The War of the Roses

23

He sat in his office, sipping his morning coffee, eating the doughnut provided by Miss Harlow, and looked glumly out of the window. He had been certain that what he had done to her kitchen would have finished, once and for all, the foolishness of her fancy dinner party. It had taken him one whole night to do the job. She’d had no right to go ahead with it, flouting him, using the proceeds from a blatant theft of his possessions. By insisting on having the party, she’d brought it all on herself.

For a while he had reveled in his cleverness, hiding in the sun-room until just the right moment; then he’d dropped the Ex-Lax into the chocolate sauce, adding an extra piece to the mix for good measure. If he hadn’t gone to the movies, he might have saved the Ferrari from her wrath, although he doubted it. Seeing it this morning, all he wanted to do was to cry. But the tears refused to come. He supposed he should have expected something of the sort. Fifty thousand shot to hell. And it was he who had shown her how to wield the weapon. She was one resourceful bitch. He’d give her that.

It was impossible to believe that a human being could change so much. Well, he was changing, too. He could be as unpredictable as she. The worst part for him now was to accept the idea of her strength. She was rubbing his nose in it, humiliating him.

‘Some people never understand until you rub their noses in it,’ he had told her many times, referring to various antagonists in his practice. Goldstein would have called it chutzpah, which was one word for which he did not need a translation. To throw a fancy dinner party with the proceeds of what was, in purely legal terms, stolen property was unmitigated chutzpah. Not to pay the overdue utility bills was compounding the chutzpah. And this deliberate destruction of one of the great mechanical marvels of the age.…

He felt his gorge rise and banged the coffee cup in its saucer. On his desk were dunning notices of all kinds, which he gathered up and ripped in half. The bill collectors were beginning to call him at the office and he was ducking the calls.

‘They’ll cut you off,’ Miss Harlow had warned.

‘Her, too,’ he had responded.

‘You’ll be without light, without air conditioning,’ Miss Harlow lectured. ‘Her, too.’

The children had begun to write and he was disturbed that they addressed their letters to his office, as if they had already acknowledged that the house was not to be his.

‘Please write to me at home. It is my home. Our home. I paid for everything in it and continue to do so.’ Rereading his words to them, he thought they sounded harsh, but he did not tear the letter up. He wanted to be emphatic. He was still the master of the family ship, he told himself. He searched his mind for what else to write, but could not think of much, since he was too absorbed in his present dilemma. One obsession at a time. He sent them handsome checks and left it at that.

He carried the inventory list with him now and every night checked through the house to be sure she had not taken any more of their possessions. She had continued to write him little notes and Scotch-taped them to his door, and soon they became repetitive; one-liners about the imminent cut-off of their utilities.

‘You pay them,’ he had scribbled, Scotch-taping the notes back on her door.

Living the way he did, from day to day, gave him a different view of time. With mental discipline, he found, he could keep his mind working, but only in the present. When an anxiety intruded that required some perspective on the future, even if only a few moments ahead, he ripped it from his consciousness. In that way he was able to cope with the impending utilities cut-off as well. No hardship, he decided, would be too much.

Ann had called him a few times at the office and he’d been deliberately cold, although he admitted to himself that he missed her. It was all part of his determination to live solely in the immediate present.

‘Are you all right?’ she would ask.

‘Coping.’ Once he had hated that word. Coping implied hopelessness.

‘I hear from the children regularly,’ she told him. ‘They’re fine. But they worry about you.’

‘They shouldn’t.’

‘So do I.’

‘You shouldn’t.’

‘I miss you, Oliver,’ she would whisper. At that point he would usually bid her an abrupt good-bye.

One night he returned home and found the house deathly quiet. The welcoming purr of the air conditioning had ceased and he realized that the absence of sound meant that the electricity had been shut off. The house had already taken on the clammy humidity of a Washington summer. Barbara had apparently left the windows closed to take advantage of the last lingering bit of cool air.

With the aid of some matches, he groped his way to the workshop, found two flashlights, and made his way back up the stairs. Then he remembered his wine. Without the cooling system, the temperature rise would threaten his reds, perhaps his whites as well. He had forgotten about that. He would empty the vault tomorrow, he promised himself, irritated by the oversight. So the wines, too, were innocent victims. He decided he needed a drink to calm his agitation. Led by the flashlight’s beam, he made his way to the library.

The wooden doorknobs of the armoire seemed stuck, which he attributed to the moisture-swollen wood. Putting the flashlight down, he tugged on the knobs with one hand braced against one of the doors. It would not budge. He tugged again. He heard a straining, squeaking sound below him and, to his horror, the armoire tipped slowly forward, all nine feet of it, a massive wall pressing downward against him. He flattened his hands and tried to hold it up, but the tipping movement was relentless. With all his strength, he tried to become a human brace. The bottles crashed against each other as the armoire slowly moved forward. Twisting his body, he managed to turn completely and brace the weight against his shoulders, pushing upwards with his legs.

For the moment he succeeded and the armoire moved back. But he was trapped under its weight. The muscles in his shoulders and thighs ached. Soon, he knew, they would weaken. His strength would ebb. When it gave out, the armoire would come crashing down on him unless he could jump out of its way, which was unlikely. Every skin pore opened and the sweat cascaded down his face, stinging his eyes.

