The War of the Roses

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 bitch. 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 Staffordshire figures? And who would tune up the Ferrari? How dare they separate him from his chores, his possessions? The idea was almost as unbearable as the pain.

He felt a pinprick in his arm and soon the pain eased somewhat, and he was floating in space, like an astronaut in a space 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 bumped 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 space. 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 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.