The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  Where next? Well, she was beaten down and exhausted and she had her money in hand, but she took out a warrant in Arizona charging him with whatever she could think of and when he went off to California she went there too. It was fall now, Leora married to Charles, the palms up and down Sunset Boulevard whipping in the winds that tore like cellophane over the dun mountains, sere days, chilly nights, a smell of smoke on the air. She called Jesperson, a man happy in the knowledge that he’d been paid for services past and would be paid again and paid well, and Jesperson gave her an address down south near San Diego, in La Jolla, where he said he’d found her husband holed up with his little dolly. In a cottage. On a quiet street. With a prospect of the ocean.

  She wasn’t reasoning. Reasoning was for little people, lawyers, architects, district attorneys. In the train on the way down from Los Angeles she went into the washroom and injected herself. Everything was very bright. She watched the ocean solidify outside the window till it might have been verdstone, shingled all the way to the horizon. People got on and off. She smiled at them all. When they arrived at the station, the conductor had to help her off the train because she didn’t recognize a thing—palm trees, the ocean glare, it was all the same to her—and there was nothing the porter could assist her with, thank you, as all she had with her was her purse and in the purse nothing but her pravaz, half a sandwich and a scrap of paper with the address on it.

  The man in the cab—and why did he look so familiar?—said he knew the place, and after they lurched up and down a farrago of streets that were indistinguishable one from the other, various dogs darting out to yap at the wheels, skinny boys in undershirts and baseball gloves flitting past on the parched lawns and all the stumpy tile-topped haciendas rushing at her with their fangs bared, they were there. She saw an open lot, a scattering of trees, sand, the bright spank of the water. “Wait here,” she said to the cabbie, and she crossed the lot unsteadily, struggling for balance in her heels. She had no plan. She just knew that he was there and she was there and that it had to end. The ocean smelled of decay. A gull sailed in out of nowhere and settled on the roof in a disclosure of feathers so marmoreal and bright it hurt her eyes. Sand leaked into her shoes. There were clumps of dune grass and they brushed her legs and the feel of them took her all the way back to the beach at Tokyo73 and she remembered how she and Frank would picnic on the cool wet sand just beyond the breakers to escape the mugginess of the city, everything fresh in the golden light on the other side of the world. He adored picnics, Frank. Adored adventure and spontaneity like the boy he was and would always be. Frank. Frank. How she’d loved him. She had. She truly had.

  But here was the house. His house. Their house. No one answered her knock. The front door—she tried it—was locked, and that wasn’t like Frank at all. Was this the right house? Across the lot, out on the street, the cabbie sat watching her from behind the windscreen of his car. She thought of going back to him, to make certain he’d got the address right, but perhaps if she just . . . peered through the window to see . . . if she might happen to recognize—

  One of his prints was staring back at her. The actor. The one with the sword and the bold pattern of squares within squares on the front fold of his robe, the Shunshō, and what was it called? Ichikawa. The Actor Ichikawa-Something. Yes. She’d know it anywhere. And there was one of his screens on the wall behind the sofa. And that table—that table wasn’t his. She’d gone to the shop to buy it herself, haggling with the shopkeeper like some fishwife in rudimentary Japanese—“Tēburu, tēburu,” she kept saying, Kore-wa ikura desu-ka? and he kept pretending he didn’t understand her—and now Frank had it, now she had it.

  The back door was open. And where was Frank, the criminal, the lecher? Out and about, no doubt, eating lobster somewhere with his whore, telling jokes, making demands. The thought of it made her seethe. She went through the house, room by room, everything strange and familiar to her at once. The little Russian’s petticoats, her perfumes. Children’s toys. The bric-a-brac Frank loved to surround himself with, as if he were the lady of the house. But it was all too much and before she knew what she was doing she was at the cupboard—a cup of tea, that was what she wanted—and she couldn’t help it if all those jars and bottles were in the way and the merest touch of her hand sent them hurtling to the floor in an explosion of sound and color and texture. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t. In fact, it was so satisfying, that simple act, that primal clatter, that she ran her hand over the next shelf and the next, till everything there was splayed out across the floor, flour, sugar, catsup, oats and vinegar, all the crude farmer’s fare Frank glutted himself with like the rube he was. Her hands were trembling when she put the kettle on to boil and they trembled when she brewed the tea and sat at the table and lifted the cup to her lips.

