T. Boyle - The Women

She spun round twice, reveling in the fit of the dress and the soft flutter of the skirts at her ankles. “And what do you think of this — for outer-wear?” Studying herself in the mirror over the sideboard, she dropped a shoulder to slip into her sealskin cape, then leaned in close to pin the matching cap atop the crest of her curls. A moment to touch up her lips, drawing down her mouth in an irresistible pout — let him resist me, just let him, she was thinking, full of a spiraling ascending joy that threatened to lift her right off her feet — and then she whirled round to give Norma the full effect.

“Well?” she said.

Norma had got up to cross the room to her. She reached out a hand to smooth the fur. “Oh, Mama,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

And Miriam was soaring, soaring, no need for the pravaz, not now, not in the mood she was in because no elixir could hope to match or improve on it — she was beautiful, she was, and she knew it. She bent for a final glance in the mirror, made a minute adjustment to the angle of the cap, patted her hair in place. Then she straightened up and gave her daughter a fervent smile, feeling like an actress waiting in the wings for her cue, the whole dreary apartment suddenly lifted out of its gloom and irradiated with light. She dropped her voice to the register of seduction. “I’ll want a taxi,” she said.

A brisk anarchic wind seized her as she stepped from the cab, her cape billowing, hat ready to take flight, all the grit and refuse of the filthy avenues and back alleys flung up at her as if in a hurricane, so that her chief concern as she went up the stairs to the lobby was her hair. And her face. Her face, of course. She would be late for their appointment, no question about it — she was already late — and now she was going to have to stop in the ladies’ lavatory and make the necessary adjustments. Heart pounding, out of breath, flustered — yes, flustered — she tramped through the lobby looking for the lavatory, and when she found it, when she pushed through the door and into the warm brightly lit sanctuary that was, thankfully, deserted at this hour, she went directly to one of the stalls and locked herself in. What she was thinking was that she couldn’t let him see her in this state, her nerves all aflutter as if she were some chorus girl plucked out of the Folies-Bergère, and so to calm herself, to slow things down and give her that air of Parisian languor that was sure to captivate him, she extracted the pravaz from her purse.

Afterward, she saw to her face and hair in the mirror, in full possession of herself once again. She reapplied her lipstick with a hand as steady as a surgeon’s, smoothed down the chartreuse velvet and gave a tug at the neckline to make the material lie just so, flared the cape, refreshed her perfume. For a long moment she studied herself in the mirror from various angles, even as two other women — middle-aged drudges 93without the faintest inkling of style or carriage — came through the door, chattering over the affairs of some office girl or other. She ignored them— Let them look, let them appreciate style, real style, for once in their godforsaken lives —and gave herself one final appraisal. Satisfied, she swept out of the room and across the lobby to the elevator, where two men in beautifully tailored suits stepped aside with fawning awestruck looks as she announced the floor to the elevator man and he tried his best to stare straight ahead.

She was greeted by a young male assistant — the offices lavish with Oriental art, a pair of Ianelli sprites, realized drawings and intricate models, the lighting exquisite, taste and elevation oozing from the very walls — and then shown into a hallway connecting to the studio, where she caught a glimpse of a short stocky elderly man with an enormous head ducking into a doorway before she was led into the studio proper and seated in a high-backed Craftsman chair. But this was no ordinary chair, and the thought came home to her with the force of revelation — this was a Frank Lloyd Wright chair. She was sitting in a Frank Lloyd Wright chair, a masterpiece designed by the Master himself! There was genius here, genius invested in the design that lent verticality to the horizontal lines of the room, in the cut and mold and finish of the wood. In the decor, the walls, the rugs, the hangings. It was as if she’d been ushered into the salon of Des Esseintes himself.

The assistant — he had the face of an acolyte, stooped shoulders, pursed lips, mole-colored hair swept across his brow — had pulled out the chair for her as if performing some holy rite. He’d offered to take her cape, but she’d declined. She wanted Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright to get the full effect of her, en ensemble, and now she had a moment to arrange the folds of the cape and settle herself. Her chair, she saw, was one of a group of three — the other two flanked a small inlaid table against the wall — and it had been set here in front of an oversized desk decorated with an enormous vase of cut flowers that gave up their beauty and fragrance in defiance of the weather and the season both; behind the desk an Oriental screen depicted a dark twisting pine with a pair of cranes nesting in the branches. “Mr. Wright will be in directly,” the assistant whispered before creeping out of the room. A moment passed, everything as still as a church, and then suddenly he was there, the very man she’d seen in the hallway, catlike, alert and present, immanently present, and could it be? The graying hair, the head of marble? But of course, of course. Those eyes. The lines of grief round his mouth. He was fraught, heroic, and young, much younger than he’d appeared at first glance—

“Madame Noel?” he said, coming round the desk to give a short bow and take her hand in his. “It’s a great pleasure—” he began, and then faltered, the customary rituals of greeting failing him because they were inadequate, hopeless, a falsification of everything he was feeling in that moment. She could see it instantly, see her power reflected in his eyes, hunger there, confusion, a gaze of pure astonishment running up and down her body like the touch of his two hands, and something else too, something deeper, primal, naked in its immediacy and need.

She gave him a soft slow smile, the pressure of her fingertips on his, then dropped his hand to lean forward and set her gold cigarette case on one corner of the desk and the little leather-bound volume she’d brought him on the other. “Oh, believe me, the pleasure is all mine,” she said, her voice falling down the register till it was a whisper, a purr. “Or no, that’s not right at all — the honor. It’s an honor simply to be in your presence.”

He flushed, fighting to recover himself, his voice too loud all of a sudden: “No, no, I do mean it, the pleasure’s all mine. You — your letter. Letters.” He’d backed away from her as he might have backed away from a fire flaring up round a length of pitch pine and settled himself behind the desk. “I was deeply moved,” he said. “You express yourself exquisitely, tremendous command of the language.”

She looked up at him, holding his gaze, then crossed her legs and began removing her gloves, finger by finger, as languidly and delicately as she could manage. All the while, he was watching her, fixated, as if she were performing some miracle of prestidigitation. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked, taking up the cigarette case so that he could see it, see her initials engraved there and the ampersand that joined them to the initials of the man who’d given it to her.

“Oh, no, no, not at all.” And he leaned forward to light her cigarette, his eyes never leaving her face.

She tilted her head back and exhaled, in her element now, as secure as a porpoise in the deep rocking cradle of the sea. “Well,” she said, dropping her chin to focus her gaze on him, “how do you like me?”