Bit by bit, in a monologue that drifts back and forth between brilliant glitter and pitiable unhinging, that asserts and withdraws, that plumes itself like a conqueror and molts a trail of bedraggled feathers, we get an approximate story.
McGowan gives her narrator no name, thus conveying the elusive track-covering, the shame that flickers beneath the arrogance. For convenience I will call her ''the woman." Having run away from her older husband, whom she refers to as ''the Bavarian," she lives in Rome with Edmund, a young Italian with a beautiful back of which we hear a great deal, and few other qualities.
Vague and unreliable bits of the narrator's past spill out. She had worked in a bank where, she variously announces, she had felt free and happy, and tyrannized and unhappy. The Bavarian was dull and stodgy; when she lit out for Europe she had taken a wad of his cash with her. Yet far from shaking his dust from her shoes, she holds on to the dust, as it were; nursing a smudgy resentment that he hasn't come after her.
Edmund's 7-year-old brother, or perhaps half brother (also nameless; she calls him ''the boy"), lives with them. Ostensibly the woman makes him the center of her world; in fact he is the mirror she performs to. She feeds him, dresses him, takes him on expeditions, and drills him continually in her skewed and inflated vision of herself and her life.
Edmund is elusive and often absent; the boy is her captive, the dukeling whom she will shape to redeem her failures and disappointments. She complains incessantly about the sacrifices she makes for him, about the trap that Edmund's lovely back has led her into.
''Where I was once my own person now I am simply the slut who boils your milk; that is the sole definition of my life today. Why? Because of beauty. So I will boil your milk every morning until I die spent and shriveled, bones ossified, death passing quite unnoticed."
Her didactic fantasy continues, the child dutifully taking it in. ''That's all, I say leaning and exhaling. That's the lesson. Beauty is fatal, the boy says quietly. If not beauty then love, I say carefully. Love is fatal, the boy amends."
