The Rose Variations, page 29
The crowd grew. The band struck up. Rose danced a few steps. Victor reached for her, and they revolved in a waltz. It must have been then that he filched the ring, because when they stood in the dappled shade under the tree a bit later, Bruce, Rose, and Victor, in front of the guests leaning higgledy-piggledy on their chairs on the humpy ground, Rose patted her pocket and it was gone.
To the tune of the fiddle and the dulcimer, Ursula approached on her mother’s arm, the fine contours of her breasts and hipbones draped in ivy-patterned cambric, her hair piled and pinned with tiny rosebuds. She seemed not so much decorated as disclosed, unearthly, an ideal—she didn’t smile—a dream of clarity, of things made eternal. Rose, holding in one hand her maid-of-honor posy, stroked and stroked the little pocket but felt no ring. She tried to search the ground at her feet without bowing her head.
A flicker in the crowd—Frances availing herself of Alan’s handker-chief, crying already. On Alan’s other side sat James, the two shoulder to shoulder, fingertips entwined, and on Alan’s face, a look either of ecstasy or of excruciating strain. Rose was losing her bearings. Unbidden came the thought of Guy and of Stephen Orrick and then of the possibility of Graham, whoever he turned out to be, and it all struck her as accidental, how love went, and none of it eternal. A nausea of the ruined and the hoped-for heaved up in her, mixed with anxiety. She couldn’t find the ring.
Bruce began his vows. Ursula glanced over, the slightest lifting of an eyebrow, at Rose’s rustling. Let the ring come. The ring would appear if she just let it. Ursula uttered the last of her vows in a whisper, gazing into Bruce’s eyes. Then she turned and, as planned, piled upon Rose the enormous bouquet and extended her palm. And as Rose jammed her hand inside her ring pocket one last time and brought it out empty, the bride’s gaze went from puzzlement, to alarm, to horror. The time was now and it was unrepeatable. Within the stricture of her corset, Rose felt anew a plummeting sensation, a desperate sense of falling. She dropped to her knees, dumping the bale of roses and ivy back into Ursula’s arms, and bent and clawed the grass for the small, heavy circlet of gold. She had an upside-down glimpse of Ursula’s mother in the front row, leaning forward and cocking her head, her face like a pie spilling out of its plate. Rose’s breasts sprung loose. It was vaudeville.
Low to the ground, Victor opened his hand, revealing both rings. She shoved her breasts back down, reached over and grabbed the larger ring and thrust it at Ursula, and then staggered up into Victor’s puckish gaze. The judge cleared his throat, and a chuckle rippled through the congregation. Victor gave a tiny bow. Rose tittered, a high, startled sound. The mishap had been entirely Victor’s doing, but Ursula would assume Rose was in league with him.
When the last of the receiving line had moved past bride and maid of honor, and Ursula said “Let’s walk,” Rose prepared herself to hear that the friendship was over.
They set off as they had so many nights in grad school, though not at their former athletic stride, but at an uncertain saunter. A rosebud dropped from Ursula’s hair, and Rose bent to pick it up.
Alan called out to them. Could he borrow Rose’s Volvo? He would get her home, he promised, but James needed to go back now. “Right now,” he said.
Rose tossed him the keys. Max, in his striped suit, danced a circle around his father. Alan nudged him away. Rose called her godson and handed him the fallen rosebud. Max, delighted, crushed it in his hand and careered off.
Ursula led Rose across the dirt track and onward through muck, sand, and anthills, neglectful of their satin shoes. A toad hopped into their path, huge and wart-encrusted; Ursula’s white hem closed over him briefly, and Rose exclaimed. Ursula ambled onward, unseeing. A garter snake flashed out of the grass, buckled itself over Ursula’s toe, and streaked away. Were these warning signs or signs of luck, of Ursula’s luck, of her untouchability? Whereas an hour before Ursula could see and hear everything, now she saw and heard nothing.
“I’m sorry about the ring,” said Rose mildly.
