The White Rose

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “You’re too extraordinary for that to be enough,” he says.

  “Ah,” Marian says, truly weary. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m very, very ordinary, and very, very lucky. I’m alive. I’m healthy, so far. I have a stable marriage and wealth and even a career that’s given me great satisfaction. And right now I have this, which I’m loving. But I can’t have it forever and I wish you would stop talking this way because I want to enjoy it now.”

  Oliver leans forward, one arm outstretched. Fingers find her face: chin, jaw, ear. “Why not?” he asks, sincerely questioning. “I don’t understand: Why not forever? Why not take forever if it’s offered? And it is, Marian. We’ll start from here and we’ll just go forward.”

  “I don’t like forward,” she says, losing her reserve. “I don’t like thinking about it, and I certainly won’t be responsible for dragging you down. If you’re so empathetic, if you’re so sure you understand me, why is this so hard for you to get? I’m forty-eight. If this is the best time of my life—and it is, Oliver, in many ways it is—then where do you think we go from here? I’m not going back to my girlish figure, I can tell you that. I’m not going back to wild abandon. I won’t be trekking in Nepal anytime soon, and I’m not going to have any kids. It’s a different country I’m going to, do you get that?” She is louder, more shrill than she can remember being, at least with him. “Oliver,” Marian says sternly. “Enjoy your youth. Enjoy me, by all means, as much as you want and as often as you want. But please don’t humiliate me by trying to make me fit into your life. I won’t fit.”

  “You’re afraid to get old,” he says with unbearable starkness. She herself has managed to avoid the word “old.” “That’s all it is. I don’t get it. I’m not afraid of it.”

  “Well, it’s a long way off for you.” She is harsh.

  “No, I mean I’m not afraid of your getting old. I know you were beautiful as a young woman. You’re beautiful now. I have every reason to believe that when you’re an old woman, you’ll be beautiful then, so what’s the big deal? It’s not why I love you today, so why would it matter in the future?”

  Marian lurches off the couch, wounded, clutching at her pants. She has never, she thinks wildly, understood the phrase “arrogance of youth” until this moment. Even Valerie Annis did not cut her so deeply. He tries to grab for her as she leans down to yank at the fabric: “Hey!” It sounds like a bark. She hates him. Then she hates herself for thinking that. “Marian, let’s talk about it!”

  “Why, so you can patronize me even more?” Marian chokes through new tears. This is getting tiresome. She has always cried too easily. Her classmates at Brearley knew how to achieve the effect: a comment about her looks, her money, her odd pedigree, at once snobbish and deficient with Jewishness. Warburg weeps again! she thinks, fumbling with the zipper. She steals a look at him and finds him injured on the couch in his now ridiculous skirt and wig. A wig he stole from her personal cupboards in her personal office. How dare he go into her things! And hasn’t he been laughing at her ever since? “You’re just being selfish!” she cries. “You’re not really interested in understanding. It flatters you to think I might love you so much I would leave my husband and my life and go live with you. Or marry you! But that isn’t what you want, really. You want to have your affair with an older woman and then go back to your own life. Which includes things I couldn’t give you even if I wanted to.”

  “No!” He jumps to his feet and makes a grab for her.

  “You feed me some line about how it doesn’t matter that I’m getting old, but you belittle me by ignoring the fact that it matters to me, and you patronize me by implying that it’s because of my vanity. It isn’t vanity, Oliver, it’s time.”

  He shakes his head, barely visible. “Time.”

  “Time! Which is no longer on my side, to quote the music of my youth. I’m losing it, every day. It’s running past me, it’s going faster than it used to, I swear.”

  She can just make him out. He is shaking his head.

