The White Rose (31 page)

Across the room, Soriah closes her book. She detaches herself from her audience and gets to her feet. “No kids,” says Marian in a whisper, as if it were a secret. “I couldn't have them.”

Denise nods. This, evidently, is explanation enough.

“Well, I want to thank you for everything you're doing for Soriah.”

I'm not doing anything, Marian nearly says, but she doesn't, because it isn't true. Whatever her intentions—an hour ago, this morning, last month—they're all beside the point, and all that matters now is that she is part of the life of the woman seated across from her, because she is part of Soriah's life. This is the heart of the matter:
She has done. She is doing
. And, most significant:
She will do
. There isn't any point in saying otherwise. Instead, Marian offers her most gracious smile—a smile of social privilege and social obligation, a smile that might have earned the approval of even her mother, Mimi Warburg—and says, “You're welcome.”

I
t is 3:28 in the morning, a fact made manifest to Oliver by the green glow of the numbers on Marian's bedside clock. Even so, even given the long concentration Oliver has brought to those numbers, he can't seem to get beyond their empirical reality to some kind of deeper meaning, such as a justification for his being awake in the middle of the night, beside Marian in a king-size bed, in a former stable, on a patch of outrageously expensive real estate at the eastern tip of Long Island. And then, in any case, it is 3:29 in the morning.

He is ill versed in insomnia. Sleep, for Oliver, has always come easily. If the odd truck or siren on Hudson Street should wake him, he merely turns over and falls again into sleep, letting it hold him until it is time for the flower market or the sun, whichever comes first. This aptitude is something Matilda once mentioned, he recalls now, as 3:30 clicks over and glows, sedately, from the far side of Marian's shoulder. In a fight once, ages ago, so long ago he can't remember its impetus or central theme, she had said, “You're so selfish, you sleep through everything,” and he had been terrified that he might have told her, at some crushingly intimate moment, something he meant never to tell anyone, which was that he had once mostly slept through nearly dying, but in the end it turned out that she was talking about something else—about his sleeping beside her one night as she wept, loudly, hoping he would wake up and comfort her. And now he is the one hoping the sleeping person beside him will wake and comfort him.

Except that Oliver doesn't seem to want that, either. He lies stiffly, 3:31, 3:38, 3:50, watching Marian breathe, a crescent of white skin visible over the sheet at her shoulder, and he tries to recollect the sex, as if that will comfort him back to sleep and rid him of whatever irksome thing is hovering here. The sex took place only a couple of hours earlier, after all—and yet it baffles him that he cannot seem to remember anything about it. Except the fact that it happened here, in this bed, but that slip of remembrance may have been reconstructed from the smell they have left behind, which is still evident, which is usually a good smell, a smell he loves, but for some reason isn't just now.

Maybe it was simply unmemorable, Oliver thinks. And that's fine. The earth doesn't have to move every time. It isn't about the sex anyway, that's what he keeps telling her. Well, that's not precisely what he keeps telling her. What he keeps telling her is that it isn't about her looks, or her age, and it isn't! Normally he loves these trial domesticities, so rarely allowed, when they can act like the couple they might be, eating together and picking up the paper and talking and making the bed. But he is not loving this night, and he is not sure he wants to figure out why.

It is only Oliver's second time in the beach house, the first a midweek in July when she was so terrified of their being seen that they never left the property. Now it's early December and the Hamptons are deserted, with empty streets in the towns and plenty of parking for the few stores that remain open. Marian had been brave enough to take him to the hardware store to buy salt—a big deal, Oliver tells himself—and introduce him to her plumber, when they unexpectedly encountered him in the parking lot, without losing her composure. They even had dinner last night at Turtle's Crossing in Amagansett, where the only attention they attracted was reassuringly hostile—the kind of looks any townies might give any summer people who didn't know their place.

Maybe she is trying it on, thinks Oliver, so fully awake now that he can make out ocean sounds, half a mile away. Maybe she is actually beginning to imagine a life with him, with plumbers and the clerk at the hardware store, just possibly wondering what Mrs. Kahn is doing buying salt with a man half her age. Perhaps this trip is not the compensation he first imagined, for their thwarted weekend nearly two months ago, but an interlude with its face to the future. His future with Marian—the one he has been asking for, ever since the summer. But the thought does not lift him, and he can't bear that it does not.