“Oh, that’s over.” Ursula said and gave an easy, absent-minded smile. Waves of grasshoppers crashed around them. It seemed their friendship, however diminished, would go on undisturbed.
A boiling, hissing, droning cloud of insects, nearly head-high, now enclosed them. Ursula waved a hand vaguely in front of her face. Rose reached for her elbow to lead her back and, glancing across the pasture, spotted a pair of figures facing each other beneath the wedding oak in the emptiness where the ceremony had been. There Alan, with slow emphasis, ticked off points on his fingers to Frances, who stood absolutely still, her neck extended, her back rigid, as straight as an arrow shot into the earth.
“Oh god,” said Rose.
Now Alan pounded an open palm with his fist, now reached both his hands out toward Frances.
“What is it?” murmured Ursula, safe in her slice of eternity, snug in her vows.
Across the field, vows were coming undone.
As the pop of champagne corks sang out at the barn door and Bruce’s brothers unknowingly covered, loudly cheering the return of the bride, Frances cried out beneath the great tree and reared back and struck Alan across the face, not a slap, but an open handed blow.
Rose abruptly left Ursula to find Max, to shield Max.
But Max could not be shielded. Able to pick his mother’s voice out in any crowd, he was running full-tilt across the pasture, already halfway to the tree.
Chapter TWENTY-SIX
Alan snatched Max up and strode toward their car as Frances scrambled after them. They jerked to a stop every few paces to shout at each other.
At the barn, a summons rang out: “Maid of Honor to dance with the Best Man!” Rose, uncertain where her duty lay, grabbed up her skirts and rushed after the Gilpins, but the car pulled away before she could reach them. As they sped off, Max could be seen pitching him-self into the front seat while Frances flapped her hands and Alan, who was never rough with Max, heaved up and shoved him backward into his booster seat.
The dance floor was little more than rented risers on unlevel ground, and Rose had the extra challenge of keeping her dress on. She could count on the corset to hold things in place only if she held herself upright. Victor danced well—held them in balance and dipped and spun her around—but she left the dance floor as soon as she could and dumped down on a bale of straw. Alan was bound to come racing back for her once he recalled that she’d given James the Volvo. She leaned back a little on her hands on the straw, and the corset held. She instructed herself not to worry. When she closed her eyes, however, the condo building in Tangle-town loomed up, the walls buckled and the roof exploded.
She opened her eyes on Victor holding two brimming glasses of champagne. She took a glass and waved him off. “It’s a big world of wedding. Go get ‘em, Victor.”
The cake was cut. Victor, at her side, passed plates. She toasted the health of the bride. He lifted his glass to the groom. The band struck up a polka. Victor reached for Rose again. Their dance was all stomp and no grace, and they went straight on into a Virginia reel. As they joined hands in an arch, he called to her: “Are you seeing anybody?”
“None of your business,” she shouted back.
Across the road, Emma’s high window flared, glass and gable lit by campfire, and singing could be heard.
Ursula and Bruce appeared in their traveling clothes. Ursula tossed her bridal nosegay to Rose, who caught it and, smiling brightly, allowed her-self the small satire of a curtsey, and then fetched her rice bag and split the contents with Victor, who seemed determined to assist her in every detail. They led the guests along the track either side of bride and groom, tossing the rice, or, rather, the bird seed—Emma had warned that wed-ding rice killed songbirds, swelled their tiny bellies and burst them—so it was parakeet mix they tossed: millet, flax seed, carrot granules, spinach flakes: fine stuff that, as they flung it, penetrated the netting of Ursula’s hat and got into her eyes. Squealing, she unpinned her hat and shook it, giving Victor the chance to really get her. She shielded her face as he pelted her. Rose grabbed and held his arm. Ursula fixed them both with a broad smile and a giddy questioning stare.
Rose rolled her eyes and Ursula was gone, folded into the wedding car, the door slammed shut by Victor, gone in a burst of motor and a clatter of rattling cans.
“Rattle bang,” said Victor, at Rose’s ear. “Noise meant to scare off evil spirits.” And before she knew it, he’d pulled her to him and kissed her.
