Barbara had gotten harder, more vocal and intransigent.
Between Oliver and Barbara communication was, in the early days of the new arrangement, nonexistent. Sometimes it was unavoidable, and Ann would hear scraps of conversation that always disintegrated into a rising crescendo of vituperation.
'I'll pay all electric and gas bills that can be attributed to normal household operations. Not to your business activities. Those you pay for.' He had confronted her in the kitchen late one evening. Ann, who was helping to baste a roasting goose while Barbara prepared a batch of baking dough, quickly faded from the scene, far enough to be out of their vision but close enough to hear.
'How can you calculate the difference?' Barbara asked sarcastically.
'I'm having a man come in from the electric and gas companies. If necessary, we'll put in separate meters.'
'What about the power from your workroom and the sauna?'
'I take no profit from that.'
'But I help pay for it.'
'Would you like to charge me for the use of my room as well? The cost of my electric blanket?' 'If I could, I would.'
'And I don't appreciate your fudging on the food bill. Thurmont agreed that you would keep those charges separate. There's no way the family can use six pounds of flour and three pounds of butter a week.'
'And what about the orange juice? I know you filched a carton of orange juice the other day. It could only have been you.' Barbara had asked the question so innocently of each of them, including the maid. Ann had wondered about the intense probing.
'I admit it. It was a damned mistake. I used it for screwdrivers. I ran out.'
'I've been meaning to tell you. Those juice cartons on the ledge are ugly.'
'It's my ledge.'
'And I don't see why you have to lock up the liquor cabinet and the wine vault.'
'What's Caesar's is Caesar's,' he said facetiously, the logic deteriorating.
'And what's God's, God's. You bastard.' 'I'm not kidding about the food, Barbara. I'm not counting the water.' 'The water?'
'Water costs,' he mumbled, but Ann could tell that his heart wasn't in the argument on that issue. 'All I'm asking for is a reasonable estimate.'
'You toss around that word 'reasonable' as if it were from the beatitudes.'
'Now you're getting biblical. Are you going 'born again'?'
'Yes, as a matter of fact. You forced it on me.'
'Well, you're not rid of me yet.'
The matter, as Ann soon discovered, was resolved by an injunction. Barbara had charged harassment and violation of their maintenance agreement. Goldstein had gone to court and won, and an injunction forced Barbara to keep her business expenses separate.
'You've only run up our legal bills,' Oliver told her in still another confrontation.
'I don't care.'
'You can't just run to the court every time we have a dispute. It's bad enough we have to wait such a long time to resolve the main matter. But what's the point of these interim decisions?'
'I'm not going to let you harass me, that's all.'
'I'm not harassing you.'
For a long time after that they did not speak at all, and things appeared to settle down into an armed truce. Oliver's routine was unvarying, and Ann noted that he had greatly curtailed his out-of-town travel, as if leaving the house meant giving Barbara a special advantage.
He would come home around midnight. After dinner at a restaurant he would go to the movies. Any movie. He carried around with him programs offered by the various repertory film theaters. He had shown them to her with all the dates checked off so that his secretary could record them in his calendar. For breakfast his secretary provided coffee and a doughnut, and a business lunch took care of his midday meal.
He had explained the routine to Ann on those evenings when, with Barbara out on a catering job, she mustered the courage to accost him on his way up to his room. For some reason, she had noted, he was nervous in her presence, a condition that she greeted with even greater curiosity.
'It's no life, Ann,' he told her one evening as they stood in the foyer. 'But the movies are a fantastic escape. Something about the darkened theater and all those strangers sitting beside you. Not like television. It's a damned lonely life.'
In the privacy of her thoughts, she could be outrageously blatant in her efforts to seduce him, and, more than once, these fantasies had become quite aggressive. But, near him, she could not bring herself to make a single untoward move, although she watched him carefully for any sign of interest. It was a struggle to put those thoughts aside. Besides, she dared not hope. Her fear of rejection was gnawing at her, and its actuality might have sent her skulking into the street, never to return.
At times even their armed truce erupted into near-violent confrontations. Once, when Ann was out, he had broken into their old room to get a bottle of Maalox he had left on the shelf of their once jointly shared medicine chest.
The household was awakened by Barbara's frantic pounding on his door. The fury of her attack frightened the
