Katya had particular scorn for a young American historian she had recently had lunch with. A self-professed Marxist, he attacked her for being a traitor to “the cause,” for having married a wealthy man. And, she said, “He thinks he’s a Communist!” She snorted with laughter. “He’s never even been to a Communist country. The nerve of this guy,” she said, “He’s American. I was raised in the Soviet Union and he wanted to tell me about it.” I thought about what Katya said: what did he know about Communism? And what did I know? I had one Soviet-bred friend, and she was certainly went against any type I could have imagined.
There were, however, two men in Marbella she thought I should meet. One, according to her, was a “merry widower” (her term) and the other some kind of northern Italian aristocrat. “A duke?” I asked. “More like a marquis,” she answered. “And stop asking questions. The problem with you,” she told me, “is that you take everything too seriously. And you’re too picky.”
I often concluded these phone conversations dizzy from the parade of abstract disqualified men, making my way along the few blocks that separated my mother’s apartment from the pool. For the first time in many years I didn’t have a boyfriend to plan a summer holiday with. I went to the pool as often as possible. Katya was right in that I worked too hard, but I was also extremely good at doing nothing at all, particularly if it was in the sun. I didn’t even swim at the pool—I just climbed the stairs to this giant concrete slab optimistically called the “solarium” where dozens of dyed-blonde, topless females of all ages and shapes spent day after day baking themselves to a leather-like crisp.
The pool club was quite expensive, but like so many institutions in Spain it was shabby and built in a neo-fascist style, something just a notch above a YMCA, but in an outdoor post-Franco setting. I’d been going there since I was twelve, but I had never clocked as many hours as I did that summer. I used to go with my aunt Inés. Being there brought back nice memories. Now I went alone, almost every day. I set up a little desert island around my lounge chair. Now it was time to turn on my back, now it was getting too hot and time for a cool shower.
When I finished the chapter of the book I was reading, I ate an apple. I normally don’t like lunch, but some days I went down to the garden cafeteria, with its plastic chairs and tables, and had gazpacho and a grilled baby sole or trout. Back at the solarium I read, played music, or listened to the housewives chattering around me. I stared up at the tops of the Mediterranean pines and pretended I was in Mallorca or Ibiza. I didn’t get one iota closer to finding myself, but I did get very tan, and that was better than nothing.
Most of the women at the pool covered themselves in sunscreen-free Nivea that looked exactly like Crisco. It even came in a Crisco-shaped tin. After days of careful observation, I began to suspect that it was Crisco, with a little perfume added. I used a cream with a protection factor of 6 and felt like a neurotic hypochondriac. I had my doubts, because the truth was, these women looked much better than me. In America, sophisticates waxed nostalgic about the carefree reckless days depicted in the Thin Man movies—martinis all day and cigarettes galore. The closest thing to this in western Europe is probably Spain.
The pool women baked all day, anointing their bodies with one hand and smoking with the other. The solarium floor was studded with terracotta ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. Some used their empty Nivea tins as ashtrays.
On the days that I skipped lunch there was an interlude of silent bliss for me starting at around 1:30 p.m. when they went downstairs to have a beer, wine, or vermouth with a two-course lunch, then came back upstairs around 3:00 p.m. to sleep it off. Some Spaniards have perfected the art of pure denial. I often heard someone complaining, while smoking, about a sore throat, blaming the symptom on a draft in their bedroom the night before, or the air conditioning at a department store or cinema. Instantly someone would chime in that there was a bug going around, someone else would agree, and all of them would nod together while puffing away in sympathy at the perils of modern life. Though I saw through this denial, it made me envious. I smoked too, and I wished that I was not bicultural, because my vices were Spanish, but my guilt was American. As the summer went on, I developed bronchitis.
There was never any reason to check the weather forecast that summer. The tanning beauties at the pool were like a farmer’s almanac. Clouds are rare in July and August in Madrid, but whenever one appeared and blocked the rays the frustration was palpable. All present sat up, squinted at the sky, and glared at each other with the synchronicity of a musical number.
