A Reliable Wife (8 page)

He looked up at Catherine, as though he had just realized she was there. As though it took him a second to realize who she
was.

“I’m sorry. There isn’t any delicate way to tell it. I’ve never told this to one single soul. Everybody knows it, but they
don’t know it from me. And I’m only going to tell it once.”

She looked steadily in Ralph’s eyes, her hands completely still in her lap. She sat as she had told herself she would do,
no matter what he said, told herself that she would not shift so much as an ankle until he finished his story. And then she
would decide. Her pulse was racing. She could feel it throbbing in her wrist.

The story, she knew, was almost over.

“I have looked for him for twelve years. I have put flowers on my little girl’s grave, and I have looked for my boy. And now
I’ve found him.”

Despite whatever she had told herself, she jumped.

“Where? Alive?”

“Alive. In Saint Louis. Playing piano in some whorehouse. They think it’s him. The detectives. They’ve thought others were
him, except they weren’t. This time I think it is. And I want him back.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s my son. He’s all I’ve got.”

“I mean, why do you think it’s him?”

“I heard you play that music, his mother’s music. I always knew that something would happen one day to make me tell the story
and the telling would make it all right. The telling would call him back. I’m not a superstitious man. But I believe that.”

Tears glistened in his cold eyes. He didn’t wipe them away, didn’t seem to notice they were there. His hands picked at his
black trousers, trembling, rose into the air to catch at a piece of dust and twist it into nothingness. He looked so ill.
She didn’t move a muscle.

“I have tried to lead a good life. I have tried to be kind, no matter what I felt, no matter how hard it was. You couldn’t
know. And I’ve made money. He’ll need money. My son has . . . luxurious tastes. I know he does. He’s his mother’s son.”

She looked at him. It wasn’t love she felt for him; she didn’t know love. But it was something equally strange to her, an
undiluted desire, produced, perhaps, by the sight of his anguish. Tears in a man. It was hard for him, the telling, and the
awkwardness of it made her breasts and body flush with desire.

“You must be tired.”

“I’m not so tired I can’t finish telling what you need to know if you’re going to marry me. You saved my life. You played
the music, the music my wife loved, the music my son played.”

“It’s a simple piece. Every schoolgirl knows it.”

“You played the music. I’m not naive. I’m not very nice, after all. If telling one lie makes you a liar, then I’m a liar,
because I told Andy she had died in a fire, and she hadn’t, although she did die, some years later. You will marry me, or
I hope you will, and we will open the house and move back into it, and everything will shine and he will come home to his
own house and his own father and a mother who is far better in every way than the mother he never had the slightest idea about.”

She couldn’t help herself. “I have to say. It’s only fair. I don’t love you.”

“I don’t expect it.”

“It’s worse. I mean, Mr. Truitt, that I can’t love you.”

“I don’t require it.”

“How do you know? If it is him, what was his name?”

“Andy. Antonio.”

“How do you know he’ll come?”

He looked at her for a long time. The light through the windows was blinding. She could smell lunch cooking, almost ready.
She could hear a clock tick. She could see Ralph in front of her, but as though lost in a dazzling snowfall.

“Because you’re going to go to Saint Louis on a train and get him.”

The light coming through the windows was brilliantly white. Almost blinding.

CHAPTER EIGHT

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.