A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Author:Robert Goolrick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical - General, Wisconsin, Family secrets, Wisconsin - History - 19th century, Family Life, American First Novelists, Fiction, Marriage, Historical, American Historical Fiction, General, Domestic fiction, Fiction - Historical
ISBN: 9781565125964
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2009-03-14T07:00:00+00:00

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.

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