The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  As Christmas approached and Norma began draping random sprigs of holly about the house and trolling carols in the kitchen (flatly and out of tune, because, sadly, she’d also apparently failed to inherit her mother’s musical talent, but hadn’t she sung “Frère Jacques” so beautifully as a schoolgirl—or was that Corinne?96), Frank’s attentions became ever more insistent. There were parties, of course. Parties everywhere. Daily. Nightly. In lavish homes, galleries and theaters, lavishly decorated for Yuletide, colored servants scraping about with trays of drinks and delicacies and all the haut monde of Chicago gathered round in their furs and jewels and fancy dress. Frank became the very avatar of the season, funneling his genius for interior design into a cornucopia of Christmas display and superhuman good cheer, parading her around on his arm as if she were the rarest treasure of all. “You’re my jewel,” he would say, and kiss her full on the lips, thrusting himself at her till she could feel him hard against her—and she would withdraw as delicately as she could without dampening his ardor entirely, and call him naughty or a billy goat or some such childish designation. And then he was on her again and again till she thought she would split open with the heat of her own desire. He would have her—and she would have him—and soon, soon.

  Still, she didn’t know quite what to expect when he invited her to his house on Christmas Eve itself. Would his grown children be there? His wife? His mother? The comical little housekeeper with the ear trumpet she’d heard so much about? His friends and associates? The neighbors? Or would it be just the two of them, locked in a passionate embrace as if they had no other attachments in the world?

  It was past dark when the taxi pulled up in front of the house. This was a small house, modest and neat, the house of his exile from the place in Oak Park he’d given over to his wife and the ruins of his mansion in Wisconsin, and if she’d expected something grander, a structure commensurate with his beauty and wisdom and greatness, she buried her disappointment. This was temporary. She could appreciate that. She was living a temporary life herself, and even as the thought came into her head, she felt a violent upsurge of feeling for him: they were exiles, both of them, and the fates had brought them together for mutual solace. What could be more perfect? More glorious?

  Full of hope and love—swollen with it, yes—she came briskly up the walk, watching for patches of ice because it wouldn’t do to fall and turn an ankle, though even that would have its rewards, her leg delicately elevated before the fire as he tended to her with a strip of bandage and a glass of champagne, his fingers kneading her flesh, wandering up her calf and back down again, stroking, probing, caressing . . . But here he was, the door flung open on a flood of light, dressed in a black velvet dinner jacket and Chinese trousers, his hair backlit like the nimbus of an angel—“Miriam,” he was calling, “my love, my dear, my jewel, here, let me help you—”

  The fire leapt up. There were bowls of blood-red roses everywhere. A brazen Buddha. The lamps he’d designed himself with their marvelous geometrical patterns and their soft shimmers of light. Candles aglow. The table set for two. Champagne on ice. And music, delicate, delicious, a string quartet serenading her from the Victrola in the corner. “It’s breathtaking,” she said, even as he kicked the door shut and took her in his arms. “Everything you touch. Just breathtaking!”

  They couldn’t stop talking—and kissing, kissing too—ranging the whole world over, from the Greeks to the Romans to the contemporary theater and the joys of Germany, Italy, Japan—she must go to Japan, she absolutely must, he insisted: the cleanest and most perfectly organic society on earth—and, of course, Paris. Which was her province. If she must go to Japan then he must come to Paris—with her as his guide. Oh, and she sang on about Paris as if it were a car ride away, as if they could browse the antiquarian shops and stroll the boulevards before the clock struck midnight. She was intoxicated, absolutely and thoroughly, right to the core of her—and not from any opiate or even the champagne, but from being there with him on the most precious night of the year.

  They ate in front of the fire at the table he’d laid there, each dish served up by him on a covered platter, hearty food—cod in cream sauce, salt pork and potatoes, too hearty maybe, too plain and well, Midwestern, but good for all that—and there was no sign of the comical little housekeeper or anyone else. Afterward she smoked before the fire and delicately tipped back a demitasse of coffee and some sort of liqueur she couldn’t identify (he abstained) and let her voice sing till she might have been a tropical bird fluttered down out of the grim black sky to brighten this parlor and this house till it shone like the center of the universe—and on Christmas Eve, no less!

  “Do you see my ring?” she asked at one point, holding out her hand to him as they sat together on a stiff-backed sofa that might have been a thing of beauty but wasn’t sumptuous at all, more like a pew in a monastic chapel, and wouldn’t a few pillows or even a quilt go a long way toward improving it—and the comfort of the room too? But all thought flew out of her head because he took her hand in his and kissed it and kissed it again, running his fingers up her wrist to her forearm, the exquisite pressure there, the fire . . . “It was worn by Cleopatra,” she went on, but he was bent to her hand still, kissing, kissing, and her breath was coming faster, “to keep her lovers faithful. This . . . very . . . ring . . .”

  His hand slid up her arm, along the smooth velvet path, no resistance to the material at all, and he was embracing her throat now and giving her the full weight of his eyes. He murmured something, whether it had to do with Cleopatra and her lovers or the height of the ceiling or the color of her eyes, she couldn’t say, but her voice was teasing out the subject, breathy and deep, no going back now—“Beware,” she whispered, “to all faithless lovers, but you, you’re not . . . faithless . . . are you?”

