might as well have been strangers.
Ralph Truitt never looked at her. She was only the first step. She herself was unimportant, inconsequential to him now. That she was beautiful was both an attraction and an irritation, a detail of her usefulness. He would have his son back.
The afternoon was endless. They were both awkward. It seemed they were strangers. They didn’t speak. Catherine tried to play the piano but found she was so exhausted she could barely move her fingers. The yellow diamond sparkled on her finger, the first spoils of her larceny. Ralph read by the fire, awkward in his wedding clothes. The house was cold. The sun shone off the snow. Truitt stared into the endless landscape as the light faded. They picked at supper, served by a silent Mrs. Larsen. Then they went upstairs and went to bed together.
“You’ll have to help me. I’m not…”
He didn’t, couldn’t, hear her. She lay very still in his father’s bed, and he entered her and almost believed she was a virgin.
She was his, she was vast, she was an empire of smells and surfaces and small sighs.
She was his wife. He touched her with his hands; he kissed her with his tongue, and she moved under him as gentle as water, as warm as a bath. The first touch of her naked skin made him gasp with all that he remembered and had denied himself for so many years.
At every moment, he asked her permission to advance, and she shyly whispered yes in his ear. He had actually forgotten the depth and intricacy of his own passion, and it flooded him with warmth and kindness.
Catherine fought her own desires. She forgot her many expert enticements. This was not about her, and that was, for once, a relief. She remembered that she was playing a part, and she played it well. She had become used to being the woman that men wanted, and she knew that Ralph wanted to begin again, to begin with a woman who was naive and shy and giving only in small, discreet ways, and she did it well, so well that she believed her own lie. He was not the first man who wanted his own desire to be central, who thought little of her except as a necessary part of his own blind groping. She became the thing he wanted, and was surprised that she, in some way, wanted it, too.
His warmth flooded her. His mastery of the ways and manipulations of love excited her. She had expected, even after his story of youthful excess, to be bored, as bored as she always was, but the textures of his body were rich and varied and exciting in ways she felt without thought. She knew that, for now, her simplicity excited him, made him believe that he was young again, all the sweetness, the charm of blind affection at his command.
He was safety. He was security. He was more passionate and kind than she had imagined he would be, and she felt, somehow, that she was losing her footing, losing her way in the dark room under his hot hands. She must not forget. She fought against forgetfulness. She fought the desire to take his hand and kiss the palm, to skim his flesh with her tongue.
They made love every night. She no longer took the blue bottle from her suitcase, to hold it in her hand, to watch the thin liquid glitter through the cobalt. She didn’t forget; she delayed.
The days seemed endless, the dinners a torture of manners and appetite suppressed. Mrs. Larsen would not look them in the eye. After dinner they went upstairs, and she went to him naked from her room and lay beside him in his father’s bed. Every night they created movement and desire out of nothing but the necessities of flesh. He found her mouth and kissed her sometimes until she couldn’t remember her own name; sometimes he just kissed her, and then moved his head and slept on her shoulder.
He didn’t speak to her anymore of his sorrows. He rarely spoke at all, as though the sexuality between them was all the conversation they needed. She tried to tell him the story she had carefully invented of her childhood. She tried to describe the horror of her molestation, the details of missionary life on other continents, all details learned from books in the library. He was sympathetic, but hushed her with his hand softly on her mouth.
He wanted a child. He longed for grandchildren, to dandle on his knee.
Little by little, with imperceptible manipulations, she became more expert, more adept at knowing what would please him. Sometimes in the night, while Ralph slept and she stared at the ceiling, she wondered whether she didn’t already have the thing she had set out to get. The love and wealth of a man who would not harm her. A man she found herself unable to find comical.
He clearly loved her. Or, if he didn’t love her, he was obsessed by her. He would allow her to have whatever she wanted. She felt herself wavering, as though a new landscape were opening before her, as though she was too exhausted from the nights of passion to focus her thoughts. The blue bottle lay in her suitcase, and sometimes she willed herself to forget it was there.
She went to town. It was very ordinary, a mud track through a short stretch of dry goods stores and hardware stores and butchers and barbers. The meat looked sad and dry in the dirty windows. The people nodded at her with curiosity and thinly veiled disdain. She wore her hair more gracefully around her face. She met the Swensons and the Carllsons and the Magnussons. She looked for the insanity she read about in the papers. She found none. She looked for beauty and found little to interest her, except the untouched faces of the children. She looked for sophisticated pleasures, but there seemed to be few pleasures of any kind. Still, she wasn’t bored. She wasn’t restless. Every day, she waited for the time to pass. She waited for Ralph to come home.
She was dazed by the way he looked without his clothes. She was entranced by the way his hand never left her cheek as he made love to her, caressing her the way he might gentle a wild horse.
They forgot conversation. She played the piano for him, the pieces he liked, the pieces he never tired of hearing. She read Whitman to him, the electric, wounded, fruitful country spread before them, the elasticity of desire. It was all a prelude to what happened in the dark, by candlelight, in Ralph’s father’s bed.
On New Year’s Day, in her gray silk wedding dress and her dark glasses, she boarded the train once again. The blue bottle was still in her suitcase. It waited like a serpent. The snowdrifts were as high as a strong man’s shoulders. Ralph Truitt stared at her through the window, searching for her hidden eyes. He did not wave as the train pulled away.
Part Two
SAINT LOUIS. WINTER. 1908.
CHAPTER TEN
The city entered her like music, like a wild symphony. The train pulled into Union Station, that giant garish chateau, and she stepped from Truitt’s railroad car into the largest train station in the world as though her skin were on fire.
The station smelled of beef and newsprint, of beer and iron. She had been away from this for too long. She had been in the wild white country, and her heart burned with the adventures, the friends, the food and drink, the multiplicity of event the city promised. People came here to be bad. People came here to do the things they couldn’t do at home. Smoke cigarettes. Have sex. Make their way in the world.
Mrs. Larsen was to have come with her, but Larsen had burned his hand badly the day before, so Catherine came alone.
She arrived in Saint Louis with a letter of credit at a bank and a room already reserved for her at the new Planter’s Hotel. It was a fine room on the sixth floor, with an austere bedroom and a small sitting room filled with mohair-covered furniture in dark colors, with elaborately swagged velvet curtains and a small fireplace. A fine room. Not the grandest room-Truitt would never have done that-just adequate, and she imagined the splendor of the suites on the upper floors, all flocked wallpaper and chandeliers and big plants in Chinese pots; cattle barons and oil barons and beer kings, men with money alone in hotel rooms, men who looked at city women in a certain way, wanted certain illicit things and were willing to pay for them, and she would have moved herself and her few belongings to something more grand, with a marble bathroom and real paintings, but she wanted to play it out, play it right, so she sat in her room and waited for the visit of Mr. Malloy and Mr. Fisk, the Pinkerton agents Truitt had hired to find his dissolute, prodigal, intractable son.
She felt that she was being watched herself, so that reports might be sent to Truitt about who this Catherine
