The War of the Roses

4

When he remembered again, the room had darkened; he heard the steady blip and ping of odd sounds, as if he were inside some huge clock, perhaps in the tall mahogany case in his foyer, the pendulum banging in his ears, the complicated works clanking in his head. Memory came and faded. They were on their honeymoon at the Groton Inn, an old, rickety colonial left-over. The dining room always seemed set for tea.

It was too hot for June. The sun baked through the roof and making love was a gritty, unsatisfactory business. She hadn’t turned on, not the way she had before they were married, but he had attributed that to the tensions of the wedding, which had been opposed by both sets of parents. He still had two years to go at Harvard Law and she was two years from a degree at Boston University.

‘I’ll work my way through,’ he had told his parents on that nasty spring day on which he had made the dreaded announcement. It wasn’t that they were opposed specifically to Barbara, but they couldn’t imagine him inhibiting his career by marrying a poor nineteen-year-old girl, saddling himself with responsibility.

‘But I love her,’ he had protested with surety, as if the words were all that was needed to explain such a radical change of life. He supposed it was their humdrum married life and their exaggerated dreams for him that prompted their opposition and he was gentle with them. A state employee’s ambition for his only son was no fragile thing.

‘I won’t let you down,’ he had promised, knowing how hard the money for his education had come. ‘But I can’t live a single minute more without her.’ It was 1961, before all the revolutions, and living together without benefit of legal marriage was still a few years away.

‘You’re crazy,’ his father had said. His mother had simply sat at the kitchen table, hands folded, head bent, and cried.

‘And I don’t expect you to pay my tuition,’ he told them. ‘I’m on my own now.’ he hesitated. ‘With Barbara.’

‘Between us, we can make it,’ Barbara had assured him.

It had struck her parents even harder, since they were both high-school teachers, and the prospect of her dropping her education appalled them.

‘I love him,’ she told them. It was still a time when those three little words were glorified as the highest of attainments. To be in love was all. They were, as the saying goes, moonstruck. All he wanted, he remembered, was to touch her, to smell her, to hear her voice.

‘I love you more than anything else in the world,’ he told her, repetitively, holding her. He was always holding her.

‘I would die for you, Oliver,’ she had sworn.

Die? His mind cleared with an explosive start.

He could not understand why he was thinking about this, lying there in the darkened room, surprised suddenly by an erection that pressed against the tight cover sheet, showing its outline. Well, I’m not dead yet, he thought, discovering also that the pain was gone. The sedatives or whatever he had been given had made him headachy and drowsy and he hovered in a kind of half-sleep, hearing the voices of professionals exchanging bits of medical information, which, he assumed, were about his own mysterious carcass. At any moment he expected to hear Barbara’s heels clicking down the corridor and to feel her cool, soothing touch.

For some reason he began thinking about the Louis XV vitrine cabinet of inlaid tulipwood with its original beveled glass and ornate mounts, signed by Linke, which he had been tempted to buy. It was Barbara who had restrained him and he had argued with her. All the logic was on her side.

‘We haven’t the room,’ she had protested, holding his arm, which twitched as the auctioneer watched his face.

‘But it’s gorgeous.’

‘The house is finished, Oliver.’

She was right, of course, he remembered that the idea of that disturbed him for weeks. Finished? They had been fooling with it for more than ten years, ever since they fell in love with its somewhat seedy facade on its high vantage point overlooking Rock Creek Park, with a magnificent view of the tall, graceful arches of the Calvert Street Bridge. Besides, it was the best neighborhood in town, and in Washington a man was known by his neighborhood.

For years the house had, like quicksand, sucked up every spare sou as they redid its ramshackle interior, room by room.

He dozed fitfully, sensing a moving stretcher, and an endless line of fluorescent lights marching along the ceiling.

‘We’re going to X-ray,’ a black attendant explained. Oliver heard him talking about a ball game in the elevator. Perhaps, he thought, visitors were deliberately being kept from him, and Barbara, nervous and tear-stained, was sitting in some lounge, waiting for the results of the tests. He wanted to ask, ‘Am I really dying?’ Fearful of the answer, he didn’t ask.

He started worrying about his cymbidium orchids, which he had proudly coaxed from their indoor pot beds with loving care and which were now on their way to maturity beside Barbara’s hanging forest and clusters of potted African violets and Boston ferns in the sunroom. It had been a challenge to try his hand at such delicate plants.

He also began to worry about Benny, the schnauzer to which he was a deity, proving his obeisance with great delight. Neither Barbara nor the kids could handle him. The tools, too, required maintenance, and the garden. Then there was Barbara’s kitchen.…

God, don’t kill me off yet, he cried within himself.

