The question seemed aggressive and she ignored it, sitting on the high bed.
‘So what are you going to do with your life, Ann?’ he asked suddenly, as if dismissing his own gloomy thoughts.
‘Jefferson is my life for the present,’ she mumbled. I’d like to be included m yours, she told him silently.
He looked at her kindly and touched her bare shoulder.
‘You’re a gift, Ann. A gift to the children. A special gift to me.’
Barbara had offered gratitude as well and it pained her now. She felt a sense of her inferiority, but dared not ask him for comparisons.
‘I’m not just giving, Oliver. I’m taking, also.’
He stopped caressing her. ‘Now you sound like her.’
She felt a wave of panic. She had acquired a sense of independence and a posture of equality. It did not seem queer to voice her affection in those terms. She saw the gap now. He was of a different generation, with a different way of looking at women. So that’s it, she decided, feeling odd waves of insight, as well as a sense of alliance with Barbara.
‘Nobody wants to be dependent anymore,’ he said gloomily. ‘Whatever happened to man the hunter, man the protector?’
‘Some people just don’t accept the idea of males being lord and master anymore.’
‘I wasn’t, really. We were a team. I was supportive of all her attempts at independence. How could I have known that the bitch was lying to me all those years? It was an act.’ His features became rigid. ‘Maybe this is an act as well.’ He pouted.
‘It’s no act,’ she said, determined to overlook his anger.
‘I’m a little wary of the sincerity of women.’ He sighed.
‘Now you’re generalizing,’ she replied sensibly, scolding} yet trying to keep an air of lightness between them.
‘Maybe so,’ he agreed. ‘I haven’t known too many women. And the one woman I thought I knew I didn’t know at all. That’s what bugs me the most, the imprecision of my understanding of her, of what she was feeling and thinking all those years.’ He looked at Ann, then gave a sigh of resignation. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever again be able to believe what a woman tells me, or shows me.’
‘I can understand that,’ Ann said. ‘We’re a clandestine gender. Lots of dirty little secrets that we’ve been conditioned to suppress.’
‘So have men,’ he replied quickly.
‘Well, then, now that we understand each other…’ She reached out to him and drew him to her. They made love slowly, tenderly, with less greed and transience than before. This time he did not preempt the act. Finally, he rolled over and lay beside her, their fingers locked together. Turning toward him, she watched his eyelids flutter.
‘There is one thing,’ she whispered. ‘Why the house? Why? Considering that the family has already been split apart. It’s only a thing. And all the possessions inside it are things. Why all the pain over the house?’
His eyelids fluttered open.
‘A thing? You don’t understand. It’s the whole world. Why should I let her take the whole world with her?’
‘But it’s also part of her world,’ Ann said gently.
‘It can’t be shared any longer. Not like this.’
‘Then why don’t you simply sell it and split the value?’
‘I’m willing to give her half the value. I paid for it. My brains. My sweat. Christ’
He was frowning and she had the impression he was talking by rote, like an actor going over his lines in rehearsal. Suddenly he stopped talking and was staring at something on top of the bed canopy.
‘What is it, Oliver?’ she asked. He moved leisurely from the bed and crossed the room. Slowly, with quiet deliberation, he moved a chair to a corner of the room and stood on it. He was naked and the act seemed odd and incongruous. She lifted herself on one elbow to observe him, but before she could speak he shook his head and put a finger to his lips. Stretching, he peered over the canopy’s side, then stepped down again. He took a robe from the closet.
With a ringer still on his lips, he quietly opened the door and went into the corridor. By then she was too curious to stay and she followed him into Eve’s room, which was next to his. Ignoring her, he kneeled and began to feel along the baseboard. Then, finding a wire, he traced it along the side of one of Eve’s bookcases. It snaked through a tiny hole near the floor.
‘Bastards,’ he muttered, crawling, following the wire. It led from Eve’s room, along the baseboard of the corridor, then upward again, to the window overlooking the garden. He bounded down the back stairs. She followed quickly behind him. He was lost in concentration. She watched him select a big knife from the wooden box on the kitchen island. Curiosity gave way to fright. She hung back in the shadows while he passed in front of her again and slowly opened the door to the garden.
When it was fully opened he sprang out and, crouching, ran across the yard to the garage, flinging open the back door. She heard noises, groans, then silence. A light was switched on,, bathing the quiet garden in a yellowish haze.
Disregarding the cold, she padded along the moist grass to the garage window. What she saw choked a scream in her throat. Oliver had a knife to a man’s throat. He was a little man in glasses, pale and frightened. She could see the indentation where the knife point pinched the skin.
He drew the man alongside a beige van, with an open side door, through which she could see lighted television screens and tape-recording equipment. Barbara had taken her station wagon and the van was parked in its place. Next to it was Eve’s Honda and beside that, encased in its cover, Oliver’s Ferrari.
She saw the two men disappear into the van through the side door.
Then she saw the tape reels come crashing out of the van, unraveling on the cement garage floor. The man was screeching in protest. When they emerged again, Oliver held the man in a hammerlock, the knife pressed to his throat.
‘…just doing my job,’ she heard the man cackle in fear. Oliver said nothing. A vein palpitated in his forehead. She had never seen him in this state.
Squinting into the glare of the naked garage bulb, viewing this sense of repressed rage and violence, she saw everything in isolation, without connection to herself. Oliver removed the knife point from the man’s neck and looked into the cab of the van. From its seat he grabbed an object, which Ann recognized as Barbara’s electronic door opener. He looked at it for a moment, shrugged, then pointed it toward the heavy door, which opened with a rumble. Then he ordered the man into the driver’s seat. The motor of the van caught and accelerated. A cloud of exhaust filled the air as it backed out of the garage. Reversing quickly, it headed full speed down the alley.
But as it moved, tires squealing on the asphalt, a shattering scream rent the air, a sound of deep pain. The van did not stop, but the sound had shocked Ann into movement and she ran along the gravel path around the garage, ignoring the sharp pain on her bare feet. Oliver was standing over something, a still, black shape.
‘The son of a bitch has run over Mercedes,’ Oliver said, and knelt beside the dead animal.
The events were jumbled in her mind. She was frightened and the distorted, broken animal made her suddenly nauseated and she had a spasm of dry heaves.
‘Serves the bitch right,’ Oliver muttered. She could not recognize his voice. He stabbed his knife into the air and, winding up like a baseball pitcher, flung it into the darkness.
16
He sent Ann up to her own room and spent the next few hours dismantling the television equipment and removing the wire. Then he smashed the camera with a sledgehammer and threw the pieces into the kitchen garbage compactor. When everything was sufficiently flattened, he carted the refuse out to the trash cans in the alley.