The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  Mr. Jackson held an arm out to her—and what was he doing, patting her on the back, was that it?—and her voice thickened in her throat till she didn’t think she could go on, all those eyes locked on her, the man with the flash saying All right, boys, ready, one more, and there was that coruscating explosion of light all over again. “All I want,” she managed to say, “is what is . . . what is . . . rightfully mine.” Her chest began to heave, no holding back, not now, and suddenly she was sobbing, sobbing so hard she had to turn away and let Mr. Jackson help her to the nearest chair, a glass of water—“Will someone get her a glass of water!”—but she still had the strength to turn her face to them once more.

  Her eyes were brimming, her lashes gone to paste. She couldn’t see their faces—they were just a blur to her—but something else rose up in her field of vision, some transient imagined presence, a figure out of a dream, gravid, round of abdomen, full of breast, smiling with the soft satisfaction of the Madonna, a false Madonna, a Russian Madonna, unwed and fucked, fucked, fucked, and she heard her voice lash out in a tinny yelp: “I want him back. I just want my husband back!”

  That night, late, she sat up in her room and tried to filter out the sounds of the street below. She was too exhausted to read, too alive in her thoughts to sleep. Someone kept pacing the floor of the room above her. There were odd thumps in the walls, a mélange of voices murmuring somewhere, the drawn-out mechanical torment of the elevator down the hall—and was the operator playing on the cables with a horsehair bow just to drive her to distraction? Was it a plot? She didn’t smoke—or hardly at all, not anymore, because Frank didn’t approve, or hadn’t approved—but she smoked now, one cigarette after another. She rose from the bed and went to the window, thinking a little fresh air might help.

  For a long while she stood there at the open window, oblivious to the cold, the automobiles and delivery trucks tapping out a secret code below her, a language of squeals and rattles and the rising pitch of engines straining against the gear, and then there was the deluge of the trolley washing down the avenue like a tidal wave. A clanking, a banging, an assault. She turned to the comfort of her pravaz then—just left the window open behind her and drifted into the bathroom, where she kept her kit—for the second time that night. Over the past few days she’d gradually increased her usual dosage, and there was a danger in that, she knew it, but she was so fraught and torn and run-down she just couldn’t help herself.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and fanned back her robe to inject herself high up on the right thigh where the blemish—la tache—wouldn’t show. And she was careful there too, because she’d known too many women in Paris who’d developed ulcers as a result of carelessness, repeatedly injecting themselves in a favorite spot, creatures of habit, their needles gone dull from use, their flesh ripe as rotten fruit. But tonight she needed comfort. Tonight was terrible. When she’d cried out to those hard men with their dog-eared pads and quivering pencils that she wanted him back, her husband, Frank, her man, her love, she hadn’t known what she was saying, but in some part of her she knew it was true. He was her husband. They’d been in love—all those years they’d been in love, burning up with it, clinging to each other through the sweat-soaked nights in Tokyo, the sere clarity of Los Angeles, the icehouse of Wisconsin. He’d been gentle with her, he understood her, their temperaments equally matched—they were artists, artists together in defiance of the world and its conventions.

  She lay back and closed her eyes and tried to think only those thoughts that brought her closer to him, but it was no use. There was that thumping, that clamor, footsteps in the hall, and the other Frank came back to her, the hateful one, the beast, the mocker and belittler, the cheat and fraud and womanizer. At some point she tried to get up to shut the window, shut out the noise, but the potion the bald little Mexican had mixed for her was just too potent to overcome and she slept on and on in a dreamless void till the sun was pushing through the curtains and all the noise was focused in a sharp peremptory banging at the door.

  It was Mr. Fake’s associate, Mr. Jackson—“Harold, call me Harold”—and he’d been worried about her. It was getting late. Could she come to the door?

  Her voice was weak in her own ears, the voice of an invalid, an old woman croaking out her days in a rocker: “No, I’m afraid I can’t. I . . . I’m just bathing and I won’t be—what time did you say it was?”

  “Twelve-thirty.”

  She pushed herself up from the bed, feeling cored-out, ashen, as if there were nothing left of her but a husk. And where were her slippers? Her robe? “I must have overslept, what with the journey, and the, the—”

  He projected his voice, leaning into the crack where the door met the frame. “Have you seen the papers?”

