T. Boyle - The Women

He looked up from what he was doing — his eternal drawing, and he was like a child, exactly like a child, an infant, that was what he was — and gave her a sour look. 116“I know it, Miriam. Believe me, we’re doing everything we can to put a stop to it.”

“A stop to it? It’s too late already, isn’t it? Do you know what those letters make me seem like?” He was watching her out of his shrewd little eyes, glaring at her, blaming her. “Like a ruined woman, Frank. Like a fool. A fool for loving you.”

And what was his response? The little man, the cold fish who wouldn’t even rise from the stool to take her in his arms and swear his love to her, who couldn’t take a cue? “I can’t help that, Miriam. What’s done is done.”

She woke next morning to a dull changeless light and a preternatural silence, as if the whole world had lost its hearing. The bed was empty beside her. Beyond the windows, a slant of gray wet snow, and of course there were no curtains to shut it out — Frank didn’t believe in curtains — so that the outdoors plunged right into the room. She might as well have been camped in Alaska or some such place, the fire dead in the hearth, her breath suspended before her face and a rime on the water glass she’d set out on the bedside table. It was too cold even to get up and use the bathroom. Too depressing. The thought of the letters came to her suddenly, the shame, the stupidity, and then she thought of her pravaz, but she never moved, and if the housemaid came in to see to her she never knew it. Sleep was like a stone pressing down on her chest. She closed her eyes. When she woke again it was still snowing, still cold, but someone had lit the fire and her bodily needs spoke to her in a way she could no longer ignore. She found her slippers and her robe and made her way to the bathroom.

And this was primitive too, despite the bronze Buddha and the Han vases and the Oriental carpets, because the water from the tap was like liquid ice and if she wanted to bathe — and she did — she’d have to send someone out to fetch wood and fire up the boiler in the cellar. She made her toilette as best she could, feeling out of sorts, thinking she might have some tea and toast to settle her stomach, but as she brushed her hair before the mirror — a hundred strokes, morning and night, just as her mother had taught her — she felt the weakness in her bowels and had to sit down a moment. Almost accidentally — idly, certainly — her hand came into contact with the cosmetics case in which she kept her pravaz and it took only a moment to decide that what she needed was an injection to set her right. It was the cold, she told herself, the dreary unrelenting winter that gave everyone chilblains and ague, the same as in Paris, but at least there she could find refuge in a gallery or a concert hall or one of the cafés or salons artistiques. Paris, she was thinking, Paris, and felt the warmth spread through her.

It was then that she heard the voices. Frank’s voice and another man’s — or no, two others — twined and murmurous. They seemed to be drifting across the loggia from the direction of the living room, and that struck her as odd — Frank hadn’t mentioned anything to her about guests arriving, though with one thing and another it may have slipped his mind. Suddenly her heart leapt up — here was the possibility of a reprieve, a release from the nullity of country life if only for an hour or two. But who could it be? Frank always surrounded himself with stimulating people, artists, musicians, architects and writers, many of them quite well-connected, and if his gatherings never quite approached the brilliance of the Parisian salons, they were often charming and diverting. And diversion was what she needed right now, above all else.

She cracked the door to hear better. Frank’s voice predominated — he seemed to be delivering some sort of speech, but then he was always giving extempore speeches on an inexhaustible range of subjects, “pontificating,” as one of his ex-draftsmen liked to say, and not very charitably she was sure — his fine mellow tenor sharpening now, even as the voices of the two men broke in to challenge him, and what was going on? Was he showing some of his prints for sale, was that it? Could Clarence Darrow have come all the way out from the city? A client? And then suddenly, through some trick of the air currents, one of the stranger’s voices rang clear—“So what you’re saying is that there is no romantic attachment whatever between you and Madame Noel? She’s merely a spiritual affinity like Mrs. Borthwick?” —and she understood. Reporters. The reporters were here.

Frank said something that she couldn’t quite catch — he must have been pacing up and down the room — and then his voice came clear too. “Yes, that’s right, I’ve hired on Madame Noel in the capacity of housekeeper, as Mrs. Breen has been dismissed, as you know—”

Housekeeper? She a housekeeper? What was he thinking?

“But surely,” the voice returned — a thin voice, reedy and wheedling—“you can’t deny that these letters give quite the opposite impression.”

She didn’t hear what Frank had to say next because she was in motion suddenly, hurriedly dressing — the silk gown, the white one, a pearl choker and her rings — thinking that this was her chance to make them see the truth of the matter, to know what she was in her deepest self, in her heart, and to let the world know too. She felt almost as if she were dreaming as she drifted through the loggia with its windows giving onto the gray frozen drifts, her feet bare as a maid’s and the gown flowing across her abdomen and her limbs with the simple elegance the Greeks had brought to perfection. Cytherea. She was violet-crowned Cytherea, the foam-risen, a goddess gliding across the carpet and into the living room where the two strangers, one bald and one not, their eyes flying to her, practically ruptured themselves jumping up out of their chairs to make obeisance to her, and “Yes,” she was telling them, enchanted by the sound of her own voice. “Yes, it’s all true: I love him!”

The denouement wasn’t quite everything she’d expected. Frank was angry with her, at least at first, but he stood by her and the two of them, the fire leaping and the storm raging beyond the windows to produce an air of romance even the most gifted scenarist would have been hard-pressed to duplicate, made their defense of a love that defies the conventions, that dares strive for the sublime no matter the niggling concerns of the hidebound and unenlightened. First she made her thoughts known, then he, back and forth in counterpoint until they were both singing the same sweet song and the newspapermen scratched at their pads till their fingers went numb. Of course, the photograph they ran beneath the headline “I LOVE HIM!” SAYS MRS. MAUDE MIRIAM NOEL OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, beautiful and doe-eyed though it was, revealing one bared and lovely shoulder and a faraway look of the most fetching appeal, left something to be desired. Namely, despite the fact that the caption read This is her first published photograph, it wasn’t her likeness. Amazingly. Though she was certainly the equal of this model, whoever she was, and the accompanying article was flattering in the extreme.

But how could they have made such a gaffe? Anyone who knew her would see in an instant that this wasn’t she — and yet, and yet, the picture was blown up to a full page and it might have been an idealized representation of her, a year or two younger, perhaps a bit firmer beneath the chin, and it was fine. Very fine. People would envy her and that was what she wanted more than anything at this point because she was no castoff and she was not in the least lovelorn — no, she had her man, one of the truly great figures of the age, and no one else did.