A Reliable Wife

CHAPTER EIGHT

He wanted to touch her. He wanted to see the exhaustion of sex in her every gesture. He wanted to unpin her hair in a warm room, and lift a pristine nightdress above her head. He wanted to feel the first touch of his hand on her smooth dry skin.

He said nothing. He did nothing.

“Does it snow forever here? It seems like it just snows and snows.”

“It snows. We’re almost to Canada. And, of course, the water… coming across the water it gathers strength.”

“And then it will stay perfectly dry, sometimes, for days at a time.” She turned her head from the breakfast table, the blinding white washing her skin from rose to pale, then turned back to him. “Sometimes you think it won’t happen again, and then it does. It’s just… it’s just there. Like that.”

“Does it surprise you? It’s the North. Across the lake it’s Canada.”

“No. No, of course not. It’s just there, that’s all.”

Every exchange making him feel like an idiot, making him draw his spine up straight and making him fiddle with his hair, and all he wanted to do was to see her naked on the floor. Not brutal, not unkind, enraptured. He wanted to be in love, but he knew that love, now, for him, was something that happened to other people.

“And it goes away?”

“In April. April or May.”

Fool. Idiot. And the worst part of it was that he knew he gave the impression of coldness. He knew that she found him sexless, as frozen as the landscape, and he wanted to say, It isn’t true, I would give everything I have to see you writhing on this floor, right now, and still he said nothing. He made no gesture that might be interpreted as leaning in to her in the slightest way.

He might have said anything. He might have said that grief had burned through him so thoroughly that it had turned his sins to ashes. That his mother had said, needle to the bone, that the way to goodness, the only way, was through pain and suffering. He could have said that grief had left him wholly good. But he said nothing. What did she care about his grief, or his sin? She had traveled the world. A missionary, she said, and there was no reason, looking at her prim quietness, her prudish stillness that never gave way for a moment, there was no reason to doubt her. She had traveled. She had heard enough about sin.

“There’s so little to do. I wish there was something I could do. When you were sick, there was some reason to be here. I felt that I was doing something you needed. It’s something I know, and I was glad to do it.”

He touched the purple scar on his forehead.

“Now I’m better. You’ll find your way.”

“I could help Mrs. Larsen, but she doesn’t like it. I could clean. I could visit the sick people in the families who work for you. I could come into town and help you. In your office.”

“I have people for that. Just enjoy yourself. The quiet. Read.”

“I love to read.”

“Then read. I’ll order you anything you want. It can be here in two days. Novels. Newspapers. Whatever you want.”

“I’ll make a list. Might I do that?”

“Of course.”

He felt strangulation, a beating in his heart. “I didn’t bring you all this way to be miserable. I hoped, hope, you will be happy. At least comfortable, in your choice.”

“You brought me here for reasons entirely your own.”

“But you came.”

“I don’t regret it. I won’t regret it.”

He wanted to hear the sounds that came from her throat when she had no breath left, when she was breathless with desire. He wanted to possess her, in all the ways his formal and distant wife had denied him, truly and deeply, in the ways of his youth. He wanted to have her in his bloodstream like a drug, to sit in his office all day making money and contemplating the rush of ecstasy in his blood.

He wanted to speak to her of his desire, of his desire for her, of the desire gripping his throat. He wanted to stand in front of her naked.

He rarely spoke to her. He never touched her, even in passing. He was no fool. He knew that she was not what she appeared to be, and he knew that what she was lay just beneath the surface of her clothes.

His loneliness was so deep. It made him feel, sometimes, as though someone malevolent were pulling on his hair. Relentlessly pulling on his hair. He wanted to touch her, and he did not. It gave him a pain like a fever.

He saw her, and he wanted to undress her. He wanted to unbutton the many buttons of her severe black dress and pull it back from her neck until he saw her white shoulders. He wanted to drop the dress on the floor, to see it lying around her feet like a pool of black oil. He wanted to see her step out of it and stand before him in her slip, a slim woman in a thin cotton chemise and dark stockings, cotton stockings he would unroll inch by inch until her delicate feet were naked on the floor. The chemise would button up the back, and so he would turn her away from him, to slip each pearl button from its buttonhole, and then the whole flimsy thing would drop, barely skimming her hips as it fell into the darkness of the mess around her feet, and so the first sight of her, his first sight of her naked body would be from the back, the wisps of hair at the neck, glowing like filaments of fire in the candlelight of a dark, cold room. He wanted to trace with his tongue the long line of her white spine, glowing in the brightness from the moon on the snow spilling through the curtains, and she would not want to move, would not turn of her own free will, and so he would grasp her shoulders and turn her toward him and then he would kiss her. The sweetness of skin. The soft touch of his lips on hers. The moment before it all began. Just pure and kind desire.

