Alfred Corn: Blue Roses

When Edgar said, “Yes, us too,” I was surprised that he and Miriam were calling it quits; but even more by his “too,” which linked their separation to Renée’s and mine. I was sitting down, elbow resting on my worktable, the phone crackling in my ear. A patch of sunlight made one part of the carpet a brighter red than the rest, and the room’s atmosphere became more resolute, more final, as though a bottle cap had just been tightened.

     “Sure, I’ll be glad to help you move.” That’s what I said, but with a flicker of inward resistance at the thought of all the packed-up possessions that would have to come down a flight from Edgar’s apartment on Thompson Street. He explained that he was shipping out in two stages, though, and that someone else had been conscripted to deal with the really big things. “Well, I’m glad you realize you’re dealing with a 98-pound weakling who can barely lift a beer mug, let alone your KLM speakers.”  That was meant to defuse the over-earnest tone of the conversation. It almost did. I asked who his other helper was but didn’t recognize the name. Edgar and Miriam bought in and then cashed out on so many relationships, their friends often didn’t know each other.

     After we said goodbye, I sat down and thought about them while doing mechanical tasks like sharpening a pencil and putting scattered papers in one or another drawer. I’d known them for a long time, but we really didn’t see each other that much after we all moved to New York. It turned into one of those serviceable linkages between couples who check in with each other from time to time, never growing closer, but never allowing the friendship to peter out altogether. Once or twice a year, they would have us to dinner or we them, and the reunited foursome always managed to discover a recent trip or project to talk about, a new book or movie—anyway, enough to underpin four courses and the strong coffee served afterwards. Those meals, which Renée and I put together with the help of Julia Child, required a three-day lead time for successful preparation, a labor-intensive enterprise we weren’t willing to wade into for anyone but Edgar and Miriam.  I remember one of those evenings we were cooking up a batch of crêpes flambées for dessert, which involved heating the little sweet crepes in a sauce of unsalted butter and Grand Marnier. Watching us fumble through the process, Edgar decided the burner under the saucepan probably needed adjusting. He bent to look and somehow his tie fell forward into the gas flame, caught fire, and had to be swatted with a dish towel that Renée handily flapped against his chest. We all laughed, and in the key of hilarity Edgar took his dessert still wearing that blackened silk stump. 

     They were New Yorkers originally, but I met them while they lived in Atlanta. Edgar taught English at the university, and Miriam (like me) was in her last year of undergraduate studies in French.  Faculty status invested him with authority, and his willingness to accept me as a peer only partly cancelled the distinction in rank. They were, as I said then, formidable.  Miriam seemed a chalk or two above the rest of the students because of her professor husband, her splashy designer dresses, her blue eyelids, her hair set low on her forehead like a gypsy or a maharanee, long black hair that she often let hang down her back.  She had a deep, surrendered smile that exposed her gums, a slow combustion of generosity that her friends would always move closer to, hoping to absorb the glow.  Edgar, on the other hand, made a point of never smiling, though you could see him struggling against the temptation.  I always remember him in fast-forward motion, nervous, jagged, his professorial verbal style a sort of counterweight to Miriam’s softness.  He was tweedy, critical, manic.  He cultivated a brushy, unkempt thatch of pale red hair, smoked a pipe, and had a way of characterizing women as “magnificent”—well, when he didn’t call them the four‑letter opposite. Some of his macho bluster I connected to an enthusiasm for Norman Mailer, who was his favorite contemporary writer. He and Mailer were Brooklynites, which they’d both experienced as a thing to overcome. But it always struck me as an example of protesting too much. It’s not so easy to appropriate the old Hemingway swagger.

