The Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

years—since he’d come back from Japan, at any rate—had worn him down. Miriam was the problem, of course, or the crown and pinnacle of it. There were money woes, certainly. Insufficient commissions, fainthearted clients, and the deep-dwelling ignorance of his countrymen (and cowardice, cowardice too) in the face of the Fauvists, the Futurists, the Dadaists and the Cubists and all the rest of the ists and isms, Duchamp and Braque and Picasso, and worse yet, the soi-disant International Style of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Meyer and Mies—all the movements that had sprung up to make him feel antiquated and embattled. None of that helped. While he was in the Far East, the Europeans had been invading America.
     
    But things were looking up. Miriam was gone now, gone since May, though every time he closed his eyes over a drawing or the pages of a book he saw her face, the tragic one she wore like a mask, rearing up in his consciousness till it dissolved in a swirl of dark bruised spots. Still, she was gone and Taliesin was at peace again. Three young couples—the Neutras, the Tsuchiuras and the Mosers—had been in residence, and there were musical evenings, good fellowship, the quiet of the fireside. And here he was, back in Chicago on business and stamping the rain from his hat and cloak in the vestibule of the theater, ripe for a little recreation.
     
    A friend 2 had asked him if he’d like to see Karsavina perform selections from “Sleeping Beauty,” “La Fille Mal Gardée” and “Les Sylphides” that afternoon and he’d jumped at the chance, though the prima ballerina’s best days were long behind her and her supramundane beauty was a whisper of what it had been. He wanted to be seen about town, if only to shake some of the lint off the moth-eaten blanket of rumor and outright lies the scandalmongers had laid over him—he’d be opening an office here again at the first of the year and needed to make his presence felt. All right. Fine. The rain fell in the street, the door swung open and shut on the premonitory breath of winter, people crowded the lobby: men in fancy dress or the suits they’d worn to church, women swathed in furs and pearls, their voices sailing away from them to chime and chirrup like the disquisitions of the birds in the aviary at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Were people avoiding him? Wasn’t that—?
     
    It was. Olivia Westphal, whom he’d once promenaded around Oak Park in his first car (the custom-made Stoddard-Dayton sports roadster that could hit sixty on the straightaway, a car he still dreamed of in the moments before waking, the “Yellow Devil” that had people leaping for the curb and cost him the very first speeding ticket ever issued on those sleepy equine streets), hoping to land a commission to build for her and her new husband (and she’d stabbed him in the back even then, opting to have Patton and Fisher build her an ornamented box of a place that was as insipid as a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes left out overnight. On the counter. In a puddle of soured milk). And what the years had done to her: she was a matron now, gone to fat in the face and upper arms, with a bulky squared-up figure that all but erased the curvilinear contours he’d once found so enticing. She looked him dead in the eye—recognized him, he saw that—and then looked away again.
     
    And how did that make him feel? Belligerent. Angry. Disgusted. Let them ignore him, the prudes and the timid little rodents they were married to, afraid all their lives to break ranks, to live, to make the grand gesture, any gesture . . . but now his companion 3 had him by the arm and was leading him toward a group of men in the very center of things—was that Robert? Oscar?—and he felt himself swell up till he could hardly keep his cane from pirouetting across the floor. What he didn’t notice—nor did his companion—was the tall dark sober-faced young woman slipping in through the door, her ticket clutched in one