The Rose Variations, page 18
“Hel-lo, Marion,” Ursula sang out. “And aren’t we in form tonight?”
But Marion didn’t hear. She’d gone off to Rose’s father and the glass of wine he held out for her. Emma, at the refreshment table, gave Rose a bright salute, but the sense of well-being Rose had summoned would not come. As she watched, Emma hoisted a wine jug, and her hands shook so badly she had to put it down again. She turned away and hugged herself a minute, and Rose realized she’d seen this once or twice before, a new aspect of Emma, aging and uncertain.
Lila. Rose needed Lila. The sight of Lila would restore the evening to her.
“Excuse me,” Rose said to the latest well-wishers. “I’ve got to thank my musicians.” She made it to the apron of the stage, where a hand caught hers and pulled her down. Guy sat there, his eyes streaming. He swiped at his face and bounced Marguerite, who craned around to look at him and fussed uncertainly.
“Thanks for coming,” Rose said lamely. “I should have warned you about Bears.”
He shook his head. “I made my commitment,” he managed to say.
“Oh? You guys are getting married?” She found she could ask quite casually.
He looked at her hard and shrugged.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You love her.”
“Do I?” he said, his voice breaking.
She pulled back. What was he doing? She’d made her peace with her solitude.
Natalie flung herself down beside them. “Oh, here you are. Guess what? Dad’s taking Mom out for supper. They’re talking.”
“Great. Wonderful. Excuse me.” Rose got up and nearly ran.
The backstage corridor was packed. People were asking for Lila, but the dressing room door seemed to be locked, so Rose went in another way.
Lila sat in a chair with Josie in her lap. They were locked in a kiss, so absorbed in one another they did not see Rose at first. Then Josie jumped up and they moved apart.
“Oh, my,” said Rose, unsteadily. Of course she should have knocked. But all day she’d been coming and going from their dressing room.
“Well,” said Lila gently, “yeah.”
Rose took a breath. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I mean, congratulations.”
“We did good?” Josie asked her. Lila laughed awkwardly.
“Wonderfully well,” Rose said. “You played utterly, fantastically well.”
“See?” said Josie. Lila wrapped her arms around Josie again and grinned foolishly.
“I think,” said Rose, “I’ll just step out and clear my head. Oh, but you must be starved.”
“We’ll go and claim a table,” said Josie.
Rose slipped out the stage door and into the park, no coat, no hat, step-ping gingerly in her heels. The snow had stopped and the paths had been plowed. Under a clear sky, the temperature was dropping, turning the wet sidewalk to ice. She teetered along a row of lights, pretending to tour the half-melted sculptures—an eagle, a lightning bolt, and a lion.
Tomorrow the reviews would be out and they’d be good, possibly raves. That was something to hang on to: columns of black and white where her name would appear, her place in the world. Perhaps she would recognize herself in print.
She examined the eagle with its beak and wing tips melted, the light-ning bolt softened to a standing noodle, the lion with its face melted smooth of features.
No matter how people had flocked to her concert, she’d go to bed by herself that night, while Lila curled up with Josie, Ursula with Bogdan, Natalie with Guy, Doris Atkinson with her Harold, possibly even her mother with her father. Emma was alone, but she’d had her husband and her children. Rose had made such a big deal, such a cause of being alone. But that hadn’t been hard to accomplish, had it? What was solitude but an absence, a lack? Really, it was nothing at all.
PART TWO
“Now you are tangled up in others and have forgotten what you once knew. . . .”
—Kabir, “The Radiance,”
version by Robert Bly
Chapter SEVENTEEN
On a bright Sunday afternoon in late March, the week before Easter, Rose lay in her kimono, lolling in bed on her sun porch, when a knock came at the door. It was not a knock she knew, not Alan’s boom-boom, nor Frances’s rhythmic rat-a-tat, nor little Max’s soft thud when Frances held him up to do the honors. The Gilpins—Alan, Frances, and their son, Max—lived upstairs, and their descending footfall usually warned her before any knock came.
“Just a sec,” Rose called and tightened her sash.
