The White Rose (37 page)

There is a vintage clothing store on the corner of Great Jones, five long racks of old jeans and leather jackets with a few moldering hostess gowns from the sixties hung in a back corner. Useless. There is a women's boutique on the next block, all wisps of dresses suspended by sequined straps. The saleswoman smiles at him, thinking—Oliver supposes—that he must be shopping for a girlfriend. He flicks through a few things, nervously, not really seeing them, then looks with interest at a short black dress, briefly trying to imagine it on Sophie's body. He has no idea what Sophie would look like in such an item. Marian—yes. Marian likes clothing, likes to put it on, likes to take it off. Marian's clothing makes you forget to pay attention to it; you see only her, and how it makes her look. Whatever she knows about dressing, it's something Sophie hasn't begun to learn, Oliver thinks. Sophie's instinct seems to be for coverage, but he doesn't really understand why. Her body is lovely to him, curved and shallow, her skin creamy, everything warm and soft. She has broad shoulders and a large chest, yet her lower half tapers to something sinewy and trim. There is a wholeness about her you don't appreciate unless she is naked, thinks Oliver, with all her lines and surfaces revealed. Then, when she dresses, her beauty somehow abandons her.

Oliver looks at the dress in his hands, and shakes his head.

The dress is too skimpy for Sophie. She would never wear it. Neither would Marian. Neither would Olivia.

Oliver leaves the shop and keeps walking. What he needs is the sort of clothing Marian might wear. Olivia, after all, was born in Marian's clothes, and they are the clothes Barton imagines her in. He needs to find the kind of clothing Marian would buy for herself, if she happened to be shopping for herself on Bleecker Street. Which she would never do, Oliver thinks.

Just before Sixth Avenue, he finds a store that carries more sedate things: tweed slacks and silk shirts, skirts that cover the upper leg. This is promising. He goes in and takes a green skirt off the rack and holds it against his hips. It looks microscopic, a doll garment. He hunts for the label: size 2. What size is he? There are no helpful measurements for the waist and inseam. There
is
no inseam. So how is he supposed to know?

Oliver looks up. On the other side of the room, two women about his own age are staring at him. He feels his face go hot. He looks at the floor. He does not even like the skirt. Does he need to like the skirt? He has never thought about whether he likes his own clothes, really.

He barely manages to get the skirt back on its hanger.

Oliver moves down the wall of clothes, lightly trailing one hand along the chrome hooks of the hangers. He is too mortified to leave, to walk past them to the door. His hand touches a silk blouse the color of mayonnaise. Marian would wear that, he thinks. He wishes Marian were here to guide him, and the notion is so absurd he actually smiles.

“Can I help?” says the salesgirl, a tiny thing in a tiny black skirt. She has come up behind him and stands with one red-clawed hand on a bony hip. Her hair is so short it's a cap.

“My girlfriend,” Oliver says haltingly. “I wanted to buy her some things.”

“And she's about your size? I saw you holding that up,” says the girl, nodding down the rack.

“Oh,” Oliver says. “Yes. My size. But a girl.”

She gives him a baffled look.

“I need a whole outfit. You know. A skirt and…top. Maybe a sweater. And some shoes, too.”

“We don't sell shoes,” says the girl.

This brings him up short. It's been nearly impossible to do this once. He's supposed to go to a different store and do it again?

“So what's her style?”

Oliver, bewildered, says nothing.

“What kind of clothes does she wear? Does she go out clubbing? Is she, like, a sorority girl, or what?”

“She's…a student,” he says. “She goes to school.”

“This isn't The Gap,” says the girl.

“No, I know. Just, something nice. To wear…to meet my parents,” Oliver hears himself say. “I want her to wear something nice.”

He sounds, it occurs to him, like his own mother, circa the late 1980s.

The girl starts pulling things out: a tartan sweater, a black long-sleeved item that sort of crosses itself over the chest, black pants. He couldn't possibly wear any of this stuff.

“No,” he tells her, starting to sweat.

