The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  “She’s invited, isn’t she?”

  “Well, I—of course. You know that. I’m building rooms for her and my aunts—and for you, for you too.”

  “And your children? The children are there, are they not? Catherine, Llewellyn, David, Frances? One big happy family? Where are they sleeping? Are they so put out by the construction?” He’d turned to her and she came right up to him now, thrusting her face in his. “You’re a liar, Frank. A liar. And a ghoul, that’s what you are, because you prefer some, some corpse to me! A memory! A dead thing!” She veered away from him, her hand snatching for something, anything she could heft, one of his damned statues, anything—but he caught her by the wrist.

  “Don’t you say a word against her,” he said, tightening his grip.

  She twisted away from him, jerked her wrist free, and here was one of his vases and she didn’t give two figs what dynasty it hailed from or what precious artisanic soul had fired it in whichever golden Chinese era—and were they all golden?—it was in her hand and then it was gone, obliterated against the wall. “Go ahead,” she said, “hit me,” but she spun out of reach, flung herself across the room and then came at him so swiftly he had to backtrack.

  “Cold meat, Frank. But I’m alive, a real live flesh-and-blood woman!” Both her hands were at her collar now and in a single savage jerk she tore the dress to her waist, her breasts falling free even as the cold air of the room assaulted her. “Look at me. Look at my breasts. You’ve fondled them enough. Suckled them like an infant. They were good enough for you then. And now you prefer a corpse, a corpse over me?”

  His face was blanched. He was backing away from her. “Miriam,” he pleaded.

  “No! No! I’ll kill myself first—is that what you want? Is it? Two corpses?”

  In the morning—Christ knew where he’d spent the night—two of his assistants appeared at the door, the mole-hair and another tight-mouthed drudge who looked at her as if she were the Gorgon herself. They were there to pack up Mr. Wright’s things and remove them to his offices. What things? she demanded, but she already knew. And she didn’t attempt to stop them, not by any means. If he wanted to run out on her, desert her, leave her bereft and unprovided for like the cad he was, well, she wasn’t about to stop him. She took a cab to Marshall Field’s, though she detested the place, and when she returned there was no trace of him at 25 East Cedar Street but for the furniture itself—even his toothbrush was gone. Again she put off telephoning to his offices and again she broke down. Just as she’d suspected, he was at Taliesin and couldn’t be reached.

  This time he didn’t come back. And though it ate at her, through every minute of every day, she stayed on in the empty house. Every time she heard a noise in the street, the scrape of a shoe along the walk or a voice lifted in greeting, she was sure it was him, sure he’d come back to her, but she was disappointed. Over and over again. As the days wore on, she steeled herself—she had resources of her own. And she had her pravaz and a prescription from a very forward-looking physician whose address she’d found in the directory. And this was her house now and she would be damned if she was going to leave it.

  Of course, she wrote him—daily, sometimes two or three times a day. She telephoned to him as well and when she did manage to reach him, he seemed distracted—and guilty too—and though he tried to act as if nothing were the matter, as if he was simply preoccupied with the building at Taliesin, she couldn’t really be held accountable if her voice did rise above an acceptable level because she was only human, as she reminded him, and not a memory. Or was she? Then his letters, which had been sympathetic, solicitous, kind—but distant, as if he were writing to an aunt or a sister away on a foreign mission—turned more resolute, as if he had finally understood that he and she could never be reconciled again. The one that hurt her most, the one that drove her out of his house and into a first-class compartment on a train headed west for Albuquerque,99 addressed her in tender reminiscent terms, especially as he talked of her charms and the thrill of knowing and loving her and how terrible he felt for having abandoned her. But it was a letter of discharge and no doubt about it. Because he was a little man. Because love—with her, at any rate—led inevitably, through stages, to ruin. “Reason is gone!” he wrote, invigorating the apostrophe with his overwrought punctuation. “Charity is gone—Now comes Fear—Hate—Revenge—Punishment—Then Regret—Shame—Humiliation—Ashes, It is the accepted Road—all ambitious Souls hear me! Sex is the curse of Life!”