He would kiss her very lightly, and her nipples would graze his shirtfront, and her lips would graze his lips, which hadn’t been kissed in so many years he couldn’t count them. His tongue would touch her tongue. He would hold her face steady with both his hands as he softly kissed her.

How could he have spent his life without this? How could his youth have passed, his body have aged untouched, unadmired, unloved? His body was starting to leave him and it would not come back. In ten years he would be old.

He wanted everything. He did nothing.

One evening, a week after he had told her the story of his life, he said to her at dinner, “I thought we would marry on Thanksgiving Day. If that’s all right. If it would suit.”

“That would be fine. Who would come?”

“Should people come?”

“I don’t know. People do. Usually. You must have friends. People you know. I haven’t seen anybody.”

“It seemed inappropriate, for you to go to town. People talk enough. And the weather…”

“There must be people.”

“A few.”

“So we’ll have people here? There will be food, a supper maybe. A wedding.”

The woman he wanted to undress, to see naked, was a stranger. Her conversation, her requests, were strange to him. Nobody had asked anything of him for so long.

“I’m not… I’m not pure. You should know.”

He watched her in silence.

“I was a child. A friend of my father’s, a fellow missionary in Africa. He came to me one night and… I’m not pure. Not without the sin of fornication. My father killed him. You should know.”

Mercy touched at his heart. He held her hand, just for a moment, for the first time.

“That life is past. It was a long time ago. It was not your fault. Don’t think about it anymore.”

She looked so far away.

“It doesn’t matter to me. Nobody’s pure. My daughter, my Francesca was pure, but nobody else.”

He passed her in the hall, they sat at dinner, and she was beautiful and unknowable. He wanted to lead her to his bed, his father’s huge cherry bed with the massive carved headboard and the finely laid, perfectly crisp sheets. He wanted to pull back the coverlet and lay her gently against the cool and antiseptic white of the linen sheets, the sheets the machines in his mills wove all day long every day. He wanted with all his heart to stand in front of her as he pulled back his braces, undid in seconds the buttons and belts of his own clothes. He would lay his father’s heavy silver watch on the nightstand. He would lie down beside her in his one-piece underwear, washed by Mrs. Larsen, changed every day, always clean, the buttons buttoned from crotch to neck.

Every piece of his clothing was always clean. He bathed every day before it was light, the water scalding, and the air in the room like a Turkish bath, thick with fragrant steam. He would stand in front of her and not think about how strong and solid his body had once been. He would not think about how he had thrown himself away on whores.

They would gasp, the whores, when they saw him naked. At the strength and grace of his body, a strength and grace even he could see, looking at himself naked in a long mirror. They would giggle with joy, and say things in Italian he could barely understand. That was a long time ago.

He looked at Catherine. He imagined her in bed. In his bed.

He wanted to hold her face until she finally raised her eyes to look at him. He wanted to look in her eyes and know who she was, who she was in her hidden soul. He wanted to kiss her with his hands on her cheeks. He wanted her to answer his kiss with an eager tongue. He wanted to feel the moment her hand moved beneath the cotton of his shirt and touched, for the very first time, the hair of his chest, the skin of his body. He wanted her to want all this and he wanted her to fear it, but he wanted her to submit.

Sometimes his loneliness was like a fire beneath his skin. Sometimes he had thought of taking his razor and slicing his own flesh, peeling back the skin that would not stop burning.

But he knew it would not happen, not happen to him, not ever.

“There’s something I would like.” She stared into the fire. It was the first, the only wish she had expressed.

“Of course.”

“I want a wedding dress. I want to send to Chicago for some material and make a wedding dress. It’s something girls dream of. I want a ring. Nothing large or fancy. My father told me I would never have one, and for that reason I want it. Not to spite him, but to say to myself that sometimes your little dreams come true, no matter what people tell you.”

