The White Rose

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Just let me out. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “Oliver, don’t be stupid.”

  “There. On the corner,” he says wildly, but she continues west, to Park. “Stop the car!” Oliver shouts.

  “I’m driving you home.”

  He flings open the passenger door, jolting her to a stop. “Thanks for a lovely time,” he tells her, with real cruelty, and steps out in the middle of Park Avenue, to the loud accompaniment of horns.

  “Oliver, get back inside!” Marian says frantically.

  He walks away, almost jauntily, holding his bag over his shoulder with a crooked finger, crossing Park to the island between its northbound and southbound lanes. The silver gray of her Volvo shoots past, westbound. He watches it as far as Madison, where it turns right, and when it does, every trace of his piggish contentment leaves him in a rush. He stands on the island, shivering a little in the air after the warm car, holding his bag in this ridiculous posture. He stands still.

  Motion in the city is its own language, understood by natives, quickly learned by newcomers. There are not many legitimate reasons to stand, inert, on a Manhattan street, and the illegitimate ones—drunkenness, schizophrenia, criminal intent—are blaring signals to the justly cautious. Oliver thinks of this, dimly, as pedestrians stream past him in both directions, plainly giving him a wide berth, then again as the light switches and traffic runs north and south past his little island, but he can’t somehow bring himself to move. Isn’t she coming back? The question finally occurs to him. Isn’t Marian coming to get him?

  He calculates the time it would take from Madison, northbound, to a right turn on Fifty-eighth, and then a right turn southbound on Park. This is time long past by now, Oliver understands, but then, when you think about it, how can Marian stop for him when he stands like this, ridiculously, in the middle? He is prolonging this ordeal by his own ignorance. Should he cross the street to the sidewalk on the southbound side and wait there? Will she know he’s gone that way and not the other way, to the northbound side? He turns experimentally to look at the other side. There is no silver Volvo on the northbound side. There is also no silver Volvo on the southbound side. Is she waiting for him on Madison?

  And how could he have said that to her, about having a lovely time? What kind of asshole is he?

  Unexpectedly, Oliver begins to cry. From the corner of one teary eye, he watches a mother snatch her little girl out of his path. In minutes he has devolved from citizen to untouchable, but he can’t seem to stop falling apart. He wants Marian. He has to apologize right now. He has to get them back to where they were before…

  But he has to keep going back, further and further, to find before.

  Oliver waits for the green light. When it comes, he crosses Park and moves swiftly, in his city gait. He presses onto the crosstown bus, behind a clutch of pubescent girls hemmed in by Bloomingdale’s bags, then leaps off at Broadway and rushes to the subway station at Columbus Circle. The wait for the number 9 is long and malodorous (two teenagers in down jackets and falling-down blue jeans share a gyro just down the platform), but when the train comes Oliver easily finds a seat. The intensity of his purpose, as the train flies north, feels good, though he has not yet brought his mind to bear on what he will say when he actually sees Marian, nor considered the possibility that she might not want him turning up in her office. All that matters, he tells himself with stubborn focus, is that he offer his apology and his love. Then he can leave her alone, for her meeting and the rest of her day. Just pull us back from the edge, he thinks. It’s a modest goal, the only one he is capable of.

  Oliver leaves the subway at 116th Street and walks east, moving swiftly through the Columbia campus, fairly confident of his destination. He has been here only once before, early in his affair with Marian (for a very memorable afternoon on the floor of her Fayerweather Hall office, while urgent students and aggravated colleagues knocked at the locked door), but he finds the building easily now and pulls open the door. He climbs the stairs, bucking the flow of students and dodging their ponderous backpacks. At the second-floor landing he turns right along the corridor to the faculty offices, walking past several open doors to the room at the end of the hall, where he finds Marian’s door unaccountably shut. There is no answer to his knock. The unwelcome image of Marian and another man, rolling around on the carpet inside, assaults his imagination, and for a long moment he glares at the plastic rectangle on the pale wood door declaring her name and office hours. She isn’t here, he reassures himself, calculating the travel time by car (considering weekday afternoon Manhattan traffic) compared to the rapid trip he himself has just made by bus and subway. He got here first, is all, and she is even now making her way from the university parking facility, or vainly searching for a parking space in the neighborhood. Or maybe—the idea strikes Oliver—she went home first, left her car there, changed her clothes before the meeting. Or maybe she is indeed on campus, but the meeting has already begun and Marian is there, not here. But where is there?