  She hadn’t.

  “Well, you’ve made a sensation. The press is on our side in this, no doubt about it—and you look magnificent in the photographs. Very proper and attractive, very put-upon. And they’ve printed just about everything you’ve said. Verbatim.” There was a pause and she could hear him shuffling his feet, shifting something from one hand to the other—the papers, he had the papers with him. “You must see this,” he was saying—or no, he was crowing, his voice ringing with triumph. “Won’t you open up?”

  She didn’t respond. She’d begun to cramp again and she was thinking she had to eat something, a soft-boiled egg, toast, a cup of coffee, anything, because she wasn’t feeling right, not at all, and the distance from the bed to the door might just as well have been a mile for all she was capable of. He shuffled his feet. Rattled the doorknob. “Mrs. Wright? Miriam—are you still there?”

  “Yes, I’m here.” The papers. She was in the papers.

  He was saying something about meeting with her—soon, as soon as she was able, because time was of the essence, strike while the iron is hot, that sort of thing, but she wasn’t listening. There was more, his voice pinched with the strain of talking through the crack of the door, and she didn’t catch much of it, not that it mattered. She was in the papers. And then he came clear again, his parting words, stirring, redemptive, vengeful: “Because we’re going to go after separate maintenance and full payment of legal fees and there isn’t a doubt in my mind that we’ll win. Not after this. Not after the show you’ve put on.”

  When he’d gone—footsteps fading down the hallway like the tread of an angel taking flight, her angel, Mr. Harold Jackson, Attorney at Law—she pushed herself up and went to the door. She looked through the peep-hole, listened a moment to be sure no one was present, then unlatched the door and bent to snatch up the newspapers. And it was all there, just as he’d said. She read through each of the articles twice and for a long while stared at her photograph—she did look charming and sad and trés chic too, and she’d have to clip it out and send it to Leora—and then she ordered up breakfast and began to think about what she might wear for her next press conference.

  Five days later the newspapers ran another sort of article altogether, a simple birth announcement that had somehow been transmuted into the stuff of headlines, and she didn’t even know about it, didn’t even see it till late in the afternoon and then only because Leora called her long distance from Los Angeles. And then her daughter Norma called. And then Mr. Jackson. And then a man from the press, wanting her reaction, but by that time she’d got hold of the Tribune and the Daily News both and she cut the connection and left the phone off the hook.

  She’d been eating a late lunch or early dinner or whatever you wanted to call it when Leora phoned and she’d been out earlier for a walk in the frozen air hoping the exercise would clear her head, but as it happened she’d felt utterly drained when she got back to the hotel and laid her cheek down on the pillow for a nap that must have stretched on for hours. She was exhausted, run-down, miserable. Because she wasn’t sleeping well at night. Wasn’t eating well either. And so she was in her rooms, staring numbly at a plate of suprême de volaille and stewed carrots when Leora’s call came through.
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  “Oh, hon,” Leora blurted without waiting for any of the usual blandishments, and it was as if she were right there in the room with her. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry? For what? What’s happened?”

  A pause, just to let her heart skip a beat. “Haven’t you seen the newspapers? ”

  “No. Not today. Not yet. I was out walking and then I, well, I—why, what did they say?”

  What they’d said was burned into her brain now, in eighteen-point type: DANCER GIVES BIRTH TO WRIGHT’S LOVE CHILD.38 Gives birth. Love child. Frank’s love child. Six pounds, seven ounces. A girl. They’d named her Iovanna. And what kind of name was that? Iovanna, Olgivanna, Russian names, names with treacly little foreign suffixes as if this were some suburb of Moscow—but this wasn’t Moscow, not the last time she’d looked. This was Chicago, in the U.S.A. There was no Volga here, no windblown steppes and Bolshevik revolutions—and what was he thinking? What was Frank thinking?

