The War of the Roses (21 page)

'For you, Oliver,' she had said, 'I'll do anything. Anything.' He had offered her the same assurance, but it didn't mean the same thing. She remembered how his every utterance was pregnant with wisdom. She had idolized him, worshiped him, remembering how she would watch his sleeping face in the quickening light of morning, kiss his fluttering eyelids, his puffed sweet lips, and when he held her in his arms, she knew that the world had really stopped just for her, just for that moment. In her mind, she heard bells now, warning bells, Are bells, ominous clanging, banging bells pealing for her lost innocence. They toll for you, Barbara, you dumb little snit, falling for that line. She blamed her parents. She blamed her friends. She blamed the movies, the songs of eternal love, the romantic lies. Sentimental bondage. Love lies.

One night she could not resist and took two Valium, expecting oblivion and relief from her racing thoughts. It didn't happen. She twisted and turned. She took a hot shower. Then an icy shower. Nothing helped. She felt agitated beyond her ability to control herself. Her heart pounded. She sweated alternately hot and cold. The drug's reaction confused her.

Terrors magnified in her mind. She felt she was drowning, choking. She could not sit in one place. She went downstairs and sat in the library. The Staffordshire figures seemed to come to life, moving, dancing, mocking her with their cobalt eyes. Like Oliver's. Her hands shook and she opened the armoire and took a long, burning swallow from
the bottl
e. It made her worse.

She went upstairs and changed into her jeans, then went outside. It was late May and warm and she walked through the quiet Kalorama streets, turned left on Connecticut Avenue, then walked as fast as she could. Sometimes she jogged for a few blocks. She could not stop herself. Once a policeman stopped his squad car and called out to her.

'It's too late for jogging, lady.'

'Bug off. It's a free country.'

'It's your ass,' she heard him say.

The sweat poured out of her body and she was surprised to see that she had reached Chevy Chase Circle. She sat on a bench in the middle of the circle, watching occasional cars speed around it. The circling images triggered a thought. Then another. And another. Finally, a revelation. She crossed the circle and ran to a public phone and dialed Thurmont's number, hearing his sleep-fogged, panicked voice.

'He did something to the Valium,' she shouted into the phone. 'I know he did something. That dirty bastard.'

Thurmont seemed confused, but her mind was clearing.

'He substituted something else for the Valium. It created the opposite effect. I was all strung out. I'm getting better.'

'Where are you?'

'Near Chevy Chase Circle.'

'Don't do anything stupid, Barbara.'

'Don't worry,' she said. 'I will never do anything stupid again.'

21

Oliver didn't tell Goldstein about the mold he had made of the lock to Barbara's room and the key he had made from the mold. He could predict Goldstein's insufferable comments. How could that supercilious asshole know what it was like to walk in his, Oliver's moccasins? Nor could he tell Goldstein about the Dexedrine he had put into the Valium capsules he'd emptied.

With whom could he argue his justification? The acts, to any reasonable observer, would seem irrational, certainly provocative. But bow could the observer react to what she had done to him? The sauna. The wine. The detective. This was no ordinary situation. He had to be alert, always. Watchful. And how could any reasonable person explain her actions. Like suddenly deciding out of the blue that it was time to break up the family. It was as if an alarm clock had rung in her head. 'All right, Oliver. Time's up.'

'Patience,' Goldstein had implored through a fo
g of cigar smoke. That was exactl
y the course he would take. Patience. The angels were on his side.

On the question of finances, Goldstein approached him cautiously.

'She's overextended businesswise. Be patient. Sooner or later, they'll come to us with a proposition.'

'What about the utility bills? They'll shut us off.'

'Close to the vest now, Rose. I've seen it a thousand times. Business always looks easy on the outside. She'll have to come to us. She has no other source of income.'

'Two thou a month. Just to run the house, the bare minimum. My God, it's a fortune.'

'Not if you're financing a business. She'll come to us. You'll see.'

As Goldstein said, he was to be patient. Meanwhile, the utility companies called him repeatedly, threatening.

'My wife pays them,' he had assured the various spokesmen.

'No, she doesn't.'

The day the children left for camp, both he and Barbara showed up at the parking lot of the Sidwell Friends School. Driving the Ferrari, he had followed Barbara's station wagon, into which she had piled the kids and their luggage. Eve's eyes were still puffy after an emotional farewell to Ann. She had
gone
off to live at the YWGA on Seventeenth Street, informing him with a note she had slipped under his door.

'And if you ever need me,' she wrote, 'I'm ready.' It was unsigned. Reading it, he had felt a pang of guilt. He had treated her badly, he decided, but he had not caused her to love him. Love. What a contemptible word. It should be abolished, especially since it did not accurately describe an enduring emotion. He had loved Barbara. Once he had told her, long ago, that love was just God's way of randomly splitting two people and letting them find themselves. When they did, they were one. That was love. That was, he thought now, unmitigated bullshit. No, he corrected himself, that gave it too much dignity. Love was a fart.

It was awkward saying good-bye to the children, who looked at them from the bus window with anxious eyes.

'I sure wish you two would either make up or make peace,' Josh had whispered to him, and Oliver assumed he had whispered the same thing to his mother. He hugged the boy, not without some additional pang of regret. What he regretted was that Josh had been created out of her genes as well. Part her. Somehow it diminished his love of the boy. Josh had his mother's deep-set Slavic eyes. He could not bear the guilt of such an unworthy feeling. He had the same feeling about Eve. It's wrong, he decided. Against nature. And seeing Barbara hug and caress the children before they stepped into the bus, he had to turn away. The sight disturbed him.

