by Warren Adler
‘Well, look at it this way,’ she said. ‘At least we got the kids out of it.’
‘The kids? I hadn’t thought of them for a while.’
‘Neither have I.’
‘They’re fine, I suppose.’
‘No news is good news. I’m glad they’re out of the line of fire.’
‘See how civilized we can be, Barbara.’ Silendy he raised his goblet, then she did.
‘People don’t matter,’ he said gloomily. ‘Only things. Things are loyal. Always there. Always true. Some things increase in value. Never people. People diminish.’ He looked at her and smiled drunkenly.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll just take back my offer.’
‘And all you have to do is take half the value. Cold cash. Lots of it. Then get out. Fini.’
‘Not till hell freezes over,’ she said. ‘It won’t in this heat.’
‘Then we’ll just have to tough it out, won’t we?’
‘I’ll drink to that.’ He upended his goblet, then opened another bottle. He held it up and looked at her. ‘Chateau Beycheville.’ He squinted at the label. ‘A ’64. I think we had a good year in ’64.’
‘Only in your mind, Oliver. Never in mine.’
Upending the bottle, he drank from it. Then he held it up again, pointing it for emphasis.
‘I want you out of my house,’ he said. ‘This is my place.’
‘Exactly my sentiments, Oliver,’ she said coolly. He raised his voice. ‘I have more right to it than you.’
‘Don’t talk to me about rights.’
‘I love it more than you do. I deserve it. You don’t love it.’
‘I don’t have to listen to this crap.’
‘You can’t take everything away. You’ve got to leave me something.’
‘Don’t get maudlin.’
She felt the tension building in him.
‘You’re selfish and grasping, Barbara. Loathsome. A loathsome bitch.’
‘I worked for it. I’m going to fight for it.’
He drained the botde and let it fall to the floor. It rolled, unbroken, under the table. He staggered toward the door.
‘Thanks for the pate,’ he croaked.
‘Don’t thank me.’ She paused until she was sure she had his attention. ‘Thank Benny.’
’Benny.’
He staggered against the wall, putting out an arm for support. He sagged but with effort straightened up and looked toward her, his eyes spitting rage. She sensed the reflex even before he moved, his raised hand suddenly materializing, holding the crowbar. Reaching for her shopping bag, she lifted it, clutched it to her chest, and got up, overturning her chair.
She saw the crowbar fall in a long, sweeping motion that pushed the candelabrum from the table. Methodically, he stepped on each candle, putting out the flames.
The darkness was total. She reached for the cleaver handle, then held it above her head, fully prepared to use it in self-defense. She was determined to show him the full extent of her stubbornness and her courage.
She had expected him to come at her and was surprised when he didn’t. He is afraid, she thought.
A deafening sound roared through the room. She heard the nerve-tingling scrape of metal on wood and the sound of his crowbar biting into the Duncan Phyfe table. The pain of the injured wood seemed to transfer itself to her own flesh. Under cover of the darkness, she backed out of the room and moved silently through the hall corridor, up the stairs, and into Josh’s room.
She curled up in Josh’s closet, her shopping bag in her lap, her fist clenching the handle of the cleaver. The beating of her heart partially obscured the sounds of his destructive tantrum.
28
For a long while he lay on the floor of his room trying to reenter time. He was procrastinating, since finding time again meant he would also find pain. Without time he could lie here through eternity. He would be able to avoid existence. Existence was the enemy.
The room had grown dark, then light, then dark again. He was not certain of the chronology. That would mean he had re-entered time. He lay in a pool of his own fetid moisture. Discovering this condition irritated him because it meant that he had also reentered space. When it became apparent that such consciousness was unavoidable, he opened his eyes.
It was daylight, of some day. He was determined to avoid the concept of time as long as possible. The room was strewn with empty wine bottles. The movement of his legs jostled some and they rolled against one another. The sound reminded him of his thirst, and he began to crawl on his hands and knees in search of filled bottles.
Finding one, he lifted himself up to a squat and, unable to find a corkscrew, smashed the neck against the floor and poured the wine into his mouth. It splashed over his chin and onto his bare chest. It did not even occur to him to try to identify the wine. It could have been white or red. His palate was numb, his sense of taste gone.
When he felt vaguely restored, he lifted himself to a standing position by grabbing the bedpost. Dizzy and nauseated, he dry-heaved, then swallowed. Time was crowding in on him now. There was no escaping it.
His ear picked up vague sounds, and he was sure his ally, the house, was trying to communicate with him. Something croaked in the distance, a chopping sound. It was trying to tell him something. He was sure of that. It wanted to communicate its pain, its outrage.
The idea of its helplessness steadied him. It also brought him fully back to time and he realized suddenly that the clock in the hall was not chiming, that he had forgotten to keep it alive by winding it. A renewable life, he assured himself.
Although the present now existed, the immediate past was unclear. History unreeled backward from now. He had searched for her. He had looked in the kitchen, the sun-room, the garden, the garage. He had ripped out the back stairs to prevent her from leaving if she was still in the house. Then he had combed the sides of the house, letting himself in again by the front door. He had got it into his head that she was in the attic, and he had dashed up the stairs, then foolishly tried to ascend the upper flight, forgetting what he had done to make it impassable. He had slipped and fallen before he had gone two steps up. Apparently he, himself, had made the attic invulnerable.
