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.
'A change of tactic,' she whispered. 'Here he comes.'
He walked right over to us, a papier-mache Oscar in his hands. 'Congratulations on your performance with Ramirez,' he said, and held it out to her. 'Best actress of the year.'
'I don't know what you mean,' my mother said. She was holding my hand, squeezing it too tight, but her face was smiling and relaxed.
'Sure you do,' he said. He tucked Oscar under his arm. 'But that's not why I came over. I thought we could bury the hatchet. Look, I'll admit I went too far calling the cops. I know I was an asshole, but for Christ's sake, you tried to destroy the better part of a year's work. Of course my agent had a preliminary draft, thank God, but even so. Why don't we just call it a draw?'
My mother smiled, shifted to the other foot. She was waiting for him to do something, say something.
'It's not like I don't respect you as a person,' he said. 'And as a writer. We all know you're a great poet. I've even talked you up at some of the magazines. Can't we move on to the next phase now, and be friends?'
She bit her lip as if she was seriously considering what he was saying, while all the while she poked the center of my palm with her nail until I thought it would go right through my hand. Finally she said in her low rich voice, 'Sure we can. Well, why not.'
They shook hands on it. He looked a little suspicious but relieved as he went back to his bargain hunting. And I thought, he still didn't know her at all.
We showed up at his house that night. He had bars on all the windows now. She stroked his new security door with the pads of her fingers like it was fur. 'Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.'
