The White Rose Read Free

Pete at the Pink Teacup to know! Why not? Don’t I love you? Am I not of sound mind?”
    “Yes,” she says, clutching at him. “I mean, no. Please. ” Even to herself she sounds frantic. “Caroline would be devastated.”
    “She’ll get over it. She’ll want me to be happy.”
    “Not happy with me. Not happy with somebody her own age. And your father!”
    “You mean,” he says coolly, “my stepfather.”
    “Yes. Oliver, please think. This is wonderful. This is…I’m…” She shakes her head in pure frustration. “I’m so happy. This year…I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
    “Missed it!” he says.
    “Please, we need to keep it private. Oliver, promise me!”
    “I won’t.” He crosses his arms in classic petulance. “You misunderstand me, Marian. This is for good with me. I mean, this is it, you know? So I want to be with you now and I want to be with you next year. I want to be with you in twenty years. I want to be with you in thirty years.”
    The thought of herself in thirty years fills her with total horror. Reflexively, she pulls up the sheets.
    “Too late,” he says smugly. “I’ve seen it.”
    “And what about Marshall?” Marian says. “Doesn’t he have a say?”
    “He had one,” Oliver says. “But he blew it. Besides, what’s he doing right now? He’d rather go off to some hut and shoot things than stay home and be with you.”
    “Oliver. You know that’s not fair.” She swings her legs over the side of the bed, still holding the sheet across herself but prepared to make her getaway. “It’s a corporate retreat.”
    “I’ve never understood the appeal of shooting things,” Oliver muses. “I think it’s an I’m-a-man-and-I’m-getting-old thing.”
    Marian turns abruptly. “Well, perhaps when you’re getting old, you’ll understand it better.”
    He recoils. “Marian.”
    “Look. I’m sorry. But there’s no point attacking Marshall. His life is a very big house with lots of rooms and I don’t go into all of them. I’m happy with that.” She softens. “After all, I wouldn’t want him in all of my rooms, either, would I?”
    Oliver, looking hard but not quite fierce, says nothing.
    “But look how we’re wasting the moment, Oliver. We’re here. He’s there. When have we ever had this?”
    “And what,” he says archly, “ is this ?”
    The very question, thinks Marian. She would like him to be quiet now, and kiss her.
    Marian considers him as if seeing him for the first time: man on the street, man through a restaurant window, man with flowers. There is a bloom on him that breaks her heart, and hair so richly brown it makes her think of fertile earth. Each cheek bears a brushstroke of pink, fading at the jaw line, as if he has just come in from a run on some spiky peak in New Hampshire. Oliver is twenty-six, elated, connected, utterly alive. She is forty-eight.
    Again, that purr as the phone makes its transapartment statement. It can be nothing important enough to wrest her from her bed, her lover, even her petulant lover. Increasingly, these past months, it has been Lady Charlotte groupies on the line, wanting to touch her telephonic hem, so to speak, so much so it now seems to Marian that it’s time to change the number altogether. She holds her breath: the phone stops.
    “I’m not trying to ruin things,” he says suddenly. “Believe me, that’s the last thing I want. But I want more, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t have it. And don’t—”
    She has begun to speak, but he continues, “Don’t try to tell me it’s for me, because it isn’t. I’d marry you today if I could. I have no problem with the age thing, you know I don’t. I only mention it because I don’t want to ignore that it’s problematic for you.”
    “I appreciate that,” Marian says carefully. “That’s very sensitive of you. But I’m asking you to do nothing for the moment. I just need some…stillness, I guess. I need to be still. Let’s give ourselves