A Reliable Wife (13 page)

“There. He told me to do anything. I said I would. It’s yours gladly. Just come home.”

“If it was home, if it had any connection to me, I would do it in a second, for you, and never need to take a ring from your
lovely hand.” He slipped it on his little finger. “Small, but pretty.” It glinted in the light from the candles overhead,
just guttering out.

“Now I want you to get out. Leave me in peace. Do you think my life is so nice? It’s not. Do you think I’m surrounded by love?
I’m not. But there’s enough that I don’t need to go through this charade.” He handed the ring back to Catherine. “Or your
little country diamond. Get the hell out, all of you.”

Malloy wasn’t finished. “Mr. Truitt, we don’t make mistakes.”

Moretti turned in a rage. “Don’t call me that name one more time, I’m warning you. My name is Moretti. This is my day off.
My hour of being nice to strangers is over. Take your insane story back to this country bumpkin, whoever he is, and tell him
how wrong you were. No, better yet, get on a train and go to Philadelphia. Ask anybody. They’ll tell you where Moretti’s is,
and ask them about their son. They don’t like what I do. They think piano playing is for girls. They want me home, too. I
would far rather go to a home where at least I know the people. But I have a home here. And you’re in it. Now get out.”

He opened the bottle and poured himself another big glass of brandy. Catherine could feel the warmth of it shooting through
her veins like fire.

“We’ll come back.” Fisk spoke softly. There was almost no threat in his voice. Just enough.

“I don’t think so. I can’t imagine why.” Antonio sat down in a blue velvet chair, his scarlet dressing gown falling open across
his chest. Catherine could see down his long torso to his navel.

There was nothing else to do. They left, and they could hear him laughing as they stumbled down the stairs in the half-light.
Humiliated, the two Pinkertons. Catherine, putting her ring back on her finger, smiled. She was somehow elated.

On the way home, through the Sunday market, through the cheap dresses and thin coats and tin rings and frozen cabbage and
copper cooking pots, she passed a man who sold birds. Yellow and blue and red canaries. Little songbirds. They looked half-dead
with the cold, but she bought one, and an elaborate cage, and carried both home, holding the bird in her gloved hand, blowing
her warm breath on its shivering body through the frozen Sunday streets of Saint Louis.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

While she waited, she wrote to Truitt. Before she told him about Antonio, she told him of her plans for the garden. She told
him about her reading, her long afternoons of research in the library. She told him about the high windows and the long quiet
tables and the slanting light. She told him about the possibilities for the garden, about how she might make it bloom again.
She was even tender, but no more so than she needed to be. After all, she barely knew him.

She asked if she might buy some seeds and order some plants for the spring, to welcome Antonio home. She knew what his reply
would be, that she could have whatever she liked, and she smiled, knowing it was true.

She stood for hours in the Missouri Botanical Garden, looking at the impossible orchids, flowers white and elegant like Tony
Moretti, blossoms exorbitantly delicate and beautiful. They might grow in the glass conservatory. She waited at the counters
while the plant men cataloged for her what would and would not grow in the climate she described. How long was the spring?
How hot was the summer? She didn’t know. She imagined what might or might not be true, and she bought carefully but with hope.
She paid with cash and went to the bank for more. She arranged the arrival date. She bought a small silver pen and notebook
with red and white Florentine endpapers, and she carefully noted the name and qualities of every plant she ordered.

She thought of her garden. She thought of her life, her patchwork quilt of a life, pieced together from castoff scraps of
this and that; experience, knowledge, clairvoyance. None of it made any sense to her.

She had no knowledge of good. She had no heart and so no sense of the good thing, the right thing, and she had no field on
which to wage the battle that was, in fact raging in her.

At least a garden had order. A garden
gave
order to an untamed wilderness. She hoped for all these things. With her bird sitting on her finger, she hoped for order in
her secret walled square, for some sense of what the right thing might be. Waiting was not good for her, she knew. Thinking
was not good. It made her remember the past, and the past was the place she did not want to be.

Tony Moretti was like her. He was like a secret garden. He believed the lies he told. He never faltered for a moment, never
wavered. And he had won.

She wrote again to Truitt and suggested that she visit Moretti alone, without the sharp intensity of Malloy and Fisk. She
wrote that a gentler approach might make Moretti see the light. She was convinced, she said, that the Pinkertons were right;
the man who called himself Moretti was his son. His son in masquerade. There was a feeling, she said, a tic in his eye, a
curl to his lip that suggested to her that he was lying. He harbored bitterness, to be sure, and regret as well, she was careful
to add, but he hid the truth behind his condescending charm and insolence, and he didn’t hide it very well.

She told Truitt about Moretti’s languid, luxurious ways, his velvet furniture and his silk dressing gown. She told of his
piano playing. She told him about the dark apartment, the rooms that revealed such exotic elegance, such assurance of taste.

She asked if Truitt was sure, if he was certain that he wanted his uncertain son under the same roof. She knew there were
parts of the past you had to let go of, certain lands that were irredeemably lost, sorrowfully lost, but, finally, lost forever.
She wrote that she would wait for his answer before proceeding.

He responded that he wanted nothing else. He wanted his son; that was his only wish. She should do whatever was necessary.
She should go to his rooms. She should dog him in the street. She should give him money, whatever he asked for.

Catherine herself was only a means to that end. He didn’t say it but she knew; it had been clear since he first told her she
was to go to Saint Louis. She was both the lure and the instrument to accomplish Truitt’s deep desire. Foolish as it was.

She would always know, now, that Truitt was a sentimental fool, that he would never imagine Catherine’s own desires, confronted
with such a ravishment.

There. At least she had covered herself. At least there would be no question of her conduct. Malloy and Fisk, even if they
followed her, would have nothing to report.

She was always and forever delighted and amazed at her own cleverness. There was no scheme she couldn’t see through. There
was no outcome she couldn’t shape to her will. By making Truitt her accomplice, she made herself the heroine of her own deceptions,
and she felt a freedom and a voraciousness she hadn’t felt before. She had at first been unsure of her footing with Truitt.
Now she knew she had him.

She walked through the streets at dusk, her karakul coat pulled tight around her throat, a veil hiding her face. She checked
to make sure she wasn’t being followed, although now it hardly mattered. She walked past the brownstones, turned into the
street of dingy clapboard houses, and stood in front of his red house.

He would be getting dressed. He would be warm from the bath, and his clothes would be laid out on the bed. He would hear the
knock on the door and hastily put away the opium pipe, the syringe, whatever his instruments of stupor and imagination and
music, never far from his hand. He would hear the knock, and he would be ready for her. He would know who it was before he
opened the door.

She knocked. He opened. He stared at her for a long moment, and then his tongue was in her mouth, as slick and salty as an
oyster. He pulled her inside, kicked the door shut, and kissed her with a ferocity that was familiar to her.

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.”