The Rose Variations Read online

  Amused, Rose answered, “Yes, it is,” but Alan took her hand and stepped backward. Rose couldn’t stand it. “And here’s your rabbit,” Rose told Alice, presenting Alan.

  Once in their seats, Alan slumped back and regarded her. She crossed her eyes at him. Abruptly, he leaned over and kissed her, a kiss that landed on her ear and slid down her neck.

  “Hey now,” she said, shivering.

  “Oh? No touch?” He looked at her—a challenge.

  “You’re gay, aren’t you?” she said quietly.

  He looked away. “Who told you that?”

  “No one told me. I just thought so.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  He didn’t say she was wrong.

  She’d noticed a tone when they were tired, a plaintive tone that went slightly mean. They were stuck somehow. She’d thought it was sex, or rather the lack of that possibility between them. She wished he’d just say so.

  Instead, they raced onward breathlessly, to readings, dance-happenings, to an all-night jazz diner. They got almost no sleep.

  “Gotta do it all now,” said Alan. “Snow’s coming.” The weather, how-ever, was merely cool, a mellow late September. Rose adopted an after-noon nap and paced herself to keep up with him.

  They went to peculiar movies. Maybe in contrast to the wind instruments he taught—all that air—Alan had a hunger for movies with brutal plots and dim, earthbound characters, movies preferably with subtitles. Toward the end of September, they went to the fateful movie, the Hypnotism Movie, as Rose would refer to it ever after. As it happened, this was exactly a month after Frances had made her prediction. The X on Rose’s calendar was by then buried under scribbled notes.

  The movie’s director was, in Alan’s estimation, the high priest of German cinema, and rumor had it he might appear. They arrived an hour early and took seats twelfth row center, close enough to the front to really see but not so close as to crowd the podium.

  Rose wore her Little Black Dress, deliberately overdressing to sass Alan, and a string of scarlet chili pepper beads, which clicked against each other as she moved. The beads were not a Frances selection, but papiermâché from a junk shop. And, though she rarely wore makeup, that night she layered on scarlet lipstick.

  Alan failed to notice any of this. He’d dressed impeccably—khakis and grass-green polo shirt—but his normally sleepy eyes were wide; his blond, almost white hair was up in a wild thatch that he kept smoothing down without success; and his beard, under the muted lights, seemed unusually black, a dark wedge into which his pale, thick mustache streaked like ash into charcoal. Nearly catatonic with excitement, he held his mouth in a grim, handsome line.

  A tiny worm of something—jealousy? envy?—turned in Rose.

  Whatever was exciting him had nothing to do with her. She remembered his lips on her neck that one time at Alice and stretched a leg over his ankle. He squeezed her knee without glancing at her, but she held her gaze on him, on the fine shape of his mouth, and went from there, strip-ping off his shirt in her mind, reaching for his fly. As though he sensed something, he shifted tensely. She gave it up.

  A stranger sitting two rows down turned and, over the empty seats between them, caught her gaze and held it with an intent, slightly puzzled look, as though he were trying to place her. She had an impression of a face all angles and salt-and-pepper hair.

  The room hushed and the filmmaker appeared—immensely tall, with deepset eyes, a lordly mane of hair, and a bearing so stiff, he might have been a medieval knight. Rose could almost hear the armor clank. Alan released a tiny sigh—apparently a dream come true. The director said hello with a barely detectable movement of his facial features. A voice called out to ask if it were true that the actors in the movie had performed under hypnosis. In clipped tones, he promised to return for discussion and signaled the lights down.

  Actors in peasant clothing came stumbling into view in front of a nineteenth-century glassworks, fires in glass kilns burning within. As could be predicted, the hypnotized actors looked like fools: slack-jawed, slack-voiced, moving with nonsensical compulsion—a god’s-eye view of human endeavor, if god had become bored and cynical.

  Rose laughed unhappily. Alan shushed her.

