A Reliable Wife

by Robert Goolrick

  Ralph had not been home in five years. He loved sex and he hated it. He loved bad women because he didn’t care if he destroyed them. There was a core of hatred in his hunger for them that never ever went away, a distaste that bit like sharp teeth, stabbed like needles, and still he couldn’t stop. He rented a hotel room, rich, the bed festooned with garlands and gold, the waiters silent as they brought champagne for Mr. Truitt and Miss Mackenzie, or Miss Irons, or Miss Kenny, for singers and dance hall girls and whores and artists’ models.

  He thought of his brother dead beneath the ground and envied him the quiet. Death at least would end this terrifying desire.

  He went to Europe. A wanderjahr, his father called it, a common thing for young men of his day. He lived in Europe the arrogant life of the newly sophisticated, his principal sophistications consisting of speaking French and knowing how to check into a hotel room with a woman who was not his wife. He was taking the Grand Tour, through the haze of London and the brilliant clarity of Paris, through the picture galleries and the racetracks and the drawing rooms of the destitute aristocracy. They pandered to him, they offered their terrified daughters like ormolu clocks, and they laughed at him the minute his back was turned. Ralph didn’t mind. He could order in any restaurant, and he could always pay the bill.

  In Florence he ran into a friend from Chicago, Edward, who was trying his hand at being a painter. Edward spent his days at the Uffizi and the Pitti, making hungover sketches, and lived in a state of such licentious dissolution that even Ralph was shocked. Ralph took a grand villa, and brought Edward to live with him. The two of them drank champagne from iced bottles and laughed as the candles dripped white wax on the marble floors during the nightly card parties and music parties and parties where no one wore any clothes.

  Every morning, young maids would kneel and scrape away the wax while Edward and Ralph slept in their sumptuous beds with their overblown whores. Life had the serenity of knowing, ceaseless decadence.

  Occasionally, in the ornately frescoed churches he visited almost by accident, Ralph would get a glimpse of a God who was, if not less terrible, at least more opulent than the God of his childhood.

  Ralph had a cook, two gardeners, six peacocks, and a handsome carriage with a liveried driver. In the back of the carriage rode a second liveried servant whose function was unclear to him.

  Edward knew pharmacies where furtive men would sell whatever drugs they wanted, powders to keep them asleep for forty-eight hours while the sun rose and set and rose again on the duomo, powders to make an erection last four hours. Ralph and Edward bought poisons in dark blue bottles which, when taken in tiny doses, could produce euphoria such as Ralph had never known, an ecstasy which felt like sex in every pore of his skin.

  Still the money came without reproach. The terror of what happened to his body when he felt desire never went away. His heart never hardened to the pain, the hatred never ceased its relentless beat. Then he saw Emilia.

  She rode by him in a shining carriage, an exquisite girl of sixteen wearing a white muslin dress with wisteria intricately woven in her black hair. Ralph never went to the pharmacist again. He never played cards, and he moved Edward and the whores and the cardsharps and the drunks into large, dark rooms on the other side of the river. He was in love.

  It shocked him to wake every morning with a clear head, to find his rooms as neat as he had left them the night before, to taste the brilliant Tuscan food laid before him by the calm, dark-eyed servants. He exercised. He took boxing lessons. He took Italian lessons for hours every day from a university student, just so he could speak to her. He rode and hunted and resolved to be the kind of man who could win the heart of this girl whose name he didn’t know.

  His clothes were splendid, his manners good enough, his parentage unknowable at this distance. American, that was enough, he supposed. His hair was brilliantined, he smelled of cologne from the pharmacy at Santa Maria Novella and of money from America.

  He was introduced to Emilia’s father, then to her mother and the slow pleasantries of her drawing room where every object spoke of old, old luxury and culture. At last he was allowed to speak to Emilia herself. Ralph was more naive in his mid-twenties than these people had been in the cradle.