“I’ll get whatever you want. I told you.”

“You needn’t worry. I don’t expect much. Ours is an arrangement, yes? Not a childish passion. We both have reasons.” And she smiled at him, the first time he had seen her smile. Her smile aroused in him a longing for something, the past perhaps, that brought him almost to tears.

“Gray, I thought. Silk, if… I could wear it again. After the wedding. Or I could give it to my daughter one day, if we were to have children.”

“Order whatever you want. Write it down, and I’ll telegraph for it tomorrow.”

He thought of her standing in this house in a wedding dress she had made with her own hands. He thought of the mortal sins that raced through his bloodstream. He thought his desire had putrefied. He thought his desires would kill her. He thought, yes, they would have a child, and it would emerge, another monster.

He did not think of wanting the woman whose photograph lay in his drawer, along with the letter which Catherine may or may not have written. He wanted the woman he passed every day in the hallway, who sat across from him at dinner, who ate her food with such delicacy and charm, her small teeth sparkling, who never failed to ask Mrs. Larsen about some sauce or some ingredient he hadn’t even tasted.

He wanted her teeth to bite him. To leave marks on his back, his legs. He wanted her hair to strangle him. He wanted her to tell him that his touch would not kill her.

He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body.

He didn’t touch alcohol. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t go to Chicago, as many would have, to have sex with women he didn’t know. Not for a long time. None of it mattered. None of it did any good.

He wanted the moment at which he finally lay naked against her, chest to chest, her hands fluttering above his shoulders like white birds in the chill night, her frantic fingers threading invisible needles. He wanted to know that his desire was life, pure and clean and unformed and unbroken. Life as good as anybody else’s. As clean as any ever known. Perfectly healthy.

In the end, such a simple thing.

In his fantasy, morning never came; they never woke to look at one another with shy eyes or bitter eyes in the blinding light. There was no tomorrow. There was only this moment, her hand sliding for the first time between his undershirt and his skin, his body sliding into the most private and untouchable parts, not just of her body but of her life, so that they were bonded together not just by the desire itself but by the burning, the ineradicable memory of the actual taste and smell of the flesh.

He remembered every woman he had ever touched. He had thought that he would forget, the way he forgot people’s names or the grades he made at university or the faces of men he had gotten drunk with and told his secrets to. But the scenes of his sexual life came back to him more and more as his years in exile endured, so that he could recall their names, he could see their silken dresses and the diamonds hanging from their ears. He could remember the names of the jewelers from whom he bought these baubles for his little sweethearts.

He could lie in bed at night and see himself, as though he were a third person, making love to an English girl named Lady Lucy while his friend and roommate watched from across the room, too drunk to move or even be aroused. He could see Lucy’s fingernails. He could feel her tongue on his feet. See the bow of her mouth as she slid him into her throat.

He could remember standing behind redheaded Sarah at a sink as she took a cloth and washed beneath her arms and between her legs, in a hotel room in Chicago, his kisses covering her thin and exhausted shoulder blades.

He thought of a widow in a neighboring state, a state where he often did business, a plain woman who had taken him into her bed, and submitted to him without a word, who arched her back with passion and spread her legs and opened every part of her body to him and put her tongue in his mouth and her mouth on his sex and then lay, afterward, wrapped around him, their mourning for everything they had given and lost like a blanket wrapped around their cooling sweat. They shivered in the dark.

When he left her, he had not even said good night. She had not even raised her head from where it lay in the crook of her elbow, her tears wetting the mangled pillow and her matted hair. He had left a red scarf hanging over the back of a green chair.

He had never gone back for it. His way had not taken him again to her house, nor had either of them imagined that it would. Love not worth even a scarf.

He remembered the insane trips he had taken to Chicago, after Emilia had left, to look for her and her lover. He knew then that it was not Emilia he looked for, that he wouldn’t have had her back if she had crawled naked in the street and begged. He was just looking, looking for it, the crack between her legs, her black nipples in the dark. Her skin like oiled earth.

He passed Catherine in the hall. He watched her from an upstairs window as she wandered the road that led from the house, poking at the dirty snow with a stick, sometimes angrily, sometimes with the forlorn hopelessness of a child.

