The White Rose (33 page)

Oliver steps back. “Good,” he spits. “Then I hope she gets her next divorce attorney to clean you out. I hate your fucking guts.”

For a moment, Henry does not react. Then he sinks back onto the banquette, shaking his head. “I'm wounded,” he says finally, laughing.

“I've never liked you,” Oliver adds. This is actually for his own benefit. Loyalty to his mother has not permitted him to voice this for fifteen years, but he wants to get it on the record, and now seems like the last possible moment to do so. It does not have the desired effect, however. Henry's laugh broadens, then peters out in a chuckle.

“Well, you know, Oliver, I'm not going to take that personally. You wouldn't have liked any man screwing your mother who wasn't your father.”

He steps back, stunned that someone thinks this of him and then stunned to realize that it's absolutely true. He wants to leave before the blond woman comes back. He does not want to see her again, to see how beautiful she is. “You tell her today,” Oliver manages to say. “Or I tell her tomorrow.”

Henry appears to consider this like the master negotiator he is, then he nods. “I agree,” he says, with maddening gravity, and Oliver turns and rushes away, his face hot with rage. He bursts out through the door and stands for a moment, lost on the top step of the diner, until Marian calls his name from the window of her car. He stumbles forward and climbs inside, and they drive in leaden silence to the highway.

A
t the best of times, it's a long trip; today, it feels interminable. The exit numbers diminish with wearying lethargy and the mood in Marian's Volvo stays intractably grim. Oliver feels by turns enraged and humiliated, alternately full of pity for his mother and disgusted with her for failing to recognize Henry's perfidy. He does not know whether he hopes his stepfather will indeed tell her tonight or not; he does not know whether he wants the privilege for himself or not; and he can barely hold one thought in his head before another comes crashing into it, like a pileup on an overcrowded highway.

The LIE is not, actually, overcrowded. The car moves swiftly enough but the exits still
tick, tick
slowly toward zero and the city, while Oliver fumes in the passenger seat and Marian drives in dour silence. They are nearly to Queens when she finally speaks.

“Poor Caroline” is what she says.

Oliver looks over at her. “She'll be rid of him.”

“And that's good?” Marian asks.

“He's an asshole.”

“To you,” she says sadly. “But you're not the one married to him.”

“I hate him,” says Oliver.

Marian sighs. “I know.”

The city's backbone slips into view. Marian gets in the lane for the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

“What are you going to do?” she says.

He looks at her as if she's insane. “Tell her. Of course.”

“Oliver, don't.”

“I will if he doesn't,” he says bitterly. “I said he had to tell her tonight or I'd tell her tomorrow.”

“I'm not sure that's wise. Right now,” she adds, cutting him off. “While your feelings are so…”

He gives her a grace period, then he jumps in. “So?”

“I was going to say, ‘emotional.' Not that there's anything wrong with being emotional, under the circumstances, but it might do Caroline more good if you cooled off a bit. Besides, you'll have to explain what you were doing in the Riverhead Diner.”

Oliver frowns. This thought had not occurred to him. What if Henry tells Caroline about the encounter? Won't she get around to requesting the details eventually?

“I don't think he saw you,” Oliver offers.

“No, I shot out of there pretty fast. I'm just sorry I didn't get you out, too.”

“Why?” he says harshly. “Is it your responsibility to protect me? Or were you protecting
him
?”

Marian gives him a brief look. “I wasn't thinking of him. I couldn't care less about him. I was thinking of you. And not,” she adds, with discernible hurt, “because it's my responsibility. Or are you confusing me with your mother again?”

It is an unfortunate slip. The temperature in the car drops again. All that restrains Oliver from shouting at her is his weariness, and the fact that they have just entered the tunnel, which is full of rapid, weaving traffic. He has also begun to be concerned about the question of their destination, an anxiety that leaps as Marian turns south on First Avenue.

“Where are you going?” he says tightly.

She frowns. “To Commerce Street.”

“No!” Oliver says, with a force he hasn't expected. It has suddenly become clear to him that he does not want it to end this way, though he cannot yet examine the nature of “it”: Their trip to the Hamptons? Their love affair? He does not want to be dropped off, left behind by her, at least not with this knot of tension between them. The notion that she might wish to be free of him, even for a short time, is terrifying. “I want to come with you,” he says, straining not to whine.

“But I'm going to the office,” she says deliberately. “For my meeting.”