  Onscreen in a rustic tavern with plank tables and a dirt floor, someone began to play a hurdy-gurdy. The ungainly bloated lute, with a keyboard down the side and a crank at the end, creaked out a sound part harpsichord, part calliope: not an entirely unpleasant sound, and, by the music, Rose was led into the story. A pair of brothers—or were they friends?— very close and very drunk, a flailing drunkenness under hypnotism— climbed up to a hayloft to sleep. In the night, one fell over the edge to his death. The next day, the other woke to find the body on the barn floor and began loudly to grieve. He seemed to know his mate was dead, but at nightfall he dragged the body to the tavern, where, demanding that the hurdy-gurdy be played, he embraced the stiffened shape and hauled it around the floor as though he could dance it back to life.

  Rose was shocked to see herself in this: dead embraces, bodies she’d clutched willfully even after the life had gone out of it.

  Someone two rows down glanced back in her direction, and silver threads lit up in his hair. She found herself lurched forward, gripping the metal back of the seat in front of her with both hands. She sat back and scanned the faces of the audience caught in the reflected light from the movie, and they were all—Alan, too—as slack-jawed and dead-eyed as the faces on screen. For the first time in years, she felt a horror of unfamiliarity and longed for family and scenes of childhood. Alan was the only one there who knew her at all. She reached for him. He caught her fingers, squeezed them absently, and let them go. She slid down in her seat, cringing.

  Shutting her eyes, she thought of the little house in New Hampshire with its screen of quince bushes in front of the porch. Her mother still lived there, and her sister. They were fighting, Rose knew, though Natalie had graduated from college and should have been out on her own; there should have been nothing to argue about. Their wild-eyed father was off following his religious group across the Alleghenies. Ten years before, having converted from normal Christianity to something more electrifying, he sat their mother down and demanded that she submit to him, to his spiritual headship, whatever that meant. Maybe a form of hypnotism? Her mother had cackled, delighted, it seemed, to have a fresh outrage over which to fight. They gave Rose the willies. But even so, for a throbbing moment, trapped in front of hypnotized actors, she missed her mother and father and sister and wished for them all to come, to gather in St. Paul in her borrowed duplex, regardless of the fact that they’d spend the visit arguing, and Rose along with them, arguing, sulking, and stomping out for walks alone or in pairs, briefly allied: she with her father because they both believed in discipline; she with her mother because they were the artists; she with her sister because they were the children.

  On screen, kilns exploded and the glassworks caught fire. Glass shattered, timbers pitched, and the actors shouted and ran. Her father would find this grimly right: an apocalyptic scene with a Christian lesson, one the filmmaker never intended, as her mother, were she present, would be sure to say. But what on earth did the filmmaker intend?

  The house lights were up and Alan sat transfixed. With great effort, he turned to Rose to confirm that they’d witnessed something splendid. She glared at him, cleared her throat, and thrust her hand in the air. At the podium, the filmmaker lifted his chin in her direction.

  “Is art a conscious act? Is an actor an artist, or a thing?” she asked.

  He sighed and dropped his chin to his chest.

  An edge in her voice, she pressed on. “And might I ask if you, yourself, directed this picture under hypnosis and who it was who hypnotized you?”

  “These actors were not mere puppets,” he said. “If I hypnotized you and gave you a knife and told you to stab your friend—” here he pointed to Alan, “—you would never do it.”

  She glanced at Alan, wh
o stared at her in horror. She barked out a laugh. For a wild moment, she saw herself, knife in hand, going for Alan in his theater seat. He turned his head away. She was a philistine and a stranger. The filmmaker called for the next question. She crossed her arms over her chest and her beads clicked against each other.

  “Nice chilies,” said a voice below her. She looked two rows down into the angular face, the bright gray eyes lit up with amusement, the shock of salt and pepper hair. He sat tall in his seat and, despite the silver in his hair, his face was unlined and youthful. He drew a couple arcs on his chest and pointed, indicating her beads. She would remember that Guy Robbin, in his first gesture to her, had pointed to his own heart.

  She was staring. She told herself to look away.

  “You hated it?” He gestured toward the screen.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know,” and she felt herself relax.