At the pool I heard such unadulterated gems of conversation that I cursed myself daily for not taking after the Spanish novelist Galdós and recording it to recycle later, to put them in the mouths of characters for the novel I wanted to write. I knew I had a story in me, and I often turned the tiniest fragments of life into stories when I talked to friends, but I was lazy and afraid of not knowing how to translate feelings into words on a page. I was not motivated enough. I was afraid of novelistic convention. I didn’t like the concepts of plot, characters, or denouement. What worried me most was the ending. I could almost see myself starting to write but I could never imagine how anything would ever end, and this paralyzed me. Once when I was hired to give a series of lectures on literature, I realized as I prepared that I liked the beginnings of most novels the best. I often hated the way they finished, finding the endings contrived or flat. I was full of excuses for not writing. An Olympic procrastinator.
Mail from America arrived every few days, diverted from my empty apartment at the college, all of it official and some of it quite important. I stuffed it in a drawer, where it stayed for many weeks. I had a datebook. I used to love buying a new one every December and filling it with notes and plans with a fountain pen. For years I had organized my life meticulously: college, master’s degree, PhD, always working at least two jobs. I had never wavered. I used to have nice handwriting and loved cheery, exotic ink colors. Lavender. Turquoise. My current calendar showed week after empty week. I didn’t want to write anything down, though once in a while I grabbed some dry old Bic pen from the back of a drawer and made a note of a doctor’s appointment in a jagged, sloping scribble. I was supposed to write an article on Franco and Hitler for a scholarly journal and had to ask for yet another extension. They were not appealing companions. The datebook gathered dust on my bedside table.
After the pool each day I went home to my room. I wasn’t doing anything, really. Emails bounced in from my American friends. They reported on the weather, on their gardens. They said, “I hope the research on your book is going well. Have a productive summer.” It was summer, after all. But I felt I had to keep up with my research and writing, I could never figure out if that summer was a vacation or not.
My mother’s flat was full of paintings by her grandfather, and books, and other objects from the nineteenth century, some even older. The sheets in the linen closet were heavy linen and had my great grandparents’ initials embroidered on them. How had these things survived? My mother usually rested in the afternoons. I tried to use that time to write articles and book reviews. In the evenings I went out with old friends or new random people or stayed in and cooked something for my mother.
I knew she was worried about me, and about how much time I was spending at the pool surrounded by women she called “the lizards.” She pretended to go about her business, within her severe limitations, and gave me as much freedom as she could. She had always been resistant to the concept of psychology, and she was wary about the presence of Cohen in my life. I could almost hear her saying to herself, “This is just a phase, like when she turned four and wanted an orange birthday cake with purple frosting.” Once in a while, when voicing an opinion about my life and my psicólogo—which sounded particularly lame to me in Spanish—she said, “What I think, and I imagine your psychologist would agree with me about, is . . .” When I seemed worried, she sometimes shook her head in frustration and asked, “Do you re
ally think this psychologist is doing you any good?” I didn’t like the question, but I couldn’t honestly defend the beneficial effects that therapy might be having on me.
I changed the subject. “In my spare time I am writing a novel.”
She nodded. “That’s a good idea.”
I had a sip of wine. “I know, I just can’t quite figure out what to write about.”
She said, “Why not write about me? I’ve had a pretty interesting life.”
“If I write about you, I would have to write about me. About our lives.”
She shrugged. “Aren’t many first novels autobiographical?”
13
MY OLD COLLEGE FRIEND ANNE invited me to visit her in Paris. Anne and I hadn’t seen each other for a long time. We used to live together in the East Village and had a sister-like friendship. I suppose I was looking to rekindle that kind of bond with anyone who might have a clue about what I should do next.
