The White Rose (19 page)

Then Marshall, to Marian's horror, stood too. They walked away together, to the dark back of the restaurant, and parted left and right to the bathrooms, like square dancers separating at the end of a formation. Oliver was looking at her, still looking. The force of it was terrible. Marian closed her eyes.

“We're wasting time,” said Oliver.

She touched her wineglass. There was no more wine.

“Why did you name your shop the White Rose?” she said, surprising herself. She was not aware of forming this question in her own thoughts, let alone having any real curiosity about it. So where had it come from?

“I'll tell you,” he said quietly, “when I know you better.”

“You must really love flowers,” she said, absurdly, despising herself.

“Please,” said Oliver.

From the edge of her vision, she felt the known vibration of her husband's stride: brown jacket, khaki pants, blue shirt, coming closer. She took a breath.

“Don't call me at home. Don't ever, ever contact me at home.”

“I understand,” he said.

And then Marshall was there, leaning over the table and reading the check. He drew bills from his wallet and flicked them onto the tablecloth. Oliver reached into his pocket.

“No, no,” her husband said, waving his hand. “I'm delighted we ran into you both. It's my treat.”

“Thank you. It was very nice to meet you.”

“Oh, Marshall,” Caroline said, returning, “that's not necessary.”

“I've already done battle with your son,” he laughed. “My treat. Such a pleasure.” He kissed her on the cheek. Marian got to her feet, unsteadily.

“Marian.” Caroline reached for her. “Now we've got to have a lunch. Just us. I'm going to call you next week.”

“Yes,” Marian stammered. “I want to.”

“And I want to hear all about what you're doing now. I didn't even ask!”

“That's okay. More of the same. I have a chair in the history department at Columbia, since last year.” She was saying this for Oliver, she realized. She was giving him information, betraying her husband, beginning an affair. By saying this.

“Oh, that's great! Miss Bakalar would be so proud of you!”

Miss Bakalar had been their fourth-grade teacher, an enemy of silliness in young ladies.

Marian smiled weakly. She held out her hand to Oliver, and he took it, but so briefly, as if he too were afraid of what the contact might produce. Even so, when he released it, she felt bereft.

They walked out into the evening, which was wet, with a river of forward-hunched pedestrians on Bleecker Street. Marian received a hug from Caroline, a sort of grip and release. Marian was in misery. She turned her face away from Oliver, to deprive herself of any more information. Marshall took her arm, above the elbow. She gripped her raincoat at the throat and they walked to Seventh Avenue, where they found a cab bound the wrong way. Marshall directed, and the driver bore this with equanimity. Marian sat, numb and dull, letting the city slip past in its motion and moisture, flying up, up the island along the luxurious corridor of Madison Avenue with its pointless boutiques, and then, at the last minute, across Eighty-seventh to their own apartment building. Hector opened the door.

Upstairs, she draped her wet coat over a dining-room chair and slipped off her shoes, staring at her bare feet. Marshall went into the bedroom. A moment later, she heard the bath begin to run. She turned and walked through the kitchen to her office, opened the door and looked at the blinking green light on her phone. She didn't listen to the messages. Already, she knew his word was good. Instead, Marian dialed the number of her other office, the small, crammed room she had inherited the year before, when the last possessor of her endowed chair had retired and she was on the cusp of her fame as the discoverer and interpreter of Lady Charlotte Wilcox. It rang four times and then clicked to life.

Three messages. The first, from Carter Hawes, about a senior distressed by her thesis grade. The second—ragged, gasping—from the student herself, asking for a meeting. The third from Oliver, still fresh. “It's me,” he said. “When can I see you?”

T
here were more phone calls—four more, to be exact—each in a voice increasingly straining not to be pitiful, each more difficult for her to resist answering. Finally, with the air of a last effort, he wrote a letter. This Marian received at her office, and opened with a hand so eager that she got a paper cut on her thumb and sat for the next, stunned moments, sucking it, like the very infant she felt herself in sudden danger of becoming.

Actually, it wasn't a proper letter at all. It was a sort of list, a collection of information, on his shop stationery. And though she would make a point of throwing it away, she first committed what it said to memory.

This was a Thursday in April, at about four in the afternoon.

Marian picked up the phone and dialed the number on the stationery.

It rang twice and he answered. “White Rose!”

“What is this?” she said angrily. “What are you trying to do?”

He took a minute to recover. “I think I've been pretty clear about that.”

“Not clear enough,” Marian said. “I want to ask you something.”

“Ask.”

She closed her eyes. “Is this some kind of mother thing? Are you looking for a mother?”

