The Rose Variations, page 32
But he’d had enough of The Subject for a while. His backpack, half-filled for the island, sat in a corner. They’d never managed to go. August over, the berries were gone, but the leaves would be turning. He thought he’d go up for a while.
He understood she couldn’t come with him.
She agreed it might be for the best. She didn’t dare miss a single class, committee meeting, or campus event. She’d get notice of tenure any time, possibly by the middle of October—at the very least by Christmas.
He didn’t plan to stay away on the island till Christmas.
“Of course not—I never meant that,” she said.
It got cold up there early. By the end of October, the ferries stopped running and the place iced in for the winter. But he’d stay awhile and air out his brain. He could afford it, as a matter of fact. He made enough money to take a month off whenever he wanted.
She watched him pack his tent, his maps, and his food and hoist his canoe to the roof of his van. She kissed him and stood waving till he drove out of sight.
And then she was bereft. She’d expected to feel released, to move lightly and swiftly to all she had to do. She had not expected to feel dead. His mail would be held at the post office. Why hadn’t he asked her to bring in his mail? She did feel lighter, but painfully so, as if a weight she had thought was herself had been wrenched off. She stood at the curb, achy in her skin.
She’d been thinking of nothing but tenure. Now, without Graham, she could think of nothing but love. She couldn’t bear to be the sort of woman who thought of nothing but love. She went to the condo, looking for company, but Frances and Max were not at home. She trudged through her days, to her office, to her classroom, to her condo.
Her London proposal came back far earlier than expected. A refusal. She hadn’t even made the first cut. Shocked, she read closely and found the reason why: on the list of names of preliminary judges was Stephen Orrick of the Seattle Sinfonietta.
She crept over to the carriage house and let herself in with the hide-a-key. In Graham’s big chair, she talked to herself. She’d put her symphony in a fresh envelope and send it out again immediately; she’d hold to her course; she’d hold on. She turned back Graham’s bedcovers and lay down to sleep in his bed that night, and the next night did the same. Without his permission, without his knowledge, she tried to sleep with him that way, she in his bed, he in his tent on his island.
They were exchanging postcards: mild jokes, short accounts of life in a tent or in a music department. Love, she signed hers, love, love, love.
Love, Graham, he replied. Love in the singular. It began to seem an injunction: love Graham. She didn’t have to be told to love Graham. She loved him, but she must have blown it with him because otherwise how could he stand to be apart from her?
Word came by departmental memo that Alan’s tutoring duties would be covered by a temporary hire. She dropped by Chairman Atkinson’s office to ask why.
Oh, they could afford it, the Chair said, and reminded her in his genial way that she, their composer, had never been expected to take on extra duties. They all knew the creation of new music required ample time. This was so, but Rose noted that his tone was perhaps a bit distant. She was the department’s only woman professor; they’d think twice before dumping her, wouldn’t they? she thought, as the Chair went on to tell her that the new hire was Vietnamese, a fresh-faced young man, an expert in computer-generated music. Racial diversity was the new mandate.
Hold on, hold steady, Rose told herself, but she felt her grip slipping. Frances. Time to go to Frances. She’d humble herself and ask Frances what all this meant, what it would mean for Rose vis-à-vis tenure.
But Frances was not at her post.
“She’s packing up to move,” explained the student answering the phones.
Rose ran over to the condo. On the landing sat a stack of cartons.
“What’s all this?” she called out, as if she couldn’t see for herself.
“Selling the place, if a buyer can be found,” said Frances. And as though there had been no interruption in their life together, she beckoned Rose inside. “The market’s flat, so it may stand empty awhile. Either way, it’s time for us to go.”
The curtains were down. The dining room stood entirely bare. In the living room, a pair of chairs and a small table were set in the place of Alan’s great old couch. His rug, also missing, left an expanse of freshly waxed wooden floor across which the light skated, chilly and dazzling. The table appeared to float, and on one side sat Max, his tousled hair shining and blueberries in a white bowl before him like bubbles of ice. Max slid off his chair, took his bowl, and came and climbed into Rose’s lap. His cheek against hers burned. She clutched him and recalled his baptism, how she’d held him in her arms and promised in his stead to trust entirely in grace and love. Max was still her godson and Frances her—what? god-sister?
