“How old’s the daughter?” Marshall said, leaning back while a waiter poured water.
“Three,” the women said, both at once.
“Three! What does she need, facials?”
Caroline laughed. “I believe shiatsu massage was mentioned in the petition.”
“No!” Marian said.
“No what?” said the man who now stood behind the empty chair, and Marian first thought that he must be that overly familiar type of New York waiter, who insists on entering the conversation every time he approaches the table and then expects to be tipped like the old friend he is. But this man was wearing a jacket and jangling keys in his hand. He stood beside the chair opposite her, and looked expectantly at Caroline. Marian, to her own surprise, found herself averting her eyes.
“Sweetheart, look!” Caroline said. “I found Marian and Marshall on the street.”
And Marian, even as she smiled, was frantically trying to affix the label “Oliver” to the man in front of her, who was not and yet was the gangly eleven-year-old she had last seen in a Greenwich backyard, huddling with a friend to avoid the adult company. In fact, there was nothing to link that child and this person—this man, she forced herself to think, because he was that—but the prima facie evidence that his mother was vouching for him.
“Hello there,” said Marshall, rising. He and Oliver exchanged a robust handshake. “That’s a very nice shop you have.”
“Thank you,” he said, turning to Marian, who began to get up.
“No,” he said, “please. It’s so nice to meet you.”
Marian sat back down and watched, rather than felt, him take her hand. When he had released it, she immediately regretted not paying closer attention.
Oliver sat. He turned to his mother with a half smile. If he was disappointed with the turn his evening had taken, Marian thought, he was doing an excellent job of hiding it.
“So what did he want?” said Marshall. “The guy who called.” This was precisely the sort of thing Marshall loved: conflict between people he didn’t know.
Oliver looked quizzically at his mother.
“I was saying that the phone rang as we were leaving. You had an aggravated customer.”
“Oh,” said Oliver, nodding. “Yes. Though I don’t think he’s my customer anymore.”
“Hard to please?” Marshall asked eagerly.
“Not so much that. Misinformed, I would say. Confused about the reality of flowers. The place of flowers in the world.”
Whoa, Marian thought, fighting an urge to roll her eyes. A flower-philosopher! As if she didn’t get enough academic pretension during the week. And then, quite suddenly, it occurred to her that she was trying not to like him.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marshall said.
Oliver watched a waiter pour water into his glass, then he picked it up. “Mr. Mortensen was upset because his roses were dying. They were very beautiful roses. Alba Maximas. Sort of our shop’s signature rose. I have them grown for us in Connecticut. And they were expensive.” Oliver shrugged. “And they were dying.”
“But you get that all the time, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Oliver said. “It’s the most frequent complaint, despite the fact that we go out of our way to remind people to recut the stems and change the water every day. It’s a big return on very little effort, which I’m sure this guy didn’t make.”
“Well, when did he buy the roses?” Caroline asked.
“Tuesday. They were cut Monday morning.”
“But it’s Sunday!” said Marian. “I mean, surely that’s a reasonable time for a rose to last.”
“It is,” Oliver said and sipped his water. “But he doesn’t see it that way. He sees it in terms of what he spent on a rose that looked perfect when he bought it, and how long it stayed that way. So we have a philosophical disagreement. From now on, he’ll be investing in silk roses, or buying cheap flowers and expecting less of them.” He sighed, but not unhappily. “He was a walk-in. Not to knock walk-ins. Sometimes it’s kind of serendipitous, who happens to come down that street and happens to look in our window—that can be really nice. But for the most part, our customers are people who already know what we do.”
“And what’s that?” asked Marshall.
“Well, we’re taking a position that celebrates the transience of the flower. Not that we don’t prolong the bloom as long as we can, but we recognize that a flower’s impermanence is part of its beauty.”
Barely perceptibly, Marshall shook his head. He was thinking, Marian knew, that this was not a sound business plan.
