“No,” says Oliver stubbornly. “Barton, do you really want to see me?”
There is silence on the other end of the phone. Oliver panics.
“Barton, don’t you understand how hard this was for me? To phone you? I can’t wait until after the holidays!” Oliver says, with quite genuine desperation. “I thought you felt the same way. I mean, all those beautiful flowers!”
In the continuing silence, Oliver’s anxiety grows.
“Barton?”
“Just thinking,” says Barton.
“This Saturday?” Oliver suggests, coyly.
“Saturday’s bad,” Barton says, understandably enough, given that Saturday is his wedding day.
“Well, what about tomorrow? What about today?” Oliver asks, then regrets it. Today would be problematic. With Marian’s wardrobe off limits, he hasn’t a thing to wear.
“No, no,” Barton thinks aloud. “I’m afraid I have a lot on my plate up here just now. I have…some people are coming in to see me at the weekend. I really can’t make it into town.”
“I’ll come up there if you’re not coming to town. I can come to where you live! All right?”
There is another pause. Oliver waits like a dread-filled angler. But then comes a twitch upon the thread.
“That would be splendid. If you are really willing to come all this way…”
“I am willing!” cries Oliver, his mind racing. “I’ll come to you. You said Saturday was bad. What about Friday?”
Friday is the rehearsal dinner.
“Unfortunately, no. Those people are arriving on Friday. Perhaps…Thursday?”
Oliver considers. Millbrook on Thursday is both temporally and geographically closer to the wedding than Manhattan on Wednesday, but he will have to work with what’s available. “Thursday, then. I’ll come to your house.”
“No!” Barton says firmly. “Not here. It’s in a state. Construction,” he says lamely. “Why not…I know a little inn, not far from here. Very private and very…”
Discreet? thinks Oliver.
“Just the place for a little quiet time together. Does that sound pleasant?”
“Oh yes,” says Oliver, his thoughts racing. “What’s it called?”
“The Black Horse. In Stanfordville. No one will be there on Thursday night, I’m sure.”
Oliver wonders if “no one” means, literally, no one, or only none of the wedding guests, due to assemble there over the following days.
“Barton,” he says, “that would be wonderful. And you’ll book the room.”
“No! No!” Barton says quickly. “That is, Olivia, it would probably be best if you booked the room. Use your name, not mine, if you would. Naturally I’ll reimburse you…”
Oliver sighs. “I’ll book the room. And I’ll meet you there at…?”
“Six on Thursday. And Olivia?”
“Yes, Barton.”
“It’s a rather restrained sort of place. You know. In case you were wondering how to dress…”
Oliver, pointedly, does not respond.
“Not that your taste is anything but refined,” Barton says, solicitously. “I hope I haven’t offended you.”
“I’m not offended,” says Oliver, who actually is, on Olivia’s behalf. “Thursday at six, then. The Black Horse in Stanfordville. I’ll book the room. You won’t forget?”
“I am already looking forward to it!” says Barton warmly.
Oliver hangs up the phone. For a moment he can only stare at it, adrenaline and anxiety coursing through him. He should feel more mercenary, it occurs to him. After all, he does not like Barton, and it appalls him that Barton is conducting an affair on the eve of his marriage—at least until he remembers that Sophie is doing precisely the same thing—but there will be no sense of triumph in these proceedings, and absolutely no merriment. The game may be afoot—and it may, moreover, be his own game—but he feels far from playful now.
Oliver leans forward in his chair, folding his arms on the table’s wooden surface and resting his head there. He is exhausted from thinking and planning and then second-guessing every single thing he has thought and planned. He feels depleted from lack of sleep, due not just to the late and fervent nights with Sophie but also to his near-constant elation and also to his near-constant sadness. The elation is for Sophie, the sadness for Marian.
