T. Boyle - The Women

“I don’t know, Leora, I just don’t know,” she said after the news had sunk in. “Sometimes it seems as if the whole world is against me.” She was sipping a cocktail and the sun was bleeding through the windows, brightening the carpet in a long narrow strip and picking individual flowers out of the pattern on the chintz sofa. “He’ll lose Taliesin now, that’s for certain”—she paused, drew in a sigh, because she was feeling something, truly feeling it, though she’d have been hard-pressed to put it in words, something to do with Frank and the way he was when she first met him, his enthusiasm for the place and for her and her in it—“but it just doesn’t give me much satisfaction to think about it. Or not as much as I thought it would.” She traced her finger round the rim of the glass and watched the sun slice Leora’s face as she leaned forward, her lips compressed in a moue of sympathy, and then she let out a bitter little laugh. “I suppose it’s the shock of having gone from fifty thousand dollars in the clear to zero — zero dollars and zero cents — don’t you think?”

Leora’s eyes — and strange she’d never noticed this before — were as pinched and slanted as the Chinese servant’s, but maybe that was only the effect of the light. And her powder. Leora had got to an age where she really couldn’t seem to exercise any judgment when it came to combating the erosion round her eyes and mouth, canyons there, craters, whole deltas of tributaries. And her nose — it looked as if it had been dredged in flour. Miriam had always congratulated herself on having inherited her mother’s complexion, but now she strained to catch a glimpse of her face in the reflectionof the curio cabinet — all of this turmoil must certainly have begun to show round her eyes, and what if she should end up looking like Leora?

Oblivious, Leora took a sip of her cocktail, removed the olive and sucked at it meditatively. “You’re not getting soft on him, are you?”

“Me? Soft?” She considered the accusation a moment, observing the way Leora was watching her in that satirical posture that was so much a feature of her, perhaps the defining feature, the arched eyebrows, the southward slant of the mouth. Another sip of the shaken gin, fragrant as heaven, cold as hell. “Never. Believe you me, Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright — Mr. Philandering No-Good Wright — hasn’t seen anything yet.”

“Good for you,” Leora said. “I was beginning to worry.”

Still, as the days wore on and Leora began dropping hints — Charles was coming to dinner, Charles Schumocker, the producer, the widower, just fifty-eight years old and without doubt the wittiest man she’d ever met and really, Miriam, you should have heard what he said the other night at the Derby, Charles this, Charles that, Charles ad nauseam — and the local judge, another little man, a pygmy, a dwarf, threw out the desertion charge on the grounds that the infraction hadn’t occurred in California, Miriam felt herself losing control, very gradually, gradient by gradient, in the way of the slippage the geologists said was causing the earthquakes that made the guesthouse a veritable percussion section once a week or so. Deep down — and Charles tried to explain this one night at dinner, making use of the china to illustrate his point — the rock plates were grinding against one another like saucers, if only saucers weren’t smooth-edged but rough. That was what was happening to her, slippage, and everything that was smooth was abrading under the placid sun until it was too much for her to bear.

The negotiations went on through the spring and into the summer of 1927, Miss Levin wiring her periodically with offers and counter-offers, Norma dunning her by post and long-distance telephone, Charles, with his high forehead and emperor’s (usually dripping) nose practically installed in the house now and Leora chattering on like a girl about the inexpressible romance of second marriages. Miriam felt — well, depleted. She was at loose ends. She needed money. There was no place for her at Leora’s, at least not during the reign of Charles, and she couldn’t afford a hotel. Finally, though it was like driving spikes right through the palms of both hands, like self-crucifixion, she gave in.

She instructed Miss Levin, by wire, to accept her husband’s latest offer—$5,000 in cash plus payment of all legal fees, a trust fund of $30,000 and a $250 monthly allowance for life 69—on one condition: that he renounce Olga for a period of five years. Word came back a day later. He refused. Categorically. Oh, she could see right through him, the coldhearted bastard. He had the upper hand now and he knew it. He was going to wait her out, that was what he was going to do — starve her, if need be, see her turned out in the streets like a beggar. And the minute the divorce was finalized he would start counting off the days till he could marry his little Russian, just as he’d done with her as soon as he’d got free of Catherine. 70But she wouldn’t give in, she wouldn’t. Not yet, anyway.

She took the train to San Francisco because she couldn’t think of anything else to do and Alvy Oates, an old friend from her Chicago days with Emil, had offered her a place to stay just as long as she wanted. All the way up the coast, as the train beat along the tracks, she cursed Frank and cursed him again. And when she got there and saw the way Alvy’s face had aged — all those pouches and wrinkles, the dewlaps of an old woman who sits in a corner all day sopping up gravy with a crust of bread — she took a good hard look at herself and went directly into a clinic there where a truly wonderful doctor who understood her every need and assured her that she had the most beautiful skin he’d ever seen on a woman of her age gave her a face-lift that would make her look ten years younger than the ten years younger she already looked. Which her husband would pay for. Soon. Very soon.

She sipped liquids through a straw while her face healed and never changed out of her dressing gown. None of her children would return her wires. Alvy went off to club meetings, bridge parties, events at the museum, the symphony, the yacht club, and she stayed behind, working cross-word puzzles and reading detective novels. It was a time of excruciating and limitless boredom. One afternoon, after spending what must have been a full hour watching a lizard creep along the wall beneath the trellis on Alvy’s patio, she wired her attorney to accept terms without proviso and on August 27 she was granted a divorce from Frank Lloyd Wright on grounds of desertion, Miss Levin submitting her testimony by deposition. It hurt her as nothing had ever hurt her before, but the money was paid out and she immediately booked a one-way fare to Chicago, where she planned to stop in to bid farewell to Norma on her way to New York and then Paris. Yes, Paris. Where she could forget all about Frank Lloyd Wright and his machinations, where she could focus on her own art for a change and grow and develop and spread her wings and maybe, once she was settled and moving in the circles she was accustomed to — or had been accustomed to before the war — she’d even remarry.

All well and good. But things bog down, things muddle. At the end of September, unaccountably, she found herself in a hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin, of all places, writing to Frank to tell him just what she thought of him and if her language was harsh so much the worse because he was the one in violation of the divorce order, not her, he was the one sneaking back up the hill to his “love nest” 71so he could stick his prick into the little Russian’s cunt and fuck her and fuck her just as if they were goats, two fucking goats, and she knew what was going on and it wasn’t right. A week later she hired a car and drove out to Dodgeville with Tillie Levin and went right on up the steps of the rinky-dink town hall and demanded to see the district attorney, another weasel by the name of Knutson. “Do you have any idea what kind of filth is going on in this county?” she shouted the moment he came through the door of his office. He looked startled. Looked as if he’d had his hide exchanged for something that didn’t fit quite right, and he was a man too, with a belly and braces and a tie stained with whatever he’d had for lunch, and no, he said, he didn’t have any idea. “Frank Lloyd Wright!” she shouted. “Frank Lloyd Wright! Does that ring a bell?”