She lurched backward and groaned. “Such a cliché, Victor—Maid of Honor and Best Man. Not gonna happen. Don’t waste your time,” she said, but the wet heat of his lips left her shaken. She stepped over to ask the groom’s youngest brother to the dance floor, the fourteen-year-old.
Alan did not reappear. The Gilpins, it seemed, had forgotten her. But she had to stay anyway; she was sworn to stay, and everywhere she went, Victor went too. He popped up beside her at the buffet without anyone seeing him cut in line. She went to use the port-a-potty, and when she stepped out, he headed the line, and then he didn’t need to pee after all; he was walking her back to the dance floor. He was mannerly; she couldn’t fault him. Except for the one kiss, he kept his hands to himself and his eyes off her cleavage.
He was probably impressed with her public face, her concerts, her recordings, her stance at the front of the classroom. But how did he know she wasn’t seeing anyone? (She couldn’t count Graham.) Was there some-thing about her that revealed, beneath the music and the professorship, a battered and lonely private life?
Or was it the dress she was wearing, her boobs pushed into view? The dress was a tease. If she got the thing off, she couldn’t appear bodacious. She excused herself to change clothes. No, Victor, she didn’t need anyone to walk her to the farmhouse.
In the twilit kitchen, she tore everything off, plopped the skirt over the empty crinoline, and fixed the corset inside the bodice. The rig stood up by itself when she stepped away. In her sweatshirt, she felt her rib cage expand. She spread her toes inside her running shoes. She was just someone in jeans now, a member of the clean-up crew. Victor could find someone else to track, someone more in the wedding spirit. She told him so.
He caught her hand. She’d talk to him, wouldn’t she? Or was talk off limits?
Talk was never off limits, she allowed. What was she doing these days? Well, she was writing a symphony.
Relieved of deadlines, she was working again, making her symphony entirely her own. She’d returned to the sound of solo cello, moving from piano to work things out on her old cello and sometimes merely singing what she wrote or perhaps quavering, but the work was going forward. She’d stumbled into a movement that was darkly, vigorously sad, a dance in which melody, at first sprightly and full of itself, got lost in rhythm, so that rhythm alone existed for a time, as day follows day and breath fol-lows breath through good fortune and bad, as the body, eating, sleeping and breathing, leads the bewildered soul onward: Rose in all her variations. Not quite coherently, she described this to Victor.
They sat just inside the barn doors, away from the noise of the band.
“Exposition, elaboration, complication, reiteration, and coda: the movements of the symphony,” chanted Victor.
“Bravo! Could this be the young man known for difficulty in retaining concepts?”
They exchanged a look, both seeming to recall that, years before, he’d brought endless questions to her office hours but had rarely listened to the answers.
“Hey,” he said, “let’s take a look upstairs.”
“Up to the hayloft, Victor? You must think I was born yesterday.”
“Gotta see what’s up there. Come on,” he said and sprang up the wooden ladder to the loft and spoke from the dark above. “You really have to see this.”
He was leaning back against a wall of hay. She stood on the far side of the loft. Moonlight and starlight leaked through gaps in the walls and misted down from the great wagon wheel of the ceiling. It was unbelievably lovely, she admitted.
And was that a cliché, he asked her? Could she please explain why she wouldn’t give him the time of day when he knew she liked him and she wasn’t seeing anyone and neither was he?
“I might be seeing someone,” she said.
“Are you?”
“Give it up, Vic. It isn’t happening.”
“But,” he said, gazing up at the ceiling, “who’s to say what will happen even five minutes from now?”
She needed no reminder that life was unstable. There were always choices, and some were nobrainers. “Don’t force me to be rude in the moonlight,” she said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t force a thing,” said Victor and laughed, and she laughed too.
“Okay,” she told him. “I have my reasons and now I’m going to bore you to tears. I can’t fool around with you, Victor,” she said, “because I’m still your professor.”
“So?” said Victor. “Big deal.”