Downstairs, the front door lock had been changed the week before by Alan. He was president of the condo association and security-minded: outside locks should be changed every two years. It was, however, a little schizophrenic, to use his phrase, that he hadn’t yet managed to deliver new keys, so the front door stood unbolted all day. Anyone could be knocking. Though the tangled streets of the neighborhood around the college tended to discourage outsiders—so easy to get lost there—it was still a city neighborhood, and the only thing between Rose and the street was her door with its peephole. She peeped out and didn’t see anyone. The knock came again, down low.
She opened the door to a strange little creature, a girl of five or six. There was something of the wild animal about her, like a squirrel or raccoon. Her snarled brown hair was held back by a worn velvet headband, and she twisted her hands—paws, really: her fingernails seemed both sharp and bitten—and gazed at Rose through widely spaced eyes of a peculiarly intense shade of blue. In her patched-together jacket, which seemed to be missing buttons entirely, Rose recognized something, and looked into the blue eyes as into a mirror, feeling absurdly that she was looking at herself. Yet a real little girl stood before her.
“Aunt Rose?” the girl said, in a tiny, tremulous voice.
“Marguerite?” breathed Rose, and knelt. “You’re Marguerite, aren’t you?”
The girl nodded curtly.
“Well, come in,” said Rose. She hadn’t seen her niece since Natalie and Guy had struck off for Mexico a month after her Composer’s Guild con-cert, on a winter vacation that had stretched into years, six years. For all Rose knew, they’d settled there.
The little girl took a step inside and looked around, and then peered up at Rose through her lashes. It was pure Natalie, that look, exact to the tilt of the chin—dauntingly innocent and at the same time obscurely scheming.
“Where’s Natalie?” asked Rose, craning into the hall. The little girl stood at the threshold of the sun porch, leaning on her toes toward the unmade bed.
“Where’s your mama?” Rose asked again.
The girl wriggled out of the knapsack on her shoulders and let it drop to the floor.
“Guy’s sposed to get me,” she said.
However, out the windows, all the parked cars were familiar. Guy’s truck, if he still had the truck, was nowhere in evidence.
“Uh-huh,” said Rose. “Your dad’s coming to get you?”
“He’s not my dad.” She tiptoed back to the kitchen. “Guy?” she called.
“Guy’s with your mom, do you think? Maybe they dropped you off here for a visit?”
Marguerite shook her head.
“Well. Are you hungry? Can I take your jacket? I’m very glad to see you.”
The girl pulled the patchwork closer, dragged out a chair from the table, and sat. Once a plate of scrambled eggs was placed before her, she warily picked up her fork. Her chin floated only inches above the tabletop. Rose reached for the phone books little Max sat on, but Marguerite refused them.
“I’m not a baby.”
“No, you’re not,” Rose carefully agreed.
“I’m in first grade. At Lincoln School.”
“I see. Where’s Lincoln School? Someplace close, or far away?” Every town and city in the country probably had a Lincoln School.
Marguerite shrugged and swallowed her mouthful of eggs. “I’m on Easter vacation.”
Rose buttered and offered a caramel roll. And could not resist resting a hand briefly on the shoulder of her small guest, this little girl with blue-blue eyes whom she herself had named. Sunlight rolled from the porch through the living room, pouring over the piano and into the kitchen alcove where they sat. The apartment was like one great room: dark woodwork, glossy white paint, and long oak floor. Rose used the sun porch for a bedroom and the little space behind the kitchen as her study. She had no need for doors to shut—she had no one to get away from.
Munching the caramel roll, the little girl slid from her seat and stepped toward the piano, pausing at the telephone by Rose’s big chair.
“Do you want to make a call?”
Marguerite considered, shook her head, and went on to the piano, reaching out to stroke its cherrywood side. A baby grand with exceptional tone, though requiring frequent tuning, the piano was a thirtieth-birthday present Rose had bought herself three years before, when the Chamber Orchestra had commissioned a song cycle. She sometimes felt that the piano was an island on which she stood with her cat. Or maybe it was her good ship—evidence of having traveled far.