  Oh, she’d known it was coming—she’d been bracing for it since that weasel of a detective called to annihilate her afternoon, her holiday, her autumn, her winter, her year—and yet she’d never dreamed it would come to this, cheap headlines, cheap sensation, a mockery of everything she was in her deepest self. Everyone she knew would be laughing at her now, Maude Miriam Noel, wife of the adulterer, the woman who couldn’t satisfy the great architect or even appease him, who couldn’t give him a child because she was too old, because she was broken down, over the hill, cast out and abandoned. She was dirt. Lower than dirt. She was nothing.

  Even as she flung the papers across the room and took up the first thing to hand—a vase, a hotel vase with an arrangement of dried flowers that infuriated her, that made her feel as if she were dried up and dead too—just for the satisfaction of seeing it explode against the near wall, she knew that the pravaz would give her no release, not today, not the way she was feeling. It took her no more than five minutes to see to her face in the mirror and wrap herself in her furs, and then she was downstairs and out on the street in the air that hit her like a dose of smelling salts. The whole world opened up then. The doorman. The cabbie. Streets, pigeons, a crust of snow. And where to? The hospital. The one named in the paper, where mother and child were reported to be doing well. And resting. Resting comfortably.

  She’d show them rest, oh, yes, she would, and already she could picture it, another scene like the one in the hotel lobby, and let them come, let the reporters come. I want to see the baby!, she would scream until there was no one in all that towering edifice with its gleaming corridors and sheltered rooms who couldn’t hear her loud and clear, I want to see my husband’s baby!

  CHAPTER 5: THE RICHARDSONS

  There was a taint of antiseptic—of carbolic acid or rubbing alcohol or whatever it was—emanating from every corner of the room, suffusing the air, choking her till she felt she could barely breathe. The shades were drawn. There was a dull hum of electricity, lights flickering and brightening and flickering again. Infants mewled, trays rattled, someone somewhere was stewing tomatoes, beets, cabbage. And meat. Meat that stank of the pan and the icebox and the slaughterhouse. She kept asking the nurse to open the window and the nurse kept telling her to lie back and rest and not to worry herself—rest, that was what she needed. “Just close your eyes now,” the nurse whispered in her liminal tones. “You want to regain your strength, don’t you? For the sake of your baby? And your husband?”

  Olgivanna couldn’t help smiling. Her husband was the last person she wanted to see, but how would the nurse know that? Unless she read the papers. But of course she did read the papers. They all did and they all knew that Iovanna—Pussy, her Pussy39—the most perfect and exquisite infant in the world, in the history of the world, was born out of wedlock, an illegitimate child, a bastard, a bastard for people to sneer at and revile. Olgivanna didn’t read the papers. And she didn’t want her husband. Her ex-husband. She wanted Frank, but Frank was working in his studio and he’d promised to be back to see her in the evening, yet wasn’t it evening now? And why was it so stifling in here and why, why, why couldn’t anyone throw open the window or even raise it an inch, half an inch, anything—anything to dissipate the staleness of the air? “Nurse!” she called out, and she tried to sit up but felt nauseous, felt weak, and let her head sink back into the pillow.

  Later—how much later she couldn’t say, but it seemed to be darker now, didn’t it?—the nurse appeared at the door with Iovanna. Her daughter. Her newborn. The light of her life, the reason for all of this, for this room with the flowers Frank had sent over, a private room with a window and a reek of carbolic acid, and the weakness she felt too. She could barely lift her arms to accept the baby, the bundle of her, light as a thought and yet heavy suddenly, impossibly heavy, miniature hands clenching and flying open again, and then the feel of the suction at her breast, a long sweet release that brought her up out of the bed and the room and out into the ambient night, soaring.

  In her dream she flew high over the embracing roofs of Taliesin, the baby clutched in her arms, and there was Frank, dwindling below her, and he was shouting to her, his hands cupped to his mouth, Look out, watch out, be careful . . . And then there was a noise, a sudden sharp thump and rattle, something clattering in the hall, a woman’s voice rising up out of a confusion of voices, and what was it? “I’m sorry, ma’am”—her nurse, Alice, straining against a whisper—“but visiting hours are over.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Get out of my way!”

  “I’m sorry, but—Dinah, Dinah, would you come here, please?”

