A Reliable Wife

by Robert Goolrick

  Despite the vitriol, it was a beginning, some kind of communication between father and son. Ralph went to work every day with a hope that Antonio would come around, would grow to forgive and to love. He was an honest man and he had such a yearning to believe.

  For Antonio, of course, he was a fish on the line. Antonio gave and then withheld, leaving the hook in his father’s mouth. It gave him pleasure.

  Antonio wanted so much. He wanted for most of his childhood never to have happened. He wanted his mother to have been faithful and beautiful and virtuous. He wanted her to have cared for him. He wanted her to have taken him with her when she ran away, giving him more than the idiot sister and the terrifying father who was not his father. He wanted the days of his boyhood to have been different. He wanted, more than anything, for his mother not to have died in squalor, to have lived and stayed with him and kept things from becoming so sadly, wrenchingly wrong. He didn’t care anymore about the beatings. They had made him stronger than his father, his real father, ever could have been. He cared about the loss.

  He sat drunk by the fire every night after Ralph had gone to bed, to the consolation of sex with Antonio’s old mistress. And he cried. He wept for his own boyhood and its simple pleasures. He sat in his old playroom and touched everything, the rocking horse, the stuffed animals and the wooden boats and the tin soldiers and he wept for his own losses in battle.

  It wasn’t the beatings or the loneliness he was weeping for, sitting with a bottle of brandy on the floor of his unchanged playroom. It was time. It was the time he couldn’t get back. Yes, Ralph would do anything, and yes, the future could hold a better life. But he would never get back the days and the hours that might have been something other than angry and miserable and painful. No money could ever change that, and nothing Truitt could say would make it right.

  There was an almost sexual pleasure in the boundless sorrow, a comfort he could give himself by letting go, a release not found even in sex for the first time with a woman he coveted. He didn’t know why he behaved the way he behaved. He didn’t care. Nobody else had lived his life. Nobody else could tell him how to be.

  Perhaps, he thought, Ralph was right. Maybe he could change. It wasn’t as though his life had given him much joy or peace.

  Perhaps weeping in the playroom was his first fearful and tentative step toward some kind of love. He didn’t know what love was, but he knew that he had begun to feel differently toward Ralph, to feel something that was not blind hatred. He was a child, and he wanted his father and his mother.

  He would wake up in the morning on the floor of his old rooms, his head throbbing, his body covered with the quilt that had covered him as a child, and he would shiver with grief and sometimes with remorse at his own behavior. He wished he could have been another person.

  Ever since Truitt had stopped torturing him, ever since he had been strong enough to run away, he had done nothing but torture himself. If Truitt had tried to kill him, then Antonio, for all his sorrow, had done his best to finish the job. The blurred days and nights, the women, the debauchery, none of it had been enough. With the return of Truitt’s love, he would have to be his own destruction.

  The idea that he could have a wonderful life had never before occurred to him. That he was rich, that he could go to Rome and marry a princess, that he might drink cold champagne at dawn on the deck of a steamer bound for the South Seas, in the company of someone who simply loved him, that he might do anything that would give him joy, that would create a wonderful life, these were phantoms that eluded him.

  Love was gone forever, just outside the window, just beyond reach, like fruit on an upper branch. In its place was the sexual attraction of tragedy. He would hang his head and swig his brandy and mourn for his life, for the hours of his childhood, for the kindness of this man who wanted to father him, for the lost beauty of his mother. He explored the extravagant rooms of his father’s house, knowing that there was no home for him anywhere. There was no getting there. There was no one there when he arrived.

  He wanted nothing more than to lie in a small, dark, warm room in an anonymous house where there was neither day nor night and have ravenous sex with woman after woman until he died. He wanted a drunkenness of the flesh. He wanted the thing he loved most in the world, the soft touch of another human being, to become a torture. He wanted to die in a sexual embrace, the last of thousands.