  His hand was on her breast, slipping beneath the material to the naked skin, to the aureole and the nipple which hardened to his touch. And his lips. His lips were on hers. She heard the fire crackle. Heard the record hiss against its label. Wind beyond the windows. The ticking of a clock. She leaned back to accommodate his weight and the slow sweet delirium of his hands and his tongue.

  “Are you?” she whispered.

  And he, fully aroused, his face gone rubicund and his ears glistening like Christmas ornaments in the quavering light, breathed his answer against the soft heat of her lips. “Me?” he puffed, working, working hard, writhing against her and tugging at the buttons of his trousers as if they were each individually on fire. “Never,” he said, sinking into her, “never.”

  CHAPTER 3: NOW COMES FEAR

  Whether Norma or her little toad of a husband approved or not was an utter irrelevance: she was moving in with Frank Lloyd Wright at 25 East Cedar Street and the whole world could choke on its pinched pathetic petit bourgeois notions of propriety for all she cared. She was going to live. Express herself. Roam with the giants. It happened that she was in love with a towering genius, a Wagnerian hero who stood head and shoulders above them all, a Tannhäuser, a Siegfried—and he was in love with her, her and no one else—and if they thought she was going to confine herself to a miserable back room in a hideous flat and live like a Carmelite nun at her son-in-law’s sufferance, they were sadly mistaken. She had her bags sent over, the trunks she’d brought with her from France, her clothes, jewelry, objets d’art, and by the middle of January she was established, mistress of her own house once again.

  It was a kind of miracle. Like being on a honeymoon all over again and this little house the ship that would take them across the wide ocean into the seas of bliss. The nights were rapturous with lovemaking, the mornings sunstruck (or at least they felt that way), and while he was at his studio spinning out his designs in the company of his scurrying functionaries, she busied herself with making the house just a soupçon more comfortable—or less austere, at any rate. That was the term she used over the telephone to Leora—“He seems so austere, almost Puritanical, as if a plush pillow were a violati
on of the sumptuary laws or some such thing.” She selected curtains for the windows, pillows for the sofa and each of the flat hard-bottomed chairs. She ordered linens and stationery featuring their entwined initials and her familial crest. China, cutlery—carpets, for God’s sake. And his taste in cuisine: “I tell you, Leora, I try, I do—and we’ve been through two cooks already—but the only stuff he seems to like is so bland, so unappealing in every way, I couldn’t imagine a single soul in all of France, even the dirtiest peasant speaking some dialect that sounds as if he’s invented it on the spot, bothering to feed it to his hogs. No, I mean it. I do. He needs reforming. Needs a good dose of culture, beyond all his drawings and his houses, which really are exquisite, I’m not denying that, not at all—”

  By the end of the second week, the punishing gray chill of January folding itself into the unrelenting arctic blast that welcomed February to the bleak canyons of Chicago, they had their first quarrel. The cook, on her instructions—and with her supervision—had prepared a lovely saumon tar-tare avec sauce moutarde for a prelude, followed by a bisque de homard, salade d’endive and a spectacular flambé of ris de veau, and she served a perfectly delicious Sancerre with the salmon and a Margaux with the sweetbreads she’d ordered herself from the wine merchant and had no little trouble finding it, incidentally, in this backwater, and he’d been less than impressed. In fact, at one point he pushed back his plate—shoved it aside as if it were something he’d found in the street—stalked into the kitchen without so much as a word and reappeared a moment later with a glass of water and an apple. While she watched, astonished, he peeled and divided the apple, feeding it into his mouth slice by slice and washing it down with the water.

  “I spent all afternoon on this meal,” she said quietly, fighting to keep any hint of severity out of her voice. “And Madeline virtually slaved to bring it off.”

  He gave her a sharp glance. “Tell Madeline she’s fired.”

  “Fired? Why, I’ve just hired her. And she’s excellent, truly excellent—Montreal bred, perhaps, but—”

  “Do I have to repeat myself? She’s fired. I’ll send to Taliesin for Nellie Breen if this is the best you can do.” He stabbed at a slice of the meat with the paring knife and held it, dripping, before him. “This sort of thing may be all the rage in Paris, but it won’t do here. We don’t eat this tripe—”

  “Sweetbreads,” she corrected, and she could feel herself going hot all over. The temerity of him, the insult. He was a boor, that was what he was. A barbarian. “You’re a boor. That’s what the problem is. You need civilizing, are you aware of that?”

  “And we don’t take alcoholic beverages—wine—with our meals.”

  She was angry all of a sudden, so infused with rage she couldn’t speak. She laughed instead, a bitter cutting sarcastic laugh.

  He was standing now, every inch of his five feet six or whatever it was clonic with fury. “Smoking,” he snarled. “It’s like living in a tobacco warehouse somebody’s set afire. It’s a disgusting habit. Totally inappropriate for a lady. And I won’t have it.”

  And now the battle was joined, because she was on her feet too, ready to throw it all back at him. “Rube!” she shouted. “Hayseed!”

