They ate dinner. He read to her from the newspaper the accounts of madness and true crimes, committed by people he knew. She read to him from his beloved Walt Whitman, seemingly the only thing he read. She read to him Whitman’s vast throbbing hopeful despairing panorama of America, the unparticular passion for every living thing.
“Be not disheartened,” she read. “Affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet / Those who love each other shall become invincible.”
She didn’t love Truitt, and every night the blue bottle came out from her suitcase; rage infused her as she held it in her hand. The blue bottle fueled her; it was her simple, her only plan. The house would be hers. The pearls, the books and pictures, the fancy rugs from India and the East, and Truitt would be hers, too. But there would be no affection, no ambling toward a sweet old age. One drop. Two drops. That was the future.
She roamed the rooms in secret, she wandered the secret garden, up to her knees in snow, the drifts in the corners over her head, while Mrs. Larsen scoured the copper pots and shook the dust from the heavy brocaded curtains. And all the while she did not forget. Her rage never decreased. The blue bottle was her defense, her key to the infinite splendor, the drowsy magnificence of the house itself.
She sewed her gray silk dress, according to an innocuous pattern picked from a ladies’ book. She felt foolish when she looked in the mirror, as though she didn’t remember what she was dressing for. The days crawled by. The snow never stopped falling.
They were married by a judge, in the living room of the farmhouse. A noonday fire burned in the fireplace. The weather cleared for the day, and two carriages stood in the yard. Two couples watched silently as they said the words. They signed their names as witnesses in the judge’s book. They joined them for lunch and went away. They 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.