  “No, of course you don’t believe me. You’re just…you’re settling into your life now. You’re out of school, so you don’t have that artificial calendar anymore that says the year is beginning, it’s halfway over, it’s ending, and now it’s beginning again, so time feels different to you,” she barely recognizes her own voice, but she keeps on. “And of course none of your friends are having heart attacks or getting cancer and you all feel like it will go on forever. But it won’t. Sometimes I still feel twenty-six and I wonder why I’m so tired and a couple of my friends are dead and everybody else is coloring their hair and getting their eyes done or having injections in their foreheads, and then I remember: that was twenty years ago. But it wasn’t. I mean, it feels like it wasn’t. It feels like…” She trails off. She despises cliché and won’t say what it feels like. “You know,” Marian hears herself say, “what I hate most of all these days? You’re going to think this is absurd.”

  “I won’t,” says Oliver, who is straining, she can tell, to understand.

  “I hate daylight savings time. I hate having to give up that hour in the spring. I hate setting all the clocks forward. I resent it so much now.”

  The smallest laugh escapes him. But then he remembers that he is not to think her absurd.

  “But you get the hour back, Marian. In the fall.”

  “Not really.” She shakes her head, genuinely saddened. “I never feel it come back. I always feel I’ve been tricked out of an hour of my life. It all goes so fast.” She stands for a moment in the darkness and is grateful for his silence. How she will ever face him again she does not know. She feels ridiculous, painfully neurotic. Ship me off, she thinks, like all of the other middle-aged lady intellectuals who didn’t bother having kids to keep themselves sane. Her best book is behind her anyway, so what’s the harm?

  “Do you want to have your eyes done?” Oliver says, surprisingly. “I mean, is that what you’re saying? Because if you do, I wouldn’t necessarily like it, and I certainly don’t think you need it, but if something like that would make you happy, then I want you to know I’d support it.”

  This, to her own amazement, lightens everything, and she smiles. “That’s sweet. That’s lovely of you. But no, I wouldn’t do it. I won’t try to slow time down, because that’s arrogant. And I’m too grateful for what I’ve had.”

  “Your health,” he says tersely. “Your career. And Marshall. I know, you told me.”

  “Yes! I am! And I wouldn’t…I don’t know, get a face-lift or something to try to pretend I’m not as old as I am. And I wouldn’t marry a man who’s twenty-six to try to pretend I’m not too old to be married to a man who’s twenty-six. This might be some kind of important life experience for you, but it doesn’t work that way for me.”

  This she regrets instantly, but of course it is too late, and he is too proud not to take offense.

  “Jesus, Marian, how can you say that? You know how I feel about you! Why are you trying to reduce my feelings, which are genuine, to a…a…rite of passage? Is that how you push me away?”

  “No,” she says, but he is unstoppable.

  “I didn’t need a sexual awakening from you, and I didn’t get one,” he says. “I’m with you because I love you and I want to be with you. It isn’t about our ages. We’re just two people who came together. It’s true we didn’t start at the same time, but can’t we finish together?”

  She stares at him, weary. Of course it is right, what he says, essentially right, though there is a certain element of drama, undeniable even to Oliver, connected to falling passionately in love with his mother’s childhood friend. She knows—truly, soberly, she knows—that his passion for her is real, that it comes from the planet of all sexual passion and all romantic love. That he loves her and even believes he wants to be with her and marry her. She does not want that love to end on this evening, in this dark, sad, and oddly disconnected scene.

  “I could never be with a man who has better legs tha
n I do.”

  This throws him. He takes a moment to regroup.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “No,” Marian says, reaching for his hand. “But it’s the best I can do. I’m tired and I’m sad, and I’m worried about what Valerie Annis would do if she found out. Not to mention Marshall. Or your mother. I want to go back to the day we were having, Oliver, but it’s gone and I’m just too wrecked right now to pull myself together. So I’m thinking, maybe, if I just hang out by myself for a while, and sleep, and do a little work in the morning, I might be able to get back on track with myself and we can meet tomorrow. We could…I don’t know, I could come downtown. We could do something there.”

  Oliver contemplates. Then one hand comes up to his head and pulls off the wig. This is a gesture of resignation. “Fine,” he says, but not harshly.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?” There is a note of anger. “For leaving you?”

