The Rose Variations, page 24
“Later that night,” he said. “Go on.”
She did not circle back; she went on. Later that night, after she’d gone to bed, she became drowsily aware that she was no longer alone in her apartment. For several minutes in that netherworld between sleeping and waking, she’d been unable to move, as though she were mud with roots growing through her. Really, she’d had the sensation of roots growing down, right through her shoulder and through her face, as though pinning her to the mattress.
“Uh-huh,” said Stephen. “And?”
Why was he rushing her? She was performing, wasn’t she? Maybe she’d shut up and he could tell a story for a change.
“And,” she continued. Paralyzed there in her bed, she saw a man’s shape. And then she was up, screaming, making for the open window where she burst a hole in the screen, a nylon screen with a tear already in it, which, thank god, ripped open quickly. And she was out on the ledge in nothing but a T-shirt and underpants. Only then did she hear Alan shouting her name.
“The gay guy upstairs with the wife and kid?”
“My friend,” she told Stephen.
“It’s Alan. I’m an idiot,” he’d called as she dragged herself back in through the window, the ripped screen burning her bare arms and thighs.
“God in heaven,” she cried. She’d have him impeached of his condo presidency and relieved of his master keys; she was serious as a heart attack. She yanked on her kimono. Someone stirred in the apartment overhead—Frances, awakened by the ruckus.
“I know, I know,” said Alan. “But I’ve brought James.” He reached into the hall and dragged someone slender and dark-skinned into the apartment.
“Let’s leave her be, man,” the stranger said softly. “Let’s get out of here.”
“This is James,” said Alan.
“He’s a tiny bit drunk,” James told her, “and we’ll be going now.”
“Rose,” Alan breathed. “This is James.”
“The chef?” she asked.
“No, no, man—the musician, the drummer. From Ethiopia,” lilted James, toeing a beat on the floor. He had wonderful slanting eyes and a heart-stopping smile.
Reaching to touch James, Alan’s hand had trembled. “I have to tell you, Rose, I love this man. I would give this man anything. I’m, like, new born. I know what love is now.”
“Such poetry,” said Stephen, dryly.
“From Alan, it is, believe me,” said Rose.
“And this is Rose,” Alan had concluded, “my best friend in all the world.”
Was she? She hadn’t seen anything of Alan in months. He was so busy with his several lives, he hardly had time for friendship. Stephen had time. Stephen was her friend. He was, yes, her very best friend now. She told him so.
“Thank you, I think,” said Stephen, his tone every bit as dry as before.
“You’re welcome,” she said. Didn’t he know that, given her life, friend-ship was nearly everything?
James had opened his arms and clasped Rose to him. He smelled lemony and she’d felt some high vibration as though his chest were full of birds, and her own chest seemed to take up the thrumming. A wild, willful look in Alan’s eye recalled the night, years ago, that he’d taken her to bed. But he was no longer that angry boy and his look was warm, ardent and certain. She’d never before seen him so entirely happy. Swiftly, he’d moved to reclaim James from her. And then, footsteps were heard descending the stairs and Frances’ soft knock came at the door.
Rose stepped out into the hall and, for the first time, told Frances a direct lie about Alan.
“White lie,” Stephen put in.
“Frances,” she’d said, “I’m so sorry,” and quickly invented the unexpected visit of an old boyfriend. “I’d let you in, but he’s not dressed.”
“I heard you scream. You sounded frightened,” said Frances. “I thought I heard Alan.” Frances rubbed her eyes. “It’s okay. You’re not the only one to make a ruckus late at night,” she said and went back upstairs.
“I don’t feel so good about that,” Rose told Alan when she’d closed her door behind her.
“It’s been tremendous to meet you,” James told her and gave Alan a tug.
But Alan pulled a chair out from Rose’s table and sat heavily down. “I love this man.” He flicked a hand toward James. “I would lay down my life for this man.”
James chuckled.
“We know this, now,” Rose told Alan. “We know this.”
