A Reliable Wife Read Free Page A

middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet,
     the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than
     that.
    The land flew away by her window, rushing horizontal flat with snow. The train jostled just enough so that, even though she
     held her head perfectly still, her earrings swayed and sparkled in the light.
    He had sent a private car with a sitting room and a bedroom and electric lights. She had not seen another passenger, although
     she knew other people had to be on the train. She imagined them, sitting calmly in their seats, pale winter skin on gray horsehair,
     while in her car it was all red velvet and swagging and furbelows. Like a whorehouse, she thought. Like a whorehouse on wheels.
    They had left after dark and crept through the night, stopping often to clear drifts from the tracks. The porter had brought
     her a heavy, glistening meal, slabs of roast beef and shrimp on ice, lovely iced cakes which she ate at a folding table. No
     wine was offered and she didn’t ask for it. The hotel silver felt smooth and heavy in her hand, and she devoured everything
     that was brought to her.
    In the morning, steaming eggs and ham and rolls and hot black coffee that burned her tongue, all brought by a silent Negro
     porter, served as though he were performing some subtle magic trick. She ate it all. There was nothing else to do, and the
     movement of the train was both hypnotic and ravishing, amplifying her appetites, as each rushing second brought her closer
     to the fruition of her long and complicated scheme.
    When she wasn’t eating, or sleeping beneath the starched, immaculate sheets, she stared at her face in the mirror above the
     dressing table. It was her one sure possession, the one thing she could count on never to betray her, and she found it reassuring,
     after thirty-four years, that it remained, every morning, essentially unchanged, the same sure beauty, the same pale and flawless
     skin, unlined, fresh. Whatever life had done to her, it had not yet reached her face.
    Still she was restless. Her mind raced, reviewing her options, her plans, her jumbled memories of a turbulent past, and what
     it was about her life that had led her here, to this sumptuous room on wheels, somewhere in the middle.
    So much had to happen in the middle, and no matter how often she had rehearsed it in her mind, she didn’t trust the middle.
     You could get caught. You could lose your balance, your way, and get found out. In the middle, things always happened you
     hadn’t planned on, and it was these things, the possibility of these things, that haunted and troubled her, that showed now
     in the soft mauve hollows beneath her dark almond eyes.
    Love and money. She could not believe that her life, as barren and as aimless as it had been, would end without either love
     or money. She could not, would not accept that as a fact, because to accept it now would mean that the end had already come
     and gone.
    She was determined, cold as steel. She would not live without at least some portion of the two things she knew were necessary
     as a minimum to sustain life. She had spent her years believing that they would come, in time. She believed that an angel
     would come down from heaven and bless her with riches as she had been blessed with beauty. She believed in the miraculous.
     Or she had, until she reached an age when, all of a sudden, she realized that the life she was living was, in fact, her life. The clay of her being, so long infinitely malleable, had been formed, hardened into what now seemed a palpable, unchanging
     object, a shell she inhabited. It shocked her then. It shocked her now, like a slap in the face.
    She remembered a moment from her childhood, the one transfixing moment of her past. She was riding in a carriage, dressed
     in a plain white dress, seated beside her mother who was not