'Coping.' Once he had hated that word. Coping implied hopelessness.
'I hear from the children regularly,' she told him. 'They're fine. But they worry about you.'
'They shouldn't.'
'So do I.'
'You shouldn't.'
'I miss you, Oliver,' she would whisper. At that point he would usually bid her an abrupt good-bye.
One night he returned home and found the house deathly quiet. The welcoming purr of the air conditioning had ceased and he realized that the absence of sound meant that the electricity had been shut off. The house had already taken on the clammy humidity of a Washington summer. Barbara had apparently left the windows closed to take advantage of the last lingering bit of cool air.
With the aid of some matches, he groped his way to the workshop, found two flashlights, and made his way back up the stairs. Then he remembered his wine. Without the cooling system, the temperature rise would threaten his reds, perhaps his whites as well. He had forgotten about that. He would empty the vault tomorrow, he promised himself, irritated by the oversight. So the wines, too, were innocent victims. He decided he needed a drink to calm his agitation. Led by the flashlight's beam, he made his way to the library.
The wooden doorknobs of the armoire seemed stuck, which he attributed to the moisture-swollen wood. Putting the flashlight down, he tugged on the knobs with one hand braced against one of the doors. It would not budge. He tugged again. He heard a straining, squeaking sound below him and, to his horror, the armoire tipped slowly forward, all nine feet of it, a massive wall pressing downward against him. He flattened his hands and tried to hold it up, but the tipping movement was relentless. With all his strength, he tried to become a human brace. The bottles crashed against each other as the armoire slowly moved forward. Twisting his body, he managed to turn completely and brace the weight against his shoulders, pushing upwards with his legs.
For the moment he succeeded and the armoire moved back. But he was trapped under its weight. The muscles in his shoulders and thighs ached. Soon, he knew, they would weaken. His strength would ebb. When it gave out, the armoire would come crashing down on him unless he could jump out of its way, which was unlikely. Every skin pore opened and the sweat cascaded down his face, stinging his eyes.
'Help me,' he screamed, remembering suddenly his experience in the sauna. Fat chance, he thought. The ruthless bitch. His resolve hardened. He tried to shift the weight periodically and managed to redistribute it temporarily, holding that position until his shoulder was shot through with pain and each position became equally unbearable. Aside from the compelling danger, which was terribly real and ominous, he felt ridiculous.
Soon he would simply have to plunge Forward, accepting whatever injury the heavy object would dispense.
The muscles in his shoulders tired first, then his back, and finally his shoulders just to keep standing. His legs began to shake. Save me, he wanted to scream. Who would hear him? Who would care?
'Dirty bitch,' he mumbled, hoping his hatred would fire the strength in his flagging muscles. His breath came in gasps now. He was faltering. His body was collapsing and he felt the full weight of the armoire move downward. His knees began to give. Gathering all his remaining strength, he prepared himself to take a giant leap forward. But he could not summon the strength. The weight was descending swiftly now. Finally he was on his knees. The pain in his shoulders was excruciating. The thought of injury or even his death in this manner revolted him, since it would give her the victory she wanted. Suddenly the power of hate intervened, and he felt the force of it shoot through his tired muscles. Concentrating all his energy, he lurched away from the falling armoire.
As it fell his body did not escape completely, and the armoire caught his shoe by its sole and badly twisted his ankle. The pain stabbed him. But he managed to contort his body, untie his shoelace, and painfully extract his foot from the trapped shoe.
Whiskey oozed from under the armoire, soaking through his clothes, its acrid smell permeating the room.
If she was up in her room, she surely had heard the crash. He had no illusions about her motives. This caper was no mere annoyance. It was the real thing. He crawled across the library floor, where a confused Benny had been startled to wakefulness by the noise of the crash. He felt Benny's warm tongue on his face. 'Good old Benny,' he whispered, embracing him, breathing in his doggy odor. It was more welcome than that of the liquor and perspiration in which he was soaked.
Raising himself on one leg, he managed to hop to the phone. It was, he was relieved to find, still functioning and he called a cab, then crawled outside to wait for it.
'You're lucky it's not broken,' the black intern in the emergency room of the Washington Hospital Center told him. He shook his head. 'You'd better get off the juice. This is what always happens.'
'I'm not on it.' ,
'You stink like a brewery.'
Oliver felt the futility of responding. Who would believe him? He accepted a shot of painkiller and went back to the house.
But before he went to sleep, he Scotch-taped a note to her door. The shock had weakened him and the scrawl and wispy and uncertain.
'You had better watch your ass,' he had written. Like her notes, it was unsigned.
He woke up in a puddle of sweat. Every muscle ached. He felt stiff, ravaged, and his ankle throbbed. With the air conditioning not working, there was not a stir of air in the room.
He posed a question to himself: Is this me? Searching his mind, he looked for glimpses of identification. He spelled his name, whispered his Social Security number, his date of birth, the name of his law firm, the address of his house, the names of his children. Superficial, he decided, half-amused, certain that the pained hulk lying moist and terrified in the two-hundred-year-old canopied bed was not himself at all.
Himself, he declared, was a forty-year-old man named Oliver Rose, with two beautiful children, Eve and Josh, and a lovely, loyal, beautiful, wonderful wife named Barbara.
The name set off a musical lilt in his mind. Barbara.
