“All right, I accept that. But it doesn’t mean we have to invite them in!” Sophie objects.
“Sophie!” Frieda says in her melodic tone of warning.
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t invite Valerie as a columnist,” Barton says. “Only as a guest. As Marian’s friend. We did have such a nice discussion, you know. She was terribly interested in you, Sophie.”
Sophie sets down her glass. “Oh? How so?”
“I told her how you’re getting your degree at Columbia, and how close you and your father are. That’s such a rare thing, today, isn’t it? Anyway, she couldn’t have been more charming. And I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I could invite someone else besides all of my stuffy friends. Of course, Marian is far too polite to ask me to invite her friend, though I know she’d be touched.”
“Bart,” Sophie says carefully, “even if you didn’t invite her in her professional role, she’d probably feel she wasn’t doing her job if she didn’t write about it. Please, Bart. Afterward, if you want to see her socially, that’s fine. But not at the wedding.”
He looks grumpily at his plate. “She said she would like to write a story about me. About my house.”
There is general silence in the face of this revelation. Sophie, alas, sees it all.
“That’s very nice, Bart,” she says, finally.
“Marvelous,” Mort chimes in. “Be sure to tell her what you’ve gone through to match that paint in the hallway. People have no idea what a proper restoration entails. They think you call up Colonial Williamsburg and say, ‘Send me the Federal Green!’ ”
“Yes,” agrees Sophie, “but did you already mention the wedding? Inviting her to the wedding?”
His silence is his answer.
“Okay,” Sophie says, thinking. “Just…we just won’t send an invitation. You can blame it on me, if you want, later. And if she calls to ask, I’ll blame myself. If we’re lucky, she’ll be gracious about it.”
Though the Celebrant has never struck Sophie as particularly gracious about anything. Still, better she be vile and absent than vile and present.
“Okay, Barton?”
He nods his assent.
“Okay, Dad?”
“It’s your wedding, Sophie.”
“Yes?” she says, trying for humor. “Does that mean I get to exclude all of your businessmen?”
He scowls at her. This matter is a battle looming, despite ongoing attempts at preemptive diplomacy.
Barton asks for more chicken.
“And when am I going to see that dress?” Barton asks, gamely moving on.
She tells them all about the dress, which is white and drops straight to mid-calf in three sheets of satin, flattering to her chest (which is large) and her calves (which are small). Barton will see the dress at the wedding, and not before.
“You’ll wear it with your mother’s pearls?” Mort asks. Sophie’s hand goes to her throat.
“Would you like that?” she says quietly, to Mort.
“It’s a lovely idea,” Frieda says. “And what are you going to do about your hair?” she asks.
Sophie raises an eyebrow. “Don’t worry. No braid.”
“I should hope not!” says Frieda.
“But I like your braid,” Barton says. “You go on and wear a braid if you like.”
“You will not!” Frieda sputters.
“Thank you, Barton,” Sophie says. “But I’d like these two to be speaking to me on my wedding day, so I’ll put it up. I’ll have it put up,” she corrects. In fact, she has already hired someone from the salon at Millbrook to come to the house on the morning of the wedding.
“What else?” says Mort, as Frieda places another piece of chicken on his plate. “What other crises?”
“No crises,” Sophie says. “Though I did get an absurd estimate from the lady at Millbrook Floral. And I didn’t even like what she wanted to do.”
“What did she want to do?” Barton asks, helping himself to more cholent.
“She kept saying how it would almost be Christmas, so we should do everything in Christmas colors. She wanted poinsettias! I said, ‘This is a Jewish wedding,’ and she just went blank. You know: What are the theme colors of a Jewish wedding? And then the estimate came and it was insane. Fifteen thousand! I’d rather do without flowers. Or we’ll just buy some plants and put them on the tables.”
“We most certainly will not,” Mort says. He turns to Barton. “My frugal daughter. Get used to her.”
Barton laughs conspiratorially.
