“Yes,” the woman says. “We have about five hundred kids visit a month.”
“It’s a lot nicer than I expected,” Marian admits. “I thought it would be terrible.”
“It is terrible,” says the woman. “Only, it’s not as terrible as it could be. We work really hard for that.”
Marian nods. “How long have you worked here?” she asks the woman, who has very short hair and is dressed in green.
“Ever since I got here. I’m Denise Neal,” she says, holding out her hand. “I’m Soriah’s mother.”
Marian looks at her in shock. “I thought you worked here,” she says finally, shaking Denise’s hand.
“I do. I work in the children’s center. It’s my job.”
“But I thought…”
“It’s all right,” Denise says flatly. “We can sit over here.”
She crosses to one of the plastic tables, and the two women sit, uncomfortably. Marian, who doesn’t know what to do with her legs, ends up in an awkward posture with her knees tightly together, like a matron at a suburban ladies’ lunch, circa 1958. Soriah’s mother watches a massive woman at the next table with a massive infant on her lap. The woman, ignoring the infant, is lecturing a teenaged boy, who predictably sulks. “Is the baby visiting?” asks Marian.
“No, he lives here. Babies can live here till they’re eighteen months old. Then they have to go out.”
“Oh. Well, I guess that’s good,” says Marian. “I mean, I guess it helps start a child off right to be with his mother. And they’re too small to know they’re…”
She stops, horribly embarrassed.
“Yeah. They know later, though,” Denise says. “Somebody told me before I got here, it’s always hardest on the kids. I didn’t doubt it. Thank God for my ma, taking care of Soriah.”
Your ma, thinks Marian, can barely take care of herself.
“Soriah’s a great kid,” Marian says, instead.
“Yeah. So. Can I ask? How did you meet my daughter?”
There is the faintest note of parental concern in the question. Denise looks directly at Marian, and Marian sees clearly now how pretty she is. She has even dark skin, a long, sinewy neck. She has hair cut quite close to her head, and very neat.
“Didn’t she tell you?” Marian asks. “She sent me a letter. About a book I wrote.”
“You wrote a book?” says Denise.
“Yes, but not a book for children. To tell you the truth, I was very surprised to get a letter from an eleven-year-old reader.”
Denise nods. “Yeah. Soriah’s smart. She’s always reading.”
“Not just smart,” Marian leans forward across the plastic table. “She’s curious. She reads to learn, not just for entertainment. And when she’s done with a book, she doesn’t just put it down. She asks questions about it. She wants to talk about it. She has—” Marian stops. She is aware, suddenly, of how this sounds, and how it is about to sound, but she can’t stop herself. “Soriah has a really good mind. She could go to college. I mean, of course she could go to college. What I mean is, she really has to go.”
Denise looks at her. “I went to college,” she says quietly.
Marian, mortified, says nothing.
“I didn’t graduate, but I went. Brooklyn College.”
“Good school,” says Marian.
“I was doing business administration. I did two years.”
“You’ll go back,” Marian says, with an attempt at a reassuring tone.
“No. I’m trying to finish in here. They have a college program.” She stops, then says, “It was drugs, you know. I guess Soriah told you.”
Marian nods. She doesn’t trust herself to say anything out loud.
“I didn’t hurt anybody. I want you to know that. But I had a habit, I’m not denying it. What they found, though, it wasn’t even mine. It was something I was keeping for my boyfriend. He held someone up, and when they came to search the house, they found it in my stuff. So he got five years for holding someone up with a gun, and I got fifteen for possession.”
This is spoken tonelessly. Marian has been a reader of the New York Times long enough to know that Denise’s situation is far from unique. Her story, in its basic parameters, very likely serves many Bedford Hills inmates.
“You think she’s okay?” asks Denise.
Marian turns to look at Soriah, far across the room. “I’m worried her school isn’t keeping up with her,” she says. “Of course, it’s none of my business.”
“What do you mean, not keeping up?”
“Nobody’s pushing her at the school. And if somebody doesn’t push, they’ll just leave her alone.”
