The War of the Roses

'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?

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 sex 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, shivery 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 sexual 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. Sex 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.