The News from Spain

by Joan Wickersham

  She has learned, with this sort of perilous reminiscence, how to turn it off, like a faucet. Stop it the minute you notice it’s beginning to drip. Close the pipes.

  “Did you eat?” she asks.

  “Not yet. I will.” He sounds tired.

  “Malcolm made macaroni.”

  “Ah. Try to say it three times fast,” he says instantly, always that quick exhilaration at being able to make a joke that is American, to play with Americanisms as nimbly as a cat batting a ball of yarn.

  They talk more, about the itinerary, about who is scheduled to come in to help her when. An unnecessary conversation—everything is efficiently arranged, as always; she is never left alone for too long; and in an extreme emergency she’d be capable of dragging herself to the telephone—but, thinking that he is reassuring her, it makes him feel better to have it. “I know,” she says. And: “Yes, that’s right.”

  She’s beginning to get sleepy now—just a hint of it, the first promise of more to come. It’s slow, luxurious. He hears it in her voice; and she hears the relief in his.

  “So would you like a story?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  He leans back in his chair, lifts his chin, and taps his lips with his fingertips, thinking. The stories he tells her are old Russian ones, tales so embedded in his childhood he can’t remember learning them—from his mother? A teacher? An old book in the Maryinsky schoolroom? They are like songs; he tells them the same way each time, almost in the same words but not quite: he still hears them in Russian, and translates as he speaks. Witches, forests, horsemen, fools. Beautiful maidens. Talking wolves and roosters. Brave tsarinas. Clever devils whose human victims prove, wryly, to be even cleverer. Soldiers whose mettle is tested through nights full of shrieking demons. Cities turned to stone.

  “One night,” he begins now, “there was a soldier who had too much to drink …”

  “Oh, this one. We had this one last week.”

  “No, this is different soldier. All soldiers are drunk.” He thinks for a moment. “That is why only few die in duels.” He stands up, staggering and reeling. Paces away from her, whirls to face the foot of her bed, points an unsteady finger in her direction, and jerks his arm, miming a pistol shot that even she—drugged, in near darkness—can tell would have missed wildly.

  “Who will I find to be this silly with me when you’re away?” she murmurs, before she can stop herself.

  He sits again and takes hold of her hand for a moment, very lightly, before letting go and folding his arms across his chest. “One night there was a soldier who had too much to drink.”

  She nods. He begins to tell her about the soldier, words she will not remember the next morning. Sleep comes, an abrupt and opaque curtain dropping.

  In the morning, there’s the leave-taking. A lot of bustle, which she hates. Just go. But she keeps her face placid, good-humored; she sits tucked in her wheelchair by the living room windows, where the sun turns the leaves of the plants pale and bright and translucent. He has the passport, the handkerchiefs. His luggage is ready. The parquet creaks under his hurrying feet. He will send her telegrams and letters. “Yes, yes,” she says, grinning at him.

  “And you two will be all right?” he says, meaning her and the cat.

  “We’re planning to get into trouble, preferably involving the police, as soon as you leave.”

  Finally he bends to embrace her, and she lifts her arms to him. They kiss—familiar, fond, nothing more, except she thinks there is a kind of careful brightness between them, an implicit understanding that to regret, or even acknowledge any awareness of, their mutual unerotic kindness would be pointless and unwise. Malcolm has tactfully and unnecessarily left the room. “Bye, cutie,” she says against her husband’s rough warm neck.

  She would never have used a word like that—a condescending endearment, or indeed any endearment—before she got sick.

  2

  Malcolm knows when not to talk. He knows when she’s tired, when bright conversation would evoke from her an automatic, well-mannered, equal, even superior brightness that would ultimately make her even more tired. He knows when solicitude would annoy or sadden her, would hit her as infantilizing. He knows when there is nothing to say. She has never told him that his ability to be silent is one of the things she likes about him, but he knows it is. She can be scorching about some of the other aides-de-carcass (her term): Miss Soap Opera, Fräulein Sacher-Masoch, The Blinding Blond, Chatty Ballet Man (who was fired after saying “Ah, the ballet, the ballet”). The nicknames were sharp but not mean; mostly she liked these people, she was even grateful to them, but she needed to blow off steam. “You know what I call you behind your back?” she asked Malcolm once.

  “What?” He wasn’t alarmed by her question, though it had never occurred to him to wonder about this.

