The White Rose (38 page)

“I'm here on Tuesdays and Fridays,” Jan says. “In case you don't want to start over again with somebody else, next time.”

“Thank you,” says Oliver, meaning it.

“You look beautiful,” Jan says, appraising him. “I mean it about your legs. Don't hide them.”

“Okay,” Oliver stammers. “I'll try.” He takes the bag of his clothes, his own safe clothes, and goes outside.

The wind seems to rush at him, nudging him off balance. Every step is a separately strange experience. The hose rub between his thighs. There is an odd flutter of skirt against his knees. His feet pinch.
Why do women wear heels?
Oliver thinks crossly. It is not
natural
to walk on tiptoe. He stops, only feet from the beginning of his journey, and looks at himself in the window reflection of Christopher Wines, against a display of Chardonnays.
That
is why they wear heels, thinks Oliver, noting the rounded calf and narrow, nearly graceful angle of his ankle. Nice legs. Marian had said that to him, too. She'd said he had nicer legs than hers, when was that? The first time he had shown them, really, in Olivia's clothes. He squints at his legs now. He lifts one, just slightly, and admires it, and then movement from inside the shop makes him look up. A young man is watching him from inside. Oliver's heart thrashes as he recognizes his admirer.
The Violet Pen
, he reaches.
The Violet Pencil, wasn't that it?
The man frowns at him. Oliver looks away so fast he totters on his heels, then pulls his new coat tight at the throat and walks off down the street, carefully, one foot deliberately in front of the other. With each step, one knee and then the other makes its appearance through the slit of his open coat.

Oliver watches his knees, watches the pavement under them. He lets himself believe that it is fascinating to observe this, but the truth is that he is terrified to look up, to see anyone seeing him. This is a level of physical self-consciousness he has not experienced since adolescence, thinks Oliver, crossing Bleecker with attention to the ground. Someone nudges him, an invisible body of great height, and Oliver looks up, involuntarily, into ardent eyes. A man in an orange down vest, bald-headed, a stranger. “Sorry,” the man says, standing his ground.

Oliver hurries away.

At Bedford, he turns left, and, leaving the busier thoroughfare, he actually slows down. The street is nearly empty, and with the light rapidly fading, the few people he does share the sidewalk with are focused on their own business. Oliver feels…not safe, precisely, but—easier. Still, he forces himself to linger before every other shop, feeling himself shift his weight and stand, examining the merchandise. Oliver idles before a restaurant—Le Rouge. He pretends to read the menu, then, slowly, he unclenches his coat and lets it fall open. The earth does not stop turning. He puts his hands on his hips.

“We're open,” a waiter says, opening the door and smiling at him. “Like to come in?” He has a thick French accent, almost a stage-French accent.

“Oh,” Oliver says. Looking past the man, into the restaurant's dim interior, he can make out the table where he once, an eternity ago, sat with Marian. “No, but another time.”

The guy nods. He wears thick silver earrings, like jacks, in both ears. He grins, not just with warmth, but with heat. “Any time,” he tells Oliver. “Ask for me. My name is Valéry.”

Valéry
, thinks Oliver. Like
Valerie
.

Then he smiles.

“Thank you!” Oliver says, and walks off down Bedford.

On the next block, Oliver walks briskly to the smoke shop and enters, so focused now that he has nearly blocked out the reality of his altered appearance. They know him here, or do in his normal guise. He comes in for emergency milk, the
Daily News
whenever there is some scandal too undignified for the
Times
to cover, Häagen-Dazs from the freezer in the back, but never for what he is purchasing today. There is one copy of the
Ascendant
left in the rack. Oliver puts it on the counter and fishes out cash from his new purse. He does not look at the man behind the counter, a Sikh in a red topknotted turban. He does not wonder if the man sees him, knows him. He grabs his paper and goes, anxious to get home, gleeful at this new idea. It's all going to work, he thinks, turning down Commerce, which is empty of people. He holds his coat closed with one hand and fishes in his pocket with the other for his keys. With each step, his plan crystallizes. He sees how to do this. He knows precisely how to get Mort Klein to the Black Horse Inn on Thursday night.

He opens the shop door and shuts it behind him. Then he goes upstairs.

It is after five o'clock now. She may not be there. She may be home, preparing for some party, or meeting someone for a drink, spreading some nasty rumor or other. He opens the salmon-colored newspaper on his kitchen table and turns on the light. He skims her hateful column, noting a gushed reference to Henry Rosenthal and his lovely new girlfriend, then finds her profile of Barton Ochstein, bachelor bridegroom, Warburg, preservationist, on the verge of marrying his fortune. It's a fawning piece of writing, culminating in a gleeful
See you all at the wedding!
but Oliver knows that Valerie Annis won't be seeing anyone at the wedding. Sophie absolutely forbade it. The Celebrant would not be pleased about that, thinks Oliver. The Celebrant would not be unwilling to embarrass a man who'd embarrassed her.

