The Women (13 page)

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Authors: T. C. Boyle

Tags: #Fiction

BOOK: The Women
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“I’m sorry,” the clerk said, and all at once the wave broke in a flash of anger that consumed her like white phosphorous. She made a snatch for the register, his hands there, the cuffs of his shirt shooting back, and they were actually tugging on it like two children fighting over a bauble on the playground and somebody—was it she?—was shouting, “Call the manager! Call the manager!”
 
Yes, it was a scene—she’d created a scene and she wasn’t sorry about it at all. She heard the clerk let out a yelp—a squeak, the sort of sound you’d expect from a rodent in a cage—and the register slipped from her grasp. People stared. All the ice of the place melted and then refroze again. And here was the manager coming up the corridor in a stiff-kneed jog, coattails flapping, eyes wild, a pale sprinkle of cake crumbs lodged in the corners of his mouth. “What is it?” he gasped, throwing the clerk an exasperated look. “What’s all this, this”—he seemed to take her in then, his eyes making a quick revolution from her shoes to her skirts to her furs and jewelry and the rigid furious compression of her face—“confusion? Is there anything amiss, madam? May I be of assistance?”
 
Oh, they were watching now, everyone in the place, though the more discreet tried to cover themselves by making a pretense of consulting watches or newspapers or counterfeiting a conversation, but they weren’t fooling her. She might just as well have been perched on the proscenium of the Apollo Theater, the curtain poised to come down, the revelatory words on her lips. “Yes,” she said, teasing out the sibilance of that sematic little
s
till the room hissed and crepitated with it, “yes, you may.” She paused to draw in a breath. “You can start by ringing up the police.”
 
His eyes jumped round the room. He was terrified, whipped already, she could see that, his only desire to soften, placate, give in. There was the hotel’s reputation to consider. The other guests. His own scrawny worth-less neck. “The police?”
 
The fury came over her again, a surge of the blood and its secret hormones that had her trembling as she snatched off her glove and pointed a single accusatory finger at the clerk. “I want this man arrested.”
 
“Please,” the manager was saying, “let’s just step into my office and I’m sure—”
 
“For aiding and abetting a crime in progress, a crime of venality, vice—and I’ll have you arrested too—”
 
“Madam, please”—and was he going to touch her, was he going to dare reach for her arm?—“be reasonable. Whatever it is, we can rectify it, I’m sure, if you’ll just give us the opportunity. In my office. Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable in my office?”
 
She stepped back from him, jerked her arm free. “Don’t you touch me,” she hissed, and she was glowing, glowing. “My husband is up there, don’t you understand?” She lifted her chin, forced her eyes to sweep the room, people turning away now, murmuring, embarrassed, caught in the act of eavesdropping, gaping, staring. “He’s up there,” she said, fighting to steady her voice even as the tears—real tears, true and spontaneous and blood-hot—erupted to sting her eyes and stain her cheeks, “up there . . . with his . . . with his
whore.
”
 
 
By the time she swept down the stairs to the lobby of her own hotel an hour and a half later, she was as composed as could be expected under the circumstances. She’d had an opportunity to put something on her stomach—the oysters Rockefeller and a handful of crackers, and that was about all she could tolerate given the state of her nervous system—and she’d changed into something a bit more demure than she’d worn to the fray (a low-waisted calf-length dress in violet with emerald satin collar, cuffs and hem and a bow of the same color at her hips, set off by a broad-brimmed felt hat in a lovely pale green to bring out her eyes. And her scarab ring, of course. And her beads and lorgnette).
35
Her lawyer had restricted her to two champagne cocktails, as a calmative, and she’d strictly avoided the pravaz—at least for the time being—because the point of this, the first press conference she’d given in years, was to produce an effect of fashionable languor combined with the wilting distress of the abandoned wife, and she understood that an excess of languor—or wilt—just might play against her.
 
