The War Of The Roses Part 2

Oliver felt the first stab of pain just as Mr. Larabee finished talking, a familiarization lecture, really, outlining the company's special problem with the Federal Trade Commission. He had been taking notes on a lined yellow legal pad and now the pencil made jiggling swirls as if it were writing independently. They were sitting around a conference table in the chairman's office in Manhattan and he'd already had more cups of coffee before lunch than was his custom.

At first he tried to dismiss the pain, but when he began to break into a cold sweat, a charge of panic gripped him and he put down his pencil and tried to cover up his discomfort with a cough. Then the chairman began to direct his remarks to Oliver, and the words sounded m.u.f.fled, incoherent, and far away. He tried to humor the pain away, hoping to extract a laugh from the abysmal predicament. It was everybody's dread to be struck down suddenly in the middle of some important event. Bladder and bowels would void. There would be vomiting and, worst of all, he would be inconveniencing everybody around him, all of whom couldn't care less. And there was the perennial joke about clean underwear just in case, but that usually applied to women.

'You feel all right, Rose?' the chairman asked.

Oliver managed a nod but knew it was unconvincing. Someone poured him a gla.s.s of water from a silver pitcher, but he couldn't get it down.

'This is ridiculous,' he whispered.

He was led to a leather couch, and he lay down and managed to open his collar and loosen his tie.

'I'm sure it will pa.s.s,' he croaked. That, too, seemed unconvincing. The stabs of pain were becoming an onslaught behind his breastbone.

'His color stinks,' someone said. He felt a hand on his forehead.

'Cold as ice.'

He heard someone say 'ambulance,' and realized suddenly that his sensory powers were becoming numb. His heart seemed ready to break out of his rib cage. His mind raced back and forth in time and memory and he wondered if he was the proverbial drowning man watching his life pa.s.s across his mind like a film in quadruple time.

'This is stupid,' he heard himself say, knowing that the words had not been spoken.

'You'll be fine,' Larabee said unctuously. Oliver had detested the man immediately and resented his concern.

I'm only forty, he thought as panic turned to pity, directed inward. He prayed he wouldn't soil his pants, remembering old admonitions from his childhood. There they were, the first signs. What galled him, too, was the lack of planning, and he wondered if he had paid all his insurance premiums. If you died at forty, your family would get a million, the insurance man had a.s.sured him, and Oliver had snickered at that, choosing term instead of whole life.

How can I die? he thought. My parents are still living. My grandparents on both sides died in their eighties. Then he counted all the people he would be letting down and that only increased his panic and he wondered if he would soon lose consciousness.

He lost track of time as he lay there. Someone covered him with a blanket but he still felt icy.

'You'll be fine,' the chairman said, his jowly face flushed with either concern or annoyance.

I've blown the first big interview with a new law client, Oliver thought, imagining the reaction of his colleagues in the firm. Poor old Oliver. Sorry son of a b.i.t.c.h. Two antiseptic-smelling, white-jacketed attendants lifted him to a wheeled stretcher, and he saw the oxygen mask coming quickly toward him. He also saw his own finger crooking in front of his eyes, beckoning. Larabee's face came closer.

'Call my wife,' Oliver croaked. The oxygen mask was clapped over his face, and he felt the motion of moving wheels, then the swirl of outdoor sounds and the ear-splitting siren as the ambulance shot forward. An icy stethoscope startled his suddenly bared chest.

'Who knows?' a voice said as the stethoscope was lifted.

'Am I going to die?' he whispered futilely into his mask. He burped and for a moment felt incredibly relieved until the pain started again. His mind had momentarily cleared, then he felt insular again as he pictured Barbara's tearstained face, and Eve's and Josh's, hovering over him, waiting for the exact moment of demise, a death-watch. I've let them down, he rebuked himself.

A flood of letdowns careened down the spillway of his anxiety-ridden mind. Who would feed Benny? Who would turn the wine, care for the orchids, wind the tall mahogany clock? Who would repair the broken appliances, watch over the antiques, the paintings, the Staffords.h.i.+re figures? And who would tune up the Ferrari? How dare they separate him from his ch.o.r.es, his possessions? The idea was almost as unbearable as the pain.

He felt a pinp.r.i.c.k in his arm and soon the pain eased somewhat, and he was floating in s.p.a.ce, like an astronaut in a s.p.a.ce capsule. Some horrible nightmare nudged at his consciousness. But he couldn't remember it, only that it was horrible. Then he sensed the ground moving under him as the wheels b.u.mped along a corridor. Above him, the ceiling was lined with fluorescent white lights. The glare hurt his eyes.

When they removed the oxygen mask, he whispered again.

