The rose variations, p.30
The Rose Variations, page 30
No such person, she said to herself, but still she lived and breathed.
“Professor MacGregor?” he called, laughing to himself unhappily.
She stretched out on the lumpy straw covered with rotten ticking.
Minutes passed. Voices dwindled. Good-byes drifted on the air. “Rose MacGregor?” she heard once again.
The young fellow was determined, and who could fault him? The mating call was strong. But there were other calls, and she was even more determined than he.
Winning by hiding wasn’t much to boast about, however. And she could only hide for so long.
Twelve hours and three buses later, she stood in the street in front of the condo, reading a note under the wiper of the Volvo at the curb where James had parked it. The note informed her that the tank was full and that her keys were upstairs with the Gilpins.
The front door of the building stood ajar. She took a breath, stepped inside, and upheaval broke over her.
Alan slammed into view, a suitcase in each hand. He dumped them on the landing and turned back to Frances, who stood hissing in their doorway, her voice hoarse, poisonous and then piteous, restraining Max, who was trying to get past her, shrieking “Daddy, I want my Daddy!”
“It’s the third time she has thrown me out,” Alan announced crisply, “and now the third time she has begged me to stay.”
“Who are you talking to?” quavered Frances. Glancing over the railing, she saw Rose, and her face went hard. “Give me your keys,” she told Alan while glaring at Rose.
“I’ve got stuff in there,” said Alan.
“Take it all right now.”
“Furniture—my desk, for instance? I cannot take it all right now.”
Frances extended her hand. He sighed, pulled keys off his chain, and gave them to her. She went in and closed the door.
“I’ve told her the truth, is all,” he said, as though to himself. He looked down at Rose, who stared back at him, oafish in her dirty clothes.
“Oh, Christ. I left you out there overnight at that godforsaken farm wedding. I cannot believe it. Frances,” he said, raising his voice not at all. Frances opened the door. “Get Rose’s keys for her, please. James gave them to you.”
“James touched them, and you expect me to?”
“You know where they are. I do not,” he said. She went. She returned, dropped Rose’s key chain down the stairwell, and was gone again.
“I’ve told her the truth,” Alan repeated, suddenly tearful. He picked up his luggage and went down the stairs.
Rose retrieved her keys, went into her apartment, unplugged her phone, ran a bath, and got in. Frances stalked down the stairs and pounded on her door. Rose heaved up out of the water and pulled on her kimono. Through the doorway, they looked at each other. Then Rose sighed, stepped forward, and put her arms around Frances who first crumpled and then struggled out of the embrace.
“You knew,” she said. Rose led her to the big chair. “And you never said a word.”
“But I did tell you,” said Rose gently, kneeling beside her. “Almost the first thing I ever said to you was that Alan was gay.”
“We are not going back there. We are not going back to that point in time.”
“Oh, but Frances. They held hands in front of you. You had to know.”
“I thought the holding hands was an African thing.” Frances looked at her wonderingly, and Rose was appalled at herself. That Frances “knew” had been Alan’s excuse, and it wasn’t true. Frances had decided not to know, but she’d also been allowed not to know. She looked blasted; her face like crockery shattered and glued back together. The door nudged open, and Max stood snuffling at the threshold. Frances held out her arms. Rose wrapped them both in an afghan and went to the refrigerator. It was the first of the many, many meals she was to make for them.
But Frances had, after all, given Rose years of comfort, of solace. Weary as she was, Rose found it a relief—no, a pleasure—to return the favor. If Rose felt a slight satisfaction that Frances hadn’t gotten away with it after all—the perfect life and the lording of it over Rose, kissing her daily on both cheeks, the years of looking down upon her from the heights of married life—Rose was still genuinely sorry. And, really, if Rose was a little false, comforting Frances, this was nothing new and it went both ways.
They’d had days and nights and years together and they’d always held up the mirror, hadn’t they, offering each other encouragement in the form of envy or warning in the form of pity? Rose, in comforting Frances and the pity that implied, warned Frances that she was truly in trouble. Frances, in allowing Rose to comfort her, envied Rose for keeping safe and encouraged her to keep even safer.
