T. Boyle - Riven Rock

She pressed into him again, held him tight, little Guido sandwiched between them, the heat of her and her odor like no other woman‘s, cloves, garlic, vanilla, onions frying to sweetness in the pan. “I’m scared, Eddie,” she whispered. “Guido… I… I nursed him, and he died burning up with the fever and so sad and pathetic he couldn’t open his mouth to say a word to me or even the priest, no last words, no nothing… and the smell of him — it was horrible, like he was all eaten up inside and nothing left of him but shit.” She was trembling, a vein pulsing at the base of her throat, the hair fallen loose under the brim of her hat and slicing into her eyes. “I’m afraid I might’ve… or little Guido, Eddie, our son. They say you can catch it just by walking past somebody on the street, and you have to understand, Eddie, I nursed him, I nursed Guido.”

Her eyes were two revolving pits, two trenches draining everything out of her face, and she wouldn’t let go of him. He was scared too. First Eddie Jr. and now this — what if she did catch it? What if she died, like Wilson and Mrs. Goux and Wing? What then? He looked over his shoulder, down the hallway to Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s door, everything soft and indistinct in the dim light of the lamp. “You’re young and strong,” he heard himself saying. “If you get it, you’ll shake it off. Like Mart. Did I tell you about Mart?”

“I’m a widow, Eddie,” she said.

He nodded. She was a widow. Widowhood. Viduity. That was the state she was in, a sorry state, twenty-eight years old and bereft, and with a son to raise.

“We can be together now.”

He nodded again, but he didn’t know why. He wanted to tell her about Eddie Jr., about the regret that was ripening inside him till it was about to turn black and become something else, something rotten and despairing, something cold, something hard. He wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t. And he tried to pull away from her — just to breathe — but she wouldn’t let go.

“Did you hear what I said?”

Looking down, looking at her feet in a pair of dusty old high-buttoned shoes some customer must have left behind at the shop: “I heard. But listen, let’s go outside and talk so Mrs. Fitzmaurice—”

“I don’t want to go outside. I want to be here. With you. Look,” she said, backing off a step and stripping the child away from her shoulder so he could see the fat infantile face staring sleepily into his own, “your son, Eddie. He’s your son and you’re my husband. Don’t you understand? I’m a widow. Don’t you know what that means?”

“I’m married,” he said. “You know that.”

He watched the lines gather in her forehead while her eyes narrowed and her mouth drew itself tight. “I spit on your marriage,” she said, swinging wildly away from him, and he was afraid she was going to knock over one of the darkened lamps, afraid she was going to wake the house, stir up Mrs. Fitzmaurice, turn everything in his life upside down.

He told her to shut up, to shut the fuck up.

She told him to go to hell.

And who was that now? Somebody at the head of the stairs — was it Maloney? — and an angry voice looping down at them like a lariat. “Keep it down, will ya? People are tryin’ to sleep up here.”

“Come on,” he whispered, “let’s talk about it outside.”

“No. Right here. Right now.”

He rolled his eyes. He was tired. He was angry. He was disappointed. “What do you want from me? You want me to move you into a new brick house tonight, with new curtains and furniture brand-new from the store with the paper wrapping still on it? Is that what you want?”

She stood there immovable, black widow’s weeds, the black veil caught like drift on the crown of her hat, the child fat and imperturbable and staring at him out of his own eyes.

“Come on,” he coaxed, “let’s go over to Pat’s and talk things out where we can be comfortable, and we can, you know…. I want you,” he said.

“I want you too, Eddie.” And she moved into him and pulled his head down to hers and kissed him again, a fierce furious sting of a kiss, all the madness and irrationality of her concentrated in the wet heat of her mouth and lips and tongue, and he knew it would be all right, all right for both of them, if he could just take her up to his room and make love to her, ravish her, fuck her.

She pulled away and gave him a long analytic look, as if she were seeing him from a new perspective, all distance and shadow. The muscles at the corners of her mouth flexed in the faintest of smiles.

“What?” he said. “What is it?”

“I’m pregnant.

Well, and it was déjà vu, wasn’t it? Simple arithmetic: one child subtracted, one child added. All he could say was, “Not again?”

She nodded. Saturated him with her eyes. Behind her, blighting both walls of the narrow hallway, were the dim greasy slabs of the oil paintings Mrs. Fitzmaurice had rendered herself, kittens and puppies frolicking in an unrecognizable world of bludgeoning brushstrokes and colliding colors. She shifted the child from one shoulder to the other.

“Jesus,” he said, and it was a curse, harsh and harshly aspirated.

Her voice fell off the edge and disappeared: “I want you to take care of me.”

This was his moment, this was the hour of his redemption, the time to cash in his three o‘clock luck though it was past eleven at night, and he could have taken her in his arms and whispered, Yes, yes, of course I will, but instead he gave her a sick smile and said, “Whose baby is it?”

“Whose—?” The question seemed to stagger her, and suddenly the weight of the child on her shoulder, little Guido Capolupo O‘Kane, seemed insupportable, and she began fumbling behind her as if for some place to set him down. It took her a minute, but then she came back to herself, straightening up, arching her back so that her breasts thrust out and her chin lifted six inches out of her collar. “Guido’s,” she said, “it’s Guido‘s,” and then she found the doorknob and let in the night for just an instant before the door clicked shut behind her.

And handsome Eddie O‘Kane, who’d failed every test put to him, and wasn’t rich and wasn’t free and had to bow and scrape to Mrs. Katherine Dexter McCormick and her demented husband and chase after every skirt that came down the street? What did he need? That was easy. Simple. Simplest thing in the world.

He needed a drink.

The Dexter château stood on a hill just outside Geneva, at Prangins, in the village of Nyon. It was a turreted stone structure of some twenty rooms surrounded by orchards and formal gardens and with a great lolling tongue of lawn that stretched all the way down to the shore of the lake, where Josephine kept a pair of rowboats and a forty-foot ketch. No one knew exactly how old the place was, but portions of it were said to date from the time of the Crusades, after which it was built up and fortified by successive generations of noble and not so noble men. Voltaire had once lived there, and in 1815 it was acquired by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, who made use of a secret tunnel in the cellar to slip off into the night when his existence became a liability to too many people. The property was surrounded by a formidable wall and high, arching iron gates, and when Katherine broke off her engagement to Stanley, she fled across the Atlantic and closed the gates behind her.

She needed time to think. Time to settle her own nerves, and never mind Stanleys — he’d meant to hit her with that vase, he had, right up until the last minute. He could have scarred her for life, killed her — and for what? What had she done to deserve it? She’d lost her patience maybe and she’d been short with him, but only because he was so obsessive and gloomy, making mountains of molehills all the time, afraid of her touch, afraid of what was happening between them, afraid of love. All that she could understand and forgive, but violence was inexcusable, unthinkable, and the truly awful thing was what it said about Stanley in his darkest soul.