But it was quite a big deal, sex between professors and students, much in the national press just then: rapacious professors, jilted students attempting suicide in the library stacks. Some of it was true, some false, but it all added up to new campus rules, and she couldn’t be flaunting rules or there’d be hell to pay. She was up for tenure, did he know?
The distant sound of singing swelled from Emma’s across the road. Rose could see that Alan wasn’t coming back to get her, a bad sign, a sign of things flying apart, of hell to be paid. She would go to Emma’s across the road—Emma, her friend, her sort of grandmother. Rose thought she’d rather sing than talk. She bid Victor good night.
“Can anyone come?” he wanted to know. As it happened, he liked to sing.
“It’ll get you nowhere with me,” said Rose, “except across the road and back.”
The wedding noise gave way to the crunch of gravel underfoot as they walked toward the singing. In the dark driveway, he took her hand.
She gave it a formal shake and dropped it. “Professor MacGregor,” she said.
She was annoyed. This not-so-very-young man, this older student— though she didn’t care if he was old as Methuselah or a squalling baby— would be in her classroom soon. She didn’t want to offend him. She wanted to kill him, was the truth. She’d come to the end of her wedding rope. She was thankful that they’d arrived at the sing.
The Larks, as the singers called themselves, liked to sing almost anything —hymns, labor songs, rounds, dancehall tunes. Many were old friends who’d brought daughters and daughters’ friends and then granddaughters and granddaughters’ friends. The men were few and cherished for con-tributing the low notes, but otherwise they were cheerfully neglected. Victor would be pounced upon—what was he? a bass? a tenor?—plugged into the circle and forgotten.
At the fire, Emma got up to greet them, rested her palm against Rose’s cheek, and then threw her arms around Victor who was at first startled and then hugged back.
Emma was in her glory with the Larks. Though pushing eighty, she’d barely been hindered by the stroke she’d suffered. She sported a pencil behind her ear and, on a string on her belt loop, a spiral notebook in which she wrote out what she had to say. And she could still sing in perfect tune, even if her lyrics were not quite clear.
What the Larks sang wasn’t quite music. Strength of voice and spirited delivery were valued, but tempos dragged and voices could be heard going sharp and flat like an out-of-tune orchestra. The trained musician in Rose went to sleep. Voices dawdled and then roared. The fire crackled. Rose sat with her arm around Emma. Victor wandered over, dropped his head beside Rose’s and offered a harmony in a clear, light tenor, and then returned to his place across the ring.
Emma raised an eyebrow and scratched something on her pad. “Who is he?”
“A student,” Rose told her.
“And what are you teaching him this evening?” scribbled Emma. She lifted the one side of her mouth in her elfin grin.
“Not a damned thing,” said Rose.
The singers began “Balm in Gilead.” She wondered whether there could be such a thing, a balm to make the wounded whole. The voices slid muddily upward—who-ole—and her skin crawled. She was whole already, just as she was. She was suddenly terribly hungry; but if she went to Emma’s kitchen, Victor was sure to follow.
She had on her running shoes. She slipped from the circle and back across the road at a run. Beside the round barn, the buffet table was almost empty. From somebody’s abandoned plate, she helped herself to a half-eaten roll and a smear of cheese, then dashed out of sight to the farmhouse. A shape loomed up in the dark kitchen. She cried out, but it was no one. She’d spooked herself with the standing shape of her bridesmaid dress.
She fled up the stairs to the room with the straw mattress, shut herself in with her back against the door, and gnawed her roll and cheese.
Bruce’s brothers welcomed Victor back in a rowdy chorus. Here he came, calling “Rose?” He called from the buffet table, then from the dance floor, and then from what might be the hayloft—he had to be kidding; the hayloft again—and then he was at the farmhouse, and she pulled her head away from the window, out of view.
The door opened below. A switch clicked, but no light came. The place had no electricity. Go, pioneers, said Rose to herself on her straw mat-tress. He called from the porch, outside again. “Rose? Rose MacGregor?”
