The light turns green.
At the end of the block, Sophie suddenly sees Marian Kahn, walking in her direction. They will cross paths and it occurs to Sophie that she really ought to say something this time—to her colleague, to her almost-relation-by-marriage—but she can think of nothing to say, and Marian Kahn looks distracted, as if she really does not want to be wrested from her thoughts. Dr. Kahn! Sophie rehearses, nonetheless. It’s me, Sophie Klein. Barton’s fiancée? Chaim Bennis’s graduate student? We met? We’re going to meet?
We pass, thinks Sophie, as they do, Marian walking briskly north, with an idle half-smile on her face. Does she live near here? thinks Sophie. On Park? Had Bart said that? Sophie turns and watches Marian go. Marian moves confidently through the crowds and up Lenox Hill, now lined with its December evergreens.
Where is Oliver? thinks Sophie, suddenly. She thinks this all the time now.
Oliver is in his shop. Oliver is on Twenty-eighth Street. Oliver is at the Pink Teacup. Oliver is sitting at my kitchen table, watching me cook. Oliver is in my bed.
Right now, Oliver is downtown, on Commerce Street, selling flowers, even as she walks to a lingerie shop to buy a bra for the purpose of marrying someone who isn’t Oliver.
Which is completely, completely wrong, it seems to her.
In front of the Regency Hotel, Sophie pauses, extracting the card from her pocket and peering at it. The futility of her errand overwhelms her, and she finds herself shaking her head, like a street schizophrenic.
“Taxi, miss?” says the doorman.
“Oh, no,” she shakes her head. “I’m not a guest here.”
He nods and she walks on.
But this is when it occurs to her that she does want a taxi. She wants to go where Oliver is, which is downtown, and she wants to go there fast. Because though only two days have passed, because though he said, only this morning, on the phone, that he is working on the problem that is her life, that everything would be all right, she needs to see him again, and to hear that again. She needs to. She turns north to look for a taxi, and there, right in front of the hotel, a taxi is switching on his light.
Sophie races back. “Is it all right?” she asks the same doorman, breathless, her hand already on the door. “I’m not a guest.”
“You told me,” he says and laughs. “Go on. There’s no one waiting.”
“Thank you!” she says and climbs inside.
The driver looks back.
“Greenwich Village, please,” she chirps.
He swings into traffic. Park Avenue is clogged with angry cars, all carping in the language of Harpo Marx. Sophie thinks of Oliver. She thinks of the small of Oliver’s back, which fits perfectly the curve of her cheek. She thinks of the sound he makes when he comes, and then of the sound he makes her make, which is not a sound she has ever made before. She thinks of Oliver’s smell, and is astonished to find that she can conjure it precisely, as if he were right here in the cab beside her. The cars are not moving. Where is everyone going? Sophie thinks crossly.
“Where is everyone going?” she asks the driver.
“Oh, it’s like this all the time here,” he says reassuringly. “You live here, you get used to it. Where you visiting from?”
He takes her for a tourist, Sophie understands. And why not? Wasn’t she picked up in front of a hotel?
“Uh…Millbrook. New York.”
“Where is that?” he says, turning west on Fifty-seventh. “Upstate?”
“Yeah. Horse country.”
“Racetracks?”
“Kind of,” she says, thinking of Saratoga.
“So is it business or vacation?” He honks at a FreshDirect truck. The two drivers promptly give each other the finger.
“Oh…,” Sophie says. Then she remembers. “I’m getting married. I’m getting ready for my wedding.”
“Yeah? Congratulations.”
“The flowers,” Sophie says, warming to her theme. “A shop in the Village is doing the flowers for my wedding. The flowers are going to be so beautiful.”
She closes her eyes and thinks of Oliver’s flowers, and as the wedding itself fades, the flowers seem to come forward in glorious focus. She can smell them here, mixed with the remembered Oliver-smell. She is in love, she thinks. This is what it smells like to be in love.
“So, where in Greenwich Village?” the driver asks.
“Commerce Street, please,” says Sophie.