  “Malcolm,” she said. Then she said: “What’s hardest is to be at such close quarters, always. I miss being alone. You make me feel like I’m alone.” She smiled at him. She had a radiant, exciting smile, sophisticated, he thought, mysterious, but also wildly free and childlike—there were more things going on in her face when she smiled than in any other face he’d ever seen—and he had to look away from her in that moment to keep from smothering her with some soulful compliment; he was in danger of turning into Chatty Ballet Man.

  This morning, once her husband has left, Malcolm sees that she wants to be quiet but busy. She wheels her chair into the den to sort through the mail. Malcolm follows. He leans down to put one arm around her shoulders and the other beneath her knees, lifts her briefly out of the chair and onto the narrow, unmade bed, steadies her while he fits a hard cushion into the seat of the wheelchair, then tucks his arm under her knees again and swings her back into the chair. He puts another cushion under her feet. Now she is raised to the right height for working at the desk. She is silent and relaxed, very still, as he accomplishes this operation.

  He would never say aloud (the ghost of Chatty Ballet Man again) that it’s like partnering, but he has thought it, that kind of mute, aloof acceptance of the boy’s support. But it can be messy, awkward, not like partnering at all, her disciplined, carefully placed arms belonging to an entirely different creature from the dangling legs—a greyhound ending in a scarecrow, he has thought. Or: a mermaid stranded on land.

  You could make a ballet about paralysis—her husband did once, years ago, long before she got sick, when she was still almost a child. She danced, ran all over the stage, was stricken, and then sat in a wheelchair. It was a small piece, done for charity, performed once. Years before he knew her, or even came to New York, Malcolm happened to read the review of that ballet, sitting in the periodicals room of the newly integrated but still nerve-racking public library in the Kentucky town where he grew up. He used to go there on Saturdays to read The New York Times—the news but mostly the arts section, the movie and dance reviews—while the two librarians passed by to see how he was doing, the one who ostentatiously smiled to show he was welcome and the one who didn’t. He remembers that review, for some reason; it talked about the beauty of her arms and what she did with her upper body as she sat in the wheelchair. Someone—well, Tim, who is in the company—has told Malcolm her husband can’t bear to remember that he put her in that piece.

  Once she is settled, Malcolm hands her the fine silver knife she uses to slit open the envelopes, positions the wastebasket next to her chair, and goes into the kitchen to get the coffee, which he and she both like to drink all through the morning, very strong, with cream. He carries it in to her on a tray, cup and saucer and a blue-and-white Danish coffeepot, delicate and easy to lift but large so that she’ll be well supplied and won’t have to call for more. Unlike the physical things he does for her body, which are not unmentionable but which go unmentioned—they happen in some different world that contains only facts, necessities, mechanics—this gracefully civilized bit of service evokes her soft, pleasant “Thank you,” and one of those radiant smiles.


  Then—he is stripping the sheets from the bed, she has gone back to the mail—she says, “Oh, God.” She is looking at an envelope. From where Malcolm is standing, a few feet away, he recognizes her husband’s scrawly black handwriting.

  “What?”

  “Wait,” she says. She slices open the envelope, scans the letter and laughs, a small, sour, exasperated sigh of a laugh. She holds the white sheet of stationery out to Malcolm.

  Dear Sweetheart—

  I am in a taxicab going down to the dock, or I am on the dock, or already on the boat as you read this. Crowded, noisy, loud horns, people say good-bye and they love each other. Even though none of this has happened yet, it will, and I will miss you. Be good and careful and eat well, not too much though, and I will come home to you soon.

  Love—

  Malcolm nods, looks at her, and waits. It seems, to him, like a nice letter; but what matters is how it seems to her.

  “What do you think?” she asks, in an overly bright, impatient, baiting voice. She’s smiling. Tell me, she invites. Tell me, and I’ll tell you you’re wrong.

  He shakes his head.

  She laughs and ducks her head, a graceful little bow, acknowledging his prudence. “Well,” she says, “it’s what you do with a child. You write the stack of letters before you go away, and you give them to a family friend to mail. One a day, or every other day; some prearranged schedule. That way, the child thinks you are thinking of her, and you can go off and be out of reach without worrying that she’s feeling neglected.”

  Wouldn’t that be a good thing? he wonders. The notion that someone might take so much trouble to console and please a child is new to him. Best, maybe, to be adored with passion, as a lover; but if you couldn’t have that, then wasn’t the next best thing to be a child beloved enough to inspire such elaborate contrivance?

