The Women by Boyle T. C

Author:Boyle, T. C. [Boyle, T. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Adult, Biography
ISBN: 9780670020416
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2009-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

The Women

CHAPTER 3: NOW COMES FEAR

Whether Norma or her little toad of a husband approved or not was an utter irrelevance: she was moving in with Frank Lloyd Wright at 25 East Cedar Street and the whole world could choke on its pinched pathetic petit bourgeois notions of propriety for all she cared. She was going to live. Express herself. Roam with the giants. It happened that she was in love with a towering genius, a Wagnerian hero who stood head and shoulders above them all, a Tannhauser, a Siegfried--and he was in love with her, her and no one else--and if they thought she was going to confine herself to a miserable back room in a hideous flat and live like a Carmelite nun at her son-in-law's sufferance, they were sadly mistaken. She had her bags sent over, the trunks she'd brought with her from France, her clothes, jewelry, objets d'art, and by the middle of January she was established, mistress of her own house once again.

It was a kind of miracle. Like being on a honeymoon all over again and this little house the ship that would take them across the wide ocean into the seas of bliss. The nights were rapturous with lovemaking, the mornings sunstruck (or at least they felt that way), and while he was at his studio spinning out his designs in the company of his scurrying functionaries, she busied herself with making the house just a soupcon more comfortable--or less austere, at any rate. That was the term she used over the telephone to Leora--“He seems so austere, almost Puritanical, as if a plush pillow were a violation of the sumptuary laws or some such thing.” She selected curtains for the windows, pillows for the sofa and each of the flat hard-bottomed chairs. She ordered linens and stationery featuring their entwined initials and her familial crest. China, cutlery--carpets, for God's sake. And his taste in cuisine: “I tell you, Leora, I try, I do--and we've been through two cooks already--but the only stuff he seems to like is so bland, so unappealing in every way, I couldn't imagine a single soul in all of France, even the dirtiest peasant speaking some dialect that sounds as if he's invented it on the spot, bothering to feed it to his hogs. No, I mean it. I do. He needs reforming. Needs a good dose of culture, beyond all his drawings and his houses, which really are exquisite, I'm not denying that, not at all--”

By the end of the second week, the punishing gray chill of January folding itself into the unrelenting arctic blast that welcomed February to the bleak canyons of Chicago, they had their first quarrel. The cook, on her instructions--and with her supervision--had prepared a lovely saumon tar-tare avec sauce moutarde for a prelude, followed by a bisque de homard, salade d'endive and a spectacular flambe of ris de veau, and she served a perfectly delicious Sancerre with the salmon and a Margaux

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