A Reliable Wife Read online

  He put his finger beneath her coat, just under the collar of her dress, and touched the beating vein of her throat. She tore at his clothes, already loose and unbuttoned, desperate to touch the smooth white skin of his chest, of his tight slim stomach, silky against her hand. His skin felt brand-new, as though it had never been touched.

  All the while he was kissing her, crushing her lips, his tongue in her mouth, against her teeth, and her tongue in his mouth, gliding over his, feeling the roof of his mouth, tasting the dissipations of the night before, the champagne and cigars and the stale breath, tasting him, and her mind went blank, her skin turned to fire, and she was lost, lost again, lost in the brightness of who and what he was, the terror of his soul. Nothing mattered. There was no time. There was no heat or cold or past or future. There was only this, her hand against his skin, her finger in his navel, her hand beneath the waist of his pants, his finger on her pulsing vein.

  Her blood was water. Her eyes were blind. She was not Catherine. She was not anybody. Nobody knew where she was. Nobody would ever know where she had been. She stood in the kingdom of touch, and it was an ecstasy to her.

  They made love as if someone were watching. Uncovered, sensitive to their own movements, their own caresses, as though it were being done for other eyes, a demonstration of the effortless ways of creating the pleasures of the body. She was on his bed, her clothes in ruins on the floor, and he was naked too, she lying sideways on the bed, her bones gone, he moving above and on and at her, his tongue expertly bringing her to climax so fast and so deeply that she went on rolling with warmth and pleasure as he entered her and brought himself to coming, letting out a cry as he did so, his only sound. It was his own masculinity he was making love to, which drove him as he rode inside her, rapture at his own skill, his own pleasures, the tenderness, the savagery, ripping through her as though for the first time.

  He made love to her until her lips were swollen from kissing, her skin covered with marks, her insides aching and raw. She was complete. Whole again.

  “Truitt,” she said in a voice she hardly recognized.

  She had known so many men. She couldn’t remember their faces. Moretti had known so many women. Their names were on the tip of his tongue, she knew. It hardly mattered that she was here, that she was the one, and none of that mattered.

  Making love to him was not like food. It was not nourishment. It was like fire, and when she came, she came down in ashes.

  Afterward she dozed, wholly unguarded. She floated in the warm waters of a foreign sea, not knowing her own name, caring about nothing, remembering nothing.

  “My little darling.” His voice was far away, a wind that came to her from the rain forest. “My bird. My chocolate.”

  She laughed softly. She nestled into him, feeling every point at which his skin touched her skin. She would never love anybody else the way she loved him, so lost, so bewildered, so helpless. Her defenses, practiced and perfected, were of no use to her now. Her mind, her speech would do her no good. She was all sensation, and hunger for more sensation.

  “My music. Speak to me.”

  She opened her eyes. She was in the French bedroom she knew so well, tented in sky blue silk, hung with a French chandelier, in the arms of the one lover who rode her dreams, who defined for her all she knew of love. How shabby, she thought. How sad.

  “Yes. What? What?”

  He looked at her with his eyes so mixed with sadness and selfishness.

  “Why isn’t he dead?” His voice was like ice on her skin, and his eyes stared at her nakedness. She covered herself with a shawl, carelessly thrown on the bed, her beautiful black embroidered shawl left behind when she went to the north, when she changed herself for Ralph Truitt.

  “He can’t be. There wasn’t . . . when would I have done it? How? What do you want?”

  “You know what I want. You know what we agreed. I want it all. I want to share it with you.”

  “And you’ll have it.” She sat up. “How was I to know he would ask for you? How was any of this in the plan? That he would ever find you? And even then, he can’t die right away, you know that. It has to go on. It has to be timed. Slow. He has to get sick, and then weak, and then he has to die, and he will, but he can’t now.”

  He put her hand on his sex and held it there. She felt it move beneath her hand, not soft, pliant as a fish, rising and falling like breath. “Swear.”

  “I promise you.”

  He got up, grabbed a towel and began to clean himself off. There was a wet pool in the bed where he had been. He never came inside her. He was terrified of children.

  He began to pick up his clothes and throw them in a corner, taking from an armoire other, equally perfect things. “As though a promise from a whore makes any difference. I have to go to work now.”

  She wept. He had never called her a whore before this hour, and the abrupt cruelty of it was sharp and terrible. She had sworn she wouldn’t let him see her cry, no one had, but she could not help herself. She could not stop.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want him dead. I want his money. I want him dead, and I don’t want to see his face. I want to hear what his face looks like when he’s dying, but I don’t want to see it. I want his stomach to turn to ice. I want his teeth to rot in his face. I want to live in my mother’s house and have exquisite things. You know what I want.”

  “And you’ll have it. You’ll have it all. But you’ll have it in time. You’ll have it so that no one will ever know we did what we’re doing.” She spoke softly. “That’s how arsenic works. It’s slow and invisible. That’s its beauty.”

  It was so entrancing, watching him dress, the boyish body slowly hidden away behind layer after layer of beautiful clothing, as elegant and sensuous as a woman in the way he put his clothes over the body which was her secret knowledge, her only possession, even if another had seen and held him just last night while she slept in her spinster’s bed at the Planter’s Hotel. No one knew him the way she did, and he loved no one but her, even if he never said it, even if he loved her only because she was the key to everything he had waited for his whole life.

  He was tied to no one but her, because nobody else could get him what he wanted. They had made it up together, like the plot of a melodrama, a shocking plot, but one that was within reach, if she were clever. And she never doubted her cleverness.

  “It will happen. You know that. It will.”

  “Tell me how. Tell me again.”

  “He will feel a pleasure. He will feel an exquisite longing for something he can’t remember. The longing will turn to poison in his mind, and he will be haunted by nightmares. His blood will get thin, and he’ll be cold all the time. No number of blankets will warm him. His hair will begin to fall out. And then he will sicken and he will die.” He listened like a child at bedtime.

  “Don’t you have any interest in who he is? Everything I said is true. He wants you home. He wants to make a home for you more beautiful than anything you . . . than I’ve ever seen. But then, I forget, you’ve seen it.”

  “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 COULDN’T STOP. It was like a drug she had stayed away from for too long. She wrote to Truitt. She told him she was making progress, but progress was slow. She promised him that Andy, as she called him in her letters, would come home.

  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.