“I'll come with you.”

“Oliver, that's…look, who knows how long it's going to go on? It might be hours!”

“Fine. I'll wait. We'll have dinner.”

She bites her lower lip and turns right on Fifty-seventh. It is a non-committal move.

“By then I'll just want to collapse,” she says. “By then,
you'll
want to collapse!”

“No,” he shakes his head. “It's fine. I'll hang out somewhere. I'll go have coffee.”

“All afternoon?” She brakes for the light on Lexington and looks at him. “Oliver, look, let me take you home. I'll call you. We can meet for dinner somewhere if it's really important to you.”

He shakes his head. “No, you won't call. Or you'll call me and say you're too tired. I'll come with you. I'll
wait
.”

Marian glares, but not at him. She glares at the weaving bodies, moving in front of her car, even behind her car, pedestrians impervious to danger. “You're being stubborn,” she tells Oliver. “I don't want to spend the afternoon worrying about you and feeling bad that you're sitting in some coffee shop waiting for me. It's going to be boring enough without that.”

“Fine!” Oliver shouts. “The last thing I want to do is bore you.”

“Oliver!”

The light turns green. He reaches back between them to his bag, on the floor behind her seat. It knocks her shoulder as he pulls it forward but he doesn't apologize.

“Just let me out. I wouldn't want to inconvenience you.”

“Oliver, don't be stupid.”

“There. On the corner,” he says wildly, but she continues west, to Park. “Stop the car!” Oliver shouts.

“I'm driving you home.”

He flings open the passenger door, jolting her to a stop. “Thanks for a lovely time,” he tells her, with real cruelty, and steps out in the middle of Park Avenue, to the loud accompaniment of horns.

“Oliver, get back inside!” Marian says frantically.

He walks away, almost jauntily, holding his bag over his shoulder with a crooked finger, crossing Park to the island between its northbound and southbound lanes. The silver gray of her Volvo shoots past, westbound. He watches it as far as Madison, where it turns right, and when it does, every trace of his piggish contentment leaves him in a rush. He stands on the island, shivering a little in the air after the warm car, holding his bag in this ridiculous posture. He stands still.

Motion in the city is its own language, understood by natives, quickly learned by newcomers. There are not many legitimate reasons to stand, inert, on a Manhattan street, and the illegitimate ones—drunkenness, schizophrenia, criminal intent—are blaring signals to the justly cautious. Oliver thinks of this, dimly, as pedestrians stream past him in both directions, plainly giving him a wide berth, then again as the light switches and traffic runs north and south past his little island, but he can't somehow bring himself to move.
Isn't she coming back
? The question finally occurs to him.
Isn't Marian coming to get him
?

He calculates the time it would take from Madison, northbound, to a right turn on Fifty-eighth, and then a right turn southbound on Park. This is time long past by now, Oliver understands, but then, when you think about it, how can Marian stop for him when he stands like this, ridiculously, in the middle? He is prolonging this ordeal by his own ignorance. Should he cross the street to the sidewalk on the southbound side and wait there? Will she know he's gone that way and not the other way, to the northbound side? He turns experimentally to look at the other side. There is no silver Volvo on the northbound side. There is also no silver Volvo on the southbound side. Is she waiting for him on Madison?

And how could he have said that to her, about having a lovely time? What kind of asshole is he?

Unexpectedly, Oliver begins to cry. From the corner of one teary eye, he watches a mother snatch her little girl out of his path. In minutes he has devolved from citizen to untouchable, but he can't seem to stop falling apart. He wants Marian. He has to apologize right now. He has to get them back to where they were before…

But he has to keep going back, further and further, to find
before
.

Oliver waits for the green light. When it comes, he crosses Park and moves swiftly, in his city gait. He presses onto the crosstown bus, behind a clutch of pubescent girls hemmed in by Bloomingdale's bags, then leaps off at Broadway and rushes to the subway station at Columbus Circle. The wait for the number 9 is long and malodorous (two teenagers in down jackets and falling-down blue jeans share a gyro just down the platform), but when the train comes Oliver easily finds a seat. The intensity of his purpose, as the train flies north, feels good, though he has not yet brought his mind to bear on what he will say when he actually sees Marian, nor considered the possibility that she might not want him turning up in her office. All that matters, he tells himself with stubborn focus, is that he offer his apology and his love. Then he can leave her alone, for her meeting and the rest of her day. Just pull us back from the edge, he thinks. It's a modest goal, the only one he is capable of.