“Was the man unpleasant?” Caroline asked with maternal concern.
“Yes,” Oliver said. To signal the subject’s closure, he opened his menu, but instead of looking at it, he looked at Marian with a directness that startled her. It was a look at once contemplative and blatantly hungry. It made Marian want to swallow. Then slap him.
“Marian wrote that book about Lady Charlotte Wilcox,” Caroline said. “Remember? I gave it to you for Christmas.”
He nodded. “I loved your book. What a character she was.”
“That’s so true,” Marian said smoothly, with false camaraderie. She slipped easily into her professional mode, the tone and demeanor of the radio programs, the television shows she had done, smoothing over the imperfect preparation of each host with her own practiced conversational style. That she was good at this she had learned along the way, after too many otherwise insipid interviews had been salvaged by her quick returns. “I think her Americanness can’t be underestimated as part of her success. Not many Americans made it to England in the late eighteenth century. To the end of her life in England people wanted to know her for that reason. She was a curiosity to them.”
“It didn’t seem to bother her,” he said. “Did she enjoy the attention?”
“I think so,” Marian smiled. “Self-effacement wasn’t her style.”
“Unlike yourself,” he observed.
Marian, who had been glancing at her menu, for no reason she could readily identify and certainly not from hunger, looked up abruptly.
“I mean,” said Oliver, “that you strike me as a very modest person, despite your accomplishments.”
This was something no one had ever bothered to observe. Her husband had never called her modest. None of her friends had ever called her modest. Yet she was modest. Actually, she could be downright self-flagellating, another observation no one had ever bothered to make. She could not bring herself to respond, and the silence hung between them, finally broken by Marshall, who turned to Oliver and said, a mite heartily, “So what’s good to eat? Your mother said you like this place.”
Oliver shifted in his chair, and Marian watched without quite listening as Oliver offered some highlights. The menu was short, and looking it over, Marian thought there was nothing she could possibly eat, but when the waiter arrived she forced herself to order the salmon and watched with gratitude as wine was poured into her glass. Careful, she thought, tasting it. The situation was already precarious.
“Do you come down to the Village a lot?” Oliver asked, turning back to her.
“No, not very much. I ought to, it’s so pretty here, but you know how it is. We all get into our routines.”
“I live my life almost entirely between Fifty-sixth and Eighty-seventh on the East Side,” announced Marshall. “Plus the theater district, okay. But almost everyone I know and everywhere I want to go’s within walking distance. I never take cabs.”
“It must be nice to be able to walk,” Caroline said. “That is the drawback of the suburbs. You see anyone on foot in Greenwich who isn’t wearing a jogging suit and you’re immediately suspicious. What’s he doing there? Why isn’t he driving?”
“I’d hate that,” Marian said. “I don’t like driving. I don’t think many Manhattan-bred people turn out to be confident drivers.” She looked at Caroline. “Are you a good driver?”
Caroline set down her wineglass. “I
am now. I wasn’t for years. Oliver’s father used to follow me around in his own car, just to make sure I got where I was going.”
“I never knew that,” Oliver said.
She shrugged. “At the time I resented it, but I do understand now. I wasn’t lousy enough for him to forbid me outright, but it worried him. I suppose you could think of it as very paternal and sexist, but the fact is, I really was a bad driver. And he thought he was taking care of me.”
Marshall leaned back as a waiter set down his onion soup. “And did you ever need his help?”
She nodded, eyeing her salad. “Once. I was taking Oliver to a doctor’s appointment. I must have been upset about something, and I went off the road. Not—I didn’t veer off the road. I didn’t hit anything, but I kind of fell off the pavement and couldn’t get back on it. So I was pretty shaken, and then there was David. We just got in his car and went to the doctor’s office, and he had the car towed back to the house. I couldn’t drive for a few months after that.” She looked across at Oliver. “Do you remember that?”
He nodded. “But sort of muddled. I remember driving off the road, but I remember Dad just being there. I didn’t know he was in a different car.”