  Oliver turns, retracing his steps to the department office beside the stairwell, an open area with several desks at which no one is sitting. He stands awkwardly at the periphery of the office, hoping someone will come to him. Minutes pass, though, before someone does, and he grows more anxious, waiting. He eyes Marian’s likely colleagues, her possible students, feeling so detached from her, half-expecting her to turn the corner and see him and increasingly afraid of how she might react to the sight of him. It has just struck him that the best possible thing might be to go now, before he interacts with anyone here, when a woman catches his eye. “Help you?” she says. She is a young woman. Maybe a college student herself, Oliver thinks.

  “I was looking for Marian Kahn,” he says.

  “Her office is down there,” the woman says, pointing.

  “I know. She’s not there.”

  “Well then,” the woman shrugs, setting down her stack of files on one of the desks. “She’s not here.”

  “Yes, but…do you know where the meeting is?”

  The woman looks up. She waits for more information.

  “The meeting on the job applicants,” he says, dropping his voice.

  She frowns, her forehead deeply ridged. “Job applicants? Is that today?”

  Before he can answer, she twists and shouts, “Lucy, is the AHA hiring committee meeting today?”

  “Next week,” says Lucy, from an adjacent office.

  “Next week,” the woman informs Oliver, unnecessarily. “Not today.”

  Oliver steps back, reeling, nearly tripping over his own bag. He is frantically trying to explain this to himself, to place it within the realm of the not-tragic, the not-irredeemable, but he can’t. She isn’t here. She isn’t coming here at all. She is somewhere else, and she is staying there.

  “Thanks,” he manages to say, but barely.

  “You can leave her a message,” the woman says. “There’s her box over there…”

  But Oliver doesn’t even look. He reaches down for his bag, grabbing it for dear life, and lurches toward the staircase. He is barely in control of his feet, barely in control of his face, and so horrendously sad that it actually hurts to think. The banister is clammy under his right hand. Gravity alone brings him back down the stairs. Then, before him, the entryway door opens, admitting the cold and a person who does not move out of the way. Irritated, Oliver looks up.

  “Hello,” the person says. “Oliver?”

  Oliver nods. He is supposed to do more than nod. He is supposed to say, “Hello, Sophie.” But this is quite beyond him, not least because he is suddenly, cataclysmically breathless, and not altogether sure where the floor is, and incidentally numb, especially in his hands. In fact, he is not even very sure that his hands are still attached to him except that, briefly looking down, he can see one of them still holding the bag, the bag of his long-ago sojourn in Marian’s house and life.

  “What are you doing here?” Sophie says. “Are y
ou here to see me?”

  Marian’s eyes are brown, Oliver thinks. Sophie’s eyes look black, her hair is black—truly black—the circles under her eyes are verging on black, themselves. She is wearing a flannel shirt again. The same as the first time? he wonders. In the kitchen? Automatically, he looks for the gap between the buttons, but it isn’t there. He wants it to be there. He feels horribly gypped that it isn’t there. It occurs to him that Sophie hasn’t the slightest idea how lovely she is. And why should she? He hadn’t the slightest idea himself, until just now.

  “Are you all right?” Sophie says, with real concern.

  “I don’t think so,” Oliver manages. It comes out hoarse, and barely audible.

  “Are you lost?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Are you…Did you want to talk to me about the flowers? For the wedding?”

  Oliver looks at her. He hasn’t done the first thing about the flowers for her wedding. And now, just thinking about the flowers for her wedding fills him with abject misery. “I’m sorry,” he hears himself say. “I feel terrible about what happened.”

  She frowns. Oliver notes the faintest of freckles on her skin. Those circles under her eyes—he hadn’t seen them before. Maybe they weren’t there before, or maybe he just hadn’t noticed. But how could he not have noticed? He has missed so much, he thinks.