She heard an unmistakable wisp of laughter. Relieved laughter. Evidently, he had been expecting a much harder question.

“No,” Oliver said. “I
am
looking for a father. But I don't think you're him.”

“Is this a habit for you? Have you done this before? Gone around trying to seduce your mother's friends?”

“Oh no,” Oliver said. “Not that I wouldn't have liked to seduce Mrs. Winograd, when I was fourteen. I had a very active fantasy life concerning Mrs. Winograd. But I never said a thing, I swear.”

“Where is Mrs. Winograd now?” Marian said, astonished to find herself jealous.

“Greenwich, I guess. I don't think she's Mrs. Winograd anymore.”

“No,” Marian agreed, absurdly, as if she knew.

“Anyway, that was just physical,” said Oliver.

“And this?” she said, her voice brittle, nearly hostile. She was, she discovered, gripping the phone so hard her fingers were beginning to hurt.

“Metaphysical.”

Marian caught her breath. For a strange, strained moment, she felt the footsteps in the corridor outside, the sputtering jackhammer of a Con Ed crew on Amsterdam, even the Doppler-dissipation of a boom box retreating west alongside Saint Paul's Chapel, occur in synch with her own heartbeat, as if she were personally propelling the world on its way.

“All right,” she heard herself say.

She hung up the phone, locked her office, went downstairs, and stepped outside into the cool spring afternoon. She walked unsteadily in the wake of the now receded boom box, west to Broadway through the campus, dispensing a wooden nod to a disheveled girl with a long black braid on the steps of Low Library, whom she vaguely recognized as a graduate student in her department. It took Marian less than a minute to find a taxi, less than eighteen to reach his door, his arms, his bed.

B
ell is sick. He phones at seven-thirty in the morning as Oliver is returning from the Pink Teacup, where he has spent a pleasant, steamy half hour recovering from Twenty-eighth Street. He is not sufficiently recovered, however, to greet this news with equanimity.

“It's not a great day to get sick,” Oliver says, mashing the phone between shoulder and ear as he hauls the containers in from his parked van.

“Yeah, I said that to myself this morning, about four o'clock. It was between upchucks. Unfortunately, I didn't listen to myself, and here I am.”

“Oh,” Oliver says. “You mean really sick. Not metaphorically sick.”

“I wouldn't waste a metaphor on you,” Bell says, good-naturedly, given the circumstances. “'Scuse me.”

Oliver hears a shuffle, then there is a brief moment of audible pain. The toilet flushes. “Bell?” Oliver says. “You okay?”

Bell, picking up the phone, grunts. “In other words, you don't need me today.”

Oh, but he does, Oliver thinks. He has the delivery to Barton Ochstein's fiancée, plus there is a rehearsal dinner on Central Park West, plus restaurants all over downtown, not to mention that Friday is always the busiest day for walk-ins. He very much does need Bell today, but what can he do?

“Of course not,” says Oliver. “Go to bed and stay there. Drink ginger ale.”

“Mmm,” Bell groans.

“No, seriously. It's good for your stomach. Where do you think you got it?”

“Academy of American Poets,” Bell says.

“What?” says Oliver

“Langston Hughes tribute. Two of the people I went with got sick. The other one said he didn't trust the pâté.”

Oliver shakes his head. “You got food poisoning at the Academy of American Poets' tribute to Langston Hughes? You don't think that's a little symbolic?”

“Yeah,” Bell says miserably. “It's a conspiracy. Look, I have to go throw up now. Can we discuss this later?”

Of course, Oliver tells Bell, wishing him luck. Then he hangs up the phone and considers.

He will close in the afternoon. He will work now, make the arrangements, load everything up, and start his rounds. He doesn't like to lose the shop business, but there is no alternative. This is the downside of keeping the staff small, he supposes.

Resigned, Oliver goes to work. He quickly assembles the restaurant orders, working mainly with hardy, dramatic, and long-lasting stock. For the rehearsal dinner he fashions eight centerpieces of fat Prelude roses in crystal bowls the hostess has dropped off, each arrangement specified to the inch in height and of the precisely requested hue. As if to compensate for this display of anal retention, the hostess has also graciously commissioned a large arrangement for her entryway, to be determined entirely by Oliver, the only proviso being that it fit the vast Waterford punch bowl she has also provided, and into this Oliver crowds calla lilies in powdery white, carefully swirling the stems so that they may be seen through the prisms of the cut crystal. It is a stunning composition and will look extraordinarily expensive—which it will certainly be, but which, in fairness, is more or less what this particular hostess wants her guests to think as soon as they walk in the door. Then, so as not to give offense with his extravagance, Oliver prepares an offering of narcissus in one of his own vases, which he will include gratis. “I thought you might like something for the powder room,” he'll say, and will hope that none of the guests are sufficiently knowledgeable about flowers and Greek mythology to take offense at his choice.

