Read The Women for Free Online Page B

at hand, the old libidinous fires restoked, 7 the quickening pulse of possibility. Was he too old for this sort of thing? Was he wary, considering what he’d been through with Miriam—and before her, Mamah and even Kitty? If the thought crossed his mind, he dismissed it. Age was nothing to him—he was fifty-seven and fit as a farmer—and he was one of those sexually charged men who couldn’t live without a woman at the center of his life. Already, since the official break with Miriam, though she’d been dead to him for a year and more, he’d come very close to finding that woman in the bow mouth and satiric eyes of a certain lady novelist, 8 and when that proved impossible on any number of scores, he’d moved a coed from the University of Wisconsin into Taliesin and his bed. But he wasn’t satisfied. Not yet. Not even approximately. He needed— complication. Love, yes. Sex, of course. But something more than that, something fraught and embattled, a relation to make the juices flow in every sense.
     
    The sandwiches were soggy, the tea tepid. Albert disappeared. The orchestra played the old songs in the old dreamily civilized way of pre-war London (tango, yes, but delivered up in a rendition that was almost sedate) and stayed away from the jittery nonsense of the speakeasies. They talked for two hours and more. They danced and she was as light in his arms as a feather pillow. He let her know that he didn’t smoke or drink and she didn’t mind at all, even as so many of the other couples on the dance floor showed the obvious effects of alcohol and every time they looked up one man or another was spiking his companion’s tea with a clear liquid decanted from a flask. She agreed with him that jazz music was, for the most part, hyperactive. And yes, she did love Bach, one of her earliest musical inspirations when she was a girl in Montenegro.
     
    He must have lifted his eyebrows— Montenegro? —because she informed him that this was a kingdom on the Adriatic and that she came from an exalted family of warriors and judges. “We are Serbs,” she told him, over-sugaring her tea, a cucumber sandwich arrested at her lips. “Do you know Serbs?”
     
    “Oh, yes,” he lied, “yes, of course. Hundreds of them.” But he was smiling—his flashing eyes, his floating hair—and breezed right past it: “And I’m still waiting for my first Montenegrin commission. You don’t think the king over there might want a new palace? In the Prairie Style? Or how about a pleasure dome on the sacred River Alph?” His smile widening to clinch the joke. “Or is that in another part of the world?”
     
    He dropped her that night at the apartment where she was staying with disciples exiled—like her—from Gurdjieff’s enclave in Fontainebleau, 9 and he was there the next morning, flowers in hand, to take her to breakfast. That was the beginning of a more elaborate dance, a waltz in three-quarter time that swept them through the corridors of museums, galleries and concert halls, with side trips to admire the houses he’d built in the city and in Oak Park, and which culminated in the inevitable invitation to Taliesin.
     
    It was December, a week before Christmas. An arctic front had advanced across the Great Lakes and the skies were stripped of color. She packed her bags—a few things only, an outfit or two for jaunts through the country, formal wear for dinner—and she came alone on the train through the whitening stubble fields and forlorn villages of Illinois and Wisconsin, having arranged for her daughter to stay behind in Chicago with her estranged husband. 10 She would remember that journey all her life, the sense of enclosure and security the coach gave her as the snow ran against the windows and she ate the sugared buns she’d brought with her and sipped coffee from the cup of her thermos, the world reduced and tranquil. Though she had a book with her—a bound manuscript Georgei had given her when she left