The Rose Variations Page 2

  Rose applied to a college far away where no one knew what to expect of her, and, making up for lost time, rid herself of her ignorance. By Thanksgiving she’d had several one-nighters—well, two—two young men whose names she could mention in coy phone conversations with Natalie, who was, after all, still in high school.

  However, the thrill of proving herself at least capable of the motions of love left her shaken. If the earth moved, it moved too fast. Everyone seemed in a hurry those days, despite the languid clothes, the droopy mustaches, the flowing hair. She, herself, was in a hurry, terrified of missing something—the latest street theater, street dance, sit-in, and the pairing off in the dark.

  But then darkness moved to morning and one woke up beside whomever and had to find something to say and a way to get out of there, to move swiftly, to not care. She hadn’t been able to manage it. She cared about everything, the young man in bed beside her, whoever he was, no more than a boy, as she was no more than a girl; mean boys she couldn’t like; sweet boys who made her nervous; other girls who might be her true friends or might not; the whole wide world. She’d wanted the world, and there she was, snarled up in it, with nowhere to rest except in music. She poured herself into music.

  Her classmates began pairing off into established couples and she found herself wanting, for no good reason, to be phoned again by some boy, it didn’t matter whom. She couldn’t stand the randomness of it. At the start of sophomore year she got herself out of the dorm to a sunny rented room. Encouraging sly remarks about her off-campus freedom, she hid out there and devoted herself entirely to her studies and her music, while nursing a frail hope that she might one day meet someone she’d really want to know who would really want to know her.

  Alone so much, she wrote clever, angry compositions which gained her attention, leery respect, and eventually prizes; one especially, which she titled The Loser, a chamber piece with a steady drone of cello, almost a march, over which poured, quite suddenly, skittering notes like a bag bursting and then a rustling and crackling like the contents of the bag being stuffed in again, quickly, quickly, while the march pressed on. Something about the piece made people laugh, and when she got up to introduce it, she learned to adopt a tongue-in-cheek tone, for the piece sounded not like losing, but finding and grabbing and winning. Taking top grad school honors, The Loser brought her to the attention of the col-lege in St. Paul. That was her luck, as far as it went.

  Ursula Kaiser, her best friend at school, had been far busier with men. One young man or another was constantly claiming Ursula as his own; and though she never seemed to take it seriously, and never let Rose feel a contrasting lack, she’d occasionally asked to borrow Rose’s rented room for the afternoon so she could “you-know-what” with a boyfriend. She brought her own sheets from the dorm, and they’d always be gone by dinnertime.

  On such afternoons, with a show of cheer, Rose took herself off to the library but, once there, found it hard to sit and instead wandered as though she had no place to be. It was fearsome, the “you-know-what” that so casually displaced her and left her exposed and perhaps pitied as she now pitied Frances.

  She studied Frances, whose sobbing had subsided to a dry gasping. Rose knew that gasping, had sobbed and gasped that way herself over whozit and whatzizface. Oh, what was the matter? She and Frances were both young. What was this pathetic dredging up of the past? Life lay ahead. At least for the year ahead, they both knew how their bills would be paid—Frances for longer, the secretary job being open-ended.

  “You simply don’t know,” said Frances, “what it is to be unlucky,” and Rose laughed again, in spite of herself, in defeat, she would have said, though the laugh had an edge to it, an edge she could not deny. Frances wanted her pity? Very well, she’d have it. Rose would go on and prove Frances right. The past notwithstanding, she planned to be lucky. Every time she’d taken off her clothes for a new man, regardless of what fol-lowed, she’d felt a surge of triumph, of coming into her own, a kingdom forbidden to most others, to her own mother and father, for instance, whose misery and clenched rages seemed to have nothing to do with sex, not as Rose had sex. And would have it. She felt in her bones a renewed, humming promise.

  Years later, looking back to this moment, it would strike her as fitting that Frances, in tears, should have brought her the news of love to come, and laughable, indeed, that she, Rose, had thought she could plan her luck. At that moment, she couldn’t even hold to her scorn for Frances. Seeing the sadness in Frances’s face, all the bravado of The Beauty gone, Rose offered her hand, and Frances took it and stood up to walk home.