Everywhere in his life is the absence of Marian. It isn’t merely that he misses her or that he bitterly regrets the harm he has caused her, and the further harm he will cause when she finds out about Sophie. It’s that, in spite of everything that has passed between them, she is the one person he most wants to tell, and talk to, about what has happened to him. More than anyone else—more than Bell, or even his mother—she is the one he wants to know this astounding fact, which is that he has suddenly and without warning discovered the woman he is supposed to be with, whom he cherishes, and who has swept away all others—herself included. Without Marian to talk to, it’s almost as if Oliver can’t commit himself to an opinion about any of this, still less think his way through what he needs to do, and what he needs to do will require much from him.
Oliver sits up in his chair. He picks up the phone again and calls information for the number in Stanfordville, New York. Barton is correct that “no one” will be in residence at the Black Horse Inn on Thursday night. The helpful young man who takes his name—who takes the name of Olivia Nemo—volunteers that they are quite empty that night. “In fact,” he adds, “I’ve just had a cancellation for the weekend, if you’d care to stay on. We’re fully booked otherwise. A wedding.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” says Oliver. “One night is enough.”
The call ends. Oliver sits, brooding.
It’s as if the crumbs he has trailed behind him through the forest have all disappeared. He doesn’t know where he is, or how he got here; he doesn’t understand how, only two weeks earlier, he woke up one morning in Marian’s house and went to sleep that night in Sophie’s bed, his hands entangled in her hair, his life entangled in her life. Fallen in love, but not out of love—that’s how it feels—as if he has been caught in one of those time-lapse photographs, jumping from one point to another and occupying the place he started from, the place he finished at, and every place in between. Why shouldn’t he have this happiness, this feeling of completion? Every time he touches Sophie he is more sure. Every time he hears her voice it is both more familiar and more welcome. Most strange of all is that the uncertainty surrounding them—the blatantly unfinished business of her wedding and the grief Oliver nurses about Marian—seems not to have penetrated what is taking shape between them. Of course, of course, Sophie should have ended her engagement months ago, weeks ago, and at the very least, days ago, but Oliver isn’t even very angry about her failure to do so, because while her passivity in this matter is certainly frustrating, he understands its cause.
The difficulty, thinks Oliver, getting up at last from his chair and taking his jacket from the closet, is not between Barton and Sophie at all; it is between Sophie and her father. Mort, for reasons Oliver himself can’t readily grasp, has a genuine attachment to Barton and obviously believes that he has brought his daughter to the brink of a good marriage. It’s her reluctance to hurt him, and not her fiancé, that stops Sophie from acting on her own feelings—or lack of feelings, Oliver thinks, putting his wallet in his breast pocket. She is trapped, quite simply, by her love.
That Oliver—thanks to a bizarre and fairly embarrassing turn of events—happens to know something about Barton that Barton’s prospective bride and father-in-law evidently do not, would under other circumstances be irrelevant, but it isn’t irrelevant now. This information has become necessary. And in any case, time is now too short to wait for Sophie to suddenly rally and seize control of the situation. When she asked for his help, her problem became his own, and a matter of honor, even while it serves his own ends. He is far from sure that what he intends to do—that the plan on which he has finally settled, after
all his exhaustive machinations—will even work, but it has to work, he decides. He can’t bring himself to think of what its failure would mean.
The plan isn’t so much a strategy as a destination: a room, with three people in it. Oliver knows now when and where the room is—he has just booked it—and he knows who the people are: Barton and Mort, who must reach an understanding together to cancel the wedding, taking the decision out of Sophie’s hands and relieving her of its responsibility. The third person is Olivia, whose existence was once a frivolity, but no more. Having now arranged for the meeting of Barton and Olivia in this particular room, at this particular time, Oliver turns his attention to Mort. Getting Mort there is the remaining problem he needs to solve, and soon. But not right now. Right now there is an even more pressing task waiting for him, and he is too afraid of it to keep putting it off.
It’s nearly two o’clock now, and downstairs Bell is undoubtedly watching the clock. He has an interview this afternoon at a midtown law firm for an Amy Lowell travel grant, an appointment for which he has borrowed Oliver’s only suit. A dreadlocked poet of Jamaican extraction is probably the last person Lowell could have imagined traveling in her name, but Oliver knows how badly Bell wants this. He’s never been to Europe or Asia, anywhere, really. Oliver has given him the afternoon off, and it’s almost time for him to head uptown.
