T. Boyle - The Women

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A dazzling novel of Frank Lloyd Wright, told from the point of view of the women in his life. Having brought to life eccentric cereal king John Harvey Kellogg in
and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in
, T.C. Boyle now turns his fictional sights on an even more colorful and outlandish character: Frank Lloyd Wright. Boyle's account of Wright's life, as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with his trademark wit and invention. Wright's life was one long howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral, or romantic. He never did what was expected and despite the overblown scandals surrounding his amours and very public divorces and the financial disarray that dogged him throughout his career, he never let anything get in the way of his larger-than-life appetites and visions. Wright's triumphs and defeats were always tied to the women he loved: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff; the passionate Southern belle Maud Miriam Noel; the spirited Mamah Cheney, tragically killed; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin. In
, T.C. Boyle's protean voice captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a masterful ode to the creative life in all its complexity and grandeur.

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She wanted to tip her head back, look him in the eye and ask just how he’d managed to acquire his knowledge — there was heat in the air and they’d be together tonight for the first time: that was the unspoken promise that had brought her all the way out here on the train — when the Tsuchiuras entered the room. She’d only had a moment to chat with them when she arrived, an exchange of the formal pleasantries — Kameki was an architect who’d worked with Frank in Japan and Los Angeles both, as she understood it — and now here they were, dressed for dinner and bowing.

“Isn’t that right, Tsuchiura-San?” Frank asked, his expression gone sly.

Another bow. There was a burst, as of gunfire, from a knot in one of the logs laid across the fire. “I am sorry, Wrieto-San, but I haven’t heard you. We are only now here.”

“I was telling Olgivanna of the sexual openness in your country — the clean, healthy view women and men alike take of the amorous functions. .”

Both the Tsuchiuras — they were young, her age, and the realization came to her in a flash — burst into laughter.

For the first time since she’d met him, Frank seemed at a loss, but he was quick to cover himself. “What I mean is, in contrast to our prudes and puritans, the timid and fearful little people who want to set the rules for everybody else—”

“Like Prohibition, you mean,” Olgivanna put in and she was soaring, already soaring on the heady currents of the place, the company, the conversation.

“Yes, well,” Frank said, leaning over to poke at the fire, “you know that I don’t approve of drinking — I’ve seen too many good men ruined by it, carpenters and draftsmen too—”

Again the Tsuchiuras laughed — and she, giddy, joined in. “A dime a dozen, Wrieto-San,” Kameki said, hardly able to draw breath he was laughing so hard, “all these drunken draftsmen. But not Tsuchiura Kameki, not a good honorable Japanese draftsman—”

“And Prohibition isn’t at all such a bad. .” Frank began, but he looked at the three of them and trailed off, laughing himself now. “But maybe”—he gave a broad wink as he set the poker back down against the unfinished stone of the fireplace—“it’s the Swiss and Austrians we have to watch out for, what do you think, Kameki?”

The Neutras and Mosers had just strolled into the room, talking animatedly in German, and Werner Moser, picking up on the last phrase, said, “And what is this we Austrians and Swiss are being accused of?”

“Sex,” Kameki said. “Good, clean, open — and what was it, Wrieto-San, civilized? — sex.”

More laughter. Laughter all around, though Dione Neutra seemed puzzled until Frank broke in, his expression sober suddenly — or earnest, that was it. Earnest. He’d enjoyed the joke — he was the soul of levity, the single most ebullient man Olgivanna had ever met, and he encouraged jocularity in his associates and apprentices — but now, settling back into the role of the Master, he returned to the point he’d been making. For her benefit. “Now you know perfectly well I was talking of the Japanese — what would you call it? — freedom in sexual matters; that is, the acceptance of sex as a vital and necessary function, uncluttered, or, or unencumbered, by the mores of the church and politicians. And so clean. The kimonos, the celebration of beauty and ceremony — the tea ceremony, for instance. And this spills over into all aspects of society.”

