The Women

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “What I mean is he’s at the Garfield Arms, right now—with her and the child—and you can catch him with his pants down, that’s the beauty of it. You’d a thought he’d have the savvy to hide the whole business, but I guess not. He’s even registered under his own name. And her too.”

  Leora mouthed something to her from across the room. Was it “guilty” or “got him”?

  “Missus? ”

  All the blood was boiling up in her brain. You didn’t register housekeepers at your hotel. Housekeepers stayed home and kept house. She felt dizzy suddenly—betrayed, betrayed yet again—and she could barely manage a response. “Yes?” she whispered.

  “I’ll tell you something else too—his consort or mistress or whatever you want to call her?”

  “Yes? ”

  “She’s big as a house. Out to here, if you know what I mean.”

  She was on the next train for Chicago, staring out the window of her sleeper at the naked mountains and the bleak dead midsection of the country, everything in shades of tan, no color anywhere, no life, no hope. She’d practically begged Leora to come with her, for support—she just didn’t know if she could go through with this on her own—but Leora had been planning her Thanksgiving party for the past two months now, a fête for forty, black tie, the sort of thing that would make her neighbors stand up and take notice, and she couldn’t just go and cancel at this late date, could she?

  No. No, of course not.

  And so Miriam was traveling alone, the pravaz her only companion. She didn’t knit, didn’t sketch. Cards bored her to tears. She had the latest Zona Gale with her and Lewis’ Arrowsmith, an excellent book really, about a fine and noble man—an idealist like herself—but she was too anxious to concentrate and wound up spending hour after hour staring out the window on the rolling vacancy of America. A colored porter stuck his head in the door every once in a while and people nattered at her in the dining car and she tried to respond, if only for the sake of civility, but the conversation (the quality of the food, the ease and speed of rail travel, something that had happened to somebody’s sister in Omaha) held nothing for her. Thanksgiving fell on the last day of the trip and though the chef went out of his way and the waiters did their best to make the turkey with mashed potatoes, gravy, chestnut stuffing and peas with pearled onions look and taste like something prepared at home with the family gathered round, it was a sad imposture and everyone in the dining car knew it. The laughter was brittle, the attempts at witticism as stale as the pie à la mode. She left the dessert untouched and retreated to her compartment.

  That night she barely slept, her mind racing along with the incessant pounding of the wheels on the track, Frank’s face rising up before her like a cork in a gutter, Frank grinning at her, mocking her, Frank superimposed over the very attractive single gentleman in the next compartment who’d trained a long look of wonder and sympathy on her every time she squeezed past him in the corridor because she was a desirable woman still, supremely desirable, with taste and class and education, worth any hundred dancers, a thousand, whole troupes of them . . . Frank, Frank, Frank . . . Frank strutting along the sidewalks of Chicago in his arrogant cock-of-the-walk way, Frank, his eyes shut tight in rapture, working his bare white buttocks atop some other woman. Some dancer. Some foreigner.

  Olgivanna Milanoff, that was the name the detective had supplied her. Olgivanna Milanoff. She said the name aloud in the dark, just to taste the bitterness of it on her tongue. The coach rocked and steadied itself and rocked again. Anonymous stations slipped past in the night, each one an outpost guarded by a single naked light, even as the wheels hammered out the tempo beneath her, Milanoff, Milanoff, and the sadness that gripped her then was like nothing she’d ever felt, not even when Emil came back to her in the hush of the alienist’s parlor and laid a hand of ice on her shoulder. It was as if a cautery had been run through her heart. This woman—this dancer—was pregnant by him, pregnant. Carrying his seed, his child. Was that what he’d wanted—another child?

  It was news to her. Because there’d never been any question of children between Frank and her—they were in their forties when they met, with grown children of their own, and from the beginning their union had existed on a higher plane. They were companions, soul mates. Not mere breeders like all the rest. Anybody could be a breeder—look at the peasants and their strings of ragged dirty children with their mouths hanging open and their hands outstretched in the undying expectation of a coin or a crust, the world already too small a place for so many mouths, so many hands. And Frank had agreed with her. Or was it just a matter of expedience?

