The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  For days the ruins smoldered, a thin stench of incineration hanging on the air, a sour smell, as if it were a thousand barrels of vinegar that had gone up and not the heart and soul of the place she’d come to love as if she’d built it herself. That smell would haunt her as she lay beside Frank in the too-narrow bed in the guest quarters, everything shifted now to accommodate the new life, the building life, the night fast with the density of darkness absolute and the blankets binding like tourniquets, and she would drift off to the sourness and awaken to it in the first light of dawn. Even the smell of the morning’s bacon rising out of the confines of the temporary kitchen was overwhelmed by it, the sweetness of the turned earth spoiled, the flowers driven down. She felt sick in the mornings now, sicker than she’d been with Svetlana, but she forced herself out of bed and into the kitchen to negotiate the space with Mrs. Taggertz and make good and certain that Frank’s breakfast was delivered to him in the studio because now more than ever he had to keep up his strength.

  She worried over him—she couldn’t help herself. She’d awakened at dawn that first day, the day after the fire, and he was already gone. Had he slept at all? And what of his burns?—they had to be re-bandaged, washed, new salve had to be applied. She wrapped herself in her robe and went out the door to the ashes and the stink and the birds singing obliviously, riotously, the sun perched like a golden wafer on the hill to the south and the cows standing in the green, green fields, and there he was in the ruins with the garden rake, stooped and saddened, everything hot to the touch still, and she asked him if he needed help, comfort, anything, but he waved her off. Later, she looked out the window and saw Billy Weston there with him, recovering fragments of pottery, bronze, shards of marble that had crumbled to a friable white dust, calcined by the fierceness of the heat. They were putting things in a bucket, useless things—it was all destroyed, couldn’t they see that?—and she wanted to say something, wanted to interfere, but she held back.

  Heat shimmers rose from the ruins. They stooped and dug. They didn’t speak, not a word, the silence between them like shared thought, and they were back now in the past, she was sure of it, gone back to the first fire, the one that had taken everything. She barely knew the story—Frank went quiet at the mention of it—but she knew his mistress had died that day, his first mistress, the one he’d built Taliesin for.28 And there was Billy’s loss, Billy’s too.

  The worst of it, though, even worse than the crowds that had gathered round to fold their arms and gossip and chew as if the tragedy were their entertainment for the evening (“Hyenas,” Frank called them), was the press. The reporters were there at first light, clamoring for a statement. They didn’t care that Frank was exhausted, mentally and physically, that he’d just suffered a loss greater no doubt than any of them had ever experienced or that he might need time to recover himself—all they cared about was when and where and how and didn’t this happen before and can you tell us how you feel? At this juncture, that is? Mr. Wright, Mr. Wright! Can you give us a statement? He turned a heavy face to them, alive only in his eyes, and gave them what they wanted because he was a public figure, because he was famous, because he had to. He told them he was relieved in that no lives had been lost, that he regretted having been so poor a trustee for the great works of art that had been inadvertently destroyed—valued at half a million, that’s right, half a million at least29—and that yes, he intended to rebuild. And then Billy Weston and some of the other workmen escorted them off the property so that they could race one another to town to wire the stories already taking shape in the scrawled-over pages of their notepads: WRIGHT BUNGALOW GONE; FIRE AT TALIESIN; BLAZE DESTROYS LOVE COTTAGE OF FRANK L. WRIGHT.

  A lesser man would have been defeated, or at least bowed, but not Frank. Before the ashes had cooled he was drawing, working through the day and into the night, measuring, coloring, erasing, Taliesin III30 begin- ning to take shape under the impress of his pencil while the blackened stone of the walls stood silhouetted against the hills like the ruins of a Roman villa. He’d sit down to dinner and gaze up at her out of his naked face, looking like a Chinese sage with his eyebrows gone and his naturally springy hair slicked back to hide the places where she’d cut out the worst of the burned spots, and there’d be a joke on his lips. Always a joke. He’d clown for Svetlana, sing “O, Susanna” a cappella and wish aloud for a piano to replace the one turned to ash. “Or a banjo, at least. How about a banjo, Svet? Is that one I see on your knee there?”

