T. Boyle - The Women

May turned to June, June to July. She hadn’t really put on any weight — or not that anyone could see, except Frank when they were in bed together and he ran his hands over the bulge of her abdomen as if this were another of his projects to be gauged and measured against a set of blueprints — but soon her condition would be evident to anyone with a pair of eyes. Like the cook. Or any of the workmen — or their busy wives. They had a talk about it one night, the two of them naked and sweating and Frank examining her under the lamplight, his face shining, the taste of him on her lips still. “We’ve got to do something before people start talking,” he murmured.

She traced a single finger down his nose to his lips, his chin, his chest. “What,” she said, feeling playful, “exactly, do you propose?”

“Miriam,” he said, and waved a hand in extenuation.

For a long moment she said nothing. The name itself— Miriam —was enough to break the mood, sour the sweetness of the moment, and there was that smell again, the faintest whiff of burning. She watched the shadow of his hand move against the wall. Beetles hurled themselves at the window screen like bullets. He’d lain here in bed with Miriam just as he was lying with her, opened himself to her, told her he loved her, swore it, swore it a hundred times. And what was she now? A stranger. An irritant. A name, just a name. “What was she like?” she asked, and her voice seemed to stick in her throat. “Was she beautiful?”

“No,” he said. “Not compared to you. Nobody is.”

“But she was beautiful.”

He shrugged. “Listen, Olya, that’s not the point. I don’t want our child born out of wedlock, that’s all. We need to be married as soon as possible, you see that, don’t you? Before word gets out. You’ve got your divorce, now I’ve got to get mine. I’m going to the lawyer tomorrow, first thing in the morning, all right? And we’ll see what happens. Maybe — as long as she doesn’t know about you, about us — she’ll take the bait and we can be done with her.” He paused, looked to the window, the beetles there — and what were they doing? Mating she supposed, like any other creatures. “She’ll need money, I know her. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll come to terms.”

“Do you love her still?”

“Love her? She’s been dead to me for years. She’s a disturbed woman, violent. Especially if she doesn’t get her way. If she even suspected. . I mean, that you were here—”

She remembered how he’d fumed over the newspaper accounts of the fire—“So much trash and sensationalism, as if I live my life for the amusement of Mr. and Mrs. Schmutzkopf over breakfast in the Loop, ‘Love Cottage, ’ and all the rest”—but was exultant that none of them had mentioned her. They didn’t know. No one knew. It was their secret, Architect Living in Sin with Pregnant Montenegrin, and if they could guard that secret just a while longer, all would be well, he promised her. She hadn’t really thought about it, not until the fire and the clamor of the newspapermen. Everything had seemed so natural to her, so involved with the earth and the change of the seasons, so distant from the city and society and all the dull decorum that went with it. She thought of Georgei then. It was no more than what — eighteen months ago? — that she’d first come to New York with his troupe. She’d been enclosed within him then, all her life a function of her master and his Work, her spirit ascending, the drums and flutes speaking a secret language that fed her limbs as she danced across the stage, danced in private, danced to a music no one else could hear, present only in her mind and her heart — and Georgei’s. How distant it all seemed now.

Georgei. The force of him, the way he could mesmerize an audience. He would sweep out of the wings like a prophet, urging the rapt crowd to lift the veil and see the universe for what it was, and he would astonish them with his music and feats of hypnotism, but the true coup de foudre was the moment the dancers broke the plane of the stage and hurled themselves into the audience. It was a leap of faith. They all spun to the accelerating beat of the music and then they rushed the lip of the stage and leapt blindly into space — and it was faith alone that kept them intact even as they landed in the orchestra pit or the boxes in front, sprawled amongst the gentlemen in their fancy dress and the ladies in their gowns. That was the leap she’d made now. For Frank.

“We’ll lie low,” he said, “just as we’ve been doing. And you’re hardly showing.” He touched a hand to her cheek. “You know what I’ll do? I’ll sketch some dresses for you, lots of material, ruffles maybe — I know, I know — but something to hide your condition. As long as possible. Because if word gets out. .”

But word does get out. Word travels fast, it seeps and bubbles and runs in the ditches like heavy rain in a wet country, and when she began to show, when there was no hiding it anymore and the leaves turned and dropped from the trees and the clouds moved in low to scatter sleet across the new windows and new roofs of Taliesin III, the phone rang again. They were sitting by the fire, she and Svetlana and Frank, reading aloud, and the instrument gave a long trailing bleat and then another. She looked up at him and she saw his eyes retract, his jaw harden: he was thinking the same thing she was. The phone hadn’t rung, not at this hour, in a very long time — not since summer, when he’d filed the divorce papers. Then it rang daily, continually, and the letters came in a deluge — she’d seen those letters, the envelopes addressed in a finishing school hand lost to the fierce accounting of haste and desperation, and inside the chilling avowals of love couched in the iconography of sex and death. Oh, my gallant knight —struck out— once gallant —struck out again— never gallant knight who took me to his bed and made of that bed an ancient bark plying the stormy seas of Eros, hard by the Isle of Thanatos and the Peninsula of Despair, how could you betray me? My trust, my heat, my blood, my heart? How could you? How could you?

On the third ring he set down the book and rose to answer the phone. She watched him pad across the carpet as if in slow motion, watched him lift the receiver from the hook. Even though she was on the far side of the room and there was a record on the phonograph and the fire was making a noise with a log of too-green wood, she could hear the shrill insinuation of the voice on the other end of the line. “Miriam,” Frank was saying. “No, Miriam, you’re wrong,” and he had to pull the receiver away from his ear.

“Liar! Fraud!” The voice rose in an ecstasy of hate and accusation. “Housekeeper!? Housekeeper!? You expect anyone to believe that, Frank, you, you”—and it wavered, all the sorrow and jealousy and rage wadded up in the expletive that followed. And then a shriek, so raw and explosive it was as if the woman on the other end of the line were being stabbed in the throat: “You used that lie up already. On me. I was the housekeeper, Frank, I was!” 32

Itell you, missus, if you want to bring this matter around in your favor you’d be well advised to come out here to Chicago—” There was a pause, phonograph music in the background, the sound of a match being struck. Miriam could hear the man — the detective, her detective 33—breathing into the mouthpiece, a hoarse ratcheting insuck and outlay of breath as if his lungs were blistered. “Because your party is conducting himself in a scandalous manner, not to mention being in violation of the laws and statues.” That was what he’d said, statues, but Miriam knew what he meant, and it shot an electric jolt right through her.