The War of the Roses (13 page)

'It's a hell of a Christmas Eve,' he said, walking to the armoire and pouring himself a heavy scotch.

'To better Christmases,' he said, raising his glass. She raised her glass in response.

'Everybody's gone,' she said, sensing her own deliberate mischief. He finished off the scotch and poured another.

'I saw two Italian pictures.
Down and Dirty
and
Bread and Chocolate
.
The place was nearly empty. Just one or two other losers. I would have seen the pictures over again, but they cleared the theater. Christmas Eve. The projectionist, I suppose, wanted to be home with his family. Home with his family. Such simple joys.' He sighed and poured himself another drink. He looked up suddenly as if acknowledging her presence for the first time.

'Why aren't you home with your family, Ann?'

It was a question she didn't really want to answer. 'I guess I'm needed here,' she whispered.

'Good for you, Ann. At least you're needed somewhere. I am apparently needed nowhere. Not even as an audience.'

He finished his drink and squatted beside her. She had seated herself Indian style at the edge of the gifts, watching the fading, flickering lights.

‘I’l
l fix those tonight. Wires need some soldering, I guess.'

She stole a view of him in profile, then her eyes lingered. She watched his lips move.

'Christmas is only for the kids anyhow,' he said. His lips began to tremble and he could not go on. She put her hand on his arm. Without turning, he put his hand on hers and pressed it.

'What a bore this must be for you, Ann.' He turned to look at her. 'I can't imagine why you put up with it. I don't know why I put up with it. None of it makes any sense, you know. Two jackasses rolling around in the mud.'

'I'm not here to judge.' She reflected suddenly that that was what she had said to Barbara.

'You should have been here last Christmas. It was a real old family time. My father made a toast. "You're a lucky man," he said. "A truly lucky man." He doesn't understand what's happened. He thinks I've got a mistress and Barbara's going through change of life. I tell him it's neither, but he's out of it. How do you explain this to anybody?'

'Don't try. It's nobody's business,' she snapped, surprised at her assertiveness.

'I think it's coping with being alone that bugs me the most. The loss of companionship. I think that's what I miss the most.'

'You'll find somebody,' she said cautiously, her heart pounding. Notice me, she begged him in her heart.

'That's out for now. Goldstein says I should cool it. I never thought my life would one day be controlled by an ex-rabbi with halitosis.' His arm played around to her shoulder.

'Dear Ann,' he said. 'You're like the only anchor in this damned, stormy sea. I don't know how we'd survive this without you being here. And the kids. What a godsend you've been to the kids. I'll bet you never bargained for this when you first came here. It was one of Barbara's better decisions, I guess.'

The house was quiet. To Ann it seemed as if the earth had stopped rotating. She dared not move. His nearness was like an electric current pulsing through her. She felt his breath against her ear.

'I haven't had a single moment of solace,' he said. 'I can't seem to wake up from the nightmare.'

For once she resisted caution, yielding to her body's responses. She turned to face his lips, her eyes probing his. His face moved closer and his lips reached for hers. She felt his tongue move inside her mouth, reach for hers, and, finding it, move and caress it. Her fingers reached for his hair. It had been a particular detail of her fantasy, her fingers entwining themselves in his beautiful, wavy salt-and-pepper hair.

She felt his urgency, the pressing hardness, as his hands groped upward along her thighs, knowing as she opened to him how deeply she wanted him to take her and enter her as she engulfed him. Just as she touched him she felt the shuddering response in herself, startling in its ferocity, like thousands of caressing fingers on every nerve.

His sudden disengagement surprised her, a wrenching movement, and a moment l
ater she heard what had apparently startl
ed him, the front door opening. She was on her knees immediately, straightening her clothes as she kneeled, fussing with the gifts, not turning when she sensed Barbara behind her. Her heart had leaped to her throat and Oliver had moved into the shadows behind the armoire, just out of her vision.

'That, you, Ann?' Barbara called. Ann turned briefly in response.

'Just rearranging the gifts.'

She felt Barbara's eyes on her back. Please don't let her go any further, she begged, invoking God.

'I'm dead on my feet,' Barbara said. 'Did you finish the mix for the pastry meat loaves?'

'Yes.'

'Kids not home yet?' 'Not yet.'

'Well, tomorrow is Christmas. I dread it.'

Ann could feel the tension in the room. She held her breath, frightened that Barbara might want to talk. She did not think she could bear it.

'Better get some sleep.' Barbara yawned, backing away. With relief, Ann listened to Barbara's footsteps ascending the stairs. It was only after the bedroom door had closed that Oliver stepped from the shadows.

'I'm sorry,' he whispered.

Reaching out, Ann grabbed his hand and kissed the center of the palm. He quickly drew it away in what seemed like a gesture of rejection. Or rebuke. He tiptoed into the foyer, opening the front door, creating the impression that he had just come into the house. He hurried up the stairs. Straining to listen, she heard him turn the lock of his door.

She stayed in the library a long time, kneeling on the floor before the Christmas tree. Had Barbara seen them? She would not let such speculation intrude on her happiness.

Her eyes
drifted upward toward the weak, flickering lights. It was only then that she realized that she had not reminded him to fix them.

13

The smell of burning had set off a reaction in his dreaming mind, suggesting fire and recalling a Boy Scout episode when a fire had gotten out of hand and burned down a country cabin. He was on his feet in a moment, bursting through the doorway, running down the steps in his bare feet.

