T. Boyle - The Women

The driver knew not a syllable of English, but San Diego was not an Anglican designation and the dollars she waved at him immediately bridged any difficulties of interpretation. The sun hammered her briefly and then she was in the back of the car, everyone grinning now — the pharmacist and the two customers who’d followed her out into the street, the boy and the taxi driver and even the random passerby, a whole world of dedicated grinning. The door shut on her, the car a Tin Lizzie, a flivver, a rattrap of the worst and flimsiest construction — and ancient, the first sedan ever made — but it had a roof, and, apparently, an engine. The thing jolted and bumped as if it were pitching headlong down the side of a cliff, the smells assaulted her all over again, the heat crouched atop her, right under the caftan (and she wouldn’t take it off, wouldn’t show her hair and the sweat and the fright she must have been), but none of that mattered for long because immediately she was dissolving a tablet in water and drawing it into her pravaz and between bumps finding a vein high up on her right thigh beneath the rolled-up sweat-soaked hem of her dress.

After that, the breezes blew and the smells dissipated. The man at the border waved them on without a second glance, the world took on a metallic sheen — the sheen of the high seas as seen from a deck chair on the SS Paris —and she wasn’t in Mexico anymore. She wasn’t in the bleached brown desert of San Diego either, not on land at all. She was on a cruise, perched high up on the rail with the wind in her face and the birds wheeling overhead, on her way back to France.

As it turned out, she didn’t get to Paris that year or the following year either. She went up to San Francisco for a while, but the place bored her — too far out of the way, too cold, too bright, what with the sun painted like a thin layer of glue over all those rows of gingerbread houses Frank would have hated till he ground his teeth to dust — and then she came back to Los Angeles for an extended stay with Leora Tisdell, 15who’d just lost her husband. For a while, through the spring and into the summer of 1925, she set up a kiln in the back of Leora’s guesthouse and with her friend’s encouragement she began to work in clay again, just to see if she could recover her eye. (Leora had artistic aspirations of her own, and now, as she put it, that she was out from under the heel of her husband, she meant to do up California in oils.)

In the first week, Miriam produced a bust of Leora and Leora produced a portrait of Miriam. The portrait was meant to be naturalistic but it was so ineptly done it might have been an abstract by Picasso or Miró, and the only feeling Miriam derived from it was sadness. “You know, don’t you, that when I was in Paris I concentrated on distinct parts of the human body rather than busts, because they’re so utterly conventional, and I worked almost exclusively in marble,” Miriam told her friend one afternoon as they sipped Singapore slings and sat regarding the clay bust, which, in retrospect, could have been worked a bit more around the nose and the orbits of the eyes and hadn’t really taken the glaze well at all. “I had a pair of folded hands accepted for the permanent collection in the Louvre, you know,” she added, and the thought buoyed her, took her off her friend’s sofa, out of the house and Los Angeles with its irritating faux-Spanish décor and drooping palms and all the way back to the day she first walked through the doors of the museum and saw them there, her hands, mounted for display, and people— Parisians —gathered there to admire them. It was a towering moment, fueled by the Singapore sling cocktail and the dose of morfina she’d taken for her digestion and to control the tremor that had begun to recur in the back of her neck — all along her spine, really — but the sensation didn’t last. A few days later she took a cast of Leora’s hands, with the thought of buying a block of Carrara marble and getting back into the game, doing something significant and lasting, but the impulse seemed to fade as the sun rose and set and rose again and again and again till it burned all the ambition out of her.

She was feeling vaguely out of sorts — betwixt and between, that was it — thinking she might go to her daughter, Norma, in Chicago, or maybe back up to San Francisco for a few days, or Mexico, down the coast somewhere, where it was clean and you could get a decent meal that wasn’t all wrapped up in those half-burned little pancakes they seemed to serve with everything, even steak, when a man came to the door asking for her. Leora’s servant — a Chinese in a white coat and faintly greasy black tie — found her in the yard, where she was stretched out on a chaise longue beside the pool reading La Noire idole 16 for the third time. She put on a wrap and padded barefoot through the dark corridors to the front door.

The man was nobody she knew — ferret-faced, lithe as a twig, with an insinuating expression. “Yes?” she said, looking down at him from beneath the high conical towel she’d wrapped round her hair.

“Maude Miriam Noel Wright?” he said, his shoulders slithering inside his jacket as if he were molting, a twitch at the left corner of his mouth.

“Yes,” she said, and she was going to add “I am she” or “I’m her,” she couldn’t decide which, when he handed her a finger-smudged envelope, turned abruptly on one heel the instant she took it from him and sauntered off down the walk.

Inside was a divorce summons and attached notice stating that Frank Lloyd Wright had initiated proceedings against her on grounds of desertion. That was it, nothing more. No explanation, no word from him, no prior warning or even the most cursory and two-faced attempt at reconciliation. And what did she feel — in that moment, the towel wrapped round her head, her toes clenching the abrasive hemp of the doormat and her right hand held out rigid before her, the black type of the summons staring back at her as if each letter were a miniature face and each face reduced suddenly to a pair of spitting lips? Rage, that was what. Not disappointment, not surprise, not heartbreak, but just that: rage.

Yes, she’d left him. Of course she had. Anyone would have. A saint — even the martyrs in their hair shirts and bloody rags. He was impossible, the single most infuriating human being she’d ever met, what with his God complex and his perfectionism, fussing over every last detail as if the world depended on it, his snoring, his musical evenings, the utter soul-crushing desolation of rural Wisconsin where he all but kept her prisoner and every overfed housewife and goggling rube staring at her as if she had the letter A sewed to the front of her dress. Of course she’d left him. But that didn’t mean she didn’t love him still.

Before she knew what she was doing she’d balled the summons in her fist and she was tearing it to pieces and flinging those pieces — sad defeated little flakes of paper like shed skin — into the flowerbed. She was in the house next, not the main house but the bungalow out back, and she had a lamp in her hand — Leora’s lamp, a hand-me-down, rubbish from the rubbish shop, no antique — and she was methodically beating it against the white plaster wall. Which was crumbling, right there before her, in an accumulating avalanche of white powder.

It was Leora who discovered her — she must have been crying out, the Chinese popping his head in the door like a jack-in-the-box and in the next moment Leora rushing into the room and calling out her name over and over, as if to remind her who she was, to bring her back, and it was as if she’d been transported out of her body, her mind flying off to cling to some hidden perch and her muscles working all on their own. The lamp was of brass. It clanged and clanged till it was a bell tolling for the dead, Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! She remembered Leora throwing her arms around her — restraining her — and Leora’s emollient voice pouring like syrup into her ear. And then they were on the couch together, the Chinese hurrying off to mix a shaker of martinis because this was an emergency, that much was clear — the lamp destroyed, the wall rutted and gouged and blood spattered there too and Miriam with her skinned knuckles and the straps of her swimming costume slipped down her shoulders and the wrap come loose so that her breasts swung free — but Miriam was sobbing so convulsively she couldn’t tell her friend what had happened. And when she tried, when she fought to get the words out, the shame of it overwhelmed her. Frank — the man she loved, her husband —was casting her aside. For a long while Leora just held her, murmuring, “Hush, hush now,” and finally the martinis were there — the beaded shaker, the delicate stem of the glass, the olive skewered on a toothpick — and Miriam felt the calm descend like the curtain falling at the end of a play.