The girl regarded the open keyboard and wiped her hands on her jacket.
“Go ahead, Marguerite.”
“Meggy.”
“You go by Meggy?”
“Yah.” She pressed a key, and then dropped both fists onto the key-board. Rose came over to demonstrate, but the girl was back at the table, examining the last of the rolls.
“Listen, Meggy, do you think you could explain how you got here and what we’re doing?” Meggy reached a bitten hand to her face and rubbed an eye. “You don’t have to worry. You can stay here as long as you like.” Rose handed her the roll, and she slipped it into some inner pocket behind the fraying flaps of her jacket. “I’ve got plenty of food, you know,” said Rose, “and you can sleep on my couch or in my big bed with me if you want.”
“Your big bed!”
Meggy rushed to the porch, dived into the covers, and fingered the scalloped satin edge of the comforter. Then she pulled the comforter over her, leaving no part exposed except for feet in muddy little shoes. Rose reached and slipped the shoes off. Her tortoiseshell cat emerged from under the bed and fixed them with an outraged stare.
“Jewels, this is Meggy,” Rose told the cat severely.
From deep in the bedding came a whimper of joy. Meggy peeked out, eyes aglow.
Footsteps came up the hall, followed by a tapping at the door. Natalie, Rose guessed.
It was, instead, the piano tuner, the baggy-suited one from that long-ago night of her Guild concert. She’d gotten herself on his waiting list soon after she bought her piano, and after a wait—he was a sort of star among piano tuners—he had come and acquainted himself with her piano, which he’d approached like a trainer approaching a horse. Writing out his checks, she’d sometimes struggled to keep a straight face, having overheard him in his baggy suit and his suspenders, earnestly talking to her piano.
She’d left him a message, the day before, that one of her keys was sticking, but she hadn’t expected him to come around so soon, and cer-tainly not on a Sunday.
“I’m in the neighborhood,” he said, looking past her to the piano. He gave his case an easy swing, though Rose, having hefted it, knew it weighed a ton. He was slight in build but obviously stronger than he looked. She stepped aside, adjusting her kimono.
Meggy came and peeked from under her aunt’s elbow as the tuner reached into the piano. He had short, dense, dark hair and a mobile face that would have been clownish if not for an impression of stillness and shyness. His hands were big and knobby at the knuckles and moved with their own separate life, as when, while in conversation with Rose, his fin-gers went on with testing and tuning and sometimes played a progression of notes and chords.
“Your daughter?” he asked. Meggy went starry-eyed and picked up the end of Rose’s kimono sash to rub between her fingers.
“My niece,” she said proudly. “Meggy, this is Graham Lowe.”
He ran his fingers down the keyboard. Nothing stuck—it was as though healed. But he wasn’t satisfied. “I’ll have to come back,” he said and went.
Meggy piled back into the thick of the covers and lay humming through goose down.
“Meggy, can you hear me? Guy’s going to pick you up? Do you know when?”
“Now,” came the little voice, sleepy and a touch cranky.
“You go on and sleep,” Rose said and ran upstairs to consult Frances and Alan.
When she’d first bought her condo, the Gilpins had so admired it that she’d felt obliged to call them when the one above went on the market. The turn-of-the-century brick building was sullen and sooty on the out-side but had treasures within: parquetry tiles at the entryway, leaded glass that shot rainbows, wainscoting never touched by paint. The oak floors resounded satisfyingly when Rose played, and the high ceilings made the smallness of the rooms seem snug rather than closed-in. She knew the people above and below, and no one objected when she pounded away on the piano or droned on the cello. The Gilpins never did, even when Max was tiny. And as Max was of the shouting, galloping sort, things were in balance between the two households, at least with respect to noise.
The Gilpins’ condo ran the length of the building, affording them a nursery for Max and an ample master bedroom at the back. For obvious reasons, Rose was glad that Alan and Frances didn’t sleep on the sun porch directly above her bed. Their living room overlay hers, but Rose’s view was into a thicket of mulberries, which gave forth a thrumming, chiming, rasping, ever-changing bird concert when she threw the windows open in summer. The Gilpins’ view soared out over the rooftops to the bell tower of Old Main on the campus where Rose once again taught, and where Alan had, five years earlier, succeeded in winning tenure.
