To Marian’s further shock, the pile of books bore, like a flag, a rather remarkable little sign that read: new york times BEST-SELLER.
She dropped her bags and dug out her cell phone to call Sarabeth.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” said Sarabeth. “We’ve had a bit of a development.”
It went on like that. Marian did the morning television shows, the afternoon radio shows, and sat down with Dinitia Smith for a flattering (even she had to admit) New York Times piece about how a mild-mannered history professor wakes up to find herself on Oprah. She began to be contacted by people from her past. She heard from a Camp Pinecliffe bunkmate, ensconced in Shaker Heights with four children and (she eagerly revealed) a sexual addiction. She heard from her old dance teacher at Miss Fokine’s, who politely inquired after her weak knees. She heard from Caroline Stern in Greenwich, felt terribly guilty, and set aside the letter to answer. She heard from Valerie Annis, interminably.
She heard from many others as well, their letters forwarded by her publisher by the box load, fans eager to contact the living representative of Lady Charlotte, burning to tell her how the vision of Charlotte at her happiest while in the absolute dregs of English society had altered their lives, lifted their depressions, graced them with the ability to let go of their own suffering. The readers who wrote to Marian clung to Lady Charlotte, admired her, and wept (belatedly) at her passing. They formed clubs to discuss her and—astonishingly—to learn more about the eighteenth century. (They wanted to read the books Lady Charlotte had read, visualize the houses in which she’d lived, and try her recipes for bread and pease soup.) She inspired a song cycle based on her letters. A playwright announced that he was composing a one-woman show about her life. Scores of people informed Marian that they were her descendants—a neat trick given that she had died without biological children. Additional letters and works of fiction by Lady Charlotte—all fraudulent, alas—were discovered with regularity.
After the first months, when Marian strained to answer each letter, singularly and with gratitude, she could not help but find the correspondence burdensome. She developed a tendency to let them stack up in their cardboard boxes, making her small office feel a bit like a warehouse. Marshall, who liked things tidy even in the rooms of the apartment he seldom entered, began suggesting a secretary to deal with the backlog, and Columbia obliged with a work-study student for a time, but even with artfully prewritten responses and a good paper shredder she fell behind. After the foreign editions were published, and correspondence seemed to flow from everywhere, Marian more or less gave up.
The box of new mail that arrived today in the arms of Valerie Annis, in the middle of her already derailed Friday with Oliver, was also bound for the back of Marian’s office, where it was fated to rest in baleful accusation for months, probably, before being dealt with. Now, when Marian passes it on her way to the bathroom (where what she has in mind is a long, depressing soak, possibly accompanied by the aforementioned brandy) the sight of it only succeeds in deepening her mood of ineptitude and loss. By this time, she thinks, Oliver is gone, halfway to the subway, probably shaking his beautiful head at the thought of her, and who can blame him? Surely the very notion of them—in bed, in love—is pitiful, and she, for one, intends to feel pity. The weekend is scuttled, with nothing salvaged but a vague promise of dinner the next night. And she did not even kiss him good-bye, Marian thinks miserably.
She turns on the tub faucet and goes to fetch her brandy, pausing to brush her cheek softly against Oliver’s roses (this serves only to heighten her misery), then she returns to the bathroom, but as she does, as she is about to pass, once again, the accusatory box of mail, a thought occurs to her. Perhaps she is going about this wrong. Most writers, after all, enjoy hearing from their readers. Most writers can help themselves to the flattery and decline to feel burdened by it. Why shouldn’t she? Perhaps, in this box, is just the thing she requires for such a dismal Friday evening. Perhaps she might find something to laugh about in the latest claim of a descent from the noble Wilcox line, or some way to feel pride in Lady Charlotte’s life-improving influence. Can’t she indulge in a little sycophantic praise without the guilt?
