A Reliable Wife (14 page)

“I’ve remembered every detail every day of my life. He’s not in the picture.”

“He loves, he wants to love you.”

He suddenly turned, and knelt with one knee on the bed. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her like a doll. She could
see his clothes all undone. She could see his white skin, feel his hot touch, even in his violence.

“He beat me. He killed my mother.”

“He . . .”

“He took my beautiful mother and he beat her until her teeth fell bloody to the floor. I saw this. He took me all the way
to Chicago to make me watch. He’s strong. He was, at least. He took her and put his ugly hands around her throat and strangled
her until she was dead. I saw this. I was thirteen years old and I saw it.” He threw her back on the bed. “Why would I want
his love? I want him dead.”

She had heard it a hundred, a thousand times, and she had never really believed it, not once. It was assumed between them
to be a truth, it was the central cause of what was happening, and she tried, she tried because she loved him, to believe
it, but she didn’t. And now that she knew Truitt, now that she was his wife, she didn’t believe Antonio anymore.

She knew such things happened. She could picture them in the grimy brownstones and the dingy tenements. She could imagine
them happening to other people. She could not imagine such a terrifying loss of sense, of restraint or reason, happening to
Ralph Truitt. She had tried to see it. She had tried to see Antonio, the first haze of a beard on his cheek, watching such
a thing happen, but the image would not come.

Such things happened to her, had happened to her, sudden bursts of uncontrollable fury, but they would not happen to Ralph
Truitt, Truitt who had exchanged drink for prayer the day his daughter’s eyes went blank, Truitt who had seen his wife having
sex with a piano teacher and closed the door and not gotten his gun.

Antonio grazed her cheek with a kiss, his dry lips like feathers on her skin. “It’s our future. It’s our future.”

She raised herself with fury from the bed.

“And you don’t have to do a single thing? Not one thing. You drink and you whore and you go to the dens and you spend every
penny with tailors who will give you endless credit because it’s an honor for their clothes to be seen on you, and I have
to do it all.”

“Me whore? What an odd thing for you to say.”

“I love you. I will do anything for you.”

“And you honestly think that’s a rare and beautiful thing. That’s what you get paid for.”

“It’s all I have to give.”

“No. It’s not. You give me my father, you surprise me with my father’s death, and your love will suddenly take on a whole
new value.”

“I’ll do it. I said I would. I will.”

“Well, don’t wait too long.”

He was dressed. He had fully left her now, and she lay naked and awkward in the cold, wet bed. His leaving was like dying
for her.

He turned to her, his eyes rimmed with tears. “I wish you could have seen her. My mother. She was so lovely, her voice so
soft, her hands so small. She would take me on her lap as she played the piano, and sing the old Italian songs. She had barely
left her girlhood.”

He sat in a chair by the darkening window. “After she left, after he drove my mother away, after my sister died, I would sneak
over to the old house, to the villa, and climb the staircase and go into her room. I would stand in her closet and bury my
nose in her dresses, breathing in my mother. She smelled like another country, a country where there was always music and
dancing. A country lit by candlelight.

“She was just a girl. She fell in love. People do, all the time. It wasn’t her fault. Maybe Truitt is my father. Maybe not.
No one will ever know. But he will pay the price for what he did to her, for what he did to me after she left.

“I have grown up, all my life, hating him. I am weary of it. I will never have a whole life until he’s gone. Do that one thing
for me.

“You reminded me of her, the first time I saw you. You have loved me, in your way. You open, by tiny bits, my hard heart.
Do this one thing for me.

“People think I’m a bad man. A useless waste. And maybe I am. But I don’t think so. I’m just a ten-year-old boy, standing
in the dark of his mother’s closet, smelling her dresses. I could be bad. But I could be good. I’ll know when I see him in
his grave.”

He stood. It was almost dark. The door opened and he was gone.

She wandered the rooms. She opened the closet and saw her fine dresses, the beads and feathers, and her hats, swooping birds
and jewels, and her delicate shoes, red and green and gold Moroccan leather, with pretty high heels and glittering buttons
and buckles, and she suddenly wanted it to start over again. The touch and smell of her clothes, her perfumed clothes, brought
it back, and she wanted to lie in bed until noon, she wanted the laughter and the dirty jokes and the bawdy songs and the
sex with men she never saw again, the clink of money in her silk purse, the thrill of champagne, the cloying sweetness after
the bubbles were gone, the awful mouth in the morning, opium and champagne, the nights upstairs with the women, in their silk-ribboned
underwear, when they would lazily caress one another’s skin and talk easily, softly all night about the things that were going
to happen and less easily about the things that had happened and, somehow, it was acceptably fine. She wanted to lie in bed
on a Sunday morning and laugh over the personal ads and not see the one placed by Ralph Truitt and know the name and say it
aloud to Antonio Moretti and see the gleam in his eye as he grabbed the paper. She wanted not to have spent the day wondering
aloud how to make use of the sad information. Ralph Truitt. Just a name, the end of an old story.

She could never get back. And if she could, where was she to get back to? Back to a carriage with her own sweet mother in
a summer storm with cadets? Back to the sweetness of her little sister’s eyes? Back to the moments just before any of this
had happened?

She closed the closet. She washed herself carefully with water from the ironstone pitcher, and she didn’t think anymore. She
washed his sex from her raw skin, luxuriating in everything, regretting nothing.

She dressed herself carefully in her lady’s disguise, she walked without fear through the dark streets of the parts of Saint
Louis nobody went to except out of necessity, and she slept like an innocent girl in her narrow bed at the Planter’s Hotel,
the sound of her bird sending her to the angels.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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.