The War of the Roses Read online

  ‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Barbara’s just left. She’ll be back in a little while. She’s been quite busy on the Pakistan Embassy order.’ She hesitated, as if she were debating something more. But nothing came. He was disappointed.

  ‘I’m going to see my client here. But I’ll definitely be home tonight. Are the kids okay?’

  ‘Worried sick. I called them at school after the doctor called.’

  ‘Super.’ He was about to offer the closing amenities and hang up. ‘Ann,’ he-said, ‘when did they call Barbara? The first time… I mean.’

  ‘Monday morning. I remember I answered the phone.

  Barbara was very disturbed.’ He felt the stab of pain again, but it passed quickly, no longer worrying him.

  ‘Well, then…’ He seemed suddenly disoriented, troubled as if by a chess move that he could not dope out, knowing the answer was there. ‘Just tell her I’ll be home for dinner.’

  After he hung up, he looked mutely at the phone box, still trying to understand the vague sense of loss. To put it out of his mind, he called Larabee.

  ‘You gave us quite a scare,’ Larabee said. He remembered the unctuousness and the ‘just fine’ admonitions. It annoyed him to know the man had been right all along.

  ‘You called it,’ Oliver said, irritated at his own attempt at ingratiation. But he could not shake the notion that his display of vulnerability, notwithstanding that it was beyond his control, had somehow spoiled his image. In a lawyer a show of weakness could be fatal. He felt the gorge of his own rhetoric rising, and, as if in counterpoint, a burp bubbled out of his chest and into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Hello…’ Larabee said.

  ‘Must be a bad connection,’ Oliver said, feeling better psychologically as well.

  Later, he came away from the chairman’s office with the feeling that he had restored some measure of confidence again, shutting off allusions to his indisposition with quick, almost impolite dispatch.

  ‘Even the doctors felt stupid for making such a fuss,’ he lied, closing the subject once and for all.

  But on the plane his ordeal reopened itself in his mind and he found himself making doodles on his yellow pad, watching the changing light of a sunset in an incredibly blue sky. What was nagging at him since being discharged was the lingering sense of utter desolation, of total aloneness. He also felt more fear now than when he was in the hospital. It was beyond logic. He had, after all, been grasped, at least figuratively, from the jaws of death. Then why the depression? Why the loneliness? What was wrong?

  ‘Call my wife,’ he had whispered to someone. In his memory the words resurfaced as a plea, a drowning man shouting for help. His imagination reversed the roles and he saw himself panicked and hysterical as he dropped everything to fight his way toward Barbara. The images were jumbled. He saw himself swimming through the choppy seas, slogging over shifting desert dunes, clambering upward over jagged rocks, a panorama of heroic acts, just to be near her. Then the fantasy exploded, leaving him empty, betrayed. How dare she not come to his deathbed?

  5

  Why had she not come? Barbara asked herself, smirking at her inadvertent double entendre. The boning knife, working in her hand by rote, carefully separated the chicken skin from the neck bone, a crucial step in achieving a perfect boning job. This was her fourth chicken-boning operation that afternoon and her mind had already begun to wander. It wandered into strange places, as if she had little control of her thoughts. She did not often think about sex and was surprised that the subject surfaced in her mind.

  He made love to her tenderly, fervently, but lit no fires in her. She was always dutiful, enduring what had become for her a dreary process, barely remembering when such contortions and gymnastics had ever brought her pleasure. He was not, she knew, oblivious of this indifference despite her Academy Award performances.

  ‘Even when it’s not so good, it’s pretty great,’ he told her often, usually after he had calmed from a panting, shivery episode of obvious and sometimes noisy personal pleasure.

  ‘It’s there to enjoy, my son,’ she had responded, hiding her disappointment behind the light humor. Wisecracks were great truth-hiders. She hadn’t really understood her sexual indifference, especially since she was once a firecracker as far as he was concerned. But that was long ago. Then, before their marriage, all she had to do was to touch him to feel all the pops begin inside her.