“But if she’s doing okay,” Denise says, “it’s good they’re leaving her alone.”
Marian shakes her head. “I don’t think it’s good. Look, she’s a great kid. I don’t think you need to be worried about her.”
Denise leans forward. “Why don’t you help her with the school? Why don’t you tell them they should be teaching her better?”
Because I’m not her mother, Marian thinks, recoiling. Because it has nothing to do with me. She is on the point of taking offense, but then, abruptly, she sees something in Denise’s face that is not an abdication of responsibility, and not an imperviousness to her daughter’s needs, and not the narcissism of a mother who failed to reject both drugs and gun-wielding boyfriends the minute she gave birth to another human being. This is unfettered misery. And it is a supplication.
“I’m not getting out, you know,” Denise says abruptly. “I don’t know if Soriah told you that. She used to pretend I was going to get out and we were going back where we were living, but I’m not getting out. I’ve got nine more years, and that’s it.”
Marian nods.
“What you just said? About how she’s reading to learn? There was a girl like that here, when I first came. Her mama’s still in here, for killing her husband, because he beat her up. But this girl, she came to visit a lot. She was about six years old then. Her name was Samantha. You see that bookshelf?” Denise points to where Soriah is sitting. “She just sat herself down and read when she came here. She must have read every book. But the last time I saw her? She had on high heels and real tight pants, and she was wearing a shirt that looked like a bra. Her mama told me she was on the pill. And the mama was happy! She said, ‘Samantha’s not gonna get pregnant like I did.’ But she’s thirteen.”
Marian, speechless, nods.
“I don’t want that to happen to Soriah. I don’t want her coming in here looking like that, you understand?”
Her tone hovers between desperation and command. Marian waits.
“When I first came here, Soriah used to say, ‘Mama, let’s play memories.’ She wanted to talk about what she remembered, from when I took care of her. Now she doesn’t ask that. I guess she doesn’t like to remember that now.”
“Maybe,” Marian says carefully, “it just means she’s thinking about the future, not the past.”
Denise turns a pained face in the direction of her daughter. “I don’t even know you,” she says quietly. “I don’t know anything about you. You got kids?”
Across the room, Soriah closes her book. She detaches herself from her audience and gets to her feet. “No kids,” says Marian in a whisper, as if it were a secret. “I couldn’t have them.”
Denise nods. This, evidently, is explanation enough.
“Well, I want to thank you for everything you’re doing for Soriah.”
I’m not doing anything, Marian nearly says, but she doesn’t, because it isn’t true. Whatever her intentions—an hour ago, this morning, last month—they’re all beside the point, and all that matters now is that she is part of the life of the woman seated across from her, because she is part of Soriah’s life. This is the heart of the matter: She has done. She is doing. And, most significant: She will do. There isn’t any point in saying otherwise. Instead, Marian offers her most gracious smile—a smile of social privilege and social oblig
ation, a smile that might have earned the approval of even her mother, Mimi Warburg—and says, “You’re welcome.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Insomnia
It is 3:28 in the morning, a fact made manifest to Oliver by the green glow of the numbers on Marian’s bedside clock. Even so, even given the long concentration Oliver has brought to those numbers, he can’t seem to get beyond their empirical reality to some kind of deeper meaning, such as a justification for his being awake in the middle of the night, beside Marian in a king-size bed, in a former stable, on a patch of outrageously expensive real estate at the eastern tip of Long Island. And then, in any case, it is 3:29 in the morning.
He is ill versed in insomnia. Sleep, for Oliver, has always come easily. If the odd truck or siren on Hudson Street should wake him, he merely turns over and falls again into sleep, letting it hold him until it is time for the flower market or the sun, whichever comes first. This aptitude is something Matilda once mentioned, he recalls now, as 3:30 clicks over and glows, sedately, from the far side of Marian’s shoulder. In a fight once, ages ago, so long ago he can’t remember its impetus or central theme, she had said, “You’re so selfish, you sleep through everything,” and he had been terrified that he might have told her, at some crushingly intimate moment, something he meant never to tell anyone, which was that he had once mostly slept through nearly dying, but in the end it turned out that she was talking about something else—about his sleeping beside her one night as she wept, loudly, hoping he would wake up and comfort her. And now he is the one hoping the sleeping person beside him will wake and comfort him.