  And he was good with her too on the subject of the fire. Wonderful, really. Far better than Vlademar would have been. Svetlana was a sensitive child, very adult, always concerned with security and order and the underlying causes of things, and the fire had been especially hard on her, the violence of it, the dislocation—and just when she’d begun to settle in and find herself. First she’d been uprooted from Fontainebleau, then from her uncle’s house in New York and from Chicago and Vlademar, and now there was this, her dresses and her books and the indispensable porcelain dolls gone forever.

  Frank had come in whistling at lunch one afternoon not a week after the fire, the day gloomy and oppressive, the sky like iron, thunder rumbling, stanchions of lightning propping up the clouds all around them. And that smell, that smell on the air still. “I see you’re in a good mood,” Olgivanna said, pulling out a chair for Svetlana as the cook fussed round the table.

  “Oh, sure,” he said, “sure,” lifting his eyebrows, where spikes of white hair had begun to sprout, “is there any other kind of mood worth being in? Huh, Svet? What do you say?”

  “There’s lightning,” she said in a very small voice. “Again.”

  “Well, it’s a fact of life. Electricity. Without it we’d have no lights at night. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  She didn’t respond, Mrs. Taggertz setting down bowls of soup and a loaf of fresh-baked bread, just the three of them at lunch, the workmen dining separately on the wall beneath the oak trees, the Neutras, Mosers and Tsuchiuras displaced now and gone. A long roll of thunder drummed at the hills.

  “Now, listen, Svet,” Frank said, setting his spoon down to reach for the bread knife and saw at the loaf with both hands, “you know perfectly well it wasn’t lightning that caused the fire, but bad wiring. And bad luck, I guess.” He handed her a roughly hewn slice of bread. “But if it wasn’t for the rain, we wouldn’t be sitting here all snug and happy because the whole place would have gone up.”

  “I know that. But if it wasn’t for the wind—” She made a vague gesture with her spoon.

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure. I know what you’re driving at, honey, and there’s no good answer for it. You take the good with the bad. The main thing is not to let it get you down.” He paused to address the soup, but he wasn’t done yet. “You know, I’ve told your mother this, but I have to say I’m humbled by it too. It does seem sometimes as if some higher power is up there throwing the dice against us—and by that I mean God, the God of the Bible with his manna in one hand and his hellfire in the other. Take Maple, for instance.”

  “Who’s Maple?”

  “She was a pedigree Holstein Maplecroft worth more than a hundred ordinary cows—we bought her to breed her and start our own line. And one day, during a storm just like this, she was out in the field with two ordinary old milk cows worth not much more than their hides and bones. I was sitting on the stone terrace with a cup of tea, watching the storm come in, when there was a powerful jolt—Boom! Just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“lightning striking right there in the field.” He lifted a finger to point beyond the windows. “Sure enough, ten minutes later a worker came to me breathless to say that one of the cows had been killed—can you guess which one?”

  “Maple? ”

  “That’s right, honey: Maple. And I tell you, you can draw your own conclusions, but what I say is you’ve got to put your head down and work, work till you add tired to tired, and never look back. Never.”31

  It was amazing to see h
ow quickly the ribs of Taliesin III went up, a whole crew of carpenters, stonemasons and laborers from the surrounding villagesgoing at it from dawn till dusk through the cumulative outpouring of each lengthening day, and Frank right there in the middle of it. He was inexhaustible, utterly absorbed, and if he wasn’t climbing the frame with his carpenter’s level or snapping a plumb line from one corner to the next, he was at his desk, refining the plans, firing off letters to prospective clients and old friends, using all his charm and persuasion to secure commissions (retainer urgently requested) and outright loans. Insurance would cover some of the cost of rebuilding, he assured her, though unfortunately—tragically—the art hadn’t been included in the coverage, and the structure he envisioned was far grander than either Taliesin I or II—here was a chance to consolidate things, eliminate the design flaws of a place that had grown by necessity and accretion. Where the money would come from, he couldn’t say, but he never let money stop him, not mere money. Oh, no.