At last, in the second section of the paper, he finds the phone number on the bottom of the page and dials. The next edition of the paper comes out on Friday. Olivia's assignation with Barton is to take place on Thursday. It can work. It can absolutely work. He won't think about the alternative.

“
Ascendant
!” chirps a voice, female.

“I would like to speak to Valerie Annis,” says Oliver, enunciating with care. “My name is Olivia.”

A
t just before three
P.M.
on Monday, Sophie stands on a raised, circular pedestal, carpeted in beige, being tugged and pinned and glared at with varying degrees of impatience by three women.

“Hold up your arm a little bit,” says Suki, one of the whippet-thin women Vera Wang has hired in an effort to make her customers feel gargantuan.

Sophie raises her arm. The illusion sleeve puckers at her armpit.

“You lost weight,” says the seamstress, with discernible aggravation.

“
Sophie
,” says Frieda, who is sitting on an upholstered ottoman in the corner of the dressing room, her aristocratic legs crossed at the ankle.

“Sorry,” Sophie says, automatically.

“I need to take in more,” says the seamstress, and she pins. Sophie holds up her arm, idly looking at herself in the mirror.

The pucker under her arm is not the only pucker in evidence. The dress has gone from sleek at its first fitting to baggy this afternoon. She would not want to marry Oliver in this dress, Sophie thinks. Actually, she would not want to marry anyone in this dress.

“I don't think we're finished,” says Suki sadly.

“No,” Sophie agrees.

“I think we need one more. Wednesday?”

“What?” says Sophie.

“For a
fitting
,” Frieda says. “Yes,” she says, taking it upon herself to answer. “We come back on Wednesday. It must be ready the next morning, though. We are leaving for the wedding on Thursday.”

“Fine. And bring your undergarments when you come,” Suki says, tapping a note into her Palm Pilot.

“My what?” Sophie says, rousing herself.

“Well, you're not going to wear that bra,” Suki says with a mincing shake of her exquisite head. She looks up, worried. “Are you?”

Sophie shrugs. “I hadn't really thought about it.”

There is general awe at this remark.

“You know,” says Suki, “there is a very good lingerie shop. Near Bloomingdale's?” she says deliberately, as though Sophie, lifelong New Yorker that she is, might not know where that is.

“I know where Bloomingdale's is,” says Sophie.

“I have their card. I think you should go right now. Let them fit you. Tell them you're wearing strapless with illusion sleeves.”

“Oh, I can't go right now,” she says vaguely, though there's nothing pressing right now. There is no work. There is no Oliver. Her only occupation, all this week, is to prepare for a wedding.

“Why not?” says Frieda shrilly, and Sophie shrugs again, making the seamstress actually grunt in frustration.

“I have my paper. Remember? To get ready for the conference?”

“You have this wedding. Remember? To get ready for being married?”

“Fine,” Sophie says.

Frieda and Suki exchange a look.

When the first arm is done, Sophie lifts the other arm. No one speaks but the seamstress, asking for more pins, then chalk. Sophie is thrilled when she finally gets the dress off her body. She has to resist an urge to kick it as she steps from its fallen circle.

“Are you coming?” Sophie asks Frieda when she emerges from the dressing room, clad—out of deference to Vera Wang and to Frieda—in a black suit.

“
Nein
. Let me take your veil home. I think you can buy a bra without me.”

“
Really
,” Sophie says, allowing the tiniest smile. “Why, thank you, Frieda. I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“Besides, today I need to fight with the caterer.”

“Oh. Well, have fun.”

“And your father canceled his dinner. I will need to order something for him.”

“What's going on?” asks Sophie, concerned.

“Nothing terrible, I think. Just saving his energy.”

“I could come have dinner with him,” Sophie says, holding open the door. Frieda passes through. She is carrying the large Vera Wang shopping bag, laden with Sophie's deftly packed veil.

“No,” Frieda says and shakes her head. Her expensively maintained copper hair shines in the afternoon light. “You buy your bra, and after that go home and do your work. Maybe then, by the weekend, you can begin to act like a bride. Really, Sophie. All of this effort.”

“All right,” she says sadly, and they walk north to the corner together. “Give him my love,” she calls, watching Frieda until she crosses Seventy-ninth. Then Sophie turns east to Park and begins to walk downtown.