They hadn’t had a real conversation in weeks, but it wasn’t as though they’d quarreled. They’d simply stepped apart. Rose had stepped first, but she’d done nothing to Frances, really, except to fall in love.
She would ask Frances for news of tenure. She would be direct.
“How are you, Frances?” was what came out of her mouth.
Frances laughed, and Rose laughed with her.
“I’m sorry,” said Rose. “I can’t seem to quit that.”
“Oh, I’m fine, really,” said Frances. “I’m sure I’m just fine.” Exhaustion showed in her eyes, and her features seemed once again as oddly sharp as they had on Rose’s first impression of her, though her hair, growing out from its boy-cut, softened her angles. She wore no makeup and the man’s white T-shirt she had on—V-necked and immaculate—over a pair of sweat pants, accentuated her swelling belly. She was simply, strikingly herself.
“You look wonderful,” said Rose. It was true.
Frances rolled her eyes. “You look worried.”
“Tenure.”
“Right,” said Frances, but offered nothing more.
“You know, Frances,” remarked Rose, “you really do look stunning.”
Frances sent Max from the room on some obscure errand—to get a dinosaur book or something of the sort—and when they were alone, she reached across the table, almost but not quite touching Rose. “Why did he say he loved me?” she asked. “Why did he insist over and over that he loved me? Do you know?”
For a moment, Frances let her grief show and wasn’t any sort of beauty, but a pregnant mother, burdened with children but otherwise alone.
“Alan did love you,” Rose stammered. “You made him a home and a family.”
But Frances shook her head, unsatisfied, this new Frances who had torn down the curtains, who seemed intent not on preserving, but on removing illusions. Rose couldn’t imagine why Frances would want to punish herself with the why of it. But Rose did know why, and Frances was asking.
She offered up the ancient history, how, back in the spring before Alan was tenured, she and Alan, standing outside the open door of the Chair’s office, had overheard Frances speaking against Alan, saying he shouldn’t be trusted with students because he lacked a family.
“And so he married me?”
“He thought you were going to put him out of his position.”
Frances regarded Rose, and her eyes had never seemed more piercing. “You people,” she said, “and your positions.” She got to her feet, and Rose struggled up after her. “I suppose you were only ever Alan’s friend, not mine.”
“Oh, no,” said Rose. “Come on, Frances.”
“Really,” said Frances. “Do you think we were ever true friends, you and I?”
“Of course we were. Are. After all we’ve been through together, of course we’re friends. Oh, Frances, why ever not?” Rose begged and realized she had not gotten what she’d come for and would not get it. Frances gave no reply. Frances had controlled the interview, and Frances had the last word, which was no word at all.
At the end of September, having sold the last of the furniture, even the table and chairs and the beds, Frances moved herself and Max and a dozen neatly labeled cartons of clothes and toys, barely filling a college maintenance van.
Not far, was all she would say about where she was going. Rose sup-posed she didn’t want to admit she was going home to her mother’s, only a few blocks away.
Back inside her own place, Rose found the ceilings too high, the space vaulting and colder yet with the empty rooms above. She packed Jewels, the cat food and litter box, and carted them over to Graham’s. Wrapped up in Graham’s blankets, wearing his sweater and his socks in double pairs, she began to cook with his pans and utensils and to eat out of his dishes. But she hadn’t moved in—oh, no. Before he returned, she intended to wash every dish, all the sheets and towels, and put it all back the way he’d had it. He was never to know.
On a night in early October, however, a key turned in the lock and there he stood. It was snowing on the island, he said, and dumped down his pack. Even from across the room, he smelled of campfire. Though she had no right to be, she was completely taken by surprise, not frozen, but painfully alive as if thawing too quickly. He was bearded, shaggy, and so bundled up that he seemed bearlike. He took her breath away. She jumped up to fill the kettle and halted. Glancing sidelong, she saw the many signs of her trespass, her failures written in her disarray: her jacket flung on his floor, her underwear in a dirty pile at the foot of his unmade bed. She turned to face him.