  May turned to June, June to July. She hadn’t really put on any weight—or not that anyone could see, except Frank when they were in bed together and he ran his hands over the bulge of her abdomen as if this were another of his projects to be gauged and measured against a set of blueprints—but soon her condition would be evident to anyone with a pair of eyes. Like the cook. Or any of the workmen—or their busy wives. They had a talk about it one night, the two of them naked and sweating and Frank examining her under the lamplight, his face shining, the taste of him on her lips still. “We’ve got to do something before people start talking,” he murmured.

  She traced a single finger down his nose to his lips, his chin, his chest. “What,” she said, feeling playful, “exactly, do you propose?”

  “Miriam,” he said, and waved a hand in extenuation.

  For a long moment she said nothing. The name itself—Miriam—was enough to break the mood, sour the sweetness of the moment, and there was that smell again, the faintest whiff of burning. She watched the shadow of his hand move against the wall. Beetles hurled themselves at the window screen like bullets. He’d lain here in bed with Miriam just as he was lying with her, opened himself to her, told her he loved her, swore it, swore it a hundred times. And what was she now? A stranger. An irritant. A name, just a name. “What was she like?” she asked, and her voice seemed to stick in her throat. “Was she beautiful?”

  “No,” he said. “Not compared to you. Nobody is.”

  “But she was beautiful.”

  He shrugged. “Listen, Olya, that’s not the point. I don’t want our child born out of wedlock, that’s all. We need to be married as soon as possible, you see that, don’t you? Before word gets out. You’ve got your divorce, now I’ve got to get mine. I’m going to the lawyer tomorrow, first thing in the morning, all right? And we’ll see what happens. Maybe—as long as she doesn’t know about you, about us—she’ll take the bait and we can be done with her.” He paused, looked to the window, the beetles there—and what were they doing? Mating she supposed, like any other creatures. “She’ll need money, I know her. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll come to terms.”

  “Do you love her still?”

  “Love her? She’s been dead to me for years. She’s a disturbed woman, violent. Especially if she doesn’t get her way. If she even suspected . . . I mean, that you were here—”

  She remembered how he’d fumed over the newspaper accounts of the fire—“So much trash and sensationalism, as if I live my life for the amusement of Mr. and Mrs. Schmutzkopf over breakfast in the Loop, ‘Love Cottage, ’ and all the rest”—but was exultant that none of them had mentioned her. They didn’t know. No one knew. It was their secret, Architect Living in Sin with Pregnant Montenegrin, and if they could guard that secret just a while longer, all would be well, he promised her. She hadn’t really thought about it, not until the fire and the clamor of the newspapermen. Everything had seemed so natural to her, so involved with the earth and the change of the seasons, so distant from the city and society and all the dull decorum that went with it. She thought of Georgei then. It was no more than what—eighteen months ago?—that she’d first come to New York with his troupe. She’d been enclosed within him then, all her life a function of her master and his Work, her spirit ascending, the drums and flutes speaking a secret language that fed her limbs as she danced across the stage, danced in private, danced to a music no one else could hear, present only in her mind and her heart—and Georgei’s. How distant it all seemed now.

  Georgei. The force of him, the way he could mesmerize an audience. He would sweep out of the wings like a prophet, urging the rapt crowd to lift the veil and see the universe for what it was, and he would astonish them with his music and feats of hypnotism, but the true coup de foudre was the moment the dancers broke the plane of the stage and hurled themselves into the audience. It was a leap of faith. They all spun to the accelerating beat of the music and then they rushed the lip of the stage and leapt blindly into space—and it was faith alone that kept them intact even as they landed in the orchestra pit or the boxes in front, sprawled amongst the gentlemen in their fancy dress and the ladies in their gowns. That was the leap she’d made now. For Frank.

