Their first year together had been good, the next four tolerable until after Laura was born, and the rest... well, nightmarish was too strong a word, but peace and harmony were virtually nonexistent in his life the past two and a half decades. Katie had been unplanned, the result of one of the few times Ruth had grudgingly permitted him to satisfy what she referred to as his “carnal male appetite.” And the last. She blamed him for the “accident,” of course, and had refused to allow him into her bed since. Not that he’d asked very often, or cared to in so long he could barely recall what it was like to have a carnal male appetite.
Now, at sixty-two, he had only one appetite left: for the room of his own, where he could be alone to read, listen to music, watch old movies and TV programs that interested him. (Ruth refused to look at anything other than soap operas, sitcoms, and gory crime shows on the new forty-inch flat-screen high-definition television set she’d bought without telling him. Whenever he turned on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel or an old black and white film, she immediately switched channels.)
“I’ve never asked you for much,” he said to her one evening, when his den-hunger had reached the critical point. “Please don’t deny me this.”
“You don’t need a den.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why? So you can hide in it, I suppose. Get away from me.”
“No,” he said. Yes, he thought. “It’s a matter of comfort. You like your TV programs, I prefer different ones. Or to just sit quietly and read.”
“Do I try to stop you from reading?”
“No, but I can’t concentrate with the TV blaring—”
“Blaring? I suppose you think I turn the sound up on purpose to annoy you. Well, I don’t. My hearing isn’t what it used to be, you know that. Don’t be so inconsiderate, Wyatt.”
It was impossible to reason with the woman. She turned everything around so that she was right and he was wrong, she made the sacrifices and he was the thoughtless one.
He kept pleading with her just the same. “You have your sewing room. Is it really too much to want a private space of my own?”
“I won’t have you turning Katie’s room into a man cave.”
“A what?”
“You heard me. Man cave. That’s what they call them now.”
“A simple den, for heaven’s sake?”
“Den. Another word for cave. Smelly places men lock themselves into to avoid their wives and responsibilities. Next thing you’ll be wanting a computer so you can look at pictures of naked women.”
“I don’t want a computer. I don’t want to look at pornographic pictures. All I want is a comfortable chair, a small TV set, a CD player—”
“We can’t afford any of that nonsense.”
“—and all my books. Yes, we can. I’ll buy everything at garage sales or Goodwill.”
“No. I won’t have it.”
“Ruth, please—”
“No!”
The next morning she vacuumed and dusted Katie’s room, closed the blinds and frilly curtains over the window that overlooked the backyard, then made him watch as she locked the door and dropped the key into her pocket — the key she had used to keep Katie locked inside as punishment for real or imagined misbehavior as often as Katie had used it for personal privacy.
“There now,” she said. “That settles it.”
Yes, it did. But not the way she thought.
He had never before gone against Ruth’s wishes, and he was well aware of what was likely to happen if he did. But he was determined to have his den. If not with her permission, then without it through daring and guile and damn the consequences. And once he had it, he would keep it no matter what she said or did.
It didn’t take him long to develop a plan of action. What he came to think of as an adventure, a covert one that added a small but spicy element of danger to his quest.
Ruth did all their grocery shopping alone, claiming that he slowed her down by dilly-dallying and bought too many useless food and drug items — a pair of gross exaggerations. The next time she went, he called Katie in the city and told her what he proposed to do. She had no objections to the makeover of her old room, in fact encouraged him in the project. Out of spite for her mother, he thought, not because she cared whether or not he had his den. Katie had inherited some of Ruth’s less than endearing traits, though she would have thrown a fit if this had been suggested to her.
Wyatt’s next step was a search for Katie’s room key. Ruth hadn’t bothered to pick a clever hiding place for it; it took only a few minutes to find it, in the back of a drawer in her sewing table. For the time being he left it where it was.
Saturdays from eleven until five o’clock were reserved for Ruth’s weekly visit with her widowed sister Elaine in Bayport. Wyatt made prior arrangements with a locksmith to come by at noon the following Saturday; fetched the key to unlock the door before the man arrived and then returned it to the sewing drawer. The locksmith replaced the lock with a similar one, after which Wyatt added its key to his keyring. There was virtually no risk in this maneuver. Ruth would have no reason to try to enter the room again during the next month — one cleaning-and-dusting was always good for at least four weeks. And once she laid down the law, she expected him to obey it implicitly.
Over the next few weeks, whenever Ruth was out shopping or away at her sister’s, he began making Katie’s room over into his. He boxed up the relatively few articles of clothing and other possessions that she’d left behind, added a scattering of toilet articles from the adjacent bathroom, and stored the cartons among others in the garage in case she wanted any of it someday. The bedside lamps and the fuzzy white throw rug also went into concealed storage. With the window blinds closed tight, there was no danger of Ruth happening to look inside while she was out puttering in her rose garden.
Seven days later Wyatt elicited the aid of Charlie Ledbetter, one of his few remaining friends, and together they moved out the remaining items. The bed, nightstands, bureau, and small writing desk went to a Goodwill donation center, the mattress and frilly window curtains to a local recycler. The room was then completely empty. Or it was until he and Charlie carried in the half dozen boxes of books — travel, Western Americana, a complete set of the classics — that Ruth had made him put in the garage because she refused to have “all those dust catchers cluttering up my house.” Charlie, who understood electrical matters, also found a way to hook up the new TV set to the house cable line.
Wyatt made the rounds of thrift shops and the local flea market the following week. A small portable TV set and roller stand were his first purchases, then a combination radio and CD player that a vendor called a “baby boom box.” He returned home just in time to lock the last of the items in his den before Ruth came back.
The next two Saturdays, again with Charlie’s help, he bought and moved in a chair, two medium-size bookcases, and a small oriental rug. The chair was a brown naugahyde recliner with a torn but reparable arm that cost him surprisingly little at a hospice thrift store. The bookcases, a matching pair stained a light walnut color that went well with the recliner, came from a garage sale. The rug, which looked expensive but wasn’t, had been an impulse buy at another thrift shop — three by four feet in size, an exotic wine red color with a blue, green, and yellow design and fringed edges.
When he had everything arranged to his satisfaction, he sat down in the recliner and surveyed his domain. It might not be perfect, but it was his and it pleased him — so much so that he couldn’t stop smiling.
There was nothing more to be gained in keeping it a secret from Ruth, he decided. It wouldn’t be possible anyway if he was going to spend time in here. Might as well unveil it to her as soon as she came home. When she saw how simply and inexpensively furnished it was, how happy it made him, she might not even make a fuss.