“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet. “So let’s tell Frances. C’mon, let’s go tell Frances.”
“Could be the rum’s talking,” observed James.
“Love. Is talking,” said Alan.
“Really?” said Rose. “But what about Max?”
Custody was on Rose’s mind—what should be done to get Meggy away, how to argue it and arrange it. She hadn’t thought of it the other way, what a parent could lose in an instant.
“You could lose Max,” she’d blurted out to Alan.
“Undeniably,” said Stephen. “But it sounds to me like you care more than he does.”
“Then I’ve told it wrong,” said Rose.
At the mention of his son, Alan had uttered Max’s name, and Max seemed to stand in the room with them, unable to see them, yet stopped, his wild animation stilled, while his father seemed to cave in on himself, to become, in an instant, elderly. He knew Max’s need of him better than anyone, and his own need to be his son’s father. Max would, of course, be fed and sheltered, but where? And from whose hands fed?
That humans should need each other struck Rose at that moment as a grievous condition, a ruinous necessity. Ursula needed Bruce so much that she’d become not-Ursula; Natalie, while unable to care for her daughter, nonetheless grasped Meggy to her; Frances wretchedly reached for Alan even as he turned her away; and Rose, too, clung at the edges, warming herself at the fires of other people’s lives.
Alan had leaned himself against James and, forgetting Rose was there, begun stroking his lover’s chest, sadly but ardently. They would not go up to tell Frances that night. But they had each other, and even to Rose it was so obviously the right thing for Alan that the consequences could not hold sway. She told Stephen so and then stopped speaking, her story over.
When Alan and James had left her, she’d been mad with arousal and lay down briefly to satisfy herself. Then she’d gone to her piano, and the pages flew, the music buoyant, tormented, but gaining power, as though she had drawn from the lives around her not a secondhand passion, but her own self in anguish and joy. Getting up from the piano to pack for the train, she’d realized she was rank with sweat. Under the shower, she’d sung her symphony aloud while the water poured over her. The singing continued now inside her head. Stephen was right—something was up with her, something more than worry and grief, something joyous.
He rocked forward and blew out a candle. “Ever done this?” He licked his fingertips and pinched another burning wick, then another, until only one was left burning.
Rose pinched the candle out. Then they were in the dark.
“Gimme the matches,” she said.
“Well, and what about you, Rose? If you’re not in love, why not?”
“Oh, I have my adventures.”
“You’re not one of those ironclad celibates, then?”
She laughed. “Like Susan B.?”
“I’ve got my theories about Susan B., behind closed doors with all those women.”
“Hey, really,” said Rose. Even with the candles out, the room had plenty of light. Or perhaps her eyes had adjusted.
“So. You’re a lesbian, are you?”
“Oh, lord. Don’t tell me—just because I have short hair?”
“You’re heterosexual like me?” he said. “Well, how boring.”
She laughed uneasily.
“I think you’re in love,” he said.
“Well, maybe with the idea of love.” The brandy slid along her tongue. She rubbed the soft leather of the chair and turned away from him toward the lights on the water.
“Or maybe with your new best friend?”
She startled. That was what he’d been waiting to hear, that she was in love with him. The possibility hadn’t occurred to her. Instantly, she knew to pretend otherwise. He’d got up to stand behind her chair. His fingers were moving through her hair. He was her conductor; they had work ahead; they couldn’t afford to fool around. He was too old for her, nearly fifty. He was married.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“You don’t have to whisper. No one can hear us,” he said. This was true. Leslie slept in the master bedroom in another wing. “I’m touching your marvelous hair,” he went on. “How does it feel?” Her skin buzzed. It felt lovely; how could it not? He knelt beside her. “Give me your hand. C’mon—you’ve shaken my hand a dozen times. You’ve kissed me before, please remember.”
“Yes, publicly.”