  At first all she’d meant to do was reclaim her property—her table and that fan and the enamel box—but once she was there, once she was inside, sitting in his kitchen with the teacup in her hand, the old feeling came over her, a rising counterweight of violence and hate. The teacup flew at the wall. And then she was up and jerking violently round the room, slamming at things as if each and every one of them—each plate and saucer and cruet—were the face of Frank himself, of his mistress, of their pinch-faced pig-tailed little bastard. She paused, barely winded, the wreckage of the kitchen lying at her feet. Then she went into the living room.

  She picked up the table first—an end table of rosewood, intricately carved—and the sound it made when it tore the screen from the wall was like the overture to a symphony. Cloth gave. Wood. Plaster. Glass rang and chimed and hit all the high notes ascending the scale. She found an axe propped up against the fireplace and brought it down on the dining room table, the bookshelf, the chairs, the divans, the desk, Frank’s desk. There was the whoosh of a ceramic vase grasping at the air, the shriek of splintering wood, the basso profundo of the andirons slamming to the floor. And who was it who alerted the police—a neighbor? The cabbie? The guardian angel of philanderers? Of fornicators?

  Oh, but she fought those apes in uniform, with their locked-up faces and blistering eyes, giving as good as she got, and if there was blood—and flesh, flesh too—caught beneath her fingernails, well so much the worse for them. She was at the window with the axe when the first of them came through the back door, a boy, a puny shoulderless wisp of a boy in a uniform two sizes too big for him. “Ma’am,” he said, “ma’am,” as if that were her name. “Now calm down, ma’am, please.”

  She swung round on him in her rage, and who could blame her? And it was a good thing for him that he ducked out of the way when she flung the axe because that axe was nothing more than an extension of herself, of her will, and if she had a thousand axes it would only be a beginning. “What right have you to accost me here!” she demanded. “This is my house, mine, and I’ll do with it as I please. Now, get out of here. Out!”

  There was another one now, older, settled into his flesh and the dog pouches round his eyes, shanty Irish, and low, lower than low, she could see that at a glance. He shouted out a whole blathering garble of threats and admonitions as if he were under the misapprehension that she was hard of hearing, but she ignored him because at that moment her eyes lighted on the most intriguing little Chinese vase . . .

  The judge lectured her and he couldn’t see how ill she was, didn’t care, because men stuck together and he was a man and Frank was a man and so was the policeman who’d taken hold of her arm as she flung the vase out onto the lawn through the shattered window and the Shunshō on its heels. Thirty days, the judge intoned, and then suspended the sentence on condition that she stay away from her ex-husband and from La Jolla and refrain from any and all criminal malfeasance whatsoever. She held herself erect. Never so much as blinked her eyes. And though it took all her strength to keep from throwing it back at him—criminal malfeasance indeed, and who was the real criminal here?—she never offered a word but for a murmur of acquiescence. Yes, she understood. Yes, she
agreed to the conditions. And no, she had no intention of returning to La Jolla. Afterward, at her press conference, she looked into the faces of the reporters and felt as serene as she’d ever felt in her life. Something had shifted deep inside her, the plates slipping and grinding until now, finally, they were interlocked, and the pravaz—the pravaz would fix them there with a new kind of permanence. Frank—and all that life as Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright—was behind her now, and that was what she told them. “I’m moving forward with my life,” she said, her voice breathing in her own ears like a second voice, an ingenue’s voice, a coquette’s. “I’ve had another offer of marriage.”

  The room went quiet.

