The Women (24 page)
The negotiations went on through the spring and into the summer of 1927, Miss Levin wiring her periodically with offers and counter-offers, Norma dunning her by post and long-distance telephone, Charles, with his high forehead and emperor’s (usually dripping) nose practically installed in the house now and Leora chattering on like a girl about the inexpressible romance of second marriages. Miriam felt—well,
depleted.
She was at loose ends. She needed money. There was no place for her at Leora’s, at least not during the reign of Charles, and she couldn’t afford a hotel. Finally, though it was like driving spikes right through the palms of both hands, like self-crucifixion, she gave in.
depleted.
She was at loose ends. She needed money. There was no place for her at Leora’s, at least not during the reign of Charles, and she couldn’t afford a hotel. Finally, though it was like driving spikes right through the palms of both hands, like self-crucifixion, she gave in.
She instructed Miss Levin, by wire, to accept her husband’s latest offer—$5,000 in cash plus payment of all legal fees, a trust fund of $30,000 and a $250 monthly allowance for life
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—on one condition: that he renounce Olga for a period of five years. Word came back a day later. He refused. Categorically. Oh, she could see right through him, the coldhearted bastard. He had the upper hand now and he knew it. He was going to wait her out, that was what he was going to do—starve her, if need be, see her turned out in the streets like a beggar. And the minute the divorce was finalized he would start counting off the days till he could marry his little Russian, just as he’d done with her as soon as he’d got free of Catherine.
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But she wouldn’t give in, she wouldn’t. Not yet, anyway.
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—on one condition: that he renounce Olga for a period of five years. Word came back a day later. He refused. Categorically. Oh, she could see right through him, the coldhearted bastard. He had the upper hand now and he knew it. He was going to wait her out, that was what he was going to do—starve her, if need be, see her turned out in the streets like a beggar. And the minute the divorce was finalized he would start counting off the days till he could marry his little Russian, just as he’d done with her as soon as he’d got free of Catherine.
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But she wouldn’t give in, she wouldn’t. Not yet, anyway.
She took the train to San Francisco because she couldn’t think of anything else to do and Alvy Oates, an old friend from her Chicago days with Emil, had offered her a place to stay just as long as she wanted. All the way up the coast, as the train beat along the tracks, she cursed Frank and cursed him again. And when she got there and saw the way Alvy’s face had aged—all those pouches and wrinkles, the dewlaps of an old woman who sits in a corner all day sopping up gravy with a crust of bread—she took a good hard look at herself and went directly into a clinic there where a truly wonderful doctor who understood her every need and assured her that she had the most beautiful skin he’d ever seen on a woman of her age gave her a face-lift that would make her look ten years younger than the ten years younger she already looked. Which her husband would pay for. Soon. Very soon.
She sipped liquids through a straw while her face healed and never changed out of her dressing gown. None of her children would return her wires. Alvy went off to club meetings, bridge parties, events at the museum, the symphony, the yacht club, and she stayed behind, working cross-word puzzles and reading detective novels. It was a time of excruciating and limitless boredom. One afternoon, after spending what must have been a full hour watching a lizard creep along the wall beneath the trellis on Alvy’s patio, she wired her attorney to accept terms without proviso and on August 27 she was granted a divorce from Frank Lloyd Wright on grounds of desertion, Miss Levin submitting her testimony by deposition. It hurt her as nothing had ever hurt her before, but the money was paid out and she immediately booked a one-way fare to Chicago, where she planned to stop in to bid farewell to Norma on her way to New York and then Paris. Yes, Paris. Where she could forget all about Frank Lloyd Wright and his machinations, where she could focus on her own art for a change and grow and develop and spread her wings and maybe, once she was settled and moving in the circles she was accustomed to—or had been accustomed to before the war—she’d even remarry.
All well and good. But things bog down, things muddle. At the end of September, unaccountably, she found herself in a hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin, of all places, writing to Frank to tell him just what she thought of him and if her language was harsh so much the worse because he was the one in violation of the divorce order, not her, he was the one sneaking back up the hill to his “love nest”
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so he could
stick his prick into the little Russian’s cunt and fuck her and fuck her just as if they were goats, two fucking goats,
and she knew what was going on and it wasn’t right. A week later she hired a car and drove out to Dodgeville with Tillie Levin and went right on up the steps of the rinky-dink town hall and demanded to see the district attorney, another weasel by the name of Knutson. “Do you have any idea what kind of filth is going on in this county?” she shouted the moment he came through the door of his office. He looked startled. Looked as if he’d had his hide exchanged for something that didn’t fit quite right, and he was a man too, with a belly and braces and a tie stained with whatever he’d had for lunch, and no, he said, he didn’t have any idea. “Frank Lloyd Wright!” she shouted. “Frank Lloyd Wright! Does that ring a bell?”
