T. Boyle - The Women

She picked up the table first — an end table of rosewood, intricately carved — and the sound it made when it tore the screen from the wall was like the overture to a symphony. Cloth gave. Wood. Plaster. Glass rang and chimed and hit all the high notes ascending the scale. She found an axe propped up against the fireplace and brought it down on the dining room table, the bookshelf, the chairs, the divans, the desk, Frank’s desk. There was the whoosh of a ceramic vase grasping at the air, the shriek of splintering wood, the basso profundo of the andirons slamming to the floor. And who was it who alerted the police — a neighbor? The cabbie? The guardian angel of philanderers? Of fornicators?

Oh, but she fought those apes in uniform, with their locked-up faces and blistering eyes, giving as good as she got, and if there was blood — and flesh, flesh too — caught beneath her fingernails, well so much the worse for them. She was at the window with the axe when the first of them came through the back door, a boy, a puny shoulderless wisp of a boy in a uniform two sizes too big for him. “Ma’am,” he said, “ma’am,” as if that were her name. “Now calm down, ma’am, please.”

She swung round on him in her rage, and who could blame her? And it was a good thing for him that he ducked out of the way when she flung the axe because that axe was nothing more than an extension of herself, of her will, and if she had a thousand axes it would only be a beginning. “What right have you to accost me here!” she demanded. “This is my house, mine, and I’ll do with it as I please. Now, get out of here. Out!”

There was another one now, older, settled into his flesh and the dog pouches round his eyes, shanty Irish, and low, lower than low, she could see that at a glance. He shouted out a whole blathering garble of threats and admonitions as if he were under the misapprehension that she was hard of hearing, but she ignored him because at that moment her eyes lighted on the most intriguing little Chinese vase. .

The judge lectured her and he couldn’t see how ill she was, didn’t care, because men stuck together and he was a man and Frank was a man and so was the policeman who’d taken hold of her arm as she flung the vase out onto the lawn through the shattered window and the Shunshō on its heels. Thirty days, the judge intoned, and then suspended the sentence on condition that she stay away from her ex-husband and from La Jolla and refrain from any and all criminal malfeasance whatsoever. She held herself erect. Never so much as blinked her eyes. And though it took all her strength to keep from throwing it back at him — criminal malfeasance indeed, and who was the real criminal here? — she never offered a word but for a murmur of acquiescence. Yes, she understood. Yes, she agreed to the conditions. And no, she had no intention of returning to La Jolla. Afterward, at her press conference, she looked into the faces of the reporters and felt as serene as she’d ever felt in her life. Something had shifted deep inside her, the plates slipping and grinding until now, finally, they were interlocked, and the pravaz — the pravaz would fix them there with a new kind of permanence. Frank — and all that life as Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright — was behind her now, and that was what she told them. “I’m moving forward with my life,” she said, her voice breathing in her own ears like a second voice, an ingenue’s voice, a coquette’s. “I’ve had another offer of marriage.”

The room went quiet.

“Who is it, Miriam?” a voice rang out. “Who’s the lucky man?”

“Oh, I can’t reveal that,” she said, and she was Maude Miriam Noel all over again, the Belle of Memphis, each word sweetening on her lips till it had the intensity of pure cane sugar, “but I will say he’s a European gentleman of conspicuously high pedigree — heir to a throne, in fact — and that I’ve recently borne him a daughter who is now in her father’s care. In Europe.” 74She faltered, lost her train of thought — or very nearly, and where was she, where was she? — but the morfina whispered in her ear and it came back to her. “Across the sea.”

“Can you give us her name? The child’s name?”

“Miriam,” another called, “Miriam—”

“There’s one more thing,” she began, and they all fell silent. She fed on that silence and took a long slow look round her, feeling supreme, joyous, on top of the world. A smile for them, for each and every one of them, and for the cameras too. “I just wanted to announce,” she went on, and here that unfortunate little tickle began to play at the base of her neck and she brought a hand to her hair as if to smooth it back and held it there a moment till the tremor subsided. And yes, there was the flash, there it was. She laughed, actually laughed aloud, with the surprise of it.

“Yes, Miriam? Madame Noel? You said you were going to make an announcement? ”

“Oh, yes, yes. I wanted to announce that I’ve taken a bungalow in Hollywood”—another pause, another slow pan of the room—“and at the suggestion of a number of prominent men in the motion-picture industry, I will be sitting for a screen test in the very near future.”

There was a murmur of voices, the shuffling of feet. Somewhere off to her left someone was laughing or maybe crying, and outside, beyond the walls, she could hear the metallic clank of the streetcar and the dull fading rumble of the wheels carrying down the avenue. She didn’t know what else to say and so she smiled again and thanked them all for coming.

It was like a haunting, like a slow, steady descent into the lair of the demon-lover, no peace, no respite, a fresh horror at every turning, chaos without end. Each time she and Frank set up a household, whether at Taliesin, in Minneapolis or Phoenix or on the very farthest verge of the continent where the land gave out and the waves pounded the shore, Miriam was there to wreck it. Each time they left the house — to go for a walk, to the grocer’s, an exhibition, a restaurant — Olgivanna never knew if it would be there when they got back. Ash, that was what she’d come to expect. Scorched earth. Ruins. The sheriff would be at the door with yet another warrant. Immigration men would pop up out of nowhere. Bankers. Lawyers. The windows would be shattered and the furniture smashed and a policeman stationed on the porch with the Shunshō print propped against the rail like a bit of refuse flung up out of the maw of a hurricane. And what if this madwoman came at them with a knife? What if she tried to harm the children? What then?

She tried to ask Frank about it, but he just waved her off. “Miriam’s a very disturbed woman,” he’d say, as if the pronouncement itself would diminish her, neutralize her, take the edge off the blade, jam the bullet in the chamber.

“But you have said yourself that she has attacked people with a weapon, have you not?”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he would tell her, but she could see that he didn’t believe it. She found him checking the windows at night. He even began locking the doors.

Her cough worsened. She developed hives, allergies, a fungal infection. The sound of her own daughters’ voices began to grate on her — their squabbling, their needs, Mama, Mama! — and the incessant suck and draw of the surf made her feel as if all the vitality were draining out of her in a pale rinse of foam. She couldn’t walk into a room of that cottage without seizing with dread and fear and hate, the tables gouged, the mark of the axe on the mantel, the walls, the baseboard. And though Frank was tender, responsive, unfailingly cheerful, whistling over a drawing or the pages of his manuscript, singing in the shower, doing a little dance round the icebox with a glass of milk in one hand and a sandwich in the other, there were times when she wanted to get up and batter him with her fists, scream till she was breathless. She wasn’t yet thirty years old and she felt as if she were sixty. She began to hate the way the sun came out of the east each morning. Everything tasted like nothing, like sand. Grit. Dirt in her mouth.