     Anyhow, it was instructive fun for a twenty‑year‑old Southerner, still more or less a clueless undergraduate, to see Miriam and Edgar.  They served martinis, and, as an appetizer, maybe artichoke leaves and drawn butter, or foie gras and flatbread.  Dinner might be sauerbraten, which I’d never had before, and dessert, say, a bavaroise à l’orange, also unknown to me. Afterwards there would be espresso served in little black basalt‑ware demitasses (an item in the Museum of Modern Art’s Design collection, I later learned).  Miriam used a handsome stainless‑steel Italian coffeemaker consisting of two separate parts that screwed together. When the connection was tight, you put it over a gas flame, and a few minutes later the aromatic black liquid would shoot up from beneath into the container at the top.  Miriam would drop a shaving of lemon peel into each demitasse, a refinement they picked up during trips to Rome. All of this fascinated me, and I tried, with only partial success, to duplicate their connoisseurship, their intake of wine and high-octane gin, their mocking condescension toward anything middle-class, all the traits that set them apart from other people I knew. Though the university offered a degree in Romance language, it was a long way from the Latin Quarter, and we all knew that Miriam and Edgar would flee Atlanta and go back to the Northeast the instant it became possible.  Edgar got a job at N.Y.U. the year after I met them. Not totally by coincidence, I began graduate school at Columbia at the same moment, cheered by the thought that I was going to live in the town that had produced them and, in theory, other people just as smart.

     After Renée and I began living together, I brought her to meet them.  It wasn’t an instant success.  I suppose Miriam and Edgar were a little jealous, and to Renée they must have seemed like in‑laws.  During the introduction, a gleam came into Edgar’s eyes, but I don’t think she noticed it.  Because Renée was small, honey-blond, and finely made, with a dancer’s springy step and the Comp Lit graduate student’s witty take on everything, she made an impression wherever she went.  But I was sure Edgar would never poach because, after all, we were friends.  Meanwhile, it didn’t take me long to see that Renée was nice to Miriam and Edgar mainly for my sake; to her they just weren’t quite… . I don’t know what descriptive term she would have used. But we all bumped along with no visible strain and soon settled into a less intense format of cool, friendly sociability constructed around meals, concerts, and plays. What became more apparent in time was the vulnerability that Edgar’s bluster and Miriam’s competent stylishness no longer fully concealed.  By appearing to have high artistic standards and no illusions, they were simply substantiating their worthiness to be your friends.  They didn’t in fact demand impressive opinions or brilliant conversational performance from Renée and me, or not as much you’d think.  Despite all that social life, all that travel and name-dropping, they were a little lonely.  In fact, sometimes I got the queasy feeling that we were their closest friends.

     One more oddity: Edgar had begun popping out with compliments on a supposed hipness he saw in us.  Renée had a history (almost a rap sheet) of leftwing activism, and once we were together I followed her lead. Our countercultural credentials included a hodgepodge of part-time work, cannabis, unemployment, writing, scene‑making, a half‑chosen, half-unavoidable bohemianism.  We had friends that would probably have been too extreme even for Edgar and Miriam along the sliding scale of unconventionality. Sure, we liked our far-out friends, the coffeehouse Che Guevaras, the drugged-out gurus, the flamboyant cross-dressers, but we (or at least I) also liked or at least admired Miriam and Edgar. Probably every couple feels as though the middle path is the one they’ve chosen, if it is really a choice. 

     When Renée and I decided to separate, Edgar and Miriam were impressed, they said, at how well we had handled things.  We’d explained to them that we still planned to be friends, and they took us at our word.  Friends: in fact, it wasn’t as easy as that.  Though we could no longer hack living comfortably under the same roof, we hadn’t managed to snap our fingers and just feel nothing about each other. There was this awkward, searing attachment that flared into curse-words whenever we happened to meet.  More than a year passed before it was possible to get through a conversation calmly.  Miriam and Edgar were told of our intention to part amicably, but not how it worked out in practice, to judge by the broken plates one of us had to sweep up off the floor.  I could see, too, that they were partly scandalized at how easy it was for us, thinking maybe we hadn’t really loved each other.  But they never stated that qualm directly.