'Call my wife. Call Barbara.'

Vaguely, he could feel them hooking him up to something and, in the distance, he heard a rhythmical blip* ping and unfamiliar sounds. Nearby, he could make out whispered voices hovering somewhere in s.p.a.ce. If they could get Barbara in time, he knew that everything would be fine. His life depended on Barbara. He would not die if Barbara came.

4.

When he remembered again, the room had darkened; he heard the steady blip blip and and ping 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. 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 all the revolutions, and living together without benefit of legal marriage was still a few years away. 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 a.s.sured 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, repet.i.tively, 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 a.s.sumed, were about his own mysterious carca.s.s. 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 gla.s.s 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 cl.u.s.ters 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.. . .

G.o.d, 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 a.s.sumed 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 b.u.t.tocks tingled, apparently from the needle p.r.i.c.ks. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 ent.i.tled 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 surrept.i.tiously 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 Emba.s.sy 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 pa.s.sed 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.

'h.e.l.lo ...' 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 s.h.i.+fting 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?

5.

Why had she not come? Barbara asked herself, smirking at her inadvertent double entendre. The boning knife, working in her hand by rote, carefully separated the chicken skin from the neck bone, a crucial step in achieving a perfect boning job. This was her fourth chicken-boning operation that afternoon and her mind had already begun to wander. It wandered into strange places, as if she had little control of her thoughts. She did not often think about s.e.x and was surprised that the subject surfaced in her mind.

He made love to her tenderly, fervently, but lit no fires in her. She was always dutiful, enduring what had become for her a dreary process, barely remembering when such contortions and gymnastics had ever brought her pleasure. He was not, she knew, oblivious of this indifference despite her Academy Award performances.

'Even when it's not so good, it's pretty great,' he told her often, usually after he had calmed from a panting, s.h.i.+very episode of obvious and sometimes noisy personal pleasure.

'It's there to enjoy, my son,' she had responded, hiding her disappointment behind the light humor. Wisecracks were great truth-hiders. She hadn't really understood her s.e.xual indifference, especially since she was once a firecracker as far as he was concerned. But that was long ago. Then, before their marriage, all she had to do was to touch him to feel all the pops begin inside her.

For years, when considering their marriage, she had

toted up lists of pros and cons. s.e.x had become one of the cons, although she did not blame him wholly for her odd lack of response. Something had changed in their chemistry, she decided. After all, it took two to tango. Secredy she knew she was excitable and could occasionally summon up fantasies and with a little digital manipulation was able to coax out a reasonable response. But she detested even thinking about that.

The list of pros was formidable and, in her mind, she saw the items actually crawl off the page. He had become a fantastic money earner. Two hundred thousand a year. Not bad for a bureaucrat's son. She was d.a.m.ned proud of him for that.

And there was the house. It was to his credit that he had seen the possibilities instantly. The neighborhood, Kalorama, tucked behind famed Emba.s.sy Row, was, of course, spectacular. It was laced with lovely old trees in full maturity, surrounding homes built earlier in the century for the then elite of the capital. Foreign governments had grabbed up the largest homes for emba.s.sies and legations. But Kalorama Circle was the diadem of the neighborhood, especially on its Rock Creek side, a clifflike perch looking downward into what in summer and spring was a lush valley. From the front of the house was the un.o.bstructed view of the lovely Calvert Street Bridge, with its graceful arches and fluted columns topped by heroic eagles. It was certainly a great pleasure to the eye, notwithstanding the fact that it was a favorite jumping point for despondent suicides.

At the time they bought it the house was extremely run down, but the outlines of its French-chateau architecture were in perfect scale, and a coat of white paint on the smooth stucco and the addition of shutters that actually closed and were painted black did wonders for the facade. The double front doors were stripped and finished with a matching black stain and fitted with gold k.n.o.bs and knockers. The two rusted light sconces above the doors were replaced with elaborate crown-shaped ones topped with complicated embroidered fretwork.

With its high windows on the ground floor, the ornamental wrought iron below the sills of the second, and the dormers built into the rusting slate tile of the third - all windows were sixteen lights - the house exceeded even their own high expectations. They were so delighted with its looks they had a copperplate engraving made of it, which they sent out each Christmas. The house, after all, was them.

Collecting antiques was a joint pa.s.sion and their weekends were taken up by sorties to auction houses or with combing the old Virginia and Maryland homesteads searching, with a canny eye, for a bargain. Most of their European vacations were devoted to this activity and sprinkled among the furnis.h.i.+ngs and accessories were memories of each trip, which, in time, became part of the mystique of their collection. Considering the way they had met, collecting antiques seemed a natural extension of their married life, as if they were acting out some youthful fantasy.