Free The White Rose by Jean Hanff Korelitz Page A

of tears, punctuated only by periods in which she forgets that she is a forty-eight-year-old woman terribly in love with a man who does not understand that he is twenty-six and what that means. She curls tightly forward against her knees, gripping them, and wetly, loudly, sloppily sobbing. For the first time all day, including when she was pushing him toward the door, she truly would like him to be gone.
    “Marian, can I help?” Oliver says. But of course he can’t. Still, she is grateful. A lesser man might have asked, “Are you having your period?” or something equally asinine, but Oliver has not, and a good thing, too, since that might have caused a fresh assault of tears. Marian has not had her period in years.
    “Look,” she manages to say, finally, between gulps, “I think…maybe it would be a good idea if I had some time to myself right now. It just isn’t fair to inflict my presence on anyone else.”
    She sees but does not hear his sigh.
    “Sweetie, I’m just…I just feel done in.” Her voice sounds ragged, clumsily patched together. “It’s better I’m alone.”
    “It’s better you’re with me,” he says tersely. “It’s better you don’t shut me out the minute you think you’re not in top form. It’s better you figure out that we’re in this together, and I am actually capable of understanding what you’re going through.”
    “But you’re not,” she says. “No one’s capable. I mean, really capable of really understanding. We get other people around the edges, maybe, but we don’t get inside. We can’t.”
    “I completely disagree.” He moves back, putting more space between them, more air. “You think a man can’t know a woman? Or is it that a young person can’t know an older one?” He waits for a response. “Or just that I’m not capable. You think I’m too simple to understand this big”—he shakes his head in frustration—“ soup of anxiety you’re carting around all the time. You think I’m too insensitive to get it. Or just too stupid.”
    “Oliver,” she says, leaning forward, “I would never think such a thing. I wouldn’t—” Love is the word. Love is what she means and wants to say, but won’t say. She will not burden him with her love, on top of everything else. “I wouldn’t feel what I feel for you if you were either of those things. I meant only that to say ‘I know what you’re going through’ is merely a gesture. We accept that it’s the best we can do, but nobody can really know. Look,” she tells him, “I know what Charlotte Wilcox ate for dinner on July seventeenth, 1784, but I’ll never know how she really felt about anything. How could I? I mean, even if she were here and I could ask her, and even if she tried to articulate it and really wanted me to understand, I still couldn’t understand. It’s not just my limitation as a historian, it’s my limitation as a human being. I can’t know, and you can’t know,” she finishes, but Oliver shakes his head.
    “You’re wrong. If you gave me a chance, if you weren’t afraid to reveal what it is, what is so horrible you can’t bear for me to get near it, you might be surprised. This could be something that connects us, but you keep it between us. You make it an obstacle.”
    She shifts uncomfortably. She would like him to leave now.
    “Look,” Oliver says, his voice quiet in the near darkness, “I accept that our situation is unusual, but we’re not the first couple to have been born so far apart. In this building alone there are probably a dozen men with wives young enough to be their daughters, and nobody bats an eyelash at them.”
    “That’s very different,” she snaps.
    “It shouldn’t be.”
    “Well, we can agree on that. But it is.”
    He looks at her. “But think about what matters in a relationship. In a marriage! It’s companionship, and friendship. And passion. We have those things. There’s longevity in what we have.”
    “The passion won’t last,”