  For years, when considering their marriage, she had toted up lists of pros and cons. Sex had become one of the cons, although she did not blame him wholly for her odd lack of response. Something had changed in their chemistry, she decided. After all, it took two to tango. Secredy she knew she was excitable and could occasionally summon up fantasies and with a little digital manipulation was able to coax out a reasonable response. But she detested even thinking about that.

  The list of pros was formidable and, in her mind, she saw the items actually crawl off the page. He had become a fantastic money earner. Two hundred thousand a year. Not bad for a bureaucrat’s son. She was damned proud of him for that.

  And there was the house. It was to his credit that he had seen the possibilities instantly. The neighborhood, Kalorama, tucked behind famed Embassy Row, was, of course, spectacular. It was laced with lovely old trees in full maturity, surrounding homes built earlier in the century for the then elite of the capital. Foreign governments had grabbed up the largest homes for embassies and legations. But Kalorama Circle was the diadem of the neighborhood, especially on its Rock Creek side, a clifflike perch looking downward into what in summer and spring was a lush valley. From the front of the house was the unobstructed view of the lovely Calvert Street Bridge, with its graceful arches and fluted columns topped by heroic eagles. It was certainly a great pleasure to the eye, notwithstanding the fact that it was a favorite jumping point for despondent suicides.

  At the time they bought it the house was extremely run down, but the outlines of its French-chateau architecture were in perfect scale, and a coat of white paint on the smooth stucco and the addition of shutters that actually closed and were painted black did wonders for the facade. The double front doors were stripped and finished with a matching black stain and fitted with gold knobs and knockers. The two rusted light sconces above the doors were replaced with elaborate crown-shaped ones topped with complicated embroidered fretwork.

  With its high windows on the ground floor, the ornamental wrought iron below the sills of the second, and the dormers built into the rusting slate tile of the third – all windows were sixteen lights – the house exceeded even their own high expectations. They were so delighted with its looks they had a copperplate engraving made of it, which they sent out each Christmas. The house, after all, was them.

  Collecting antiques was a joint passion and their weekends were taken up by sorties to auction houses or with combing the old Virginia and Maryland homesteads searching, with a canny eye, for a bargain. Most of their European vacations were devoted to this activity and sprinkled among the furnishings and accessories were memories of each trip, which, in time, became part of the mystique of their collection. Considering the way they had met, collecting antiques seemed a natural extension of their married life, as if they were acting out some youthful fantasy.

  She had also always been interested in cooking. Her mother had been an excellent cook, and she had learned a great deal working for professional cooks and bakers on her summer vacations. As the kids demanded less of her time she began to harbor vaguely commercial ideas. There was, she knew, a sense of inadequacy fermenting inside her, although she consciously resisted seeing herself as the traditional woman, which, she thought, was a cruel label hung on some females by their more zealous sisters.

  She had designed the kitchen with a commercial idea in mind. Oliver was enormously supportive, although she was never quite sure whether he was merely patronizing her or really believed in her ability to make it as a caterer. Nevertheless, he threw himself int
o the idea with vigor, devoting his weekends to every aspect of the kitchen’s construction. With his knowledge of electric circuitry and craftsmanship, he gave the contractors a fit. She, in self-defense, learned to decipher much of the background mysteries about how things worked and had even become quite proficient in changing washers, tightening faucets, cleaning grease traps, and repairing the garbage disposal. One Christmas he had even given her her own tool chest. For years he had taught her how to use them in his own basement workshop and she had helped him build the sauna and the adjoining shower, done without the help of a contractor. They had also restripped and finished some of their antique furniture together.

  As an upwardly mobile lawyer building his law practice, he traveled frequently, but managed to keep his weekends reasonably sacrosanct. The house, they both knew, enclosed the real limits of their world and they sought out things connected with the house that they could do together. Like indoor gardening, although their interests splintered eventually as he began to cultivate orchids and she continued with her Boston ferns and African violets.