  “For not making it harder than it is. For understanding that it’s just an off night, not the whole space-time continuum.”

  After a moment, he smiles. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Marian says. Now that it is settled, now that he is leaving, she has lost her bravado, her will to be alone. Suddenly, she finds herself anticipating the vacuum whoosh of the front door shutting behind him, the creaking of the elevator gears. Oliver, she nearly says. Don’t go.

  Oliver walks over to the other couch, kneels down on the rug, and hunts beneath the fringe for his lost clothing. Then he leaves the room, walking uncomfortably in his hastily pulled-up tights. It is true about his legs, she thinks sadly, watching them crisscross beneath the skirt. They are indeed better than her own: skinny and muscled with fine, smooth knees. Too pretty for her, she thinks. Also too handsome. Christ—had she actually said that about daylight savings time? How sad, Marian thinks. How truly gone I am.

  It is going to be a long and unhappy night.

  Out in the kitchen, there is a shuffle and then the final click of the office door. Oliver comes back in, dressed in his clothes from the prehistory of that morning. She can barely remember them now: black pullover, olive corduroy pants, the brown leather shoes he inherited from his father and cherishes so much that he will not wear them if it looks like rain. Marian puts on a smile so strained it threatens to break. She forces herself to hug him, then she forces herself to stop.

  “Tomorrow,” Oliver says.

  “Yes.” Bravely. “Whatever you want to do.”

  “I’ll have to think about that. I’ll have to give that long thought. Long and detailed.”

  “Good.” She is going to cry again, Marian thinks. She would like him to leave before she does. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  Then, finally, he turns to go. She can breathe, but carefully, knowing he is still near, still close enough to rush back in at the sound she is capable of making. Only a few seconds more. He summons the elevator with a buzz. She counts to three and again to three and once again, and then hears the rumble of gears as the door opens, taking Oliver Stern, whom she does love, and deeply, away.

  Marian lets her head fall forward into her hands. The hands, she notes from a distance, are wet, and it takes a long, disconnected moment to understand that she herself has provided—is providing—this moisture. So boring! Marian thinks, pausing in her misery to be miserable about that, too. She is so beneath her own standard, her new standard, of what a woman ought to be at her time of life. This is the curse of history, she thinks, weeping. This is why it is not necessarily a good thing to unearth our betters from the lost sands of lost time: they do not necessarily show us ourselves to best advantage. Indeed, she has acquired the habit of imagining Lady Charlotte as her own personal critic and now conjures her on the other sofa, incongruous and yet unassailably at home on Park Avenue and in the year 1997, with her skirts fanned around her, flicking her tongue in disgust at the blubbering madwoman. Truly mad! Marian laments noisily. Mad to send away her lover in the middle of passion—idiot, idiot. Just how many twenty-six-year-old lovers does she believe are waiting to take his place?

  Marian gets to her feet. Brandy, she has promised herself, and brandy she will have, in a fine crystal glass in front of the blinking lights of the city. Then, fortified, she will go out into the world and try to do some good thing to redeem herself. Some good thing—she can’t imagine what it might be, but there must be something she can do. First brandy. No, first water, to shock her tears into retreat.

  The only light in the apartment now comes from the kitchen, in a wedge of illumination that crosses the dining room into the room she occupies. It just reaches the small rectangle of paper Oliver left on the coffee table, and when Marian sees this she stops.

  The address from Barton. The address Oliver will need for the flowers. The card to remind him of his commission, and its recipient: Sophie Klein, the fiancée.

  This is the moment when Marian understands that she will not be seeing Oliver the following day. This is when she knows that she will be sick, or will say she is sick, and unable to come downtown. This is when she knows that the ground of their affair has shifted beneath her, and at her behest, even though it may be against her will.

  Which is why she must make sure Oliver does not leave without the card. She moves quickly, forgetting everything else as she tears through the living room and kitchen and snatches up the house phone. There is a clattering sound from the lobby, as a hand fumbles the button to clear the line, and then Hector’s voice, finishing his instructions to a delivery man. “Yes, lobby,” he says finally.