  “Right,” he said. “It was too weird to hate.”

  When the movie let out, Rose watched as he unfolded himself to an immense height and turned in her direction. But Alan bolted from his seat and Rose, suddenly shy, hurried off after him. The evening had been exhausting and though she expected nothing more than an argument with Alan, she couldn’t, at that moment, reach past the known for the unknown.

  She and Alan were going to fight; she couldn’t see how to avoid it. She wanted to ask to be dropped off at home, but he drove as though possessed to his place, gave her a glass of wine and, the very next moment, took the wine glass from her and pulled her to his bed.

  He was rough and sudden, plunging into her. There was no laughter, no talk; all his lightness was gone and he lay upon her afterward, a slaughtered carcass, once she’d moved his hand away from the mechanical fumbling between her legs which he’d offered in afterthought. They were about to be very, very sorry.

  “Well, this was stupid,” she said, waiting for him to move his weight off her. “What are we—hypnotized?”

  “Well,” he said in a bleak voice, “isn’t it always awkward the first time?”

  “First and last as far as I’m concerned. I want what we had.”

  He rolled off and looked at her. She turned away from him, wrapping herself in the sheet.

  “We still have it,” he said.

  “I doubt it.”

  “No, we do,” he said, swaying to his feet. “Get up. I’m taking you to breakfast.”

  “At midnight?”

  “Come on, Rose Marie.” His voice was forced and trembling.

  He handed her clothing to her: panties, nylons, Little Black Dress. “Just pull it on any old way. We’re going out to breakfast with our hair all uncombed.”

  Sitting across the booth from him in the all-night jazz diner, she cast her eye around for some sight or sound to provide distraction. None came. The place was unusually quiet and empty. She made herself look over at Alan and, for once, he held her gaze for more than two seconds. She did feel she knew him and that he had at least begun to know her. Could they love each other after this bad beginning?

  She reached over and tousled his hair. Almost imperceptibly, he shrank from her.

  Chapter THREE

  They tried to act as if nothing had happened, loyally went on cooking together and phoned at night before sleep, though the conversations were strained and very much shorter.

  She couldn’t bring herself to blame him. She had asked for it. Sitting beside him at the movie, she’d summoned his attentions the way women did, with a look, a pressing of knee to knee. Why, then, had she been horrified to have his mouth on hers, to have the act of love under way? Was he gay, as she’d first thought, or was it just a lack of chemistry between them? He’d moved fast, torn through the streets, getting her to his apartment and to his bed. She’d been curious about what he intended, drawn by the glint in his eye and afraid that the flare of emotion was anger, that he suddenly couldn’t stand her, and that the friendship, so newly begun, was about to be over. She had thought, as he pulled her to her feet, that he was about to say something terrible and then drive her home because she’d failed to love the Hypnotism Movie.

  What was it about that movie that produced in him such a brash elation? People with their souls sucked out? The crashing wreck of every-thing? She’d been revolted. Hadn’t she lined up her past mistakes to remind herself of such consequences, to fortify herself against unfocused eyes and colliding bodies? How could she, the very next hour, allow her-self to be led where she’d just vowed she would no longer go?

  Her body was desolate and confused. It was as though she’d been struck naked and couldn’t get her clothes back on. Perhaps she wasn’t made for love, and music alone was her calling. Perhaps she’d have to learn to ignore her body’s foolish buzzing.

  She’d have liked to phone Ursula—someone far away and not involved. However, back in Philadelphia, Ursula was having her own bleak time in the first grueling months of her medical residency: the twenty-four hour off/on schedule, the catnaps grabbed in hospital bunks, the food from vending machines. She was too poor to call Rose, too infrequently at home to have Rose call her, too busy to write more than cramped, unhappy postcards about her wretched boyfriend. She was fighting with her boyfriend, or her fiancé, depending. But fighting or not, Ursula at least knew what it was to live with a man. If Ursula answered the phone, what could Rose do but confess another misbegotten one-night stand?

