The White Rose (3 page)

For a minute the question does not compute. Then she feels her heart begin to pound.

Marian glances at Barton, who seems to be frowning at the painting above the mantelpiece. She is not surprised. The painting is dark, abstract, and difficult. Barton is strictly an ancestral portrait man, himself.

“I want you again,” says her lover, from her office, from her clothing.

And then, for the first time in all her forty-eight years, she truly understands the phrase
weak in the knees.
The heavy tumbler slips in her palm.

“I'm sitting here thinking about it.”

“Oh,” she manages to say. “It's on the left. In the drawer, on the left.”

“I love that place under your arm, where the freckle is. I love where your thighs touch. I'm not going to make a big deal about it. If he's such a cretin, he won't notice if you excuse yourself.”

Marian stands perfectly still, perfectly firm. She has turned away from her cousin. Outside, in the sliver of open space between two Fifth Avenue towers, she can just spy the glint of setting sun on the Reservoir.

“Hmm?” Oliver prods. “Are you coming?”

She can see the little runners, too. Little bug-sized runners, running around. She used to run around the reservoir, herself, but it proved too hard on her knees, her old knees, her weak knees. They are now very weak, indeed.

“Come on. You can lift my skirt and I'll lift yours.”

I'm not wearing a skirt,
she nearly says aloud.

There is a rustle from the sofa, gratuitous and clearly impatient. “Look, we'll finish it tomorrow,” she hears herself say, and even allows herself a moment of smugness:
I sound good! I sound fine!
“That's enough for right now.”

“Marian…,” Oliver is crooning. “We'll light a candle under Lady Charlotte's portrait. I'll kiss you in the precise place Lord Satterfield kissed her.”

“Yes,” she says tightly, no longer amused. “We'll do that tomorrow.”

He sighs so audibly she wonders if she is hearing it through the phone or all the way from the office. “Then I'd better just come out,” Oliver says suddenly.

Marian gasps. “What? No, that's not necessary.”

“Tell him I'm your research assistant. Let's have some fun.”

She is about to yell at him, but the light on the phone has already gone out. The phone is silent. Out of breath, Marian replaces the phone and turns around.

“My research assistant,” she hears herself say.

His eyes leave the painting and study her. “What?”

“That was…my research assistant.”

And now she can't think what to do. Give him his drink? Run for the kitchen? Head for the nearest exit?

“What about her?” he says impatiently, and then there is a new, unmistakable sound from the kitchen. Her office door: shutting. Barton turns around once again.

Marian goes to the bar and clutches at the bottles. She resists, but only barely, the urge to down Barton's bourbon herself.

“Oh, hi!”

The greeting comes from the doorway, though the voice is not exactly familiar. And then the chilling rustle of silk as her cousin rises.

“Hello!”

The second voice is Barton's. A different Barton. A Barton enthralled. She has never heard this Barton's voice before. Marian pivots, drink in hand.

“Oh God,” she can't help saying, and very loudly.

Oliver, quite placid, and quite pleased with himself, looks languidly in her direction. He is indeed wearing her clothes, clothes he evidently gathered from the living room floor on his dash for the service elevator: one gray cashmere turtleneck sweater, one camel-colored wool skirt (which hits her at the knees but him decidedly above), one pair of black tights, Marian's shoes—and amid her shock she allows herself the briefest moment of horror at this information: he can fit into her shoes, her feet are as big as a man's!—and…and this is what takes her breath, what she cannot, cannot understand, refuses to accept: her wig.

This, then, is the item that fell from the shelf. She can't even remember which shelf precisely, or when she put it there, years ago, how many years? Diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy…twelve years. Twelve years ago!

“Hi!” this absurd new Oliver says again.

She wants to hit him. She will never speak to him again.

Barton repeats his equally avid greeting: “Hello! You must be Marian's assistant!”

“Yes,” he says affably, as if this scenario is entirely mundane. His voice is not precisely normal, but it is not fake, either. It is breathless, she decides, as if Oliver has exerted himself in walking from the kitchen. “I'm her assistant. I'm Olivia.”

Olivia,
thinks Marian with astonishment. But of course.