  She brooded over this ugly proposition all the dreary way across the country—sex the curse of life, indeed; he hadn’t felt that way on Christmas Eve when he’d had her twice in succession and then again the following morning, the celebration of Christ’s birth and the sacred hymns of the angelic choir notwithstanding. Or in the weeks after when he’d installed her in his house like a houri extracted from his harem and had his way with her whenever the urge struck him, which was any time of the day or night because he was as randy as a goat, the randiest man she’d ever been exposed to, even in France, even in Italy. And now, suddenly, sex was the curse of life. He’d twisted everything, the hypocrite, making her out to be the one at fault, reducing the monumentality of what they’d had together to a vulgar expression of sexual gratification as if they were apes in the jungle or some such rot. Well, she wouldn’t have it. And she wrote back to him, page after page, her emotions burning into her fingertips, the fountain pen, the ink that seared the very paper before her.

  She blasted him, of course she did, but she expressed the fullness of her love too—and it was no infatuation, she reminded him, but a mature and spiritual love that stood against the petty conventions of a society bound up in its petty rules.100 She wouldn’t go to Taliesin if he begged her. She couldn’t. “Because a spirit walked abroad there whose presence must not be offended by one who truly loved him.” She went on in this vein, dredging up every Gothic reference to churchyards, yew trees and demon lovers she could recall, then began to remonstrate with him. Couldn’t he, above all people, with his finer sensibilities and conceptual brilliance, appreciate that this pining after a ghost was so false, so cheap, nothing more than two-penny sentimentality, a poor flimsy excuse for real love and loyalty? And she asked him, humbly and sincerely, if he wouldn’t accept gratefully a poor loving heart that he had mutilated beyond all thinking. He was the one in the wrong, couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t he see all she was offering him, in spite of the condemnation of that pitiless and cheaply moralizing society that made her an outcast for the “sin” of loving him? Even as she wrote, absorbed, distracted, resentful and brimming with love all at once, she felt the strength come back to her.

  “I SHALL WIN!” she exclaimed. “You’ll see! When the smoke of battle clears away I shall be a rainbow again—and, undying name—an altar of fire that you have tried to dash to hell. I shall weave a rose wreath and hang it round your neck. You will call it a yoke of bondage and curse it—no matter. You are afraid of the light I give you. You crouch in darkness. Come, take my hand, I will lead you.” And her valediction, intimating in its restraint whole worlds of love and grief and passionate regret, was, simply, Miriam.

  And then she arrived, shriven, on the high altar of the west, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos. She went barefoot in the mornings. She worshipped the sky. Took eau naturelle and unleavened bread. Wrapped herself in diaphanous things and let Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy apply their healing touch to her soul. Time was a mountain. Waters flowed, the wind blew. She watched the eagles rise on the thermals over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as if they held all the power of the universe in their wings—or perhaps they were vultures, but no matter. She was there. She lived in the moment.

  Gradually, his letters softened. Guilt ate at him—he’d seduced and abandoned her when she’d given up everything for him, even to the opprobrium of society, and he understood that now and begged her forgiveness. He sent money. He needed her. Wanted her. Pleaded with her to come back to him—and not just to Chicago
, but to Taliesin, to be its mistress. And she? She let him dangle, reveling in her power to reach out to him across all that expanse of raw country and tighten the clamps of her hold on him. So what if it was venereal? He needed her. And he would see what she could give him beyond that, beyond the curse of sex—and yes, she threw the phrase right back in his face. They would walk the world together, she wrote him, hand in hand, stride for stride, and challenge the very gods for their sublimity.

  By July, she was back in Chicago. By the end of August, she was at Taliesin.101

  CHAPTER 4: FLESH AND BLOOD

  He was lonely, that was the long and short of it. Despite the fullness of the days at Taliesin and his utter absorption in the work going forward, despite the company of his children and the ministrations of Mother Breen, despite riding and farming and picnicking and charades and board games and singing round the fire at night till he thought his lungs would burst, he was parched for the touch of a woman. Miriam was right. Mamah was a ghost, dead and gone, and you couldn’t lie with a ghost. The thought might have been callous—Mamah hadn’t been in the ground a year yet and already she was as faded in his memory as if she’d been gone a century, and perhaps that was a trick of the brain, a defense mechanism, a way of loosening the coils of grief so they didn’t choke all the air out of your lungs and drain the blood from your heart—but all he could see in his mind’s eye was Miriam. Miriam undressing by candlelight, teasing him, flaunting herself, perching naked on the corner of the bed and pulling him down atop her, Miriam with her breasts exposed over the sweet silken curve of her abdomen, her dress in tatters, crying Look at me, I’m flesh and blood, flesh and blood!