She takes a hanger off the rack on the opposite side of the room: a black dress, long sleeved, with a high neck, and a hem at the knee. Maximum coverage. Modest, ideal for meeting potential in-laws. For a moment, his heart leaps, and then he pictures himself wearing it, and he is only Oliver Stern, ridiculous in a black dress. What is he thinking? What is he thinking? There is no fucking way he can do this.

“I have to go,” he says quickly, and he dives for the door.

Outside, there is the first hint of evening, a diminishment of winter light. The encroaching darkness alarms him. He needs to begin this so that he can finish it. He can't go back to his home until he does.

Oliver begins to walk again, but this time in the opposite direction, northwest on Bleecker. It takes him a moment to realize both that he knows where he is going and that his failure to go there first was a willful evasion. When he reaches Christopher he turns left, his head down, trying to conjure the normality of his everyday walks in this neighborhood—his own, after all. Christopher Street might be holy ground to a generation of gay men, but it's just another street in his orbit. Doesn't he shop at the Duane Reade at Christopher and Seventh? Doesn't he buy his Cabernet Sauvignon at Christopher Wines?
I am a child of the Village. No less than the trees and the stars. I have a right to be here
, Oliver tells himself

Right next to the wine store, the display of leather men in the window of Transformations looks just as it always has, but for the sprigs of holly protruding from the mannequins' black chaps. Oliver does not pause, looking being—in a sense—worse than entering. He pushes open the door and charges in. A slender blond man looks up from his laptop at the counter.

“Hello,” he says amiably.

“I'm not gay,” says Oliver. “I mean…sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too,” says the man, bemused. “That is a great loss, I'm sure. But on the other hand, why should you be?”

Oliver frowns. “Because…isn't this…” Oliver gestures, words having failed him.

“Look,” the man says, not unkindly, “are you a customer or a tourist? Because I can recommend a few good books if there isn't a chance in hell you're going to buy anything.”

“I'm not a tourist,” Oliver says, with some offense. “I live on Commerce Street.”

The blond man raises an eyebrow. The eyebrow, Oliver notices, is brown. He's wearing a blond wig.

“I mean,” he says, “I definitely need to buy something. I need help.”

The man folds down his laptop.

“But I just…I know this is a store for drag queens. And that's great. I've got nothing against drag queens. I'm just not a drag queen.”

“Shocking news,” the blond man says. “And here I had you pegged for Wigstock.”

“I'm…I need…” Oliver falters. “I have to buy some clothes. I mean, not clothes for a man. I have to get…”

The man puts up a hand. “Please. This is hurting me. You can stop.”

Oliver stops.

“Drag queens. Yes,” he says. “Downstairs. Everything from Joan Crawford to Bette Midler at the baths. Leather in the back room. But everything else is just for your garden variety cross-dresser. Suburbia to Wall Street. Suitable for parents' night at the middle school. Nothing Faerie Queen. Nothing
offensive
to your very
heterosexual
requirements, I promise.”

“But I just said—”

“Cross-dressing,” the man says, rolling his eyes. “Look, here's a cram sheet: drag queen equals gay, cross-dresser equals straight. Straight?” he repeats, taking in Oliver's confusion. “As in,
I like to wear the dress, the tasteful pumps, and the understated jewelry, whenever my wife takes the kids to visit her folks in Iowa? By the time she gets back I'm so revved up I practically have to make my move in the SUV
. Yes?”

Dumbly, Oliver nods. “Okay. I didn't know that.”

“Sit down,” he says, pointing to a chair. “And my name is Jan.”

Oliver sits. He wonders if he is obligated to give his name, too.

“Your first time, I take it?”

First and last
, Oliver wants to say. But it isn't his first time. And it won't be his last.

“It's a long story,” he tells Jan. “I sort of did it by accident once. Now I need to do it again. I need to be this…person.”

“You liked it, in other words,” Jan observes, and Oliver is about to object: No, of course he hadn't liked it. Then he remembers: the flirting with Barton, the sweet, strange seduction, of and by Marian, on the couch in her living room. He had liked that. But it was too complicated to explain.

“Yes,” he says.

Jan smiles, showing small, even teeth. “Fine.” He gets up. He is a small man, with narrow shoulders. He is wearing a silk shirt, unbuttoned to just above the navel, showing a hairless, honey-toned torso, and jeans. “So tell me all about her.”

