says suddenly. “Believe me, that’s the last thing I want. But I want more, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t have it. And don’t—”

  She has begun to speak, but he continues, “Don’t try to tell me it’s for me, because it isn’t. I’d marry you today if I could. I have no problem with the age thing, you know I don’t. I only mention it because I don’t want to ignore that it’s problematic for you.”

  “I appreciate that,” Marian says carefully. “That’s very sensitive of you. But I’m asking you to do nothing for the moment. I just need some…stillness, I guess. I need to be still. Let’s give ourselves some time.” Please, she adds to herself, since she is not deluding herself about the rest of it.

  “How much time?” Oliver says.

  “Until…” Marian smiles, considering. “Until my rose is ready.”

  He smiles. “You mean Lady Charlotte’s rose.”

  “Of course.”

  “A rose to order: pompous, overblown, and…what was the rest of it?”

  “Pompous, overblown, and incapable of regret. That’s what I asked for, I seem to recall,” says Marian, laughing. “Surely that can’t be too difficult.”

  “Difficult? It’s a serious challenge! But it might take time. I may not get it on the first try, you know.”

  “Then I will wait,” Marian says, and they kiss.

  Kissing him is her favorite thing. Kissing him is a thing she can do for hours. Oliver is a kisser of spectacular abilities, because he—alone, she believes, of his gender—has grasped the secret power of a kiss that does not necessarily lead to activities more genital. In other words, he can kiss for the sake of kissing, and a woman need not fear kissing him if she is not prepared to have sex immediately afterward. Marshall, it occurs to her even as she luxuriates in Oliver’s tongue, Oliver’s slightly overbitten front teeth, has never quite gleaned this fact, though she doesn’t hold it against him. Most men, after all, offered kisses as they might offer invitations to join a board: if you accepted, you’d better be prepared to come up with the goods. Marshall, a man of his generation (their generation, she reminds herself), had better things in mind than the meeting of lips, even the interplay of tongues: they were in it for fucking, pure and simple. Not that fucking didn’t have its place.

  But Oliver…well, Oliver likes to kiss. Just now, indeed, he is holding her head, fingertips light on her jaw, lifting it, adjusting it, and her mouth is full of him and her thoughts are full of him, until she is almost helpless to keep herself from taking those demure above-the-shoulder hands and placing them decisively below the shoulder so that she can disprove her own point about kissing for kissing’s sake as quickly as possible. But before she can do that, there is a rude buzzing sound from the kitchen.

  “Drat,” Marian says, pulling back.

  “Oh, let it go,” says Oliver, his voice dreamy.

  “Can’t.” She sits up. “It’s downstairs. The doorman knows I’m here.”

  “So?” He leans back on his elbow. “If it’s a delivery he’ll take it.”

  Marian gets out of bed, wrapping the sheet around herself like a lady on a Grecian urn. “Mr. Stern,” she informs him, “I live in this building. I have lived in this building for fourteen years. These doormen know far too much about my life, and I know virtually nothing about theirs. It is a strange and strained state of affairs that requires a highly choreographed dance involving all participants, and an inordinate amount of courtesy. And part of that courtesy, my young man, is answering the house phone when it buzzes.”

  “Okay!” He puts up his hands and grins. “Answer! Answer!”

  “Also random chats about the weather, cooing over baby pictures, superficial commentary about city politics, and a working knowledge of the championship prospects of major New York sports teams. I do not refrain from answering the house phone when he knows I’m upstairs and then expect the departure of my young and lovely friend in due course to pass without some salacious interest. Do you follow me?”

  “Like a slave,” Oliver laughs. “Now hurry up and answer the phone.”

  Marian does. She trails her sheet through the apartment, hearing the house phone sound its angry buzz a second time as she pads over the dark wooden floors. In the dining room her mail from yesterday is piled on the long oak table: magazines, catalogues, bills, a fat manila envelope of Charlotte reviews, from Italy this time, forwarded by another satisfied publisher. Also a box from Hammacher Schlemmer, another of Marshall’s gadgets to be fussed over, perplexed by, and ultimately consigned to molder with its gadget cousins in the hall closet. “All right!” she hisses to herself as the house phone blasts anew.

  “I’m here!” She reaches the kitchen and snatches it up. “Sorry, Hector. I was working, didn’t hear the phone.”

  “Mrs. Kahn? It’s Hector downstairs? I try to stop him.”

  Marian goes cold. Her sheet slips in her grip. Irrationally, she thinks of Marshall up there in Nova Scotia. He is up there, isn’t he?

  “What is it, Hector?”

  “He coming up. He say he your cousin. He insist! He say you expecting him, he your cousin! Mr. Barton Ox he say he name is.”

  Ox?

  Oh no. Oh no no no, Marian shakes her head. And it’s her own bloody fault: the idiot said he was coming to town and she’d failed to head him off. And now he’s here, on his way up. And she is in the kitchen holding a sheet over her breasts. And there is a naked man in her bed.