Except that Oliver doesn’t seem to want that, either. He lies stiffly, 3:31, 3:38, 3:50, watching Marian breathe, a crescent of white skin visible over the sheet at her shoulder, and he tries to recollect the sex, as if that will comfort him back to sleep and rid him of whatever irksome thing is hovering here. The sex took place only a couple of hours earlier, after all—and yet it baffles him that he cannot seem to remember anything about it. Except the fact that it happened here, in this bed, but that slip of remembrance may have been reconstructed from the smell they have left behind, which is still evident, which is usually a good smell, a smell he loves, but for some reason isn’t just now.
Maybe it was simply unmemorable, Oliver thinks. And that’s fine. The earth doesn’t have to move every time. It isn’t about the sex anyway, that’s what he keeps telling her. Well, that’s not precisely what he keeps telling her. What he keeps telling her is that it isn’t about her looks, or her age, and it isn’t! Normally he loves these trial domesticities, so rarely allowed, when they can act like the couple they might be, eating together and picking up the paper and talking and making the bed. But he is not loving this night, and he is not sure he wants to figure out why.
It is only Oliver’s second time in the beach house, the first a midweek in July when she was so terrified of their being seen that they never left the property. Now it’s early December and the Hamptons are deserted, with empty streets in the towns and plenty of parking for the few stores that remain open. Marian had been brave enough to take him to the hardware store to buy salt—a big deal, Oliver tells himself—and introduce him to her plumber, when they unexpectedly encountered him in the parking lot, without losing her composure. They even had dinner last night at Turtle’s Crossing in Amagansett, where the only attention they attracted was reassuringly hostile—the kind of looks any townies might give any summer people who didn’t know their place.
Maybe she is trying it on, thinks Oliver, so fully awake now that he can make out ocean sounds, half a mile away. Maybe she is actually beginning to imagine a life with him, with plumbers and the clerk at the hardware store, just possibly wondering what Mrs. Kahn is doing buying salt with a man half her age. Perhaps this trip is not the compensation he first imagined, for their thwarted weekend nearly two months ago, but an interlude with its face to the future. His future with Marian—the one he has been asking for, ever since the summer. But the thought does not lift him, and he can’t bear that it does not.
Given that his mood now seems unshakable, Oliver makes an effort to pinpoint its beginning, and here, at any rate, he has some success. Before the sex but after returning from the restaurant. When he went upstairs to phone his answering machine at home.
Yes, that was it.
And yes, there had been yet another phone message from Barton Ochstein on the answering machine. And no, he no longer finds anything about Barton remotely funny, and wonders that he ever did.
Oliver closes his eyes. He is wired now, stiff with anxiety. He has not said a word to Marian about her cousin and his ardent attentions, not since that time in front of her building, delivering the first order of roses he assembled for the mythic Olivia. If she thinks, as she undoubtedly does, that Barton’s suit has petered out, that is because Oliver has shielded her, and perhaps—he admits—himself. Barton has been anything but discouraged by Olivia’s failure to respond to his gifts. In addition to the weekly deliveries to his putative fiancée’s Morningside Heights apartment, Barton has continued to order arrangements for Olivia, growing increasingly flattering and specific in their accompanying cards, and Oliver has continued to charge Barton for his orders and also continued to deliver them to Marian, despite the fact that he has never yet been paid for a single stem. Oliver is no longer at all smug about his handling of the matter. How long will Barton be content to wait for his reluctant transvestite before saying something to Marian? Or worse, bounding into the White Rose to demand actual physical contact with his elusive object of desire?