  Well, so was he. And he found himself burying his face in her letters to catch the faintest scent of her, all the while wondering what she was doing out there in New Mexico—had she taken another lover, was that it? She was a matchless beauty, elegant, brilliant, worldly, and if he’d seen nothing like her in Chicago, what must the hidalgos have thought of her out there under the open sky? He pictured her in the arms of a tall mustachioed figure in a sombrero, some sunburned hybrid of Tom Mix and Teddy Roosevelt, and felt the loss of her like a physical ache. But then it was a physical ache when you came right down to it. And he soothed it in a way that was juvenile, unclean and lonely, lonely to the core.

  He was there at the station in Chicago when she stepped off the train in a fumarole of porters, bags and scuffling shoes, the engine spewing cinders and ash, steam rising and pigeons settling like an avian snow, people crying out, families reunited, lovers embracing—even a pair of Alsatians wagging their tails and capering for joy—but she didn’t seem to recognize him, not at first. Down the platform she came in a magnificent stride that was at once commanding and unabashedly sensual, the Negro porters scurrying to keep up with her and a whole series of men glancing up from newspapers and cigars like dominoes toppling one against the other all the way down the line. He felt the blood drain from his extremities and settle in that one essential place—he knew those eyes, those limbs, those breasts—but didn’t she know him? Didn’t she recognize him? He started forward, his confidence wilting, wondering if she was still harboring a grudge—or was it her eyesight? She was of an age—and she did employ that lorgnette as something more than a prop . . . “Miriam!” he cried, his voice cracking under the strain even as he lurched out from behind a wall of anonymous men hunched over their cheap suitcases and made himself glaringly visible, his stick raised high and his cape flowing in the liquefaction of its folds. She stopped. Turned toward him. He tore the beret from his head and waved it wildly. And then? Then she was in his arms.

  “How was your journey?” he asked, leading her out to the street and the car as the porters brought up the rear and the searing summer air streamed in through the open doors.

  “Oh, darling, darling, you don’t want to know.”

  “Was it that bad?” He tried out a smile, ready to make light of it, but his blood was seething, the very touch of her, the scent . . .

  “Heat,” she said, never missing a stride, and then she was directing the Negroes as they loaded her things into the car. “Like this. Heat like this. Only worse. There was the dust, eternal dust, and people so inconsiderate—and I hate to say it, stupid, stupid and thoughtless—as to leave the windows open wide day and night. Insects. I could write a treatise on the insects of the West and Middle-West. But let’s not talk about me, let’s talk about you. You look thinner. Or thicker. Definitely thicker about the waist. Have you put on weight? Is the life in the country”—and here she gave him her first smile—“so restful, then? Unclouded days, sap running in the trees, the easeful sway of the hammock? All that?”

  He was off then, off on a speech of his own, settling into his rhythms like a jockey feeling the stride of his mount on the stretch run, gabbling on about the structural problems they were encountering, the vagaries of his workforce, the lay of the stone they were quarrying and the quality of the lumber from the mill, not to mention the fluidity of the design and the changes of conception he was making daily, and Paul Mueller, of course, Paul’s contributions, and the Japanese, how they were becoming increasingly cordial in their communications and how certain he was that the big project was going to go through. They were halfway across town before she stopped him. “Well,” she said, giving him a coy look from beneath the wide floral brim of her hat, “didn’t you miss me?”

  He had. He did. The blood shot to his groin again. And then the next speech was spinning out of him with all the fluidity and spontaneous grace he’d inherited from his preacher father.102 He was indicting himself, begging her forgiveness and forbearance, pledging fealty and love and unraveling a whole spool of excuses, when she stopped him again. “Oh, that’s all very gratifying,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the racket of the motor and the yapping of some sort of mongrel or other that had been chasing behind the wheels for the past block and a half, “but where are you taking me?” Another look from beneath the shade of the hat. Her smile was full now, her eyes dancing, lips swollen. And licked. Licked wet with the pink retreating tip of her tongue. “And for what purpose?”