  There was Catherine. She was like the drug, the poison he craved. In the absence of other diversions, she was a woman whose secrets he knew. She was always in the house, sewing, reading the books she had sent from Chicago. She had abandoned him. She had betrayed him, denied him the golden promise.

  She slept every night in his father’s bed. His father had sex with her, and told her he loved her, a thing Antonio had never said, and would never have meant. It wasn’t enough to want all women; he wanted Catherine be all women to him.

  She deliberately avoided him. She shut herself up in her room, sewing, when Truitt was away. She sat at the table like a stranger and talked to him as though she had no memory of the velvet cords that he had used to tie her to his bed, of the fire that had burned her skin. His sorrow was infinite. His desire was specific, and immense.

  Truitt went to town. Antonio would find her, follow her, would open his heart to her, tell her how coming back to this house had made him different, how it had opened a wound he had thought healed forever. The sight of Truitt, the man who had been so capable of destruction, sitting calm and safe from accusation, even sitting in his own remorse, made him afraid, he said. It frightened him to think it could be different, that things could, from this moment, change.

  She advised patience. She advised giving the old wounds time to heal. There was no more talk of Truitt’s death. He told her he had arsenic in his room, the arsenic he had brought from Chicago, and that late at night, drunk on Bordeaux and alone while his father slept with his mistress, his creation, he picked it up and sniffed it and held it in his hands and longed for death. He told her that if there were a button in his leg he could push so that he would vanish and never have been, he would push it. She expressed horror that he would contemplate such a thing. He had learned to drive a car, she said. He could go anywhere. His life was waiting. She didn’t understand a word he said. She was no longer the woman who had spoken to him for hours of nothing, of amorous nothings.

  The silence enveloped him, strangling him. Every morning, his razor was an invitation. Every night, the arsenic was an aphrodisiac. His loneliness was terrifying, but he wouldn’t come to town, wouldn’t come down to meet the proper young women his father invited from Chicago, to sit at table with their banker fathers, all exquisite manners and musical, sexless laughter. They had no darkness. It was useless, the light, to him.

  He wrote suicide notes and stored them in a locked drawer. He wrote letters to his father in which he described Catherine’s past in fine detail, letters that would destroy, in a single swift stroke, both their lives forever. These letters he burned.

  He was lonely, lost inside himself; he was exhausted from simply sustaining a life he found horrible, from holding his head up in a scornful public, from the pretense of his own narcissism. He said the words over and over to himself, realizing how trivial they sounded. He spoke his heart to Ralph, late and drunk one night.

  “I want . . . I wanted to be somebody else. After I left, I wanted things to change. They didn’t.”

  “We all wanted to be somebody else. Somebody braver, or more handsome, or smarter. It’s what children want. It’s what you grow out of, if you’re lucky. If you don’t, it’s a lifetime of agony. I wanted . . . what? To be elegant, not some country hick, to be loved, to live unharmed and have my way in everything. I never wanted this, never wanted to have anything to do with business.

  “I wanted to marry a contessa and live happily ever after. It doesn’t happen that way. Play the hand you have, Antonio, that’s all anybody expects. And it’s a pretty good hand.”

&nb
sp; “I’m in pain, all the time. I hurt.”

  “And I’m sorry for that. If there were anything . . .”

  “There isn’t.”

  “I know.”

  It was a road without end, a conversation with no point. If you spend your days speaking to someone who speaks a foreign language, how are you ever to be understood? He could say the words, his father could listen, but the words had no weight for either of them. It was a way of passing the time, the mournful son and the compassionate father.

  Let it go, Antonio would tell himself late at night, as he lay on the nursery room floor. Live a regular life, crippled, sorrowful, but sweetly ordinary. Speak to the girls from Chicago. Drive your car so that you can be the envy of the town. Learn the rules of business and give up the dark room and the thousands of women. It was like seeing a distant shore and knowing he would not reach it.