Then Oliver turns his attention to the dual Ochstein orders. If Barton has been sitting by the phone to learn whether Olivia liked his flowers, he must be disappointed—Olivia has as yet received no roses, and thus tendered no grateful thanks—but now Oliver has a small problem. He can't in good conscience charge Barton for a delivery to Olivia if no such delivery exists. On the other hand, he has no intention of allowing Olivia—and how protectively he already thinks of her!—to engage in a relationship of any kind with Barton. On the
other
other hand, if he does not charge Barton for an Olivia delivery, Barton will quite justly want to know why not, and what is the owner of the White Rose going to tell him?

Oliver decides that the solution, imperfect though it may be, is to assemble the arrangement, bill Barton Ochstein for it, and deliver it to someone else. To Marian, Oliver thinks. He will tell her the truth—he won't pretend to have sent the flowers himself—and they will laugh about it together. Marian, after all, is the only one in whom he can confide the circumstances, and the only one who will get the joke. In any case, he would have brought her roses today. He likes for Marian always to have his flowers near her. Having made this decision, he takes down the order form from his office wall and marks up the charges, noting the same price beneath the fiancée's—Sophie Klein's—name, and the “O” beside it. Then he sticks it back up on the corkboard, peers hopefully at his trays of dirt with their embedded roses (a few are just breaking the surface), and begins making up the two arrangements.

Ochstein's unintended gift to Marian will consist of hot red Royal Danes, swirled in a vase of cloudy Mexican glass. He inserts a card (“For Marian, with the compliments of Barton Ochstein, Esq.” in case Marshall should see it) and turns his attention to Sophie Klein, whose taste in flowers he cannot know (but whose taste in men does not bode well for it). In the face of this void, Oliver makes a superior effort, comprising three dozen opulent white Iceberg roses in a squat container of frosted glass. Around this he wraps the slender black branches he buys on Twenty-eighth Street and soaks in water until they are pliant, and the effect is of a bird's nest with doves rising. It is not imaginative, but it is beyond reproach, and given the state of his information, it is the best choice he can make.

He is just wrapping the Klein vase with bubble wrap when the phone rings, and to his great chagrin Oliver finds himself once again fielding the inquiries of his eager customer, Barton Warburg Ochstein. Barton is not in a fine mood.

“I wish to speak with the owner,” he begins, after identifying himself.

“Speaking,” says Oliver. “I'm just putting the finishing touches on Miss Klein's white roses.”

“Yes, yes,” says Barton distractedly, “and did that other order go out?”

“Ah—” Oliver plays for time. His thoughts race.

“The roses to Olivia. I asked you to deliver—”

“Yes, Mr. Ochstein. But I'm afraid it's taken me some time to get in touch with her.”

“I told you,” Barton says with loud exasperation, “she works for Marian Kahn.”

“Yes, but I didn't want to leave messages on Dr. Kahn's answering machine,” Oliver explains. “I only reached her—Olivia—yesterday.”

“Good,” Barton says, regrouping. “Well then, you have her address. May I—”

“No,” Oliver breaks in. “I mean, she didn't want the flowers delivered to her home. She said she lives in a bad neighborhood, and there's no doorman. There would be no way to leave them for her.”

“Well, what are you going to do about that?” Barton demands, as if this is Oliver's problem. Oliver concentrates.

“She's arranged to pick them up here at the shop. I believe she's stopping by tomorrow.”

Barton seems to consider this. “All right. Oh, and I didn't catch her last name. I suppose you have that information.”

Does he? thinks Oliver. In fact, he has never gotten beyond “Olivia,” much less given her a back story.

“Well?” Barton says testily.

Oliver clutches back to high school Latin.

“Nemo,” he declares, then cringes, since that is far too obvious.

“N-E-M-O,” Barton confirms, also confirming that it is not too obvious for him. “And I suppose she gave you a phone number? For you to contact her in the future?”

The future?
thinks Oliver. Was he going to have to do this
again?

“Uh…”

“Surely she doesn't want you to continue to contact her at her job.”

“No,” Oliver agrees, thinking furiously. “No. Well, yes, she gave me a phone number.”

“And it is…?”

He nearly hangs up. What does Barton think he is? A procurer? Does $75 worth of roses entitle anyone to an unlisted number? Does the fact that Olivia has agreed to accept her flowers automatically mean that she welcomes his attentions?
Women are so put upon
, he thinks bitterly.
What shit we have to deal with
.