  They were ordinary people, pretentious and penniless and ambitious for their beautiful daughter, and Ralph took them for more than they were. He miscalculated how most Italian families can drag some title out of the attic. He didn’t see that they had no money, that their servants went unpaid, and that angry dressmakers went out the back door as he came in the front. He didn’t see that their daughter was their only marketable asset.

  He saw an exquisite beauty whose voice was music and whose manners were poetry. His Italian was, after all the lessons, the language of a child. Emilia spoke pleasant French and comical English, she blushed like the dawn as he tried to see her eyes. For months, she was sweet and charming and just beyond his reach, like the peach at the top of the tree.

  He whispered her name to himself as he walked along the Arno. Absence from her was physically painful, as though his nerves were on fire. Her company was the only context in which he found his character acceptable. He lit candles for her love. He prayed for a miracle. Then finally, Ralph understood, was made to understand. Emilia was for sale.

  She was sweet to him, and infinitely charming in a musical way, and Ralph, knowing so little of love, saw what he felt in his heart reflected on her face, and believed that she loved him. Her father would be saddened to part with her, but would, in the end do so because she loved Ralph and because he would, after all, be compensated for his loss.

  Buying things was easy for Ralph. He had already spent three years in the silver vaults and picture markets of Europe, and he knew that the aristocracy were always reluctant to part with their treasures, and he also knew that, in the end, it wasn’t the parting that was in question but only the price.

  He wrote again to his father. He asked for a great deal of money. His father replied that he would send what Ralph wanted, but that he wished for Ralph to come home now, to come back and run the business. A bargain was struck. Ralph could have the bride if he would take on the responsibility he had been allowed to shirk for so long. For Ralph, the solution was a happy one. He had known for years that, no matter how long the line he had been given to play on, sooner or later he would feel the sting of the hook in his mouth and be reeled home.

  All his life, he had hoped that, in the end, he would be allowed to love someone enough to speak of his fears and so be rid of them, and it was to Emilia that he told his terrible secrets, the fire in his veins, the cruel rage in his heart, and she healed him with a laugh and a kiss. You will see, she said, this is silly. No one will die.

  She barely understood what he was saying. Her English was composed of manners and poetry and light, and she had no vocabulary to comprehend such darkness. All she knew was that she had been raised to be sold, and being sold to Ralph was certainly not the worst of her options.

  While waiting for her elaborate trousseau to be sent from Paris and then fitted and refitted, while the endless negotiations about the dowry were being completed with such cruel acumen by Emilia’s father that not a single tradesperson went unpaid, the telegrams came. Your father is ill, the first one said, come at once, but he could not leave. Your father is dying, said the second, and still he waited for Emilia to be ready.

  Your father is dead, said the third telegram. So he married Emilia in haste and boarded a train and then a boat and then a train and traveled until he arrived at the farm in Wisconsin with his wife, the prodigal son come home.

  Emilia was pregnant before they got home. Ralph welcomed and dreaded the birth. He remembered kneeling by his father’s grave, Emilia beside him, her voluminous pearl gray skirt from Paris shimmering in the sun. Her face, so angelic in Florence, seemed merely peculiar here, too exotic for the flat landscape.

  It was all so long ago. They were all dead now, his father, Emilia, th
e little girl she gave birth to in that first Wisconsin spring, his brother. All dead, even, finally, his relentless mother, who never forgave him.

  He had thought it would fade, but it never did. For twenty years not one soul had touched him with affection or desire, and he had thought his need would fade, and he was amazed, at the turning of every year, how the lust that had gripped his youth gripped him still in all its ardor, all its rage. It had hardened around his heart, more every year, and it never let him go.

  Yet he leaned away from the soft voices of the few women who spoke to him, knowing he could have any one of them, yet choosing none. Instead, he chose solitude, or he was chosen by it, and it was horrible and unbreakable. For still, at any moment, every night and day, his flesh itched with desire, his mind turned constantly on the sexual lives of the men and women around him, and this turning caused him to loathe and cherish other people in equal measure. His love died with Emilia, and with the child, but his desire flourished in the barren soil of his heart and its soft whispering never ceased in his ear.