His gaze went by slow and exhausted degrees from puzzlement, not to dismay nor disapproval, but to what seemed like relief and then to a sort of merriment and a radiance as though he’d solved the puzzle, coming to the answer he most wanted. He sat down unsteadily and opened his arms to her.
Love, love, love, she’d signed her postcards. And here she was, waiting for him.
“I was only borrowing the place. Only camping out. I know I didn’t ask,” she blurted and rushed to the nearest pile of her things and began to gather them up.
“Stop that,” he said sharply.
If ever the time had come for trusting in grace and love, it might have been then. But she couldn’t stop—she was too embarrassed. Why trust, why fall in a heap on someone else when she had something private and far less helpless? She had her luck; she preferred her own if she had any luck left at all.
Chapter TWENTY-NINE
Lila burst into town from the farm harvest, unpacked a box of apples and potatoes, a pair of pumpkins, a tub of goat cheese, and an enormous rutabaga with the dirt still clinging to it; pounded out a fanfare on Rose’s piano and halted, mid-chord.
“You don’t look like someone who’s just smashed home her first symphony.”
“No,” said Rose. She wasn’t going to cry. Her solitary state was too much her own doing to think of it as other than her natural condition. “Love,” she muttered.
“Who?” said Lila.
Except for the time Rose had introduced Graham to Frances—when, really, she’d been unable to avoid it—she had never mentioned Graham to anyone. She’d done that once too often, talked up this new man or that, and where were they now? “You know how love goes.”
“How?”
Rose shook her head. Missing Graham while he’d been on his island was nothing to how she missed him now, a feeling made worse by his nearness in the neighborhood and the dread of meeting him by chance. She might have walked over and knocked on his door, might have called him, but couldn’t bear, not even by phone, to contend with what was behind the terrible look on his face when she’d rushed out his door on the night he’d returned from the island. And it struck her with finality that he hadn’t called her, either.
“Okay. Love goes bad,” Lila agreed and reached for a box of tissues.
“Most of the time, yes, it does. Remember you and me?”
“Yeah, and now look at us,” said Lila, dabbing at her friend’s eyes.
“Don’t laugh,” said Rose.
“You’ll laugh, too,” said Lila. “Listen up.”
Rose had in the past written some exceptional pieces, but the symphony was, in Lila’s opinion, the best thing yet. She’d copied the manuscript— without permission, given Rose’s recent threat to retire from the world—and had located a terrific conductor, a woman and so, predictably, a freelancer, which was, in this case, a stroke of luck. Lila’s eyes sparkled; her cheeks shone ruddy through her tan and a fresh, luxuriant growth of beard—the very face of luck.
Rose bit. “Because?”
The conductor had an open slot to fill, last-minute, in the Santa Fe Music Festival.
“It’s a chamber music festival,” said Rose. “I need an orchestra.”
“Will you please? They will hire the Santa Fe Orchestra and just about any soloist you’d care to summon. I, myself, very much hope to be considered.”
Rose did laugh then, or rather, let out a tortured coughing.
“It’s gonna be a triumph,” said Lila. Then she took herself back to the farm.
The day before Halloween, the confirming call came from the new conductor, who was ready to talk terms. Rose’s hands shook, holding the receiver, but she answered calmly about timing, fee, and travel. The thing was real and would likely make all the difference for tenure. Was it possible that a single phone call could set her life on track again?
Hanging up, she got out a knife and Lila’s pair of pumpkins and carved one with a careless, silly smile and the other tense and slit-eyed. Then she phoned the guest house in San Francisco where Alan was doing sabbatical “research” on “West Coast jazz influences”—running all over the city with James. He’d begun life over, living with a vengeance. He was giving Frances total proceeds from the sale of the condo. And Frances was let-ting him see Max. He was going to get to show Max California. It was early morning in San Francisco, and Alan and James, just going to bed, were dizzy with hilarity and alcohol.
