A Reliable Wife (24 page)

His father, his real father had left his mother for a rich young widow. His father was the man who had no face. His father
had taught piano, was named Moretti, had given him life. This Truitt was a remote stranger whose death was the only thing
Antonio had lived for for more than a dozen years. This Truitt who bought and sold and disposed, who spoke to him in kind
tones that Antonio could not bear.

Only Catherine was real, and she had become somebody else, someone unknown to Antonio. But beneath her clothes lay her skin,
and, just as Antonio remembered in his skin every blow from Truitt’s hand, remembered every word spoken in anger, so there
lay, in Catherine’s skin, the memory of who and what she had been. She had meant the world to him, and he couldn’t let go.
Not now.

Not ever.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

He sat at her feet, like a dog, patient, benevolent, longing to be loved. He was ashamed of his willingness to be humiliated.
She showed him the picture of what the dress would look like when it was finished. It was almost done, a simple dress of elegant
shape with buttons that ran from the floor to the neck, with white gauze collar and cuffs. It was pleated down the front to
the waist, the pleats held in place by stitches so small they were almost invisible. The wool was thin and expensive, fluid
in her hands. She moved the dark cloth swiftly through thin white fingers, the needle flashing in and out, the quiet click
of the steel needle on the silver thimble she wore on her finger.

She deftly turned the dress, hauling in the yards of wool to work on the hem. Antonio’s knee grazed the fabric, and he was
electrified. Beneath the dark blue was her shoe, and her white stockings, and beneath that her fresh skin, the map of her
whole body. Beneath were her sweet scents and her secret places, places he had traveled and dwelt.

“Hattie Reno,” she said softly. “You had a letter from her. I recognized the handwriting.”

“I told them. I had to say something. I burned the letter.”

“She’s well.”

“They’re all well. They miss you. She said the theater was filled with dull people. She said the beer had gone flat since
you left, all the bubbles gone away. You amused her. She misses you.”

“Don’t say anything about me. It was another life.”

“Was it, Mrs. Truitt?”

“People change, Antonio. People move on.”

“I don’t. I don’t move on.”

“Hattie Reno was my best friend. Now I hardly remember her. Not out of unkindness, it’s just that things are so different.”

“You’re pretending.”

She put down her sewing for a moment. “I don’t think I am. I got tired of being terrible, terrible to people.”

“You were never terrible to me.”

“We were terrible to each other. It was another time. It was like a madness. Antonio, it’s gone now. You have to make your
peace with that. You have to make peace with your father.” She resumed her sewing, the swift stitches going through the dark
hem.

“I’m too tired. I’m so tired, you can’t imagine.”

She looked at him. “I know it’s hard. I know he did terrible things to you. You have to forgive now. Unless you do, he can’t
forgive himself.”

“You tried to kill him.”

“And then I stopped. I couldn’t do it. Something in me changed. I couldn’t hurt a fly, now.”

“Once you would have done anything for me. You made me a promise.”

“I was another person. Another person made that promise.”

“And that’s it?”

Her eyes flashed. “What do you need that you don’t have? You have his love. You have his money. You have his attention. Make
something of that. Make a life for yourself.”

He touched the hem of her dress. Fire shot through his fingers and up his arm. He touched her shoe.

“Don’t do that.”

“It means nothing? Nothing at all?”

“It means nothing. Don’t do it.”

He got up and walked away, the heels of his shoes sounding on the marble floor. He didn’t know where he was going or what
he was going to do.

She couldn’t mean it. She couldn’t separate her long past from her present as easily as that. She couldn’t deny what they
had been to one another, the things they had done, the plans they had made.

He sat in his room and drank brandy. If he wasn’t going to have his father’s death, he wanted his old life. She couldn’t turn
her back on the pleasures of the vices as easily as that. He wanted her. It went off like a gunshot to his brain, and after
that he knew nothing. It was all darkness after that.

He walked swiftly back through the corridor and down the long steps. He walked through the great hall under the Venetian chandeliers
and into the conservatory. She was still sitting, but she knew he was coming, she must have known, because she had put down
her sewing. She sat quiet and calm, waiting for him, her eyes large, the mixed desires she felt written on her face.

He grabbed her hands. She pulled away. He grabbed her arms and pulled her up to him. He pressed himself against her, the full
length of his body against the full length of hers, his mouth on her mouth, his hands around her, moving across her shoulders
through the fabric of her dress. She was trembling.

She pulled away. “Antonio. Don’t do this. I’m begging you.”

“I have to. I’m so sorry. I have to.”

He kissed her again. He put his hand up along her face, while with his other arm her pulled her close to him. He put his hand
beneath her dress, he felt her skin, her warm smooth skin, and the fire was in him and he knew there was no turning back.
She wanted this. She had to remember, and she had to want it. He said it over and over to himself.

Then he lost all thought, he lost the ability to think and became pure motion as his mouth and hands took her back to the
days and nights in his room in Saint Louis, the days when she had been somebody else, somebody who lived for her body and
its delights, somebody who gave herself because she had no care for who or what she was. She had laughed, then, she had been
scornful of the ordinary world with its ordinary moral scruples, and he had been part of that, her diversion, her own wild
love. They had been twins in their desires, rising and falling on each other’s breath, and he had covered her body with kisses,
and there was no part of her that was not his.

She was the delight and the agony of his youth, yet she had not mattered, he now realized. She was only the portal to this
sensation of being lost, of floating unmoored high above the earth, and he wanted that back again. It was as close as he could
come to death.

She was new. She was a stranger. It was as though she had come to him in disguise, the trappings of her old life gone, the
dress and hair and clean face of her new life a costume she had put on to amuse him.