  In his fever, now, the women came to him. In his fever, they touched him. Their touch both burned and cooled.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT SNOWED FOR THREE DAYS. Catherine was so bored she was sometimes afraid she would lose her mind, or at least lose her way. In the midst of this crisis, she must not lose sight of her plan. Every night she turned the blue bottle in her hands and watched the blizzard through the liquid. Like a scene in a snow-globe; she saw it unfold. Every night she prayed he wouldn’t die.

  When she wasn’t nursing Ralph, she roamed the rooms, looking at everything, touching every object, every piece of furniture. She turned over every plate, picked up every piece of silver to see the hallmarks stamped there. Limoges, France. Tiffany & Co., New York. Wedgewood. She calculated the worth of each piece, the value of the whole.

  The few conversations she had with Mrs. Larsen either concerned Ralph’s treatment, or seemed to her like snatches grasped from a dim understanding of a foreign language.

  “His shoes is never there, by the door. His shoes is by the chest of drawers. He gets them from New York City.”

  “I’ll move them.”

  “No. Leave them be. I’ll move them. I know how he likes things.”

  Deep in the night, as they sat by his side, “Sleeping like a baby now. His head is big as a watermelon. He ain’t going to die.”

  Catherine never knew whether some response was required. She had slight knowledge of how to talk to other people.

  She slept sitting in a chair in his room. She wore her plain black dress and heard the wind howling outside. She nursed him with tenderness and efficiency. Three times a day, she sat alone at the gleaming table and ate the exquisite food Mrs. Larsen brought her. A clear soup the color of rubies. A meringue with chestnuts. Duck in a mustard sauce. Things she had never seen, foods that frightened her with their beauty. She asked Mrs. Larsen if she and her husband didn’t want to eat with her, or have her eat in the kitchen with them. That, apparently, was not part of the plan, and so she went on in solitude at the head of the enormous table.

  She ate with an appetite that excited and appalled her. Rich foods so at odds with the bleak country, so suitable for the comfort of the cold. Her hunger was fueled by boredom and anxiety, and it never went away, no matter how much she ate.

  At night, she stood for hours at her window, watching the snow fall, longing for what she had left behind. During the day, the whiteness was so bright, she had to shield her eyes from the glare. She could not keep the curtains open for more than a few minutes.

  She thought of people, ordinary people, moving through the streets of the cities, and she marveled at the commonplace of their lives.

  She thought of the rooms she had left behind, the rooms in which she waked and breathed, the way they were furnished, the way voices carried in through the open windows, the way she walked and wept in them. She stared down at the stupid and list less people who had somehow managed to achieve in a flawlessly easy way those dear little things that eluded her.

  They owned plates. They all had socks. The world was filled with people, and she thought with derision of the extraordinarily few she had known, really known, in her life.

  And as much as she might sneer at the emptiness of their lives, the stupidity and the boredom, she had ended up in this house, soundless in the relentless snow, and she gladly would trade places with any one of them.

  In the life behind her, she would smoke cigarettes and drink liquor and take drugs and grab what she could get out of the sea of people around her. Men wrote her letters. They had seen her at the theater, high up in a box, and they would write and she would answer. So delicate. She would find forgetfulness for an hour or a summer or a night with any one of them whose letter amused her, a man with blue eyes or green eyes or brown eyes, their faces so close, pleading for what she could not imagine, and eventually the tremor would pass and the luxurious beauty of it would fade and she would see only the stupidity and the foul odors and the hatefulness of her own heart, a hatefulness which told her every minute that the pleasure these people obviously found in these simple moments would be forever denied to her. And then she would move on.