  But Jesus God he worked fast, glad to be rid of her, to cast her aside and find someone new, someone younger, someone pretty and naïve and unformed to pour himself into, to mold and hammer and shape the way he never could have shaped her. Well, she pitied the woman. And she could have him, this Olgivanna, this Russian or whatever she was, have her Frank Lloyd Wright, the great man bestriding the world like a colossus for all to see when in actuality he was the most venal dirty insufferable little coward she’d ever known—and a lecher, a lecher to boot . . .

  Chicago was cold and clear, the sun as pale as suet and hanging low over the houses and factories and the shadowy monoliths of the skyscrapers. The cab took her through quiet streets, cars drifting past like untethered boats, people gazing numbly from behind their curtains or trudging past one another as if speech hadn’t been invented yet. She checked into her hotel, freshened up in her room and immediately went back down to the lobby to order a car (though in truth she was so worn-out and exhausted she could have slept for a week). Standing there at the curb, waiting for the doorman to assist her, she nearly lost her resolve. But the thought of the divorce settlement—how Frank had manipulated her, hiding everything from her, his deceit, his adultery, his Russian paramour (Paris, Paris indeed, and how convenient for him)—steeled her. There’d be no settlement now. She’d never sign—she’d tear the papers up and throw them in his face. The bastard. The son of a bitch. He would see—she would make him see—because the balance had turned and it was all in her favor now.

  She had the car drop her off a block from the Garfield Arms34—it wouldn’t do to get too close. She was on her way to the museum, that was the story she and the detective had concocted in concert with her Chicago lawyers, when she just happened to see her husband’s car pulled up in front of the hotel where she’d stayed with him on occasion. She called out a greeting to his chauffeur. Exchanged pleasantries with him. And, curious, she’d gone into the lobby to inquire after her husband, only to discover, to her horror, et cetera.

  The wind was in her face—and if she’d thought she was in California still, she was disabused of that notion, the cold a force of its own, bits of paper and refuse driven before her like drift, the manholes steaming, businessmen buckling under the weight of their scarves and greatcoats. She was wrapped in fur, her hair pulled back in a bun and imprisoned beneath her turban, her heels beating a martial tattoo on the pavement. Up the street she came, determined, her shoulders thrown back, her head held high. And it was just as they’d planned—there was the car sitting idle at the curb, and there was Billy, hunched over a cigarette and giving her a sheepish woebegone look. “Billy,” she cried, bending to peer in the window of the car, “what a surprise. What are you doing here? Is Mr. Wright staying over?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She watched him wriggle a bit, and it was clear whose side he was on. “Down from Taliesin on business?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, I’ve just come back, you know. California was lovely, but my place is here with my husband. I’d thought he was in Wisconsin still—but how convenient that he’s here in Chicago. Perhaps I’ll just stop in and say hello—”

  He had nothing to say to this, but oh, he was wriggling now. Good. Good. Let him suffer, the apostate, with his false face and bugged-out eyes.

  “—and then maybe we can all go up together, jus
t like old times. Right, Billy?”

  Still nothing. His face was set, one hand held fast to the wheel, the other working the cigarette at his lips. Finally, because the conversation was over—that much was evident, even to him—he raised a finger to his cap in salute.

  Inside, the lobby was busier than she would have expected, and she had to wait a moment behind a couple checking in (with enough baggage to mount an expedition to Timbuktu) before she could catch the desk clerk’s attention. The clerk was a man in his thirties with a toothbrush mustache and blue-black hair greased to a seal-like phosphorescence, no one she recognized, but then staff turnover was scandalous these days, not at all like it used to be when you could count on seeing the same faces down through the years. He showed his teeth. “May I help you, madam? ”

  “Yes, I’m Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s my understanding that my husband is currently in residence here.”