He puts on his jacket and goes downstairs. Bell, as predicted, is shifting nervously in the unfamiliar suit, standing in the middle of the room, as if he’s afraid to get his clothes dirty.
“Hey, that looks good,” Oliver says. “You feeling fine?”
“Feel like shit,” says Bell.
“You want my advice? Tell them you need to see Greece. Tell them you need to drink from the well of Western civilization.”
“Colonial swine,” says Bell.
“Precisely,” Oliver smiles. “That’s the point. Take it from me as a white, privileged, Ivy League–educated, heterosexual male.”
“You forgot Jewish,” Bell observes.
“I did not forget. I merely de-emphasized. Look, why don’t you just go? I’ll take it from here.”
“No, that’s okay,” Bell says and shakes his head. His dreadlocks shift against his shoulders. “I can stay till three.”
Oliver smiles. “Bell. Go away,” he instructs. “All is well here. I will see you in the morning.”
Bell emits a nervous sigh. “I’ll go. Okay.” He goes into the office and returns with his own coat, which he carefully puts on. Then he leaves.
Oliver steps over to the window and stands behind one of the urns, which he and Bell packed that morning with Boule de Neige. Silently, he watches Bell walk past the theater, the restaurant nestled in the crook of the street, and on to Barrow, where he turns the corner and disappears. The street is empty now. The afternoon is passing. There is nothing else to wait for.
Oliver puts the CLOSED sign in the window, turns off the lights, and leaves, walking in the opposite direction, toward Seventh Avenue. He feels prickly and false, as if he is already in disguise and fearing detection, as if anyone might tell, from looking at him, where he is going, what he is doing, which of course they cannot. He goes to Bleecker and looks around for a minute, a stranger in his own neighborhood, only vaguely clear on what he is looking for and how to find it. Then he walks south.
There is a vintage clothing store on the corner of Great Jones, five long racks of old jeans and leather jackets with a few moldering hostess gowns from the sixties hung in a back corner. Useless. There is a women’s boutique on the next block, all wisps of dresses suspended by sequined straps. The saleswoman smiles at him, thinking—Oliver supposes—that he must be shopping for a girlfriend. He flicks through a few things, nervously, not really seeing them, then looks with interest at a short black dress, briefly trying to imagine it on Sophie’s body. He has no idea what Sophie would look like in such an item. Marian—yes. Marian likes clothing, likes to put it on, likes to take it off. Marian’s clothing makes you forget to pay attention to it; you see only her, and how it makes her look. Whatever she knows about dressing, it’s something Sophie hasn’t begun to learn, Oliver thinks. Sophie’s instinct seems to be for coverage, but he doesn’t really understand why. Her body is lovely to him, curved and shallow, her skin creamy, everything warm and soft. She has broad shoulders and a large chest, yet her lower half tapers to something sinewy and trim. There is a wholeness about her you don’t appreciate unless she is naked, thinks Oliver, with all her lines and surfaces revealed. Then, when she dresses, her beauty somehow abandons her.
Oliver looks at the dress in his hands, and shakes his head.
The dress is too skimpy for Sophie. She would never wear it. Neither would Marian. Neither would Olivia.
Oliver leaves the shop and keeps walking. What he needs is the sort of clothing Marian might wear. Olivia, after all, was born in Marian’s clothes, and they are the clothes Barton imagines her in. He needs to find the kind of clothing Marian would buy for herself, if she happened to be shopping for herself on Bleecker Street. Which she would never do, Oliver thinks.
Just before Sixth Avenue, he finds a store that carries more sedate things: tweed slacks and silk shirts, skirts that cover the upper leg. This is promising. He goes in and takes a green skirt off the rack and holds it against his hips. It looks microscopic, a doll garment. He hunts for the label: size 2. What size is he? There are no helpful measurements for the waist and inseam. There is no inseam. So how is he supposed to know?
