A Certain Age (12 page)

By now, Sophie's familiar with the procedure. At first, there's just an ordinary hallway, bare and damp, like any boardinghouse or tenement on just about any street in Manhattan. Somebody shows them down a narrow flight of stairs, smelling like urine, and opens an unpromising door at the bottom. And bang, poof! Out comes a burst of jazz and laughter, and cigarettes and fun. Julie swoops inside, and Sophie follows her, straight to a small round table in the corner where a man sits waiting for them, arms crossed, nursing a lowball and a smoke and a few empty glasses.

“Peter, duck! I knew I could count on you.” Julie drops a kiss on the man's cheek and turns to drag Sophie into range. “Darling, this is Sophie Fortescue, Jay Ochsner's brand-new fiancée. Sophie, this is Peter van der Wahl, a friend of the family.”

Peter van der Wahl sets down drink and cigarette and rises to greet her. He's a man of modest proportions: hair brown, eyes blue, face pleasantly well-bred. He doesn't seem a bit sauced, despite the empty glasses standing before him. He smiles politely and tells her how pleased he is to meet her.
Sophie likes him at once, but she can't quite encompass the idea that Julie Schuyler's fallen in love with
this
fellow. Just like that.

“I'm always happy to meet another friend of Julie's,” she says warily, and Peter pulls out a chair for her and makes a signal in the direction of the bar, which takes up most of the rest of the room.

“Oh, I've known Peter all my life,” says Julie. “It's one of my earliest memories, isn't it? When one of the Bouvier boys kicked over my sandcastle—well, it wasn't much of a sandcastle, I was only two or three—and Peter came in and punched him in the nose. How old were you, darling? Six?”

“Five.”

“An older man.” Julie winks. “We've been friends ever since. He does my bidding and doesn't complain, and I reward him whenever I can.”

Sophie looked back and forth between the two of them.

“Give a girl some of that ciggy, Peter,” says Julie, and she helps herself. “Hasn't he arrived yet?”

“Not yet. He had something to do first, he said.”

The world begins to right itself. “Hasn't
who
arrived yet?” Sophie asks.

“Why, the fellow I've fallen in love with.” Julie hands back the cigarette. “My goodness, you don't think I meant
Peter,
do you?”

“I didn't—”

“My God, that would be like kissing one of my brothers.”

A waitress arrives, bearing a tray of loaded highball glasses, which she sets on the table, one by venomous one. From the expression on Peter's quiet face, Sophie guesses that Julie's sentiments aren't returned in quite the same fraternal flavor. Poor man. Wouldn't it be just awful, to be hopelessly in love with Julie Schuyler?

Julie selects one of the glasses and examines it—not that carefully—against what light she can find. “No, it just so happens that Peter's acquainted with the object of my affections, and he's kindly offered to make the introduction for us.”

“You haven't met him yet?”

“No. I've only seen him from afar. He walked into the party tonight and
murdered
me from across the room.”

“Murdered you?”

Julie places a hand on her heart. “Murdered me.”

Peter turns his eyes upward to inspect the ceiling. “This happens twice a week, you understand.”

“Oh, but this time it's
real,
Peter. I haven't stopped thinking about him.”

“Really? That's—oh, three whole hours?”

“Applesauce. Haven't you heard of love at first sight?”

“You haven't even met.”

“For God's sake, don't be such a wet blanket, Peter. You're making me anxious
.
” She finishes her drink, snatches the cigarette from Peter's fingers, and stubs it out in the ashtray. “Dance with me. It'll settle my nerves.”

“You haven't got any nerves,” he says, but he stands up anyway and allows her to drag him off to the few square yards of linoleum flooring in front of the musicians, which is packed with frenetic dancers: feet flying, hands splayed. Sophie looks after them for a stunned few seconds, until Julie's blond head is swallowed whole, leaving only a single erect black feather to shimmy above them like a periscope.

Sophie returns her attention to the table before her, and the several glasses standing atop it, reminding her of downtown itself: all those buildings perched on such a tiny speck of land. The great weight of the Woolworth tower, reigning like a colossus. She picks one up and sniffs the rim. A medicinal smell assails her nostrils, like a hospital disinfectant.