“You’re speaking of the geisha,” Olgivanna heard herself say. All around her the room was held in suspension, the fire radiant, the Christmas wreaths capturing the light, the vast planes of the windows opening onto the night and the drifted snow beneath. Geisha, she thought. The courtesans with their clogs and kimonos and lacquered hair. Was that what he wanted?

“Women of the floating world,” Kameki said in a soft voice.

Frank moved into her, put an arm round her waist, the heat of him like a second fire, like a movable furnace. “Yes,” he said, “the geisha. But not one of them — none I’ve ever seen, anyway — could match the beauty and grace of you.”

And then someone said, “Here, here,” and they were all lifting glasses of cider and he was staring her full in the face, swept up in the rapture of the moment. She closed her eyes for the public kiss, the stamp and seal and imprimatur of her new master, and she felt so transported she let the image of Georgei — wizened, pale, sunk into the graying sheets and the fortress of his mind — fade until it was nothing at all.

And then — and then there was dinner, bountiful honest food and the sort of conversation that lifted up the world and all of them but Frank speaking English with an accent, Japanese, German, Montenegrin — and when they gathered round the fire afterward and Dione played her cello and sang Schubert in the voice of an angel descended, she felt so natural, so at home, that she got up and danced for them all. She knew the song 12only vaguely, but that didn’t matter because there was a deeper rhythm at work here, an enchantment that intoxicated her. She let herself go deep into the spirit, the harmonious movement, the trance of the Sufi mystics, everything Georgei had taught her, and she brought it all to the surface of her being, right there, right there in Taliesin in the big room before the fire that snapped and breathed in the crucible of creation — and not for an audience in a theater somewhere, but for him, for him alone.

CHAPTER 2: MIRIAM AGONISTES

None of the doctors could help her in Los Angeles or the provincial outpost of San Diego either, little people all of them, sniveling types, handwringers, an army of effete bald-headed men in spectacles who were mortified of the law — as if this law had any more right to exist than Prohibition, because who was the federal government to dictate what people could and couldn’t do with their own bodies, their own minds, their personal needs and wants and compulsions? Were they going to regulate needs, then? Dole them out? Tax them? Miriam 13was so furious, so burned up and blistered with the outrage of it that she must have been overly severe with the cabman — the driver with his hat cocked back on his head and his trace of a Valentino mustache — because when they got to the border at Tijuana, he stopped the car, turned round in the seat and demanded payment in full. Insolently. Out of insolent little pig’s eyes. “This is as far as I go,” he said, and she couldn’t place his accent.

She was immovable. She felt her face concretize, the pores sealing up, the muscles round her mouth and eyes going to stone. “Nonsense,” she spat. “Drive on.”

There was a customs man standing off to the left of the car, a slouching congenital idiot with a lazy eye and bad teeth, and he’d already showed them his smile and waved them on — no searches here, no passports required — and he was giving her a curious look now. As if he’d seen everything in his day, every sort of indecision and cataclysm, women four and five months gone heading down to la clínica for the procedure that would make them right again, rumrunners with their empty trucks, day-trippers and ethnologists and rock collectors, but this, this was a new wrinkle altogether.

“No,” he said, “no more,” and he shoved his way out of the car and tried to pull open the back door, but she held fast to the handle. “Get out,” he insisted and it gave her a small pulse of pleasure to hear the tremor in his voice. The war was already won.

“I won’t,” she said just to savor the words on her lips. “Now, I’ve paid you to take me to Tijuana, and I won’t budge until you fulfill your end of the bargain.” She looked round her in growing outrage: the customs man, a river of Mexicans in pajamas and serapes, mules, dogs, Indian eyes, Indian hair, dust, muck, filth, the street vendors and beggars in their cutaway rags — and hanging over it all the heat, the impossible punishing heat that stewed the odor of decay till she could barely breathe. “Move on,” she demanded.

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