Given that his mood now seems unshakable, Oliver makes an effort to pinpoint its beginning, and here, at any rate, he has some success. Before the sex but after returning from the restaurant. When he went upstairs to phone his answering machine at home.

Yes, that was it.

And yes, there had been yet another phone message from Barton Ochstein on the answering machine. And no, he no longer finds anything about Barton remotely funny, and wonders that he ever did.

Oliver closes his eyes. He is wired now, stiff with anxiety. He has not said a word to Marian about her cousin and his ardent attentions, not since that time in front of her building, delivering the first order of roses he assembled for the mythic Olivia. If she thinks, as she undoubtedly does, that Barton's suit has petered out, that is because Oliver has shielded her, and perhaps—he admits—himself. Barton has been anything but discouraged by Olivia's failure to respond to his gifts. In addition to the weekly deliveries to his putative fiancée's Morningside Heights apartment, Barton has continued to order arrangements for Olivia, growing increasingly flattering and specific in their accompanying cards, and Oliver has continued to charge Barton for his orders and also continued to deliver them to Marian, despite the fact that he has never yet been paid for a single stem. Oliver is no longer at all smug about his handling of the matter. How long will Barton be content to wait for his reluctant transvestite before saying something to Marian? Or worse, bounding into the White Rose to demand actual physical contact with his elusive object of desire?

The phone calls madden Oliver. Naturally, he rues his decision to give out his own phone number. Over the past weeks, Barton's messages have progressed from formal greetings to something more familiar, more intimate, more pleading. And without the slightest reciprocation—without even the most formal thanks for his flowers! Olivia, thinks Oliver, has been chilly in the extreme to her suitor. Any other man would surely have gotten the message by now, but Barton seems to have convinced himself that Olivia is a coquette, toying with him before she reels him in. He dearly wants to be reeled.

Over the past weeks, Barton's pattern has established itself: a call to the shop confirming that Olivia has picked up her flowers, followed by a call to the apartment to flatter and cajole, followed—a few days later—by another call to the shop for a bigger and more flamboyant order, with a more explicit card. Plus hang-ups. Lots of hang-ups. Two of them, for example, when Oliver checked his answering machine last night. And then the message: “Hello, dear Olivia. This is Barton Ochstein. Did you love your dahlias? I'm coming into town at the end of the week. I know a sweet little restaurant in Chelsea, we could have a quiet dinner. Call me, dear.”

Marian, if she knew, would be irate, and mostly—Oliver knows this—at him. Her cousin's impropriety aside, Oliver created this sorry scenario, Oliver took it upon himself to don Marian's clothes and saunter forth into the world as a latter-day Lord Satterfield. He had only wanted to make fun for them both, but now he is paying the piper. With every phone call and every flower Olivia has become more of a problem, more of a snare, and not just for himself and Barton but for Marian, too. And, he supposes, for Sophie Klein. Every one of them, he thinks, rolling stiffly onto his back, has a right to be furious with him.

Marian has always chided him for his playful side. Even as she laughed along, she cautioned him: he might easily make a mistake, and go too far, and harm them both. Now this silly trick would prove her right, Oliver thinks, closing his eyes. She would fail to understand how it had gotten away from him, week by week and flower by flower. She would not laugh with him now. She would find nothing at all amusing in the spectacle of Barton, on the eve of his nuptials, in avid pursuit of another woman, especially another woman he knows is no woman at all. Even speculation about her disapproval is more than Oliver can stand, but while he berates himself for having dug the hole in which he finds himself, the means to get out of his hole utterly elude him. He could try passing along a message from Olivia to Barton to cease his efforts, but he somehow doubts Barton would take that lying down. He could tell Barton that there is no Olivia, but that would leave the matter of the man dressed in woman's clothing in Marian Kahn's apartment on a Friday afternoon with her husband out of town. He could threaten to pass along certain details to Sophie Klein, but the memory of his personal remark to Sophie is still fresh, and she had been perfectly right to resent it. No matter how clear to him Sophie's imminent mistake may be, it has nothing to do with him. She has nothing to do with him. Oliver turns over in the bed again and opens his eyes.

Four-oh-three. Oliver looks bitterly at the numbers, then considers the bedroom window, which looks south to the ocean. It seems absurd that he has not seen the ocean on either of his trips here, but the beach does not appear to figure prominently in Marian's Hamptons life. The house, which once sheltered horses for a nearby estate, has a pool out back, so minimalist it registers as a kind of dark decoration in the lawn. The beach is for families and singles on the make, and a front lawn for a still loftier echelon of Hamptons houses. It might as well be an hour's drive away.

