T. Boyle - The Women

“Mrs. Wright? Miriam? Are you listening to me?”

She was, of course she was. She gave a little wave of her hand. Public opinion. The fools, the idiots. To favor some little adventuress, some adulteress, a husband-stealer, over her. . She could still see the headlines: WRIGHT’S OLGA BARES LIFE STORY; Public Misled; Begs Merciful Heart for Baby; and then, down the page: Not a Dancer; Toils Without Luxuries. Oh, it was all there, the whole sob story — how the little Russian had cooked and scrubbed and chopped wood at Taliesin till her fingers had practically fallen off, how she’d only come to Frank after Miriam had deserted him, and how she wasn’t a dancer any more than Frank was a piano player because he liked sometimes to sit at the keyboard to play an air for the family and that the press had stuck her with the sobriquet only as a means of cheapening her as if she were some cabaret performer or cigarette girl when in fact she came from the most distinguished family in all of Montenegro — but it didn’t matter a whit. The pretty pictures, the downcast look, the naked cry for sympathy. Anybody could see she was a whore and whores qualified for nothing, not mercy or sympathy or credibility or even notice.

“You can’t go on expecting the impossible,” he was saying, leveling that look on her. “Now — and let me remind you once again — his most recent offer, totaling twenty-three thousand dollars, including five thousand in cash and an additional three thousand for expenses and attorneys’ fees to be paid out immediately as a means of discharging your obligations, including the one thousand and some odd dollars owing to the Southmoor, seemed perfectly reasonable to me, as you well know—”

“Seemed reasonable to you? I suppose it would, because at this point I can only imagine you’re more concerned with your own welfare than with mine. You want your fee — that’s the long and short of it, isn’t it? But this is my life we’re considering here. I’m the one who’s been dragged through the mud. I’m the one who has no means of support and no hope of it.”

“Even your children. .” he began, taking another tack. And was he debating her now? Was that what she was paying him for? Debates?

“What have my children to do with it?”

“They’re in agreement with me. Settle, that’s what they say. You can’t expect them to — well, I know this is a delicate matter and perhaps none of my business beyond anticipating the timely remuneration of your legal fees to this firm — but you can’t expect them to continue taking on your debt in the hope of. . I don’t know what.” He paused to remove his spectacles so that his eyes floated up at her like two faintly greenish fish in a yellowed aquarium. “What is it that you want exactly, Mrs. Wright — Miriam? Vengeance? Do you want to see him destroyed, is that it?”

It came to her then that he was a small man too, self-serving, narrow-minded, a coward like all the rest. She was so angry all of a sudden, so inflamed and eruptive and just plain irritated she had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. “I won’t settle,” she said finally, her voice as dry as two husks rattling in the wind. “Never,” she said. “Not till I die.”

He looked away, shifted in his seat, impatiently clamped the spectacles back over the bridge of his nose. “You don’t want an attorney,” he said, and he was the one struggling to control his voice now, “you want an avenging angel.”

She rose abruptly from the seat, all the listlessness scorched right out of her. Her hands were trembling as she reached down to snatch up her bag and for a fraction of a second everything seemed to blur as if she’d been punched in the face. She was halfway to the door before she swung round on him. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”

The days began to flicker at her like a motion-picture film on a screen she couldn’t reach — somehow she was stuck in the back row, in the cheap seats, watching her own life transpire with a foreign logic until, inevitably, it sank into melodrama. And sorrow. A sorrow so deep she couldn’t bear to get out of bed half the time. There was that smell in the walls, the stench of fatality, of rot. The wallpaper was hideous — where was Norma’s taste? The broken bicycle. A table with three legs, propped up on an overturned wastebasket and a volume of Dickens— Bleak House , and how bleakly appropriate. Most mornings she was sick in her stomach, the cramping there, sick in her bowels, as if nothing would ever pass through her again. She found herself sweating, even outside in the arctic blast that reanimated the dead limbs of the trees and scoured the gutters. Her son-in-law irritated her. Norma irritated her. The idea of Christmas drove her into a frenzy of loathing, the spangles and the balls and the phony good cheer dispensed by every grinning hostess and street-corner drunk. Merry Christmas. It was like a war cry to her. Chicago: she hated it. Winter: she hated it. And here she was, forced to spend half her time out in the full fury of the season tramping from her lawyer to the doctor and then on to the next doctor and the next, the only thing that gave her comfort in the shortest supply.

And where was Frank while she was stuck here living hand to mouth? He was in California, released finally from Minnesota pending a grand jury investigation into the Mann Act charges, living off his friends, his bounteous friends, no doubt sitting at that very moment beneath a tangerine tree with the sun on his face. And her beside him. The bitch. The breeder. She couldn’t recall which day it was — one dead ice-bracketed eternal afternoon of that week between Christmas and New Year’s — when she decided to go to Leora, who was back now in Santa Monica as any sensible person would be. She’d just made use of the pravaz, the elixir seeping through her veins while the radiator belched and Norma’s husband tramped by in the hall as if his feet were encased in lead, when she had a sudden incandescent vision of the red bougainvillea climbing the bleached white stucco wall of Leora’s guesthouse while hummingbirds hovered and the Chinese tiptoed out of the house holding his tray aloft in a pillar of sunlight. The next day she was on the train.

She hadn’t followed Frank to California, that was what she told herself — and Leora agreed with her. She’d come for her health. For the air. The sun. And if Jesperson had tracked down Frank’s address for her (and he wanted to be paid too, the four-flusher, because in his profession that was all that mattered, money), there was no reason she shouldn’t use it to see him prosecuted. At the first opportunity, as soon as she was rested from her trip, she went downtown to the police and filed a charge of desertion against him, then made another foray to Tijuana and the very accommodating little brown man in the farmacia there. That was good, that was fine. But just then Frank wasn’t in Los Angeles — she got wind of the fact that he’d gone to New York to oversee the sale at auction of his precious prints as a stopgap to save Taliesin from the bank. Immediately she wired her new attorney 67and her new attorney wired a colleague in New York to appear on the scene with a warrant of attachment for the prints, which were, after all, community property. For two days she sat with Leora at the dining room table, in the living room, in the twin chaise longues on the back lawn, smoking cigarettes and calculating her share and how it would clear her debts in a single stroke, and for those two days she was happy, genuinely happy for the first time in months, till the news came back that the collection had sold for a fraction of what it was worth — less than $40,000 68—and that even worse, the auction house had put in a legal claim on the entire proceeds to cover past loans against the worth of the collection. Once again, and she couldn’t help feeling the hand of fate in this, Frank had outmaneuvered her, even if he’d managed to outmaneuver himself in the bargain.