  “You came all the way up here?” Sophie asks. “To apologize?”

  “Yes!” Oliver says, with some relief, and truthfully enough. He has in fact come all the way up here to apologize, albeit not to her.

  “Well, it’s not necessary. I shouldn’t have run out like that. I’ve actually been meaning to phone you, myself.”

  “You have?” he asks, astonished.

  Sophie grins awkwardly. “Not that you haven’t seen crazy brides before…”

  “You are so beautiful,” says Oliver.

  They look at each other in shock.

  “I won’t take it back,” he tells her.

  Sophie nods. “All right.”

  “Don’t ask me to,” he adds, sounding very nearly angry.

  “All right,” she says.

  The door opens. Someone pushes past them, up the stairs.

  “Would you like to go somewhere? And talk?” says Sophie.

  Oliver nods.

  “My apartment is—”

  “Yes,” Oliver says, and walks past her, quickly, terrified to make contact. After the smallest hesitation, Sophie comes, too, then passes him to show the way, walking slightly ahead and not looking back. They cross Amsterdam and walk east on 118th, to Morningside Drive. He knows the address. He has written it himself, week after week, and taped it to a bowl or a vase of white roses, and given it to Bell for delivery, but he has never been here, himself. He follows Sophie inside the building, past the slumbering doorman, into the ornate, aged elevator. He won’t meet her eyes, and neither of them says a thing.

  There is exactly one thought in Oliver’s head, and that is the remembered patch of revealed abdomen between the misaligned buttons of Sophie’s flannel shirt. Whatever presents itself as an impediment to that patch of skin will have to be swept aside, he is thinking. Not because the hunger he feels is carnal—not merely that—but because he feels he is supposed to put his hand on her there, and then his mouth, and when he does these things he will understand why he is following Sophie Klein to her apartment, so full of longing that he wonders how he can survive the walk, and the wait, though it’s measured in minutes, and then seconds. She is clattering her keys ahead of him in the narrow corridor. She is turning the key in the lock, then turning around to face him, her back to the open door, and then they are both inside.

  He touches her face and her throat, the long thick plait of her hair. He touches her hand. It never occurs to Oliver that she does not want him to do these things. Sophie stands perfectly still, her breath shallow. “I want,” he begins to say, but the object of his want escapes into redundancy. He wants everything: her hair, which is somehow unbound around them, and her breasts under his hands and her mouth, amazingly open, and at last, the white skin of her belly, which he goes down on his knees to press his cheek against. He is not confused about where he is, or whom he’s with. Whatever disquieting thoughts occur to him—the fact that he is in love with Marian, for example, the fact that Sophie is engaged to Barton—he beats back and then returns to her, and to the amazement on her face. She holds him very tightly. “Sophie,” Oliver says, kissing her throat and asking permission.

  It afflicts him that another man might have touched her like this, but only until he is inside her. When he is inside her she looks at Oliver as she cannot possibly have looked at anyone, ever, ever, and he understands for the first time what it means to a woman to be, actually, penetrated by another person, and the privilege of that, and the joy of that, which is so much more than physical. Tenderness passes between them as they move, first slowly, then less slowly. Sophie pulls him against her, and he opens his eyes to watch until she stops and is very still. She is so lovely, he thinks. She breaks open his heart.

  “Oh, don’t cry,” Sophie tells him, but he does. And then she does, too.

  “I’m involved with someone,” Oliver says, sobbing.

  Sophie’s fingers move in his hair. “What a coincidence. Me too.”

  Without stopping crying, he laughs. Then he asks her what they are going to do.

  “I don’t know,” Sophie says.

  They lie in some discomfort on the hard floor of her entryway, their clothes detached and strewn about them. Sophie’s hair falls over Oliver’s face like a veil. The afternoon light fades through Sophie’s living-room windows, and the shadows edge up the hallway to where they are lying, and finally it is dark everywhere.

  “My father’s dying,” says Sophie.

  Oliver opens his eyes. He can’t see a thing in the dark.

  “Sophie,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

  “He has hepatitis,” she says. “We found out last winter. It was just after I met Bart.”