  “Who is it, Miriam?” a voice rang out. “Who’s the lucky man?”

  “Oh, I can’t reveal that,” she said, and she was Maude Miriam Noel all over again, the Belle of Memphis, each word sweetening on her lips till it had the intensity of pure cane sugar, “but I will say he’s a European gentleman of conspicuously high pedigree—heir to a throne, in fact—and that I’ve recently borne him a daughter who is now in her father’s care. In Europe.” 74 She faltered, lost her train of thought—or very nearly, and where was she, where was she?—but the morfina whispered in her ear and it came back to her. “Across the sea.”

  “Can you give us her name? The child’s name?”

  “Miriam,” another called, “Miriam—”

  “There’s one more thing,” she began, and they all fell silent. She fed on that silence and took a long slow look round her, feeling supreme, joyous, on top of the world. A smile for them, for each and every one of them, and for the cameras too. “I just wanted to announce,” she went on, and here that unfortunate little tickle began to play at the base of her neck and she brought a hand to her hair as if to smooth it back and held it there a moment till the tremor subsided. And yes, there was the flash, there it was. She laughed, actually laughed aloud, with the surprise of it.

  “Yes, Miriam? Madame Noel? You said you were going to make an announcement? ”

  “Oh, yes, yes. I wanted to announce that I’ve taken a bungalow in Hollywood”—another pause, another slow pan of the room—“and at the suggestion of a number of prominent men in the motion-picture industry, I will be sitting for a screen test in the very near future.”

  There was a murmur of voices, the shuffling of feet. Somewhere off to her left someone was laughing or maybe crying, and outside, beyond the walls, she could hear the metallic clank of the streetcar and the dull fading rumble of the wheels carrying down the avenue. She didn’t know what else to say and so she smiled again and thanked them all for coming.

  CHAPTER 9 : TALIESIN REDUX

  It was like a haunting, like a slow, steady descent into the lair of the demon-lover, no peace, no respite, a fresh horror at every turning, chaos without end. Each time she and Frank set up a household, whether at Taliesin, in Minneapolis or Phoenix or on the very farthest verge of the continent where the land gave out and the waves pounded the shore, Miriam was there to wreck it. Each time they left the house—to go for a walk, to the grocer’s, an exhibition, a restaurant—Olgivanna never knew if it would be there when they got back. Ash, that was what she’d come to expect. Scorched earth. Ruins. The sheriff would be at the door with yet another warrant. Immigration men would pop up out of nowhere. Bankers. Lawyers. The windows would be shattered and the furniture smashed and a policeman stationed on the porch with the Shunshō print propped against the rail like a bit of refuse flung up out of the maw of a hurricane. And what if this madwoman came at them with a knife? What if she tried to harm the children? What then?

  She tried to ask Frank about it, but he just waved her off. “Miriam’s a very disturbed woman,” he’d say, as if the pronouncement itself would diminish her, neutralize her, take the edge off the blade, jam the bullet in the chamber.

  “But you have said yourself that she has attacked people with a weapon, have you not?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” he would tell her, but she could see that he didn’t believe it. She found him checking the windows at night. He even began locking the doors.

  Her cough worsened. She developed hives, allergies, a fungal infection. The sound of her own daughters’ voices began to grate on her—their squabbling, their needs, Mama, Mama!—and the incessant suck and draw of the surf made her feel as if all the vitality were draining out of her in a pale rinse of foam. She couldn’t walk into a room of that cottage without seizing with dread and fear and hate, the tables gouged, the mark of the axe on the mantel, the walls, the baseboard. And though Frank was tender, responsive, unfailingly cheerful, whistling over a drawing or the pages of his manuscript, singing in the shower, doing a little dance round the icebox with a glass of milk in one hand and a sandwich in the other, there were times when she wanted to get up and batter him with her fists, scream till she was breathless. She wasn’t yet thirty years old and she felt as if she were sixty. She began to hate the way the sun came out of the east each morning. Everything tasted like nothing, like sand. Grit. Dirt in her mouth.