Although the obstacle was of his own making, it had sparked his caution. If she had done that to Benny, she was capable of anything. Anything. And if he were eliminated, who would guard the house?
Once, he had heard sounds and had followed them, hearing screams of pain, and he had arrived in the sun-room to see a vaguely familiar form running in the garden. Ann. He had not set these traps for Ann, and he was thankful that she had escaped. It was not her war. The traps were for Barbara.
It was that idea, he remembered, that had brought him back to his room, where he had let time disappear. He was certain that she was somewhere in the house. Probably living like a rat, burrowing in every nook and cranny. What he had to do was to flush her out. Cautiously. Cleverly. Nothing must be safe.
He lay down, letting his mind grope for a plan. It started to grow dark again. On the night table beside him he found a half-spent candle and lit it with a match. The flickering yellow light calmed him. He felt safe again and his mind became fully alert.
He ate some stale bread and washed it down with wine. Carrying his crowbar and the candle, he carefully opened the door. His foot hit some object and he heard a crunching sound. Bending, he saw a broken Staffordshire figure, one of the most valuable, Garibaldi. Eschewing mourning, he lifted the candle. In its glow he saw her familiar scrawl in lipstick. She no longer used paper or cardboard, but wrote directly on the door.
‘I’ll break some every day,’ he read.
He did not allow himself the slightest emotion, concentrating only on what he had to do. Gathering his tools, first he removed all the bolts from the hinges of every door but his own – closets, room doors, everywhere there was a hinge. No door but his own and those leading to the outside world could be opened without barking out a
signal. He set each door carefully so that the slightest motion would make it fall. Then he went to work on the furniture, loosening bolts, removing legs and supports, tipping every piece so that it would fall on touch.
He avoided the dining room, which was a shambles, although he could not resist looking at what he had carved into the tabletop: bitch. He loosened every screw and bolt in the kitchen he could find, especially those that held up still-intact overhead pots, leaving them just at the point of weakest tension. He did the same with shelves and cabinet doors. Working methodically, concentrating only on his actions, he was able to shut out extraneous thoughts.
The candle went out. By then it had started to grow light again. Thankful for the natural light, he moved the heaviest cast-iron pots and put them at the top of the first-floor landing. Others he wedged into the corners of the risers.
Working now with accelerating speed, he loosened the winding brass banister, then partially removed the tacks that held the stair carpet to the risers. Just brushing against the banister would sent the carpet flipping over into the chandelier well.
The clock offered another challenge. He fiddled with the pendulum to make a longer stroke so that it would hit the wooden sides. Working with the mechanism, he changed the calibration so that the chimes would be noisier and make more of a clanging sound. Then he loosened all the fasteners that held the pictures on the walls of the library and the parlor.
He reveled in his creativity, rejoicing in the imaginative scenario of destruction that would be set off by the slightest vibration. Everything would go off at once, like an explosion in a fireworks factory. The thought made him giddy. With extreme caution, he made his way up the stairs to his room and quiedy locked the door.
Searching among the existing bottles, he found two, both 1969 Dom Perignon. Despite its warmth, he opened one. The cork made a noisy popping sound and the champagne foamed out. Drinking some, he poured the rest over his head, as athletes do when they win a championship game.
But he hadn’t won yet, he admonished himself.
Not yet. He’d save the other bottle for that victory.
29
From her makeshift bed, composed of insulation pads piled one on top of the other in a corner of the attic, she heard him puttering around beneath her. The attic air was stagnant, blazing hot, and she had removed everything but her panties. Beside her was the canvas shopping bag, containing all her movable possessions.
For the past days and nights she had shifted from place to place, moving stealthily, using all her senses.
The movement below was something new. For some time he had been snoring, with froglike regularity, and she had slipped out of her hiding place to make a sortie into other parts of the house. She had gone into the library and put some Staffordshire figures in her shopping bag, crushing the Garibaldi and sprinkling its contents outside his locked door. Then she had calmly written her warning on his door in lipstick.
She let herself into her old room, looking for some change of clothing, but the room stank from the rotting food and she had to hold her nose. Every object in the room, including her clothes, was permeated with the stench.
Because her inner antenna was so alert, she sensed that someone was watching the house. Peeking through a crack in the drapes, she saw Ann dozing against a tree across the street. It took a while to identify the figure, since she had closed the door on the past. Who was Ann?
She remembered Ann as an enemy, hostile, and she quickly removed the girl from reality by closing the shutters, sealing off the room.
She made her way upstairs, defying his trap by sitting on one step at a time and bracing herself against the wall. It pleased her to have conquered this obstacle. She had already withstood all his assaults. Indeed, she had come up with a few of her own. Her weapon, she decided, would be tenacity. She would outlast him.
He was making no effort to be quiet, and she was able to slip from the attic through the square hole in the ceiling of a storage closet at-the rear of the house. Crawling toward the edge of the stairs, she listened to the sounds he was making, trying to recognize them to identify his actions. He was fiddling with doors and furniture. She heard him go into the kitchen, come out to the foyer, then move up the stairs.