It's a chilly day, and Sophie keeps her hands in her pockets, one of them fingering the business card Suki handed to her. The lingerie shop is not, as it turns out, unknown to her: a block or two south of Bloomingdale's on Lexington, run—at least, in the past—by a crotchety Russian woman who determined bra size by gazing balefully at her customer's chest and then called out the correct numbers and letters. Sophie had gone there once… when was it? In high school, she thinks, when she failed the self-serve test of Bloomingdale's own chaotic lingerie department. How many bras has she bought, and worn, and washed to death, since then?

She stops at a red light and reaches down to pat a bichon frise.

“Pretty dog,” Sophie observes to its owner, a brittle old lady in mink, though she does not think the dog is at all pretty. The woman smiles, gratified, her powdered skin shockingly white around the mouth. Standing beside her on the street corner, two schoolboys in Collegiate blazers puff at cigarettes.

The light turns green.

At the end of the block, Sophie suddenly sees Marian Kahn, walking in her direction. They will cross paths and it occurs to Sophie that she really ought to say something this time—to her colleague, to her almost-relation-by-marriage—but she can think of nothing to say, and Marian Kahn looks distracted, as if she really does not want to be wrested from her thoughts.
Dr. Kahn!
Sophie rehearses, nonetheless.
It's me, Sophie Klein. Barton's fiancée? Chaim Bennis's graduate student? We met? We're going to meet?

We pass, thinks Sophie, as they do, Marian walking briskly north, with an idle half-smile on her face. Does she live near here? thinks Sophie. On Park? Had Bart said that? Sophie turns and watches Marian go. Marian moves confidently through the crowds and up Lenox Hill, now lined with its December evergreens.

Where is Oliver?
thinks Sophie, suddenly. She thinks this all the time now.

Oliver is in his shop. Oliver is on Twenty-eighth Street. Oliver is at the Pink Teacup. Oliver is sitting at my kitchen table, watching me cook. Oliver is in my bed.

Right now, Oliver is downtown, on Commerce Street, selling flowers, even as she walks to a lingerie shop to buy a bra for the purpose of marrying someone who isn't Oliver.

Which is completely, completely wrong, it seems to her.

In front of the Regency Hotel, Sophie pauses, extracting the card from her pocket and peering at it. The futility of her errand overwhelms her, and she finds herself shaking her head, like a street schizophrenic.

“Taxi, miss?” says the doorman.

“Oh, no,” she shakes her head. “I'm not a guest here.”

He nods and she walks on.

But this is when it occurs to her that she does want a taxi. She wants to go where Oliver is, which is downtown, and she wants to go there fast. Because though only two days have passed, because though he said, only this morning, on the phone, that he is working on the problem that is her life, that everything would be all right, she needs to see him again, and to hear that again. She needs to. She turns north to look for a taxi, and there, right in front of the hotel, a taxi is switching on his light.

Sophie races back. “Is it all right?” she asks the same doorman, breathless, her hand already on the door. “I'm not a guest.”

“You told me,” he says and laughs. “Go on. There's no one waiting.”

“Thank you!” she says and climbs inside.

The driver looks back.

“Greenwich Village, please,” she chirps.

He swings into traffic. Park Avenue is clogged with angry cars, all carping in the language of Harpo Marx. Sophie thinks of Oliver. She thinks of the small of Oliver's back, which fits perfectly the curve of her cheek. She thinks of the sound he makes when he comes, and then of the sound he makes her make, which is not a sound she has ever made before. She thinks of Oliver's smell, and is astonished to find that she can conjure it precisely, as if he were right here in the cab beside her. The cars are not moving. Where is everyone going? Sophie thinks crossly.

“Where is everyone going?” she asks the driver.

“Oh, it's like this all the time here,” he says reassuringly. “You live here, you get used to it. Where you visiting from?”

He takes her for a tourist, Sophie understands. And why not? Wasn't she picked up in front of a hotel?

“Uh…Millbrook. New York.”

“Where is that?” he says, turning west on Fifty-seventh. “Upstate?”

“Yeah. Horse country.”

“Racetracks?”

“Kind of,” she says, thinking of Saratoga.

“So is it business or vacation?” He honks at a FreshDirect truck. The two drivers promptly give each other the finger.

“Oh…,” Sophie says. Then she remembers. “I'm getting married. I'm getting ready for my wedding.”

“Yeah? Congratulations.”

“The flowers,” Sophie says, warming to her theme. “A shop in the Village is doing the flowers for my wedding. The flowers are going to be so beautiful.”

She closes her eyes and thinks of Oliver's flowers, and as the wedding itself fades, the flowers seem to come forward in glorious focus. She can smell them here, mixed with the remembered Oliver-smell. She is in love, she thinks. This is what it smells like to be in love.

“So, where in Greenwich Village?” the driver asks.

“Commerce Street, please,” says Sophie.