Yet they were so little alike. What had they ever been but two women brought into relation by happenstance, by circumstances?
Circumstances were just now crashing down. Rose, too, was on the verge of a crash, as Frances was certain to know. In the near future, Rose would need Frances, though how much sway Frances actually held over tenure was impossible to say.
Rose recalled telling Alan not to worry, fatuously lecturing him to ignore Frances, to stand back and let the wheels turn. But one never could exactly gauge the power of a department secretary who might convey or fail to convey the bits and scraps that kept things moving or brought them to a halt, who didn’t turn the large wheels but might redirect things by the slightest turn of the smallest wheel.
So what if Rose and Frances had little in common but their history? Frances might still help Rose survive it all safely. Hadn’t it been Frances who, in the past, had pointed out Rose’s future to her, when she herself couldn’t see it? For some seven years, hadn’t Frances been the one to light the way?
Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
In and out of her rooms and theirs, upstairs and down, Frances and Alan carried out their furious leave-taking. They seemed to prefer Rose’s apartment for their battles. She understood that: neutral ground. Willing and curious, at first, she cooked and tidied for them all and calmed Max, who cried and raged and built teetering block cas-tles under her piano and smashed them down. Late summer, school not yet in session, Rose and Max and Frances were home at Rose’s all the time. Alan was also present, in person or over the phone to Frances, a dozen times a day or, lacking keys, over the speaker box down at the front door.
He could get in if he wanted to, said Frances. He knew everyone in the building; someone would let him in. She demanded that he come upstairs again and show his face, even if he’d been there not an hour before. Telling him so, she banged Rose’s call button and broke it, which was okay by Rose, who was growing weary of the buzzing.
Between rounds, Frances and Alan rehearsed to Rose what they would say next.
Frances: Alan had responsibilities. He was condo president—he should repair Rose’s buzzer at once. He was a father—dishonest and weak, but, even so, she would take him back. Would she deny her children a father— little Max and the babe-to-be? No, but he would keep his vows; he’d admit he had been dishonest and weak; there would be no men.
Whenever Alan saw Rose at home or at school, he clapped his hands to his forehead. He was not afraid to face Frances. He was over every day, was he not?—yes, to caretake the condo. He’d get to Rose’s buzzer. (No hurry, Rose told him.) Frances was the dishonest one, trying to bully him back into her bed and make him pretend he was someone he wasn’t. Was Frances against joy? He loved men; she was not a man.
Between rounds, Frances moved furniture, slammed things, stacked things and rearranged things all over Rose’s apartment. Opening her cup-board, Rose found her shelves stuffed with Frances’s saltine boxes and had to ask where her plates had gone. And had to wait for an answer, because here was Alan again, in person.
He threw his arms around Max and raised his voice to Frances. Even more than he missed his boy, he seemed to miss his wife and to hold her to him, somehow still his. Otherwise, why try so loudly, so relentlessly, to make her adopt his version of things?
He loved men; she was not a man. Would she never get it?
Frances was more than not a man—she was a woman, Rose heard her-self say, forgetting for the moment that she’d declared herself neutral.
What did that mean, Alan wanted to know.
Frances rolled her eyes and returned to her subject: vows, eternal promises.
But Alan had to know what Rose meant.
Alan loved men. Frances was a woman. Life moved on, Rose couldn’t help saying.
So?
So, however much Alan missed Frances and Max, it was clear that he wasn’t coming back—except here he was again.
Alan turned to Frances. He had always and would always admire and respect her, he said, and burst into tears.
“What are you trying to do?” Frances demanded of Rose.
There were many things Rose could say about letting go, she told them. But she herself had always let go with frightening ease. And she would shut up now.
“Right,” said Frances.
“Right,” echoed Rose. At least she could spirit Max away and leave them to their dismantling. She packed up the satchel of blocks and took Max off to school with her, where he built his castles beneath the piano in a practice room while she played. It was loud under the piano, but Max seemed to crave a blanketing of sound.