The parents watched the bus pull away, waving long after it was out of sight. A hush of mutual loss fell over the group and soon they got into their cars and drove off. He started to get into his car. Her voice stopped him.

'I know about the Valium,' she said. 'I don't know how you did it. Just don't think you're going to get away with it. Not ever.' He had turned to look at her face, noting with pleasure the new nest of wrinkles around her eyes. He looked at her, said nothing, then jumped into the Ferrari and drove off.

He would have to be careful now. And prepared. He could see the hatred in her eyes, the thirst for retaliation. A nerve in his cheek twitched. He looked at his watch. It was too early for the movies to be open. He dreaded the idea of being alone. The loss of the children, he discovered, did move him, putting a lie to the ugly thoughts he had had just a few moments before.

Driving around in the Ferrari gave him no pleasure. A heavy blanket of gloom descended on him. Separation hadn't given him self-reliance. He was, under all the bitterness and antagonism that had built up inside him, a family man. House, wife, kids, dog. Just like on television. He thought of his father, who had never really been what the sociologists call a role model. He was just a white-collar bureaucrat. But when he came home and shut the door in his clapboard house in Framingham, he was home safe. Home free. He had his chair, his pipe, his plaid bathrobe, his sense of family. House. Wife. Children. Dog. He was always his mother's 'man.' She would even say it exactiy that way. 'My man likes his eggs four minutes. My man hates rice pudding. My man likes egg-salad sandwiches for his lunch and a Delicious apple. Not Mcintosh.' She was specific about all his father's needs, highly detailed. Everything was done to enhance the old man's life. The lucky bastard. He was king of the universe. Like prunes for breakfast. Good for the bowels. Or the Jell-O for dinner. Good for the prostate. Or the fish on Fridays. Good for God and the brain. They were Catholics by birth and inclination, but didn't care much for the priests, although he knew that his mother secretly prayed for their salvation. For her husband and kids. Rarely for herself.

It was that kind of woman he had wanted Barbara to be, had imagined she was. His mother's large bosom was the world's umbrella. It was safe under there. Warm. Wonderful. Next to her big, generous heart. The tears mattered when they were shed under that umbrella. It chased pain. It made home sweet, sweeter than sweet.

'She is a good woman,' his father had confided. And she was that. How he envied him now. Sleeping next to that big pillow of strength and love and safety all those years. What was the jungle compared to that? His mind skipped backward in time and when he looked at his reflection in the car's side window, he had grown up. He hadn't lived at home for twenty years and although they were, he was thankful, still loving, their lives were lost somewhere back there in the Framingham of twenty years ago.

He stopped the car and went into a People's drugstore and called his family. His father answered.

'Hey, Dad.' It meant flogging himself to be cheerful.

'Son.' Oliver could hear him yell, 'Molly, it's Oliver.' And in a moment his mother had picked up the receiver.

'Ollie?'

'Mom.' He paused, swallowing the hard ball of phlegm that had lodged in his throat. 'I just put the kids on a bus to camp.'

'They're all right?' She was always suspicious when he called. Outside her home, life was uncertain and dangerous. They exchanged the usual amenities. How is Josh? How is Eve? How is your practice? How is your health? How is it going? That meant the divorce. His parents hadn't been down to see them since the breakup, although they had seen the children during Barbara's trip to Boston. Barbara hadn't come. Deliberately, his mother avoided any mention of Barbara.

'There's no way you can make it up?' his mother asked.

'No way.'

There was a long pause in which he could read her mind and see her face. Such things didn't, couldn't happen in her world. Please, no tears, he begged silently, and after more innocuous words, they hung up swiftly, never having gotten used to long-distance calls. Nevertheless, he walked away comforted, wondering which was truth and which was fiction. Their life. Or his.

He hadn't intended to go back to the house, but his mind had lost all sense of space and time and before he realized it he had driven the car into the alley. When he saw where he was, he expected Benny to come running and that image brought with it the desire to go for a ride, maybe down to Hains' Point, where Benny could run around and catch a Frisbee, one of the few tricks Oliver had taught him.

He went into the garden and whistled loudly, two fingers in his mouth. Usually this was enough to disrupt Benny's perpetual
sniffing after bitches. He whistl
ed again. No answer. Then he got in the car and roamed around the neighborhood, offering periodic whistling clarions. Benny slept at the foot of his bed, and although he snored and sometimes forgot that he wasn't outside, Benny was, as Oliver acknowledged to himself, better than no one. A lot better.

Paradoxically, the irony cheered him. To think that the only loving member of his family in town was nothing but a mangy schnauzer amused him. At least Benny was sympathetic to his troubles, and on many an occasion during the past trying months Oliver had poured out his heart to him. Some things simply had to be said out loud. And Benny had looked at him thoughtfully, big brown eyes smoldering with alertness, head cocked, ears standing up rigidly.

'You cute, horny bastard,' he said when Benny looked at him that way, offering the mutt a hug, which required a special tolerance for Benny's usual gamey aroma.

It cheered him to think that he still had Benny and even his disappointment at not finding him couldn't dispel the sudden sense of optimism. Searching for him killed enough time for the movies to open and he sat through two Woody Aliens at the Biograph, surprised that he could still laugh after having seen them for the fourth or fifth time.

He ate two roast-beef sandwiches and fries at a Roy Rogers and headed home, keeping the terror of his loneliness at bay as he listened for Benny's familiar greeting. Benny usually waited for him, stretched supine under one of the bushes along the perimeter of the house, springing up to cuddle his master's leg. Oliver's coming in by car always confused Benny, since he had to run around to the rear and couldn't get into the garage. He would stand on his hind legs at the door, waiting for Oliver to open it, then lunge playfully, invariably muddying up Oliver's suit.