  “Which room? I insist you tell me which room—”

  “Please, please, ma’am, won’t you hold your voice down? The infants are—Dinah, will you please tell this lady that we just cannot accept—”

  Pussy began to stir, kicking out her legs in a spasm even as her eyes flashed open, two pinpoints of light in the muted darkness of the room. She wasn’t fussing, not yet, just lying there orienting herself, awakening to the world once again. Olgivanna’s eyes went to the door. Which stood ajar—or half-open, actually, because the nurses liked to be within earshot in the event of an emergency, but this wasn’t an emergency, was it?

  The voices rose, tangled, fell back again. There was a brief tap dance of heels on the linoleum flooring, renewed protests, and then the sounds receded down the hall in the opposite direction. Though she wasn’t feeling particularly alert—it was as if she’d been drugged, and why couldn’t she regain her strength, what was wrong with her?—she had a moment of clarity that allowed a single pulse of alarm to flash through her. What if it was Miriam? Frank’s wife. Miriam. The madwoman. He’d warned her about how irrational Miriam could be, how violent and unpredictable.40 And she could still hear the tortured cry that had come at her over the telephone wire, that choked mad searing expostulation that was like no human sound she’d ever heard. She drew Iovanna to her and held her breath.

  Suddenly there was a clatter of footsteps, bold and rapid, hurrying down the hall toward her. She heard Alice cry out “Stop!” in a breathless gasp and then there were more footsteps and a man’s voice was repeating the injunction even as the door of the room across from hers was flung open and a woman entered her line of vision, all skirts and hat and angry flailing shoulders. A thought darted in and out of her head—should she try to hide the baby, tuck her in under the bedclothes, the pillows, slip her down on the floor beneath the bed?—and then the door flew back and there she was, Miriam, her face bloated and red, her eyes set close as an animal’s, Miriam in the flesh, her mouth twisting round the only word she could summon: “You!” she shouted. “You!”

  By the time Frank arrived—out of breath, his hair windblown, his face drained—the danger had passed, or the immediate danger, at any rate. The orderly had seen to that. Miriam was gone now, long gone, ushered out the door in a whirlwind of threats and insults, and the corridors were hushed as in the aftermath of some natural disaster, but Olgivanna could see her still.
Feel her. Feel her hate and envy and fear radiating out of the very atmosphere itself. There’d been a moment of suspended time as the door struck the wall and rebounded in slow motion, this woman, Frank’s wife, poised on the threshold of the room, her features working through the shadings of her emotions, a moment in which Olgivanna, as weak as she was, as terrified and humiliated, could see into her, the abandoned wife come face-to-face with her successor, her bugbear, the succubus that had stolen her husband away. She felt something move inside her. Not aggression or the will to defend herself—though there was that if it came to it—but something akin to pity.

  It was short-lived.

  Because even as the orderly vaulted into the frame, even as he seized Miriam by the arm and Miriam turned on him like a cat tossed in a bag, the vile words began to spew out. “Slut!” she shrieked, jerking away from him and thrusting her face back into the room. “Vampire! Whore! You leave my husband alone!” But then Alice was there, slipping past them to secure the door and press her weight against the impervious slab of oak while Iovanna, compromised on the third day of her inchoate life, began to cry with a sharp sudden intake of breath, her face suffused with blood and her hands grasping at the air as if she could possess it.

  “I know you’re weak,” Frank was saying. He was pacing the room, five steps to the right and pivot, five steps to the left and pivot again. “It was a difficult birth. You need your rest. But I can’t let this sort of thing go on—it’s just too risky. And the newspapers—”

  “She has frightened me. And the baby. The baby has started crying.”

  “Damn her. Damn that woman.”

  The bedclothes pressed down on her like the lid of a tomb. She’d never felt wearier in her life. “She is your wife, Frank. But how could she be? How could you have loved her?”

  He didn’t come to her, didn’t take her hand or put his arm around her or smooth her hair away from her face—he just kept pacing, and the question, the question of love, then and now, went unanswered. All at once the room seemed to shrink, dwindling before her eyes. She felt as if she were in a prison cell, and who was the jailer? He was. Frank was. “She’s vengeful,” he said, “that’s all. A spurned woman—and she was the one who left me, let me remind you . . . But we’ve got to get you out of here, which is why I telephoned to your brother.”