And that's the drink that Julie's already finished.

She tries another one—an untouched glass—and extracts a little sip, just to prove she's not afraid of it. Her tongue sizzles. Stiffens in shock. Goes a little numb. And then she looks up, because a shadow has just darkened the table, and it can't possibly be Julie and Peter, can it? The music's not over.

The funny thing is, she's had a premonition all along. She's had the feeling that something's coming, something unexpected and secretly delightful, or else she wouldn't have abandoned her fiancé at the Schuylers' party uptown. She
wouldn't have climbed into a taxi with Julie Schuyler and left for parts unknown if she hadn't felt this waggling in her stomach, this tingling in her fingers beneath the satin and the rose-shaped engagement ring. Something's arriving at her door, something marvelous, and she remembers—just as she turns from her highball glass, choking a little—where she's felt this familiar anticipation before.

So it's not a surprise, is it, when she lifts her gaze to find Mr. Rofrano's shadowed face staring down at her.

“Hello, there,” she gasps, just before the coughing fit strikes.

BY THE TIME JULIE AND
Peter return, damp and scintillating, the coughing has died away, though the blushing has not. She knows her cheeks are pink—she suffers the telltale scorch of her own blood, right there under the skin—and probably her nose and neck, as well. Such a terrible blusher. Mr. Rofrano has drawn up a chair and offered her his handkerchief, which she's just handed shyly back to him, and now he leans forward to ask her a question.

As his black head bends to hers, Sophie turns to hear him better, and who should swing her head and meet Sophie's gaze at that exact instant? Julie, that's who. (Uncanny, isn't it? How animals know when someone's watching.) Julie stops dead, and her eyes move back and forth, cavalier and Sophie, and from the expression on her face, she's just been murdered for the second time this evening.

Mr. Rofrano rises politely from his chair. “Peter,” he says, nodding at Julie's partner.

“Rofrano. Glad to see you.” Gladness is not the tenor of Peter's voice, however. “This is Julie Schuyler. You know Philip, of course? She's his cousin.”

Julie draws near and holds out her hand. “My goodness, Sophie. Do you two know each other?”

“I met Miss Fortescue last week, when I had the honor of presenting her with a—a token from an admirer.”

“
You're
Sophie's cavalier?”

“Isn't it amazing? Such a small world,” Sophie trills.

“Yes, it is.” Julie leans over and snatches a drink. “I don't think there's more than two dozen people in it, sometimes.”

“Four hundred, isn't that right? The capacity of Mrs. Astor's ballroom,” says Mr. Rofrano.

“Oh, that's just a story. Anyway, her house is long gone, and the ballroom with it.” She slings back the entire drink, all at once, and blinks her eyes furiously to keep it down.

Peter places one hand at the small of her back. “Careful, now.”

“Don't be silly. I think I'd like to dance some more, darling, if you don't mind?” She turns her head briefly to Mr. Rofrano. “A pleasure to meet you. Take good care of my little Sophie while I'm gone, won't you?”

LATER, AS MR. ROFRANO SEES
her home in a taxi, Sophie can't quite decide what Julie meant by that. Did she suspect some sort of attraction between the two of them, Sophie and Mr. Rofrano? Or had some other piece of knowledge fallen into place, from that jigsaw of ephemera that constituted the habits and customs of the New York upper class?

Sophie hadn't danced with him, after all. She'd steered her eyes scrupulously away from Octavian's face, because she was engaged to another man, and Julie was smitten. They had chatted stiffly, conscious of this awkward thing between them, this fiction of impartiality. But you couldn't fool Julie, could you? And Julie had obviously not been fooled.

Sophie stares at the gloved hands in her lap and says, “I hope I haven't put you too far out of your way.”

“Of course not. Anyway, I'm not about to send a girl home by herself in the middle of the night.”

“That's very kind of you.”

“Kindness has nothing to do with it,” he says, almost under his breath, and then: “If you don't mind my asking, shouldn't your fiancé be around to do this kind of thing?”

“We left him uptown at a party.”

“Oh, of course. The Schuylers.”

“How did you know that?”

He hesitates. “Well, I was there, too, for a bit.”

