“But not everyone was marrying Ben,” Rose said pointedly.
Lizzie nodded. She was convinced Ben was going to marry the woman he was with now—once Ben was in, he was in. Their mutual friends hadn’t told her much: Long Island–bred, Michigan grad who worked in advertising. “She’s organized,” their friend Jen sniffed, and if that was the worst she could come up with—well, then. Lizzie should be happy for him. She had cheated on him; she had orchestrated their relationship’s demise (it had taken her a while to admit that to herself). Even she was impatient with her own regret—and yet she still wondered if she had made an irrevocable mistake. Though, as Claudia had pointed out, it seemed to be the irrevocability that she focused on, and not Ben himself.
“Are you seeing anyone now?” Rose asked.
It was sweltering out here, in the noonday sun. “Well,” Lizzie said as she shed her jacket, “no one special. And you?”
Rose shook her head. “No one special either.”
Lizzie gave a light smile. They walked on in silence. Then Lizzie said: “Can I ask you a question? You turned Thomas down at first. I know you said it had to do with your parents, but I’m wondering: How did you know?”
“Know what?” Rose said, but she said it with warmth and a distinctly raised brow.
“How did you know that you could be happy with Thomas in the long run?” As she said this, Lizzie thought: Rose must have met and married Thomas in her twenties. Lizzie was already fifteen years older, at least. Time was barreling by.
“It’s a good question,” Rose said. “Honestly, I don’t know. Or rather: I wasn’t certain. But I wasn’t not certain either, and that was enough, at some point. I liked him quite a lot. He made me happy—so little then made me happy. But I wasn’t certain, not at all. Sometimes you have to jump.”
It was, in a sense, standard advice, but coming from Rose, it felt like advice that Lizzie might be able to follow. “I hate jumping,” she said. “I loathe heights.”
Rose laughed. “Your jump can be from the smallest step. Heights might not be involved at all. And you know, marriage can be quite difficult. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“So I hear,” Lizzie said. But her newly married friends didn’t like to talk about it—or if they spoke of it, it was to each other, not to her. “Did you ever hear the story of my grandparents?” she asked. Rose shook her head, and Lizzie continued: “Years and years ago—my father must have been in college—my grandparents were having breakfast, and my grandfather, who was a really quiet, taciturn type, said, ‘I’m going out for oranges.’ He got up, left the table. He never came back. A week later, she got a postcard from him from Florida, which said, ‘I’m sorry. The oranges are better here.’”
“My goodness,” Rose said. “And that was that?”
“That was that. They never divorced, but they never lived together again,” Lizzie said. “So you see: my family does not have the marriage gene.”
“Now, that is a cop-out if I’ve ever heard one.”
“What?”
“A cop-out,” Rose repeated with impatience. “Blaming circumstances, evading responsibility.”
“No, I know what ‘cop-out’ means; I just didn’t expect you to use that word.”
“Why? Everyone thinks it’s slang, but it’s ‘cop’ as in the verb meaning ‘to take,’ and not as in the police sort of ‘cop,’ although the two share commonalities.”
Lizzie laughed.
“What?” Rose said irritably. “What?”
Inside the American wing, they admired a small Mary Cassatt painting of a mother and child. (Rose spoke of the composition—“Do you see the diagonals formed by the child’s legs?”—while Lizzie noticed that the mother looked so wistful, and wasn’t looking at her child at all.) They saw Edward Hoppers and high-kicking dancers carved out of wood and many a landscape. After negotiating the knot of people in front of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy (he looked so insolent, resplendent in his silvery-blue clothing, so self-satisfied, Lizzie thought), they stopped at the museum’s café, and sat in plastic chairs on the shaded patio, overlooking the immense gardens. It was midafternoon but Lizzie had skipped lunch. Now she bit into her dry chicken sandwich and said to Rose: “Did your family have a lot of art besides the Soutine?”
“Not really,” Rose said. “There were objects galore—vases, music boxes, silver swords that had been my grandfather’s, a landscape that I think had been a wedding present. But my parents weren’t art collectors. It was strange, the way my mother fell in love with The Bellhop. Even now I remember the way she looked at it.”
Lizzie nodded. She didn’t think it was strange, but Rose’s face was veiled in contemplation. She didn’t say anything for a moment and neither did Rose. “Do you collect any art?” Lizzie asked timidly.
There was a shift in her look; Rose, returning to herself. She scoffed. “Oh no, I would never spend the kind of dollars on art that you need to.”
Lizzie smiled. “So you’re not a spender.”
“Most definitely not. It used to drive Thomas crazy. ‘A yearly trip to Hawaii won’t be the end of us,’ he’d say, and he was right, but it made me nervous nevertheless.”
“Now, that I understand,” Lizzie said. “We’re alike in that way. And unlike my father. You know for my sixteenth birthday he offered to buy me a piece of art. Anything I wanted.”
“Anything?”
“Well, he knew I wouldn’t have picked anything outrageous. At first I started haunting these galleries on Melrose, and then, one day, I walked into a vintage clothing store, of all places.” She remembered the day perfectly. “I saw a photograph from the sixties, a black-and-white shot of two chubby young girls, sisters. One sat on the couch, clutching a doll in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other. It looked like she was about to slice the doll’s hair. The other sister sat below her on the floor, staring at the camera, legs spread out, holding a toy grenade. The girls terrified me. And I just knew that my dad would hate it. There was one other obstacle.”
“It was thousands of dollars.”