“Excuse me?”
“Commerce Street?”
She sighs.
“Seventh Avenue, then. Where it hits Bleecker.”
“Right.”
When he pulls over, Sophie puts bills through the little plastic window and gets out, quickened with longing. It’s a magic thing, chemical, and she rushes on, turning right on Grove past the Pink Teacup, which she reflexively glances into, but he isn’t there, because he is home, only a block away, waiting for her, though he doesn’t know it yet. I am a woman who is having an affair, she thinks in amazement, only days before her wedding. An hour ago, she was trying on a bridal gown. Now she’s here and happy and can barely remember the name of her fiancé.
Barton, she thinks, with effort, but even this fails to puncture her elation.
Then she rounds the corner onto Commerce Street.
The shop windows are dark, which makes no sense. It’s afternoon, and someone should be here, Bell if not Oliver. She looks upstairs, to Oliver’s apartment, and there too the lights are out.
Sophie shakes her head. She stoically climbs the stone steps to the shop door and reads—deliberately, as if she were quite dense—the small sign in the window, which says CLOSED.
Then she knocks anyway, and listens to the sound bounce off the walls inside.
She does not know what to do with herself.
The street, of course, is empty. The street is nearly always empty, unless the little theater is letting out. There’s a restaurant just past it, where Commerce bends and veers into Barrow, but nobody seems to be there, either. Idly Sophie wanders down to the Cherry Lane, and attempts to read the reviews of the current offering, then walks past to examine the posted menu on the restaurant, but nothing really registers, and besides, the restaurant is closed, and besides that, she isn’t hungry.
Actually, Sophie hasn’t been hungry for a while. Since the day Oliver came to find her at Columbia, her appetites have moved in a different—for her unprecedented—direction. Not that she has stopped eating. Only a few nights ago she was here, up in Oliver’s apartment, making pot roast and kugel (Oliver had shown himself to be shockingly ignorant of kugel) and eating both with relish, but every morning she has been lighter, more lithe, more loved, more astounded at what her body has done, and now it looks as if Oliver’s long-ago comment about brides who drop twenty pounds before the wedding might actually have proved prescient. But of course, there isn’t to be a wedding. Oliver has promised her. And besides, she doesn’t have the right bra.
Sophie looks at her watch. The street is darkening, and not a single person has appeared since her arrival. This must be the stillest place in the city, she thinks, reluctantly retracing her steps toward Bedford, and passing in front of the shop once more. There are white roses in the windows massed in matching black urns, looking voluptuous and confident. Before knowing Oliver, Sophie had never thought much about flowers, even, despite her own historical preoccupations, about white roses, but now she has come to regard a flower in the room as a participant in her mood. Barton’s white roses, for example, which had arrived every week, she had heartlessly allowed to wilt. Or the new white roses, in a white vase on her little kitchen table, which Oliver had carried over her threshold two nights before: instantly the most beautiful thing in her home. Or the astonishing moment she woke up, one morning last week, in Oliver’s bed on Commerce Street, with his mouth over her breast and his hands coiled in her hair and the dark pink calla lilies, in an ironstone jug on the bedside table, at which she had stared in wonder for as long as sh
e could keep her eyes open. Whatever happens, thinks Sophie, walking fast, there will now have to be flowers.
At the corner, she turns right on Bedford, pausing to read the historical marker on a skinny townhouse—Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, it turns out, in 1923—then walks past to a smoke shop where she buys herself a Styrofoam cup of anemic coffee and a copy of the Ascendant, the last but one in the rack. Armed with these props, Sophie goes back and sits—not in front of the shop itself, but farther down, nearly opposite the theater, under a handy streetlight, on the steps of a brownstone that looks uninhabited. It’s dark now, but at least it isn’t cold, Sophie thinks, peeling off a corner of her cup’s plastic lid and taking a first sip, which promptly scalds the roof of her mouth. She opens the coral colored pages of the paper, skimming the accounts of a recent real estate war, the battle for control of a Broadway producers’ consortium. She is looking for the article about Bart, of which he is very proud, and most of which he has already read to her over the phone, but before she finds it she is sidetracked by the Celebrant column, featuring a caricature of its author, Valerie Annis, and a photograph of Oliver’s grinning stepfather, Henry Rosenthal, with his new girlfriend. Sophie, reading the couple’s fervent quotes of happiness, is selfishly glad that Henry Rosenthal is departing Oliver’s life at the very moment she herself is entering it, thereby relieving her of the need to be polite to such an odious man. The girlfriend, in the throes of her own absurd divorce—twenty thousand a week in child support! Sophie marvels—is shown in another picture with her nearly ex-husband, CEO of an entertainment-information conglomerate. They look happy, too, thinks Sophie.
