The White Rose Read Free Page A

some time.” Please, she adds to herself, since she is not deluding herself about the rest of it.
    “How much time?” Oliver says.
    “Until…” Marian smiles, considering. “Until my rose is ready.”
    He smiles. “You mean Lady Charlotte’s rose.”
    “Of course.”
    “A rose to order: pompous, overblown, and…what was the rest of it?”
    “Pompous, overblown, and incapable of regret. That’s what I asked for, I seem to recall,” says Marian, laughing. “Surely that can’t be too difficult.”
    “Difficult? It’s a serious challenge! But it might take time. I may not get it on the first try, you know.”
    “Then I will wait,” Marian says, and they kiss.
    Kissing him is her favorite thing. Kissing him is a thing she can do for hours. Oliver is a kisser of spectacular abilities, because he—alone, she believes, of his gender—has grasped the secret power of a kiss that does not necessarily lead to activities more genital. In other words, he can kiss for the sake of kissing, and a woman need not fear kissing him if she is not prepared to have sex immediately afterward. Marshall, it occurs to her even as she luxuriates in Oliver’s tongue, Oliver’s slightly overbitten front teeth, has never quite gleaned this fact, though she doesn’t hold it against him. Most men, after all, offered kisses as they might offer invitations to join a board: if you accepted, you’d better be prepared to come up with the goods. Marshall, a man of his generation ( their generation, she reminds herself), had better things in mind than the meeting of lips, even the interplay of tongues: they were in it for fucking, pure and simple. Not that fucking didn’t have its place.
    But Oliver…well, Oliver likes to kiss. Just now, indeed, he is holding her head, fingertips light on her jaw, lifting it, adjusting it, and her mouth is full of him and her thoughts are full of him, until she is almost helpless to keep herself from taking those demure above-the-shoulder hands and placing them decisively below the shoulder so that she can disprove her own point about kissing for kissing’s sake as quickly as possible. But before she can do that, there is a rude buzzing sound from the kitchen.
    “Drat,” Marian says, pulling back.
    “Oh, let it go,” says Oliver, his voice dreamy.
    “Can’t.” She sits up. “It’s downstairs. The doorman knows I’m here.”
    “So?” He leans back on his elbow. “If it’s a delivery he’ll take it.”
    Marian gets out of bed, wrapping the sheet around herself like a lady on a Grecian urn. “Mr. Stern,” she informs him, “I live in this building. I have lived in this building for fourteen years. These doormen know far too much about my life, and I know virtually nothing about theirs. It is a strange and strained state of affairs that requires a highly choreographed dance involving all participants, and an inordinate amount of courtesy. And part of that courtesy, my young man, is answering the house phone when it buzzes.”
    “Okay!” He puts up his hands and grins. “Answer! Answer!”
    “Also random chats about the weather, cooing over baby pictures, superficial commentary about city politics, and a working knowledge of the championship prospects of major New York sports teams. I do not refrain from answering the house phone when he knows I’m upstairs and then expect the departure of my young and lovely friend in due course to pass without some salacious interest. Do you follow me?”
    “Like a slave,” Oliver laughs. “Now hurry up and answer the phone.”
    Marian does. She trails her sheet through the apartment, hearing the house phone sound its angry buzz a second time as she pads over the dark wooden floors. In the dining room her mail from yesterday is piled on the long oak table: magazines, catalogues, bills, a fat manila envelope of Charlotte reviews, from Italy this time, forwarded by another satisfied publisher. Also a box from Hammacher Schlemmer, another of