  If Rose had been walking with Ursula instead, this might have been the start of a joke, one of their favorites. Back in grad school, Ursula had been in medicine, and the med school and dorm was far from the music building and Rose’s rented room even farther off. However, they walked the distance one or two evenings a week, out amongst the sooty buildings of Philadelphia, Rose’s dark hair bound up in a knot, Ursula’s, red-brown, flying like a flag, and when eventually they reached Ursula’s place or Rose’s, they might turn around and walk back to the other’s, because a woman wasn’t supposed to be out alone after dark, although two together were okay; and so it should continue, they’d say, back and forth till day-break. They never actually went till daybreak, walking from Rose’s to Ursula’s to Rose’s again, but walking late as they often did, they pretended they could, no sweat, and the idea filled them with glee at how far they might accompany one another.

  Rose’s stride was too long for Frances. She shortened her steps. Did Frances like her? With all that complaining about Rose’s luck, Frances might actively dislike her even. Did she like Frances? Stopping at the gate to her mother’s house, where she still lived, Frances looked up and what-ever she saw in Rose’s face made her step backward. In response, Rose opened her arms to Frances, who clutched her convulsively. In spite of themselves, they were going to be friends.

  Chapter TWO

  Love within a month, Frances had predicted. To amuse herself and kid Frances, Rose put up a calendar in the kitchen and marked a month ahead with an X. Unabashed by her storm of tears, Frances continued to visit every day, though now she was openly doleful, full of sighs and choked references to Harold.

  “Hey, Frances, wanna shake the place up? Rearrange the furniture?”

  “No,” said Frances, but couldn’t name a reason why. It was Rose’s place for the year.

  So she took down all the photos she could reach and put them in the empty chest of drawers and wrestled the chest and the mahogany table and chairs that filled the dining room and the great, wingback armchairs from the living room into the two matching studies, his and hers, Harold’s and Doris’s, that stood on either end of the apartment.

  Rose would eat on the kitchen table. The bedroom was now clear of all but the bed and the window-lined front rooms of all but a couch, and while she worked Rose could pace back and forth through the rooms without having to watch where she was going.

  Students were soon to arrive. She busied herself planning classes on three-by-five cards, absorbing Rules and Procedures, putting on the role of college teacher like a part in a play. It was a play for which she’d need costumes. Her lack of a wardrobe was not just the chic penury of grad school. Clothes had not concerned her parents, who didn’t entertain and never went out, except for her father, to church. It was amazing for Rose to con-template that she was about to earn a salary and would have money for clothes. Yet all she knew of how women dressed she’d gleaned from old movies on television.

  On her bicycle, she ventured downtown to a department store—the department store, according to Frances, the only store for clothes—and, with a newly granted credit card, she selected her lady professor clothes: a shirtwaist dress with buttons from hem to collarbone, a sweater set in dove gray, a long skirt in tweed so craggy, twigs and pebbles seemed part of the weave. She roped all this to her bike basket and bore triumphantly back up the hill.

&nb
sp; Reviewing the purchases, Frances made an odd little noise in her throat—Rose’s taste was a bit governessy. There’d be cocktail parties, didn’t she realize? There would be evenings.

  Rose let herself be taken in hand. Half-naked before Frances in the department store fitting room, she tried on a half-dozen versions of the Little Black Dress that Frances was certain she needed. The fitting room was tiny, and though Frances averted her eyes, Rose couldn’t hide the fact that she went braless. By contrast, Frances, beneath her sundress, possessed a crisp, molded quality that indicated foundation garments, even though she, like Rose, was far too slender to have anything to shore up or hold in. Frances, however, was not the one undressed, and Rose fought the feeling that she’d become a 4H Project, Frances’s prize calf.

