Free A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick Page A

him
     with tenderness and efficiency. Three times a day, she sat alone at the gleaming table and ate the exquisite food Mrs. Larsen
     brought her. A clear soup the color of rubies. A meringue with chestnuts. Duck in a mustard sauce. Things she had never seen,
     foods that frightened her with their beauty. She asked Mrs. Larsen if she and her husband didn’t want to eat with her, or
     have her eat in the kitchen with them. That, apparently, was not part of the plan, and so she went on in solitude at the head
     of the enormous table.
    She ate with an appetite that excited and appalled her. Rich foods so at odds with the bleak country, so suitable for the
     comfort of the cold. Her hunger was fueled by boredom and anxiety, and it never went away, no matter how much she ate.
    At night, she stood for hours at her window, watching the snow fall, longing for what she had left behind. During the day,
     the whiteness was so bright, she had to shield her eyes from the glare. She could not keep the curtains open for more than
     a few minutes.
    She thought of people, ordinary people, moving through the streets of the cities, and she marveled at the commonplace of their
     lives.
    She thought of the rooms she had left behind, the rooms in which she waked and breathed, the way they were furnished, the
     way voices carried in through the open windows, the way she walked and wept in them. She stared down at the stupid and list
     less people who had somehow managed to achieve in a flawlessly easy way those dear little things that eluded her.
    They owned plates. They all had socks. The world was filled with people, and she thought with derision of the extraordinarily
     few she had known, really known, in her life.
    And as much as she might sneer at the emptiness of their lives, the stupidity and the boredom, she had ended up in this house,
     soundless in the relentless snow, and she gladly would trade places with any one of them.
    In the life behind her, she would smoke cigarettes and drink liquor and take drugs and grab what she could get out of the
     sea of people around her. Men wrote her letters. They had seen her at the theater, high up in a box, and they would write
     and she would answer. So delicate. She would find forgetfulness for an hour or a summer or a night with any one of them whose
     letter amused her, a man with blue eyes or green eyes or brown eyes, their faces so close, pleading for what she could not
     imagine, and eventually the tremor would pass and the luxurious beauty of it would fade and she would see only the stupidity
     and the foul odors and the hatefulness of her own heart, a hatefulness which told her every minute that the pleasure these
     people obviously found in these simple moments would be forever denied to her. And then she would move on.
    She itched for a cigarette. She would wade through drifts over her head for the escape of opium or morphine. But she was far
     away from all that. She would not even take a glass of sherry. She would follow her plan and her plan would work, if, of course,
     Truitt did not die.
    “How is he, Miss?”
    “He’s restless. And hot.”
    “Tough old bird. Don’t you worry, he’ll make it.”
    When I have his money, she thought, I will go far away, I will go to a country where I don’t know anybody and I don’t speak
     the language and I will never talk to anybody ever again. But no, that wasn’t the plan. She must remember the plan. When she
     had his money, she would marry her useless and beautiful lover and they would live a life of such extraordinary delight. Oh,
     yes, that was the plan.
    In every one of the cities where she haphazardly had landed, when anxiety and dissatisfaction engulfed her as they eventually
     did, she found the municipal library and spent hours there, reading descriptions and guides to other places she might eventually
     go. She knew the street plans of Buenos Aires and Saint Louis and London. She knew in intimate detail any number of places