She spread the papers out before her. Took a sip of her coffee. Of course, the past year had been hard on her, what with the way she’d been thrown over by René and that unfortunate incident with the carving knife — and she would have stabbed him, she really and truly would have and gladly gone to the Santé Prison for it, if he’d only stood still long enough. And there was her cat. Mr. Ribbons — or Monsieur Ribbons, as she liked to call out from the door and watch him scamper across the street, his tail held erect above him. When he’d begun to spit up blood, she immediately suspected the crabbed odious horse-faced woman downstairs of poisoning him, and there’d been another regrettable incident over that, though the veterinarian assured her that the animal had died of natural causes. Yes. Certainly. Natural causes. What else could it be? At the thought of it she looked up sharply over her reading glasses, riveting the waiter with a look, which he ignored, and where were her eggs? Had they sent out to the provinces for them? Did it take a Cordon Bleu chef to set a pot of water boiling and dice a few tomatoes over a pan?
She was irritable, and she would have been the first to admit it. It was the war, the uncertainty, the rumors. Everyone said it would be over in six months, but what if it wasn’t? What if the Germans pushed through and marched into Paris? What if there were shortages, rationing? Would the cafés be deserted? Would her landlady raise her rent? She’d thought of going back to Chicago, to Norma, but that was distasteful to her in so many ways she could hardly count them. So many of her friends — the Americans and English, at any rate — had already left, the Belknaps, Clarissa Hodge, the Payne Whitneys. Even her closest friend and confidante, Marie-Thérèse, had gone away to the country, deserting her when she most needed someone to confide in, and not just over René but the creeping fear that started as a kind of upset of her stomach and radiated all the way down to her toes and back up her spine to the nape of her neck, the fear that everything she knew and loved was wearing down and coming to some awful end.
The waiter sauntered up with the heavy ceramic plate and slipped it onto the table as if he were placing a bet at Auteuil before vanishing like a magician, only to reappear in the depths of the café, a freshly lit cigarette jutting from his mouth. She spread her napkin across her lap, adjusted the newspaper and her reading glasses, and cut into one of the sausages. It was then that the headline caught her eye: SEVEN SLAIN AT TALIESIN. And under it: Love Bungalow Murders. She set down the fork and began reading — the story was so horrific, so compelling and awful, she couldn’t help herself; it was like a novel, a romance, and here was the hero of the affair, Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, in half-profile, staring out nobly across the continent and the sea too. Her breakfast went cold. The coffee sat untouched. The waiter never so much as glanced at her.
She read through the article twice and then sat for a long while studying the photograph. Very slowly, as if she couldn’t control it, she began to shake her head from side to side even as the tremor crept up her spine one vertebra at a time, as if a series of individual fingertips were poking at her in succession.
The poor man, she was thinking. The poor, poor man.
NOTES
1
Wrieto-San in the original.
2
Unidentified male; perhaps one of his acquaintances from earlier, happier days in Chicago society.
3
Call him Albert Bleutick for convenience’s sake, a man of median height, median coloring, with a medial swell of paunch and a personality that was neither dominant nor recessive, a companion of the second stripe, one who could be relied upon to pick up the tab at lunch and actively seek out tickets to the ballet, the symphony, the museum. His was the fate of all minor characters in a major life: to perform a function and exit, as colorless as the rain descending on the dreary gray streets on a day that might as well have rinsed itself down the drain for all anyone cared.
4
I knew her at Taliesin as a sour, thin, humorless woman, tubercular in that first year, busy, always busy with the work of the place, scrubbing, hanging out clothes, hoeing in the garden and splitting wood for the stove, the furnace and the seventeen fireplaces we kept going eternally for the poor heat of them in that cavernous edifice, but she was a girl once, and in love. Grant her that.
5
Wrieto-San in the original, and ff.
6
Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, 1866 (?) -1949. Philosopher, composer, shaman, hypnotist. Magnum opus: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. Espoused lifelong doctrine called “The Work,” a muddled philosophy of being with its own mythos and cosmology that attracted to him a ring of disciples whom he arbitrarily embraced and cast out of the fold. He was at Taliesin in 1938, I believe it was, a shambling ancient Armenian Turk or Gypsy of some sort with an accent so impenetrable he might as well have been talking through a gag. I remember seeing him off in the distance each morning, a bundle of animated rags conferring with Mrs. Wright while Wrieto-San fumed in the studio.
7
One of those curious overheated phrases of O’Flaherty-San, which we will let stand.
8
Zona Gale, author of popular appeasements such as Miss Lulu Bett, who was then at the height of her fame, and more marginally, her beauty. But she kept cats and had claws of her own. And, of course, like all novelists, she had unrealistic expectations.
9
Officially, the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, an oxymoronic designation, it seems to me.
10
Vlademar Hinzenberg. An architect. A Russian.
11
Wrieto-San was a great one for holidays — Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas — and if there was no holiday in sight he would invent one to suit him, the Fundament of June, Midsummer’s Eve, the Pillars of March, the stronger the whiff of paganism the better. He was an inveterate arranger too, forever fussing over his furniture and objets d’art, and he threw himself into holiday decoration with all the fierceness of his unflagging energy (an energy, unfortunately, that often manifested itself in a sort of superhuman volubility that made it difficult to be around him for more than an hour or two at a time).
12
“The Elf King.” And what could be more appropriate?
13
Maude Miriam Noel, 1869–1930. Southern belle, sculptress, dilettante. Wrieto-San’s second wife. I never met her personally, but Billy Weston described her to me in some detail. “She was trouble,” he said. And then he used one of those peculiarly apposite American expressions — such a trove, the English language—“She was,” and he paused a moment to stare off into the distance, as if his brain, the actual organ, were being radically compressed by the squeezebox of the memory, “real hell on wheels.”