The War of the Roses Read online

  ‘You’re fine,’ she whispered, embracing him without conviction. ‘That’s the bottom line.’

  It was an expression she had picked up from somewhere. Perhaps from him. It signaled an unrecognizable inner voice, warning him. Something in his world was awry, misplaced, out of focus. He wasn’t sure.

  ‘I’m sorry, Barbara. I don’t understand.’

  She watched him, shrugged, then smiled. That, too, seemed hollow. Perhaps, he thought, the drugs had interfered with his receiving apparatus and were working hell on the emotions as well. He was picking up indifference. Indifference. An invisible antenna seemed to crackle in his head, confirming reception.

  ‘You’ll feel better after dinner, Oliver. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘Why should you feel so sure? And me, so unsure?’

  She shook her head and turned away, and he could hear her padding down the steps, going away. Was it for long? he wondered.

  7

  She was alone in the kitchen. Ann and the children were studying in their rooms. In the distance she heard Benny’s persistent, grating bark. It was sure to prompt a neighbor’s complaint. Mercedes lay asleep on one of the top kitchen shelves. Forcing her concentration, Barbara put the chicken flesh, neck, gizzard, hearts, livers, and bones into the large enamel stock pot already in place on the gas burner. She added water and salt and lit the burner, hearing the pop as the flame from the pilot light ignited the hissing gas from the burner ring.

  Wiping her hands on her apron, she wandered into the dining room, touching the cool marble of the serving credenza. She saw her image in the silver punch bowl, studying its distortion, considering whether the reflection were really her. Perhaps, she wondered, she was merely an ornament, as static as the silver candelabrum beside her with nothing behind the facade but history. She remembered her mother’s words suddenly, their tone of disappointment and rebuke when she had announced that she was quitting college to devote herself to Oliver. Ancient history, she thought with contempt.

  ‘Loving someone doesn’t mean you have to give up everything,’ her mother had warned.

  ‘It’s just until he gets out of law school,’ she had assured her.

  ‘But you need something for yourself.’

  She had been surprised at that, since she believed that her mother had worked out of financial necessity.

  ‘You have to understand what it means to love someone as much as I love Oliver,’ she had responded, as if that were all that needed to be said. Why hadn’t they warned her of the transience of such emotions? Nothing lasts except things. Her fingers traced the curled design of the elaborate candelabrum.

  Yet she was less angry with her mother for not pressing the point harder than she was with herself, deriding her stupid, utterly ignorant nineteen-year-old self.

  Love, she thought, remembering it now only as something that had tricked her. Love lies.

  Her earlier emotion returned, stronger than before. It was not as if she had wished that a healthy Oliver would die. Certainly not. That would be cruel, immoral, and unthinkable. But since, as the first call from the doctor had indicated, he was gravely ill anyway, the unthinkable became… well, thinkable.

  With a thought like that, she asked, how could one live with oneself? And how could one live with Oliver?

  It was not the first time she had contemplated a life without her husband. The idea had been smouldering inside her for a long time. Perhaps from the beginning. She could not, of course, pinpoint the moment, since they were always so busy planning ahead, building, growing children or plants, collecting antiques. Their life together seemed divided into projects. Supporting him through law school. Playing good wife to upwardly mobile public servant. Being especially nice to his senior law partners – the quintessential traditional spouse. Chunks of time devoted to being ingratiating. Making him a cozy oasis of a home, a place to restoke the fires. They had gone from tiny apartment to split level in the far-out suburbs. Then came car pools and dancing classes and more car pools and orthodontists. All that culminating in this… this giant, all-consuming, magnificent house project in which they had jointly poured every drop of their energy and fantasy. So what happens now that is finished? she asked herself, walking into the library, where he was reading the paper. It was a question that demanded an answer. And she had it ready.

  ‘I didn’t come rushing to New York to visit you in the hospital, Oliver, because I didn’t care.’ It was not precisely the answer to the question as posed. Yet it said it all. He looked up from The Washington Star, squinting over his half lenses.