Marian goes to the kitchen for a knife. The box is sealed with brown tape that, when sliced, splits to reveal a thick pile of mail: pink envelopes (to match the pink book jacket? Marian wonders), manila sheaths, white business mailers with dignified return addresses, postcards of every stripe and even the occasional blue air gram. She helps herself to a wedge of the topmost letters.
In the bathroom, Marian sets down her glass and letters on a ledge and drops her clothes onto the floor, trying to avoid looking through the doorway at the bed, which remains in its earlier, dangerously evocative disarray. Now Oliver is on the subway, Marian thinks, abruptly remembering what he told her, so many hours ago, it seems, about smelling her on his fingertips. She experiences a shock of longing, followed by a long ebb of sadness, and then considers the alarming notion that she could call him right now and leave a message at his apartment, telling him to come back. Just then the phone actually rings, saving her.
She steps out of the puddle of her clothing and goes to answer, illogically hopeful though she knows it can’t be Oliver and doesn’t want to speak to anyone else.
“Hello?” Marian says.
It’s Marshall, sounding hale and distant, calling from Nova Scotia.
“Marian?”
“Oh, hi! Are you having fun?”
“Yeah. But the bugs, Jesus. And you know that citronella is total crap.”
Marian sighs. “I’m sorry. I asked at Hammacher Schlemmer.”
“It’s all right. Ruben brought enough DEET to drown every bug within twenty miles. You know, he shot a deer today.”
She closes her eyes. Technically, she has nothing against hunting, but the point of it eludes her. “How’s he going to get it home?”
“What? Oh, I don’t know. They’re cutting it up into steaks or something. We’ll pick up an ice chest. Listen, anything happening?”
“Oh…” She thinks quickly. “Well, Barton came down today. I didn’t know he was coming but apparently he wrote to me about it. I swear I’m losing my mind.”
“He’s not after money, is he?” says Marshall.
“No. Well, not ours. But listen, you’re going to die: he’s getting married.”
“That fruit?” Marshall barks. “What, like in Vermont? Do we have to go watch while he marries some guy under a chuppah?”
“No, no! To a girl! He’s getting married to Sophie Klein. As in Mort Klein?”
This floors him, even long distance. “You’re not serious. Mort Klein’s daughter? Why, for Christ’s sake, would she marry him?”
Marian sighs. “Love is strange.”
“Mort Klein’s worth more than a billion!”
“Which would cover a lot of restoration, I’d say.”
“Shit, Marian. That’s amazing.”
She agrees. “So, you’re doing lots of corporate bonding?”
Marian hears a grunt. “Yeah, I know it sounds like a bunch of Iron John crap, but the fact is, you go away with someone and you share a toilet with him and sit in a mud hole for a few hours and he becomes a person who is somehow less likely to screw you.”
“And vice versa?”
“Well, in theory.”
Marian laughs. “That’s my Marshall. So what are you all talking about?”
“Oh, the usual. The wives, the kids, the girlfriends.”
She breathes evenly.
“Joking!” he says and laughs. “Only two of them have girlfriends.”
“Which two?”
She thinks: You?
“Hey, I’m not telling. These are my sacred brothers. Secrets revealed in this hunting lodge gotta stay here. But don’t fret,” he adds, “it’s not me, and that’s all you need to worry about.”
“I wasn’t worried,” she says, her voice flat.
“Good. I get back
on Tuesday. We’ll just go to Nicola’s, okay?”
“Okay,” says Marian. “Unless you want me to cook you up some of the meat.”
He pauses. “What meat?”
“The meat! Aren’t you up there shooting things?”
“I’ll take Nicola’s,” he laughs. “You okay and everything?”
“I’m okay,” she says. And everything.
“Good. See you.”
“Yes.”
Marian hangs up the phone. Then she looks at it. Then she says to it, to him, “But I am not okay, actually. Actually, I’m in love, and he’s twenty-six. Actually, he’s Caroline Stern’s son, remember? Oliver? Who has the flower shop? I think about him all the time. All I want is to touch him and talk to him and look at him. I love you and I wouldn’t leave you, no matter what you’ve done, but I’m in love with someone else. What’s the matter with you, Marshall?”
