The Women of Great Men

 

Beautiful Exiles by Meg Waite Clayton and The Women by T.C. Boyle

These two books illustrate the commonality of great men and the women who love them, in both negative and positive ways/

 

Them

the men

they need you.

Ernest and Meg, 

You two were born like romeo and juliet

amongst the divisive rubble and struggle for Spain.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney

You were the other two born in the panic, there was nothing to come home to except smoke and mirrors.

In wars, the great romantics, the swelling pride of it, their work is always so important, so so important and every one of you, mistress or wife, understands that.

You nourish his fear like a wet nurse, you bear his desires like an Olympus hero. 

He languishes when you aren’t there. 

For you are his ghostly inspiration, his spectral muse,

He needs you where he can easily find you.

Cuba, war, Idaho, war, Cuba, war, the memories of Spain kept you going, together, driving like some deep- throated engined plow, push past the lonely days, months, years between you, opened up as precisely as a surgeon’s knife,

When it is best and the difference of what it is between now and never you must tread.

Without the inclusion of time, we all can live forever

He always had the fire to remember the murders, the charred desolation of guilt because he wasn’t there. His beloved Taliesin and you,

Taken away, of the two, only you could not be replaced.

 

Here we are so contained in our own stories, looking inside ourselves for the things to hold on to when we are drowning in our time.

Meg, it was on the way back to him from Italy. He called you there.  He begged you back to Cuba and you came with all your memories.

Momah, Your ghost interrupted him, beckoned him from Chicago, he drives all night in the rain, that failing hope wasn't enough to douse the flaming slaughter.

The good and the bad,

The end pummeling you into submission.

There is nothing there waiting for any of you.

You are sure of it when you see them, her and him, laughing and drunk, just like the wars when you mastered him/

The rendezvous,

the love,

they always love you until they don't.

When that final moment gets to you, it's never clear when that started.

Fire always leaps to its hunger like a new lover, voracious and hard to satiate,

Once it starts, it’s hard to keep down the thrill of it consuming everything you once loved- the bottlebrush by the sea, the quaint villages amongst the pine, it's smoky clarity, your fresh Sprite of hells delight ignites.

It all retreats to the safety of ignominy.