“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, now 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.”
“I’ve remembered every detail every day of my life. He’s not in the picture.”
“He loves, he wants to love you.”
He suddenly turned, and knelt with one knee on the bed. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her like a doll. She could see his clothes all undone. She could see his white skin, feel his hot touch, even in his violence.
“He beat me. He killed my mother.”
“He…”
“He took my beautiful mother and he beat her until her teeth fell bloody to the floor. I saw this. He took me all the way to Chicago to make me watch. He’s strong. He was, at least. He took her and put his ugly hands around her throat and strangled her until she was dead. I saw this. I was thirteen years old and I saw it.” He threw her back on the bed. “Why would I want his love? I want him dead.”
She had heard it a hundred, a thousand times, and she had never really believed it, not once. It was assumed between them to be a truth, it was the central cause of what was happening, and she tried, she tried because she loved him, to believe it, but she didn’t. And now that she knew Truitt, now that she was his wife, she didn’t believe Antonio anymore.
She knew such things happened. She could picture them in the grimy brownstones and the dingy tenements. She could imagine them happening to other people. She could not imagine such a terrifying loss of sense, of restraint or reason, happening to Ralph Truitt. She had tried to see it. She had tried to see Antonio, the first haze of a beard on his cheek, watching such a thing happen, but the image would not come.
Such things happened to her, had happened to her, sudden bursts of uncontrollable fury, but they would not happen to Ralph Truitt, Truitt who had exchanged drink for prayer the day his daughter’s eyes went blank, Truitt who had seen his wife having sex with a piano teacher and closed the door and not gotten his gun.
Antonio grazed her cheek with a kiss, his dry lips like feathers on her skin. “It’s our future. It’s our future.”
She raised herself with fury from the bed.
“And you don’t have to do a single thing? Not one thing. You drink and you whore and you go to the dens and you spend every penny with tailors who will give you endless credit because it’s an honor for their clothes to be seen on you, and I have to do it all.”
“Me whore? What an odd thing for you to say.”
“I love you. I will do anything for you.”
“And you honestly think that’s a rare and beautiful thing. That’s what you get paid for.”
“It’s all I have to give.”
“No. It’s not. You give me my father, you surprise me with my father’s death, and your love will suddenly take on a whole new value.”
“I’ll do it. I said I would. I will.”
“Well, don’t wait too long.”
He was dressed. He had fully left her now, and she lay naked and awkward in the cold, wet bed. His leaving was like dying for her.
He turned to her, his eyes rimmed with tears. “I wish you could have seen her. My mother. She was so lovely, her voice so soft, her hands so small. She would take me on her lap as she played the piano, and sing the old Italian songs. She had barely left her girlhood.”
He sat in a chair by the darkening window. “After she left, after he drove my mother away, after my sister died, I would sneak over to the old house, to the villa, and climb the staircase and go into her room. I would stand in her closet and bury my nose in her dresses, breathing in my mother. She smelled like another country, a country where there was always music and dancing. A country lit by candlelight.
“She was just a girl. She fell in love. People do, all the time. It wasn’t her fault. Maybe Truitt is my father. Maybe not. No one will ever know. But he will pay the price for what he did to her, for what he did to me after she left.
“I have grown up, all my life, hating him. I am weary of it. I will never have a whole life until he’s gone. Do that one thing for me.
“You reminded me of her, the first time I saw you. You have loved me, in your way. You open, by tiny bits, my hard heart. Do this one thing for me.
“People think I’m a bad man. A useless waste. And maybe I am. But I don’t think so. I’m just a ten-year-old boy, standing in the dark of his mother’s closet, smelling her dresses. I could be bad. But I could be good. I’ll know when I see him in his grave.”
He stood. It was almost dark. The door opened and he was gone.
She wandered the rooms. She opened the closet and saw her fine dresses, the beads and feathers, and her hats, swooping birds and jewels, and her delicate shoes, red and green and gold Moroccan leather, with pretty high heels and glittering buttons and buckles, and she suddenly wanted it to start over again. The touch and smell of her