  He fumbled a moment, the open wound of Taliesin still lying bloody between them, and the oratorical flow, the sheer dance of words, stuttered short. “I, well, I thought we’d, maybe—if you have no objections, that is, and I know you must be exhausted—”

  “The Garfield?” she said, and the way she said it, so casually, so gracefully, so lewdly, made it the most exciting thing he’d ever heard.

  “No,” he said, grinning, and for the first time since they’d got in the car he reached out a hand to touch her intimately, on the upper thigh, where the material of her dress had pulled tight beneath her when she slid into the seat. “I thought the Congress.”

  Two days later—and what choice did he have?—he moved her back into the little house at 25 East Cedar Street and did his best to overlook her moods and dietary peculiarities, her florid speeches about art and literature and her continued insistence that he sit for a marble bust. He hadn’t time to sit for a bust, he kept protesting (gently, ever so gently). He was a working architect, preoccupied with the business of the world. And busts, in any case, were for dead heroes, for military men and the like. No, she countered, not at all—what of Rodin’s bust of Balzac? Of Hugo? Granted, they were in bronze, but marble was for the ages—as he was. He might have told her it was architecture that was for the ages, but he kept the thought to himself. What he wanted, above all, was harmony, and he was determined to establish it this time around, to give as well as take, because he’d suffered the long withering attrition of her absence. If he had to nurture her, if he had to put up with a pillow here or there and eat French food once in a blue moon, what of it? She was his star, his torch, his impetus. Was he in love? He couldn’t say. But she was on his arm when he went to the concert hall, when he went out to dine or simply take the air, and she was there in his bed at night, as warm and loving and virtuosic
as any man could ever hope to ask or dream.

  Inevitably, the question of Taliesin came up again. It emerged one morning out of a perfectly ordinary breakfast conversation. The new cook, a fox-faced girl with a wandering eye and a West Virginia coal miner’s accent, an adept at plain things, flapjacks and sidemeat, eggs over easy, grits and hot black coffee, had just served breakfast and taken herself off to hide in the kitchen, and he was commenting on a piece in the paper about the building costs associated with one of the new skyscrapers going up along Michigan Avenue, when Miriam, looking up from her own newspaper, said, “Isn’t it time you took me up to Wisconsin?”

  She was dressed all in white, in a clinging gown of silk, and her hair was loose on her shoulders. The lorgnette dangled from one hand, swaying gently back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch. In her other hand, balanced delicately, a teacup held in abeyance. She was smiling, congenial, insouciant, the question no more charged than a query about the weather or what color hat he might like to see her in.

  He never hesitated. From the moment he’d written her to come back to him he saw how selfish he’d been, demanding her full commitment and loyalty and yet all the while keeping her off-balance so that she was never certain of her status. Small wonder she had her moods. It was his fault. Entirely his. He set down the newspaper and gazed steadily into her eyes. “We’ll drive up tomorrow,” he said.103

  The day was clear, the road untrammeled. He was whistling, fiddling with the gearshift, the choke, feeling as light as the puffs of cloud running high overhead across the pale blue roof of the world. Every bend in the road, every tree and cow, whether it be Holstein, Jersey or Swiss Brown, was the subject of a spontaneous discourse, and he couldn’t help himself, his tongue running ahead of him, the joy of possession working on him like the heady poteen the Irish laborers drank behind his back when he could smell it on their breath and see it in the delirious dance of their too-green eyes. Miriam sat beside him, uncharacteristically silent, a soft smile on her lips. How could she be so calm? he wondered. How could she not feel what he was feeling, this bubbling joy that made him want to burst into song? He stepped on the accelerator, rocketing past a tractor towing a cart piled high with corn, the wheels churning up twin tornadoes of dust and the back end wagging with the thrust of the engine, and suddenly he was singing, singing for her, singing for the joy of it. He sang “Clementine” twice through and then “Old Kent Road,” and so what if the farmers stared and his voice floated on down the road behind him like the windblown squawk of the summer geese charging from one pond to another? He was happy. Purely happy.