He took her hand, pulled her to him and kissed her, and she returned the kiss, self-consciously matching his pressure. How stupid of her not to see this coming. Rumors had warned her, but she had disbelieved. She’d wished for a conductor. She’d rejoiced when there was more to it—friend-ship, she’d insisted, pure friendship. The worst she’d been willing to think of him was that he was a little arrogant, controlling and shaping his world. She saw she was the same, insisting that things be the way she wished or foolishly pretending they were. Unlike Stephen, she lacked the force to make things be as she wished. She was a fool. She’d fooled her-self. She’d pretended her way into this, this situation.
“So what you feel for me is only friendship?” he said with a wicked calm in his voice.
She regretted that it took no effort to get up from the chair. To exit the bed behind the curtains wouldn’t be as easy. He led her there. The curtains parted silkily. She didn’t want this. It wasn’t love. She wanted to finish her symphony and see him conduct it. She felt not so much led as hoisted up, a sack of flour. He went on kissing her, and she went on returning his kisses promptly, like a student answering questions. The enthralling softness of his touch turned sharp, like a father’s shoulder digging up into her belly. He unloosed her fingers from the bedframe and pushed her in. The featherbed puffed up around her. He was pulling his shirt over his head.
She was going to allow this, was she?
Chapter TWENTY-TWO
She was tense and wincingly dry, but he didn’t know it. He was busy trying to get hard, holding himself over her as if he were in the up motion of a pushup, brushing his hips back and forth between her spread legs which she’d opened for him correctly, widely, a very good girl. If he was embarrassed by his lack of a hard-on, he didn’t say. He wasn’t saying anything, but working away, flopping against her. Leaning on one hand, he reached for her face, her jaw, and pulled himself up the bed and loomed over her, nudging at her mouth with his cock. She tried to suck, but he wouldn’t hold still. He flopped against her lips and chin. It was the joke punishment: fifty lashes with a wet noodle, but she’d better not laugh. She’d better make a good job of it—fuck him and get out of there. She’d better mind his feelings. On paper, her career was in Seattle now. Her tenure application was laced with his name.
Better a participant than a witness, he’d warned her, but she’d stayed on alone with him in that room, the room where he slept, exposing herself.
The buzz inside her brought on by her thrill over Alan and James and stoked by her furious writing had halted. Her voice was stopped up in her throat. She was going to have to speak, at least to tell him to put on a condom. If they got that far. His cock flopped loosely against her face. She gasped, drawing breath when she could, as the doughy expanse of his belly pressed up and down on her, forehead to collarbone. He was older; of course he’d have a paunch. She saw the purpose of the cunning pleats in his Italian trousers. She saw how he worked it from the podium: the trousers outlining the slender legs, the blackness of the tailcoat drawing the eye up to the wide shoulders, the tails drawing the eye down and away from the vacant white shirtfront over the frog belly. To make room to breathe, she reached to raise his belly, but he batted her hands away. He lifted her chin, adjusting her to him. The lights on the Sound jerked in her sight as he bounced. One eye was blocked by his belly. With her other eye, she peered into the room and, between bounces, noted where her blouse lay on the floor by her sandals and her skirt, flung over the chair where a half hour ago she’d sat, yakking away.
She couldn’t think of that now; she might, like a little girl, give way to tears—like Meggy, she thought, and then realized she’d never seen Meggy cry. Her heart contracted. Why did Meggy never cry? One of her eyes had started to leak, but Rose wasn’t crying, oh no, she was not a little girl but a grown woman in bed with a man.
Why wasn’t he getting hard? Maybe it was the brandy. He’d refilled his glass more than once that evening. Or maybe he didn’t really want her either and would see that and quit. Maybe she’d be excused; maybe she could still face his wife in the morning.
He moved down again and spread her knees wide, grinding heavily on her. She rocked her hips a little, in time with his thrashing. If he didn’t get hard, he might blame her. If he didn’t get hard, they’d never get this over with, whatever it was going to be.
