A Reliable Wife (9 page)

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. In stead, 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.

CHAPTER NINE

He gave her a gold cross on a fine gold chain. He brushed away the wisps of her hair and fastened it around her neck.

She thought of her pathetic baubles, buried in the snow, her ticket to freedom. They seemed inconsequential now.

Men only give you what they give you, Catherine thought, staring out at the endless and uncontrollable snow, when they know
they can’t give you what you want.

What she wanted, of course, was a quick marriage to Ralph Truitt, followed by his painless demise. What she wanted was both
love and money, and she was not to have either except through Ralph, except, in fact,
after
Ralph. What she wanted was some control in her life, to get her meaningless little jewels back, something that was her own,
the sparkle of her old life, to sleep once again with her faithless lover, far away. She had had a lifetime of filthiness
and vileness and lust. What she longed for, in her heart, to her surprise, was a springtime as lush and erotic as the winter
was chaste and bloodless.

The light bothered her eyes and gave her headaches that would rage fiercely for days. She had fair eyes, like her father.

“I would like some dark glasses for the sun.”

“Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“The light hurts my eyes.”

“Don’t look out the windows.”

“It’s all there is to do.”

He got smoked glasses for her, and she wore them in the house during the day. Like a blind person, she stared out into the
white blank canvas that was her only pastime. She could see rabbits, frozen in the snow. She could watch the crows that descended
to pick at the flesh. She could watch Larsen as he watched her staring out the window. With the glasses, the whiteness had
detail. With the glasses, no one could see the glitter in her eyes.

Her package arrived from Chicago. Twelve yards of dove gray raw silk. A paper pattern. Ralph gave her the exquisite diamond
ring, and the cross, which he swore had not come from his first wife. Ralph gave her a trip to see the house. The real house.

She had had presents before, of course. Funhouse bijoux, carny sparkles boys had given her even when they knew they would
not walk with her beyond the limits of the fairground. But this, this was different. It was not, in the first place, a present
in the actual sense, since he would not give it to her. He was merely letting her see it. He was merely letting her know that
it would, in fact, be her future home, once she had done as he asked, married him and brought his lost boy home.

Yet it was a gift, she supposed, watching the house rise out of the landscape’s interminable sameness, watching it take shape
before her. It was his best hope he was giving her. It was his folly and his disastrous failure. It was the house he had built
hoping his heart would find a home there, and it had not worked, and he had been shamed there, and humiliated. Still, he was
showing it to her, knowing that he was showing her also his heart, and that was, after all, the one gift that no one had ever
given her.

They crossed a field and through a wood, and entered into a long sloping rise, and the house began to appear before them.

It was splendid. It stood square and golden and massive and beautiful, and Catherine’s heart took flight when she saw it.
She had never seen anything like it, so alone in the vast wilderness, so regal in the midst of such ordinary land.

It took everything in her to remain calm, to rest her hands quietly on the heavy wool throw, to wait until the horse had stopped
before descending from the sleigh. But it was her heart’s delight, the first wonderment she had felt for so many years.

They walked up one side of the broad double staircase that led to the massive double door. Truitt pointed out a painting over
the door which showed, she supposed, the villa as it must look in summer, with its orchards and its gardens and it pools and
its broad long lawns leading down to the pond and the river beyond.

The doors were unlocked and swung open easily, and they walked into a broad, high central hall. Catherine couldn’t stop herself.
She gasped. It was so lovely, lovely despite its grandeur and its size. The ceilings were frescoed with adorable babies with
wings and flowers in their hair. The room was lit by two colored glass chandeliers that hung from yellow velvet cords, each
prism a different jewel, each ray of light a different soft color. From Venice, he said. They had been lowered and lit for
her, ablaze with flame for their arrival. They were crystal flowers, hanging in the air, flowers that gave light.

The walls were covered in rose silk. Portraits, too many to count, looked down. The floor was marbled and patterned, covered
in rich old rugs. The sofas along the sides of the hall were large and gilded. Countesses had walked here. Dukes had read
poetry on the sofas. The high windows dazzled the room with light.

On either side, more massive rooms. He showed her everything, with the same slow disinterest. There was a ballroom, a music
room, a library, a dining room where thirty people could have dinner. There was a glass conservatory where exotic plants once
grew, orchids and palms. There were sitting rooms in many colors, filled with rich old furniture. One room was all pale yellow,
like butter. One was turquoise, one green. One was trellised, painted with vines and flowers. The windows gave out onto the
same interminable whiteness, but inside, everything was warm and golden.

“It’s always heated. Mrs. Larsen comes over to clean. I haven’t been here for years.” Truitt seemed to feel nothing. He was
the tour guide, pointing out a picture here or a table there, things that even still had special meaning for him.

Upstairs, nine massive bedrooms, each a different color, each warm and rich beyond anything Catherine had ever seen. The beds
swagged and ribboned, the sheets laid perfectly, as though important guests would arrive at any moment.

“This was her room.” It was a sumptuous, royal blue. A sitting room and a dressing room were attached to it. Her comb and
brush were still on the dressing table. A cut crystal bottle was still filled with amber perfume. “And this was Franny’s room.”
He stood at the door but wouldn’t go in. They hung back and looked at the tiny bed, fancy enough for a princess, and the child’s
furniture and the gay curtains. A rocking horse stood beneath one of the high windows.

“She would ride for hours, back and forth. Back and forth, laughing. God, she was a delight.” The slightest catch in his voice
was the only emotion. “She died in that bed. I sat by her, night and day.”