Rose too. She wanted music. She was back at her symphony. She wanted to get it done, get it out, rush a commitment from some new orchestra, slam a new entry into her tenure portfolio, but all she seemed able to do was to rearrange the parts of it, as Frances rearranged furniture, shoving and slamming and stacking with nonsensical precision, only to unstack again.
Fortunately, Frances wasn’t strong enough for every rearrangement she imagined. She wanted to switch Rose’s study and bedroom—Rose should sleep behind the kitchen and work on her sun porch. She wanted Rose to help her lug the bed back and the desk forward—better light for work, all those windows, said Frances. But that wasn’t it.
After bedtime, after Frances and Max said goodnight and clumped upstairs, after the distant sounds of the bath—tap gushing, faint sloshing, and then a dim tunefulness, Frances managing a lullaby—after the quiet interval during which Max fell asleep, Frances came alone to Alan’s study on the sun porch, directly over Rose’s bed. There, she wept softly at his maple desk in his swivel chair and talked to herself so quietly that it was clear she didn’t want to be overheard.
But Rose, coming to bed below, heard the swivel of the chair and the muttering and weeping. Frances didn’t mean to admit anyone into the privacy of her defeat, but Rose couldn’t help listening and then making use of what she heard.
The symphony came together: a burst of tears. First movement: Utterly lost and alone. What must I undergo? Then the question posed calmly and more emphatically, elaborated with greater dread: Must I walk through the world alone?
Second movement, complication: Could there be something, someone to help me? What is love? Where is it found?
Rose took to setting paper and pencil by the bedside. Her bed became her desk. She went to bed to work by lamplight and by the sound of Frances’s grief—moaning, sobbing, and sighing.
Third movement, argument: This can’t be love, this confusion, this frailty.
Rose made rapid progress and would have liked to give thanks and once or twice, in the day, nearly did, nearly thanked Frances for grieving so openly, as if for them both. Sometimes in the night Rose wept too, quietly, and imagined that they’d drawn close, she and Frances.
Then, as the nights passed, Frances’s grieving lost its labored sound, and then the sighing lessened and Rose could barely hear her. No matter; the symphony was nearly finished. All she needed was a bridge to the end to bring her to what she’d written long before, that final movement of ease, assurance, and peace.
An evening came when Frances and Max went out visiting. Was it to Frances’s mother, or had she said friends? It didn’t matter; Frances was finally seeking someone else to talk to, and Rose was glad to find herself alone, except for the unnerving quiet. So when she heard a thump on her porch, and then another, a heavier sound than her cat’s thud from bed to windowsill, from windowsill to floor, she went to investigate.
Outside her windows, opposite the sunset, a full moon lolled on the horizon, huge, membranous and scarlet. From below, a badminton birdie flew up, thumped her window, fell, spiraled up, and thumped the window again. It wasn’t the usual frill of white plastic, but something old, knotted and black, black-feathered—Graham’s shuttlecock.
She ran down to open the door. And there he stood, the moon huge behind him.
She pointed and stuttered, “Blood orange.”
He asked her, naturally enough, whether she’d been away.
She might as well have been—her phone in constant use and her buzzer broken.
Not that she’d forgotten him. In the practice room or working alone in bed at night, she’d allowed herself to dream about Graham, urgent, embarrassing fantasies.
She felt she shouldn’t think of him. After she’d told him she was entirely unattached, how could she explain that a sexual indiscretion might cause her to lose her job? Soon she would have to redraft her port-folio, crossing off the Seattle Sinfonietta. Still, she returned in her mind to Graham’s house and his cooking, to the night when, if she hadn’t lost her nerve, they would surely have climbed together into his bed beneath the shattered lute. She’d thought of how that lute might appear from beneath and the cracked resonance that might come from the chamber if an arm were to fling against it in the throes of lovemaking. She’d imagined Graham’s weight on her, and that made it all the harder to phone him. She knew she ought to phone him. She hadn’t properly thanked him for supper, and it was her turn to call. She’d even tried to joke herself into it, scribbling out a phone script—Hi, Graham, it’s Rose, how’re you?