  “Thank you, Hector!” Marian yelps. “That’s fine!” And she hangs up the phone and tears back to the bedroom, letting her sheet fall behind her on the rug. “Oh shit!” she is muttering. “Oh very much shit.”

  “Hmm?” Oliver is in the bathroom. Water runs into the sink.

  “Oliver!” Marian hisses. “You’ve got to get out of here! My cretin of a cousin is coming upstairs. I completely forgot he was coming to the city, and now he’s in the elevator.”

  “Why’s he a cretin?” Oliver asks with interest.

  “Not now!” She is fumbling with her bra strap. It springs from her fingers once, twice. “Shit!”

  “Calm down, sweetheart. I’ll just leave.”

  “You can’t leave. I mean, you have to leave, but you can’t leave. You can’t go out the front door, you have to go o
ut the back door. You have to go now.”

  “But I have no clothes on,” Oliver says wickedly. “Have you thought how that will look?”

  “Where are your clothes?” Marian asks frantically, but even as she does, two things happen: she knows where his clothes are—they’re where her own clothes of the afternoon are, deposited all over the living room as she and Oliver had moved from chair to rug to sofa hours earlier—and the doorbell rings.

  “Oh shit!”

  “So why’s he a cretin again?” says Oliver.

  “Go!” She swats him and opens a bureau drawer, snatching out a black cashmere sweater. “And be quiet. Get your clothes, go into my office, quietly, and when you’re dressed, go out the back and take the service elevator down. I’ll…I’ll call you when he’s gone. I’ll call you at the shop.”

  “Will you have dinner with me?”

  The doorbell rings again. Twice, this time.

  “Sure, of course. Just…Oliver, please, just scram.”

  But he insists on kissing her once more, catching her head as it emerges from the neck of her sweater, and even amid her panic she feels the briefest rush as he clutches her. Then he pads nakedly away, refusing, like any man, to be hurried. Marian yanks open the drawer of her dresser and takes the top pair of pants. Black, like the sweater. She’ll look funereal, but she is already dressed and moving toward the door. And yet there is something…something nagging her, and not the now-enraged rings of the bell. It’s something about…no, not the clothes. (As she moves past the living room she can see that Oliver has picked up her own as well as his—sweet of him.) Not the doorman, not even her cousin, who is the last person she wishes to see, it’s something about…

  “Hi!”

  Marian flings open the door, and a fleshy index finger is lifted away from the buzzer.

  “Oh, Barton! What a treat!” She gushes. And then it comes to her.

  It’s the service elevator. Which is broken and awaiting repair, and not going anywhere.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Ridiculous Man

  They didn’t want to let me come up!” he says indignantly. “Can you imagine that?”

  Barton’s face is a veritable purple, Marian thinks. She offers a kiss with minimal contact to his sweaty right cheek.

  “Oh,” he pauses in his rant to smear the cheek against hers. “I said, ‘Of course I’m going up! I’m her cousin!’ ”

  “We’ve had some trouble with people who’ve read the book…,” Marian says lamely.

  “Yes, yes.” He waves his thick hand dismissively. It occurs to Marian that he does not know which book she means. Does he even know she has written a book?

  “So they’re very careful, you see. Once we had a whole busload from Indiana down in the lobby. Luckily we were out at the beach that day, but the other tenants were not happy.”

  “What?” He seems to be looking around worriedly. “Can I get something to drink?”

  She takes his coat, which is heavy tweed, and drapes it across her arm. “Come on into the living room. Come tell me all the news.” Marian turns on a lamp. The day has turned its corner into dusk. She strains to hear some sound in the kitchen, in the maid’s room–office, and beyond. Surely he can’t still be getting dressed? “What will you have?”

  “Oh,” he says, considering. “Maybe some bourbon. You have bourbon?”

  “It’s in the kitchen. Give me a sec.” And she takes off, moving quickly in her bare feet across the hallway and dining room. When she gets to her office she finds Oliver lounging on the daybed. He is wearing a pair of boxer shorts. Only a pair of boxer shorts.

  “Did you know your elevator is broken?” he says casually.

  “No! I mean, yes. Yes. I did, but I forgot. Oliver, where are your pants?”

  He appears to consider this very seriously. “Maybe under the sofa?”

  “Oh no! You forgot them?”

  Oliver shrugs, but he is clearly enjoying himself. “I didn’t forget them. I missed them. I was in a hurry.”

  Her own clothes from earlier, she notes, are piled at the foot of the daybed.

  “I have to go. I have to get him a drink. Look, just stay here, okay?”

  He grins at her. At the sight of his little overbite, she melts a bit. “Where would I go?” Oliver says mildly. “I’m in a compromised position. I’ll just amuse myself in here.”

  “Fine,” she says, distracted. “But quietly.”

  Marian dashes into the little bathroom next to her office, flushes the toilet and loudly shuts the door. Then she grabs a glass, scoops up some ice from the icemaker in her freezer, and scoots back to the living room, where the bourbon has been all along. “Sorry!” she says gaily. “Had to pee!”

