The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  Of course, as is often the case, the reality of a given situation doesn’t necessarily accord with one’s expectations—her years with Emil had brought that home to her, resoundingly—and the architect’s response wasn’t quite what she’d hoped for. He was intrigued, yes, how could he help but be? And yet he was distant too because he didn’t know her, couldn’t begin to see her true self through the impress of her pen—he might have thought she was some overheated spinster with a poetic bent, another parlor philosopher, one more petitioner reaching out to cling to his feet as he ascended the Olympus of architecture—and there was no invitation.

  Though certainly he was interested. She could sniff that out in the first few lines, anyone could. And she immediately wrote back, her second missive even more effusive than the first (and why not?—she was too great and giving a soul to restrain her feelings) and this time she told him more about herself, about her flight from Paris, her romantic yearnings, her life lived in the service of her art, and she found a dozen ways to praise his genius that had revolutionized the very highest art of them all for an entire generation. In a postscript she begged for a meeting, however brief, because her heart simply wouldn’t rest to think of him alone in his torment. She signed herself, In All Sympathy and Hope, Madame Noel.

  The reply came by return mail. He would be pleased to receive her in his studio at Orchestra Hall92 and perhaps, if time allowed and she was willing, to show her some recent examples of his own art. Would five o’clock, Thursday, suit her? If not, he’d be happy to arrange another date and time. He awaited her reply and looked forward with great pleasure to meeting her. And he was, just as she’d expected, faithfully hers, Frank Lloyd Wright.

  She spent three hours on her clothes and makeup, rejecting one outfit after another until she settled on a clinging gown of chartreuse velvet cut to show her throat, shoulders and arms to best advantage. She powdered her face, did her eyes and lips, brushed out her hair—and her hair was her glory, always had been, as abundant as a debutante’s and not a single thread of gray showing through the russet curls that fell en masse at the nape of her neck—and then, after a painstaking inspection in the full-length mirror, she looked to her jewelry. A selection of rings—the scarab, of course—her diamond and seed pearl cross with the rose gold chain to bring his eyes to her throat, the lorgnette trailing languidly from its silk ribbon. She wanted him to see her as she was, au courant, cultured, a gifted artist who’d exhibited at the Louvre and was trés intime with the salons of Paris, a woman of stature and character, the natural beauty whose presence and refinement made all the rest of the women toiling along the streets of the Windy City seem like so many mutts. “How do I look?” she called out to Norma as she swept into the living room. And Norma, bless her, gazed up at her mother in genuine awe. “Oh, Mama, you look like you just stepped out of the Paris rotogravure!”

  She spun round twice, reveling in the fit of the dress and the soft flutter of the skirts at her ankles. “And what do you think of this—for outer-wear?” Studying herself in the mirror over the sideboard, she dropped a shoulder to slip into her sealskin cape, then leaned in close to pin the matching cap atop the crest of her curls. A moment to touch up her lips, drawing down her mouth in an irresistible pout—let him resist me, just let him, she was thinking, full of a spiraling ascending joy that threatened to lift her right off her feet—and then she whirled round to give Norma the full effect.

  “Well?” she said.

  Norma had got up to cross the room to her. She reached out a hand to smooth the fur. “Oh, Mama,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

  And Miriam was soaring, soaring, no need for the pravaz, not now, not in the mood she was in because no elixir could hope to match or improve on it—she was beautiful, she was, and she knew it. She bent for a final glance in the mirror, made a minute adjustment to the angle of the cap, patted her hair in place. Then she straightened up and gave her daughter a fervent smile, feeling like an actress waiting in the wings for her cue, the whole dreary apartment suddenly lifted out of its gloom and irradiated with light. She dropped her voice to the register of seduction. “I’ll want a taxi,” she said.