Caroline smiled. “Well, anyway. Like I said, I’m a good driver now. I haven’t gone off the road in twenty-two years.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Marshall, signaling the waiter. “Could we have another?” he said, lifting the wine bottle from its ice bucket.
Oliver turned from his mother to Marshall. “What took you out of the Upper East Side today, then?”
“Oh,” he said, “we saw that play on your street. That restaurant play. What’s it called?” he asked Marian.
“Fully Committed.”
“Fully Committed,” he repeated unnecessarily. “About the guy who works in the restaurant.”
“Yes,” said Oliver. “It’s been running for months.”
“Did you like it?” Caroline said.
“I did,” Marian said. “Marshall not so much. It’s difficult to get used to the actor doing so many different voices. I thought it was funny, and I’m sure it’s quite accurate.”
Oliver nodded. “My friend Bell says so. He used to work in a restaurant.”
Ah, Marian thought. He’s gay. Then: Thank God.
“He was a line cook at a restaurant that shall remain nameless. It’s famous, and well within your stomping ground,” Oliver told Marshall. “He said that each day began with generalized screaming and built to the chef’s complete collapse. Bell actually loved the work. He’s a very good cook. But he couldn’t take the mania.”
“He’s a placid guy,” Caroline agreed.
She must have made her peace with this, thought Marian.
“So he quit?” Marshall asked, trying to cut the melted cheese on his soup with the edge of his spoon.
“No,” Oliver said and shook his head. “He got fired. The chef didn’t like the way he was always talking to the plants.”
They all stopped what they were doing and looked at him.
“I went down to a Nuyorican poetry slam last summer, and there was Bell. He read this poem. Well,” Oliver said and laughed, “I’m not sure it was a poem, really. More like a rant. Or maybe a rap, I guess. Anyway, it was all about how he got fired for talking to the plants in the restaurant. The chef kept a rosemary bush, and there were a few other herbs in the summer, just to have on hand. Bell liked to take his breaks out in the back and talk to the plants. He said it relaxed him, and the plants seemed to like it.”
The waiter arrived, made small talk, and set down their plates.
“So he got fired?” Marian said.
“Yeah. The chef was having one of his fits, and he told Bell to get out. He thought Bell was too happy, I guess.” Oliver smiled. “Well, he is a little too happy. But the kitchen was just his day job, anyway. I mean his ego wasn’t tied up in it, just his livelihood. He’s a poet, and he’s doing pretty well with that, but he got out of the MFA program at Columbia last year with the equivalent of a small country’s national debt. So anyway, when I heard his poem, I thought that a guy who talks to plants was exactly the kind of person I’d been meaning to hire. It just hadn’t occurred to me to put that in the job description, which may be why none of the assistants I had hired had been working out.”
“What a motley crew,” said his mother, shaking her head. “There was the guy who turned up stoned every day, and the Korean anti-Semite.”
“Don’t remind me,” Oliver said and laughed.
“And that girl with the boyfriend who kept hanging around.”
“Him I really didn’t like. Poor girl.”
“You wanted to save her,” his mother said gravely.
Oliver nodded. “Wanted to. Didn’t.”
“Oliver, the guy knew where you lived. What could you do?”
Oliver turned to Marian. “Every time she talked to a male customer, the boyfriend had a fit. He was wound up so tight, everybody was tense when he was around, which was all the time. The whole shop was tense. The flowers were tense. The best you could hope for was that he’d fall under a train. I’m sorry, that sounds terrible.”
He wasn’t apologizing for what he felt, Marian noted. Only how it sounded.
“So one day she calls me from the highway. She’s on her way to Seattle, on a bus. I said, ‘Good for you!’ And when the guy comes tearing around looking for her I said how furious I was at her, for quitting without notice, and he bought it and went away.”
“You were fortunate,” Marian said, picking at her salmon.
