‘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.
The list of pros was formidable and, in her mind, she saw the items actually crawl off the page. He had become a fantastic money earner. Two hundred thousand a year. Not bad for a bureaucrat’s son. She was damned proud of him for that.
And there was the house. It was to his credit that he had seen the possibilities instantly. The neighborhood, Kalorama, tucked behind famed Embassy Row, was, of course, spectacular. It was laced with lovely old trees in full maturity, surrounding homes built earlier in the century for the then elite of the capital. Foreign governments had grabbed up the largest homes for embassies and legations. But Kalorama Circle was the diadem of the neighborhood, especially on its Rock Creek side, a clifflike perch looking downward into what in summer and spring was a lush valley. From the front of the house was the unobstructed view of the lovely Calvert Street Bridge, with its graceful arches and fluted columns topped by heroic eagles. It was certainly a great pleasure to the eye, notwithstanding the fact that it was a favorite jumping point for despondent suicides.
At the time they bought it the house was extremely run down, but the outlines of its French-chateau architecture were in perfect scale, and a coat of white paint on the smooth stucco and the addition of shutters that actually closed and were painted black did wonders for the facade. The double front doors were stripped and finished with a matching black stain and fitted with gold knobs and knockers. The two rusted light sconces above the doors were replaced with elaborate crown-shaped ones topped with complicated embroidered fretwork.
With its high windows on the ground floor, the ornamental wrought iron below the sills of the second, and the dormers built into the rusting slate tile of the third – all windows were sixteen lights – the house exceeded even their own high expectations. They were so delighted with its looks they had a copperplate engraving made of it, which they sent out each Christmas. The house, after all, was them.
Collecting antiques was a joint passion and their weekends were taken up by sorties to auction houses or with combing the old Virginia and Maryland homesteads searching, with a canny eye, for a bargain. Most of their European vacations were devoted to this activity and sprinkled among the furnishings and accessories were memories of each trip, which, in time, became part of the mystique of their collection. Considering the way they had met, collecting antiques seemed a natural extension of their married life, as if they were acting out some youthful fantasy.
She had also always been interested in cooking. Her mother had been an excellent cook, and she had learned a great deal working for professional cooks and bakers on her summer vacations. As the kids demanded less of her time she began to harbor vaguely commercial ideas. There was, she knew, a sense of inadequacy fermenting inside her, although she consciously resisted seeing herself as the traditional woman, which, she thought, was a cruel label hung on some females by their more zealous sisters.
She had designed the kitchen with a commercial idea in mind. Oliver was enormously supportive, although she was never quite sure whether he was merely patronizing her or really believed in her ability to make it as a caterer. Nevertheless, he threw himself into the idea with vigor, devoting his weekends to every aspect of the kitchen’s construction. With his knowledge of electric circuitry and craftsmanship, he gave the contractors a fit. She, in self-defense, learned to decipher much of the background mysteries about how things worked and had even become quite proficient in changing washers, tightening faucets, cleaning grease traps, and repairing the garbage disposal. One Christmas he had even given her her own tool chest. For years he had taught her how to use them in his own basement workshop and she had helped him build the sauna and the adjoining shower, done without the help of a contractor. They had also restripped and finished some of their antique furniture together.
As an upwardly mobile lawyer building his law practice, he traveled frequently, but managed to keep his weekends reasonably sacrosanct. The house, they both knew, enclosed the real limits of their world and they sought out things connected with the house that they could do together. Like indoor gardening, although their interests splintered eventually as he began to cultivate orchids and she continued with her Boston ferns and African violets.