‘But it’s wrong to keep someone locked up.’
She had deliberately avoided taking Valium for months. High on life, she had told herself, but the business problems began to crowd in on her. Soon the kids would be off to camp, she reasoned, and she might be able to scrimp and get back on her feet financially without Oliver’s finding out. If only he would get the hell out of the house. His presence galled her. It was unfair. Wrong. She admitted to herself that she would have been perfectly content had he been boiled alive in the sauna. She wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
Then Thurmont called her.
‘He’s found out about the overdue utility bills. He’s fuming. Goldstein was leering through the phone.’
‘Then we’ve simply got to ask Oliver for more. It’s simply not enough. I never had trouble before this.’
‘He cheerfully paid everything, Barbara. Remember, this is a divorce action. And there’s a written agreement. The case doesn’t come up for a few more months. If you get yourself more into the hole, you may be forced to compromise.’
‘Never,’ she said. She paused, then looked into the mouthpiece of the phone. ‘Are you charging me for this call?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then bug off.’
She spent a great deal of time now holed up in her room. It began to get warm, and she opened the windows. Before, she would not have thought twice about turning on the air conditioner. Now she resisted, concerned about the utility bills. Mostly she brooded about her former self, that stupid little doll baby willing to sacrifice herself, everything, for some silly, girlish romantic notion.
‘For you, Oliver,’ she had said, ‘I’ll do anything. Anything.’ He had offered her the same assurance, but it didn’t mean the same thing. She remembered how his every utterance was pregnant with wisdom. She had idolized him, worshiped him, remembering how she would watch his sleeping face in the quickening light of morning, kiss his fluttering eyelids, his puffed sweet lips, and when he held her in his arms, she knew that the world had really stopped just for her, just for that moment. In her mind, she heard bells now, warning bells, Are bells, ominous clanging, banging bells pealing for her lost innocence. They toll for you, Barbara, you dumb little snit, falling for that line. She blamed her parents. She blamed her friends. She blamed the movies, the songs of eternal love, the romantic lies. Sentimental bondage. Love lies.
One night she could not resist and took two Valium, expecting oblivion and relief from her racing thoughts. It didn’t happen. She twisted and turned. She took a hot shower. Then an icy shower. Nothing helped. She felt agitated beyond her ability to control herself. Her heart pounded. She sweated alternately hot and cold. The drug’s reaction confused her.
Terrors magnified in her mind. She felt she was drowning, choking. She could not sit in one place. She went downstairs and sat in the library. The Staffordshire figures seemed to come to life, moving, dancing, mocking her with their cobalt eyes. Like Oliver’s. Her hands shook and she opened the armoire and took a long, burning swallow from the bottle. It made her worse.
She went upstairs and changed into her jeans, then went outside. It was late May and warm and she walked through the quiet Kalorama streets, turned left on Connecticut Avenue, then walked as fast as she could. Sometimes she jogged for a few blocks. She could not stop herself. Once a policeman stopped his squad car and called out to her.
‘It’s too late for jogging, lady.’
‘Bug off. It’s a free country.’
‘It’s your ass,’ she heard him say.
The sweat poured out of her body and she was surprised to see that she had reached Chevy Chase Circle. She sat on a bench in the middle of the circle, watching occasional cars speed around it. The circling images triggered a thought. Then another. And another. Finally, a revelation. She crossed the circle and ran to a public phone and dialed Thurmont’s number, hearing his sleep-fogged, panicked voice.
‘He did something to the Valium,’ she shouted into the phone. ‘I know he did something. That dirty bastard.’
Thurmont seemed confused, but her mind was clearing.
‘He substituted something else for the Valium. It created the opposite effect. I was all strung out. I’m getting better.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Near Chevy Chase Circle.’
‘Don’t do anything stupid, Barbara.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I will never do anything stupid again.’
21
Oliver didn’t tell Goldstein about the mold he had made of the lock to Barbara’s room and the key he had made from the mold. He could predict Goldstein’s insufferable comments. How could that supercilious asshole know what it was like to walk in his, Oliver’s moccasins? Nor could he tell Goldstein about the Dexedrine he had put into the Valium capsules he’d emptied.
With whom could he argue his justification? The acts, to any reasonable observer, would seem irrational, certainly provocative. But bow could the observer react to what she had done to him? The sauna. The wine. The detective. This was no ordinary situation. He had to be alert, always. Watchful. And how could any reasonable person explain her actions. Like suddenly deciding out of the blue that it was time to break up the family. It was as if an alarm clock had rung in her head. ‘All right, Oliver. Time’s up.’
‘Patience,’ Goldstein had implored through a fog of cigar smoke. That was exactly the course he would take. Patience. The angels were on his side.
On the question of finances, Goldstein approached him cautiously.
‘She’s overextended businesswise. Be patient. Sooner or later, they’ll come to us with a proposition.’
‘What about the utility bills? They’ll shut us off.’
‘Close to the vest now, Rose. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Business always looks easy on the outside. She’ll have to come to us. She has no other source of income.’
‘Two thou a month. Just to run the house, the bare minimum. My God, it’s a fortune.’
‘Not if you’re financing a business. She’ll come to us. You’ll see.’
As Goldstein said, he was to be patient. Meanwhile, the utility companies called him repeatedly, threatening.
‘My wife pays them,’ he had assured the various spokesmen.
‘No, she doesn’t.’
The day the children left for camp, both he and Barbara showed up at the parking lot of the Sidwell Friends School. Driving the Ferrari, he had followed Barbara’s station wagon, into which she had piled the kids and their luggage. Eve’s eyes were still puffy after an emotional farewell to Ann. She had gone off to live at the YWGA on Seventeenth Street, informing him with a note she had slipped under his door.
‘And if you ever need me,’ she wrote, ‘I’m ready.’ It was unsigned. Reading it, he had felt a pang of guilt. He had treated her badly, he decided, but he had not caused her to love him. Love. What a contemptible word. It should be abolished, especially since it did not accurately describe an enduring emotion. He had loved Barbara. Once he had told her, long ago, that love was just God’s way of randomly splitting two people and letting them find themselves. When they did, they were one. That was love. That was, he thought now, unmitigated bullshit. No, he corrected himself, that gave it too much dignity. Love was a fart.
It was awkward saying good-bye to the children, who looked at them from the bus window with anxious eyes.
‘I sure wish you two would either make up or make peace,’ Josh had whispered to him, and Oliver assumed he had whispered the same thing to his mother. He hugged the boy, not without some additional pang of regret. What he regretted was that Josh had been created out of her genes as well. Part her. Somehow it diminished his love of the boy. Josh had his mother’s deep-set Slavic eyes. He could not bear the guilt of such an unworthy feeling. He had the same feeling about Eve. It’s wrong, he decided. Against nature. And seeing Barbara hug and caress the children before they stepped into the bus, he had to turn away. The sight disturbed him.