She lived with her husband and young son in a sleek, rather impersonal apartment in the Fifth Arrondissement. Lots of stone and stainless steel—quite cold. They had a nanny. Both of them worked in fashion, but the husband had been an architect and he had designed the flat according to her specifications. The weather was gray, and I spent too much money on clothes in my favorite neighborhoods, the Marais, Abbesses, and ate Vietnamese food and steaks au poivre, or with béarnaise sauce, delights that were difficult to find in Madrid. I drank champagne. Anne was pregnant with her second baby and she was sleepy all the time. Once when we were sitting on the couch having drinks before dinner, she fell asleep.
Anne took me to adorable French baby clothing stores. She was a couple of years younger than me, but I felt she was light years ahead of me. After her rebellious late twenties, she had miraculously emerged as a graceful young mother and wife. It occurred to me that she was probably like this before college, where we had seemed so alike because we lived in dorm rooms and ate in the cafeteria together and liked the same boys. But we were not at all alike. She met her husband-to-be at a beautiful wedding in the French countryside, and together they bought this large apartment in Paris. She wasn’t from Paris, yet she seemed completely at home there. Many of my friends have done this, in New York or Madrid, but few made it look so appealing and simple as Anne. I instinctively sensed I would never find myself in her shoes, or anywhere near them. I watched her buy baby clothes, and she looked so lovely, considering and deciding between this or that little outfit. I knew that would never be me. Though I was still young, I reckoned I’d gotten the timing wrong, and that if I ever straightened my life out it would be too late. I would still be living in my New England village, not Paris, and I might be alone, and at the time it was very hard to see any silver lining in this, or how I might change my course. Convention, which looked so comfortable from the outside, had eluded me.
Everyone seemed very tough and thin in Paris, and the men and women had a more unique style than people in Madrid. I thought about the clothes I’d bought and how unhappy I would be if I got sick and had no money to look after myself properly because I’d spent it all on fashion. At least I would be beautifully dressed. Every time I went to Paris I wondered if I’d run into Philippe, a film director I briefly had a crush on years earlier, but I never did. I’d met him in New York and when he returned to Paris he sent me flowers, postcards, and two interminable handwritten letters, in broken English, about Lacan, and depression that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. He said I was a “phantasm,” or perhaps an angel, I can’t remember. I agreed to see him when I passed through Paris a year later, but I was too shy to call him, and that was that. He lived near Pigalle, and despite the years that had passed I still associated the neighborhood with him and cheered up as I passed in front of the dingy cafes and sex clubs.
Paris was almost always as I liked it to be, in a way New York usually wasn’t. I realized this had a lot to do with the fact that I had never lived in Paris, but only been there on vacations. In New York I used to spend a lot of money and effort trying to match my experiences to the image I had, and often the image seemed just out of reach. This happened when I lived alone, and with other people. It was a time when it seemed a miracle could happen to us at any moment. But it never did. Miracles only happened to other people—a few degrees removed from my group. We had regular brushes with glamour and great success. I, in particular, was as good at attracting these opportunities as I was at repelling them. When I dated a boy from an interesting family, he was the disinherited black sheep; when a handsome film producer took me to dinner too quickly with his parents, I found it embarrassing and couldn’t see him again.
But New York had advantages. Nobody cared where I was from. Nobody insisted that I was not really American, or not really Spanish because I was a mix. In New York I could be American, Spanish, Euro-something, or nothing at all. It was a great relief. In the time I had walked a block to buy a coffee from a deli, my path had crossed with a hundred people whose backgrounds were more complex than mine. Nobody asked that dreaded question that one of my students once put his finger on: Where are you really from?
14
BACK IN MADRID A WEEK later, Katya called and invited me to Marbella. I had to think hard about this. My mother thought it a tacky and potentially dangerous idea. My friend Mónica, who was a journalist and mother of two, thought I was crazy to hesitate. “Marbella at Mr. X’s? A palatial house on the sea? Why wouldn’t you go?!” She was always slightly disappointed in my lack of chutzpah. Okay. I was supposed to be having adventures and exploring life.