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so he could
stick his prick into the little Russian’s cunt and fuck her and fuck her just as if they were goats, two fucking goats,
and she knew what was going on and it wasn’t right. A week later she hired a car and drove out to Dodgeville with Tillie Levin and went right on up the steps of the rinky-dink town hall and demanded to see the district attorney, another weasel by the name of Knutson. “Do you have any idea what kind of filth is going on in this county?” she shouted the moment he came through the door of his office. He looked startled. Looked as if he’d had his hide exchanged for something that didn’t fit quite right, and he was a man too, with a belly and braces and a tie stained with whatever he’d had for lunch, and no, he said, he didn’t have any idea. “Frank Lloyd Wright!” she shouted. “Frank Lloyd Wright! Does that ring a bell?”
And what was Tillie saying—“No, no, stay calm, Mrs. Wright”—and why in Christ’s name was this moron just standing there gaping at her?
“Listen, ma’am,” he was saying, trying to back into his office with the firmest intent of shutting the door on her, and he wasn’t going to get away with that, he wasn’t—“I’ve told you over the telephone that this office will not revive those charges and that those charges are dead—”
“He’s fornicating!” she screamed. “Immoral purposes, the Mann Act, in violation . . . everywhere. Of, of—of everything!”
There was breakage, and she couldn’t help that, because the coward ducked back into his office and shut the door on her and he wouldn’t do his duty, wouldn’t serve the writ, wouldn’t stop the fucking—and things spun out of control after that no matter how Tillie tried to mollify her. And what next? What next? At dinner that very night, as she tried to summon the desire even to lift the fork to her mouth over the miserable excuse for a meal the Lorain Hotel of Backwardsville, Wisconsin, put before her, a man with a face like boiled meat and two little pig’s eyes identified himself as a federal agent and put her under arrest on a charge of sending obscene material through the mails on account of the letter she’d sent Frank to just tell him off because who did he think he was, and they put her in her room and guarded the door as if it were a prison cell. She beat on that door till her hands were raw and she screamed, oh, she screamed. Five hundred dollars, the judge said. And she fired Tillie. And Paris was a dream. And she went right to the governor of Wisconsin himself, Fred R. Zimmerman, over the way she’d been treated and he wouldn’t see her and she went back to Chicago and that room with the broken bicycle and found the governor there for some sort of convention and she marched directly through the dining room of his hotel crying out that she demanded to see him on urgent business and he was the littlest of little men because he actually got up from the table when she was still twenty feet from him and scuttled sideways through the kitchen and out the service entrance into the street and he was probably still scuttling. And Frank went to Arizona
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to get away from her and she just had no choice in the matter but to follow him there and demand that somebody put a stop to this
fucking.
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to get away from her and she just had no choice in the matter but to follow him there and demand that somebody put a stop to this
fucking.
Where next? Well, she was beaten down and exhausted and she had her money in hand, but she took out a warrant in Arizona charging him with whatever she could think of and when he went off to California she went there too. It was fall now, Leora married to Charles, the palms up and down Sunset Boulevard whipping in the winds that tore like cellophane over the dun mountains, sere days, chilly nights, a smell of smoke on the air. She called Jesperson, a man happy in the knowledge that he’d been paid for services past and would be paid again and paid well, and Jesperson gave her an address down south near San Diego, in La Jolla, where he said he’d found her husband holed up with his little dolly. In a cottage. On a quiet street. With a prospect of the ocean.
She wasn’t reasoning. Reasoning was for little people, lawyers, architects, district attorneys. In the train on the way down from Los Angeles she went into the washroom and injected herself. Everything was very bright. She watched the ocean solidify outside the window till it might have been verdstone, shingled all the way to the horizon. People got on and off. She smiled at them all. When they arrived at the station, the conductor had to help her off the train because she didn’t recognize a thing—palm trees, the ocean glare, it was all the same to her—and there was nothing the porter could assist her with, thank you, as all she had with her was her purse and in the purse nothing but her pravaz, half a sandwich and a scrap of paper with the address on it.
The man in the cab—and why did he look so familiar?—said he knew the place, and after they lurched up and down a farrago of streets that were indistinguishable one from the other, various dogs darting out to yap at the wheels, skinny boys in undershirts and baseball gloves flitting past on the parched lawns and all the stumpy tile-topped haciendas rushing at her with their fangs bared, they were there. She saw an open lot, a scattering of trees, sand, the bright spank of the water. “Wait here,” she said to the cabbie, and she crossed the lot unsteadily, struggling for balance in her heels. She had no plan. She just knew that he was there and she was there and that it had to end. The ocean smelled of decay. A gull sailed in out of nowhere and settled on the roof in a disclosure of feathers so marmoreal and bright it hurt her eyes. Sand leaked into her shoes. There were clumps of dune grass and they brushed her legs and the feel of them took her all the way back to the beach at Tokyo
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and she remembered how she and Frank would picnic on the cool wet sand just beyond the breakers to escape the mugginess of the city, everything fresh in the golden light on the other side of the world. He adored picnics, Frank. Adored adventure and spontaneity like the boy he was and would always be. Frank. Frank. How she’d loved him. She had. She truly had.