  A brisk anarchic wind seized her as she stepped from the cab, her cape billowing, hat ready to take flight, all the grit and refuse of the filthy avenues and back alleys flung up at her as if in a hurricane, so that her chief concern as she went up the stairs to the lobby was her hair. And her face. Her face, of course. She would be late for their appointment, no question about it—she was already late—and now she was going to have to stop in the ladies’ lavatory and make the necessary adjustments. Heart pounding, out of breath, flustered—yes, flustered—she tramped through the lobby looking for the lavatory, and when she found it, when she pushed through the door and into the warm brightly lit sanctuary that was, thankfully, deserted at this hour, she went directly to one of the stalls and locked herself in. What she was thinking was that she couldn’t let him see her in this state, her nerves all aflutter as if she were some chorus girl plucked out of the Folies-Bergère, and so to calm herself, to slow things down and give her that air of Parisian languor that was sure to captivate him, she extracted the pravaz from her purse.

  Afterward, she saw to her face and hair in the mirror, in full possession of herself once again. She reapplied her lipstick with a hand as steady as a surgeon’s, smoothed down the chartreuse velvet and gave a tug at the neckline to make the material lie just so, flared the cape, refreshed her perfume. For a long moment she studied herself in the mirror from various angles, even as two other women—middle-aged drudges93 without the faintest inkling of style or carriage—came through the door, chattering over the affairs of some office girl or other. She ignored them—Let them look, let them appreciate style, real style, for once in their godforsaken lives—and gave herself one final appraisal. Satisfied, she swept out of the room and across the lobby to the elevator, where two men in beautifully tailored suits stepped aside with fawning awestruck looks as she announced the floor to the elevator man and he tried his best to stare straight ahead.

  She was greeted by a young male assistant—the offices lavish with Oriental art, a pair of Ianelli sprites, realized drawings and intricate models, the lighting exquisite, taste and elevation oozing from the very walls—and then shown into a hallway connecting to the studio, where she caught a glimpse of a short stocky elderly man with an enormous head ducking into a doorway before she was led into the studio proper and seated in a high-backed Craftsman chair. But this was no ordinary chair, and the thought came home to her with the force of revelation—this was a Frank Lloyd Wright chair. She was sitting in a Frank Lloyd Wright chair, a masterpiece designed by the Master himself! There was genius here, genius invested in the design that lent verticality to the horizontal lines of the room, in the cut and mold and finish of the wood. In the decor, the walls, the rugs, the hangings. It was as if she’d been ushered into the salon of Des Esseintes himself.

  The assistant—he had the face of an acolyte, stooped shoulders, pursed lips, mole-colored hair swept across his brow—had pulled out the chair for her as if performing some holy rite. He’d offered to take her cape, but she’d declined. She wanted Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright to get the full effect of her, en ensemble, and now she had a moment to arrange the folds of the cape and settle herself. Her chair, she saw, was one of a group of three—the other two flanked a small inlaid table against the wall—and it had been set here in front of an oversized desk decorated with an enormous vase of cut flowers that gave up their beauty and fragrance in defiance of the weather and the season both; behind the desk an Oriental screen depicted a dark twisting pine with a pair of cranes nesting in the branches. “Mr. Wright will be in directly,” the assistant whispered before creeping out of the room. A moment passed, everything as still as a church, and then suddenly he was there, the very man she’d seen in the hallway, catlike, alert and present, immanently present, and could it be? The graying hair, the head of marble? But of cou
rse, of course. Those eyes. The lines of grief round his mouth. He was fraught, heroic, and young, much younger than he’d appeared at first glance—

  “Madame Noel?” he said, coming round the desk to give a short bow and take her hand in his. “It’s a great pleasure—” he began, and then faltered, the customary rituals of greeting failing him because they were inadequate, hopeless, a falsification of everything he was feeling in that moment. She could see it instantly, see her power reflected in his eyes, hunger there, confusion, a gaze of pure astonishment running up and down her body like the touch of his two hands, and something else too, something deeper, primal, naked in its immediacy and need.

  She gave him a soft slow smile, the pressure of her fingertips on his, then dropped his hand to lean forward and set her gold cigarette case on one corner of the desk and the little leather-bound volume she’d brought him on the other. “Oh, believe me, the pleasure is all mine,” she said, her voice falling down the register till it was a whisper, a purr. “Or no, that’s not right at all—the honor. It’s an honor simply to be in your presence.”

