Robert Goolrick: A Reliable Wife

The idea that he could have a wonderful life had never before occurred to him. That he was rich, that he could go to Rome and marry a princess, that he might drink cold champagne at dawn on the deck of a steamer bound for the South Seas, in the company of someone who simply loved him, that he might do anything that would give him joy, that would create a wonderful life, these were phantoms that eluded him.

Love was gone forever, just outside the window, just beyond reach, like fruit on an upper branch. In its place was the sexual attraction of tragedy. He would hang his head and swig his brandy and mourn for his life, for the hours of his childhood, for the kindness of this man who wanted to father him, for the lost beauty of his mother. He explored the extravagant rooms of his father’s house, knowing that there was no home for him anywhere. There was no getting there. There was no one there when he arrived.

He wanted nothing more than to lie in a small, dark, warm room in an anonymous house where there was neither day nor night and have ravenous sex with woman after woman until he died. He wanted a drunkenness of the flesh. He wanted the thing he loved most in the world, the soft touch of another human being, to become a torture. He wanted to die in a sexual embrace, the last of thousands.

There was Catherine. She was like the drug, the poison he craved. In the absence of other diversions, she was a woman whose secrets he knew. She was always in the house, sewing, reading the books she had sent from Chicago. She had abandoned him. She had betrayed him, denied him the golden promise.

She slept every night in his father’s bed. His father had sex with her, and told her he loved her, a thing Antonio had never said, and would never have meant. It wasn’t enough to want all women; he wanted Catherine be all women to him.

She deliberately avoided him. She shut herself up in her room, sewing, when Truitt was away. She sat at the table like a stranger and talked to him as though she had no memory of the velvet cords that he had used to tie her to his bed, of the fire that had burned her skin. His sorrow was infinite. His desire was specific, and immense.

Truitt went to town. Antonio would find her, follow her, would open his heart to her, tell her how coming back to this house had made him different, how it had opened a wound he had thought healed forever. The sight of Truitt, the man who had been so capable of destruction, sitting calm and safe from accusation, even sitting in his own remorse, made him afraid, he said. It frightened him to think it could be different, that things could, from this moment, change.

She advised patience. She advised giving the old wounds time to heal. There was no more talk of Truitt’s death. He told her he had arsenic in his room, the arsenic he had brought from Chicago, and that late at night, drunk on Bordeaux and alone while his father slept with his mistress, his creation, he picked it up and sniffed it and held it in his hands and longed for death. He told her that if there were a button in his leg he could push so that he would vanish and never have been, he would push it. She expressed horror that he would contemplate such a thing. He had learned to drive a car, she said. He could go anywhere. His life was waiting. She didn’t understand a word he said. She was no longer the woman who had spoken to him for hours of nothing, of amorous nothings.

The silence enveloped him, strangling him. Every morning, his razor was an invitation. Every night, the arsenic was an aphrodisiac. His loneliness was terrifying, but he wouldn’t come to town, wouldn’t come down to meet the proper young women his father invited from Chicago, to sit at table with their banker fathers, all exquisite manners and musical, sexless laughter. They had no darkness. It was useless, the light, to him.

He wrote suicide notes and stored them in a locked drawer. He wrote letters to his father in which he described Catherine’s past in fine detail, letters that would destroy, in a single swift stroke, both their lives forever. These letters he burned.

He was lonely, lost inside himself; he was exhausted from simply sustaining a life he found horrible, from holding his head up in a scornful public, from the pretense of his own narcissism. He said the words over and over to himself, realizing how trivial they sounded. He spoke his heart to Ralph, late and drunk one night.

“I want… I wanted to be somebody else. After I left, I wanted things to change. They didn’t.”

“We all wanted to be somebody else. Somebody braver, or more handsome, or smarter. It’s what children want. It’s what you grow out of, if you’re lucky. If you don’t, it’s a lifetime of agony. I wanted

… what? To be elegant, not some country hick, to be loved, to live unharmed and have my way in everything. I never wanted this, never wanted to have anything to do with business.

“I wanted to marry a contessa and live happily ever after. It doesn’t happen that way. Play the hand you have, Antonio, that’s all anybody expects. And it’s a pretty good hand.”

“I’m in pain, all the time. I hurt.”

“And I’m sorry for that. If there were anything…”

“There isn’t.”

“I know.”

It was a road without end, a conversation with no point. If you spend your days speaking to someone who speaks a foreign language, how are you ever to be understood? He could say the words, his father could listen, but the words had no weight for either of them. It was a way of passing the time, the mournful son and the compassionate father.

Let it go, Antonio would tell himself late at night, as he lay on the nursery room floor. Live a regular life, crippled, sorrowful, but sweetly ordinary. Speak to the girls from Chicago. Drive your car so that you can be the envy of the town. Learn the rules of business and give up the dark room and the thousands of women. It was like seeing a distant shore and knowing he would not reach it.

Catherine never left his mind. When he met her, he was a young boy, a young man, and she was an elegant courtesan pursuing opportunities. She had seemed glamorous. She had manners, and she knew things about the world. He knew nothing, nothing at all. She had bought him shirts. She had taught him how to dress, how to eat in restaurants and speak with his eyes lowered. She had shown him the intricacies of his own body. She had woven a circle around him and kept him safe for a time. Then the monsters returned to claim him, and he himself became a monster-cruel, unyielding, and conniving. He had turned on her because she had seen him in his innocence and hope, because she believed in these things, and he had hurt her again and again, and she had allowed it, and for this he felt a sorrow which burned like hot lead.

On a sober morning, when he happened to be awake, he went and sat by Truitt in the office. He listened and watched as Truitt increased his fortune, as he listened to the complaints of his workers and dealt with them fairly and compassionately. It was like watching a painting. There was no movement; there was no sound. Truitt thought his son was taking an interest. Truitt thought he was coming around to a kind of acceptance, the kind of bargain he himself had made so many years before. The next morning, Antonio couldn’t remember having been there, couldn’t recall a single word or picture one detail of the office.

His father, his real father had left his mother for a rich young widow. His father was the man who had no face. His father had taught piano, was named Moretti, had given him life. This Truitt was a remote stranger whose death was the only thing Antonio had lived for for more than a dozen years. This Truitt who bought and sold and disposed, who spoke to him in kind tones that Antonio could not bear.