  The pro side was, indeed, considerable. They had tried to get the children to share their interests but their lives, it seemed, were on another tack, although both parents believed that the exposure would stand them in good stead as adults.

  There were other pros as well. He was intelligent, attractive, articulate, humorous, with a wide variety of intellectual, as well as material, interests. And she did bask in the joy of his colleagues’ and clients’ approval, despite the occasional jealous bitchiness of their wives.

  So, then, she asked herself – or was the question directed to the chicken whose skin she now rolled away from the carcass as if it were a sweater? – why did I not come?

  She detached the lower part of the main wing bone with shears so that the lower end of the bone would slide along with the skin. Then, carefully, she began to detach the fibers from the carcass. When the skin reached the middle part of the drumstick, she severed the bone and detached the skin, repeating the operation on the other drumstick. The tail came off with the whole skin and she snipped it free with the shears.

  Satisfied with her handiwork, she flattened the skin on the cutting board and began to mend what had inadvertently become torn, then she banged it flat with the side of a cleaver.

  ‘Because I didn’t give a damn,’ she cried out to the chicken’s denuded carcass. She felt a ball of anger growing inside her, swirling about for definition, detesting its* inarticulateness. She searched her mind for reasons.

  ‘I must have reasons,’ she whispered as the anger burst into the reality of the kitchen and she banged the pointy edge of the cleaver into the wooden cutting surface, scarring it irrevocably.

  What she really wanted after she had received the first call from the hospital was for him to die. That was the absolute truth of it. She wanted him to expire, to be eliminated from her life as painlessly as possible, extracted like a rotten tooth.

  Oliver dead? The idea frightened her and she shuddered. Surely the thought was an aberration. To wish him dead implied hatred. Hatred? Such a response seemed inhuman. She swallowed hard and her body shook. But she could not suppress the urgent clarity. She had, indeed, hoped he would die.

  6

  Oliver barely remembered the cab journey over Memorial Bridge, the swing around Lincoln Memorial, past the State department, around Washington Circle. All these landmarks passed in front of him like indistinct photographs. Ann had apparently been watching from a front window and had opened the door before he inserted his key. The mahogany clock in the hallway read two minutes to six, he noted as he dropped his briefcase on the marble floor. Even in his semiconscious drugged state in the hospital, he remembered he had heard the chimes in his mind like ancient echoes.

  ‘Josh is at basketball practice. Eve is at her ballet class. Barbara is delivering an order of pate.’ There was a note of apology in her tone and her face searched his, betraying anxiety.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I look a little pale.’

  ‘A little.’

  He walked back to the sun-room to see his orchids, which, like him, had miraculously survived. He felt the soil around the root, which was still damp.

  ‘Not to worry. Daddy’s home,’ he whispered to the flowers.

  He went up to his bedroom, undressed, debated whether or not to use the sauna, then opted for a long hot shower instead. For some reason he felt the need to shock himself, hoping it might chase the depression. He turned off the hot water and turned on the cold. His skin tingled and for a moment he had to catch his breath, but the pain did not return, and he wondered if he missed it, like an old friend.

  Barbara burst into the bathroom as he toweled himself, and kissed him on the lips. He drew her to him and enclosed her against his damp body.

  ‘It scared the shit out of me,’ he whispered into her chestnut hair, stifling a sob. The warmth of her was reassuring.

  ‘It must have been awful,’ she said, insinuating herself out of his embrace. His body was damp and it had wet her blouse, which she unbuttoned now. Watching her, he noted that she studied her face in the bathroom mirror, throwing back an errant strand of hair.

  ‘I’m fine now,’ he said to her image in the mirror. Running the gold-plated taps, she dipped her face into scoops of lukewarm water. He studied the ridgeline of her spine, wanting to trace his fingers over its peaks and loops. Slipping into his velour robe, he moved back into the bedroom and sank into a bergere chaise, lifting his bare feet to caress the curled wood. From there he could not see her, but he could hear her moving about, then came the rush of water and the cascaded flush. She walked out, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe.

