T. Boyle - The Women

“You’ve got him dead to rights, missus.”

She didn’t want to hear what he had to say, couldn’t stand it, couldn’t tolerate another word. She should have broken the connection right then and there, but she didn’t — she held on, her whole frame gone rigid with the dread of what was coming, the certainty she’d contracted for, proof positive. “And I’m sorry to have to say it”—he insinuated his voice into the speaker, parceling out the words as if she were paying extra for each one—“but what I mean is in flagrante delicto.”

Leora was watching her from the sofa. She knew her face had gone white, drained of color as surely as if she were the heroine of a Saturday afternoon melodrama, the news they’d both foreseen come home to them, to her, long distance from Chicago. She wasn’t kidding herself — she wasn’t born yesterday. She knew Frank. She knew what he was capable of. But to hear it now, from the lips of a man every bit as odious as the one who’d slithered up the front walk and handed her the summons on that concussive day in July, shook her nonetheless. Frank didn’t love her anymore. There was no going back. “No,” she said, “no,” not knowing what else to say.

“What I mean is he’s at the Garfield Arms, right now — with her and the child — and you can catch him with his pants down, that’s the beauty of it. You’d a thought he’d have the savvy to hide the whole business, but I guess not. He’s even registered under his own name. And her too.”

Leora mouthed something to her from across the room. Was it “guilty” or “got him”?

“Missus? ”

All the blood was boiling up in her brain. You didn’t register housekeepers at your hotel. Housekeepers stayed home and kept house. She felt dizzy suddenly — betrayed, betrayed yet again — and she could barely manage a response. “Yes?” she whispered.

“I’ll tell you something else too — his consort or mistress or whatever you want to call her?”

“Yes? ”

“She’s big as a house. Out to here, if you know what I mean.”

She was on the next train for Chicago, staring out the window of her sleeper at the naked mountains and the bleak dead midsection of the country, everything in shades of tan, no color anywhere, no life, no hope. She’d practically begged Leora to come with her, for support — she just didn’t know if she could go through with this on her own — but Leora had been planning her Thanksgiving party for the past two months now, a fête for forty, black tie, the sort of thing that would make her neighbors stand up and take notice, and she couldn’t just go and cancel at this late date, could she?

No. No, of course not.

And so Miriam was traveling alone, the pravaz her only companion. She didn’t knit, didn’t sketch. Cards bored her to tears. She had the latest Zona Gale with her and Lewis’ Arrowsmith , an excellent book really, about a fine and noble man — an idealist like herself — but she was too anxious to concentrate and wound up spending hour after hour staring out the window on the rolling vacancy of America. A colored porter stuck his head in the door every once in a while and people nattered at her in the dining car and she tried to respond, if only for the sake of civility, but the conversation (the quality of the food, the ease and speed of rail travel, something that had happened to somebody’s sister in Omaha) held nothing for her. Thanksgiving fell on the last day of the trip and though the chef went out of his way and the waiters did their best to make the turkey with mashed potatoes, gravy, chestnut stuffing and peas with pearled onions look and taste like something prepared at home with the family gathered round, it was a sad imposture and everyone in the dining car knew it. The laughter was brittle, the attempts at witticism as stale as the pie à la mode. She left the dessert untouched and retreated to her compartment.

That night she barely slept, her mind racing along with the incessant pounding of the wheels on the track, Frank’s face rising up before her like a cork in a gutter, Frank grinning at her, mocking her, Frank superimposed over the very attractive single gentleman in the next compartment who’d trained a long look of wonder and sympathy on her every time she squeezed past him in the corridor because she was a desirable woman still, supremely desirable, with taste and class and education, worth any hundred dancers, a thousand, whole troupes of them. . Frank, Frank, Frank. . Frank strutting along the sidewalks of Chicago in his arrogant cock-of-the-walk way, Frank, his eyes shut tight in rapture, working his bare white buttocks atop some other woman. Some dancer. Some foreigner.

Olgivanna Milanoff, that was the name the detective had supplied her. Olgivanna Milanoff. She said the name aloud in the dark, just to taste the bitterness of it on her tongue. The coach rocked and steadied itself and rocked again. Anonymous stations slipped past in the night, each one an outpost guarded by a single naked light, even as the wheels hammered out the tempo beneath her, Milanoff, Milanoff, and the sadness that gripped her then was like nothing she’d ever felt, not even when Emil came back to her in the hush of the alienist’s parlor and laid a hand of ice on her shoulder. It was as if a cautery had been run through her heart. This woman — this dancer —was pregnant by him, pregnant. Carrying his seed, his child. Was that what he’d wanted — another child?

It was news to her. Because there’d never been any question of children between Frank and her — they were in their forties when they met, with grown children of their own, and from the beginning their union had existed on a higher plane. They were companions, soul mates. Not mere breeders like all the rest. Anybody could be a breeder — look at the peasants and their strings of ragged dirty children with their mouths hanging open and their hands outstretched in the undying expectation of a coin or a crust, the world already too small a place for so many mouths, so many hands. And Frank had agreed with her. Or was it just a matter of expedience?

But Jesus God he worked fast, glad to be rid of her, to cast her aside and find someone new, someone younger, someone pretty and naïve and unformed to pour himself into, to mold and hammer and shape the way he never could have shaped her. Well, she pitied the woman. And she could have him, this Olgivanna, this Russian or whatever she was, have her Frank Lloyd Wright, the great man bestriding the world like a colossus for all to see when in actuality he was the most venal dirty insufferable little coward she’d ever known — and a lecher, a lecher to boot. .

Chicago was cold and clear, the sun as pale as suet and hanging low over the houses and factories and the shadowy monoliths of the skyscrapers. The cab took her through quiet streets, cars drifting past like untethered boats, people gazing numbly from behind their curtains or trudging past one another as if speech hadn’t been invented yet. She checked into her hotel, freshened up in her room and immediately went back down to the lobby to order a car (though in truth she was so worn-out and exhausted she could have slept for a week). Standing there at the curb, waiting for the doorman to assist her, she nearly lost her resolve. But the thought of the divorce settlement — how Frank had manipulated her, hiding everything from her, his deceit, his adultery, his Russian paramour (Paris, Paris indeed, and how convenient for him) —steeled her. There’d be no settlement now. She’d never sign — she’d tear the papers up and throw them in his face. The bastard. The son of a bitch. He would see — she would make him see — because the balance had turned and it was all in her favor now.