T. Boyle - The Women

He was off then, off on a speech of his own, settling into his rhythms like a jockey feeling the stride of his mount on the stretch run, gabbling on about the structural problems they were encountering, the vagaries of his workforce, the lay of the stone they were quarrying and the quality of the lumber from the mill, not to mention the fluidity of the design and the changes of conception he was making daily, and Paul Mueller, of course, Paul’s contributions, and the Japanese, how they were becoming increasingly cordial in their communications and how certain he was that the big project was going to go through. They were halfway across town before she stopped him. “Well,” she said, giving him a coy look from beneath the wide floral brim of her hat, “didn’t you miss me?”

He had. He did. The blood shot to his groin again. And then the next speech was spinning out of him with all the fluidity and spontaneous grace he’d inherited from his preacher father. 102He was indicting himself, begging her forgiveness and forbearance, pledging fealty and love and unraveling a whole spool of excuses, when she stopped him again. “Oh, that’s all very gratifying,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the racket of the motor and the yapping of some sort of mongrel or other that had been chasing behind the wheels for the past block and a half, “but where are you taking me?” Another look from beneath the shade of the hat. Her smile was full now, her eyes dancing, lips swollen. And licked. Licked wet with the pink retreating tip of her tongue. “And for what purpose?”

He fumbled a moment, the open wound of Taliesin still lying bloody between them, and the oratorical flow, the sheer dance of words, stuttered short. “I, well, I thought we’d, maybe — if you have no objections, that is, and I know you must be exhausted—”

“The Garfield?” she said, and the way she said it, so casually, so gracefully, so lewdly, made it the most exciting thing he’d ever heard.

“No,” he said, grinning, and for the first time since they’d got in the car he reached out a hand to touch her intimately, on the upper thigh, where the material of her dress had pulled tight beneath her when she slid into the seat. “I thought the Congress.”

Two days later — and what choice did he have? — he moved her back into the little house at 25 East Cedar Street and did his best to overlook her moods and dietary peculiarities, her florid speeches about art and literature and her continued insistence that he sit for a marble bust. He hadn’t time to sit for a bust, he kept protesting (gently, ever so gently). He was a working architect, preoccupied with the business of the world. And busts, in any case, were for dead heroes, for military men and the like. No, she countered, not at all — what of Rodin’s bust of Balzac? Of Hugo? Granted, they were in bronze, but marble was for the ages — as he was. He might have told her it was architecture that was for the ages, but he kept the thought to himself. What he wanted, above all, was harmony, and he was determined to establish it this time around, to give as well as take, because he’d suffered the long withering attrition of her absence. If he had to nurture her, if he had to put up with a pillow here or there and eat French food once in a blue moon, what of it? She was his star, his torch, his impetus. Was he in love? He couldn’t say. But she was on his arm when he went to the concert hall, when he went out to dine or simply take the air, and she was there in his bed at night, as warm and loving and virtuosic as any man could ever hope to ask or dream.

Inevitably, the question of Taliesin came up again. It emerged one morning out of a perfectly ordinary breakfast conversation. The new cook, a fox-faced girl with a wandering eye and a West Virginia coal miner’s accent, an adept at plain things, flapjacks and sidemeat, eggs over easy, grits and hot black coffee, had just served breakfast and taken herself off to hide in the kitchen, and he was commenting on a piece in the paper about the building costs associated with one of the new skyscrapers going up along Michigan Avenue, when Miriam, looking up from her own newspaper, said, “Isn’t it time you took me up to Wisconsin?”

She was dressed all in white, in a clinging gown of silk, and her hair was loose on her shoulders. The lorgnette dangled from one hand, swaying gently back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch. In her other hand, balanced delicately, a teacup held in abeyance. She was smiling, congenial, insouciant, the question no more charged than a query about the weather or what color hat he might like to see her in.

He never hesitated. From the moment he’d written her to come back to him he saw how selfish he’d been, demanding her full commitment and loyalty and yet all the while keeping her off-balance so that she was never certain of her status. Small wonder she had her moods. It was his fault. Entirely his. He set down the newspaper and gazed steadily into her eyes. “We’ll drive up tomorrow,” he said. 103

The day was clear, the road untrammeled. He was whistling, fiddling with the gearshift, the choke, feeling as light as the puffs of cloud running high overhead across the pale blue roof of the world. Every bend in the road, every tree and cow, whether it be Holstein, Jersey or Swiss Brown, was the subject of a spontaneous discourse, and he couldn’t help himself, his tongue running ahead of him, the joy of possession working on him like the heady poteen the Irish laborers drank behind his back when he could smell it on their breath and see it in the delirious dance of their too-green eyes. Miriam sat beside him, uncharacteristically silent, a soft smile on her lips. How could she be so calm? he wondered. How could she not feel what he was feeling, this bubbling joy that made him want to burst into song? He stepped on the accelerator, rocketing past a tractor towing a cart piled high with corn, the wheels churning up twin tornadoes of dust and the back end wagging with the thrust of the engine, and suddenly he was singing, singing for her, singing for the joy of it. He sang “Clementine” twice through and then “Old Kent Road,” and so what if the farmers stared and his voice floated on down the road behind him like the windblown squawk of the summer geese charging from one pond to another? He was happy. Purely happy.

They stopped for luncheon in Cross Plains, after which she grew calmer still, so much so she might have been comatose — or lost in a deep waking sleep. He kept shooting glances at her, her hair fluttering in the breeze, her eyes fixed straight ahead, her frame in perfect equipoise as if she were balancing on an invisible wire, and eventually he fell silent himself. A thought had occurred to him. A nagging unsettling thought, one he’d tried to suppress through the course of these running days. It had to do with what he knew of Miriam’s temperament, how easily it could shift from light to dark, from this calm to sudden fury, and how that might accord with his mother’s moods, not to mention Mrs. Breen’s. Mrs. Breen ran the household the way the Kaiser ran his army. And his mother, no wilting flower herself, had taken exception to the housekeeper on any number of grounds (“Don’t you dare call that woman Mother, not while I’m in this house”). 104Since the construction was progressing rapidly he’d moved her into the new wing — at her insistence — if only for an extended visit till the renovation was completed and the design fully realized, and that was fine. At least for the first day or so, until she and Mrs. Breen began feuding about everything from how to boil an egg to the proper way to make up a bed, set the table and polish silverware. How would they react to Miriam? More to the point: how would Miriam react to them? Distracted, he laid his hand atop hers and she turned to give him a vague smile as the wind took her hair and the sun tugged them forward and the road melted like butter under the glow of it. Like any gambling man, he could only hope for the best.