Read Online The Women by T. C. Boyle - Free Book Online

“You know, don’t you, that when I was in Paris I concentrated on distinct parts of the human body rather than busts, because they’re so utterly conventional, and I worked almost exclusively in marble,” Miriam told her friend one afternoon as they sipped Singapore slings and sat regarding the clay bust, which, in retrospect, could have been worked a bit more around the nose and the orbits of the eyes and hadn’t really taken the glaze well at all. “I had a pair of folded hands accepted for the permanent collection in the Louvre, you know,” she added, and the thought buoyed her, took her off her friend’s sofa, out of the house and Los Angeles with its irritating faux-Spanish décor and drooping palms and all the way back to the day she first walked through the doors of the museum and saw them there, her hands, mounted for display, and people— Parisians —gathered there to admire them. It was a towering moment, fueled by the Singapore sling cocktail and the dose of morfina she’d taken for her digestion and to control the tremor that had begun to recur in the back of her neck—all along her spine, really—but the sensation didn’t last. A few days later she took a cast of Leora’s hands, with the thought of buying a block of Carrara marble and getting back into the game, doing something significant and lasting, but the impulse seemed to fade as the sun rose and set and rose again and again and again till it burned all the ambition out of her.
     
    She was feeling vaguely out of sorts—betwixt and between, that was it—thinking she might go to her daughter, Norma, in Chicago, or maybe back up to San Francisco for a few days, or Mexico, down the coast somewhere, where it was clean and you could get a decent meal that wasn’t all wrapped up in those half-burned little pancakes they seemed to serve with everything, even steak, when a man came to the door asking for her. Leora’s servant—a Chinese in a white coat and faintly greasy black tie—found her in the yard, where she was stretched out on a chaise longue beside the pool reading La Noire idole 16 for the third time. She put on a wrap and padded barefoot through the dark corridors to the front door.
     
    The man was nobody she knew—ferret-faced, lithe as a twig, with an insinuating expression. “Yes?” she said, looking down at him from beneath the high conical towel she’d wrapped round her hair.
     
    “Maude Miriam Noel Wright?” he said, his shoulders slithering inside his jacket as if he were molting, a twitch at the left corner of his mouth.
     
    “Yes,” she said, and she was going to add “I am she” or “I’m her,” she couldn’t decide which, when he handed her a finger-smudged envelope, turned abruptly on one heel the instant she took it from him and sauntered off down the walk.
     
    Inside was a divorce summons and attached notice stating that Frank Lloyd Wright had initiated proceedings against her on grounds of desertion. That was it, nothing more. No explanation, no word from him, no prior warning or even the most cursory and two-faced attempt at reconciliation. And what did she feel—in that moment, the towel wrapped round her head, her toes clenching the abrasive hemp of the doormat and her right hand held out rigid before her, the black type of the summons staring back at her as if each letter were a miniature face and each face reduced suddenly to a pair of spitting lips? Rage, that was what. Not disappointment, not surprise, not heartbreak, but just that: rage.
     
    Yes, she’d left him. Of course she had. Anyone would have. A saint—even the martyrs in their hair shirts and bloody rags. He was impossible, the single most infuriating human being she’d ever met, what with his God complex and his perfectionism, fussing over every last detail as if the world depended on it, his snoring, his musical evenings, the utter soul-crushing desolation of rural Wisconsin where he all but kept her prisoner and every overfed