  She itched for a cigarette. She would wade through drifts over her head for the escape of opium or morphine. But she was far away from all that. She would not even take a glass of sherry. She would follow her plan and her plan would work, if, of course, Truitt did not die.

  “How is he, Miss?”

  “He’s restless. And hot.”

  “Tough old bird. Don’t you worry, he’ll make it.”

  When I have his money, she thought, I will go far away, I will go to a country where I don’t know anybody and I don’t speak the language and I will never talk to anybody ever again. But no, that wasn’t the plan. She must remember the plan. When she had his money, she would marry her useless and beautiful lover and they would live a life of such extraordinary delight. Oh, yes, that was the plan.

  In every one of the cities where she haphazardly had landed, when anxiety and dissatisfaction engulfed her as they eventually did, she found the municipal library and spent hours there, reading descriptions and guides to other places she might eventually go. She knew the street plans of Buenos Aires and Saint Louis and London. She knew in intimate detail any number of places she had never been. Like a studious schoolgirl, she sat in the waning light of a vast municipal library, and she learned things.

  She imagined them in Venice, herself and her useless child of a lover, sleeping until afternoon, their rooms at the Danieli a riot of half-eaten sweets and empty champagne bottles and exquisite lingerie. She had studied Italian, the light slanting down from the library’s high windows.

  She saw them rising languidly, the morphine a dull film across his black eyes, swathed in silks and cigarette smoke, drinking Chianti in a gondola as it moved across the black water toward the lights of the Lido, and the gondolier would sing of love and every door would open to them, revealing infinite ancient rooms of luxury and beauty and charm where aristocrats, princesses, and counts and kings would kiss them on both their cheeks and they would never grow old and they would never die. She would never be alone. She would have her lover’s beauty and her own, and she would have Ralph’s money, and surely the two together would be enough. That at least was the plan.

  She would marry Ralph Truitt, and then, one day, almost imperceptibly he would begin to grow old and die. And then, one day, not long after, he would be dead and she would have it all.

  “Mrs. Larsen?”

  “Yes, Miss?”

  “Where does this food come from?”

  Mrs. Larsen laughed, spooning sauce over a breast of duck.

  “Come from? I make it.”

  “But . . .”

  “You thought we ate beef jerky? Corned beef and cabbage? Ham from October to May? Like hicks? Well, some do. We don’t. There’s an icehouse where we keep most things. Some things he sends for,
from Chicago. Some of it came on the same train you came on.”

  “You cook like an angel.”

  “I learned it a long time ago. I was just a girl. In the other house. It was another time. And, I have to say, it’s nice to do it again. Do it properly.”

  “Another house?”

  “Yes. It was a long time ago.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Is. It’s still there.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s nearby. No more than a mile. We never go there.”

  “What’s it like?” Perhaps this other house was where the beautiful things with the names on the bottom had come from.

  “It doesn’t matter. We never go there. Snow doesn’t stop, we’ll be at the end of the fancy food soon enough.” Mrs. Larsen left her alone at the long table with the gleaming silver.

  Catherine knew about cooking, French cooking. She had read about it in the library. She had never actually done it, but she knew recipes for sauces by heart. She tried not to appear overly curious. It made Mrs. Larsen nervous.

  It was amazing the things you could learn in a library, just by looking them up. Poisons, for instance. Page after page after page of poisons. As simple as a cookbook. If you could read, you could poison somebody in such a way that nobody would ever know.

  Ralph Truitt’s house had no books. There was an old upright piano covered with an embroidered Spanish shawl, and between her nursing chores, before every meal, she practiced her little pieces. Mostly, though, she didn’t know where she belonged here, and there was no one to tell her. Not Mrs. Larsen, who was jolly and honest and assumed the same of her, assuming, along with the rest of it, that comfortable people somehow made themselves comfortable. She was enormous and kind, Mrs. Larsen, unlike her tiny thin husband, who watched Catherine’s every move with suspicion and treated her with only barely disguised contempt.