Rose was now up for tenure herself and recalled how nervous Alan had been those years before, and the grief she’d given him. Now she under-stood what had made him so nuts: the awareness of judgment from every quarter, of the criticism possible from any faculty member or staffer, any student, or secretary, even, that might tip the scales, though by appearances they were all such pals, such a community. She had no real reason to worry. Her music was getting wide play and, as she was the only com-poser on campus, she was considered a shoo-in for tenure and had been told so, the murmured assurance passed on to her in the tone of the ultimate compliment. It had actually begun to annoy her. She wanted the job, but she could do without the secret handshake.
She hoped tenure was worth it to Alan. He’d paid an enormous price for it. It wasn’t her business, but she couldn’t help think of the household above her as brought into being by accident—or rather by misadventure.
On an afternoon five years earlier, Rose, just rehired at the college, and Alan, his tenure decision imminent, had stood side by side, sorting through their mail slots. There was nothing unusual in Frances chatting away in the Chairman’s office, but Rose and Alan, by mischance, were hidden from sight behind the Chair’s open door. If they’d been standing even a few feet over, Frances would have seen them and shut up. As it was, her clear, low voice emerged as though on a ribbon of foul-smelling smoke. She was telling the Chair that, since he had asked, she found Alan a bit peculiar, though terribly nice, of course. Hearing this, Alan had turned to stone, while Frances went on to say, in a quiet little voice, that Alan was maybe a trifle needy toward students, seeing as he lacked a family life, and that it possibly made for a not quite healthy, not entirely wholesome atmosphere.
Rose had been unable to drag Alan away and, afterward, failed to dispel his fright. She told him Frances’s opinion meant nothing. It was known that Alan and Frances had had a failed affair, that Frances would have an ax to grind. Since you asked, Frances had said, but that was no proof that the Chair had asked her. Chairs had to nod and let people run on about things. Rose had assured Alan that what Frances had said was more a reflection on her than on Alan—she was the lonely, needy one. Why, she’d gotten involved with Atkinson himself, once upon a time— didn’t Alan remember?
Of course he remembered, but it made no difference. The fact that he’d met every tenure requirement and that everyone knew that his relations with students were above reproach seemed to mean nothing to him. Rose commanded him to stand back and let the wheels turn. Instead, in a fit of proving himself to be unpeculiar and thoroughly wholesome, he took Frances to bed again and then, seeming to turn his whole life over to the proof, asked her to move in with him. To Rose’s mind, it was a slow-motion wreck, the accidental overhearing, then the extreme and lengthy response. By the end of the school year, he and Frances were engaged.
Maybe they did cherish each other, the Gilpins. They seemed to. Having had Max, they were in deep, and Rose with them—she was god-mother. She saw them daily, ate with them—if she wasn’t at supper, they’d want to know why—and counted herself lucky, never as lonely as she would have been without them. But she was also, secretly, their anthropologist— and a skeptical one. How could she not study them? She wanted to know if long-term love—if marriage—was ever any good, and the Gilpins were her only example close at hand.
Six months after Max was born, they’d moved in above her and begun the habit of leaving their door open to her, literally ajar every night and all day on the weekends. Their door opened into a book-lined foyer, and no one walking by could see very far in. And no one but Rose and her cat would venture beyond Max’s scissor fence, which expanded to the width of the doorway. Her firmament, she called them, her domestic heaven, which was where she went once she was certain Meggy had fallen asleep.
“What’s happening in heaven?” she called out, and followed Jewels in, stepping carefully over the turrets and buttresses of Max’s multicolor block castle.
All was going smoothly in heaven. Alan crouched on his hand-knotted Oriental rug, blowing razzberries on Max’s belly, both in a roaring frenzy. At three,Max had a voice bigger than his size, a shock of hair black as his father’s beard, and his mother’s sharp nose and chin.
