T. Boyle - The Women

As Christmas approached and Norma began draping random sprigs of holly about the house and trolling carols in the kitchen (flatly and out of tune, because, sadly, she’d also apparently failed to inherit her mother’s musical talent, but hadn’t she sung “Frère Jacques” so beautifully as a schoolgirl — or was that Corinne? 96), Frank’s attentions became ever more insistent. There were parties, of course. Parties everywhere. Daily. Nightly. In lavish homes, galleries and theaters, lavishly decorated for Yuletide, colored servants scraping about with trays of drinks and delicacies and all the haut monde of Chicago gathered round in their furs and jewels and fancy dress. Frank became the very avatar of the season, funneling his genius for interior design into a cornucopia of Christmas display and superhuman good cheer, parading her around on his arm as if she were the rarest treasure of all. “You’re my jewel,” he would say, and kiss her full on the lips, thrusting himself at her till she could feel him hard against her — and she would withdraw as delicately as she could without dampening his ardor entirely, and call him naughty or a billy goat or some such childish designation. And then he was on her again and again till she thought she would split open with the heat of her own desire. He would have her — and she would have him — and soon, soon.

Still, she didn’t know quite what to expect when he invited her to his house on Christmas Eve itself. Would his grown children be there? His wife? His mother? The comical little housekeeper with the ear trumpet she’d heard so much about? His friends and associates? The neighbors? Or would it be just the two of them, locked in a passionate embrace as if they had no other attachments in the world?

It was past dark when the taxi pulled up in front of the house. This was a small house, modest and neat, the house of his exile from the place in Oak Park he’d given over to his wife and the ruins of his mansion in Wisconsin, and if she’d expected something grander, a structure commensurate with his beauty and wisdom and greatness, she buried her disappointment. This was temporary. She could appreciate that. She was living a temporary life herself, and even as the thought came into her head, she felt a violent upsurge of feeling for him: they were exiles, both of them, and the fates had brought them together for mutual solace. What could be more perfect? More glorious?

Full of hope and love — swollen with it, yes — she came briskly up the walk, watching for patches of ice because it wouldn’t do to fall and turn an ankle, though even that would have its rewards, her leg delicately elevated before the fire as he tended to her with a strip of bandage and a glass of champagne, his fingers kneading her flesh, wandering up her calf and back down again, stroking, probing, caressing. . But here he was, the door flung open on a flood of light, dressed in a black velvet dinner jacket and Chinese trousers, his hair backlit like the nimbus of an angel—“Miriam,” he was calling, “my love, my dear, my jewel, here, let me help you—”

The fire leapt up. There were bowls of blood-red roses everywhere. A brazen Buddha. The lamps he’d designed himself with their marvelous geometrical patterns and their soft shimmers of light. Candles aglow. The table set for two. Champagne on ice. And music, delicate, delicious, a string quartet serenading her from the Victrola in the corner. “It’s breathtaking,” she said, even as he kicked the door shut and took her in his arms. “Everything you touch. Just breathtaking!”

They couldn’t stop talking — and kissing, kissing too — ranging the whole world over, from the Greeks to the Romans to the contemporary theater and the joys of Germany, Italy, Japan — she must go to Japan, she absolutely must, he insisted: the cleanest and most perfectly organic society on earth — and, of course, Paris. Which was her province. If she must go to Japan then he must come to Paris — with her as his guide. Oh, and she sang on about Paris as if it were a car ride away, as if they could browse the antiquarian shops and stroll the boulevards before the clock struck midnight. She was intoxicated, absolutely and thoroughly, right to the core of her — and not from any opiate or even the champagne, but from being there with him on the most precious night of the year.

They ate in front of the fire at the table he’d laid there, each dish served up by him on a covered platter, hearty food — cod in cream sauce, salt pork and potatoes, too hearty maybe, too plain and well, Midwestern, but good for all that — and there was no sign of the comical little housekeeper or anyone else. Afterward she smoked before the fire and delicately tipped back a demitasse of coffee and some sort of liqueur she couldn’t identify (he abstained) and let her voice sing till she might have been a tropical bird fluttered down out of the grim black sky to brighten this parlor and this house till it shone like the center of the universe — and on Christmas Eve, no less!

“Do you see my ring?” she asked at one point, holding out her hand to him as they sat together on a stiff-backed sofa that might have been a thing of beauty but wasn’t sumptuous at all, more like a pew in a monastic chapel, and wouldn’t a few pillows or even a quilt go a long way toward improving it — and the comfort of the room too? But all thought flew out of her head because he took her hand in his and kissed it and kissed it again, running his fingers up her wrist to her forearm, the exquisite pressure there, the fire. . “It was worn by Cleopatra,” she went on, but he was bent to her hand still, kissing, kissing, and her breath was coming faster, “to keep her lovers faithful. This. . very. . ring. .”

His hand slid up her arm, along the smooth velvet path, no resistance to the material at all, and he was embracing her throat now and giving her the full weight of his eyes. He murmured something, whether it had to do with Cleopatra and her lovers or the height of the ceiling or the color of her eyes, she couldn’t say, but her voice was teasing out the subject, breathy and deep, no going back now—“Beware,” she whispered, “to all faithless lovers, but you, you’re not. . faithless. . are you?”

His hand was on her breast, slipping beneath the material to the naked skin, to the aureole and the nipple which hardened to his touch. And his lips. His lips were on hers. She heard the fire crackle. Heard the record hiss against its label. Wind beyond the windows. The ticking of a clock. She leaned back to accommodate his weight and the slow sweet delirium of his hands and his tongue.

“Are you?” she whispered.

And he, fully aroused, his face gone rubicund and his ears glistening like Christmas ornaments in the quavering light, breathed his answer against the soft heat of her lips. “Me?” he puffed, working, working hard, writhing against her and tugging at the buttons of his trousers as if they were each individually on fire. “Never,” he said, sinking into her, “never.”

Whether Norma or her little toad of a husband approved or not was an utter irrelevance: she was moving in with Frank Lloyd Wright at 25 East Cedar Street and the whole world could choke on its pinched pathetic petit bourgeois notions of propriety for all she cared. She was going to live. Express herself. Roam with the giants. It happened that she was in love with a towering genius, a Wagnerian hero who stood head and shoulders above them all, a Tannhäuser, a Siegfried — and he was in love with her, her and no one else — and if they thought she was going to confine herself to a miserable back room in a hideous flat and live like a Carmelite nun at her son-in-law’s sufferance, they were sadly mistaken. She had her bags sent over, the trunks she’d brought with her from France, her clothes, jewelry, objets d’art, and by the middle of January she was established, mistress of her own house once again.