  Oliver’s head is on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. “Yes.”

  “The crazy thing is, all this time I’ve refused to see the connection.”

  Oliver concentrates. Across the city, a siren whines. A thought occurs to him, but in a delayed, sluggish manner. “Isn’t hepatitis…I mean, can’t they cure that?” he says.

  “Hepatitis A, they can cure. Hepatitis B. Unfortunately, our letter came up C.”

  “And that’s…”

  “Bad.”

  It’s so cold now. The bare floor is cold. Oliver turns tightly toward her until his face, at least, is warm.

  “How long…,” Oliver begins to ask. “I mean, what are his doctors saying?”

  “Oh,” she says, “I don’t think doctors tell you anymore. They didn’t tell us, anyway. Maybe we just didn’t ask. He was hospitalized last summer, then for a week in September. They keep switching the drugs, but it’s sort of a diminishing return, you know?”

  Oliver nods against her chest. She is, he realizes, both obstinate and wretchedly frail. Like himself. Which also, and just as suddenly, occurs to him.

  “You lost your father,” she says, matter-of-factly.

  “Yes,” he confirms.

  “Did you get over it?” Sophie asks.

  The unwelcome image of Henry Rosenthal shudders into his head. “No,” he says.

  “But you have your mother?” she asks, her voice cracking a bit.

  Oliver lifts the hair from over his face. He can see her eyes. “Sophie,” he tells her, “you won’t be alone.”

  As if to prove this, the telephone rings. Sophie flinches.

  “I don’t have to get that,” she says, unconvincingly, but when Barton Ochstein’s booming voice begins to fill the apartment, she curses and scrambles to her feet. Oliver watches her move, naked, down the corridor. “I’m here,” she cries, snatching up the phone.

  Oliver sits, his back against the entryway wall. His
sweater hangs on by one arm. His pants and shorts bunch stupidly at his ankles. He can hear Sophie, muttering agreements, giving nothing away. “Oh, no,” she says, with false empathy. “Well, I’m sure that’s fine. Okay. Okay. Yes, you too.”

  Oliver stands and pulls up his pants. He puts his other arm into the sweater and pulls it over his head. Then he walks down the corridor.

  Sophie is sitting on a stool, next to the kitchen counter. Oliver’s flowers—his, not Barton’s—are on the counter, failing. One rose droops down to the butcher block, forlorn. The call is over, and Sophie leans forward, forearms together on the Formica surface. Her hair falls over her shoulder, nearly obscuring her breasts, her ribs, but oddly not her face. “That was Barton,” she says, unnecessarily.

  “I gathered.”

  “He doesn’t want to have the rehearsal dinner at the inn after all,” she says. “He managed to get his plumbing parts delivered. For the downstairs bathroom.” She trails off. “At his house. So he wants to have the dinner there.” Sophie pauses. “He’s very proud of his house, you know. He likes people to see it.”

  “Sophie,” Oliver says.

  “I said it was fine. I don’t really care about it one way or the other. And my father loves Bart’s house.”

  “Sophie,” he says sharply. “What are you talking about?”

  She looks up at him and frowns.

  “My father…You should have seen him when he met Bart. When I started seeing him, my father was so thrilled.”

  Oliver shakes his head.

  “It’s…He thinks of Bart as someone who will keep me safe. Do you understand? Because he won’t be here,” Sophie says, stumbling over her words. “And he’s right. I’ll be safe. I don’t feel anything.” She laughs, a strained laugh. “How safe is that?”

  “You can’t marry him, Sophie.”

  “I realize that,” she says. “But I can’t not marry him, either.”

  Oliver is about to ask for an explanation, but he stops himself. He doesn’t feel entitled to the question. Instead, he looks away from Sophie and takes in what he can see of the apartment: the view of the open sky over Morningside Park and Harlem beyond, a few paintings, a wall of bookshelves. Over the kitchen table is a framed poster bearing the black-and-white image of a woman’s wide face, her dark hair parted far on the side of her head, with German text. It announces an exhibit, Oliver thinks, or perhaps an academic conference. He peers at the title, Die Weiße Rose, deciphering the language as best he can. Then he understands.