  He flushed, fighting to recover himself, his voice too loud all of a sudden: “No, no, I do mean it, the pleasure’s all mine. You—your letter. Letters.” He’d backed away from her as he might have backed away from a fire flaring up round a length of pitch pine and settled himself behind the desk. “I was deeply moved,” he said. “You express yourself exquisitely, tremendous command of the language.”

  She looked up at him, holding his gaze, then crossed her legs and began removing her gloves, finger by finger, as languidly and delicately as she could manage. All the while, he was watching her, fixated, as if she were performing some miracle of prestidigitation. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked, taking up the cigarette case so that he could see it, see her initials engraved there and the ampersand that joined them to the initials of the man who’d given it to her.

  “Oh, no, no, not at all.” And he leaned forward to light her cigarette, his eyes never leaving her face.

  She tilted her head back and exhaled, in her element now, as secure as a porpoise in the deep rocking cradle of the sea. “Well,” she said, dropping her chin to focus her gaze on him, “how do you like me?”

  It took him a moment—he was, as she was soon to learn, rarely at a loss for words—and then he spoke the truth, the gratifying truth, quite plainly: “I’ve never seen anyone like you.”

  She let her smile bloom again and then—had she ever felt so free, so magnetic?—she began quoting Rimbaud in the accent of the transplanted Parisienne she was, and of course he’d never seen anyone like her, how could he have? “ ‘Mais, vrai, j’ai trop pleuré! Les Aubes sont navrantes. / Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer: / L’âcre amour m’a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes.’ ”

  He was smiling too, smiling so hard it looked as if his face would rupture, but this was most definitely not a smile of comprehension. Could it be that her hero, this arbiter of taste, this passionate artificer, the Hephaestus to her Aphrodite, did not speak the language of romance? Of civilization?

  “Comprenez vous?” she tried, leaning forward now.

  An awkward moment, the first in this enchanted encounter, passed between them before she switched to English. “It’s a poem,” she said. “Meant to soothe you in your suffering because you must know that others have experienced desolation too. You’re not alone, that’s what I’m trying to convey. Not alone.” She leaned into the desk. “Listen,” she said, dropping her voice lower still, “the poet says: ‘But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. / Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.’ And now the last line, which applies perhaps more to me in my present state than to you, though I know you’ve felt deeply and felt the hurt of it: ‘Sharp love has swollen me with heady languors.’ ‘Swollen me!’ Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, taking up one of the tools on his desk—a triangle, was that what it was?—and turning it over in his hand. “It’s quite beautiful. The French especially. You recite so, so evocatively.” He set down the triangle, took up something else now—a T-square. “I’m more of an Emerson man myself. Longfellow. Carl Sandburg—he’s a personal friend. Terrific man. Great soul.”

  And now he was reciting for her, his face lit with the pleasure of it, the music of him, his eyes: “ ‘You will come one day in a waver of love, / Tender as dew, impetuous as rain, / The tan of the sun will be on your skin, / The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech.’ ”

  She sat perfectly still a moment, letting his words resonate till they were alive inside her, till she felt them like a rhythmic pulse that beat along with her own. “Magnificent,” she said. “Bravo! You recite so exquisitely I would have thought you an actor. And your voice—”

  His smile showed the perfection of his teeth. He tapped one hand on the glowing surface of the desk as if to keep measure with the lines still flowing in his head. “It’s the poet,” he said. “Give Carl the credit. Speaking of poets, would you happen to know of Taliesin, by the way? Has he come into your purview over there in Paris?”

  He hadn’t. She’d never heard of him. She composed her face, all seriousness and a bright eagerness to know. “Is he Italian?”

  “No, no, no: I’m talking of the legendary Welsh bard and shape-shifter, the man whose face was so beautiful it was said to radiate light.94 Richard Hovey—do you know Richard Hovey? He wrote a masque called ‘Taliesin’ some years back? No? First-rate. I think you’d appreciate it. Very delicate and deep. Like you.” He paused, as if he’d gone too far, his eyes dodging away from hers for just an instant. “Well, anyway, I’ve named my house after Taliesin—my estate, that is. In Wisconsin. After the poet. And you must see it, absolutely, you must—when, that is . . .” he trailed off.