  They’d been to the State Fair together, which in size and noise and embellishment made the county fairs of Rose’s New Hampshire childhood seem paltry. The Minnesota State Fair had livestock barns as big as factories, separate barns for sheep, goats, pigs, roosters, and even rabbits, some of which seemed not rabbits at all but pastry concoctions in fur. There were tractors with ten-foot tires, wall-sized honeycombs crawling with bees, a lagoon with seven-foot sturgeon. Frances led the way amidst the steam of dry ice and the smell of crackling fat to buy them bits of meat and starch fried on wooden sticks, foot-long hot dogs and foot-high ice cream cones. On the Midway, which reached to skyscraper heights— and on that scale, even the Ferris wheel was frightening—Frances chose a hammer-shaped ride that arced up and down and swung full circle. High in the hammerhead, plastered to the safety bar, struggling not to barf her ice cream, Rose observed Frances as her eyes went huge and shot sparks and she laughed and shrieked. Rose instructed herself not to underestimate Frances. Inside that girdle was something wild.

  “Hold,” said Frances in the department store dressing room, placing Rose’s hands in her hair and stepping back to look at the umpteenth Little Black Dress.

  “Buy this one. It makes your rear look tiny.”

  “Oh?” Rose wasn’t in the habit of considering herself from the rear.

  “You’ll want heels with it.”

  “Flats,” said Rose.

  “But not those,” said Frances, who knew the shoe department as well as her own garden, which was small but burgeoning, double-planted and perfectly manicured, not a weed, not a shriveled leaf. She led Rose to pumps with leather soles and small, stacked heels, classics, she said, and then to the shoe repair window for Cat’s Paws, little rubber heel reinforcements to be affixed before even a single wearing, adding years to the life of the shoes.

  “Cat’s Paws? Frances, you know everything.”

  She really seemed to. Just as she’d predicted, Alan Gilpin took a shine to Rose.

  At the first department meeting, he approached her, faking a limp. “The woman who ran over me with her bicycle,” he announced, toasting her with his coffee cup.

  “Shall I buy you a cane?” Rose retorted. He dropped the limp and sat down beside her.

  She got through her first weeks of teaching with his “moral support.” She was assigned a huge section of Intro to Music; beneath her lecture hall, Alan marched his Bagpipe Corps, bleating and wheezing. Routing his evening run past her duplex, he spattered acorns against her front windows. She retaliated with hot pepper cookies, alluringly set on a doily in his mailbox. He gnashed them down and then demanded to see just how such a treat was produced—a ruse—he knew the Chair’s apartment and was avid to try out the antique Kitchen Chef range.

  So began their joint cooking ventures. Showered after his evening run, he’d arrive at her door with groceries for a mouth-watering stroganoff or a magnificent paella. She sat him down to her millionaire chicken, amazed him with her blackberry crumble. They jabbered, shoulder to shoulder, at sink and stove in her kitchen or his, conversations that extended into late-night phone calls and picked up again in the office the next day.

  Frances followed all this with a knowing eye and a brave little smile.

  Alan called Frances flighty. “A flibbertigibbet,” he said.

  But Rose knew Frances had substance and, on an afternoon in mid-September, despite Alan’s lack of enthusiasm, invited them both over for coffee.

  Alan came early, arranged himself on the bench on the back stair landing, and stretched his legs in a lizardly fashion over the banister, his eyes half-lidded.

  “Well,” said Frances, bursting in, “aren’t you two the item?”

  “Item?” said Rose and beckoned Alan in from the porch.

  “Running around campus together? Seen in the bookstore holding hands,” she breathed.

  “Holding hands? I don’t think so,” said Rose. She and Alan had visited the bookstore together and perhaps one had grabbed the other’s hand in enthusiasm over some book or other, but nothing else.

  “Oh, come now,” Frances persisted. “You’ve been seen weekend morn-ings out to breakfast together with your hair all uncombed.”

  Alan gave a small, strangled cough. It had to be Rose who’d been seen with her hair uncombed. Alan always appeared well groomed, even in his sweaty running clothes. In this he more closely resembled Frances. But he did seem to like being seen with Rose, regardless of whether her hair was combed, and she felt the attachment to be genuine—he liked being alone with her as well. They were not an item, however. It was phony to let Frances think so, and there was something fraudulent also in the pose Alan struck and the tone with which he introduced Rose around campus. But maybe she, too, gained advantage by pretending to be half of a couple in public? It made her appear less lonely, anyway, than Frances.