  There was a flurry of activity at the door behind her, bellhops, baggage, people sweeping in from the cold. A great fat man in a beautifully tailored wool suit sank into an armchair on the far side of the room and then immediately rose again with a roar of laughter to greet a smart young woman in a fox coat. There was a sound of music drifting in from somewhere, two bars of a popular tune, and someone out on the street was impatiently honking an automobile horn. The clerk gave her a blank look. “Mrs. Wright, did you say?”

  “Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright,” she repeated, and the man checking in beside her at the long marble-topped counter gave her a covert glance, “and I have reason to believe that my husband is here under suspicious circumstances. Now, I’d like to have a look at the register, please.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t allow that, madam. It’s against our regulations.”

  “That is his automobile pulled up to the curb out there. That is our chauffeur at the wheel. Again, I ask you: let me see the register.”

  The man beside her—she had a vague impression of whiskers, starched collar, the flush of the alcoholic—was staring openly at her now. Had she raised her voice? She hadn’t meant to. She’d told herself to stay calm at all costs, to avoid making a scene—or too big a scene at any rate—and here she was, losing control of herself. The clerk’s eyes were locked on hers, dismissive eyes, eyes that reduced her to an aggrieved nonentity, a nuisance and nothing more, and she felt a wave of emotion rising in her throat as if it would choke her—she hadn’t thought it would be this hard, this disorienting and tragic, but the fact of the matter was undeniable: Frank was upstairs with his paramour and she was left stranded at the desk like a beggar.

  “I’m sorry,” the clerk said, and all at once the wave broke in a flash of anger that consumed her like white phosphorous. She made a snatch for the register, his hands there, the cuffs of his shirt shooting back, and they were actually tugging on it like two children fighting over a bauble on the playground and somebody—was it she?—was shouting, “Call the manager! Call the manager!”

  Yes, it was a scene—she’d created a scene and she wasn’t sorry about it at all. She heard the clerk let out a yelp—a squeak, the sort of sound you’d expect from a rodent in a cage—and the register slipped from her grasp. People stared. All the ice of the place melted and then refroze again. And here was the manager coming up the corridor in a stiff-kneed jog, coattails flapping, eyes wild, a pale sprinkle of cake crumbs lodged in the corners of his mouth. “What is it?” he gasped, throwing the clerk an exasperated look. “What’s all this, this”—he seemed to take her in then, his eyes making a quick revolution from her shoes to her skirts to her furs and jewelry and the rigid furious compression of her face—“confusion? Is there anything amiss, madam? May I be of assistance?”

  Oh, they were watching now, everyone in the place, though the more discreet tried to cover themselves by making a pretense of consulting watches or newspapers or counterfeiting a conversation, but they weren’t fooling her. She might just as well have been perched on the proscenium of the Apollo Theater, the curtain poised to come down, the revelatory words on her lips. “Yes,” she said, teasing out the sibilance of that sematic little s till the room hissed and crepitated with it, “yes, you may.” She paused to draw in a breath. “You can start by ringing up the police.”

  His eyes jumped round the room. He was terrified, whipped already, she could see that, his only desire to soften, placate, give in. There was the hotel’s reputation to consider. The other guests. His own scrawny worth-less neck. “The police?”

  The fury came over her again, a surge of the blood and its secret hormones that had her trembling as she snatched off her glove and pointed a single accusatory finger at the clerk. “I want this man arrested.”

  “Please,” the manager was saying, “let’s just step into my office and I’m sure—”

  “For aiding and abetting a crime in progress, a crime of venality, vice—and I’ll have you arrested too—”

  “Madam, please”—and was he going to touch her, was he going to dare reach for her arm?—“be reasonable. Whatever it is, we can rectify it, I’m sure, if you’ll just give us the opportunity. In my office. Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable in my office?”