  He wasn’t he realized, simply observing her as he did frequently. He was inspecting her, noting that the years had been kind to her willowy body. Her legs and thighs were still tight and youthful, and her large breasts still high, although their weight had begun to bring them lower then when he had first seen them. He felt the urge to touch her, and there was a brief hardening in his crotch, but she seemed self-absorbed, her mind elsewhere.

  ‘You’d be proud of me, Oliver. I sold the Ecuadorans a weekly package. Next week my chicken galantine. After that my cassoulet. And, of course, my pate de campagne.’

  He was always supportive, and he was surprised that he could not concentrate on what she was telling him.

  She had moved to her Queen Anne dressing table and began brushing her hair. Still, she seemed elusive, like a stranger.

  ‘I thought I was checking out,’ he said, turning his eyes to their lacy bedspread with its battery of high pillows against the carved headboard. Dominating one wall was a high chest of drawers with an elaborately carved bonnet in the rococo manner, which they had both stripped and finished. The drapes were not drawn and through the floor-to-ceiling sixteen-light windows, he could see the moving lights of the rush-hour cars crossing the Calvert Street Bridge. Between the windows was a Capucius secretaire, with its top open. Barbara used it as a working desk. On its surface was a picture of the four of them at the Grand Canyon, a color print with a blaze of orange painting the rear clifls. On the walls were prints of slender Art Deco ladies, languorous and sensual. He looked at them, but they gave him no pleasure. Watching them, he felt the sense of emptiness begin again.

  ‘I can’t understand why you didn’t come,’ he said, swallowing hard, talking to the pictures. So this was the elusive chess move, he discovered suddenly. He had cut to the heart of the matter. Although he did not see her, he knew she had turned toward him.

  ‘I was in constant telephone touch,’ she said testily, with a hard edge to her voice.

  They had no definite diagnosis until this morning.’ He spat the words at her, still not looking at her face.

  They said your condition was stable.’

  ‘I was in pain. I thought I was dying.’

  ‘But you weren’t.’

  ‘You could not have known that.’

 
‘Don’t get prosecutorial, Oliver.’

  He allowed himself a long pause, surprised that his chest was free of pain, although his stomach seemed to have tightened. He burped and his breath tasted sour.

  He looked at her now. This time it was she who turned away.

  ‘If the situation were reversed, I’d be there as quick as I could.’ The display of his own vulnerability galled him.

  ‘But it wasn’t reversed,’ she said, getting up and going to their dressing room. She emerged quickly in a long robe. ‘I’ve got to see about dinner. The kids should be home soon.’

  ‘It’s your attitude,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand it.’ He deliberately moved so that he could see her face. It was composed. Her hazel eyes scrutinized him calmly. He detected no outward signs of insecurity or lack of self-confidence. There was no tension or anxiety. To him now, her persona seemed reconstructed, different.

  ‘Maybe I’m suffering from the escape-in-the-nick-of-time blues.’ He sighed, acknowledging to himself this gesture of surrender, certain that it was a lie. ‘It’s just that…’ He began to grope for words, uncommon for him. ‘When you’re on the edge of the abyss, you think everyone is writing you off. It’s a nasty feeling.’

  ‘I think you’re overreacting, Oliver.’ She started to move, but his voice recalled her.

  ‘I guess I just wanted reassurance.’ He sighed, deliberately posturing. He was surprised that he knew this. What he needed now was to be held, caressed. Perhaps like a baby at his mother’s breast. God damn it, he screamed within himself. I need you to love me, Barbara.

  ‘Believe me, Oliver,’ she began. ‘If I’d thought it was something awful, I would have come. You know that.’ What disturbed him now was he felt she was trying to convince herself. He forced himself to obliterate the suggestion, stood up, and draw her toward him again. She didn’t glide, hesitating before she moved.