“Not as fortunate as she was. But anyway, that was another bad hire. I got lucky with Bell, even if I have to listen to him be happy all the time. And he’s always trying to fix me up with his leftover girlfriends.”
“Let him,” said Oliver’s mother. “I’m sure they’re lovely.”
“Then you are sadly misinformed,” said her son, with a brief smile.
“Your Jewish mother would like to dance at your wedding,” said Caroline, sighing.
“My Jewish mother will have to wait,” Oliver said flatly. Then he turned to Marian.
Not gay, Marian thought, crushed, and everything her desperate assumption had held at bay these last minutes came surging back at her, the dam breaking everywhere at once. It felt like drowning. It felt like the spreading heat of an allergic attack, making her flush and closing her throat. She wanted to push her face into ice. He was still looking.
Now Marshall was telling, again, the story of how his partner of years and years had gone behind his back to force him out of the company they’d started and how he had learned of it (at the opera, of all places, between acts, in the Vilar Grand Tier restaurant, overhearing some clueless underling from Goldman Sachs in the next booth) and again how he had gone to the partner the following week and confronted him, but not without first acquiring every share of stock he could readily locate and persuading the owners of others, which meant the confession of sins and the placation of not a few old foes over extraordinarily expensive wines, and then summoning the entire board to watch this traitor be escorted from the building, again, his friend! For years! And Caroline was murmuring and shaking her head as she ate, lifting her glass and setting it down. What was she eating? Marian, distracted by incidental curiosity, looked, saw, looked back to find Oliver still looking at her. He wasn’t eating either.
“You’re not eating,” Marian observed.
“No.” He agreed.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“How awful,” said Caroline. “I’ve never understood that. To some people, nothing matters but the money.”
“I’m not like that,” said Marshall, as if she’d implied otherwise. “I think it’s very simple. Some people like to build. Some like to destroy. I’m a builder.”
Even though the company he had built sometimes destroyed, thought Marian.
“It’s very easy to tear things down, or to
undermine a project. It’s hard to make something out of nothing.”
“You would have liked David,” Caroline said suddenly, and now at last Oliver looked away from Marian and at his mother.
“I did like him,” said Marshall. He looked at his wife, as if to ask, I did like him, didn’t I? Remind me.
“Yes,” Marian reassured him. “I remember how much you liked him. I’m so sorry we didn’t all see more of one another. Greenwich felt a lot farther away, then, somehow.”
“That was before we started driving five hours every Friday night to get to the East End,” Marshall said. He told the waiter he was finished with his steak.
“Five hours!” Caroline said and laughed. “That’s absurd. Is it worth it?”
“That’s what we ask ourselves every week on the LIE,” Marian said nervously. “You spend hours and hours trying to plot shortcuts, but there aren’t any. Everyone’s trying to squeeze through the eye of the needle out there. Once you hit Riverhead, it’s just you and the rest of the financial, publishing, fashion, media, and art worlds, all attempting to buy the same tomato at the same roadside stand.”
“Oh no!” Caroline said and shook her head. “I was out there years ago. It wasn’t crowded at all. And the light!”
Marian nodded. “Yes, that’s the problem. You finally crawl out of the car in the worst possible mood, and you’re starving but every single restaurant is jam-packed, and the farm stands have been picked clean, and the line out the door of the Barefoot Contessa is an hour long, and you’re ready to murder your spouse for not remembering to pack a lousy can of tunafish, and all you want to do is call the real estate agent. But then in the morning you wake up and you look out the window and there’s…this light. This amazing, beautiful, watery, planetary light, and you think, Oh yeah. That’s it. You’d go to the end of the earth, let alone Long Island, for light like that.”
“And then,” Marshall said, “your spouse goes out and brings you back a beautiful breakfast, which you and he consume in your garden, illuminated by the aforementioned light, and you relax all day and catch up on your reading and go for a walk and get together with your friends in the evening…”
The White Rose Page 16