  She stepped back from him, jerked her arm free. “Don’t you touch me,” she hissed, and she was glowing, glowing. “My husband is up there, don’t you understand?” She lifted her chin, forced her eyes to sweep the room, people turning away now, murmuring, embarrassed, caught in the act of eavesdropping, gaping, staring. “He’s up there,” she said, fighting to steady her voice even as the tears—real tears, true and spontaneous and blood-hot—erupted to sting her eyes and stain her cheeks, “up there . . . with his . . . with his whore.”

  By the time she swept down the stairs to the lobby of her own hotel an hour and a half later, she was as composed as could be expected under the circumstances. She’d had an opportunity to put something on her stomach—the oysters Rockefeller and a handful of crackers, and that was about all she could tolerate given the state of her nervous system—and she’d changed into something a bit more demure than she’d worn to the fray (a low-waisted calf-length dress in violet with emerald satin collar, cuffs and hem and a bow of the same color at her hips, set off by a broad-brimmed felt hat in a lovely pale green to bring out her eyes. And her scarab ring, of course. And her beads and lorgnette).35 Her lawyer had restricted her to two champagne cocktails, as a calmative, and she’d strictly avoided the pravaz—at least for the time being—because the point of this, the first press conference she’d given in years, was to produce an effect of fashionable languor combined with the wilting distress of the abandoned wife, and she understood that an excess of languor—or wilt—just might play against her.

  For all that—and for all her experience of photographers during her years with Frank—the flash powder startled her so that for a moment she lost consciousness of where she was, the speech she’d mentally prepared vanishing along with the drift of white smoke.36 She must have put out a hand to steady herself—blinded, absolutely blinded—because her lawyer, Mr. Jackson, an associate of Mr. Fake, took her by the elbow and whispered encouragement to her even as the next flash went off. “It’s all right,” he was saying, “this is fine, fine. Look aggrieved. That’s right. Good.”

  When she came to herself she registered the faces ranged round her in a rough semicircle—eight or ten men, with their pencils poised—and she caught the reflected dazzle of the chandelier overhead and the pure gleaming expanse of the marble floors, the plush weave of the Oriental carpets and the exotic herbage of the potted palms, and felt a thrill run through her. She was the focus here—the star, the cynosure—not Frank. These men were waiting for her, to hear what she had to say, to record and broadcast her words to the nation.

  “I want to remark,” she began, drawing in a breath so moist and deep it was as if she’d been underwater all this time and was only now coming to the surface, “how sad an occasion this is for me and how much I appreciate your coming here today.” She paused, let her
eyes rest on each face in succession. They were staring at her, rapt. No one moved. No one said a word. “And I’d like to make it clear no matter what my husband might say in contradiction, or how skillfully he might manage to twist the truth, that I never left him. He is my husband. My legally wedded and lawful husband in the eyes of God and man—and the true and shining love of my life.”

  One of the newspapermen, a boor in a cheap suit and an asymmetrical haircut, interrupted her: “I’m sorry to have to ask this, but we didn’t know that you were married—weren’t you both advocates for free love?”

  She waved a hand in dismissal. “We were married in the most romantic moonlight ceremony anyone could imagine, even the greatest poets of the ages—at midnight, on the bridge at Taliesin. It was the crowning moment of my life.”37

  There was a pause while they scribbled, heads bent, pencils scraping.

  “Still”—and she was in command now, absolutely, the thrill of vindication running through her like a new kind of drug—“there are some things a woman simply cannot abide no matter how faithful she may be.”

  And now the room fell silent. Here was the real meat of the story, the scandal they were all waiting for. Very softly, in her steadiest voice, she explained that he had left her no recourse but to sue for divorce, in spite of all the love she held for him. He’d been cruel to her, had physically abused her—and here she began to falter, she couldn’t help herself, all her sorrow, all the humiliation of her position and the raw hurt of it pressing down on her like the weight of some medieval torture. “I went west,” she continued, and she had to pause again to gather herself, “for my health. On doctor’s orders. The pure dry air of . . . of Los Angeles . . . and then I come back to my husband only to find that he, that he—”