The War of the Roses

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 fog of cigar smoke. That was exactly 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 whistled 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.

Benny still wasn’t there. But still it wasn’t time to panic. Often Benny would straggle home late at night or early in the morning. Sometimes Oliver would leave the back door ajar and Benny would push his way in and scratch at the door to Oliver’s room. Still asleep, he would get up, open the door, and let the dog in.

Lying there in the large, canopied bed, alone, Oliver listened to the sounds of the house, a rhythm he knew as well as his own heartbeat. The absence of the children and Ann was tangible and he could sense the emptiness around him. Somehow their presence in the house gave him some sense of belonging, of cohesiveness. And the house itself, its very familiarity, offered some comfort. His womb, he thought, wondering if Barbara, too, felt this same sensation. He sensed her lurking in what was once their bed across the hall. ‘Lurking’ was the word that had come to mind. And he saw her curled in the embryo position, listening, as he was now, to the sounds of the house.

Unable to sleep, he got out of bed and searched the room for a vodka bottle. Finding one, he poured some into a tumbler, then opened the window and brought in a small carton of orange juice from the ledge. There wasn’t much left and he emptied it into the glass and drank it hurriedly.

Then he went back to bed and quickly began to slip into drowsiness. Before he could get to sleep, he heard a scratching on the door.

Benny.

Without opening his eyes, he got up, opened the door, and heard Benny pad to his accustomed spot on the Art Deco rug. Oliver got back into bed, feeling better, relieved.

It began as an abstraction. First came the loss of time. Then a burst of colors exploded in his brain and he opened his eyes. The room had become a toy kaleidoscope, with the patterns constantly changing.

He sat up, startled, rubbed his eyes, but the patterns merely changed. They did not go away. The Hepplewhite secretaire grew bloated as he looked at it and the file cabinets seemed to be floating in midair. Reaching out, he tried to touch one. It seemed to evaporate.

But when he looked up at the canopy and saw it descending on him, as in the famous horror story, he heard a scream. It did not sound like his voice at all -a whiny cackle, like that of a rooster being strangled at sunrise. Jumping off the bed, he felt his knees buckle and he lay on the floor, panting, searching for some shred of reason.

My mind, a faint trickle of logic told him. My mind. He touched his head, which seemed larger, but soft, like a sponge. He sensed something moving near him, something luminous and large, glowing, like a large ball of white fire. It was alive and its breath stank. Something warm and moist covered his face. Sitting up, he watched the apparition. It was monstrous, hideous, moving. He hit it with his fist and heard a strange sound, amplified, bursting in his ears.

His eyes would not focus and he moved back, sliding along the floor, overturning bottles. Some of them crunched under his weight and he felt a stab of pain in his buttocks. He watched the apparition move, then he turned away in horror. He had never felt more terror, as if he had suddenly descended into a special kind of hell.

‘Forgive me,’ he cried, but he could not hear his voice. Crawling on his hands and knees, he groped his way over objects. Looking back, he saw the apparition following. Colors continued to explode in his mind. Every object in the room seemed distorted, out of sync. His body bumped against something cool and hard and some brief trace of logic returned. He was in the bathroom, climbing into the tub. Still the apparition pursued him.

Clutching a fiery, golden metallic object, he felt it give and he was suddenly in a cold rainstorm. He lay back, letting the water run over him. Colored drops invaded the space above him, crawling over him like insects. The rain reminded him of something, something long ago. He heard pounding on the windowpanes and the muffled drone of a croaking voice. ‘Going once. Twice.’

‘Sold,’ the voice screamed. His body lurched, grew still. He was certain that it was his tears coming down as rain.

Logic returned in fits, like blips on a computer screen, first as random patterns, then as connections. The colors faded, disappeared. He could see a spear of sunlight through the water rushing above him and finally he was observing himself lying in the bathtub being sprinkled by a gush of water from the shower head.

Testing his reflexes before he made an effort to rise, he felt pain in his buttocks, and as he rose slowly his head spun and ached. Stepping cautiously out of the tub, he held on to the sink and turned off the water. There was blood on the bathroom tile and on his fingers where he had touched the cuts. His eyes focused clearly now, and in the mirror he saw his rump, a network of oozing red tributaries.

Patting himself dry, he sprayed disinfectant on the cuts, then walked into his room. It was a mess. The bedclothes lay in disarray on the floor, which was strewn with broken bottles. He picked his way carefully across the broken glass and got into his shoes. Standing in the center of the room, he tried to reconstruct what had happened. Oddly, he remembered the images he had seen. Nightmarish shapes and sounds. Then he heard Benny’s pained whimper and saw him cowering in the corner, his big brown eyes laden with hurt. He looked mangy, off color. Moving closer, he appeared to be covered with a whitish sticky substance.

