The War of the Roses (23 page)

With a nod to public relations, she also invited a food editor of
The Washington Post
and his wife. His name was White and he had written a number of cookbooks, including one cataloguing famous recipes of former White House chefs. She could not come up with a Cabinet minister but settled instead for an undersecretary of the Army, whose wife she had met casually at parent meetings at Sidwell Friends. To round off the list, she invited the military attache of the French Embassy and his wife, an attractive young couple who were present at most parties given by the French Embassy.

The plan was, she knew, a bold stroke and she was determined to make a lasting impression, to start people talking. It would be the first of many, an advertisement of herself. With the children gone, she was less harried, although the tension between her and Oliver continued. She would just have to live with that, she decided, hoping that, once and for ail, she had foreclosed on any more harrassment from him. Soon, she was sure, he would come to his senses and move out of the house.

Naturally, she would do all the cooking herself. A
vichyssoise
to begin with, followed by crab imperial, beef Wellington with
pate de foie
gras,
a delicate salad of watercress, mushrooms, and endives, and for dessert, custard-filled eclairs with a warm chocolate
sauce. For wines, she picked a C
hablis Grand Cru for starters, followed by a 1966 Saint-Emilion. And for a dessert champagne, a good brut.

For a moment she felt tempted to break into Oliver's wine vault, but she resisted that. At all costs she must avoid any confrontations. Also, this was her show. Hers alone. She would prove to herself that she was capable of offering a complete dinner service. She checked her china, counted out her silver and crystal glasses. So what if she was being blatantly commercial? She was in business.

She made a long list of ingredients - crabmeat, fillet of beef, potatoes, capers, endives, mushrooms, eggs, chocolate. On and on. And she haunted the markets for perfect choices. Without the children to worry about, she was able to work at her own pace, largely ignoring Oliver's comings and goings. He seemed to be keeping out of her way, and she was thankful. She put financial problems out of her mind as well. She found she enjoyed working on projects with specific goals. It gave her life more structure, more purpose. It was delicious to savor such freedom. To be sure she got a good night's sleep, she took a strong sleeping pill. It made the nights go faster. Shut out all anxieties. She also devised a plan to thwart any malicious interference by Oliver, just in case the matter with Benny hadn't taught him a final lesson.

On the day before the party, she moved a cot into the kitchen. Her idea was to prepare everything that day and to spend the night in the kitchen, working right up to the point when the three in help she had hired would arrive. Carefully, she inspected the food she had purchased for any signs of tampering. The wines as well. Satisfied, she began the job of preparation.

For some reason, the one arm tap in the stainless steel sink would not run cold. She tried the other sink and the same condition prevailed. It wasn't a serious problem, but when she moved the tap arm to hot, it came out scalding and scorched her hand. She screamed in pain. It had never happened before, but after the initial shock, she countered the problem by emptying ice cubes into a large stock pot and used the resulting cold water for washing the various ingredients.

Only vaguely did she relate the mishap to Oliver. Even if it was sabotage, she was determined that nothing would stand in her way. When one of the mixing heads came loose from the mixing bowl on the kitchen island center and flew into the ceiling, narrowly missing her face, she received her first jolt of real concern. Her fingers shook as she picked up the head, looked at its thread, then reattached it. It could have been her fault. She might not have tightened it properly.

She fitted the Cuisinart with the slicer top and fed peeled potatoes into it, watching with satisfaction as the thinly sliced pieces piled into the transparent bowl. But when she turned the bowl cover to the of
f position, it did not stop the
blade from whirring and she quickly flicked the machine to the off position. Still it continued to whir. She then reached to pull the plug from the socket but it would not come out.

As she contemplated the problem the room seemed to be growing hotter and she noted that all the burners on the electric stove were red hot. She turned the knobs, but her action had little effect. Still she resisted any sense of panic, determined to remain calm despite the continuous whirring of the Cuisinart. Finally, in a fit of pique, she tugged at the wire and the Cuisinart fell to the floor, which loosened the slicing blade and sent it careening like a projectile into the range hood, ricocheting off a cabinet before it lost power and clanked into one of the sinks.

To avoid being hit, she had fallen to the floor; as she rose the knife box toppled, spraying knives over her body, making cuts in her thighs. Runn
ing to the sink, she inadvertentl
y pulled the arm of the faucet, scalding her hand. As it shot away from the fiery liquid her hand brushed the disposal switch, which set the machine moving deep in the bowels of the basin. She tried to shut it off, but it did not -step. As she reeled away from it the range-hood fan inexplicably turned on, as well as the two blenders along the shelf.

Reaching for the plugs, her hand brushed the toaster, which was hot. The red light went on in the coffee maker and on the microwave oven. The dishwasher began its first whirling cycle. Joining the maddening symphony, the disposal began to rasp, offering a grating, nasty metallic counterpoint.

The sweat of fear poured down her back. Every electrical appliance in the kitchen seemed to have turned on in sequence.

The cacophony of sound stabbed at her eardrums and the blood from her knife wounds began to soak through her slacks. Her scalded hand ached as she staggered madly around the kitchen bumping into pots, pans, colanders, salad bowls, scattering canned goods and food, breaking plates. Her head banged into the copper pots hanging overhead and when she felt herself falling from dizziness, she grabbed at them, bringing them down with her and bruising herself.

She lay in the wreckage screaming and helpless. Finding the strength to crawl along the kitchen floor on her belly, she grasped at the knob to the downstairs door, lifted herself, and staggered down the wooden stairs, slipping near the landing, banging her head. The noise from the kitchen followed her. She groped for and found the fuse box, opened the metal door, and pulled the master switch, plunging everything into darkness.