  ‘Didn’t care?’

  He removed his glasses and balanced them on the Chesterfield’s leather arm.

  ‘I just didn’t care,’ she said clearly.

  ‘You mean it didn’t matter if I lived or died?’ His fingers tapped a crossed thigh and his eyes had narrowed.

  ‘No, Oliver.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ He seemed genuinely confused, and she thought of the millions of other women somewhere who had suddenly imparted this same truth.

  ‘Dead serious. Without doubt. I don’t care. I haven’t cared for a long time.’ She calmed herself, having determined that she must be both calm and cautious.

  ‘Just like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘You dismiss a life. A relationship. A family.’ He snapped his fingers again. ‘Just like that.’

  ‘Just like that.’ She too, snapped her fingers. No, she thought. It wasn’t at all just like that.

  She watched him grope for control. He stood up, opened the doors to the armoire, and poured himself a heavy scotch. He swallowed deep and hard.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ he said after a long pause.

  ‘Believe it.’

  She was sitting in the matching Chesterfield chair, her back stiff, her fingers digging into the hollows just behind her knees. The Staffordshire figures seemed a live audience. He rubbed his chin and shook his head.

  ‘Is there someone else?’

  His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. Apparently he had deliberately choked off a sob. ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want someone else?’ he asked quickly, and she sensed the trained lawyer’s mind emerging. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Always be vague under cross-examination,’ he had told her once.

  ‘Is it something I’ve done?’ he asked gently, obviously grasping at some shred of hope.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Then is it something I haven’t done?’

  She formed her reply carefully. ‘It has nothing to do with your conscious self,’ she said sofdy. She watched his face as it mirrored his growing anger.

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ he exploded. His anger was, she knew, unavoidable. She hoped he wouldn’t cry. She did not want to show him how unmoved she would be.

  ‘It means,’ she responded calmly, ‘that you have no control over the situation and probably no blame. It’s me,’ she paused, shrugged, and tightened the grip behind her knees. ‘I don’t believe I can stand the idea of living with you for another moment. As I said, it’s not your fault…’ He started to speak but she held up her hand. ‘And any injuries you might have inflicted on me were not done consciously.’

  ‘Injuries?’ His voice shook. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  *I know. I wish I was more articulate. But you see I’ve never had the training…’

  ‘So that’s it,’ he said, finding sarcasm. ‘You gave up your life for me.’

  ‘A part of it.’

  ‘I made you quit school. Made you a slave.’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘And you’re – what is the cliché? – unfulfilled.’

  ‘That, too.’

  She sensed his rising contempt, steeling herself for what she knew was coming, had to come.

  ‘And the kids? Don’t they have a say?’

  ‘The kids will be fine. I have no desire to abdicate my responsibilities in that quarter. And, no, they don’t have a say.
’

  ‘Jesus.’ He squinted into her eyes. ‘Is this you?’

  ‘Yes. It’s me.’

  ‘Not Barbara. Not the girl I married.’

  ‘Not her. I’m sorry, Oliver. Really sorry. I wish I could do it so it wouldn’t hurt.’

  There was a long pause as he paced the room. Stopping, he turned away and looked blankly at the tides of the leather-bound books, then circled the rent table and finally went back to the armoire and poured himself another drink. He gestured with the bottle, offering a drink. Obviously he had no idea of what was supposed to come next.

  ‘No. Thank you,’ she said politely.

  He shrugged and gulped down another drink, suddenly jabbing a finger below his breastbone.

  ‘This is playing hell with my hiatus hernia.’

  ‘Take a Maalox.’

  He sighed, grimaced, and breathed deeply, staring at her.

  ‘You’re a cold-blooded bitch.’

  ‘I’m sorry if that’s your perception.’ But the label made her uneasy. She was not cold-blooded, nor did she wish to be cruel.