“Oh. You should have said hello.”

“I didn't see you, or I might have.”

Sophie frowns, because there's some fatal hole of logic there, but she's too sleepy and too tipsy to locate it. The sleepiness has come over her like a blanket, since stepping into the taxi with Mr. Rofrano, and all she wants on this earth is to boldly lay her head on his woolen shoulder and plunge into an abyss of sleep from which she wouldn't climb out for days. Already her eyelids are sagging. “Oh, of course you were there. How silly of me. That's where Julie spotted you.”

“Did she?”

“Yes. You murdered her from across the room—”

“I certainly didn't mean to.”

“—so she was forced to ask Peter to introduce you.” Sophie pauses. “How do you know Peter?”

“I stayed at his family's place in Long Island a couple of summers ago. I was just back from France. Not too sure what I wanted to do with myself. Whether I wanted to do anything at all.”

“And did you find out? What you wanted to do, I mean?”

“I guess I did. I thought I did, anyway.”

The streets are passing quickly, too quickly. In a few minutes they will arrive on Thirty-Second Street, and Sophie will bid Mr. Rofrano good-bye and resume her life as the fiancée of Jay Ochsner. Planning a wedding and a honeymoon and a home together. “Selling bonds, you mean?”

“It's a living, I guess.”

She doesn't reply. Maybe if they don't speak, the time will pass more slowly, and she can simply relish Mr. Rofrano's presence beside her, aspect by aspect. Very solid and warm, smelling like cigarettes and the sweaty, alcoholic dankness of the establishment from which they've recently emerged. (
You'll
see my Sophie home, won't you, Mr. Rofrano?
Julie said, sporting as only Julie could be, falling sideways into Peter, and Mr. Rofrano said of course he would.) His upper leg lies about a foot and a half from her upper leg, but she can feel him anyway, can perceive his presence on her skin as if they're actually touching. Or maybe it's just the cocktails? She only drank one, but the effect is far in excess of any old glass of champagne, blurring lines and skin and clothes and borders until she can't quite locate the territory where Sophie ends, or where Mr. Rofrano begins.

Mr. Rofrano doesn't speak either, and in some strange way—much like the imagined touching of their bodies, when there is none—the silence itself seems to speak for them, querying and replying back and forth. Until Sophie asks, a little too forcefully: “But what do you
really
want to do, then?”

“Now that's a funny question,” he says slowly.

“What's so funny about it?”

“For one thing, no one's ever asked me before.”

“Nobody? Not your parents or anybody?”

“My parents are dead.”

“Oh!” Sophie squeezes her hands together. “I'm so terribly sorry. How stupid of me.”

“That's all right. You had no way of knowing.”

“But you never talked about them, so I should have realized . . .”

“It doesn't matter. It happened a while ago.”

“My mother died when I was a baby, and I haven't stopped missing her.”

“Did she? Well, I'm sorry for that.” He sets his hands on his knees, fingers spread. His thumbs rub against the sides of his trousers. “Do you mind if I ask how she died?”

“I—I don't know exactly. A sudden sickness of some kind. I don't think they knew what it was, really. What about your parents?”

There is a brief hesitation before he answers. “My father shot himself over some sort of bad investment when I was fourteen—”

“Oh, Mr. Rofrano!”

“And my mother died of the 'flu when I was in France.”

“How terrible for you. I'm so sorry.”

“It was a blow, I guess.” His fingers flex on his knees. “I got the news in December of 1918. My aunt sent the telegram. The war was over, but I hadn't gotten my demobilization papers yet. They held the funeral without me.”

“Oh, Mr. Rofrano.”

“Anyway, I guess that's why I stayed around Paris for a while, afterward.”

“Because you had no one to go back to,” Sophie whispers. She reaches bravely across the eighteen inches and lays her hand—the left hand, the one hiding an engagement ring under the glove—on his, and begins a sentence that she regrets an instant later. “How I wish . . .”

“Wish what?”

“Nothing.” Twenty-Fourth Street. Only a minute or two left. Eight blocks of frozen pavement. Sophie withdraws her hand and says, hurriedly now, “You didn't answer my question. What you
really
want to do.”