She lay on the cold floor of the basement, wondering if she had died. The house was uncommonly still, the air conditioning silenced. Every part of her seemed to ache and it was the pain finally that convinced her that she was still alive. In the darkness she could not tell if it was tears or blood that rolled down her cheeks. She could not even determine which was more pervasive, her pain or her anger.

Trying to stand, she fell back. Her knees gave, but she followed a beam of daylight from the partially opened door and dragged herself up the stairs. The kitchen was a shambles. Avoiding the wreckage, she staggered to the bathroom to survey the damage to her body. There were some bruises visible on the side of her head. A crisscross of cuts ran over her thighs. The blood had caked and there were welts and bruises on her arms. Her scalded hand smarted.

But the physical pain paled beside her anger. She had no illusions about what had occurred. The bastard had booby-trapped the kitchen. As she cleaned herself and suffered the stings of antiseptic on her cuts, she felt an irresistible urge for revenge. As she had suspected when she had locked him into the sauna, she knew she had the capacity to kill. Without guilt. Without remorse. Hadn't he attempted to mortally injure her by tampering with her kitchen? By making it a weapon?

After her thirst for revenge came determination, a hardening of the will beyond anything she had ever experienced before. 'You will never stop me,' she told her image in the mirror.

She -cleaned up the kitchen as best she could and, using tools from his workshop, pried out the plugs and disconnected all the appliances he had tampered with, including the electric stove. One sink was still operating. She did not call an electrician. There was no time. Besides, surveying the situation, she decided that she could still prepare the dinner without using any of the appliances, although she had to go to the store and buy a hand-operated meat grinder and several slicing and grating gadgets.

'Fuck technology,' she whispered to the mute appliances, checking carefully to be sure that the gas stove and oven had not been tampered with. Miraculously, the gas stove had escaped. She would need that.

As she worked long into the night, she felt a grudging admiration for labor-saving devices that had been created for the benefit of the modern woman. The irony, she knew, was that these devices had been invented by men, making women obvious conspirators in their own destruction. Such thoughts kept her attitude positive and her resolve unweakened. She reveled in her independence, her creativity, her resourcefulness.

She slept in her clothes and with one hand on the handle of a cleaver, knowing that if he gave her the slightest opportunity she would use it on him. The surety of that knowledge brought odd comfort. She heard him come into the house, but he had not paused, bounding up the stairs to his room, in his wake the sound of Benny's nails clicking on the marble foyer. To further fortify herself, over each entrance to the kitchen she had stretched a taut line, on which she hung pots and pans, set to make a loud clatter at the least provocation.

She lay on the cot, eyes open, listening for the slightest sound. Let him come. She was ready. . . .

At dawn she was up again, putting the final touches on the
foie gras,
pounding the dough for the puff pastry in which she would wrap the beef fillet. By midmorning she had filled the clamshells with the makings of the crab imperial, readying it for the oven. The fillet was now being partially cooked in the oven, prior to its being coated with
foie gras,
wrapped in pastry, and decorated. The
vichyssoise
was already safely tucked away in the refrigerator.

She had kept her head. She was proud of that and when the three servants showed up - two white-gloved waiters and a maid - she felt the euphoria of victory. Nothing was impossible.

She sat at the head of the table like a presiding magistrate. She had carefully dressed in an old Galanos and had brought in a hairdresser to do her hair. Her guests, echoing her own thoughts, pronounced her beautiful and she felt high-spirited and witty, joking with the Greek ambassador on her right and the Thai ambassador on her left. She had high expectations that the after-dinner toasts would offer exaggerated compliments to her charm, her looks, and, most important, to her culinary ability. Mr. White, the
Washington Post
food editor, asked explicit questions about each dish and seemed gready impressed by the details she provided.

She sensed how impressed they were with the house, its possessions, the lovely silver and china displayed on the table. The beef Wellington was perfect, and she was certain that some supernatural force had intervened to assist her.

'I cannot tell you all how happy I am,' she told them as the waiters, skilled in the impeccable French service, served each guest a slice of beef Wellington. She could not remember ever being happier. This wo
uld be the first of many dinner
parties, she decided. She would be more than a great caterer of Washington, she fantasized. She would be a great hostess. After all, she had the grand house, the charm and attractiveness, and would be, or was already, one of the great practitioners of the noble art of cookery. She would surpass Julia Child, become a great world culinary authority. International celebrities would vie with one another to be invited to her table, and her books would be published throughout the world.

'I hadn't realized,' the Greek ambassador said as his fork slipped into the tender beef, 'what an extraordinary woman you are.' He looked at her with an expression of fawning admiration. For the first time in her life she felt a sense of power. This was her conception. Her party. It vindicated her willingness to go through the fires of hell to keep this house, this ambience.

Pleased, she looked around the table at her guests -the men in black tie, the women in expensive gowns -realizing how much this house made a statement in the pantheon of Washington. It was something she had always believed, sensed, but now she saw its real value and understood the true reason for her private war. In Washington, perhaps everywhere else, a person is known by the neighborhood he keeps, the size of his house and the possessions therein. For someone like herself struggling for personal fulfillment, it meant a head start.

The idea warmed her and she felt herself softening. Perhaps some compromise could be worked out with Oliver. Now that she felt more secure, there might be more room to relax her demands. If only he would give her space. His presence crowded her. His living in the house was a constant irritant.