Rose told him about her Santa Fe premiere.
“Wow,” he said. “Wow. James, listen to this. I’m putting James on.”
“Wait,” she said. “Alan, I need you. How should I spread the word at school?”
“Oh, right. You’re all hung up on that tenure crap.”
“Look who’s talking. And I don’t see you throwing over your teaching job,” she said, though who knew?—that might be next.
“Rose,” he said, “sweet Rose Marie. Of course I will ferret out the names on your tenure committee and I will talk to every one of them.”
“You can do that?”
“I have my methods. I will immediately spread your news.”
“You’re pleased for me?”
“Thrilled.”
She thanked him for that, very much; thanked him for being so ready to help her.
She was entirely welcome and she could stop thanking him now.
No, really, she was grateful that he was happy for her because, the truth was, she didn’t feel anything.
“It’ll come,” he said. And if she’d get off the phone, he’d start tracking down her committee, all but Chairman Atkinson, whom she should tell the news herself, in the boldest of terms, in superlatives, and in person before he heard it from someone else. “Run, run, run to him,” said Alan. “He’ll love it.”
She put down the phone and tidied her hair. Since her sloppy days squatting at Graham’s, her days of falling apart alone, she’d pulled herself together and now dressed correctly in public and private—was there any difference in her life any more?—and if she felt cold, that void at her center, that ice in her bones, she shivered through it. She put on a light jacket over a pressed white shirt and trousers and stepped out the back door. Some eight years had passed since she’d first set foot in Minnesota, years of good luck and bad, of finding and losing. And now, it seemed, her best luck might hold.
At the back door, however, she was halted by a wave of chill: not the cold in her bones, but in the air. The frigid Canadian weather that had chased Graham from his island had made its way southward, and white stuff was falling, a sight so startling for October, she had to step out in it to prove this wasn’t some eerie downflux of rice, but cold, hard, wet grains of snow. She went back inside to dig out her overcoat. It occurred to her to call ahead to Frances for a formal appointment with the Chair, but nobody answered at the music department. The switchboard confirmed what she saw out the window: snow heavy enough to close school. The sky was a mattress shredding downward. They were in for an actual blizzard. Up and down the street, small vampires and princesses and super-heroes would be in despair—could Halloween be cancelled?
Here was the fabled snow of October, foretold to her as a warning back East, a reason never to come to Minnesota. Flaming leaves still clung to branches, while leaves on the ground, unraked or in piles, lay whitening. Her mulberries had turned to plaster; the houses across the way were vague white shapes; the tower of Old Main, a vertical smudge. Still, a blizzard was something. Its power to nullify schedules, to send people home and keep them home, created unplanned hours, the great freedom of a snow day. She’d use hers to meditate upon her future. She was going to have a future, after all.
She told Jewels all about it as the cat paced back and forth on the summer quilt, jazzed by the change in air pressure. Dragging out her comforter, Rose wrapped herself and the cat up in it. Storm windows not yet in place, the screens were clogging up, whiting out the view. She whispered into purring fur and down feathers. A concert hall in Santa Fe, wild applause, herself ascending the stage in new clothes: she tried to see it but only got a blur. All she could see was this: herself crossing campus once the blizzard was over, not run-run-running but, with quiet purpose, walking past Frances in her glass guardhouse, past her own office, soon to be hers permanently, to the inner sanctum, the Chair’s office—Harold, rather; Harold’s office. As they were to be permanent colleagues— peers—she must learn to call him Harold.
She could see all this, but couldn’t hold it in mind. She closed her eyes, and a figure appeared—not quite a person, but an empty dress, a silly bridesmaid dress, peony skirt and décolletage inflating with snow and wind. A man with salt-and-pepper hair turned in a movie theater seat and was swallowed up in snow. A little girl in a raggedy coat with blue-blue eyes, her own eyes, rushed toward her, blew through her. A shuttlecock flew upward. She leaned her forehead against the window toward the pounding storm and tasted the longed-for tang of vinegar. Then she got up out of her warm nest and went to the phone to dial.