The branches were smoldering and the flames were just beginning to sprout like orange needles among the green. He kept an extinguisher in a closet under the stairs. Grabbing it, he rushed back to the library, where the flames had already begun to eat away at the paper wrappings of the gifts.

Upending the extinguisher, he squirted the foam in large white arcs on the creeping flames.

'Daddy.' It was Eve behind him, stifling a scream.

'Get back,' he responded. The flames were quickly under control. But a foul, smoky smell permeated the room as he continued to pour out the contents of the extinguisher until the fire was out.

'The damned lights,' he cried. 'I should have fixed the lights.'

'You've ruined everything.' It was Barbara's voice, filled with anger.

'What was I supposed to do?' he shot back. 'Let the whole house burn down?'

'You knew they weren't working right. You knew they were dangerous.'

He dropped the extinguisher, banging it on the floor, and glared at her.

'I suppose I'm being accused of ruining everybody's Christmas.'

Eve and Josh had begun to poke through the remains. Most of the gifts were charred or utterly destroyed. Oliver had bought Josh a pair of binoculars, which the heat had bent out of shape.

'Well, it was a nice thought, Dad,' Josh said, holding up the distorted object.

'I'll get you another pair,' Oliver said.

'What did you get me, Dad?' Eve asked quietly, wiping her soot-stained hands on her robe.

'According to your mother, a not-so-merry Christmas.' He looked at Barbara, who turned away in contempt. I saved their lives, he thought, his eyes briefly flickering as they caught some sympathy in Ann's. She had just come into the room.

'Isn't it ghastl
y, Ann?' Eve said.

'Merry Christmas, one and all,' Josh said, holding up his binoculars and smiling at the scorched tree. Orange shafts of the early sun had begun to filter through the windows.

'I guess there's nothing left to do but clean up,' Barbara said, striding into the mess and beginning to sort out the remains. The Sarouk rug was sooty but not burned and the children rolled it away from the tree.

'I hope you didn't cancel our fire insurance as well,' Barbara muttered as he stood around clumsily.

'Fuck Christmas,' he said angrily, striding out of the room. He detested her attempt to make him feel guilty.

In his room he lay on the bed and tried to ward off an oncoming massive depression. It was as if all his old values had been tortured into new shapes.

They had seen only the destruction, none of the fatherly concern. Remembering last night he wavered suddenly, almost ready to accept blame. He had, indeed, forgotten to fix the lights, but hadn't Ann promised to remind him?
Ann
.
The memory of desire stirred him, focusing his mind. His body responded and he caressed his erection. Any female who had found herself in his sights at that moment would have been fair game he decided, dismissing the specter of any romantic involvement. That would be fatal, Goldstein had warned. 'Don't get mixed up with another woman. Not just yet,' he had intoned. 'It's safer to court Madam Palm and
her f
ive-sisters.' He had been surprised at Goldstein's levity. Besides, Ann was too young. Yet he needed a woman. Any woman.

He remembered Ann's orgasmic reaction to his embrace. So I'm not completely sexless, he decided, like a prisoner in a dark black cell to whom any ray of light is a gift.

He watched his throbbing erection, tense and trembling, as if it hap! a mind of its own. Closing his eyes, he imagined Ann naked, thighs open, waiting, nipples erect. He was plunging his erection into her, plunging deeply, urgendy. He reached for it, feeling the pleasure begin, then recede. Something was intruding on the mechanism of his fantasy. He tried to fight it away, but its momentum was re
lentl
ess and his body reacted. The tide" of blood ebbed. He saw Barbara's face, rebuking: 'You knew they were dangerous,' she had said about the lights. Had he really?

Leave me alone, he pleaded.

But he did not want to be left alone.

Not alone.

He stayed in bed most of Christmas Day, although both Eve and Josh came in to apologize or commiserate. He wasn't sure which. They had opened the windows to air out the house and he had said it was all right if they went out for Christmas dinner with Barbara and Ann. He knew it troubled them, not having him join them, but wisely they hadn't pressed the point. When they left,

Benny jumped on his bed and burrowed his head into his chest. But he stank so badly of doggy odor that finally Oliver had to swat him off. But the odor had given him some purposeful activity for the day.

Getting dressed, he went downstairs, first taking a peek at his orchids. To his dismay, they seemed to be browning along the petal edges, an ominous sign, surprising, since only yesterday they had been in mint condition.

'Don't mock me,' he told them, proud of their beauty, especially compared with Barbara's more pedestrian plants. He watered them, offering whispered encouragement, then went down to his workroom, lifting a shaking Benny into the big cast-iron sink, which he filled with lukewarm water.

'You and me, kid. Merry Christmas,' he told the frightened dog, whose brown eyes begged relief. As he scrubbed the stinking dog he remembered inexplicably their Gift of the Magi Christmas.

They had vowed to give each other something non-material. He was senior at Harvard Law then and they were tight for cash, barely able to survive on her job demonstrating kitchen gadgets at Macy's. By a stroke of providence - he used those terms then - he had gotten word about the job offer with the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, providing, of course, that he passed the bar exam. He kept the news from her for nearly a week so that it would coincide with Christmas. He had been curious, of course, about what she had gotten him, certain that, whatever she offered, his would be the topper.

'I'm pregnant,' she told him after he had made his announcement.

It was, in a way, a total deception on her part. Fair warning unheeded. He had hidden his confusion and displeasure, wondering why she had complicated their lives without consultation. The object is to control our lives, not let our lives control us, he told her, and she had agreed.