A Reliable Wife

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

She couldn’t stop. It was like a drug she had stayed away from for too long. She wrote to Truitt. She told him she was making progress, but progress was slow. She promised him that Andy, as she called him in her letters, would come home.

She went to Antonio’s every day. She was no longer afraid of Fisk and Malloy. She never saw them. She assumed they lurked in the shadows, but she was too far gone to care.

She and Antonio would make love, sometimes for ten fierce minutes, sometimes until dark turned to light and then to dark again, and then she would pull a dress from the closet and they would go out. They ate oysters and drank champagne.

Away from his singular obsession with Truitt, his charm was childish and indelible. He made her feel like a girl again, when everything was fresh and possible. He would tell her over and over the story of his travels, the comic peculiarities of the people he had met on the way, and it always seemed new and innocent, the endless adventures of a boy who never grew up. His laughter was like clear water, sparkling with sunlight, spilling over rocks in a spring forest.

He made her laugh. With Truitt, she never laughed. Truitt was many things, solid and good things, but she never laughed.

She knew also, because he sometimes told her in the night when his armor slipped away, when he lay naked and lean and finally vulnerable in her arms, that, in reality, it was mostly a long and lonely scramble for the next dollar or the next woman, a young, broken man alone in the world with no mother or father, never a home to come home to, but when he sat with her over oysters and champagne, it was as though his life had always been filled with sunlight and clean sheets.

He would speak to her of her beauty, how he never tired of it, and she would believe him.

She went to the rude beer hall where he played the piano, and she flirted with other men right in front of him, knowing he wouldn’t do anything. Sometimes there would be fights, overdressed laborers in a rage, and she wouldn’t even move from her table.

Afterward, they would go to the dens, where Chinese women would undress them, wrap them in silk, massage their naked bodies with warm scented oils and feed them black, rubbery balls of opium. They would go home at dawn, and she would change into her other clothes, the clothes she had worn to come to him, and go back to the Planter’s Hotel. She couldn’t get the key in the lock sometimes; a sleepy porter had to help her. She slept until noon and woke to the sound of a bird singing.

She drank strong black coffee and ate almost nothing, golden toast with sweet preserves. She hardly slept, just the hours between dawn and noon. Sometimes, in the library in the afternoons, she almost fainted from hunger, her kid gloves lying by the stack of books.

She studied the horticulture of roses. She could feel the thorns prick her skin, could almost smell the blood on the back of her hand. She was not what she appeared to be to Ralph Truitt, but she was not what she appeared to be to Tony Moretti either, and she never stopped to wonder which self was her true self and which one was false.

She saw so many of her old friends. Hattie Reno, Annie McCrae and Margaret and Louise and Hope, Joe L’Amour, Teddy Klondike. She looked everywhere in every room for her sister Alice, Alice who lived somewhere in this vast city, who moved in these circles when she felt well, Alice whom she used to take to the circus and the opera. But Alice was invisible, and nobody knew where she was.

She had bought Alice books that she never read. She had bought her jewelry that she lost or gave away. She had tried, in all the world, to save one thing, to make her sister thrive, to be her friend, and she had failed even in that.

Catherine wanted to find Alice and take her to Wisconsin, to wrap her in the white gauze of the far country until she was healed and whole. She wanted to dress her in Emilia’s finery and watch as she swept down the long staircase of the villa into the high frescoed hall. She would be like a child in a masterpiece, Catherine’s masterpiece. She still believed she could save her.

“Forget her,” said Hattie Reno. “Nobody’s seen her for months. And the last time anybody did see her, she looked awful. Nobody talked to her and she didn’t care. I was ashamed for her.”

“She’s my sister.”

“And she’s mean and she’s hard and she’s sick. She’s the kind of girl don’t want a roof over her head. Just runs wild. Men don’t even like her no more.”

“She’s never had a real roof over her head.”

“And you want to give her one. Before she’s dead. You and who else? Who would pay for this roof?” Catherine never talked about Ralph Truitt. Her absence went unexplained. In Chicago, they assumed. They imagined they knew the reason. Fresh blood. New men with new money.

“Yes. Before she’s dead.”

She knew that Antonio needed her in a way that was beyond speech, and this she took for adoration. It wasn’t. It was need and habit, an addiction, but it wasn’t love, no matter how often he might say it.

Sometimes, sitting in the early afternoon, still in her nightdress in the quiet of her room at the hotel, the scarlet bird on her finger pecking at small pieces of a roll she held up, sometimes she knew this with a clarity that was like a knife in her heart. But he was different.

For Antonio, Catherine was the one woman who never stopped being thrilling, because her need for him was so enormous, because it made her vulnerable and willing and unprotected in ways that other women weren’t. Antonio was years younger than Catherine. He was, for her, the last grasp at a youth that was betraying her.

He could do anything he wanted, love her, smack her, kiss her feet, and she would do anything he asked. She was older. She was losing her youth, and that in itself was part of her interest for him, like drinking the last of the wine. And she would kill his father and give him everything. She would do anything. She would do this. His father’s death had become the bit in his teeth, the impossible, unbeatable hand at poker. He was willing to wait, but not for long.