  Barton looks up. “What?”

  She crosses the living room to the bar, flicks open the door, locates the bourbon and pours. “You’re looking good. It’s so nice to see you in town. You never come down anymore, do you? But you should have called.”

  You really should have called, she thinks.

  “Oh, the phone,” Barton says bitterly. “It just rang and rang. Then that message machine. I refuse to speak to a machine! I’m not a machine, I won’t speak to one! Besides, I knew you were here. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “I was working,” Marian says lamely. “Sometimes when I’m working I don’t answer the phone.”

  Does he know what I mean by work? she wonders. And why is she defending herself? Marian goes to the bar, before the window. The light outside is going and she feels the day slipping from her hands. Though perhaps, she thinks longingly, it can still be salvaged. Perhaps Barton will drink his drink and go away and there will be more time. On top of the bar, massed in a silver pitcher, are more flowers from Oliver: roses, but strange roses, white with pink at the tips. Oliver has a thing for roses, and these are lush, lovely, and greedy for attention.

  “I finally decided, I’ll just go upstairs,” he continues, as if he has not heard her speak. “And they wouldn’t let me come up!”

  Then he is off again, on the doorman and his impudence. “I told the man I was your cousin, but he said…”

  Poor Hector, Marian thinks with a sigh. This will require a tip. A big tip.

  Barton drinks his bourbon. He has put on weight, mostly in the neck, but the effect—she observes with irritation—is actually not to his detriment. Barton has always managed solid good looks in spite of his corpulence. Moreover, having now attained the age at which his comportment—prematurely middle-aged—is more or less appropriate, he looks like nothing so much as a captain of industry. This is odd, because Barton has never had anything to do with industry. In fact he has never, to her knowledge, had any sort of job, let alone a job likely to pay what a captain of industry might expect to be paid. In fact, it occurs to her now, Barton can’t possibly have much remaining wealth at all. Whatever money his side of the family once had must now be much dissipated by his generation of one. The final generation, Marian imagines, since he has never shown the slightest inclination to procreate. And that, she supposes, is no bad thing.

  “Didn’t you get my letter?” he says, accusatory.

  His letter? She got it: Coming to NY Oct. 9/10, will call. On a heavy cream-colored card with a pen-and-ink drawing of his house near Rhinebeck on the front. The house had a name—The Retreat—also rendered in said drawing. And a date, likewise inscribed: c. 1830. And a provenance, ditto: The Home of Henry Wharton Danvers, 1804–1878.

  He is a ridiculous man. He has been for years. Before that, he’d been a ridiculous boy.

  “I got it,” she says merrily, pouring some seltzer into a glass for herself. “I was looking forward to seeing you. When shall we get together?”

  Tomorrow, Marian is thinking. I can do tomorrow. A drink somewhere. Not here. Maybe the Cos Club. Her precious weekend with Oliver, and she has to have drinks with her visiting cousin at the Cos Club!

  He looks at her as if she is insane. “We’re…together…now.” He speaks
deliberately, as if she is a child. Not only a child, but a backward child.

  “Well…” She thinks of Oliver in his boxer shorts, and then, as if on cue, there is a distinct rustle from the direction of the kitchen. Barton does not seem to notice. The ice in his highball glass tinkles.

  “So don’t you want to know what it’s all about?” He leans forward, extending the glass toward her.

  What it’s all about? Marian thinks. She hadn’t known there was an it. Where was the it in Coming to NY Oct. 9/10, will call?

  “Of course! I can’t wait!” She takes his glass. “Tell me.”

  “I’m getting married.”

  There’s a definite fumble at this point as Marian grapples with the highball glass, which somehow is prevented from falling on the Aubusson while nonetheless bathing her hands with seltzer. She stands still for a moment, barely gripping the glass between wet palms. Barton getting married? The very notion is absurd. Barton uttering the phrase “my wife”? Barton in bed with a…woman? She wants desperately to laugh, but she manages to muster enough control to sputter, “How wonderful.”

  Wonderful. As in full of wonder. As in will wonders never cease?

  How Marian wishes she were in a position to give full voice to her wonder. In the most delicious of all possible scenarios, she would now be shrieking, YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS! and WHO CAN YOU POSSIBLY INTEND TO MARRY? and WAIT A MINUTE, I’VE ALWAYS ASSUMED YOU WERE—

  “Yes, I’m quite pleased,” Barton says, and indeed he is now the picture of pleasure. “She’s a fine girl. A lovely girl. Not silly at all.”

  This seems an odd point of defensiveness, Marian thinks. “Girl?” she manages to say.

  “Well, young lady. Of course, she couldn’t be old, you know!” he offers cheerfully. “We intend to start a family.”

  “Family?” Marian thinks she might faint. “You’re going to have children?”

  “Well,” he grins, enjoying her all too obvious state of alarm, “not me of course! She’s going to have them.” Barton looks at her. “I’ve surprised you, I see.”