Oliver sits up. Suddenly, he is full of resentment that she has never taken him to see the ocean. Just because the beach isn't part of her routine, why has she never thought of him? Last summer they could have swum or lain in the sun like normal people, but she never suggested it. Last night they could have walked there in a few minutes and been back before the fire was out, but they didn't.

He is aware of his hands clenching fistfuls of goose-down comforter. He does not know if he has ever before felt such a fog of ill will. Marian, undistressed, sleeps on.

Quietly, Oliver slips from the bed. He puts on his jeans, his sweater, and laces up his boots. He is going to see the ocean, right now. He will go quickly and stake his claim to it, and then return with his absence unnoted, which doesn't matter because he is not doing it to be cruel to her but to be kind to himself. He begins to move across the wood floor, which creaks.

Marian sleeps. She is—he pauses to note—very beautiful asleep, as not every beautiful woman is. In sleep, she abandons her self-conciousness and is merely herself, a woman of middle years with enough beauty, enough kindness, enough grace, and a superior mind. Watching her, Oliver finds her nearness almost unbearably poignant, and wants to wake her up to show her herself, but instead he walks quietly to the door and goes down the stairs.

It's different here from Marian's other home. The beautiful surfaces and rich colors of Park Avenue are not present in this house, which retains elements of its former life: massive beams overhead, wide planks underfoot, and a half door to the kitchen. There is a large log cabin quilt nailed to one wall and, opposite, a great fireplace composed of fieldstones, each individually chosen and placed—Marian has explained—by an ancient Sicilian. Oliver finds it strange that the house, so much closer to his own taste than the Park Avenue apartment is, feels far more foreign to him, but perhaps it is because this place is so much more an expression of Marian's intimate life with her husband. The New York apartment might be a home, even a primary home, but it accepts certain conventions of what an apartment on Park Avenue should look like, and so loses an element of individuality. This house, filled with Marshall's military art and Marian's books (all sorted by genre, then author, then publication date) and the fruits of their early, misguided (in Oliver's opinion) passion for Bauer Ringware, belongs to them. With the discomfort that attends this realization, Oliver opens the sliding glass door to the backyard and steps outside.

The night is hard with cold. It moves quickly through the woolen strands of Oliver's sweater, finding his skin, but he decides against going back for his coat. He walks fast to get warm, first going to the end of the cobblestone driveway and then turning along Hedges Lane. On either side the privet hedges are so high he can make out only the tips of the houses they nearly obscure, but he has glimpses from the driveways as he goes by: shingled “cottages” grown massive on steroids, and modern conflagrations of steel and glass. Oliver walks quickly, parallel to the ocean, which crashes some distance to the right. Then he slows in wonder. On his right a building of baffling immensity is being assembled. Oliver gapes at it, trying to discern its purpose. Surely not an office complex? he thinks. Surely not here? The zoning must be airtight around this particular patch of soil, with its ocean view and its private swath of beach far on the other side of the rising shell. It must be a house, he understands, but how can something so large be a house? There will be enough room within its projected walls for each member of the largest possible family to have a house of his or her own. Oliver shakes his head and steps back from the fence. The Hamptons, as far as he can tell, have been conjured out of equal parts potato field and pretension, and for all of Marian's rhapsodizing about the light, it is not light that mostly motivates the absent inhabitants of these houses. They don't come here to bathe in it, nor even in the waves he now once again hurries toward, but to be wealthy and exclusionary in the company of other wealthy and exclusionary people.

Not that he has anything against rich people. By the standards of most of the planet, after all, he himself has far in excess of his needs. What's more, a world suddenly deprived of the wealthy would sweep away most of his friends, nearly all of his relatives, the majority of his clientele, and, not incidentally, the woman he happens to be in love with. Yet there are the rich people he loves and the rich people who need to build châteaux for their weekend use, and something certainly distinguishes the two groups from each other. He will not bring himself to call it class (Oliver stubbornly participates in the mass fantasy that there is no class in America), though this is the position his mother would take, were she here to argue the issue with him. On the other hand, he knows it isn't really about money, either. People without resources can be astoundingly snobbish, while the wealthiest person he has ever met—the baffling heiress Klein—let him in at the service entrance wearing a half-buttoned flannel shirt.