“Well, sit, please!” Barton says enthusiastically. He reaches for Oliver's elbow and force-guides him to the couch. As Oliver sits, he delicately crosses his legs at the knee. He has, Marian notes, great legs. But she knew that.

“Olivia,” Marian says quickly, “is one of my graduate students. She's been helping me on the new book.” She hustles across the rug and practically hurls the glass into Barton's lap. He chuckles a bit as he takes it, then introduces himself.

“I”—pause for emphasis—“am Barton Ochstein.”

“Yes!” says Oliver. “Of course I know that. Marian has told me about you!”

Barton leans forward. “Nothing but the truth, I hope!”

“Nothing but the facts!” says Oliver and giggles, and Marian, slinking dejectedly back to her own sofa across the room, wonders why, if he needs to be a girl, he has to be the giggling type.

But of course, he doesn't need to be a girl—that's the point—and since he isn't a cruel man, there is something else in play here, an attitude not essentially mean but not unwilling to make levity from someone's ignorance, either. It's a quality she hasn't seen in him before, Marian reflects, because he is not like other New Yorkers she has known, many she has known, who will willingly comment on the taxi driver's hygiene or the waitress's intelligence. His kindness, she has always thought, comes from his knowing the inequities of the world, and how fortunate he's been: in his health, his comfort, the love of his family, and the bounty of his education. And perhaps that is why he is willing to make sport of Barton Ochstein, whose privileges outweigh even Oliver's own, and who has made so much less of them than he ought.

Marian watches them in silence for a moment. They are on a wavelength, this absurd couple, chortling in concert, making small, flirtatious touches of neutral body parts. Can Barton actually think Oliver is a girl? Fresh as the memory of his flesh may be, she forces herself to see Oliver with neutral eyes: young female, demurely dressed, clear skin and hairless jaw, flat-chested but also flat-throated, as the turtleneck covers his Adam's apple. His body is lithe and twists with a suppleness she herself has not possessed in some years, his hands are masculine but small. His voice—to her ears—is strained, but perhaps that is because she knows his natural voice. (This voice, she suddenly realizes, is his sexual voice, the voice of his neediness and discovery, the voice of his pleasure. It is
her
voice, it
belongs
to her, and how she resents his using it now, only to make fun.) And while the wig, which she has happily not seen in years, looks a bad fit to her, it might fool someone who cares to be fooled, or just isn't looking.

Barton is looking. He is leering, and she does not know which offends her most: that he is newly affianced, that she has always supposed him to be gay, or that the object of his perfectly evident lust is the object of her own. She watches Barton's hand, at rest on the cushion between them, delicately turn at the wrist until the knuckle presses Oliver's leg. This charade, she thinks, is the worst thing Oliver has ever done, and by far the most dangerous. This is the joke that will drag him into trouble. Only don't, she thinks fervently, let it drag me, too.

“Oh, I know Rhinebeck!” Oliver is saying. “I once had a boyfriend who took me up for the weekend.”

“Ah!” Barton's eyes widen.

Marian sits forward. “Don't you need to leave, Olivia?” she asks pointedly.

“No!” Barton says.

“No,” Oliver smugly agrees. He sinks back into a cushion. “I have time.”

“You…” Her thoughts grasp. “You have a…doctor's appointment, isn't that right?”

“It was canceled,” Oliver says languidly.

Barton assumes a look of concern. “A doctor! You're not ill, I hope?”

“Never better,” Oliver confirms.

“Don't you have…” Marian searches. “A date?”

“Canceled,” he says, leaning back against the cushion.

“Now who would cancel on you?” asks Barton. “Whoever he is, he isn't worth it.”

“I couldn't agree more.” This is Oliver, shaking his pretty head. “I think he was ashamed to be seen with me. He denied it, of course, but that's what it was. Some people are. Some people,” he says, with a little choke, “don't set much stock in living honestly and openly with the person they love. I have nothing to hide,” he adds, in case Marian has failed to glean his meaning. She has not failed.