Oliver leaves the subway at 116th Street and walks east, moving swiftly through the Columbia campus, fairly confident of his destination. He has been here only once before, early in his affair with Marian (for a very memorable afternoon on the floor of her Fayerweather Hall office, while urgent students and aggravated colleagues knocked at the locked door), but he finds the building easily now and pulls open the door. He climbs the stairs, bucking the flow of students and dodging their ponderous backpacks. At the second-floor landing he turns right along the corridor to the faculty offices, walking past several open doors to the room at the end of the hall, where he finds Marian's door unaccountably shut. There is no answer to his knock. The unwelcome image of Marian and another man, rolling around on the carpet inside, assaults his imagination, and for a long moment he glares at the plastic rectangle on the pale wood door declaring her name and office hours. She isn't here, he reassures himself, calculating the travel time by car (considering weekday afternoon Manhattan traffic) compared to the rapid trip he himself has just made by bus and subway. He got here first, is all, and she is even now making her way from the university parking facility, or vainly searching for a parking space in the neighborhood. Or maybe—the idea strikes Oliver—she went home first, left her car there, changed her clothes before the meeting. Or maybe she is indeed on campus, but the meeting has already begun and Marian is there, not here. But where is there?

Oliver turns, retracing his steps to the department office beside the stairwell, an open area with several desks at which no one is sitting. He stands awkwardly at the periphery of the office, hoping someone will come to him. Minutes pass, though, before someone does, and he grows more anxious, waiting. He eyes Marian's likely colleagues, her possible students, feeling so detached from her, half-expecting her to turn the corner and see him and increasingly afraid of how she might react to the sight of him. It has just struck him that the best possible thing might be to go now, before he interacts with anyone here, when a woman catches his eye. “Help you?” she says. She is a young woman. Maybe a college student herself, Oliver thinks.

“I was looking for Marian Kahn,” he says.

“Her office is down there,” the woman says, pointing.

“I know. She's not there.”

“Well then,” the woman shrugs, setting down her stack of files on one of the desks. “She's not here.”

“Yes, but…do you know where the meeting is?”

The woman looks up. She waits for more information.

“The meeting on the job applicants,” he says, dropping his voice.

She frowns, her forehead deeply ridged. “Job applicants? Is that today?”

Before he can answer, she twists and shouts, “Lucy, is the AHA hiring committee meeting today?”

“Next week,” says Lucy, from an adjacent office.

“Next week,” the woman informs Oliver, unnecessarily. “Not today.”

Oliver steps back, reeling, nearly tripping over his own bag. He is frantically trying to explain this to himself, to place it within the realm of the not-tragic, the not-irredeemable, but he can't. She isn't here. She isn't coming here at all. She is somewhere else, and she is staying there.

“Thanks,” he manages to say, but barely.

“You can leave her a message,” the woman says. “There's her box over there…”

But Oliver doesn't even look. He reaches down for his bag, grabbing it for dear life, and lurches toward the staircase. He is barely in control of his feet, barely in control of his face, and so horrendously sad that it actually hurts to think. The banister is clammy under his right hand. Gravity alone brings him back down the stairs. Then, before him, the entryway door opens, admitting the cold and a person who does not move out of the way. Irritated, Oliver looks up.

“Hello,” the person says. “Oliver?”

Oliver nods. He is supposed to do more than nod. He is supposed to say, “Hello, Sophie.” But this is quite beyond him, not least because he is suddenly, cataclysmically breathless, and not altogether sure where the floor is, and incidentally numb, especially in his hands. In fact, he is not even very sure that his hands are still attached to him except that, briefly looking down, he can see one of them still holding the bag, the bag of his long-ago sojourn in Marian's house and life.

“What are you doing here?” Sophie says. “Are you here to see me?”

Marian's eyes are brown, Oliver thinks. Sophie's eyes look black, her hair is black—
truly
black—the circles under her eyes are verging on black, themselves. She is wearing a flannel shirt again. The same as the first time? he wonders. In the kitchen? Automatically, he looks for the gap between the buttons, but it isn't there. He wants it to be there. He feels horribly gypped that it isn't there. It occurs to him that Sophie hasn't the slightest idea how lovely she is. And why should she? He hadn't the slightest idea himself, until just now.