He would fall asleep with his fingers inside her, lick the musk away when he woke up. He would have sex with her when she was bleeding, would have sex with her when she was drunk, would have sex with her when she was asleep. His appetite and her desire to be pleased were both endless. He found it exciting when she came to him in her plain proper dresses, like sex with a stranger, somebody foreign to him.

She was in a dream. She found it hard to remember where she was.

She wrote to Truitt every day. She constructed a life, and she wrote him every imagined detail. She did not want him to forget her power over him, the power to end his loneliness, to bring his son home, to make his garden grow again.

“Tell me about him,” Antonio said once, after sex. His head was on her breasts, his dark hair teasing her, teasing her into a kind of stupor. She could close her eyes and try to imagine his face. She could see nothing, although she could recall with perfect clarity the faces of people she hardly knew.

“I want to know everything. Tell me again.”

“He’s tall. He’s thick.”

“Fat?”

“Not at all. Powerful.” She was careful now. She wanted to please; it was her profession. She wanted to tell him only what he wanted to hear. “He’s got a lot of money, I think. I know. He’s got a lot of businesses. Mostly iron, for the railroads, for machinery, for everything. Everybody works for him. A lot of money. I don’t know how much. He’s got a railroad car. He thinks it’s remarkable to own an automobile. And there’s the house, but you know it. There’s his silence. He reads poetry. I read to him at night. He’s very sad. He’s sad in himself, in his heart.”

“Imagine when we live in the house. Imagine the parties.” He could see the parties; she didn’t have to describe them. They were like his life now, but with more people and more money and more champagne and more everything that might, in the smallest way, give him pleasure. There would be women to wait on him, to pick up and clean his ruined clothes. There was his father’s grave, next to his sister’s. He would spit on it.

Where would the people come from? They would bring them in the railroad car, from Chicago, from Saint Louis, an endless succession of people who would do anything for him because he could do anything for them, if he chose, at his whim. He would have sex with somebody else while Catherine watched. He would shave his face in a gilded mirror from France. Sleep in the golden bed his mother had brought from Italy. They would take drugs from Chicago and walk down the middle of the streets of the town laughing at nothing, and nobody could do one thing about it. And the money would never stop coming in. There would be no end to the luxuries.

“Your toys are still there. Your sister’s dresses hang in the closets. Your mother’s, too. They are beautiful.”

“You’ll wear them.”

“I’ve tried. They’re too small. They would fit Alice. They’re hopelessly out of fashion, like in a museum. A box of jewelry is in her dressing table. Pearls and emeralds and rubies. Bows made of diamonds to wear in your hair. A diamond watch. Things she forgot to take, or couldn’t take, when she left.”

“He beat my lovely mother. He beat her until she bled. She hardly knew what she was doing. She left with the dress that was on her back, nothing else.”

“It’s all still there.”

“And I don’t want Alice. Not anywhere near me.”

She tired of telling the story. Tired of comforting him. He was still a boy, a little boy who was frozen in childhood, and who could never get it back. She knew this. She knew the father’s death and the diamond bows and the callous, lascivious disregard would never restore to him what he had lost, because what he had lost was time and what he had left was rage.

He knew it, too. He tried to remember. He tried to remember his sister, or his mother, and nothing came to mind. His anger was the hot still point on which his life was impaled.

“He misses you with all his heart. He’s sorry for what he did. The pain of it never goes away.”

“You think my pain goes away? You think I like this, this ignorant life?”

She had to be careful at every step, a tightrope walker in the circus.

He couldn’t sleep at night. His heart pounded and the blood raced at his temples. He felt a pressure in his body and he tossed and turned until the light was too bright outside to stay in bed. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he settled for unconsciousness, the morphine, the opium, the wine, but he woke up and he didn’t feel rested.

He felt that his soul, his rage, showed on his face. He imagined the skin of his face splitting open and the pus of his rage sliding down his fine high cheekbones.

He ate only enough to stay alive, and then only foods of the most rarified kind. Oysters and champagne. Quail and caviar. Melons that were brought up the river from South America out of season. Ham from Parma. Foods that passed for a caress from a woman long dead, a woman he imagined had loved him as a child.

He had sex because he was beautiful. It was beauty’s burden to be made available. He had sex because there was a moment during the act of love in which he forgot who he was, forgot everything, forgot his father and his mother and his tiny idiot sister, forgot the beatings and the curses that Ralph had hurled against his flesh, and Ralph cold sober, sober and cold, over and over, willing him to hell and he a child of eight, when it began. In sex, he ceased thinking and became only being, all movement and pleasure and expertise. He lived in a sexual frenzy because sometimes, afterward, he could sleep for an hour or two.

“Don’t tell me about it. Don’t talk about him.”

“Whatever you want.”

Catherine was an exception, the woman he came back to again and again. The woman who was all he understood of love. She had been savaged by her life and her face was still beautiful, her body untouched by disease. She knew what she was getting into; she saw into his soul and wasn’t burned by the fire.

Alice was another exception. He had gotten drunk one night when Catherine was away marrying his father, and he had spotted Alice as he staggered home in the dawn. She was standing, standing as though frozen, on the corner of a dark street, and he had approached and said two words to her. They had had sex in less time than it would take to play the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. They had not said a single word, as though he were too bored and Alice merely mute.

“I know where she is.”

“Who?”

“Alice. She’s in Wild Cat Chute.”

Catherine turned away and covered her face with her hands. Tony Moretti smiled.