I took the train to Málaga and was picked up by a driver-bodyguard. I’d already met him in Madrid, where he and the others on the security team wore dark suits. At the train station I hardly recognized him in his Bermuda shorts and polo shirt, a small canvas tourist satchel hanging from his waist. I wondered if that was where he kept his gun.
Marbella’s patent lack of values of any kind was the opposite of what my therapist and enlightened, progressive American friends held dear. Marbella was un-veneered capitalism and sunshine. It was the tomb of the romantic, and everything seemed, really, surprisingly simple. Desire, beauty, charm, lust, satisfaction—even fame—were all subservient to cash. Intelligence, originality, and style were superfluous. All that mattered for women was one’s status as a luxury, duty-free object. The outfits, accessories, plastic surgery, and hair extensions could easily be computed, and all the men needed was the means to buy, or at least rent long-term. It was better to be a shop assistant at an expensive boutique, where you appeared luxurious and valuable by association, than to be a down-and-out aristocrat. Lineage didn’t count—which may be democratic, I suppose—nor did education.
Their house was a contemporary-style villa on the water. The butler showed me to my room and told me that the señores, Katya and husband, were playing tennis and would be back later. He pointed to the phone near my bed and told me to dial 26 if I needed anything. I tried to think of things I might need. I wasn’t used to being in a guest room alone surrounded by armed men. I hung my clothes in the closet and tried to make myself at home. Keep an open mind, Lola. The floors in my room and bathroom were heated marble, and I walked back and forth many times to feel the warmth on my bare feet as I opened all the windows to let the garden air in. There were no books in my room. This was the kind of house people longed to be invited to, and yet I felt like I was in a creepy Saturday Night Live skit. Was there something wrong with me?
I went out to explore the rest of the house, wary of attack dogs and bodyguards, but there was no one, and no sound but the trickle from a fountain in the courtyard and some kind of Muzak that was piped through the vast rooms. I felt kind of like Nancy Drew, but there was no mystery to be solved. Off the courtyard on either side of an arched entrance were two identical mirrored bars, in a show of double excess—his and hers? The bottles and glasses were arranged next to silver bowls with mixed nuts and Fritos. It was too early for a drink, but I ate some Fritos, barbecue f
lavor, just because they were there. I took some from one bar and then from the other. I expected them to be limp and humid; in fact I wanted them to be stale. Perhaps they’d been there for a decade. But they weren’t. These people knew how to keep their Fritos fresh and crispy, and someone was paid to make sure this was the case. I hadn’t seen or eaten them since kindergarten. Who’d have thought that the wildly rich liked BBQ corn chips with their whisky? I did find some books, mainly unreadable: Fifty Great Men. Keys to Success. The Beauty of Jewish Culture. Then a variation on all of the above, wrapped into one great volume: Fifty Great Successful Jewish Men. However, there was one that looked good, and was: Philip Roth’s The Facts.
The weekend was a parade of characters: the marquis that Katya was so excited about, who drank gin and tonics as if they were water; the owner of a nightclub; a real estate tycoon; the tennis pro with his girlfriend; and Katya’s Pilates teacher. I understood, for the first time, what the expression “hangers-on” meant. I strained at conversation with the tycoon, and heard myself asking, with what was hopefully a cosmopolitan look in my eye, “How are you enjoying Marbella?”
I realized I would never make it in Marbella, and that I would never get to sleep. I left a lamp on, the furthest one from the bed, as I always do when I sleep alone, but that didn’t help. It was a long night of intense anxiety, which I spent squinting at the Philip Roth book. I looked at the phone near my bed and wondered what the number for the local 911 was. Would they come if I called, or had they been bought off by Mr. X? Was I having fun yet?
Madrid Again Page 9