  ‘There is no easy way to do this, Oliver. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  His lips trembled and she sensed that he was holding back more recriminations, making an effort to contain his anger.

  ‘I guess it’s an epidemic. All the girls of our generation with your checklist of unfulfilled dreams, lusts, and fantasies. We’ve busted our asses to make you content. Now you shit on us. We gave you too damned much…’ His voice faded. She had expected that, too. Had gone over all the potential arguments.

  ‘So I guess you want a divorce?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not even a trial separation. Fini?’

  ‘I told you how I feel, Oliver. Why flagellate yourself?’

  He shrugged, and a nerve began to palpitate in his jaw.

  ‘I thought I was doing one hell of a job. I thought this was supposed to be success.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘It’s going to be a bother,’ he said. ‘Life’s a bother.’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking philosophical, Barbara.’

  She stood up. What more was there to say? Through her own pain, she felt the bells of freedom ring in her head. Save yourself, the rhythm urged. She supposed he’d move out in the morning.

  8

  He didn’t move out in the morning. He was too disoriented. To avoid another confrontation, he got out of the house at six, before anyone had risen, and slipped into the surprisingly nippy morning. He always walked to the office.

  He never took the Ferrari to work. Besides Barbara’s Ford station wagon, they didn’t own another car except, of course, for Eve’s Honda. And whom could he trust with such a work of the automaker’s craft? The Ferrari lay tucked in its cozy wrapper, in the garage, like a rare gem. As he walked to work, even on the coldest days, it gave him pleasure to know it was there, sweet-tuned and ready just in case. He took no pleasure in the knowledge today.

  He hadn’t slept. He wasn’t used to the high, canopied Chippendale bed in the spare room across the hall from their bedroom. It had looked so inviting and comfortable when they bought it. It was too high and too hard. They had furnished the room strictly for guests, with a beautiful Hepplewhite secretaire of figured satinwood decorated with marquetry, a mahogany dressing table, and a japanned commode. On the floor was a round Art Deco carpet and draperies that matched its beige field. The room, he decided was too showy for comfort.

  From his tossing and turning, the sheets had bunched and parted from the mattress, which added to his discomfort. Yet he refused to straighten them out, perhaps out of some masochistic desire to be punished for his marital shortcomings, whatever they were.

  This phenomenon – it seemed the only way to label it – was not an uncommon experience among his acquaintances. ‘She just upped and said, "No more marriage." Like her whole persona had been transformed. Maybe it’s something chemical that happens as forty gets closer.’ He had heard it said in a hundred different ways.

  ‘It’s endemic,’ he decided, heading down Connecticut Avenue, almost at a jog, until, breathless, he found himself leaning against the fountain rim at Du-Pont Circle. It was there that the realization hit him. He was on the verge of starting a whole new life for which he was totally unprepared. And in lousy physical shape to boot, he thought, noting his labored breathing. Perhaps he would have been better off with a heart attack.

  Sometime near dawn he had run out of explanations, having traced his life with her from the moment he had first clapped eyes on her in the parlor of the rickety Barker house in Chatham. Cribb and Molineaux. They had finally joined the two on their wedding night.

  ‘Let them do all our fighting for us,’ Barbara had told him then.1

  The story had worn well over the years, although in the darkness and the new circumstances, the punch line had lost its humor. Once, the auctioneer’s error had come from providence. Now, once again, it seemed merely stupid. If the pair hadn’t been broken, Oliver might have been spared this.

  He had, Oliver told himself, been a good and loving husband. He had nearly offered ‘faithful’ to complete the triad but that would have discounted his two episodes with hookers during conventions in San Francisco and Las Vegas when the children were small. My God, she has everything she could possibly want, he had railed into the night, sapped finally by the exhaustion of his disorientation.

  What confused him most was that he had not been warned. Not a sign. He hated to be taken by surprise.