For all that—and for all her experience of photographers during her years with Frank—the flash powder startled her so that for a moment she lost consciousness of where she was, the speech she’d mentally prepared vanishing along with the drift of white smoke.
36
She must have put out a hand to steady herself—blinded, absolutely blinded—because her lawyer, Mr. Jackson, an associate of Mr. Fake, took her by the elbow and whispered encouragement to her even as the next flash went off. “It’s all right,” he was saying, “this is fine, fine. Look aggrieved. That’s right. Good.”
 
When she came to herself she registered the faces ranged round her in a rough semicircle—eight or ten men, with their pencils poised—and she caught the reflected dazzle of the chandelier overhead and the pure gleaming expanse of the marble floors, the plush weave of the Oriental carpets and the exotic herbage of the potted palms, and felt a thrill run through her. She was the focus here—the star, the cynosure—not Frank. These men were waiting for her, to hear what she had to say, to record and broadcast her words to the nation.
 
“I want to remark,” she began, drawing in a breath so moist and deep it was as if she’d been underwater all this time and was only now coming to the surface, “how sad an occasion this is for me and how much I appreciate your coming here today.” She paused, let her eyes rest on each face in succession. They were staring at her, rapt. No one moved. No one said a word. “And I’d like to make it clear no matter what my husband might say in contradiction, or how skillfully he might manage to twist the truth, that I never left him. He is my husband. My legally wedded and lawful husband in the eyes of God and man—and the true and shining love of my life.”
 
One of the newspapermen, a boor in a cheap suit and an asymmetrical haircut, interrupted her: “I’m sorry to have to ask this, but we didn’t know that you
were
married—weren’t you both advocates for free love?”
 
She waved a hand in dismissal. “We were married in the most romantic moonlight ceremony anyone could imagine, even the greatest poets of the ages—at midnight, on the bridge at Taliesin. It was the crowning moment of my life.”
37
 
There was a pause while they scribbled, heads bent, pencils scraping.
 
“Still”—and she was in command now, absolutely, the thrill of vindication running through her like a new kind of drug—“there are some things a woman simply cannot abide no matter how faithful she may be.”
 
And now the room fell silent. Here was the real meat of the story, the scandal they were all waiting for. Very softly, in her steadiest voice, she explained that he had left her no recourse but to sue for divorce, in spite of all the love she held for him. He’d been cruel to her, had physically abused her—and here she began to falter, she couldn’t help herself, all her sorrow, all the humiliation of her position and the raw hurt of it pressing down on her like the weight of some medieval torture. “I went west,” she continued, and she had to pause again to gather herself, “for my health. On doctor’s orders. The pure dry air of . . . of Los Angeles . . . and then I come back to my husband only to find that he, that he—”
 
Mr. Jackson held an arm out to her—and what was he doing, patting her on the back, was that it?—and her voice thickened in her throat till she didn’t think she could go on, all those eyes locked on her, the man with the flash saying
All right, boys, ready, one more,
and there was that coruscating explosion of light all over again. “All I want,” she managed to say, “is what is . . . what is . . . rightfully mine.” Her chest began to heave, no holding back, not now, and suddenly she was sobbing, sobbing so hard she had to turn away and let Mr. Jackson help her to the nearest chair, a glass of water—“Will someone get her a glass of water!”—but she still had the strength to turn her face to them once more.
 
Her eyes were brimming, her lashes gone to paste. She couldn’t see their faces—they were just a blur to her—but something else rose up in her field of vision, some transient imagined presence, a figure out of a dream, gravid, round of abdomen, full of breast, smiling with the soft satisfaction of the Madonna, a false Madonna, a Russian Madonna, unwed and fucked, fucked, fucked, and she heard her voice lash out in a tinny yelp: “I want him back. I just want my husband back!”
 