She struggled against him. She fought, and this too drove him on, made him feel unbound. He could have her when she didn’t
want him. He’d done it before. When she was angry with him, he could still have her. When he had been too rude or too drunk
or too late, she would still come creeping into his room while he slept and lie down beside him and let him take her, because
she had nowhere to go, because she believed that her life was in the gutter and he was the gutter in which she lived.

He tore at his shirt, and her hands scratched at his body, her nails drew blood, and she started to scream, to call Mrs. Larsen.
He held his hand over her mouth and lifted up her skirt, tearing at her stockings and her underclothes until her flesh was
beneath the palm of his hand. Then things grew calmer. He breathed more gently. For just a second, there was no sound except
the twittering of birds, as his hand moved toward her sex, as he covered her mouth and she didn’t make a sound.

He took his hand away from her mouth and kissed her, violated her mouth with his tongue and bit at her lips and still she
didn’t make a sound, still she stood twisting beneath his arms, but soundlessly, only the rustle of her skirt on the floor,
only the sound of the flapping wings of the birds and the rustling of the palm fronds where the birds alighted. He kissed
her eyes, the skin of her forehead. He licked her face and bit at the lobes of her ears. It felt as though he were on fire.

He needed her to want him. He needed her never to have gone away, never to have abandoned him in this insane scheme they had
concocted, never to have slept with his father. She was his lover. His. She was the desire of his childhood, the woman on
the trolley car, the young girl in the restaurant, the whore at the end of the dark street.

He ripped at her dress, and it tore open in his hands, two quick pulls and it was open. He tore at her thin camisole until
he could see her breasts, the dark nipples full and erect. He fell to his knees and pulled her forward, her breasts in his
mouth, his teeth biting her nipples. He knew he was raping her. He knew this was not her will, not what she wanted, and he
found that erotic as well.

He tore at fabric, and he saw the dark triangle of hair. She was still standing, her hands on top of his head. His hair was
wild, it was slick with sweat from the exertion of doing this thing he didn’t want to do, this thing he had to do to bring
himself one step closer to his own death.

She was crying now, and he could hear her breath coming in and out as she cried, and he rose and licked the tears from her
face as he undid his pants and pushed himself into her, against her will and he knew it and didn’t care. She wasn’t Catherine
anymore. She was someone he didn’t know, and he didn’t care if he hurt her or defiled her or made her ashamed. She was the
last one; this was the last time. He would never see her again.

She stabbed him twice. She stabbed him with her sewing scissors out of a basket on the arm of the chair. She stabbed him in
the back and then she stabbed him in the shoulder when he lurched back in shock. Her dress hung open in the front, her skin
exposed; her camisole was a rag around her naked torso, just beginning now to round, to show a fullness. Her body arched forward
as she howled in pain and rage and despair.

“Why?” was all she screamed. “Why?” Again and again.

Now he began to cry, blood pouring from his shoulder and his back, he howled in pain for all that was lost, everything that
was broken now for good, everything he could never get back. He had wanted something, but now he couldn’t remember what, “He
killed my mother! I saw it!”

“He didn’t, Antonio. That never happened.” Drawing her ruined dress around her, trying to hold it closed with one hand and
sweep her hair away from her face with the other, her eyes dry now, her mouth hard and unyielding and her voice hard, too,
hard and filled with the truth.

“He let her die. She was sick, Antonio. You dreamed it. You imagined it so much, out of hatred, out of . . . I don’t know,
out of something, that you thought it was real, but it wasn’t. She was sick. She was alone and dying, and he took you to see
her and she didn’t even know your name, and he turned his back on her and walked away and in that, yes, he killed her, but
not the way you think.”

“No!”

“Yes. And he has spent a lifetime regretting it, wishing he could have felt otherwise, but he didn’t, and he let her die and
you have to let her die, you have to let her die in peace and not look to find her, not wonder where she is. She’s gone, that’s
all. She was always gone. Long before she was dead.”

He was bleeding badly. He was in pain. He didn’t care. He fell to his knees and buried his head in her ruined skirt and wept,
wept for himself. And then they heard the sound in the door. They heard Truitt’s footsteps in the hall, but it was too late.
Her dress was ruined, Antonio’s blood fell to the marble floor and Truitt would know everything that had happened, and know,
too, that he had finally been betrayed beyond his ability to endure it.

Then he was standing in the door. Then he knew.

Antonio turned to him, his hands covered with his own blood, his face a mask of pain. “Yes! I raped her. I’ve been with her,
inside her a thousand times. Do you know what she is? Do you know who she is?”

The color drained from Truitt’s face. He stood stock still. He saw everything, in frozen detail, the tattered dress, the blood
on his boy, the birds, the palms. He smelled the jasmine and the orange blossoms and he saw the dress and the blood and he
understood, and he knew he was going to kill his son.

He stepped forward and picked Antonio up by the shoulders and held him in his arms, the son’s blood staining his father’s
shirtfront, wetting him through to the skin.

And then Truitt’s hands moved. He fists came down on his son’s head, buckling his knees, and Antonio stood while his father
beat his face and his body with his fists and he didn’t resist, he didn’t try to protect himself. It was like a dream of long
ago, a memory of his boyhood. He merely thought, said to himself, this is it, this is the moment and then you can rest. If
we just get through this, you can finally come home, be at home and rest.

Finally he ran. He turned from his father’s grasp, he turned from Catherine, seeing her scream but not hearing it, seeing
the last look on her face as she screamed because she loved him and hated him at the same time, seeing her call his name but
not hearing it, the voice he had loved, he ran from the conservatory, scattering the tiny birds, he ran and Ralph followed
him, his fists still beating his son’s bleeding back.