Her instincts were sharp, and by the sounds he made she was able to map his progress. Finally, she came back to the storage closet and hoisted herself back into the attic, pleased with her catlike agility. Lying horizontally across the square opening, she continued to listen. He was setting traps, constructing obstacles, creating new dangers. The idea amused her. Didn’t he know that the house was her ally? Nothing he devised could really hurt her. How foolish of him not to realize that.
In her mind each isolated sound outlined his little ploys, his booby traps. She was certain she knew exactly what he was doing. Well, she had a few tricks of her own up her sleeve.
She groped on hands and knees through the blazing-hot attic, half lit by daylight filtering through slatted vents. Over one shoulder she carried her shopping bag. She had made a sling for the cleaver and carried it stretched across her chest like a bow.
Once before, she had crawled into this attic space. Years ago, when the men had come to attach the chandelier. An engineer had determined that the main beam had to be reinforced if the chandelier was to be safely attached, and additional wooden beams were superimposed over the original one.
She found the exact spot where the chandelier’s chain was embedded by spikes in the beams. She remembered that the men who had attached it were proud of their handiwork. And, indeed, they should have been. The chandelier was perfectly balanced and safe, considering that it was hanging from a chain three stories high.
She hacked away at the wooden beam with her cleaver. It was hard work. The cleaver was not as effective as an ax. Sweat poured out of her, and she had to rest periodically. Her objective was to weaken the beam and, therefore, the stability of the chandelier. Just in case she needed an ultimate weapon. He, too, she knew, was sparing no energy, concocting ingenious traps.
After hacking away for nearly an hour, she lay exhausted on the insulation pads until her energy returned.
It was dark when she let herself down from the attic hole. She heard him close the door of his room, as always the signal that she could leave the safety of the attic. Her fingers moved ahead of her, like fluttering antennas. The closet door, she noted, was not quite true and she quickly realized that he had removed the hinges. Opening it slowly, with minuscule movement, she slipped through the crack. Did he really believe that the house would hurt her? Not now. Not ever.
Moving on her hands and knees, she reached out her arms, touching everything in front of her, like a mine detector. The floor was slick, with little friction. He had separated and loosened the carpet on the landing. Stretching herself on her back lengthwise, she slid slowly down the steps, landing gendy. By now her eyes were accustomed to the darkness and she saw at once the odd shapes on the stairs to the first floor. Her mind had created a map of everything in the house and the slightest thing awry was enough to trigger a reaction. The lightest touch of her fingers, for example, showed her the banister was loose.
Proud of both her deductive ability and her stealth, she moved toward the back stairs. He had removed the wedge he had placed at the door to make the missing bolts more hazardous, a problem now easy for her to deal with. Using what she thought of as the sled method, she slid down the stairs on her back. The obstacles he had placed on the flat surfaces were easily avoided and she was able to crawl along the corridor to the library and carefully gather up armfuls of the Staffordshire figures both on the library mantel and in the parlor. She put them in her shopping bag and carefully retraced her steps, avoiding all his crude booby traps.
She got up the back stairs by applying a type of rappeling, using her cleaver periodically to dig into the wall, then hoisting herself up by its handle. For every measure there was a countermeasure, she told herself, proud of her resourcefulness, crowing
over how badly he had underestimated her ingenuity.
Squatting in front of his room, she selected two Napoleons from her shopping bag and with her cleaver beheaded them and stood the figures on the floor in front of his door.
With her lipstick she wrote on the door: ‘Off with their heads.’ Unable to stifle her giggles, she moved away and, again using the rappeling method, shimmied up the stairs and back to her attic hideaway.
She lay on her makeshift bed of insulation, ignoring the heat, the sweat of her body, and whatever physical discomfort she was supposed to feel. Only one emotion seized her. The joy of having bested him. Her body, too, seemed suffused with a sexual response, an exquisite sensation of unspecific ecstasy, a post-orgasmic after-thrill. Her nipples were erect, her inner parts moist.
She was Barbara, her identity clear, unmistakable. Mistress of herself. Surviving in the jungle.
30
Ann’s fear immobilized her. She lay on the bed in her room, listening to the sporadic rhythm of the faulty air conditioner. It seemed to be running in tandem to the beating of her heart. Did she have, she asked herself, some obligation to report what was occurring in that house? But what could she report? She could not put any order to her explanation. What was really going on in there? She imagined conversations with detectives in urine-smelling rooms.
‘I think they’re trying to kill each other.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I was inside. The entire inside is unsafe.’
"What were you doing inside?’
She was not afraid of being charged with anything. Or was she? Perhaps if she had talked to Oliver. Touched him. Was that really Oliver she had seen, that ravaged, zombielike figure? Surely not the man she had loved. Loved? The word repelled her now.
Yet even the mute, worn figure of Oliver conveyed less terror than the house itself. It had become alive, a chilling, bloodless monster. The memory of its brutality recalled her body’s punishment. Their mutual hate had breathed life into it. A house? She detested it now. Her revulsion gave her the strength to rise from the bed.