  And then, just when things looked darkest, came a sea change. Miriam was charged with breaking and entering, in addition to vandalism and violating a prior restraining order. She was the one before the court now. She was the one with her photograph in the paper, the one shamed and publicly humiliated. And finally, at long last, the newspapers began to see her for what she was—an imbalanced and vindictive woman who would go to any lengths to destroy her ex-husband’s happiness—and they turned against her, just as Frank had said they would. “I’m not a dancer,” Olgivanna had told them, and that had carried weight, certainly it had, but it was the revelation that Miriam had hounded her out of the hospital with her newborn child that truly aroused public sentiment. That portrait of the young mother hustled out the door on a stretcher while her infant clung to her breast and the sleet drove down out of the sky was all but biblical—she might have been Mary hiding the Christ child from Herod, and where, in the public eye, did that leave Miriam? And then their year of probation was up and Frank married her75 and gave her the present of Taliesin, rescued, at least for the time being, from the bankers.76 “We’re going home,” he told her, “back to Taliesin. To stay.”77

  All the way across country, married now, legitimated, holding her happiness inside her like a rare and shining thing, in love with her husband and her children all over again, she could think of nothing but Taliesin. Her garden was two years dead, the livestock sold off at auction by the Bank of Wisconsin, the flowerbeds given up to weed. The house would be a mess, she knew that, damaged by the weather and neglect, perhaps even vandalized, but it was home and they would soon be there and that was all that mattered. Home. Taliesin. The house of the hill. She saw it when she closed her eyes at night, one scene after another shuffling in her head like cards in a deck, and it was there in the daytime too, solid, impregnable, while the countryside rolled by and all the towns and villages and farmhouses in the world vanished behind them in a swirl of fading specks. When the car finally turned into the drive and they came up the rise to the courtyard, she was so overcome she sprang out the door before it had rolled to a stop, running on ahead while Frank and Billy Weston fumbled with the luggage and the children shouted out, and here were the flagstones beneath her feet and there the overgrown garden and the sentinel oaks and the Chinese bell she’d longed to ring again—and she did ring it, jerking hard at the clapper to let the sound carry out over the countryside in all its annunciative fervor.

  Inside, it was different, and she wasn’t prepared for it. She pushed open the door and the first thing she saw was a heap of rubble hastily swept against the wall—broken crockery, the shards of a vase, the spark of glass—and a rug rolled up in the corner and soaked through because of a leak in the wall above that was even now dripping, dripping. It was cold. Late October, the day lying soft as a glove over the hills, but in here, where no fire had been lit in a year and more, it was winter. And where was the wood for
fuel? Unfelled, unchopped, unsawed, unsplit, unstacked. She wandered into the bedroom next, the girls’ voices echoing behind her—“Mama, where are you? Oh, no, look at this! Mama, Mama!”—and saw that there were no bedclothes, no blankets, no pillows even. They’d stolen everything, the neighbors, the farmers, their upstanding, decent and God-fearing countrymen who could hardly wait till Frank’s back was turned to descend on the place. Thieves, that was what they were. Thieves and hypocrites.

  She drifted through the rooms in a daze, shivering, defeated, and even Frank couldn’t warm her, though he sent Billy for wood and had him light the fires in the living room and bedroom and the boiler in the cellar. Things were smashed everywhere. They’d stolen the crockery, the silverware, tools, towels, the kitchen implements, Frank’s drafting set, his bow compasses and protractors and calipers and even the collection of colored pencils he’d been building for twenty years—and what one of them, what smirking farm boy or his whiskery hog-stinking father, could have any use for those pencils except spite? Except to show what they thought of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright and his fancy dress and his manners and his mansion on the hill? It sickened her. There was the smell of urine in the corners, as if they’d marked their territory like animals. That was what their neighbors thought of them. That was what they were worth.