T. Boyle - The Women

Their second quarrel came at the end of that week and he was the one who set it off — again — because he was in a mood, she could see that the minute he stepped through the door. He didn’t like the pillows, that was it. They made the place look like a whorehouse, he said, and she said, “So what does that make me?”

He had no answer for that, and she saw what a little man he was, what a yellowbelly, and no sooner did he divest himself of his cape and hat than he started in on the subject of her stationery and the china she’d ordered. “It’s vulgar, Miriam. Your coat of arms? What of mine? Don’t you think the Lloyd Joneses go back farther than the, the — whoever your people are?”

“My father was a Hicks. And we trace our origins back to the earliest settlement of Virginia. If it weren’t for the War Between the States, we’d—”

“The plain red square,” he said. “That is how I’ve marked my stationery all these years and that is how I’ll mark it in the future. Do you understand me? I won’t discuss it.” 98

She was seething — the way he cut her off, dictated to her. Who did he think he was? “Yes? And what will you discuss? Taliesin? Tell me about Taliesin and why I’m not invited there. Is it because of that dead woman? You think I’ll sully her memory, is that it?”

He averted his face — a sure sign he was lying — and said, “No, that’s not it at all. It’s just that we’re rebuilding right now and you really wouldn’t be comfortable there, what with the dirt and confusion, the limited room, and my attentions of course would be distracted in terms of the work going forward—”

“What about your mother?”

“My mother? What has she got to do with it?” His voice flared. “I suppose you resent her having given birth to me, is that it? Because you weren’t there?” He was bent over the lamp in the corner now, jerking at the switch. The light caught his face as he turned to her, everything about him savage and animalistic, like some burrowing thing trapped outside its den, and he was hateful, hateful.

“She’s invited, isn’t she?”

“Well, I — of course. You know that. I’m building rooms for her and my aunts — and for you, for you too.”

“And your children? The children are there, are they not? Catherine, Llewellyn, David, Frances? One big happy family? Where are they sleeping? Are they so put out by the construction?” He’d turned to her and she came right up to him now, thrusting her face in his. “You’re a liar, Frank. A liar. And a ghoul, that’s what you are, because you prefer some, some corpse to me! A memory! A dead thing!” She veered away from him, her hand snatching for something, anything she could heft, one of his damned statues, anything — but he caught her by the wrist.

“Don’t you say a word against her,” he said, tightening his grip.

She twisted away from him, jerked her wrist free, and here was one of his vases and she didn’t give two figs what dynasty it hailed from or what precious artisanic soul had fired it in whichever golden Chinese era — and were they all golden? — it was in her hand and then it was gone, obliterated against the wall. “Go ahead,” she said, “hit me,” but she spun out of reach, flung herself across the room and then came at him so swiftly he had to backtrack.

“Cold meat, Frank. But I’m alive, a real live flesh-and-blood woman!” Both her hands were at her collar now and in a single savage jerk she tore the dress to her waist, her breasts falling free even as the cold air of the room assaulted her. “Look at me. Look at my breasts. You’ve fondled them enough. Suckled them like an infant. They were good enough for you then. And now you prefer a corpse, a corpse over me?”

His face was blanched. He was backing away from her. “Miriam,” he pleaded.

“No! No! I’ll kill myself first — is that what you want? Is it? Two corpses?”

In the morning — Christ knew where he’d spent the night — two of his assistants appeared at the door, the mole-hair and another tight-mouthed drudge who looked at her as if she were the Gorgon herself. They were there to pack up Mr. Wright’s things and remove them to his offices. What things? she demanded, but she already knew. And she didn’t attempt to stop them, not by any means. If he wanted to run out on her, desert her, leave her bereft and unprovided for like the cad he was, well, she wasn’t about to stop him. She took a cab to Marshall Field’s, though she detested the place, and when she returned there was no trace of him at 25 East Cedar Street but for the furniture itself — even his toothbrush was gone. Again she put off telephoning to his offices and again she broke down. Just as she’d suspected, he was at Taliesin and couldn’t be reached.

This time he didn’t come back. And though it ate at her, through every minute of every day, she stayed on in the empty house. Every time she heard a noise in the street, the scrape of a shoe along the walk or a voice lifted in greeting, she was sure it was him, sure he’d come back to her, but she was disappointed. Over and over again. As the days wore on, she steeled herself — she had resources of her own. And she had her pravaz and a prescription from a very forward-looking physician whose address she’d found in the directory. And this was her house now and she would be damned if she was going to leave it.

Of course, she wrote him — daily, sometimes two or three times a day. She telephoned to him as well and when she did manage to reach him, he seemed distracted — and guilty too — and though he tried to act as if nothing were the matter, as if he was simply preoccupied with the building at Taliesin, she couldn’t really be held accountable if her voice did rise above an acceptable level because she was only human, as she reminded him, and not a memory. Or was she? Then his letters, which had been sympathetic, solicitous, kind — but distant, as if he were writing to an aunt or a sister away on a foreign mission — turned more resolute, as if he had finally understood that he and she could never be reconciled again. The one that hurt her most, the one that drove her out of his house and into a first-class compartment on a train headed west for Albuquerque, 99addressed her in tender reminiscent terms, especially as he talked of her charms and the thrill of knowing and loving her and how terrible he felt for having abandoned her. But it was a letter of discharge and no doubt about it. Because he was a little man. Because love — with her, at any rate — led inevitably, through stages, to ruin. “Reason is gone!” he wrote, invigorating the apostrophe with his overwrought punctuation. “Charity is gone — Now comes Fear — Hate — Revenge — Punishment — Then Regret — Shame — Humiliation — Ashes, It is the accepted Road — all ambitious Souls hear me! Sex is the curse of Life!”

She brooded over this ugly proposition all the dreary way across the country — sex the curse of life, indeed; he hadn’t felt that way on Christmas Eve when he’d had her twice in succession and then again the following morning, the celebration of Christ’s birth and the sacred hymns of the angelic choir notwithstanding. Or in the weeks after when he’d installed her in his house like a houri extracted from his harem and had his way with her whenever the urge struck him, which was any time of the day or night because he was as randy as a goat, the randiest man she’d ever been exposed to, even in France, even in Italy. And now, suddenly, sex was the curse of life. He’d twisted everything, the hypocrite, making her out to be the one at fault, reducing the monumentality of what they’d had together to a vulgar expression of sexual gratification as if they were apes in the jungle or some such rot. Well, she wouldn’t have it. And she wrote back to him, page after page, her emotions burning into her fingertips, the fountain pen, the ink that seared the very paper before her.