The White Rose by Korelitz Jean Hanff

Author:Korelitz, Jean Hanff [Korelitz, Jean Hanff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Historical
ISBN: 9781401359867
Amazon: 1401359868
Goodreads: 232935
Publisher: Miramax
Published: 2005-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Flower Issue

Sophie oversleeps: flat on her stomach, her arms wrapped around the pillow, the blankets down around her ankles, where they habitually end each night. Her apartment building is a prewar pile that overlooks Harlem from the heights of Morningside Drive like a fortified castle, which, in a way, it is. Though he did not actively resist her intention to set up house near Columbia, Mort Klein set certain nonnegotiable conditions with regard to Sophie’s proposed apartment. These included discernible police presence on the surrounding streets and twenty-four-hour security in the lobby. Sophie’s apartment is a sky-blue perch on the uppermost floor, indifferently furnished and decorated. For a woman nurtured in a treasure house of Belle Epoque New York, Sophie is shockingly unconcerned by design. Her rooms are nouveau-IKEA, faithfully transplanted from Exit 13A off the New Jersey Turnpike to her four-room pad, with certain jarring notes of Mackenzie-Childs-ish excess left over from Roberta Sarnoff’s first, premature trousseau (Roberta—engaged twice but married once—took her Columbia B-School degree straight to Princeton, where she is raising towheaded twin boys, throwing fund-raisers for McCarter Theater, and having a grand old time) and an amateur but beloved still life of irises by Felicia Litkowitz Klein. At least Sophie thinks they are irises.

She wakes with a start, freshly tense though lacking focus for her tension. It is Thursday, nearly ten, an outrageous time to be getting up, without even the excuse of a wild night behind her. (The night behind her, ordinary to the point of sheer forgetability, involved the library, a take-out falafel, a recorded tirade from Frieda on her answering machine—this pertaining to the omission of certain of her father’s Kaplan Klein board members from the wedding list—and David Letterman.) Now she is groggy and low, reluctant to begin her day and wildly unhappy. Sophie retrieves the covers from her ankles and pulls them up over her head. She wallows for a good five minutes, during which time she tries to think of someone to phone, but each of the few who come to mind are rejected in turn. Frieda is not to be taken on without a certain clarity of mind. Her father is, at this hour, at the busy center of a busy universe. Sophie does not want to listen to Roberta bemoaning the dearth of good restaurants in Princeton, and while it may be shockingly late in New York, it is still early in Los Angeles, where Philippe Labatt has gone to be homosexual beyond the ken of his mother. Sophie does not want to call Barton.

So she drags herself up and makes coffee and drops her aged Dalton T-shirt atop the teetering mound of laundry at the bottom of her closet and puts on one of her many (but one of her few remaining clean) Olga minimizer bras, a green flannel shirt, and her last pair of laundered jeans, which feel undeniably snug at the waist. (The falafel, thinks Sophie, with regret—so fattening, so irresponsible with that expensive Vera Wang awaiting her.

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