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and she remembered how she and Frank would picnic on the cool wet sand just beyond the breakers to escape the mugginess of the city, everything fresh in the golden light on the other side of the world. He adored picnics, Frank. Adored adventure and spontaneity like the boy he was and would always be. Frank. Frank. How she’d loved him. She had. She truly had.
But here was the house. His house.
Their
house. No one answered her knock. The front door—she tried it—was locked, and that wasn’t like Frank at all. Was this the right house? Across the lot, out on the street, the cabbie sat watching her from behind the windscreen of his car. She thought of going back to him, to make certain he’d got the address right, but perhaps if she just . . . peered through the window to see . . . if she might happen to recognize—
Their
house. No one answered her knock. The front door—she tried it—was locked, and that wasn’t like Frank at all. Was this the right house? Across the lot, out on the street, the cabbie sat watching her from behind the windscreen of his car. She thought of going back to him, to make certain he’d got the address right, but perhaps if she just . . . peered through the window to see . . . if she might happen to recognize—
One of his prints was staring back at her. The actor. The one with the sword and the bold pattern of squares within squares on the front fold of his robe, the Shunshō, and what was it called?
Ichikawa. The Actor Ichikawa-Something.
Yes. She’d know it anywhere. And there was one of his screens on the wall behind the sofa. And that table—that table wasn’t his. She’d gone to the shop to buy it herself, haggling with the shopkeeper like some fishwife in rudimentary Japanese—
“Tēburu, tēburu,”
she kept saying,
Kore-wa ikura desu-ka?
and he kept pretending he didn’t understand her—and now Frank had it, now
she
had it.
Ichikawa. The Actor Ichikawa-Something.
Yes. She’d know it anywhere. And there was one of his screens on the wall behind the sofa. And that table—that table wasn’t his. She’d gone to the shop to buy it herself, haggling with the shopkeeper like some fishwife in rudimentary Japanese—
“Tēburu, tēburu,”
she kept saying,
Kore-wa ikura desu-ka?
and he kept pretending he didn’t understand her—and now Frank had it, now
she
had it.
The back door was open. And where was Frank, the criminal, the lecher? Out and about, no doubt, eating lobster somewhere with his whore, telling jokes, making demands. The thought of it made her seethe. She went through the house, room by room, everything strange and familiar to her at once. The little Russian’s petticoats, her perfumes. Children’s toys. The bric-a-brac Frank loved to surround himself with, as if he were the lady of the house. But it was all too much and before she knew what she was doing she was at the cupboard—a cup of tea, that was what she wanted—and she couldn’t help it if all those jars and bottles were in the way and the merest touch of her hand sent them hurtling to the floor in an explosion of sound and color and texture. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t. In fact, it was so satisfying, that simple act, that primal clatter, that she ran her hand over the next shelf and the next, till everything there was splayed out across the floor, flour, sugar, catsup, oats and vinegar, all the crude farmer’s fare Frank glutted himself with like the rube he was. Her hands were trembling when she put the kettle on to boil and they trembled when she brewed the tea and sat at the table and lifted the cup to her lips.
At first all she’d meant to do was reclaim her property—her table and that fan and the enamel box—but once she was there, once she was inside, sitting in his kitchen with the teacup in her hand, the old feeling came over her, a rising counterweight of violence and hate. The teacup flew at the wall. And then she was up and jerking violently round the room, slamming at things as if each and every one of them—each plate and saucer and cruet—were the face of Frank himself, of his mistress, of their pinch-faced pig-tailed little bastard. She paused, barely winded, the wreckage of the kitchen lying at her feet. Then she went into the living room.
She picked up the table first—an end table of rosewood, intricately carved—and the sound it made when it tore the screen from the wall was like the overture to a symphony. Cloth gave. Wood. Plaster. Glass rang and chimed and hit all the high notes ascending the scale. She found an axe propped up against the fireplace and brought it down on the dining room table, the bookshelf, the chairs, the divans, the desk, Frank’s desk. There was the whoosh of a ceramic vase grasping at the air, the shriek of splintering wood, the basso profundo of the andirons slamming to the floor. And who was it who alerted the police—a neighbor? The cabbie? The guardian angel of philanderers? Of fornicators?
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