He leaned against her kitchen wall, his hands stuffed in his pockets. The glossy white of the wall made a sort of corona around his dark head with its close-cropped hair. Though slender and no taller than she, he seemed huge, as though the moon had gotten in.
She turned her back to him, putting on the teakettle, gabbling about her music and about how tenure was making her nervous, hoping her hands would stop shaking.
She’d imagined not only lovemaking but fantasies of him running to her rescue. He’d carry her away from all worries about her future. It would be a rising-up on the wings of love. How sentimental of her, how pathetic.
She passed her glance over his head, the bristly hair, the emphatic eye-brows, the wide forehead, the abruptly pointed chin—a face both sharp and kind.
She’d lost a commission she needed for tenure. She could tell him that much without saying how. And, of course, a symphony, however great on paper, did not exist until played, she told him, in a tone so jaded that anyone might think she was not at all aware of this man standing before her in whom she’d put such huge, outlandish hope.
He had crow’s feet like she did, and deep laugh lines. At the moment, however, his mouth was still and his face was a mask. She recognized this as a trick of his: his courteous blank look, his “ancient craftsman.” She could understand why he’d mask himself to her now. She was rambling on about orchestras in her professional voice, her mask, her official stance with its any number of words to keep her out of trouble. Not that she’d succeeded in keeping out of trouble.
“Well,” she said. “Why should it be easy? Aren’t humans made for difficulty?”
He spoke up suddenly. “Difficulty? What about happiness?” His voice, for all its Midwestern plainness, had a sparkle in it. His face, though wary, had come alive, his eyes so suddenly keen on hers that she dropped her gaze to his hands and the shuttlecock he was turning over and over.
“Happiness,” she said. “What’s that?”
“You tell me,” he demanded.
But all she had to offer was sadness. She fetched the teacups. She asked him to sit down. But he went on standing against her wall, fidgeting with the shuttlecock, longing and apprehension washing across his face.
That morning, she told him, sadness had announced itself again. Out behind the building, very early, she’d heard such a banging that she’d struggled out of bed and gone to the window to see a figure in a tan coat in the alley casting lids off garbage cans, pushing the cans over and strewing the garbage. It was Doris Atkinson, the Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife of the Chair of her music department, in her Burberry coat.
“No kidding,” said Graham, in a toneless voice.
“No kidding,” Rose echoed witlessly, keeping her story going, making strings of sounds just to keep his eyes on hers.
She’d spotted Doris Atkinson that morning and rushed to her closet and wrenched on her jeans in a hurry to go down and help. She didn’t admit why to Graham: that she’d recognized the opportunity for a private talk with her Chair to gain assurance that he, at least, was on her side and would fight for her tenure; and what better pretext than by leading his poor, demented wife home to him? But it didn’t matter—Frances had saved Rose from her ignoble errand. Frances had got there first.
Frances Gilpin, her upstairs neighbor, was someone Doris recognized, Rose explained. Frances dropped over to the Atkinsons’ at least twice a week to help the Chair manage, and so it was better that Frances be the one to take Doris home.
There they went down the alley, Frances in her nightgown and bathrobe, with her little boy, Max, in his pajamas and Doris with garbage down her coat front, going off toward campus and the Atkinsons’ duplex as though this were normal: Frances with her head held high, her robe sashed around her swollen belly, coaxing along her little son, who dragged the rubberized treads of his pjs, coaxing along Doris in her expensive, soiled coat—a brave parade that seemed to Rose the very picture of sadness.
Some of this she had put into her symphony, she told Graham. She had no orchestra to play it, but she was finishing it anyway. Perhaps that was how she defined happiness—work? Solitary progress in work? The teakettle whistled, full boil. She turned to fill the teapot. She placed upon the table a plate of saltines.