“Well, okay. What about the shop Barton ordered my roses from?”
Barton frowns. “But that’s in the city.”
Sophie, lifting her glass, shrugs. “So? They delivered here. They can deliver to Millbrook. He can’t charge any more than fifteen thousand, can he? And I don’t think he’d offer us poinsettias, even if he is a bad Jew.”
All three of them stop eating and look at her.
Sophie is aware, quite suddenly, of her own right hand, nervously testing the buttons of her shirt, which are certainly, appropriately fastened, revealing nothing. Not that there is anything to reveal.
“He’s what?” Mort says.
“Oh, it’s nothing. We were just chatting.”
“About how he is a bad Jew?” Frieda looks horrified.
“How did you even know he was Jewish?” her father asks. “The delivery boy?”
“No, not the delivery boy. The owner. I told you, the owner came himself.”
“Good!” Barton says.
“Sophie, this is very inappropriate.” Frieda is shaking her head in little arcs. “You should not speak to service people in such a personal way. You don’t go questioning tradesmen on their personal thoughts.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right,” Sophie says quickly, wanting to leave the subject. “I won’t do it again. But can we go back to the flower problem? I’m going to ask him for an estimate. Okay?”
“A Jewish florist,” Mort shakes his head. “Well, why not? It’s in the Song of Songs, after all.”
“What is?” says Sophie.
And her father closes his eyes and intones, from memory, from years before:
My beloved has gone down to his garden,
to the beds of spices,
to pasture his flock in the gardens,
and to gather lilies.
I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine;
he pastures his flock among the lilies.
“Daddy!” Sophie says. “That was beautiful.”
“I accept your compliment,” he says, “on behalf of King Solomon.”
“I can’t believe you remembered that!”
“Oh, your mother loved the Song of Songs,” Mort says. “I used to read it to her. She would melt, every time! Very useful if we’d had a fight.” He turns to Barton. “Remember that.”
“Oh,” Barton says, “it’s not necessary. Sophie and I will not have fights.”
And this is how it comes to her, in a wave, in a sinking wave, pitching her back, even as she sits there and smiles her agreement. Because Barton, her betrothed, is perfectly right: they will not have fights. She can no more see fighting with him than she can see turning to him in passion, and though it has never before seemed to her a loss—a terrible, irreparable loss—it seems so now. Theirs will be a life of geniality and avoidance of conflict, of deferring to each other’s authority in front of the children and giving each other lots of space.
Which is surely what I want, thinks Sophie, who now finds herself—abruptly, astoundingly—on the point of tears. Surely I can’t want someone who’ll make me angry?
She turns in alarm to Mort, who is nodding.
“No father could ask for more,” he says, fading before her eyes.
CHAPTER TWELVE
An Unlovely Daughter
On a Saturday morning one week later, Marian walks down Madison Avenue in a fog. She has left Marshall asleep, or near asleep, turning grumpy in their bed with a comment m
eant to be positive and hauling the duvet over his head. His bad mood is a remnant of the party she forced him to attend the night before at the home of her department head, Carter Hawes. The party is an annual event (and indeed is the only professional event at which she compels Marshall’s attendance) featuring food catered by Columbia (bad) in an apartment provided by Columbia (enviable) and a cast of Columbians, who are—one and all—without the slightest interest in Marshall: his life, his times, his work. Invisibility is challenging for someone of her husband’s temperament, Marian knows, and she would not ask it of him if Carter Hawes were not so irascibly susceptible to slights. It is simply the lesser of two ills to have a resentful husband than to have a department head smarting at the non-appearance of his media star’s partner, and it is only once a year, as Marian had reminded him—both on the way uptown in the taxi and afterward at Nicola’s (compensating him his earlier dinner). Hawes, a specialist in the English civil wars, had been unprepared to see one of his rank and file acquire actual late-twentieth-century American fame, and was known to have thrown tantrums in the office over the media requests for Marian still fielded by the department secretaries. Marian walks on eggshells around him, but not out of kindness. She does not like Carter Hawes. She does not like his wife, a former graduate student in linguistics who promptly dropped her own life to marry him and has had absolutely nothing to say, on any subject, in any of the conversations Marian has ever attempted with her. Marian does not like the department, which is not even occasionally joyful, like some of the other Columbia departments she has had contact with, but seems to run only on internal rivalries and petty schisms. But she likes her job, and this is one of its labors.