Then, at the bottom of the column, she finds herself mentioned as the almost-bride of “Barton Warburg Ochstein (see profile, page 14)”—which is odd in itself, thinks Sophie, because Barton’s middle name isn’t Warburg but Samuel—but that’s only the first of several mistakes in the text, some of them quite worrying. There’s her own description as a Columbia “undergraduate,” a “reclusive heiress,” and the likely inheritor of three billion dollars (which isn’t only off by roughly 50 percent but is not, in any case, a point Sophie wishes to see in print). There’s the description of her impending wedding as “the event of the season in party-obsessed Millbrook” (Really? thinks Sophie dryly), and finally, there is the Celebrant’s rather chilling sign-off, “See you all at the wedding!”
Oh no you won’t, thinks Sophie, enraged (and quite forgetting—for the moment—that there isn’t going to be a wedding). No invitation had been sent to Valerie Annis. Hence Valerie Annis had no cause to think she was in a position to See you all at the wedding!
There comes, from up the street, the click of a woman’s heels on the pavement. Sophie, registering this, does not look up at first—a woman in heels, after all, is not the person she is waiting for—but the novelty of an actual human presence on Commerce Street eventually gets the better of her. She wrests herself from the distorted Sophie of the Celebrant’s column and peers over the top of the paper. A woman is indeed coming down from Bedford Street, teetering a little on her heels, wearing a coat she holds together at the throat. She has dark hair to her shoulders and walks with her head down, as if unwilling to take her eyes off the pavement, and she moves hurriedly, nearly skipping as she reaches the center of the street. From beneath her arm, a pink newspaper peeks out. Sophie assumes she’s headed for the restaurant—a manager, perhaps? or the hostess?—but then, to her great surprise, the woman slows in front of the White Rose, and stops. Sophie puts down her paper entirely. The woman climbs the steps, reaches into her coat pocket, and extracts a key. The key fits the door. The woman goes inside. A moment later, Sophie, devastated, watches the light in Oliver’s apartment switch on.
I’m involved with someone, he told her.
He told her, right away, on the floor of her apartment, with their clothes everywhere around them. And what had she said? Sophie concentrates. What a coincidence. Me too.
She is about to be married, for Christ’s sake! And Oliver is already involved with someone. Who is up there now, Sophie thinks, biting her lip. Who has her own key, which is something Sophie herself does not. Because if I had one, thinks Sophie bitterly, I wouldn’t be sitting out in the cold with a cup of lousy, scalding coffee.
He may help her. He may even want her. But he is involved with someone, which he told her, and she can’t say he didn’t. She can’t even be angry, except at herself. Which she is. Oh, she certainly is. Her face is hot in the cool evening air, and her eyes burn with imminent tears, and she has never, never felt so lonely in her life as on this dark, forgotten little street.