     I wondered if it was something like superstition that led Edgar to ask for my help when he moved, thinking my talismanic presence was going to make his own Independence Day turn into a celebration. When I got to his place (Miriam wasn’t there), I asked a few oblique questions. He said that they meant to separate as husband and wife but continue as friends, the way Renée and I had done. “Miriam is still angry,” he admitted with a half smile.  Which had to mean that the decision to split up was Edgar’s. I nodded and signaled silent empathy. The obligatory cardboard boxes, waiting for us to heft them, made an irregular ziggurat in the middle of the living room, a clear challenge to my tendency to shrink from manual labor.  Anyhow, after half a dozen trips up and down the stairs together, Edgar asked me simply to wait by his green Peugeot, to be a watchdog for thieves or meter maids, while he brought down the rest of his stuff. Because New Yorkers almost never drive in the city itself, I hadn’t seen that car for a long time. Edgar brought it back from France the year he taught in a university over there, about a hundred and fifty miles south of Paris.  I’d been in the Peugeot only twice before.  The first time was two springs ago when Renée and I went for a weekend at Edgar and Miriam’s house in the Berkshires. An involuntary memory, which kept me occupied waiting out there on the street, in the cool weather of late October.

     The house was a gingerbread white elephant, a legacy Edgar had inherited from two maiden great‑aunts who had lived there year-round for several decades.  One of them was artistic and had painted the walls inside with simple murals of dignified, faceless ladies in long dresses, watering flowers with the help of spouted cans (those, too, painted with flowers). The gracefully feminine figures were no doubt some idealized version of the aunts themselves. Edgar had poetically left their murals untouched.  The garden ladies were a fresco for the kitchen, but there were other floral decorations elsewhere in the house.  Thinking back, I remembered that the bedroom they gave us had wallpaper not only on the walls but also on the ceiling—in an improbable pattern of blue roses. The paper was in such bad condition from decades of dampness, Edgar had painted over most of it with a thick coat of white. But wherever a blue rose was intact, he had left a round opening in the paint, so that, lying on the bed, you still had the benefit of a dozen or so nostalgic peepholes into the Massachusetts of 1918.

     It was chilly that spring, but by noon we were able to sun a little.  For seating, Edgar had set up folding chairs on the lawn in front of the house, not far from a hammock, a watering can, a lilac that was on the verge of blooming.  Everything as pleasant as can be except for a black-fly swarm that kept dive-bombing us.  Eventually Miriam brought out a few lengths of mosquito netting and broke into a giggle as she draped them over our heads.  We laughed, too, but didn’t take the netting off. Still, one or two flies managed to get through (there were tears in the fabric) and annoy us.  We must have made a funny tableau out on the lawn, shrouded in our black, defensive veils, mourning some unspecified deceased relative or friend.  Strains of Mozart’s “Hunting Quartet” flooded from the stereo indoors out into the yard where we were—violin echoing violin, cello underscoring viola.  Edgar was an ardent music maven, and, though I seldom heard music in a hall, hundreds of classical recordings lined the walls of my apartment; so we used to talk about music endlessly. He reminded us that the “Hunting Quartet” had been used in the film The Rules of the Game, which I’d seen a couple of times, without remembering the soundtrack or much of the plot. Adultery in country-houses? Something like that.

     After supper that night Renée and I talked in our bedroom, glad to have the friendly supervision of the roses overhead. We undressed and jumped under our crinkly quilt, shivering from the chill, and held each other until the bedclothes got to a bearable temperature. She told me she really wished she could get Edgar to stop patting her on the bottom.  I spluttered a protest. “What the—?” But there was no chance she’d ever make a big issue of it. Edgar had headed off objections one evening a couple months earlier by telling us a story about pinching some ridiculous faculty wife and then having her pompous husband call up after the party and yell at him (in his absurd German accent) to “keep his hants off my vife!”  Renée and I had laughed cooperatively at this figure of fun without realizing we were sealing her fate.  Shortly after that Edgar’s bottom‑patting began, she learned to be wary of him when he’d had more than three martinis—which was practically any time he was a guest or a host.  Renée was feminist and that meant I was supposed to leave the problem to her. Besides, she didn’t want to give him any excuse for lumping me together with the German professoriate. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, but if your wife is a feminist and says she can handle something, you’d best let her do it. She sighed and chuckled. A very small draft of cold air moved through the bedroom from some unknown source, a loose window probably. But, our arms wrapped around each other, we managed to ignore it and fall asleep.