Oliver looks up. On the other side of the room, two women about his own age are staring at him. He feels his face go hot. He looks at the floor. He does not even like the skirt. Does he need to like the skirt? He has never thought about whether he likes his own clothes, really.
He barely manages to get the skirt back on its hanger.
Oliver moves down the wall of clothes, lightly trailing one hand along the chrome hooks of the hangers. He is too mortified to leave, to walk past them to the door. His hand touches a silk blouse the color of mayonnaise. Marian would wear that, he thinks. He wishes Marian were here to guide him, and the notion is so absurd he actually smiles.
“Can I help?” says the salesgirl, a tiny thing in a tiny black skirt. She has come up behind him and stands with one red-clawed hand on a bony hip. Her hair is so short it’s a cap.
“My girlfriend,” Oliver says haltingly. “I wanted to buy her some things.”
“And she’s about your size? I saw you holding that up,” says the girl, nodding down the rack.
“Oh,” Oliver says. “Yes. My size. But a girl.”
She gives him a baffled look.
“I need a whole outfit. You know. A skirt and…top. Maybe a sweater. And some shoes, too.”
“We don’t sell shoes,” says the girl.
This brings him up short. It’s been nearly impossible to do this once. He’s supposed to go to a different store and do it again?
“So what’s her style?”
Oliver, bewildered, says nothing.
“What kind of clothes does she wear? Does she go out clubbing? Is she, like, a sorority girl, or what?”
“She’s…a student,” he says. “She goes to school.”
“This isn’t The Gap,” says the girl.
“No, I know. Just, something nice. To wear…to meet my parents,” Oliver hears himself say. “I want her to wear something nice.”
He sounds, it occurs to him, like his own mother, circa the late 1980s.
The girl starts pulling things out: a tartan sweater, a black long-sleeved item that sort of crosses itself over the chest, black pants. He couldn’t possibly wear any of this stuff.
“No,” he tells her, starting to sweat.
She takes a hanger off the rack on the opposite side of the room: a black dress, long sleeved, with a high neck, and a hem at the knee. Maximum coverage. Modest, ideal for meeting potential in-laws. For a moment, his heart leaps, and then he pictures himself wearing it, and he is only O
liver Stern, ridiculous in a black dress. What is he thinking? What is he thinking? There is no fucking way he can do this.
“I have to go,” he says quickly, and he dives for the door.
Outside, there is the first hint of evening, a diminishment of winter light. The encroaching darkness alarms him. He needs to begin this so that he can finish it. He can’t go back to his home until he does.
Oliver begins to walk again, but this time in the opposite direction, northwest on Bleecker. It takes him a moment to realize both that he knows where he is going and that his failure to go there first was a willful evasion. When he reaches Christopher he turns left, his head down, trying to conjure the normality of his everyday walks in this neighborhood—his own, after all. Christopher Street might be holy ground to a generation of gay men, but it’s just another street in his orbit. Doesn’t he shop at the Duane Reade at Christopher and Seventh? Doesn’t he buy his Cabernet Sauvignon at Christopher Wines? I am a child of the Village. No less than the trees and the stars. I have a right to be here, Oliver tells himself
Right next to the wine store, the display of leather men in the window of Transformations looks just as it always has, but for the sprigs of holly protruding from the mannequins’ black chaps. Oliver does not pause, looking being—in a sense—worse than entering. He pushes open the door and charges in. A slender blond man looks up from his laptop at the counter.
“Hello,” he says amiably.
“I’m not gay,” says Oliver. “I mean…sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” says the man, bemused. “That is a great loss, I’m sure. But on the other hand, why should you be?”
Oliver frowns. “Because…isn’t this…” Oliver gestures, words having failed him.
“Look,” the man says, not unkindly, “are you a customer or a tourist? Because I can recommend a few good books if there isn’t a chance in hell you’re going to buy anything.”
“I’m not a tourist,” Oliver says, with some offense. “I live on Commerce Street.”
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