A SATURDAY AFTERNOON, hot and scented with fire, a parched sky. The time of year you couldn't even go to the beach because
of the toxic red tide, the time when the city dropped to its knees like ancient Sodom, praying for redemption. We sat in the car down the block from Barry's house, under a carob tree. I hated the way she watched his house, her calm that was not even sane, like a patient hawk on top of a lightning-struck tree. But there was no point in trying to convince her to go home. She no longer spoke the language I did. I broke a carob pod under my nose and smelled the musky scent and pretended I was waiting for my father, a plumber inspecting some pipes in this small brick house with its dandelion-dotted lawn, its leaded picture window with a lamp in it.
Then Barry came out, wearing Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt that said Local Motion, funky little John Lennon sunglasses, his hair in its ponytail. He got in the old gold Lincoln and drove away. "Come on," my mother said. She put on a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind the photo editor used when he handled stills, and threw me a pair. I didn't want to go with her but didn't want to be left in the car either, so I went.
We walked up the path to his house as if we belonged there, and my mother reached into the Balinese spirit house he kept on the porch and pulled out a key. Inside, I was seized again by the sadness of what had happened, the finality. Once I had thought I might even live there, with the big wayang kulit puppets, batik pillows, and dragon kites hanging from the ceiling. His statues of Shiva and Parvati in their eternal embrace hadn't bothered me before, when I thought he and my mother would be like that, that it would last forever and engender a new universe. But now I hated them.
My mother turned on his computer at the great carved desk. The machine whirred. She typed something in and all the things on the screen disappeared. I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have. She took a horseshoe magnet from her purse and wiped it over all his floppy diskettes marked "backup."
"I almost feel sorry for him," she said as she turned the computer off. "But not quite."
She took her X-acto knife and selected a shirt from his closet, his favorite brown shirt. "How right he should wear clothing the color of excrement." She laid it on the bed and slashed it into fringe. Then she tucked a white oleander into a buttonhole.
SOMEONE WAS pounding on our door. She looked up from a new poem she was writing. She wrote all the time now. "Do you think he lost something valuable on that hard disk? Maybe a collection of essays due at the publisher this fall?" It frightened me, watching the door jump on its hinges. I thought of the marks on my mother's arms. Barry wasn't a brutal person, but everyone has a limit. If he got in, she was dead.
But my mother didn't seem upset. In fact, the harder he pounded, the happier she looked, pink-cheeked, bright-eyed. She had brought him back to her. She got out the folding knife from her pencil can and unfolded it against her thigh. We could hear him screaming, crying, his velvet voice rubbed threadbare. "I'm going to kill you, Ingrid, so help me God."
The pounding stopped. My mother listened, holding the knife open against the white silk of her robe. Suddenly he was on the other side of the apartment, pounding on the windows, we could see him, his face distorted with rage, huge and terrifying in the oleanders. I shrank back against the wall, but my mother just stood in the center of the room, gleaming, like a grassfire.
"I'm going to kill you!" he screamed.
"So helpless in his fury," my mother said to me. "Impotent, one might say."
He broke a windowpane. I could tell he hadn't intended to because he hesitated, and then, in a sudden burst of courage, he thrust his arm through the window and fumbled for the latch. She crossed the room faster than I could have believed possible, lifted her arm and stabbed him in the hand. The knife struck home. She had to jerk it out, and his arm raced back through the hole in the window. "You bloody bitch!" he was screaming.
I wanted to hide, to stop up my ears, but I couldn't stop watching. This was how love and passion ended. The lights were going on in the next building.
"My neighbors are calling the police," she said out the broken window. "You better go."
He stumbled away, and in a moment we heard him kick the front door. "You fucking cunt. You won't get away with this. You can't do this to me."
She threw open the front door then, and stood there in her white kimono, his blood on her knife. "You don't know what I can do," she said softly.
AFTER THAT NIGHT, she couldn't find him anymore, at the Virgins or Barney's, at parties or club dates. He changed his locks. We had to use a metal pasteup ruler to open a window. This time she put a sprig of oleander in his milk, another in his oyster sauce, in his cottage cheese. She stuck one in his toothpaste. She made an arrangement of white oleanders in a hand-blown vase on his coffee table, and scattered blooms on his bed. I was torn. He deserved to be punished, but now she had crossed over some line. This wasn't revenge. She'd had her revenge, she had won, but it was like she didn't even know it. She was drifting outside the limit of all reason, where the next stop was light-years away through nothing but darkness. How lovingly she arranged the dark leaves, the white blooms.
A POLICE OFFICER showed up at our apartment. The officer, Inspector Ramirez, informed her that Barry was accusing her of breaking and entering and of trying to poison him. She was completely calm. "Barry is terribly angry with me," she said, posing in the doorway, her arms crossed. "I ended our relationship several weeks ago, and he just can't let go of it. He's obsessed with me. He even tried to break into this apartment. This is my daughter, Astrid, she can tell you what happened."
I shrugged. I didn't like this. It was going way too far.
My mother kept going without missing a comma. "The neighbors even called the police that night. You must have a record of it. And now he's accusing me of breaking into his house? That poor man, really, he's not all that attractive, it must be hard for him."
Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway. Oh Inspector Ramirez, her eyes said, you're a good-looking man, how could you understand someone as desperate as Barry Kolker?
After he left, how she laughed.
THE NEXT TIME we saw Barry was at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, where he liked to shop for ugly gag gifts for his friends. My mother wore a hat that dappled her face with light. He saw her and turned away quickly, fear plain as billboards, but then he thought again, turned back, smiled at us.