  “A busybody,” pronounced Alan, once Frances had gone. “A Nosy Parker. She always has to have something to report.” Rose rolled her eyes. “Really,” he insisted. “She tattles to the Higher-Ups—not that I care what she says about us.”

  But there was no us—not really.

  “The Higher-Ups,” Rose said and sighed.

  Alan had explained all about the Higher-Ups. His third-year review was upon him; he had two more years to go before he’d know for certain whether or not he’d be tenured. The only son of a single mother, a seam-stress in Fargo, he knew exactly what he wanted: more of what he already had. His campaign was detailed and farranging. He saw to it that his students adored him; wrote and published, of course; and, in addition, volunteered for a bizarre variety of campus tasks, listable on his résumé but unrelated to music. He judged homecoming royalty, hosted alumni, life-guarded faculty kids at the pool, and, in off hours, brooded on tenure. Rose let it be known she found this boring. In her opinion, he was in danger of reducing himself to his résumé.

  “Curriculum vitae,” he corrected. Résumé was the term for freelancers.

  “Crummy little freelancers,” she said. “Like me?”

  “Oh, tenure’s just a thing,” he sighed. “You could get on the track if you wanted.”

  The college, like a number of schools in the region, styled itself as the Harvard of the Midwest, revealing a fear of inferiority. It nonetheless possessed an accomplished faculty, hailing from many lands, and the students were bright and lively. Rose could see the allure of tenure, but she wasn’t getting on any track. Why was academic tenure the be-all and end-all? He could get work other than teaching. He could travel. Why, he could live in Paris!

  On what money, he wanted to know?

  He could teach English. She’d go with him. They would translate. They would cook.

  “Cook in Paris?”

  He could play music—pack along his instruments. She’d heard him jam with a rag-tag band of city musicians, all talented, but even so, he stood out. He cut a figure: his rangy height, his well-chosen clothes, his attitude, his car, a vintage gray-green Volvo with leather seats. He was making his way and Rose couldn’t believe it really depended on a teaching job at a small college in Middle America. At any rate, tenure as a topic was becoming thoroughly tiresome.

  Fortunately, he was open to distraction,
dying to laugh, and game for any escapade. When distracted from the tenure thing, he seemed lighter than air.

  Frances, by contrast, seemed heavier laden. Rose let her attention to Frances dwindle, returning her calls less promptly and then calling her almost not at all. She trained herself to walk swiftly through the front office, greeting Frances without really looking at her. Frances seemed to expect nothing better and Rose felt a pang. But the threesome hadn’t worked and, except for the tenure thing, Alan was so much more fun.

  “Rose Marie,” he said one night. She’d let slip her middle name and he loved to tease. He was lounging in a bentwood rocker he’d rescued from a dumpster, repaired and painted a periwinkle blue with a cunning red stripe like a satin ribbon running over and around the runners. She lay on his long couch viewing a spray of reddening treetops through his windows.

  “Rose Marie,” he declared, “we have got to get out of here.”

  “Where to?” she said. “Downtown? To the old dead fountain and the clock tower?”

  “You know nothing,” he said. “Get up. We’re going to Minneapolis.”

  Minneapolis: blues clubs, sidewalk cafés, the West Bank where a parade of mimes, druggies, and street musicians kept things stirring late into the autumn night. Here was the world: the thronged voices, bursts of song, the rustle of taffeta and click of dress shoes, on-and-off blare erupting through doors opening and closing. Alan kept them to the sidelines, to the edge of the street and the back of the hall, where he watched everything raptly, silently, observant of who was present, applauding discreetly, low profile, mindful of his reputation.

  Oh god, the tenure thing.

  They went to a weird staging of Alice in Wonderland in a cellar, where, to get to their seats, they had to crowd into an elevator with Alice herself. The elevator was lined with mottled brown paper, and as they descended, a hurtling sound suggested they were flying through a tunnel. Alice looked right at Rose and spoke: Had she seen a rabbit, and was this the way to the tea party?