‘Help me,’ he screamed, remembering suddenly his experience in the sauna. Fat chance, he thought. The ruthless bitch. His resolve hardened. He tried to shift the weight periodically and managed to redistribute it temporarily, holding that position until his shoulder was shot through with pain and each position became equally unbearable. Aside from the compelling danger, which was terribly real and ominous, he felt ridiculous.

Soon he would simply have to plunge Forward, accepting whatever injury the heavy object would dispense.

The muscles in his shoulders tired first, then his back, and finally his shoulders just to keep standing. His legs began to shake. Save me, he wanted to scream. Who would hear him? Who would care?

‘Dirty bitch,’ he mumbled, hoping his hatred would fire the strength in his flagging muscles. His breath came in gasps now. He was faltering. His body was collapsing and he felt the full weight of the armoire move downward. His knees began to give. Gathering all his remaining strength, he prepared himself to take a giant leap forward. But he could not summon the strength. The weight was descending swiftly now. Finally he was on his knees. The pain in his shoulders was excruciating. The thought of injury or even his death in this manner revolted him, since it would give her the victory she wanted. Suddenly the power of hate intervened, and he felt the force of it shoot through his tired muscles. Concentrating all his energy, he lurched away from the falling armoire.

As it fell his body did not escape completely, and the armoire caught his shoe by its sole and badly twisted his ankle. The pain stabbed him. But he managed to contort his body, untie his shoelace, and painfully extract his foot from the trapped shoe.

Whiskey oozed from under the armoire, soaking through his clothes, its acrid smell permeating the room.

If she was up in her room, she surely had heard the crash. He had no illusions about her motives. This caper was no mere annoyance. It was the real thing. He crawled across the library floor, where a confused Benny had been startled to wakefulness by the noise of the crash. He felt Benny’s warm tongue on his face. ‘Good old Benny,’ he whispered, embracing him, breathing in his doggy odor. It was more welcome than that of the liquor and perspiration in which he was soaked.

Raising himself on one leg, he managed to hop to the phone. It was, he was relieved to find, still functioning and he called a cab, then crawled outside to wait for it.

‘You’re lucky it’s not broken,’ the black intern in the emergency room of the Washington Hospital Center told him. He shook his head. ‘You’d better get off the juice. This is what always happens.’

‘I’m not on it.’ ,

‘You stink like a brewery.’

Oliver felt the futility of responding. Who would believe him? He accepted a shot of painkiller and went back to the house.

But before he went to sleep, he Scotch-taped a note to her door. The shock had weakened him and the scrawl and wispy and uncertain.

‘You had better watch your ass,’ he had written. Like her notes, it was unsigned.

He woke up in a puddle of sweat. Every muscle ached. He felt stiff, ravaged, and his ankle throbbed. With the air conditioning not working, there was not a stir of air in the room.

He posed a question to himself: Is this me? Searching his mind, he looked for glimpses of identification. He spelled his name, whispered his Social Security number, his date of birth, the name of his law firm, the address of his house, the names of his children. Superficial, he decided, half-amused, certain that the pained hulk lying moist and terrified in the two-hundred-year-old canopied bed was not himself at all.

Himself, he declared, was a forty-year-old man named Oliver Rose, with two beautiful children, Eve and Josh, and a lovely, loyal, beautiful, wonderful wife named Barbara.

The name set off a musical lilt in his mind. Barbara.

Dear Barbara. Whatever had happened to her? Where was everybody?

He had lived with and loved someone for nearly two decades and all she was, was an object of his imagination, something without substance or reality. He wished he could blot her from his mind, all the years, all the false roles.

He got out of bed and opened the drapes to the rising sun. Opening the windows, he was disappointed to discover that the outside air was as hot as it was inside. He had forgotten how hot it was inside. He had forgotten how hot a Washington summer could be.

Something was missing in the room. Benny wasn’t there. Somehow he had got lost in the shuffle of last night’s events. Sticking his head out the window, Oliver shouted the dog’s name, then* listened for his familiar bark. Yet he wasn’t worried about Benny. Benny could take care of himself.

Inadvertently, as he moved toward the bathroom he put too much weight on his ankle and crashed against the wall in agony; it took some time to gather his strength again. Peering at his worn face in the bathroom mirror, he felt the odd sensation of personal liberation. He actually felt good, and he couldn’t believe it. He searched his mind for a reason. For the first time since Barbara had shocked him with her admission, he now felt the complete absence of doubt. He had no more illusions. He knew the real score. The lines were clearly drawn. The bitch would not be satisfied until she had his balls in her hand. Never, never, he vowed. It was the moment of truth. Basic hate. Basic war.

He winked at his image in the mirror and, making a fist, shook it in front of his face. There was no undue heat to his anger now. The cutting edge was cool. He knew what he had to do. He picked up the phone.

‘I’ll be away for a few days,’ he told Miss Harlow.

‘You need a vacation, Mr. Rose.’

He paused, deliberately giving weight to suggestion.

‘I know what I need,’ he whispered, hanging up.