  He gave her a look that chilled her—he was as capable of murder as any cutthroat roaming the alleys of the south side—and he actually took a step toward her, as if he would dare. Just let him, she was saying to herself, her feet braced and her body gone rigid. Just let him. But he checked himself—she saw the rational part of him take over as if a switch had been thrown, and he was afraid of her, wasn’t he? The little man, the coward. “You disgust me,” he said finally. And he turned on his heel, jerked round and strode out the door and into the black curtain of the night and he didn’t think of his cloak or his hat or the scarf that never once left his throat but when he was sitting at table or asleep in bed.

  “Go!” she shrieked, darting to the door with the plate of sweetbreads and the sautéed champignons de la forêt and the sherry sauce she’d created from scratch raised in one hand. “Go, you bastard!” And the plate went with him, describing a drooling parabola across the moonlit yard till it crashed to the walk and scattered its contents for the birds and the squirrels and the scavengers of the night.

  They made it up, of course—with a furious bout of lovemaking that began almost as if it were a free-fall match between two determined adversaries and ended in the sweetest surrender—but not before he went off to Wisconsin without her. For three entire days. And no word of him. Nothing. It was as if he’d never lived here, as if she’d never known him, and this house, filled with his things, was a memorial only, a tomb of nobody’s making. The first night she didn’t sleep an instant, replaying the scene over and over again in her head, wishing she’d showed more restraint, less fire and fury, because she did love him as she’d never loved anyone in her life, she was sure of it, absolutely and without question, and she missed him with an ache that echoed inside her like a cry of despair from the cored-out trunk of a withered tree.97 The following day was purgatorial, an accumulation of intolerable minutes and torturous hours that made her lash out at Madeline and the various delivery men presenting their wares, and she wouldn’t call him at his offices like some castoff baggage who can’t keep track of her man, she wouldn’t. By the close of the second day, she was certain he was deceiving her with another woman, his secretary, his wife—Kitty, that was her name, Kitty, and why not just call her cunt and get it over with? She telephoned Leora and sobbed through the thin swaying wires, telephoned Norma to tell her her mother was ruined, and finally, though she fought it, she broke down and telephoned his studio. Where the reedy wisp of an effeminate acolyte came over the line to inform her that the Master—Mr. Wright—had gone up to Taliesin to oversee the work there. And when was he expected back? Oh—a long calculated pause—he couldn’t say. After that, she had her pravaz, only that. And even then, she cried herself to sleep.

  At breakfast the morning after they’d made it up he was tender with her, tender and gentle too, and they sat across the table from each other in a satiate glow, no need for words, their silence broken only by the most solicitous murmurings, Would you care for another cup of tea, dear? Cream? Can I get you another egg? Darling, if it’s not too much trouble, would you please be kind enough to pass the salt? She clung to him when he got up to leave for work, their kisses so heated he very nearly had her right there on the carpet, and when he came home the first thing she did was lead him into the bedroom. And she let Madeline go, just to please him, and that night she stood over the stove herself, half-dressed, and made him potatoes in the pan with onions and a steak au jus with no flavoring other than a pinch of salt and a dash of pepper. He never stopped talking, not even to draw breath, and after dinner he sat at the piano and serenaded her till she sank into the new plush pillows like a queen, like Cleopatra herself. He was hers, he was hers, he was hers, and the world was a good and beautiful place once again.

  Their second quarrel came at the end of that week and he was the one who set it off—again—because he was in a mood, she could see that the minute he stepped through the door. He didn’t like the pillows, that was it. They made the place look like a whorehouse, he said, and she said, “So what does that make me?”

  He had no answer for that, and she saw what a little man he was, what a yellowbelly, and no sooner did he divest himself of his cape and hat than he started in on the subject of her stationery and the china she’d ordered. “It’s vulgar, Miriam. Your coat of arms? What of mine? Don’t you think the Lloyd Joneses go back farther than the, the—whoever your people are?”

  “My father was a Hicks. And we trace our origins back to the earliest settlement of Virginia. If it weren’t for the War Between the States, we’d—”

  “The plain red square,” he said. “That is how I’ve marked my stationery all these years and that is how I’ll mark it in the future. Do you understand me? I won’t discuss it.”98

  She
was seething—the way he cut her off, dictated to her. Who did he think he was? “Yes? And what will you discuss? Taliesin? Tell me about Taliesin and why I’m not invited there. Is it because of that dead woman? You think I’ll sully her memory, is that it?”

  He averted his face—a sure sign he was lying—and said, “No, that’s not it at all. It’s just that we’re rebuilding right now and you really wouldn’t be comfortable there, what with the dirt and confusion, the limited room, and my attentions of course would be distracted in terms of the work going forward—”

  “What about your mother?”

  “My mother? What has she got to do with it?” His voice flared. “I suppose you resent her having given birth to me, is that it? Because you weren’t there?” He was bent over the lamp in the corner now, jerking at the switch. The light caught his face as he turned to her, everything about him savage and animalistic, like some burrowing thing trapped outside its den, and he was hateful, hateful.