Last to Know: A Novel(7)
5
EVENING LAKE, 3 A.M., Rose Osborne
Rose Osborne woke at the same time as Harry Jordan. Startled out of a bad dream, she reached nervously across the bed for her husband but Wally was not there. The covers were thrown back and Wally’s side of the bed was cold, which meant he’d been gone for some time. It wasn’t unusual these days. Her husband had not been sleeping well; Rose thought he’d probably gone down to the kitchen to get a cup of the chamomile tea she recommended, though she suspected it was more likely to be a shot or two of vodka.
They had come to the family vacation house on the lake, as they had every summer since their first child was born eighteen years ago, when Rose was a mere girl of twenty-one. Married too young, as she realized ruefully later, but so hotly in love nothing else mattered but being with Wally who wanted her “forever.” So what else could she do but marry him.
Wally called Rose his “lavish” woman. She was round and soft, always hoping to be a size twelve but mostly sticking at fourteen. She loved that Wally enjoyed the way she looked, the way she felt under his hands. She was still the same size now, still round and soft with a mass of curly, coppery-brown hair worn shaggy to her shoulders because it was easier that way, and big brown eyes that Wally had once told her were definitely not “spaniel-like.” More of a Labrador, he said. Rose had not been sure if that was a compliment but decided it was better if she took it that way. Her long legs and racehorse-slender ankles were her best features, that and her smiley mouth and pleasing expression.
Wally didn’t tell her he loved her “Labrador” eyes until after she agreed to marry him and he’d actually put the ring on her finger “just to make sure,” he said with that smile that twisted up her heart and melted her bones and made her tremble with desire for him. He wanted her! Rose Gothorpe, born to an American father and English mother who Rose thought must have been a direct descendent of Queen Victoria, whose mores and moral code her mother followed perfectly, imposing them on her own daughter, making Rose feel wicked for her desire.
Being an only child wasn’t all bad though, Rose remembered now. She was thinking of her own brood and their sibling squabbles and the times she’d had to separate them like sparring wrestlers fighting over which twin had taken whose ballet slippers and which one had deleted whose homework and who had eaten the last of the ice cream and put the empty carton back in the freezer. Guilty on all counts, she thought with a fond smile. Kids were kids and that’s just the way life was.
She was living in Greenwich Village when she met Wally, sharing the smallest apartment possible with two other girls, yet even so, paying the rent was a continual worry.
If there was one thing Rose could be thankful for though, it was the year’s cooking lessons she’d taken, and the joy she got from them. And the weight she gained because of them.
Her curves certainly hadn’t kept the guys away; Rose could have taken her pick; she could, as her mother told her after she’d accepted Wally and brought him home to meet the family, have done better for herself than a penniless would-be writer who picked up the occasional script job on a TV series that almost paid his way, with about enough left over for them to share a pizza and a beer and a cozy night, for which no money was needed, spooned together in his single bed after they had made earth-shattering love, unable to let go of each other because if they did it was so narrow one or the other of them would fall out.
With money earned from the sale of his first story Wally bought her a ring, the flattest, thinnest diamond ever seen but at least it looked big. Rose recalled their celebration, at a proper restaurant. Was it the Sign of the Dove? Something like that, somewhere in Manhattan on a rainy night clasping hands across the table, her with her left hand pointedly up flashing her new status, wearing the tight black cashmere sweater her mother had given her last birthday and a white pencil skirt that clung sexily to her rounded rear, with beige suede heels soaked from the walk in the rain because financially a taxi was out of the question, her hair a-frizz from the damp, curling all over the place, her brown eyes golden with love for him. Wally, her all-American boy. They were all of twenty-one years old, both of them. Old enough to vote, old enough to drink liquor, and old enough to marry. Certainly old enough—or young enough—to have so much sex Rose would hurt from the love-bruises on her inner thighs as she walked to NYU the following morning, worried about her degree in English Lit and Anthropology though what she would do with either of them was debatable.
Those were the good times, Rose thought now, when their only problems were how to be together and how to make enough to pay the rent and to eat, with a little left over for a bottle of Italian red. Inevitably, she had gotten pregnant. Marriage followed. Not the small “family-only” ceremony Wally had pictured, but an outrageous blowout, a Christmas garlanded church packed with family, some of whom Rose hadn’t seen in years; her friends in fancy getups and staggeringly high heels; huge football player buddies of Wally’s; their college professors; even Wally’s great-grandma made it from Seattle, Washington. Looking at her, serene and smooth-skinned, cheekbones still holding everything up, Rose glimpsed her future children in that face.
Oh, she had been such an outrageous bride though, in long, clingy scarlet silk-velvet, strapless, with her golden breasts spilling out under a little white ermine shrug and the string of good pearls her parents gave her as a wedding present. Wally said he thought a new car would have been a better choice, but, hey, that’s who her parents were. And she was their only child.