  Other people couldn’t help, not Ursula, not her mother, who would blame her—Rose could blame herself without any help—and not her sister, Natalie, who would sympathize extravagantly, betraying pleasure in Rose’s misfortune. And not Frances, who might find the story irresistible to repeat. There was no one to turn to—Alan, least of all.

  To her astonishment, he tried again a week later. On his way out her door one night, he turned back, and as though executing a formal figure in a dance, placed his hands on her shoulders, pressed his mouth to hers and attempted to press his tongue between her lips. She clamped her teeth together and stood frozen. He turned and walked heavily down her stairs.

  In the last days of September, crab apples dropped and mixed with leaves, smearing the paths on campus. From a stand outside the student union, she bought Concord grapes, a favorite fruit of her childhood, but found the popping skins and viscous flesh unexpectedly gross and tossed them. She went about her duties woodenly. The Midwestern accents, which she’d first found intriguing, now seemed exaggeratedly flat: words without nuance.

  One day as she stood at the xerox machine, Frances laid a confiding hand on her arm. “You guys have a fight?” she said in that same flat accent.

  But Rose had no intention of confiding. Frances had predicted the dis-aster— love within a month—and Rose didn’t intend to give her the sat-isfaction of knowing that, a month to the day, something of that sort had happened, or a careless half-minute of it.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” murmured Frances, blocking Rose’s path to her office. “It’s normal to fight.” Frances opined that Alan needed understanding. “He’s such a special man, don’t you think? So erudite.”

  Rose regarded her.

  “Erudite,” said Frances. “And so very high-strung.”

  Rose walked into her office and closed the door. Erudite? He might be a Nobel laureate for all Rose cared. He didn’t know the first thing about himself, kissing her as though he meant it. She knew when a kiss was meant. As to high-strung, she was high-strung herself. At the moment, she had trouble meeting her students’ eyes, enduring their gaze on her, upon her body.

  He hadn’t wanted her. His touch had been experimental, self-absorbed, uninterested in her. She did blame him for that much. Oh, possibly he admired her physical form as an object in his collection, like his rocking chair with the ribbon stripe. But his touch between her legs after their rushed, nearly violent union had been hesitant, almost ignorant. He’d been what she might even call shy, turning his back to put on the condom.

  Could it be, was it possible that, up to t
hat night, he’d been a virgin? It seemed unlikely, but, if true, would explain a great deal.

  If it was only that, well, she might even have been unkind in what she’d said and done or failed to say and do.

  Leaving his kitchen one night, she turned back and asked if they could talk about it.

  “If you mean our little sexual fiasco, what’s there to say? You don’t want to. I believe I’ve made clear what I want.”

  “Well, something’s not right.” She reached for his hand, drew a breath, and asked him.

  His eyes widened. “A virgin? Oh, I don’t think so.” He withdrew his hand.

  “Is that a no?”

  He threw back his head and laughed harshly and for so long that she began to listen for him to draw a breath and gasped in, herself, to prompt him. He subsided into a chuckle of what seemed genuine merriment. He wasn’t going to tell her.

  She’d only been acquainted with him for six weeks. It was vanity to imagine she knew him. She could only learn what he chose to reveal.

  “Look,” he said. “Let’s not and say we did.”

  “But I’m afraid we already did,” she said.

  “I love you, Rose.” He kissed her, keeping his tongue to himself.

  October arrived and snow had yet to fall. Afternoons were sometimes hot. Late one day, walking to the dry cleaners laden with her sweater set into which she’d sweated copiously and her splotched black dress—grease spots and the odor of sweat were not quite the professorial image; these professor clothes were expensive to maintain—she paused to check her wallet, when a voice called out to her, called hi, or hey, or something.

  A man in a torn denim jacket and an old crushed fedora sat with a newspaper on the concrete wall. Not ten feet away, he regarded her in absolute stillness. Doubting herself, she’d half turned away when he called to her again.

  “Seen any weird German movies lately?”

  He folded his paper and stood to a sudden, staggering height. He took his hat off and she saw the flash of silver in his dark hair.