  Catherine never left his mind. When he met her, he was a young boy, a young man, and she was an elegant courtesan pursuing opportunities. She had seemed glamorous. She had manners, and she knew things about the world. He knew nothing, nothing at all. She had bought him shirts. She had taught him how to dress, how to eat in restaurants and speak with his eyes lowered. She had shown him the intricacies of his own body. She had woven a circle around him and kept him safe for a time. Then the monsters returned to claim him, and he himself became a monster—cruel, unyielding, and conniving. He had turned on her because she had seen him in his innocence and hope, because she believed in these things, and he had hurt her again and again, and she had allowed it, and for this he felt a sorrow which burned like hot lead.

  On a sober morning, when he happened to be awake, he went and sat by Truitt in the office. He listened and watched as Truitt increased his fortune, as he listened to the complaints of his workers and dealt with them fairly and compassionately. It was like watching a painting. There was no movement; there was no sound. Truitt thought his son was taking an interest. Truitt thought he was coming around to a kind of acceptance, the kind of bargain he himself had made so many years before. The next morning, Antonio couldn’t remember having been there, couldn’t recall a single word or picture one detail of the office.

  His father, his real father had left his mother for a rich young widow. His father was the man who had no face. His father had taught piano, was named Moretti, had given him life. This Truitt was a remote stranger whose death was the only thing Antonio had lived for for more than a dozen years. This Truitt who bought and sold and disposed, who spoke to him in kind tones that Antonio could not bear.

  Only Catherine was real, and she had become somebody else, someone unknown to Antonio. But beneath her clothes lay her skin, and, just as Antonio remembered in his skin every blow from Truitt’s hand, remembered every word spoken in anger, so there lay, in Catherine’s skin, the memory of who and what she had been. She had meant the world to him, and he couldn’t let go. Not now.

  Not ever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ANTONIO FOUND HER in the conservatory. It was late afternoon, and the songbirds twittered from branch to branch and the jasmine hung heavy with scent and the roses had begun to bud in the warm hothouse air. The late light fell through the fronds of giant ferns and palms she had bought in Saint Louis. The windows were fogged with moisture. Orchids grew in Chinese pots. She was sewing, folds of fine dark blue, almost black wool covering her lap, billowing out onto the red marble floor.

  He sat at her feet, like a dog, patient, benevolent, longing to be loved. He was ashamed of his willingness to be humiliated. She showed him the picture of what the dress would look like when it was finished. It was almost done, a simple dress of elegant shape with buttons that ran from the floor to the neck, with white gauze collar and cuffs. It was pleated down the front to the waist, the pleats held in place by stitches so small they were almost invisible. The wool was thin and expensive, fluid in her hands. She moved the dark cloth swiftly through thin white fingers, the needle flashing in and out, the quiet click of the steel needle on the silver thimble she wore on her finger.

  She deftly turned the dress, hauling in the yards of wool to work on the hem. Antonio’s knee grazed the fabric, and he was electrified. Beneath the dark blue was her shoe, and her white stockings, and beneath that her fresh skin, the map of her whole body. Beneath were her sweet scents and her secret places, places he had traveled and dwelt.

  “Hattie Reno,” she said softly. “You had a letter from her. I recognized the handwriting.”

  “I told them. I had to say something. I burned the letter.”

  “She’s well.”

  “They’re all well. They miss you. She said the theater was filled with dull people. She said the beer had gone flat since you left, all the bubbles gone away. You amused her. She misses you.”

  “Don’t say anything about me. It was another life.”

  “Was it, Mrs. Truitt?”

  “People change, Antonio. People move on.”

  “I don’t. I don’t move on.”

  “Hattie Reno was my best friend. Now I hardly remember her. Not out of unkindness, it’s just that things are so different.”

  “You’re pretending.”

  She put down her sewing for a moment. “I don’t think I am. I got tired of being terrible, terrible to people.”

  “You were never terrible to me.”

  “We were terrible to each other. It was another time. It was like a madness. Antonio, it’s gone now. You have to make your peace with that. You have to make peace with your father.” She resumed her sewing, the swift stitches going through the dark hem.