She sits down on the bed, which is at once the bed of her recent lovemaking with Oliver and the bed of her marriage. Her marital bed. Incredibly, it has never occurred to her before this moment what an additional crime it is, to have brought him here, of all the beds she might have chosen. There is a spot of damp near the pillow that she touches with the back of her hand, and a twisted sheet-end falling over the edge of the mattress. The sheets are from a French hotel she and Marshall once stayed in, so smooth and cool they had ended up purchasing two sets from the gift shop. The other set is out at the beach, and has a small burn hole in one of the pillowcases from when their dryer broke down a few summers back. The nights she has slept in these sheets, in this bed, with her husband—they must number in the thousands. She has never slept here with Oliver but she has done other things, things she never did with her husband.
It seems to Marian that she has been remarkably without introspection in these matters, avoiding the hard topics—shameful for anyone, but for a scholar…inexcusable. How she has managed, these past six months, not to consider herself an adulteress she can’t really say, but from the moment she and Oliver began—fell in love, she tells herself—she has evaded most of the self-censure and all of the bitter words: “adultery,” “unfaithful,” “extramarital,” “wanton.” Wanton? thinks Marian. What is wanton, after all? Immodest? Lustful?
Well, I’m certainly lustful, thinks Marian, conjuring the memory of Oliver’s mouth between her legs, and suffering the attendant jolt of pleasure, then its guilty aftermath.
She has had friends who were unfaithful, Marian reflects. Some discussed their affairs with her, some still don’t know that she knows. They were ugly women and beautiful women, newly married and long married to lovely men or utter louts. Some were nonchalant about what they had done, and some were destroyed by it. She knows women whose marriages sailed on, undisturbed, and women who devastated their whole lives, with bitter divorces, distraught children. There seems nothing to unite this group of women, nothing that separates them from the other women she knows, no unifying principle at all, except that she was not one of them. Until now. Until Oliver.
Marian lies back on the bed. It is, for her, a perfect bed, its specific degree of firmness prescribed by the back doctor Marshall consulted some years earlier, and now so familiar to Marian that she finds it difficult to sleep when she is traveling. The damp spot, now close to her face, has a smell of yeast. She closes her eyes, trying to remember the smell of Marshall’s semen, and comes up empty. Married two decades, and her husband’s most intimate smell is utterly beyond her recollection. I must hate him, it occurs to Marian. It’s an act of hate, isn’t it, to bring a lover to a marriage bed? Yet why should she hate Marshall? What has Marshall ever done to be hated?
Marian, sighing, reviews the list.
What she wants, what she has always wanted, is for Marshall not to find out, so that when it is over with Oliver—as of course it will have to be sometime, soon—Marshall will be there, his future with her unaltered. It is certainly unfair, but she can’t help that. She will make up this debt to him as he has made up his own debts to her, with friendship, support, and regard.
Regard, thinks Marian, turning her cheek to the wet patch. It is no match for passion, really. She begins to cry, making the damp spread against her skin. Twenty years with her husband, years of profound challenges and joyful celebrations, and they do not approach that moment this afternoon, in this bed, when he was inside her and moving and she had turned her head to look at his white roses, which are of course still there but of course no longer the same at all.
Marian stops crying by dragging the back of her hand across her eyes. Even more than she wants to vent her sadness, she is tired, especially of crying. She sits up and gets to her feet, then stalks across the room to the bathroom, turning off the tap and easing into the water. It is near scalding, just as she likes it. For the first time in an hour, her mood breaks and slightly lifts. One gulp of brandy and she is very nearly cheerful. The bathroom tiles, gray marble, grow misty with heat, an effect she did not anticipate when she designed the room, but which she enjoys. I am safe, she thinks. As long as I stay here, nothing bad can happen.