But she does not indulge these thoughts for more than a moment, at least in public. And when her moment has passed, Sophie gets to her feet, empties her Styrofoam cup onto the pavement, and walks west to Hudson Street to find a taxi home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A Good Person, If Not a Good Wife
Marian’s happy mood lasts just as long as it takes her to walk home, moving among the fur-clad and satisfied citizens of Park Avenue. Christmas is afoot now, and the city’s stubborn insistence on referring to this season as the Holidays cannot negate the omnipresence of mistletoe and fir. A large electric menorah has been erected on the traffic island at Park and Sixty-first, and Marian turns to look at it as she passes before the Regency Hotel. The menorah is a good ten feet tall, and towers above the bodies crossing beneath it, but it diminishes when set in scale with the great line of Christmas trees, stretching all the way up to Spanish Harlem. The trees have always appeared at this time of year, for as long as Marian can recall. She saw them from the window of her childhood bedroom, on Eighty-first Street, little bouquets of color making their own string of lights along the center of Park Avenue. Marian remembers the great cross of lighted windows left behind each night in the Pan Am building at the avenue’s southern end, and thinking of them now, she even turns to glance back in the direction she’s come, as if they might still be there. But of course there has not been a cross at the southern end of Park Avenue for many years. There has not, come to think of it, been a Pan Am building for many years, either.
“Hello, Hector,” Marian says, smiling, as she reaches her lobby. She unwinds the scarf from her neck. “Getting chilly.”
“Yes. Gonna be snow,” Hector says agreeably.
They ride up in accustomed and not uncomfortable silence. Marian watches the numbers flash by and thinks ahead to the good and the bad of her anticipated afternoon: a hot bath (good) and the abbreviated pile of thirty-one shortlisted applicants for the Columbia job openings, their thinned ranks considerably offset by their bulked-up dossiers (bad). Perhaps she will have the bath first and then address the stack in a calm and focused mood. Perhaps she will do her work first and have the reward of her bath after. Or maybe she should just take the dossiers into the bath with her and be done with it. Who’s to know the difference? Marian thinks, almost gaily.
But all gaiety dissipates when she goes to collect the files in her office and notes her answering machine light, which is fluttering with waiting messages.
Oliver, is her first thought, but Oliver, in all these months, has never broken his word—when he needed to speak with her, he phoned the office. Moreover, he has not contacted her since their disastrous return to the city. The message counter reads fourteen. With a groan, Marian takes off her heavy coat and drapes it on the chair. Then she finds a piece of paper and sits down at her desk.
Number one. “Hi. Um, Marian? This is Soriah.” Then nothing. And more nothing. Then, “Well, all right. I guess I’ll call again.”
Soriah, writes Marian on her pad. No phone number.
Number two. The silence of someone listening.
Number three. More silence.
Number four. “Oh, Dr. Kahn? It’s Betty Evans with the Rhinebeck Historical Society. Just wanted to touch base with you about Thursday? We’d like to invite you to stay the night at the Beekman Arms as our guest. A few of us
would be very glad to take you to dinner. It’s a nice inn, if you don’t know it, and good food. Anyway, if you’d call me to confirm the lecture at two, I’ll give you directions, my number is…”
Marian writes down the number. The Rhinebeck Historical Society has been asking her to come for nearly a year. Though she’s glad to use the excuse of Bart’s wedding to cross at least one outstanding obligation off her list, Marian has no intention of spending an evening trapped with historical society ladies at the Beekman Arms, no matter how good the food is. She had planned on driving back to the city after the lecture, but now it occurs to her that she might just remain in the area, book a hotel and stay on for the rehearsal dinner the following night. Then she can get a good night’s sleep and rest up a bit before Marshall arrives and the dreaded ordeal of her cousin’s wedding festivities begins. Book room–Millbrook, she writes on her pad, thinking how stupid she’s been to leave this so late. With the many wedding guests, surely everything will be booked. Only…didn’t Valerie say that she had canceled a room? Marian concentrates, her pen tapping the page, but she can’t remember the name of the inn.
Number five. “Um, Marian?” Silence. “Okay.”
Number six, and number seven, again and again, Soriah. As Marian listens she becomes not frustrated, but very, very worried.
Number twelve. “This is Soriah. I don’t know the number here. I’ll call you again.”
The number here? thinks Marian. She reaches across the desk to her Rolodex and flips to the card bearing Soriah’s name, then dials her telephone number. There is no answer.
A homebound invalid and a paid attendant in two small rooms, and no one answers the phone? Marian draws a box around the name Soriah.
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