“Nor should you!” says Barton. “We are human creatures, with human needs. If there is love between two people, that is all that matters.” He reaches over to touch him, to touch Oliver, on his thigh. Barton's hand, damp from the glass, leaves a damp mark on the soft cashmere skirt, and staring at it Marian suddenly understands that her cousin is quite clear on Olivia's gender. He is not flirting madly with a person he mistakes for a woman. He is flirting madly with a man in women's clothing. Oh Barton, she thinks, equally piteous and pissed off. But she can't seem to take her eyes away from them.

“You are a remarkable young woman,” says Barton, and not to Marian. “To have such strength of character, and at your age.”

Oliver actually blushes. “Thank you. But I owe that to someone else. Someone who taught me to believe in myself. Do you know who that person is?”

Barton shakes his head, but Marian, with a plummeting feeling, thinks she does.

Oliver gets to his feet and fixes her with a look of such tenderness that in ordinary circumstances she might meet it with open arms. Then he walks to the couch where she is sitting and perches on the armrest, settling one cashmere-clad arm behind her head. “This woman,” he says in his breathy voice.

“Oh?” Barton sounds dubious.

“This wonderful woman. She sat down with me and showed me that if I was not myself, truly myself, I was nothing. And that I deserved to be loved for who I was.”

“Ah,” he mutters. “Yes. Good.”

“She changed my life, this woman.”

Marian shrugs with embarrassment, but she is experiencing something equally uncomfortable, from his nearness, from the thin strength of his arm, through the cashmere of her sweater and through the cashmere of his, which is also hers.

Barton nods avidly, like a convert in the front row of a revival tent. “Yes!”

Yes indeed, Marian thinks. She can't help glancing to her right, where Oliver's knees peek out from beneath the skirt, crossed in black tights. They are lovely knees, attached to lovely thighs.

“I've spent so much of my life,” Oliver says, carefully, “well, cut off, in a sense. All I want is to connect. Like Forster said!” he ends brightly.

“Forster?” Predictably, Barton is dim on Forster.

“He once wrote, ‘Only connect…' That's what he craved. Contact with another person. Human touch. Not even bodies, but souls. The people he wrote about lived alongside one another, but they never really looked inside one another.” Oliver pauses. “Forster was a very lonely man. I don't want to be lonely,” he says, with a catch in his voice.

The catch, Marian realizes, is real. She turns to look at him and he looks frankly back. And there is her Oliver. She would know him anywhere, with his cool gray eyes and the tiny brown mole at his left temple. And then, unbidden, there is a great leap inside her. She wants to reach for him. She wants to put her hand under his skirt. She thinks of her own hands unfastening his bra—an astonishing thought. Is he even wearing a bra? Is he wearing
her
bra? What would it be like to unfasten a bra and slip forward the shoulder straps? she wonders, unable to turn her thoughts aside. She knows the mirror of this, the clumsy hand behind her back, the way her shoulders fall forward, protectively, the hands coming up to cover her breasts in modesty. But how would it feel to reach behind him and flick that latch of hook and elastic? Would he hold the fabric against his chest, unsure about letting go? And what would it be like to pull up a skirt and strip down a pair of tights? Would he cross his legs? Would he…Oh my God…would he open them? She is stunned by the realization that her thighs are pressing together, right now, right this second.

Oliver stares at her, that infuriating half smile still taut across his face, but less certain than a moment earlier. Because he knows, Marian thinks. He knows exactly what she is considering, exactly what she is wanting. Then he moves beside her. The motion is so small, it is more an adjustment than a motion, but it leaves him just perceptibly turned in her direction, and the hand in the lap of his skirt—her skirt—slowly twists, like a card player showing his cards, and lies palm up and open.

Across the room, Barton clears his throat.

God, she is thinking, what will it take to make him go away? What will it take to make him disappear so that she can make love to Olivia?

Perhaps this: the house phone sounds its metallic buzz from the kitchen, and up she leaps, automatically, leaving the two of them in dangerous isolation in the living room, the inadvisability of which occurs to her almost instantly. She is about to rush back, to warn them both in some idiot way not to talk to each other, not to look at each other, when the house phone buzzes again, three short jolts this time, and it gets her attention, as Hector tends to favor the long and languid depression of finger to button. Not Hector?