Robert Goolrick - A Reliable Wife

He could lie in bed at night and see himself, as though he were a third person, making love to an English girl named Lady Lucy while his friend and roommate watched from across the room, too drunk to move or even be aroused. He could see Lucy’s fingernails. He could feel her tongue on his feet. See the bow of her mouth as she slid him into her throat.

He could remember standing behind redheaded Sarah at a sink as she took a cloth and washed beneath her arms and between her legs, in a hotel room in Chicago, his kisses covering her thin and exhausted shoulder blades.

He thought of a widow in a neighboring state, a state where he often did business, a plain woman who had taken him into her bed, and submitted to him without a word, who arched her back with passion and spread her legs and opened every part of her body to him and put her tongue in his mouth and her mouth on his sex and then lay, afterward, wrapped around him, their mourning for everything they had given and lost like a blanket wrapped around their cooling sweat. They shivered in the dark.

When he left her, he had not even said good night. She had not even raised her head from where it lay in the crook of her elbow, her tears wetting the mangled pillow and her matted hair. He had left a red scarf hanging over the back of a green chair.

He had never gone back for it. His way had not taken him again to her house, nor had either of them imagined that it would. Love not worth even a scarf.

He remembered the insane trips he had taken to Chicago, after Emilia had left, to look for her and her lover. He knew then that it was not Emilia he looked for, that he wouldn’t have had her back if she had crawled naked in the street and begged. He was just looking, looking for it, the crack between her legs, her black nipples in the dark. Her skin like oiled earth.

He passed Catherine in the hall. He watched her from an upstairs window as she wandered the road that led from the house, poking at the dirty snow with a stick, sometimes angrily, sometimes with the forlorn hopelessness of a child.

“What do you do? When you go out walking?”

“I just look.”

“Have you lost something?” “It doesn’t matter. I just look.”

Who was she? What did she think about all day, while he was at the office, his dark office in the iron foundry, pushing his goods around the country, digging deep into the earth to haul out its riches? Where did she go when she wandered away from the house after lunch, as he knew she did because Mrs. Larsen told him she did?

He wanted to touch her, to tear her clothes, and he did not. Instead, he gave her things. He sent for hothouse roses from Chicago that arrived blood red and sat in vases, roses that were named with the old names, French poets, English dukes. The roses, forced to lavish bloom under glass, gave no scent.

He sent for chocolates. He sent for marzipan in the shape of animals and flowers, candies for which she had no taste and which Mrs. Larsen slipped to her sweet-toothed husband in secret, until they were gone. He sent for bonnets she had no place to wear. He sent for music boxes, and sparkling ear bobs, which she would not put on. He sent for novels, and she read of the adventures of rakes half his age, of the despair of English girls wandering the moors looking for their dead lovers. He sent for a tiny bird, which sang her to sleep, which she allowed to fly at will around her room, the room he had slept in as a boy.

He would not allow her to leave the property. She had never seen the town. So, instead, he gave her trifles.

He had a taste, long suppressed, for the luxurious and the exquisite, and he knew how to pick a wine or a brooch or a bolt of silk. These things were like a memory in his flesh. The superb. The intoxicating. Every day he arrived home with something in his hand for her, little, expensive gifts that she accepted shyly, with a slight surprise. She had, he knew, no place to wear them, no place to put them.

These things, these ribbons and all this rigmarole, were his way of touching her. These things, out of season, unattainable, reserved for the few, for the rich and decadent, passed from his hand into hers every day. “Oh,” she said, drawing in her breath. “Oh, Mr. Truitt, how beautiful.”

He could feel the simplicity of his life fading away, like a drunk long sober about to take his first taste of brandy.

Love drove people crazy. He saw it every day. He read it every week in the paper. Every week the papers were filled with the barn burnings, the arsenic taken, the babies drowned in wells to keep their names a secret, to keep their fathers away from them, to keep them from knowing the craziness of love. To send them home to the holiness of God. He read these stories aloud to Catherine at night, after supper, and she would invent stories about the sad women and the deranged men. She would say their names over and over, until even their names became a kind of derangement.

“Why do they do it, Mr. Truitt? Why are they so sad and affected by…?”

“Long winters. Religion.”

“Will it happen to us, then?”

“No.”

She wanted to go to town, of course. Anybody would, to walk the streets, to spot the ordinary woman who next week might drown her children, the wearied worker who would slaughter forty head of his own cattle in a single night. He would not let her go to town, even though people already knew she was in his house. Finally, they thought.

If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do? It would, thought Ralph, produce me. It has. His hand would reach into his pocket as she spun her stories. He would touch, lightly, the length of his own sex.

But still he did not touch her. He separated his desire for her, for any and every woman, from her actual physical self. He kept his distance. He knew neither how to love nor how to desire, in any real way. He had lost the habit of romance.

But he lay in bed every night, the sheets clean and smelling of crisp winter nights, and he thought of her, in her room down the hall. He pictured, like pornographic etchings, the hidden parts of her body. He did not touch himself. He couldn’t bear it. A grown man. A man who was almost old, the stupidity of it, and her just down the hall.

His sins lay not in acrobatic visions of penetrations and humiliations. His perversion was silence. Silence and distance.

He lay, straight and sober in his bed and thought of Lady Lucy Berridge in Florence thirty years before, her aristocratic vagaries and titillations. Sooner or later, in the dark, Lucy’s face, or Serafina’s or even Emilia’s, always turned into Catherine’s. Catherine laughing at him.

He wondered, in the dark, in the latest hours, whether she thought of him in return, just down the hall, so clean, so rich, so polite. But she did not. He never crossed her mind.

She lay, Catherine, in a clean, simple nightdress, her eyes to the blinding moon and the drifting snow, and she dreamed of cigarettes. She dreamed about smoking cigarettes and about the body of a worthless man who lay next to some other woman in some other bed, in tangled sheets in a rotten town, miles and miles and miles away.

He gave her a diamond ring. It was large and yellow, surrounded by smaller diamonds like a glittering daisy. He kissed her hand.

He gave her a gold cross on a fine gold chain. He brushed away the wisps of her hair and fastened it around her neck.

She thought of her pathetic baubles, buried in the snow, her ticket to freedom. They seemed inconsequential now.

Men only give you what they give you, Catherine thought, staring out at the endless and uncontrollable snow, when they know they can’t give you what you want.

What she wanted, of course, was a quick marriage to Ralph Truitt, followed by his painless demise. What she wanted was both love and money, and she was not to have either except through Ralph, except, in fact, after Ralph. What she wanted was some control in her life, to get her meaningless little jewels back, something that was her own, the sparkle of her old life, to sleep once again with her faithless lover, far away. She had had a lifetime of filthiness and vileness and lust. What she longed for, in her heart, to her surprise, was a springtime as lush and erotic as the winter was chaste and bloodless.