People would say she’d gotten to where she was—Composer in Residence, Seattle Sinfonietta—on her back. There was talk already, she realized. She heard again the wry remarks, saw the raised eyebrows, the winks in her direction. She saw now that people assumed she’d been sleeping with Stephen Orrick all along. Which might as well be true, if she were willing to pay this price to see her commission through to performance.
His words and his tone had seemed practiced, getting her undressed and under him. It was apparently what he did: took women to bed. She grasped that now. Of course, he was far from the only conductor to make his way across women’s bodies, though he would gain nothing professionally by sleeping with Rose. It was likely just a reflex.
Wealthy volunteers, almost all of them female, who raised and maintained concert halls, who kept the books, paid salaries, funded commissions, and who saw to it that the seats were filled, did not do all that for nothing. The savvy conductor “played” the volunteers as a sort of second orchestra, and what better way to string them along, the bevy of them, than to offer at least the possibility of going to bed with him? Stephen had no paid staff, other than a stage manager and a secretary. Even the bookkeeper was a volunteer. Such women did not turn over their time— what might otherwise be full-time paid work—for the purely altruistic love of music. They did it at least partly for the life around the music: the gossip, the flirtations with artists, the intrigues.
Stephen gave a sigh and rolled off of her. “Well.”
“It’s okay,” she said, her voice swift and quiet and not her own. “Really.”
“I’ll be better at it in the morning.”
In the morning? “Sure,” she said.
“Or shall we see what we can do for you now?” For the first time, he reached his fingers between her legs. She caught his hand quickly and raised it to her lips—she wouldn’t have him find her dry, frightened cunt. Rarely had she thought of herself as that—hole to be plugged, cunt. And she wasn’t even that; she had no desire. She turned on her side away from him. He ran his hands over her, touching her breasts and stroking her ass. Fear held her there beside him, fear of the harm he could do her.
“Ah, Rose. I knew you were hot. I knew you were a hot one,” he said.
Why? Cold to her bones, she nearly asked him why. She couldn’t see a clock. It was probably too late to catch the redeye flight from Seattle to St. Paul, and the train would not depart until the evening, but she could go and camp out at the station. She’d pack and head out. If she could only move.
“Well,” she said, “I’m off to bed now,” and with great effort sat up.
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her back to him. “Nuhuh. You’re sleepin’ wif me.” Baby talk? He thought he’d hold her with baby talk?
“Look,” she told him, “I can’t be here when the house wakes up.”
“Leslie’s driving the girls over to church. They’ve got a thingie at Sunday school. We won’t see ’em till lunchtime.” He snuggled closer.
“Leslie,” she echoed and waited for shame. Instead, what came was hatred. She hated all husbands and wives. Alan, she thought, would admire the arrangement—the guestroom so convenient to Stephen, the wife asleep out of earshot, off in another wing. Of course, Alan and Frances were a different matter: the tricks, schemes, and maneuvers seemed mutual. Stephen’s Leslie had done nothing to coerce Stephen to marry her, as far as Rose knew. Theirs was a storybook courtship as they both told it.
“Do you like doing it in the morning?” he asked, his voice husky and sly.
Or maybe Leslie did know. She had, after all, lit candles for Rose and Stephen, turned off the lights, and absented herself. Maybe she knew all about his affairs; maybe she even arranged them, luring in female house guests to distract him so she wouldn’t have to suffer his wretched love-making. How could Leslie stay married to such a man? Rose realized with dread that he was the sort she herself had sometimes imagined marrying, a prominent, accomplished man. This one had nothing to offer her, not even marriage, but even so, he had seized her and flung her down; he had taken her. Apparently she was easy to take.
His arms were tight around her. His palm, as he brushed over her breasts, caused her nipples witlessly to tighten.
This is sex, she told herself bitterly, what you long for, what you’ve been missing.
A whistling blew through her hair. He was snoring: an accordion with a toneless, gasping inhale and then a labored, whistling exhale. She let it fill her ears. She was going to travel on that whistle; she was going to get up and out of there. He shuddered, and his breathing seemed to stop. She waited as if at a deathbed. At length he sucked in again.