He was lifted onto a cold, metal, X-ray table and rotated like a chicken on a spit. A white-smocked technician poked at him in a businesslike way, and he heard an intermittent buzz, which, in his clearing mind, he assumed was the sound of the picture-taking process. Why don’t I feel pain? he wondered, noting that a clock on die wall read twelve.

‘What day is it?’

‘Wednesday,’ the technician answered.

Later they brought him back to another room, where he was isolated by a screen. They did not hook him up to any mechanical devices, and he noted that his arms and buttocks tingled, apparently from the needle pricks. He slept some more, then was awakened gently by the touch of a cool hand. Blinking his eyes open, he peered into a bespectacled pinkish face.

‘You’re a lucky bastard, Mr. Rose.’

‘I’m not dying?’ he whispered.

‘Hardly. It’s your hiatus hernia. Quite common, really. We thought it was a heart attack and took all the precautionary measures. You had one hell of a gas pain. It sometimes simulates an attack.’

He pushed himself up, feeling a sense of renewed life.

‘So I’m born again,’ he snapped, feeling the residual aches of the medication and intravenous devices, and a lingering hurt in his chest.

‘You never died.’

‘Yeah. A lot of people will be disappointed. I’ll be the laughingstock of the firm.’ He swung his legs over the bed. ‘Tell my wife to come in and get me the hell out of here.’ He looked at the doctor. ‘No offense, but if all you do is come up with a gas pain, you should close up shop.’

The doctor laughed.

‘I just talked to your wife and gave her the good news.’

‘She’s not here?’

‘It would have been for naught,’ the doctor said.

‘I suppose…’ Oliver said, checking himself. He was entitled to feel insecure.

They brought him his clothes, wallet, keys, money, and briefcase, and he dressed, still feeling shaky. In the hospital lobby he went into a phone booth and called home.

‘Oh, Oliver. We’re so happy.’ It was Ann’s voice.

He formed a quick mental picture of her, wheatish hair, light freckles, round face, with a smile that set off deep dimples. He realized suddenly that she was always surreptitiously observing him. Why was she on the phone? he wondered. Where was Barbara?

‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ he mumbled.

‘Barbara’s just left. She’ll be back in a little while. She’s been quite busy on the Pakistan Embassy order.’ She hesitated, as if she were debating something more. But nothing came. He was disappointed.

‘I’m going to see my client here. But I’ll definitely be home tonight. Are the kids okay?’

‘Worried sick. I called them at school after the doctor called.’

‘Super.’ He was about to offer the closing amenities and hang up. ‘Ann,’ he-said, ‘when did they call Barbara? The first time… I mean.’

‘Monday morning. I remember I answered the phone.

Barbara was very disturbed.’ He felt the stab of pain again, but it passed quickly, no longer worrying him.

‘Well, then…’ He seemed suddenly disoriented, troubled as if by a chess move that he could not dope out, knowing the answer was there. ‘Just tell her I’ll be home for dinner.’

After he hung up, he looked mutely at the phone box, still trying to understand the vague sense of loss. To put it out of his mind, he called Larabee.

‘You gave us quite a scare,’ Larabee said. He remembered the unctuousness and the ‘just fine’ admonitions. It annoyed him to know the man had been right all along.

‘You called it,’ Oliver said, irritated at his own attempt at ingratiation. But he could not shake the notion that his display of vulnerability, notwithstanding that it was beyond his control, had somehow spoiled his image. In a lawyer a show of weakness could be fatal. He felt the gorge of his own rhetoric rising, and, as if in counterpoint, a burp bubbled out of his chest and into the mouthpiece.

‘Hello…’ Larabee said.

‘Must be a bad connection,’ Oliver said, feeling better psychologically as well.

Later, he came away from the chairman’s office with the feeling that he had restored some measure of confidence again, shutting off allusions to his indisposition with quick, almost impolite dispatch.

‘Even the doctors felt stupid for making such a fuss,’ he lied, closing the subject once and for all.

But on the plane his ordeal reopened itself in his mind and he found himself making doodles on his yellow pad, watching the changing light of a sunset in an incredibly blue sky. What was nagging at him since being discharged was the lingering sense of utter desolation, of total aloneness. He also felt more fear now than when he was in the hospital. It was beyond logic. He had, after all, been grasped, at least figuratively, from the jaws of death. Then why the depression? Why the loneliness? What was wrong?

‘Call my wife,’ he had whispered to someone. In his memory the words resurfaced as a plea, a drowning man shouting for help. His imagination reversed the roles and he saw himself panicked and hysterical as he dropped everything to fight his way toward Barbara. The images were jumbled. He saw himself swimming through the choppy seas, slogging over shifting desert dunes, clambering upward over jagged rocks, a panorama of heroic acts, just to be near her. Then the fantasy exploded, leaving him empty, betrayed. How dare she not come to his deathbed?