Marian’s destination is Bloomingdale’s, where she intends to distract herself, until her lunchtime appointment, with the purchase of a dress suitable for a December wedding. She looks forward to this task with as little pleasure as she anticipates the event itself, and walks to the store accompanied by a grim internal monologue on the general subject of herself.
In the days since her thwarted weekend with Oliver, Marian has felt her most profound wants grow in opposite directions. It pains her now to remember how skeptical she was at the inception of their affair, and her defensive and nearly constant disavowal of anything he said in praise of her or in devotion. Of course—she accepts this now—Oliver has always told her the truth. What he wants he has wanted from the start: to be living openly with her in a committed way. And what, she asks herself now, stepping aside to evade the Whitney visitors crowding a street display of fake Prada bags, is so terrible about that? Whatever friction exists between them comes almost entirely from herself. So what if she stopped resisting? Marian thinks, slowing automatically, respectfully, before the former storefront of the late and much lamented Books & Co., now home to a purveyor of sweaters. What if she were suddenly unencumbered by the need to punish herself for every moment of pleasure, every surge of happiness, even for the relatively innocuous interludes of mere companionship, all of which Oliver gives her? How would it feel to be actually happy with him, to allow him his own happiness without automatically dispatching the bad fairies to ruin everything? Oliver isn’t just lovely and ardent, after all, he’s smart. He’s thoughtful. He is drawn to beauty, but not for selfish or hedonistic purposes. He has curiosity about almost everybody, but he likes being alone. If you could subtract the troublesome, unseemly bits—his being the son of her oldest friend, for example; her being married and old enough to be his mother—then they are actually wonderfully suited. What are we talking about, anyway? Marian thinks crossly. Great sex? Interesting conversation? Warm mutual affection? Even Jane Austen would be forced to approve of them. After all, what did Darcy and Elizabeth have that she and Oliver do not?
At Seventy-second, she stops and jabs at the red button that tells the light to change.
She waits.
The thing is, thinks Marian, shifting her weight at the curb, she actually is in a position to make a change in her life. A comprehensive change. If she wants it badly enough, she can actually do what Oliver has asked her to do, and survive the aftershocks. This is true for a variety of reasons:
Marian has no children.
Her husband of many years would recover, possibly very quickly.
She can afford to be a divorced woman, or married to a man with more precarious finances than herself.
I must be the most fortunately situated adulteress in history, thinks Marian.
The light turns green. She steps into the crosswalk.
For the first time since falling in love with Oliver, Marian permits herself the fantasy of walking with him, just walking with him openly, on Park Avenue, in Central Park, even into Carter Hawes’s sprawling Riverside Drive apartment. She seats them at the front table at Nicola’s, where her neighbors and her Brearley classmates and the aging friends of her parents would drift past to their dinners, and imagines herself introducing Oliver to these shocked matrons and their husbands. Marian could have that. She could withstand the amusement her altered circumstances would generate—older woman! younger man!—because she would have Oliver.
But for how long?
And this, of course, is the other direction in which her mind has traveled.