Grabbing him by the neck chain, Oliver moved him into the bathroom and drew the blind, throwing the room into semidarkness. Luminous paint. The revelation came at him with a rush. He remembered the orange juice.

‘God damn it,’ he shouted, feeling the rage overflow and tighten into a ball in his chest.

He dressed hurriedly, picked up the orange-juice carton, and, leashing Benny, took him downstairs. He did not even look at Barbara’s closed door, deliberately trying to contain his rage. Soon, he told himself, promising that she would pay dearly. He drove Benny to the vet in Eve’s Honda.

‘What asshole did that?’ the vet asked, looking at Benny.

‘Somebody who didn’t like him, I guess,’ Oliver responded.

‘It’ll take all day to clean him up,’ the vet said. ‘I also want to check his skin.’

Oliver nodded, then thrust the orange-juice carton in front of him.

‘I also need a favor. There’s something in this I want analyzed. I think he drank some.’

‘Orange juice?’ The vet shook his head. He seemed perplexed. Taking the carton, he sniffed at it, then shrugged. ‘I’ll call you.’ He looked at Benny. ‘You poor bastard,’ he said, leading him away.

Oliver went to the office, but he couldn’t concentrate. Occasionally last night’s colors burst in his mind again and he broke into a cold sweat. For most of the day he lay on the couch and tried to hold himself together.

‘You all right?’ Miss Harlow asked, coming into office.

‘I had a rough night.’

‘Tomcats, the lot of you,’ she mumbled.

Finally the vet called. Hiss Harlow put him through.

‘LSD,’ he said. ‘Your dog took an acid trip. Maybe he sprayed that stuff on himself.’

‘Very funny.’ He had suspected as much. The information didn’t come as a big surprise.

‘He looks fine now. We got it all off. He’s a tough old guy-‘

‘So am I,’ Oliver muttered as he hung up. His head felt clearer than it had all day.

He resisted calling Goldstein. Her behavior wasn’t actionable because he couldn’t prove anything. Remembering what he had done to her Valium, he smiled ruefully. ‘Ingenious bitch,’ he whispered. He even felt a touch of grudging admiration.

So she’s getting to be a murderous little viper, he told himself. He’d show her what that really meant.

When he went upstairs to his room that night, he found a note Scotch-taped to his door. He saw Barbara’s left-handed scrawl: ‘I’m having a dinner party Friday night. I would appreciate your not interfering in any way.’

The note was unsigned, as if any identification on her part would have implied a modicum of intimacy. He crumpled the note and kicked at her door. A dinner party? Where was the money coming from? ‘You monster,’ he cried. There was no response.

He decided he needed a drink and went downstairs to the library, opening the armoire and pouring himself a tumbler of scotch. Neat. He swore off mixers, especially orange juice. And vodka. So he was now paying for her dinner parties. How much of his own victimization was he expected to tolerate? It was beyond endurance. She was flaunting him, humiliating him. Sitting down on the couch, his hurt buttocks smarted and he stood up quickly. Besides, something was nagging at him, beyond mere indignation, as if something in the room itself was awry. His eyes did a cursory inventory, like a moving TV camera, and his mind ticked off their possessions as if a page of the list had been inserted into a slot in his brain.

There was some intuitive deductive system at work, triggered by something missing. His eyes roamed, lingered, inspected. ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’’ his voice boomed out. Little Red Riding Hood was missing. This was different. He rushed to the phone and dialed Goldstein’s number.

‘Little Red Riding Hood is missing,’ he shouted into the phone.

‘I know, the wolf ate her.’

‘Don’t you understand, Goldstein? She stole it to pay for the dinner party. It’s a Staffordshire figure.’

There was a long pause.

‘You should take a long vacation, Rose.’

‘She stole it. Don’t you understand? She’ll get at least two grand.’

‘I’m taking a long vacation. You should, too. As fast as possible. We’ll worry about it when I get back.’

‘How can you go on vacation?’

‘I go when Thurmont goes. Don’t worry. It’s only for six weeks.’

‘Six weeks?’

‘We’re entitled, Rose. We work hard.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘You call me late at night to tell me about Litde Red Riding Hood missing. What don’t I understand?’

It seemed futile to explain. The words hung in his throat.

‘That’s where the money is coming from, Goldstein.’ There was no response on the other end.

‘The money…’ Oliver began again.

‘I’m going on vacation, Rose,’ Goldstein said finally. ‘Which reminds me. You’re behind on my retainer.’

Oliver hung up, staring at the phone in its cradle. So it’s every man for himself, is it? he thought, feeling a charge of adrenaline stiffen his resolve. He’d show them what resolve really meant.