  “I’m too tired. I’m so tired, you can’t imagine.”

  She looked at him. “I know it’s hard. I know he did terrible things to you. You have to forgive now. Unless you do, he can’t forgive himself.”

  “You tried to kill him.”

  “And then I stopped. I couldn’t do it. Something in me changed. I couldn’t hurt a fly, now.”

  “Once you would have done anything for me. You made me a promise.”

  “I was another person. Another person made that promise.”

  “And that’s it?”

  Her eyes flashed. “What do you need that you don’t have? You have his love. You have his money. You have his attention. Make something of that. Make a life for yourself.”

  He touched the hem of her dress. Fire shot through his fingers and up his arm. He touched her shoe.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “It means nothing? Nothing at all?”

  “It means nothing. Don’t do it.”

  He got up and walked away, the heels of his shoes sounding on the marble floor. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was going to do.

  She couldn’t mean it. She couldn’t separate her long past from her present as easily as that. She couldn’t deny what they had been to one another, the things they had done, the plans they had made.

  He sat in his room and drank brandy. If he wasn’t going to have his father’s death, he wanted his old life. She couldn’t turn her back on the pleasures of the vices as easily as that. He wanted her. It went off like a gunshot to his brain, and after that he knew nothing. It was all darkness after that.

  He walked swiftly back through the corridor and down the long steps. He walked through the great hall under the Venetian chandeliers and into the conservatory. She was still sitting, but she knew he was coming, she must have known, because she had put down her sewing. She sat quiet and calm, waiting for him, her eyes large, the mixed desires she felt written on her face.

  He grabbed her hands. She pulled away. He grabbed her arms and pulled her up to him. He pressed himself against her, the full length of his body against the full length of hers, his mouth on her mouth, his hands around her, moving across her shoulders through the fabric of her dress. She was trembling.

  She pulled away. “Antonio. Don’t do this. I’m begging you.”

  “I have to. I’m so sorry. I have to.”

/>   He kissed her again. He put his hand up along her face, while with his other arm her pulled her close to him. He put his hand beneath her dress, he felt her skin, her warm smooth skin, and the fire was in him and he knew there was no turning back. She wanted this. She had to remember, and she had to want it. He said it over and over to himself.

  Then he lost all thought, he lost the ability to think and became pure motion as his mouth and hands took her back to the days and nights in his room in Saint Louis, the days when she had been somebody else, somebody who lived for her body and its delights, somebody who gave herself because she had no care for who or what she was. She had laughed, then, she had been scornful of the ordinary world with its ordinary moral scruples, and he had been part of that, her diversion, her own wild love. They had been twins in their desires, rising and falling on each other’s breath, and he had covered her body with kisses, and there was no part of her that was not his.

  She was the delight and the agony of his youth, yet she had not mattered, he now realized. She was only the portal to this sensation of being lost, of floating unmoored high above the earth, and he wanted that back again. It was as close as he could come to death.

  She was new. She was a stranger. It was as though she had come to him in disguise, the trappings of her old life gone, the dress and hair and clean face of her new life a costume she had put on to amuse him.

  She struggled against him. She fought, and this too drove him on, made him feel unbound. He could have her when she didn’t want him. He’d done it before. When she was angry with him, he could still have her. When he had been too rude or too drunk or too late, she would still come creeping into his room while he slept and lie down beside him and let him take her, because she had nowhere to go, because she believed that her life was in the gutter and he was the gutter in which she lived.

  He tore at his shirt, and her hands scratched at his body, her nails drew blood, and she started to scream, to call Mrs. Larsen. He held his hand over her mouth and lifted up her skirt, tearing at her stockings and her underclothes until her flesh was beneath the palm of his hand. Then things grew calmer. He breathed more gently. For just a second, there was no sound except the twittering of birds, as his hand moved toward her sex, as he covered her mouth and she didn’t make a sound.