Reaching the opposite corner of the street, she pauses to look in the Ralph Lauren windows. It alleviates her mood to indulge her dislike of Ralph Lauren (which dates to his massacre of antique quilts, for skirts, in the 1970s), but she cannot sustain it for long and is soon walking south again, moving among the slender, blond women of the avenue: the shopping women, whose work is to pollinate these flower-boutiques with money and bring forth the nectar of their merchandise. There may be a reason, it occurs to Marian, watching a lynx-clad specimen paused at the doorway of Frette, that these shopping women do not age, a reason that has nothing to do with exercise or plastic surgery. They do not age because they are not permitted to enter the decrepit years in public; after their flush is past they depart and are replaced by women so closely resembling them in earlier years that, collectively, they maintain the illusion of stasis. Offstage, somewhere, Marian thinks—down a private Hamptons lane or in a grand Berkshires estate—the prior discards patiently wait out their golden years in meek compliance with the bargains they’ve made. Their children grow up, unknowing, with a tag-team of youthful, look-alike mothers, and their husbands underwrite the whole enterprise, compensated with the envy of their peers and the eternal twenty-nine-year-old in their beds. How much longer for this one? Marian wonders, passing the lynx woman as she enters Frette. And what happens if she refuses to go at her appointed hour?
Marian, as it happens, has never thought of herself as beautiful. Awkward daughters of acknowledged beauties do not long remain unclear on this issue, and Mimi Warburg—legendary hostess—was brutally honest when it came to her only child. Marian’s ankles were held to be “good,” and her eye color “fortunate.” As to the rest, all was camouflage and acceptance of what could not be controlled. Accepted, Marian thinks, pausing to consider the windows of Barneys (already easing into holiday mode with cues of red and green). She had accepted it, all of it—the ordinariness of her appearance, the predisposition to feel lucky if anyone showed an interest in her—and the odd thing was that she had not resented this. Or she hadn’t, at least, until a man came into her life and convinced her that she actually was beautiful. Before Oliver, she might have anticipated the years ahead as something subtle, a gentle walk down an elevation so gradual she would not feel the passage. Now she contemplates the loss of her looks with real fear, and wishes back her former plainness. Newly baptized as beautiful, all Marian feels is a kind of clutching against age.
Marshall, to his credit, has never made an issue of her looks. When he chose her, when he made his declaration of choice, years ago as they were walking across the town green in New Haven, Marian understood that he had chosen a companion mind, far more than an object of physical passion, and though this particular pairing might have
seemed odd to some of Marian’s more cerebral fellow students—Marshall being decidedly more clever than intellectual—it was not at all odd to Marian. (Her own parents had not been particularly well matched in mind and ran out of interesting conversation by the time Marian was old enough to listen for it.) Though Marshall had been spared the rarified and socially ambitious upbringing Marian had endured, and though he was in fact far too arriviste to have merited the regard of Mimi Warburg and her circle, he turned out to speak the language Marian herself had chosen to speak—about music and theater, the love of her city, its physical comforts, its literary institutions, its somber but nonbelieving Judaism. These were Marshall’s predilections as well, though he had not inherited them as she had. Perhaps she respected him for that, too.
Marshall had always had an instinct for the deal, Marian thinks, turning east on Sixty-first. In the early years, his covetous enthusiasms for emerging companies would terrify her, tied as they were to great quantities of their shared wealth, but he had seldom made a misstep. He upheld a personal, somewhat idiosyncratic, code of loyalty. He labored under the delusion that his subordinates were bound to him by respect, and that the directors of the companies he took over would willingly work under his new leadership once they saw that he meant only to make them—the conquered, himself, everybody!—even more successful. Marshall had never played very well with others, it was true, and yet he had been true to his word as far as Marian was concerned. Twenty years and they still had plenty to say to each other, and knew what not to say. That, too, is a kind of regard, thinks Marian.
By the time she reaches Bloomingdale’s, the Saturday morning crowd has reached near-standstill at the escalators, and Marian, as familiar with the department store’s floor plan as her own apartment’s layout, opts to cross the cosmetics floor and catch the secondary escalators in the men’s department. This requires the evasive movements of a running back to avoid the fragrance hawkers, but she can’t avoid the miasma of scent entirely. Marian is holding up a hand to dissuade an eager representative of Bobbi Brown when she hears someone call her name above the din and lowers her guard long enough to receive a full facial blast.
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