“Excuse me?”

“Commerce Street?”

She sighs.

“Seventh Avenue, then. Where it hits Bleecker.”

“Right.”

When he pulls over, Sophie puts bills through the little plastic window and gets out, quickened with longing. It's a magic thing, chemical, and she rushes on, turning right on Grove past the Pink Teacup, which she reflexively glances into, but he isn't there, because he is home, only a block away, waiting for her, though he doesn't know it yet.
I am a woman who is having an affair
, she thinks in amazement,
only days before her wedding
. An hour ago, she was trying on a bridal gown. Now she's here and happy and can barely remember the name of her fiancé.

Barton
, she thinks, with effort, but even this fails to puncture her elation.

Then she rounds the corner onto Commerce Street.

The shop windows are dark, which makes no sense. It's afternoon, and someone should be here, Bell if not Oliver. She looks upstairs, to Oliver's apartment, and there too the lights are out.

Sophie shakes her head. She stoically climbs the stone steps to the shop door and reads—deliberately, as if she were quite dense—the small sign in the window, which says
CLOSED
.

Then she knocks anyway, and listens to the sound bounce off the walls inside.

She does not know what to do with herself.

The street, of course, is empty. The street is nearly always empty, unless the little theater is letting out. There's a restaurant just past it, where Commerce bends and veers into Barrow, but nobody seems to be there, either. Idly Sophie wanders down to the Cherry Lane, and attempts to read the reviews of the current offering, then walks past to examine the posted menu on the restaurant, but nothing really registers, and besides, the restaurant is closed, and besides that, she isn't hungry.

Actually, Sophie hasn't been hungry for a while. Since the day Oliver came to find her at Columbia, her appetites have moved in a different—for her unprecedented—direction. Not that she has stopped eating. Only a few nights ago she was here, up in Oliver's apartment, making pot roast and kugel (Oliver had shown himself to be shockingly ignorant of kugel) and eating both with relish, but every morning she has been lighter, more lithe, more loved, more astounded at what her body has done, and now it looks as if Oliver's long-ago comment about brides who drop twenty pounds before the wedding might actually have proved prescient. But of course, there isn't to be a wedding. Oliver has promised her. And besides, she doesn't have the right bra.

Sophie looks at her watch. The street is darkening, and not a single person has appeared since her arrival. This must be the stillest place in the city, she thinks, reluctantly retracing her steps toward Bedford, and passing in front of the shop once more. There are white roses in the windows massed in matching black urns, looking voluptuous and confident. Before knowing Oliver, Sophie had never thought much about flowers, even, despite her own historical preoccupations, about white roses, but now she has come to regard a flower in the room as a participant in her mood. Barton's white roses, for example, which had arrived every week, she had heartlessly allowed to wilt. Or the new white roses, in a white vase on her little kitchen table, which Oliver had carried over her threshold two nights before: instantly the most beautiful thing in her home. Or the astonishing moment she woke up, one morning last week, in Oliver's bed on Commerce Street, with his mouth over her breast and his hands coiled in her hair and the dark pink calla lilies, in an ironstone jug on the bedside table, at which she had stared in wonder for as long as she could keep her eyes open. Whatever happens, thinks Sophie, walking fast, there will now have to be flowers.

At the corner, she turns right on Bedford, pausing to read the historical marker on a skinny townhouse—Edna St. Vincent Millay's, it turns out, in 1923—then walks past to a smoke shop where she buys herself a Styrofoam cup of anemic coffee and a copy of the
Ascendant
, the last but one in the rack. Armed with these props, Sophie goes back and sits—not in front of the shop itself, but farther down, nearly opposite the theater, under a handy streetlight, on the steps of a brownstone that looks uninhabited. It's dark now, but at least it isn't cold, Sophie thinks, peeling off a corner of her cup's plastic lid and taking a first sip, which promptly scalds the roof of her mouth. She opens the coral colored pages of the paper, skimming the accounts of a recent real estate war, the battle for control of a Broadway producers' consortium. She is looking for the article about Bart, of which he is very proud, and most of which he has already read to her over the phone, but before she finds it she is sidetracked by the Celebrant column, featuring a caricature of its author, Valerie Annis, and a photograph of Oliver's grinning stepfather, Henry Rosenthal, with his new girlfriend. Sophie, reading the couple's fervent quotes of happiness, is selfishly glad that Henry Rosenthal is departing Oliver's life at the very moment she herself is entering it, thereby relieving her of the need to be polite to such an odious man. The girlfriend, in the throes of her own absurd divorce—twenty thousand a week in child support! Sophie marvels—is shown in another picture with her nearly ex-husband, CEO of an entertainment-information conglomerate. They look happy, too, thinks Sophie.