“About…?” says Oliver. He is sweating now and wants to take off his jacket, but he is afraid to do it. Taking off his jacket means he is staying, which means he is actually doing this.

“This person you mentioned. Tell me about her. Then we'll figure out her wardrobe.”

Oliver takes a breath. “She's a graduate student. She's…”

A gay man
, he has been about to say.
A straight woman
. He can barely keep it all clear anymore.

“She's a very nice girl.”

“I'm sure,” Jan drawls. “Does she go out or stay in?”

“She goes out,” Oliver says. “I mean, not nightclubs. But she needs to be able to walk down the street. Just…not flashy, okay?”

“I got it,” says Jan. “Tweed, cashmere, no stilettos, am I warm?”

Very warm, Oliver considers, thinking about Marian's clothing. He nods.

“So let's go shopping.”

It takes nearly an hour, most of it spent in the dressing room. After allowing Oliver to choose a wig nearly indistinguishable from Marian's and wordlessly handing him a boxed item that proves to be a bra with separate breastlike fillers, Jan directs Oliver to the dressing room at the back of the store and shifts into a Zen-like shopping zone from which he both procures and rejects, evaluating each combination of garments with either a “yes” or a “no.” In short order, Jan confers approval on a red boatneck cashmere sweater, a beige button-down silk shirt not unlike the one he himself is wearing, a brown skirt that zips up the side and falls to Oliver's knees. He brings two pairs of tights, rejects one of them, rejects the other, and goes back for a third, which satisfies him. He produces a gold necklace and takes it away, to Oliver's relief. He brings shoes that are too tight, shoes that are too loose, and, finally, shoes that do not hurt too much, do not look too wrong, and with heels that are not too high. “Nice legs,” Jan observes.

Oliver, lost in his own reflection, only nods.

The astounding thing, he thinks, is that she really is here, even more present than the first time. Olivia—Marian's devoted research assistant and the object of Barton's dogged attentions—has taken on her own freight of character in the dressing room at Transformations, with every small decision contributing to the person she has become. Oliver sees her now. She is not pretty, exactly, but she is sweet, and a little shy, and also very determined to have what she deserves. She is…alluring, Oliver decides, scrutinizing her in a guy way. Not the girl you notice the first time you sweep the room, in other words, but the one you wake up wondering about five days later.

Looking at himself in the mirror, from the front, the side, the front again, is a queasy, out-of-body experience. Oliver's instinct is to avert his eyes, but at the same time, he can't seem to look away. He forces himself to take several deep breaths, and meets his own gaze.

“Hello, Olivia,” Oliver says, experimentally.

“Hello,” Olivia says.

Jan returns, his arms full. “You need a coat,” he says briskly. “You can't wear this with your jacket. You need a purse.”

“No purse,” says Oliver, snapping out of it.

“Don't be silly. Nice girl like you wouldn't go out without a purse.”

Oliver lets him choose a purse. He lets Jan show him how to hold it. He lets Jan pick a coat, camel's hair.

“You could use a little makeup,” Jan observes. “You have pretty good skin, but makeup never hurts.”

“No makeup,” says Oliver, and this time he holds his ground.

“Whatever,” Jan puts up his hands. “Okay, that's one outfit. How about some evening wear?”

Oliver gets out his wallet. “This is fine, thank you. You want to ring it all up and I'll get changed?”

“Get changed?” Jan asks. “What for? You look great. I'll throw your other clothes in a shopping bag.”

“No, no,” he shakes his head. “I couldn't.”

“Don't be silly. You said she has to be able to walk down a street. If a man can't walk down Christopher Street in drag, where can he, pray tell?”

Oliver smiles, but he shakes his head.

“Look, you live on Commerce, right? What is that, like, three minutes? If you can't walk home from here, why have you wasted your time with all this?”

Oliver considers. Jan is, of course, perfectly correct. Three minutes. And when will he ever have the nerve to practice again?

“All right,” Oliver says. He pays, using his Visa card, and stands looking between the two leather-clad mannequins at the now darkening street as Jan totals the bill. Outside is an unknown country.