  ‘You look a mess,’ one of his colleagues said to him cheerily as Oliver passed his office in the corridor. A jogger, the man was always the first to arrive. Oliver had not wanted to be observed, since he knew his demeanor told his whole story. He had seen it a number of times himself, the unshaven, abject figure in the rumpled suit and curled collar arriving before seven, another marital victim of the sisterhood’s rage.

  ‘Don’t say another word,’ he had admonished the innocent colleague as he lunged for his own office and plopped helplessly into the swivel chair behind his desk. In a silver frame, Barbara stared back at him, offering a Mona Lisa smile. He flung the picture into the waste-basket. He could not remember how long he sat there, blank and empty, wanting to cry.

  His secretary, Miss Harlow, a jolly, middle-aged lady, came in and almost immediately saw Barbara’s picture in the wastebasket.

  ‘I need lots of kindness this morning,’ he said.

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘And a doughnut with my coffee from now on.’

  ‘Jelly or plain?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he admitted, looking up to face her misty eyes. ‘And don’t try to cheer me up.’

  Soon after she left, Harry Thurmont called. Oliver had secretly hoped the call would be from Barbara, contrite and apologetic. He knew Harry, a divorce lawyer, only casually. People called him the Bomber. His heart sank.

  ‘She’s retained me, Rose,’ Thurmont said. His voice had a gleeful note.

  ‘I guess you’re as good as any,’ Oliver said gloomily. He was annoyed that she had wasted no time in getting herself legal counsel. He realized he would have to do the same.

  ‘I think if you’re reasonable we can work things out,’ Thurmont said.

  ‘I’m really not ready to talk about it.’

  ‘I know. And I’m real sorry. Believe me, I tried to talk her out of it. That’s always the first step. That’s what they teach us at law school. I’m afraid she’s adamant.’

  ‘No give at all?’ he muttered into the mouthpiece, instantly sorry for letting his anxiety show. ‘None,’ Thurmont replied.

  ‘I don’t care. I haven’t cared for a long time,’ she had said. It was still impossible to believe. ‘Suppose she changes her mind.’

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ he asked testily.

  ‘It’s gonna be a nut cutter,’ Thurmont said abruptly. ‘Better cover your ass.�
��

  ‘As bad as that?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘When?’

  Thurmont ignored the question.

  ‘You’d better get yourself your own man quick time,’ he warned. His tone was ominous.

  Oliver nodded to the empty office. He knew the cardinal rule of the legal profession. Only a fool acts as his own lawyer, especially in a domestic case.

  ‘Maybe if things cooled down a bit…’ he began, being wishful again. Thurmont chuckled. It was the cackle of a predator and Oliver hung up. He looked at the phone in its cradle for a long time, wondering if Barbara had told the children. With shaking fingers – he had to rub them to get them to do the job – he dialed his home number. Ann answered.

  ‘She’s gone to the French Market with a new batch

  ‘Well…’ He started to say something. You’re not part of it, he wanted to assure her.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like me to tell her, Oliver?’

  ‘Lots,’ he answered. ‘Mostly bad.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  It wouldn’t be long, he was certain, before his wife turned her against him. The children as well. But why? If only he had some real clue to his crime. Perhaps, then, the punishment would be acceptable.

  He asked one of his recently divorced colleagues for the name of a good divorce lawyer. The man, Jim Richards, answered instantly.

  ‘Harry Thurmont.’

  That’s hers.’

  ‘You poor bastard.’

  He shook his head and looked at Oliver sadly. ‘Run for the hills. He’ll take your eyeballs.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Oliver said. ‘I expect we’ll be quite civilized about it.’

  ‘Civilized? Harry Thurmont isn’t civilized. You’re in the jungle now.’ He thumbed through his phone book. ‘Try Murray Goldstein. He’s in the building. He’s an ex-rabbi. You’ll get lectures and lots of sympathy. You’ll need it.’

  ‘All she wants is out,’ Oliver muttered. ‘That’s what they all say.’