  “Hector? My guest, the young man who just came down? He left something. Is he in the lobby?”

  There is a brief pause. A mumbled consultation. “He’s gone. Carlo took him down.”

  “Can you catch him?”

  “Oh…just a minute,” says Hector. A muffled sound, like a hand over the mouth of the receiver. “Carlo can see him. He’s going after him. Just at the end of the block.”

  “Oh!” She is thrilled. She is truly so grateful. It is a salvation, to have this piece of evidence gone from her apartment and on its way. “Thank you, Hector! I really appreciate it. Thank Carlo for me.”

  “I coming up,” Hector says.

  “I’ll wait at the elevator,” she tells him, and puts down the receiver.

  Then, adjusting her clothing and wiping her hands once more over her face, she exits her own front door to stand in the antechamber and wait.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Clos des Fleurs

  When Oliver comes up from the subway on West Fourth there is a fine mist in the night air that seems to come from all directions and is disorienting in its warmth—like, thinks Oliver, a sprayed disinfectant, or the cloud of perfume permanently ambient on the cosmetics floor of Bloomingdale’s. He closes his eyes instinctively, but the mist is not unpleasant. Oliver walks north on Sixth Avenue, his hands deep in his jacket pockets. He considers again, and again resists, the notion that he is being sanitized, that the hours of sex and fighting and comedy and grief might be washed from his skin and pass from his thoughts. The truth is, he does not want them gone at all. The truth is that the mess and frustration of his life with Marian—and it is a life, now, despite her terror of admitting it—are part of something that he loves. He doesn’t, of course, love her anxieties and self-tormenting, but he knows better than to try to separate the melancholy from her character. He accepts her, in other words. More than that, he wants her.

  It isn’t, after all, the first time they have turned a corner into such confusion. He remembers one of their early dinners, on a Saturday night at Le Rouge, when she traveled the distance from hilarity to depression in what seemed like a single breath, and could be restrained from leaving the table, the restaurant, and all the elation of their first weeks together, only by his two feet gripping, pincerlike, her ankle under the table. Where it comes from is not a mystery to him. Marian seems programmed to deny herself happiness, and the more she lets plea
sure slip past her defenses, the more she seems to beat it back. Since Oliver observes this tendency equally in Marian’s relationship with her friends, in her guilt over money, and in her ambivalence toward professional success—which is merited, in her own case, by the most honest of labor—he knows not to take it personally. So the fact that he has just been expelled from her apartment, and from the weekend they had long ago set aside for themselves, does not entirely crush him.

  But what a waste, Oliver thinks, echoing Marian’s own sentiment from only an hour earlier. What a waste of their weekend, with its absent spouse and its empty apartment and its tender, athletic, glorious commencement. What a waste of this clear night, which might have found them out walking, or holding hands in a movie, or even scouting last-minute cancellations to hear Bobby Short at the Carlyle—he would have loved that, he thinks sadly. And the lost tomorrow, the rare pleasure of waking up with her and falling back asleep, or getting up, or staying in bed…He has experienced these good things just enough to regret their absence. But perhaps, for tomorrow at any rate, there is still a possibility, as Marian said, and he has no reason to disbelieve her, since her moods have a way of shifting back in his direction. They will talk in the morning, and when they do she will say that she wishes she had not needed to be by herself, but hopes they might…soon…

  Tomorrow night, then. Afternoon, if he can coax her from her work, but surely by night, and now the reverie unfolds: what they might do tomorrow night. It unfolds even as he walks, like a carpet stretching down the pavement before him: he will cook for her—he is a skilled cook of limited repertoire—and he will buy a really good bottle of wine, taking the advice of the guy at Christopher Street Wines who can’t quite tell that Oliver is straight (and is so hopeful that Oliver does not see how to communicate this without hurting the guy’s feelings), and then he will talk to Marian and touch Marian and take Marian to bed and be happy.