Read Online The White Rose by Jean Hanff Korelitz - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz
Ads: Link
This time occurs frequently, perhaps even daily, but it is easily missed, and feels, as a result, beyond uncommon. It can be missed by looking in the wrong direction, or by being under an umbrella, or by being indoors or at the movies or the Food Emporium at just that instant. To catch it, then, is rare and not a little glorious, which is why Marian always notes it when she does. She remembers, most clearly of all, the first time she noticed it, coming home from the Fokine School of Dance on Seventy-ninth with her hand in Mary’s hand, and finding herself on Park Avenue at just that liminal moment to see a sparkle in the sidewalk beneath her school shoes. And she remembers thinking: I never noticed that before.
Aubergine Time, she came to call it. (“Aubergine” being a word used by her mother, and meaning a kind of purple, though with exotic overtones.) Aubergine Time passed so quickly that you could barely close your hand around it before it fled between your fingers, and in Marian’s life she had never clutched at more than a hundred. There had been four on the front steps of the Brearley School; one slinking out of the park, shivering beneath the arm of her first boyfriend, Roger Frank, one outside the Fairway on Broadway and Seventy-fifth, a rash of them in and around Gramercy Park, where she and Marshall had spent their first married years, and one a month before today on Commerce Street, while she was racing the length of the block to Oliver’s door with her arms full of groceries.
And oddly, at this particular moment, even as Marian wrenches herself away from Oliver—from Olivia —and walks to the end of the living room, the two large windows begin to beckon with that uncommon but familiar light, and she thinks (even with all of her rage and encroaching depression and also humiliation, because it had happened in front of Oliver, who knew that she thought it was all true, even if he himself did not): Oh! It’s now!
It is now. It is right now, on the great glittering ravine of Park Avenue, and she just has time to wish that she were not here inside, even with Oliver, but outside in that light—even looking as terrible as she does with her puffy face. I love this, Marian thinks, which is absurd, because she is actually quite miserable. And yet…the spiky buildings, the rising steam over the East River, and the floating specks of light as planes dispersed, poor things, from this very center of the universe, in a sky thick with aubergine, which makes Marian remember, as she always remembers, the white, white shoulders of her mother, seated at a white dressing table by a window flooded with this exact light.
“Marian?” Oliver says. He is still in the hallway.
And then it is over. Fled. The aubergine called back up to the heavens as evening fills its void.
“I did not like that woman,” he says.
“She does not expect to be liked,” Marian says, turning. “She expects to be reckoned with.”
He looks relieved at her apparent recovery.
“What a thrill for her, to find my cousin here. And with his news!”
Oliver frowns. “Why? What’s it to her?”
“Well, it’s a scoop. It’s a big deal, Mort Klein’s daughter getting married. Mort Klein may be generous with his house, you see, but not with his private life. I mean, you can see his ballroom if you support the Jewish Museum or the Philharmonic or the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, but you won’t find the family there. They’re private people.” Marian sinks onto the couch. “People like Valerie don’t understand them. What’s the point of being private!”
“‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors,’ right?”
“Right,” Marian says. “Actually,” she continues, “I ought to be grateful. If Barton hadn’t been here she’d have been a lot more interested in you.”
Oliver crosses over and sits beside Marian on the couch. After a moment, he crosses his legs at the knee.
“Good girl,” Marian says and
Aubergine Time, she came to call it. (“Aubergine” being a word used by her mother, and meaning a kind of purple, though with exotic overtones.) Aubergine Time passed so quickly that you could barely close your hand around it before it fled between your fingers, and in Marian’s life she had never clutched at more than a hundred. There had been four on the front steps of the Brearley School; one slinking out of the park, shivering beneath the arm of her first boyfriend, Roger Frank, one outside the Fairway on Broadway and Seventy-fifth, a rash of them in and around Gramercy Park, where she and Marshall had spent their first married years, and one a month before today on Commerce Street, while she was racing the length of the block to Oliver’s door with her arms full of groceries.
And oddly, at this particular moment, even as Marian wrenches herself away from Oliver—from Olivia —and walks to the end of the living room, the two large windows begin to beckon with that uncommon but familiar light, and she thinks (even with all of her rage and encroaching depression and also humiliation, because it had happened in front of Oliver, who knew that she thought it was all true, even if he himself did not): Oh! It’s now!
It is now. It is right now, on the great glittering ravine of Park Avenue, and she just has time to wish that she were not here inside, even with Oliver, but outside in that light—even looking as terrible as she does with her puffy face. I love this, Marian thinks, which is absurd, because she is actually quite miserable. And yet…the spiky buildings, the rising steam over the East River, and the floating specks of light as planes dispersed, poor things, from this very center of the universe, in a sky thick with aubergine, which makes Marian remember, as she always remembers, the white, white shoulders of her mother, seated at a white dressing table by a window flooded with this exact light.
“Marian?” Oliver says. He is still in the hallway.
And then it is over. Fled. The aubergine called back up to the heavens as evening fills its void.
“I did not like that woman,” he says.
“She does not expect to be liked,” Marian says, turning. “She expects to be reckoned with.”
He looks relieved at her apparent recovery.
“What a thrill for her, to find my cousin here. And with his news!”
Oliver frowns. “Why? What’s it to her?”
“Well, it’s a scoop. It’s a big deal, Mort Klein’s daughter getting married. Mort Klein may be generous with his house, you see, but not with his private life. I mean, you can see his ballroom if you support the Jewish Museum or the Philharmonic or the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, but you won’t find the family there. They’re private people.” Marian sinks onto the couch. “People like Valerie don’t understand them. What’s the point of being private!”
“‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors,’ right?”
“Right,” Marian says. “Actually,” she continues, “I ought to be grateful. If Barton hadn’t been here she’d have been a lot more interested in you.”
Oliver crosses over and sits beside Marian on the couch. After a moment, he crosses his legs at the knee.
“Good girl,” Marian says and
Similar Books