  “We’ll lie low,” he said, “just as we’ve been doing. And you’re hardly showing.” He touched a hand to her cheek. “You know what I’ll do? I’ll sketch some dresses for you, lots of material, ruffles maybe—I know, I know—but something to hide your condition. As long as possible. Because if word gets out . . .”

  But word does get out. Word travels fast, it seeps and bubbles and runs in the ditches like heavy rain in a wet country, and when she began to show, when there was no hiding it anymore and the leaves turned and dropped from the trees and the clouds moved in low to scatter sleet across the new windows and new roofs of Taliesin III, the phone rang again. They were sitting by the fire, she and Svetlana and Frank, reading aloud, and the instrument gave a long trailing bleat and then another. She looked up at him and she saw his eyes retract, his jaw harden: he was thinking the same thing she was. The phone hadn’t rung, not at this hour, in a very long time—not since summer, when he’d filed the divorce papers. Then it rang daily, continually, and the letters came in a deluge—she’d seen those letters, the envelopes addressed in a finishing school hand lost to the fierce accounting of haste and desperation, and inside the chilling avowals of love couched in the iconography of sex and death. Oh, my gallant knight—struck out—once gallant—struck out again—never gallant knight who took me to his bed and made of that bed an ancient bark plying the stormy seas of Eros, hard by the Isle of Thanatos and the Peninsula of Despair, how could you betray me? My trust, my heat, my blood, my heart? How could you? How could you?

  On the third ring he set down the book and rose to answer the phone. She watched him pad across the carpet as if in slow motion, watched him lift the receiver from the hook. Even though she was on the far side of the room and there was a record on the phonograph and the fire was making a noise with a log of too-green wood, she could hear the shrill insinuation of the voice on the other end of the line. “Miriam,” Frank was saying. “No, Miriam, you’re wrong,” and he had to pull the receiver away from his ear.

  “Liar! Fraud!” The voice rose in an ecstasy of hate and accusation. “Housekeeper!? Housekeeper!? You expect anyone to believe that, Frank, you, you”—and it wavered, all the sorrow and jealousy and rage wadded up in the expletive that followed. And then a shriek, so raw and explosive it was as if the woman on the other end of the line were being stabbed in the throat: “You used that lie up already. On me. I was the housekeeper, Frank, I was!”32

  CHAPTER 4 : IOVANNA

  I tell you, missus, if you want to bring this matter around in your favor you’d be well advised to come out here to Chicago—” There was a pause, phonograph music in the background, the sound of a match being struck. Miriam could hear the man—the detective, her detective33—breathing into the mouthpiece, a hoarse ratcheting insuck and outlay of breath as
if his lungs were blistered. “Because your party is conducting himself in a scandalous manner, not to mention being in violation of the laws and statues.” That was what he’d said, statues, but Miriam knew what he meant, and it shot an electric jolt right through her.

  “You’ve got him dead to rights, missus.”

  She didn’t want to hear what he had to say, couldn’t stand it, couldn’t tolerate another word. She should have broken the connection right then and there, but she didn’t—she held on, her whole frame gone rigid with the dread of what was coming, the certainty she’d contracted for, proof positive. “And I’m sorry to have to say it”—he insinuated his voice into the speaker, parceling out the words as if she were paying extra for each one—“but what I mean is in flagrante delicto.”

  Leora was watching her from the sofa. She knew her face had gone white, drained of color as surely as if she were the heroine of a Saturday afternoon melodrama, the news they’d both foreseen come home to them, to her, long distance from Chicago. She wasn’t kidding herself—she wasn’t born yesterday. She knew Frank. She knew what he was capable of. But to hear it now, from the lips of a man every bit as odious as the one who’d slithered up the front walk and handed her the summons on that concussive day in July, shook her nonetheless. Frank didn’t love her anymore. There was no going back. “No,” she said, “no,” not knowing what else to say.