     The second visit to the country (and the second ride in the Peugeot) was the October just after Renée and I had separated.  I came by myself.  Black flies had long gone, and the blazing autumn trees were so clear and sharp they looked like bouquets of bright flowers under a bell jar—orange maples, yellow chestnuts, red pin-oaks all clumped together. In the orchards, crooked old apple trees quietly surveyed a scattering of bruised windfalls.  I helped Miriam gather cattails, dried ferns, and other tastefully handsome weeds to take back to the city, where sheaves of them would be put in earthenware vases next to the fireplace.  

     At night we sat by the brick fireplace, heating up big snifters of brandy, then taking perfumed sips that carried the fire down our throats.  We talked about the “old days,” Atlanta, the marvelous and ridiculous times we’d had together over the years. And how you couldn’t really get good watercress or fresh mushrooms in America, not the same as in France. We didn’t talk about Renée; and there weren’t any available bottoms for Edgar to demonstrate admiration for. Yet he did land a couple of light claps on my shoulder before I went upstairs at bedtime. (I know: very strange.)  Next morning bird calls woke me up, and I saw the roses floating overhead, through the holes in their surrounding white paint.  I lay and stared mindlessly at them until time for breakfast.  I had a premonition that I wouldn’t be coming back to that house again. What didn’t occur to me was that it was going to be the last time I saw Miriam and Edgar together.  

     Seeing the half-loaded Peugeot outside his apartment building the morning of the move reminded me that in fact I hadn’t been back. I wondered, too, what Edgar planned to do with the house. Close it up, sell it, maybe? He had brought down all his belongings now. Most of them I recognized, one or two from the country place. There was a handsome collage done by Miriam’s father, who taught painting at N.Y.U. There was a bottle of Beefeater gin; some blue enamel kitchenware; several nicely framed Hogarth prints from the Marriage à la Mode series, sooty ink on fine cream paper; a box filled with shoes and shoe‑trees; and some framed belle époque posters from France.  

     It’s standard opinion that material goods are trivial, but at this moment, with Edgar and me, in a kind of male reticence, not saying anything, these objects, these items from Edgar’s personal history museum, seemed weighty as much in psychological terms as their actual poundage.  No doubt it would have been more dignified for him simply to have said goodbye to Miriam and consigned all the things they jointly owned to the past. Yet I didn’t blame him for wanting a few familiar reference points in his new bachelor pad. They would bring a note of continuity and comfort, which he’d clearly need.  But those shoe‑trees were sort of nakedly mournful.  That wasn’t something that could be said because Edgar and I were pretending there was nothing unusual in the move. We were sophisticated, hip, unflappable. Right.

     I noticed a truck identified as Broadway Maintenance parked in front of a tall streetlamp nearby.  A cherry‑picker at the end of a telescoped crane was lifting a man up to the top of the lamp pole so that he could install a new bulb. Obviously, they have to be replaced at times, but I’d never seen anyone do it. A few expert movements and then down came the cherry‑picker, the workman holding on to a burnt‑out glass pumpkin, which looked surprisingly large next to his chest. I wondered how long bulbs lasted on the average and whether the same man in the same truck would be back a year from then to remove the one he was about to install.

     At Edgar’s new address, our task cranked into reverse.  The difference here was that an elevator had to be negotiated.  Its door wanted to close on us before we’d emptied each load.  Infuriating how much trouble moving is (and I should know, having done it so often).  As I dragged some things along the hallway, a door opened and a woman’s head popped out to see who was making all the noise, a paranoid little Yorkie at her feet meanwhile barking at me, all to no avail. I pushed on to Edgar’s apartment.