 
That night, late, she sat up in her room and tried to filter out the sounds of the street below. She was too exhausted to read, too alive in her thoughts to sleep. Someone kept pacing the floor of the room above her. There were odd thumps in the walls, a mélange of voices murmuring somewhere, the drawn-out mechanical torment of the elevator down the hall—and was the operator playing on the cables with a horsehair bow just to drive her to distraction? Was it a plot? She didn’t smoke—or hardly at all, not anymore, because Frank didn’t approve, or hadn’t approved—but she smoked now, one cigarette after another. She rose from the bed and went to the window, thinking a little fresh air might help.
 
For a long while she stood there at the open window, oblivious to the cold, the automobiles and delivery trucks tapping out a secret code below her, a language of squeals and rattles and the rising pitch of engines straining against the gear, and then there was the deluge of the trolley washing down the avenue like a tidal wave. A clanking, a banging, an assault. She turned to the comfort of her pravaz then—just left the window open behind her and drifted into the bathroom, where she kept her kit—for the second time that night. Over the past few days she’d gradually increased her usual dosage, and there was a danger in that, she knew it, but she was so fraught and torn and run-down she just couldn’t help herself.
 
She sat on the edge of the bed and fanned back her robe to inject herself high up on the right thigh where the blemish—
la tache
—wouldn’t show. And she was careful there too, because she’d known too many women in Paris who’d developed ulcers as a result of carelessness, repeatedly injecting themselves in a favorite spot, creatures of habit, their needles gone dull from use, their flesh ripe as rotten fruit. But tonight she needed comfort. Tonight was terrible. When she’d cried out to those hard men with their dog-eared pads and quivering pencils that she wanted him back, her husband, Frank, her man, her love, she hadn’t known what she was saying, but in some part of her she knew it was true. He was her husband. They’d been in love—all those years they’d been in love, burning up with it, clinging to each other through the sweat-soaked nights in Tokyo, the sere clarity of Los Angeles, the icehouse of Wisconsin. He’d been gentle with her, he understood her, their temperaments equally matched—they were artists, artists together in defiance of the world and its conventions.
 
She lay back and closed her eyes and tried to think only those thoughts that brought her closer to him, but it was no use. There was that thumping, that clamor, footsteps in the hall, and the other Frank came back to her, the hateful one, the beast, the mocker and belittler, the cheat and fraud and womanizer. At some point she tried to get up to shut the window, shut out the noise, but the potion the bald little Mexican had mixed for her was just too potent to overcome and she slept on and on in a dreamless void till the sun was pushing through the curtains and all the noise was focused in a sharp peremptory banging at the door.
 
It was Mr. Fake’s associate, Mr. Jackson—“Harold, call me Harold”—and he’d been worried about her. It was getting late. Could she come to the door?
 
Her voice was weak in her own ears, the voice of an invalid, an old woman croaking out her days in a rocker: “No, I’m afraid I can’t. I . . . I’m just bathing and I won’t be—what time did you say it was?”
 
“Twelve-thirty.”
 
She pushed herself up from the bed, feeling cored-out, ashen, as if there were nothing left of her but a husk. And where were her slippers? Her robe? “I must have overslept, what with the journey, and the, the—”
 
He projected his voice, leaning into the crack where the door met the frame. “Have you seen the papers?”
 
She hadn’t.
 
“Well, you’ve made a sensation. The press is on our side in this, no doubt about it—and you look magnificent in the photographs. Very proper and attractive, very put-upon. And they’ve printed just about everything you’ve said. Verbatim.” There was a pause and she could hear him shuffling his feet, shifting something from one hand to the other—the papers, he had the papers with him. “You must see this,” he was saying—or no, he was crowing, his voice ringing with triumph. “Won’t you open up?”
 
She didn’t respond. She’d begun to cramp again and she was thinking she had to eat something, a soft-boiled egg, toast, a cup of coffee, anything, because she wasn’t feeling right, not at all, and the distance from the bed to the door might just as well have been a mile for all she was capable of. He shuffled his feet. Rattled the doorknob. “Mrs. Wright? Miriam—are you still there?”

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