  “I know what you’re feeling,” she said, with fervor, real fervor. “You poor man. How you’ve suffered. You have. I know that perhaps better than any soul on this earth, because we’re attuned—we’re twins, that’s what we are, twins.” She was so excited she very nearly jumped out of the chair to run to him, clutch him to her, heat and heal and solace him with a passion so perfect and deep he’d put all the tragedy and ruin behind him forever. But not yet, not yet: the moment was too delicious. She slid forward till she was perched on the very edge of the chair, her hands in motion, her eyes speaking for her. “But listen,” she said, “listen to Gérard de Nerval, just listen: ‘I move in darkness—widowed—beyond solace, / The Prince of Acquitaine in a ruined tower. / My star is dead...’ ”

  Her eyes were full. She couldn’t go on. If she were to look back in that instant on all the heightened moments of her life, all the intensity, the passion, the quarrels and turmoil and transcendent flights of sheer spiritual grace, nothing could have compared to what she was feeling in those precious minutes since she’d walked through his door. She couldn’t seem to breathe. She felt faint. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “Forgive me. I’m just—it’s just that I am so . . . deeply . . . moved . . .”

  And then he was there at her side, offering his handkerchief, the finest cambric, faintly scented, and she was dabbing at her eyes. “Here,” she said, impulsively snatching up the pamphlet she’d brought him, “here, take this as the smallest consolatory gift from me to you in your time of need—and take it to your heart. The scriptures heal—Jesus heals. I know. I’ve been down that road.”

  He looked puzzled. Son of a preacher, nephew of Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who was one of the great pulpit orators of his time, and he was doubtful? Reluctant?

  “Here, take it,” she said again, her voice reduced to a kind of sob, and she had to get hold of herself, had to bear down here a moment, or the mood would evaporate, the whole shining room with its glitter of art and hope and beauty dissolved like a vision out of The Arabian Nights, and she felt the pressure of his hand in hers and then the book—Mary Baker Eddy’s sweet, sweet revelation—passing from her fingertips to his.95 �
��You’ll heal,” she whispered, her voice steadier now. “Trust me. You’ll heal.”

  Somehow they were both standing. His arm was round her shoulders and his hand—his hand—was unconsciously massaging the short thick sturdy hairs the seal had once worn in the polar sea to fight back the chill of the world. It was perfect. It was exquisite. And what was he saying—murmuring—in her ear? “There, there, it’s all right. I’ll be fine. I will. And you, you kind, beautiful and spiritual woman, you’ll be fine too. I’ll read the book. I’ll read it because it’s from you.”

  She raised her eyes to him. She was trembling. Her voice was a whisper. “Has anyone ever told you you have the most magnificent head?”

  Again he looked puzzled.

  But she went on, the words coming in a rush now: “You must sit for me, I won’t take no for an answer, and though I prefer hands—hands are my special interest, and feet too, hands and feet, but no matter—I’ll mold a bust of you and it’ll be magnificent, the grandest thing I’ve done. But you will sit for me? Won’t you? Promise?”

  The next two weeks were a tourbillion of dinners, dances, museums, art exhibitions and automotive visits to the houses he’d built and of which he was as preening proud as a child with his first assemblage of wooden blocks. He would pull into the drive at one domicile or another without announcing himself, spring out like an acrobat to rush round to her side of the car and wait impatiently while she prepared herself for the blast of the wind, then march her round and round the place, expatiating on every last detail—right down to the origin of the copper in the downspouts—before waltzing into the house as if he owned it and starting all over again with the interior details. All the while, the inhabitants standing patiently by as he criticized the style and placement of the furniture or some element of his conception that didn’t seem sufficiently appreciated, he never took his eyes from her. And despite the cold, despite her aching feet and the strain of bursting into the homes of total strangers who looked at her as if she were something between a captive and an invader, his gaze—awestruck, appreciative and undisguisedly carnal—made her glow.