“What do you do? When you go out walking?”

“I just look.”

“Have you lost something?” “It doesn’t matter. I just look.”

Who was she? What did she think about all day, while he was at the office, his dark office in the iron foundry, pushing his goods around the country, digging deep into the earth to haul out its riches? Where did she go when she wandered away from the house after lunch, as he knew she did because Mrs. Larsen told him she did?

He wanted to touch her, to tear her clothes, and he did not. Instead, he gave her things. He sent for hothouse roses from Chicago that arrived blood red and sat in vases, roses that were named with the old names, French poets, English dukes. The roses, forced to lavish bloom under glass, gave no scent.

He sent for chocolates. He sent for marzipan in the shape of animals and flowers, candies for which she had no taste and which Mrs. Larsen slipped to her sweet-toothed husband in secret, until they were gone. He sent for bonnets she had no place to wear. He sent for music boxes, and sparkling ear bobs, which she would not put on. He sent for novels, and she read of the adventures of rakes half his age, of the despair of English girls wandering the moors looking for their dead lovers. He sent for a tiny bird, which sang her to sleep, which she allowed to fly at will around her room, the room he had slept in as a boy.

He would not allow her to leave the property. She had never seen the town. So, instead, he gave her trifles.

He had a taste, long suppressed, for the luxurious and the exquisite, and he knew how to pick a wine or a brooch or a bolt of silk. These things were like a memory in his flesh. The superb. The intoxicating. Every day he arrived home with something in his hand for her, little, expensive gifts that she accepted shyly, with a slight surprise. She had, he knew, no place to wear them, no place to put them.

These things, these ribbons and all this rigmarole, were his way of touching her. These things, out of season, unattainable, reserved for the few, for the rich and decadent, passed from his hand into hers every day. “Oh,” she said, drawing in her breath. “Oh, Mr. Truitt, how beautiful.”

He could feel the simplicity of his life fading away, like a drunk long sober about to take his first taste of brandy.

Love drove people crazy. He saw it every day. He read it every week in the paper. Every week the papers were filled with the barn burnings, the arsenic taken, the babies drowned in wells to keep their names a secret, to keep their fathers away from them, to keep them from knowing the craziness of love. To send them home to the holiness of God. He read these stories aloud to Catherine at night, after supper, and she would invent stories about the sad women and the deranged men. She would say their names over and over, until even their names became a kind of derangement.

“Why do they do it, Mr. Truitt? Why are they so sad and affected by…?”

“Long winters. Religion.”

“Will it happen to us, then?”

“No.”

She wanted to go to town, of course. Anybody would, to walk the streets, to spot the ordinary woman who next week might drown her children, the wearied worker who would slaughter forty head of his own cattle in a single night. He would not let her go to town, even though people already knew she was in his house. Finally, they thought.

If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do? It would, thought Ralph, produce me. It has. His hand would reach into his pocket as she spun her stories. He would touch, lightly, the length of his own sex.

But still he did not touch her. He separated his desire for her, for any and every woman, from her actual physical self. He kept his distance. He knew neither how to love nor how to desire, in any real way. He had lost the habit of romance.

But he lay in bed every night, the sheets clean and smelling of crisp winter nights, and he thought of her, in her room down the hall. He pictured, like pornographic etchings, the hidden parts of her body. He did not touch himself. He couldn’t bear it. A grown man. A man who was almost old, the stupidity of it, and her just down the hall.

His sins lay not in acrobatic visions of penetrations and humiliations. His perversion was silence. Silence and distance.

He lay, straight and sober in his bed and thought of Lady Lucy Berridge in Florence thirty years before, her aristocratic vagaries and titillations. Sooner or later, in the dark, Lucy’s face, or Serafina’s or even Emilia’s, always turned into Catherine’s. Catherine laughing at him.

He wondered, in the dark, in the latest hours, whether she thought of him in return, just down the hall, so clean, so rich, so polite. But she did not. He never crossed her mind.

She lay, Catherine, in a clean, simple nightdress, her eyes to the blinding moon and the drifting snow, and she dreamed of cigarettes. She dreamed about smoking cigarettes and about the body of a worthless man who lay next to some other woman in some other bed, in tangled sheets in a rotten town, miles and miles and miles away.