Then he dutifully recites the only number that comes readily to mind: his own. And Barton, his mission complete, puts down the phone without further niceties.

For a minute, Oliver just stands there, frantically reviewing the conversation, wondering if he has done the right things, given the right answers, chosen the right strategy. The phone number doesn't worry him. It rings upstairs only, not in the shop, and there's little danger anyone but himself will answer a call from Barton. Also, he has never gotten around to recording a greeting for his voicemail, so callers get the prefab, computerized voice instructing them to leave a message—no problem there. What concerns him is that he has now affirmed the reality of Olivia. He has fully named her, extended her existence. What are his intentions for her—mercenary? defensive?—and how does he plan to disentangle her—disentangle
himself
, thinks Oliver—from Barton's avid interest? And, worst of all, what would Marian say, if she knew?

Oliver shakes his head. It is, in any case, a conundrum for another afternoon. This afternoon, he has miles to go and promises to keep, and he is already pressed for time.

He wishes Bell were here to help with the Waterford bowl, which is unwieldy and nearly slips as Oliver edges down the front steps, but by two o'clock he has loaded the van with the centerpieces, the calla lilies, the restaurant commissions, the Ochstein roses. When everything has been wedged tightly into place, Oliver reluctantly puts the
CLOSED
sign in his window, locks the door, and heads off into the Friday traffic.

First, he drops off the restaurant orders, mostly in Clinton and Chelsea, one in the newly happening Lower East Side, only a few doors from the Tenement Museum. Then Oliver fights his way over to Ninth Avenue and creeps uptown to Central Park West, where he endures a catechism of muted hostility from the doorman and is finally allowed to park—briefly!—in the precious space they guard in front of the building.

“For Mrs. Holland,” he says, again, this time for the super, who is glaring at him. Oliver sets down two of the centerpieces in the service elevator and goes back to the van. No one offers to help. When he arrives at the huge Waterford bowl, they watch him lower it to the pavement and lock the door, then carefully lift it again. Then he walks gingerly to the back of the lobby with the arrangement in his arms, and the super takes him up.

Mrs. Holland awaits, stick thin in jeans, a white silk shirt, and tiny shoes that look as if they have been formed from Persian carpets. Her dark hair is pulled back in a youthful ponytail, but she is too immaculate to seem truly young. “Ooh!” She claps her hands. “Didn't they come out beautifully! Now let's make sure they're the right height.”

Has she forgotten that she specified the height? Oliver wonders. Or does she think he doesn't know how to measure?

With intense care, he brings her Waterford bowl into the kitchen, which is already humming with caterers and smelling distinctly of recently cooked foie gras, and sets it on the counter. Mrs. Holland is staring at it, undoubtedly running the numbers.

“I found them in the flower district this morning,” he says with practiced admiration. “I've never seen such beautiful callas. They were in Costa Rica last night.”

This has the desired effect. “Isn't that extraordinary!”

“They'll last a good long time, too,” Oliver says. “Just please, every day, recut and change the water. You'll be amazed how long they stay this pretty.”

“I will,” says Mrs. Holland. (She means, of course, that her housekeeper will.) “Well, bring the centerpieces in,” she says, eagerly now. “Let's try them out. And the bride just arrived. I want her to see them, too.”

Oliver moves the last of the bowls from the elevator floor into the kitchen, then begins ferrying them through the apartment: kitchen, dining room, foyer, and into the living room, which is long and lined with tall windows. Through the windows, the autumn carpet of Central Park is visible, like a private holding. The room has rich red walls and serious art—he recognizes a Chagall over the mantelpiece, and a large Raphael Soyer portrait on the opposing wall—but its customary furniture has been banished to another location and replaced by eight round tables, already beautifully laid, and chairs cloaked in white muslin.

“Let's see!” the hostess says, with jarring excitement.

Oliver places the bowl and plucks a suspicious petal. He wonders if she is going to produce a ruler, or a paint chip.

“Perfect,” she says.

“Oliver,” says someone else.

He turns. Matilda is in the doorway, her face alight. This takes him a long moment to understand.

“Matilda,” says Oliver. He walks over to her and kisses her on the cheek. Then, inevitably, he hugs her. Her hair is disconcertingly straight, disconcertingly blond. He is not clear on how this has been accomplished. There are diamonds in her earlobes, one of which scratches him as he steps back. “I take it you're the bride?”

“You know each other?” Mrs. Holland says in great confusion. The florist has just kissed her future daughter-in-law, and her understanding of societal strata has, accordingly, been uncomfortably shuffled.

“We were at Brown together,” Matilda says, still looking at Oliver.