     Its floor was bare except for accumulating piles of boxes and suitcases.  Skewed quadrangles of light from the southern windows sprawled across the parquet.  I didn’t go down for the next load and said I wanted to have a look at Edgar’s new surroundings. There was more to it: I was remembering a similar apartment I once lived in, with the same kind of southern light.  I’d taken it for several months during a period when Renée and I had done a trial separation, less than a year after we first moved in together.  We eventually patched things up; and said the relationship, since it had survived such a serious test, was now stronger than it had been. We were in denial about that. When couples start to discuss their “relationship,” like it’s some third party they’re living with, things are already on the way down.  My apartment hadn’t been as clean as this one, but what can you expect on the Lower East Side?  I liked living there, though, in the thick of the East Village’s twenty-four-seven carnival, the street politics, the lifestyle, the rainbow colors. Was it around then that Edgar began listening to the Beatles and letting his hair grow longer?  I think so. 

     He brought in the last few things, and we talked, a little artificially, about the parquet floor and the fixtures.  I congratulated him on the southern exposure, the view downtown.  The topic of Miriam didn’t come up.  He gave me his office number at school, which I’d never used, saying it would be a while before the telephone company got around to his order. 

     It wasn’t easy to absorb the anemic smile he mustered as our eyes met and parted.  The sworn pact of breeziness faltered. I’d always thought of Edgar as well defended, but chinks in the armor were showing. Every word dangled like a sword on a thread ready to tear through the nonchalance we always used with each other.  My goodbye handshake tried to convey solidarity, reassurance, warmth, joined to the right kind of detached awkwardness. The rituals of male bonding, I guess, and I have to say I hated it.  Finally, Edgar told me not to forget to call Miriam.  I promised I would.

     I saw them, separately, in the months that followed. Not often enough, admittedly. A funny unease surfaced when I tried to be social with them as one divorced single to another. Conversations kept losing momentum and lapsing into parched silence. I know they remained on speaking terms, but Miriam began seeing a therapist, and Edgar spent a week in the hospital because an ulcer had gnawed a dime-sized hole in his stomach.  He didn’t end up liking single life as much as he thought he would—no surprise to me.  When the novelty wears off, what exactly is the point of waking up next to a different face several times a month, not nearly as entrancing as it had seemed the previous night? 

     I’d be surprised if Miriam ever smiled her gum-exposing smile at Edgar again.  I keep wondering whether I ought to consider myself (and Renée) as responsible, in some sense, for what happened to them. Our supposedly “amicable separation” might have been a catalyst. I felt some guilt, whether or not justified.  Anyway, I will never know the truth of it because the rules of the game between Edgar and me banned (as just too uncool) any earnest efforts at self-revelation. That restriction remained in force, and of course we no longer had Miriam to smooth over the disconnect. Longer and longer intervals came between each meeting. In time we stopped seeing each other. Also, I noticed that Miriam never called; so, eventually, I stopped calling her.

     Another question that keeps coming up, no doubt because it’s beside the point, is whether the bedroom ceiling of their guest room in the country has been entirely whitewashed now, with no roses currently visible. If it has, memory could still see them. Not to mention other images that appear when little tears in the fabric of consciousness let things slip through, uncomfortable nonsense that we’ve tried to screen out.  But Edgar may have left the house as it was. If the roses are still there, then so are the ladies, watering cans in tow, incorrigible in their determination, despite the ravages of weather, to plant something hardy, to get it to grow and splash some color on their kitchen walls.

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Copyright 2026 Alfred Corn. First published in Hosts: Stories by Alfred Corn (Madhat, 2026)

Alfred Corn is an esteemed American poet and writer who has received many honors including an Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. The Returns: Collected Poems by Alfred Corn is available from Press 53.