Another gulp.
And now, Marian decides, for some entertainment. She picks a letter from the top of the pile, postmarked St. Louis.
Dear Dr. Kahn,
My book group just finished reading Lady Charlotte, and we all wanted you to know that we just love your book. We had such an interesting discussion afterward, about how we all grew up with an idea of what kind of shape our lives were going to have, but she must have had no idea. It’s a good lesson for a bunch of old biddies like us! (We’re in our forties, mostly!) The funny thing is, half of our group didn’t want to read the book in the first place. Mostly, we like novels, especially southern novels. But we’re glad we did, and we all want to read Helena and Hariette, which I read in USA Today they are going to publish again. So thanks for your great book, and if you’re ever in St. Louis, we’d love to show you around!
Sincerely yours,
(Mrs.) Lorna Joseph
“Well, thank you, (Mrs.) Lorna Joseph,” says Marian, pushing the folded paper back into the envelope and setting it down on top of the toilet lid. A little praise, a little heat…isn’t it nice how everything is working out? And to think that there is a whole group of women waiting to show her around St. Louis! Marian begins to think of excuses to go to St. Louis. The centenary of the World’s Fair? The arch? Barbecue?
She drinks a little more brandy.
The next letter is written on hotel stationery from the Miami Marriott but postmarked Los Angeles. It contains no salutation, and reads:
How dare you eggrandise this lesbien! “Lady” Charlotte was no lady and your as bad as her. I saw you on Today and it’s a disgrace how you go around making out like this womans some kind of saint when all she did was fornicate with men she was’nt married to! You need to think about what your doing with your life. I am sending you some litrature because Jesus loves you and has a plan for you’re life, and its not to write books about homosexuals.
It is signed A Christian Women. The inevitable brochure is attached with a paper clip. Its cover shows a painting of the Rapture: planes crashing into buildings, trains on fire, saintly bodies rising from their graves.
Marian puts it on the toilet seat, too.
In her new, albeit fragile, mood, this letter does not unduly distress her. One lesson she has learned is that any opinion expressed by a person who does not understand how to use an apostrophe may be disregarded with impunity. Marian sips her brandy and contemplates the lights of the city through her bathroom’s tall, narrow window.
Next letter:
Dear Professor,
I write to tell you that my father’s mother was Jane Wilcox, who was born in Chicago in 1923. My father thinks his mom’s dad hailed from New York someplace, so I was wondering if you could write back to me and tell me where we fit in to the Wilcox family your book was about. My dad says you should look around the Jamestown area—that’s where he thinks
the family is from. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
Sincerely yours,
Paul MacDonald
“Hire a genealogist, Mr. MacDonald,” Marian says and sighs. “I’m a little busy right now.”
She picks up the next letter.
It slips from its white envelope, a folded piece of paper that bears the heading “New York Public Library, Tremont Branch, Bronx,” but the handwriting, belying such official stationery, is juvenile. Indeed, it slopes down to the right as it crosses the page, as if suffering from the lack of ruled lines.
Dear Professor,
I read your book about the woman who went to England and everything she did. I don’t think I can understand what she had to be so happy about, because she was in prison. Didn’t she mind being in prison? My mom’s in prison and she doesn’t like it and neither do I. I feel like I’m missing the point of your book, so I decided to write to you. I know you’re probably too busy to answer me, but my address is 2111 Hughes Avenue, Bronx, New York 10457.
Yours very truly,
Soriah Neal
P.S. I’m eleven.
Oddly enough, the first thing Marian thinks is, This girl understands the purpose of the apostrophe.
The second thing she thinks is,Why is an eleven-year-old reading my book?
And then the last thing, before depression overwhelms her: This is the saddest letter I have ever read.
CHAPTER SIX
A New Rose
In the morning, Oliver eats his habitual breakfast of scrambled eggs at the Pink Teacup on Grove Street, and reads the New York Times.
The White Rose Page 12