It was as though the child would walk into the room the next minute, pick up one of the dolls laid neatly in a row on the
bed, each with its fixed expression of innocent bliss. Catherine wanted to pick one up, but she didn’t go in. She couldn’t.
Mixed with the odor of childhood still hanging in the air was the sharp smell of death, and grief, a smell too familiar to
her. The last of childhood. The end of purity.

They saw it all. Antonio’s room. The guest rooms, the servants’ hall, the kitchen with copper pots by the dozen gleaming on
stone walls.

At the back of the house, outside, was a walled enclosure, visible from the window of Emilia’s room, and from the broad hallway.

“Her secret garden. Giardino segreto. Italian foolishness. She would grow flowers there, roses and things. She said every
Italian house had one, and she brought gardeners from Italy to tend it. She had trees that twined around each other, white
flowers that, in the night, smelled like a woman’s perfume. The small house, just there, that’s where she grew lemons and
oranges.

“Except it never worked. The summer is too short and she could never plant the right things. The gardeners were fools, used
to a different climate, I guess. The lemons died. The flowers never came up, frozen in the ground. She sent for hothouse flowers,
put them in the ground where they died. The Italians couldn’t do a thing. Useless and stupid. It was an idea. It didn’t work.”

When they had seen it all, Catherine outwardly as sober and unmoved as Truitt himself, they went home. Home to the small ordinary
house decked out with the fantastic leavings of the more fantastic empire.

Catherine dreamed of the house. She saw herself walking its broad halls, sweeping in gowns of silk and lace and embroidery
down its wide marble stairs. She imagined herself mistress of the house.

Catherine began to go there every other day. When Mrs. Larsen went to clean, when Truitt was away at business, she would go
and sit in every room, play the long untuned piano in the ballroom, look through the drawers and the closets. She spent whole
afternoons staring at the enclosed white of the secret garden, imagining it fragrant with lemons and lilies, alive in the
sunlight of August. It was a place for lovers’ secret whisperings. It was in the world, but away from it, like the heart.

It was as he had said. Everything was still there. In Francesca’s room, she opened the closet to stare at the tiny dresses.
She touched one and felt its silken whisper in her hands.

“Her mother had a dress made for the child to match every dress she had for herself. Even made little copies for the dolls.
They look old-fashioned now, but you can tell. Still. It was senseless.” Mrs. Larsen was enraged by the idiocy of it. “Look
at them. Are these for a child? A child who couldn’t dress herself, couldn’t feed herself, couldn’t do anything but look with
that little smile on her face? Look at this.”

She pulled from the rack a white linen shift, simple and graceful. There were words embroidered on the front of the dress,
foreign words.

“She couldn’t even say her own prayers. So her mother had this made, with prayers in Italian embroidered down the front. ‘So
she’ll sleep with God.’ That’s exactly what she said. Franny was like a puppet to her mother, a mindless puppet. But she had
a heart. She loved her rocking horse, she loved to be held, she loved to hear a man’s voice singing. She didn’t have the brain
God gave a baby. But she was a person. A whole person. It broke his heart when she died. It broke his heart when she was alive.
Like it was his fault.”

“It wasn’t his fault. Surely not.”

“It was that woman. Was me, I’d rip every one of these dresses out of here. Make a fire. It’s sad, but the child is dead.
They’re all dead.”

“Not the son. He says. Truitt says.”

“If you ask me, he’s dead, too, Antonio. Dead or useless as his mother. All this chasing around, it’s not going to get Truitt
anything.”

Catherine didn’t tell Truitt she went to the house. She didn’t tell Truitt she wore his wife’s pearls, stuck diamond bows
in her hair. She didn’t tell him that she tried on the old-fashioned dresses, even though they were too small, sweeping the
carpeted floor with the sweet whoosh of ruffled silk. She didn’t tell him she spent long afternoons in the library, reading
the romances and the plays and the poets. Mrs. Larsen kept her secret, she supposed, because life went on as before. Because
she hoped for Truitt’s happiness.

They ate dinner. He read to her from the newspaper the accounts of madness and true crimes, committed by people he knew. She
read to him from his beloved Walt Whitman, seemingly the only thing he read. She read to him Whitman’s vast throbbing hopeful
despairing panorama of America, the unparticular passion for every living thing.

“Be not disheartened,” she read. “Affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet / Those who love each other shall become
invincible.”

She didn’t love Truitt, and every night the blue bottle came out from her suitcase; rage infused her as she held it in her
hand. The blue bottle fueled her; it was her simple, her only plan. The house would be hers. The pearls, the books and pictures,
the fancy rugs from India and the East, and Truitt would be hers, too. But there would be no affection, no ambling toward
a sweet old age. One drop. Two drops. That was the future.

She roamed the rooms in secret, she wandered the secret garden, up to her knees in snow, the drifts in the corners over her
head, while Mrs. Larsen scoured the copper pots and shook the dust from the heavy brocaded curtains. And all the while she
did not forget. Her rage never decreased. The blue bottle was her defense, her key to the infinite splendor, the drowsy magnificence
of the house itself.

She sewed her gray silk dress, according to an innocuous pattern picked from a ladies’ book. She felt foolish when she looked
in the mirror, as though she didn’t remember what she was dressing for. The days crawled by. The snow never stopped falling.

They were married by a judge, in the living room of the farmhouse. A noonday fire burned in the fireplace. The weather cleared
for the day, and two carriages stood in the yard. Two couples watched silently as they said the words. They signed their names
as witnesses in the judge’s book. They joined them for lunch and went away. They might as well have been strangers.