The phone calls madden Oliver. Naturally, he rues his decision to give out his own phone number. Over the past weeks, Barton’s messages have progressed from formal greetings to something more familiar, more intimate, more pleading. And without the slightest reciprocation—without even the most formal thanks for his flowers! Olivia, thinks Oliver, has been chilly in the extreme to her suitor. Any other man would surely have gotten the message by now, but Barton seems to have convinced himself that Olivia is a coquette, toying with him before she reels him in. He dearly wants to be reeled.
Over the past weeks, Barton’s pattern has established itself: a call to the shop confirming that Olivia has picked up her flowers, followed by a call to the apartment to flatter and cajole, followed—a few days later—by another call to the shop for a bigger and more flamboyant order, with a more explicit card. Plus hang-ups. Lots of hang-ups. Two of them, for example, when Oliver checked his answering machine last night. And then the message: “Hello, dear Olivia. This is Barton Ochstein. Did you love your dahlias? I’m coming into town at the end of the week. I know a sweet little restaurant in Chelsea, we could have a quiet dinner. Call me, dear.”
Marian, if she knew, would be irate, and mostly—Oliver knows this—at him. Her cousin’s impropriety aside, Oliver created this sorry scenario, Oliver took it upon himself to don Marian’s clothes and saunter forth into the world as a latter-day Lord Satterfield. He had only wanted to make fun for them both, but now he is paying the piper. With every phone call and every flower Olivia has become more of a problem, more of a snare, and not just for himself and Barton but for Marian, too. And, he supposes, for Sophie Klein. Every one of them, he thinks, rolling stiffly onto his back, has a right to be furious with him.
Marian has always chided him for his playful side. Even as she laughed along, she cautioned him: he might easily make a mistake, and go too far, and harm them both. Now this silly trick would prove her right, Oliver thinks, closing his eyes. She would fail to understand how it had gotten away from him, week by week and flower by flower. She would not laugh with him now. She would find nothing at all amusing in the spectacle of Barton, on the eve of his nuptials, in avid pursuit of another woman, especially another woman he knows is no woman at all. Even speculation about her disapproval is more than Oliver can stand, but while he berates himself for having dug the hole in which he finds himself, the means to get out of h
is hole utterly elude him. He could try passing along a message from Olivia to Barton to cease his efforts, but he somehow doubts Barton would take that lying down. He could tell Barton that there is no Olivia, but that would leave the matter of the man dressed in woman’s clothing in Marian Kahn’s apartment on a Friday afternoon with her husband out of town. He could threaten to pass along certain details to Sophie Klein, but the memory of his personal remark to Sophie is still fresh, and she had been perfectly right to resent it. No matter how clear to him Sophie’s imminent mistake may be, it has nothing to do with him. She has nothing to do with him. Oliver turns over in the bed again and opens his eyes.
Four-oh-three. Oliver looks bitterly at the numbers, then considers the bedroom window, which looks south to the ocean. It seems absurd that he has not seen the ocean on either of his trips here, but the beach does not appear to figure prominently in Marian’s Hamptons life. The house, which once sheltered horses for a nearby estate, has a pool out back, so minimalist it registers as a kind of dark decoration in the lawn. The beach is for families and singles on the make, and a front lawn for a still loftier echelon of Hamptons houses. It might as well be an hour’s drive away.
Oliver sits up. Suddenly, he is full of resentment that she has never taken him to see the ocean. Just because the beach isn’t part of her routine, why has she never thought of him? Last summer they could have swum or lain in the sun like normal people, but she never suggested it. Last night they could have walked there in a few minutes and been back before the fire was out, but they didn’t.
He is aware of his hands clenching fistfuls of goose-down comforter. He does not know if he has ever before felt such a fog of ill will. Marian, undistressed, sleeps on.
Quietly, Oliver slips from the bed. He puts on his jeans, his sweater, and laces up his boots. He is going to see the ocean, right now. He will go quickly and stake his claim to it, and then return with his absence unnoted, which doesn’t matter because he is not doing it to be cruel to her but to be kind to himself. He begins to move across the wood floor, which creaks.
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