  “You’re quick,” is what he says. “Right, he must have mailed it several days ago.”

  “I’m crazy, is what you mean. To be already convinced that this is only the first of these letters, that there will be more. As they say in mystery novels.” He must look baffled (he is), because she adds, “In Agatha Christie, whenever a threatening note arrives, someone says, ‘This is only the first.’ ”

  “This is a threatening note?”

  “Malcolm, don’t be stupid.” Her voice is gentle. He sees that she is close to tears. Well, of course she is. Her husband is in love with someone else.

  “Malcolm,” she says, “you’re not the one mailing them, are you? He didn’t give them to you?”

  “No,” he says, startled, truthful.

  “Oh, good. That really would be more than I could stand.” She reaches for his hand and, without looking at him, leans her cheek very briefly against his wrist.

  There’s been a long string of these girls. She was one of them. She had predecessors—some wives, some not—and she’s had successors.

  Sitting here, sorting the bills (her husband used to insist on doing them until she finally told him it was ridiculous, she was sitting around twiddling her thumbs so much that her entire brain felt twiddly, and just give her please the goddamn bills), anticipating lunch, she’s thinking about them, this string of women, and trying to remember how she thought about it all when she was the new one. Not even yet the new one—but the upcoming one, the future one, the one beginning to be singled out. None of it had happened yet, but she could tell that the light was shining on her, flickering sometimes but getting stronger as she got closer to it. All she had to do was walk toward it; and it shone, invitingly, approving of the way she walked.

  She was young and dumb, she thinks now. Ruthless. No, young. Trusting the grown-ups, and he was the leader of the grown-ups. She had not seen anyone acting upset—his wife continued to be as kind as ever—and, not seeing any hurt, it had incredibly not occurred to her that she was part of something hurtful. Everyone seemed to feel Oh, yes, of course; so she felt it too.

  If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else, an older dancer said to her—such a nonchalant blend of malice and reassurance, though at the time she’d missed the malice and had not needed to be reassured.

  Oh, well, if it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else, she has thought in the years since then, telegraphing her thoughts in the general direction of some new ballerina who was bumbling, pale and blank and fluttery, toward that same bright light.

  “Oh, well.” It’s artifice, a performance, whether said of love or illness, before an audience or just to oneself. No one really thinks “Oh, well,” but repeated often enough, rehearsed, it can become admirable, almost believable.

  This time, though, she can’t say it. She’s tried. She’s sent tokens—flowers, joke gifts, once a very old Russian cross—on opening nights. She’s hosted at dinner a couple of times, evenings that were awkward, painful, not because of her husband’s bewitchment but because of the new one’s shyness, which is so extreme that it’s a kind of encapsulation. She’s coined a name for her—he’s always liked young dancers, babies, but this one is even younger: “How goes it with the Infant?” she’s asked her husband sometimes, with a kind of hearty, almost bawdy cheer that made her shudder. “Infant does very well,” he would answer. Look, they can speak of it! They can share a joke!

  Only lately, he hasn’t spoken or joked about it. “How’s the Infant?” “Fine,” he says, vaguely, as if he isn’t quite sure which infant she’s referring to. In the beginning he talked a lot about what the Infant could do—how high, how fast, how bravely. “No fear—none. She’s like cat.” He’s compared other dancers to other things—“She’s like knife, clean, bam!” “She’s like smoke.” “She’s like happy little dog—jumps until you pat on the head”—but of the Infant, now, he’s gotten quieter. It isn’t the silence of having moved on; it’s a different silence, of having moved deeper. He is not making new ballets for anyone else, and he’s casting the Infant in all the old dances, wanting to see what they’ll look like on her. The old dancers are miffed and alarmed and helpless; the young ones cry and try to get thinner. She hears all this, shut up in the apartment. People bring in the gossip along with the books and the flowers. She shrugs. She sees herself shrugging, in the mirror that leans against one of the living room walls, a mirror she uses for physical therapy and otherwise pretty much ignores.

  “Oh, dear,” said one visitor, who’d been fretting about losing her old parts and was suddenly aware of having been thoughtless. “But I guess there are worse things in life.”

  “Yes,” she said, and laughed, “like frozen spinach. Have you ever tasted it? Somehow I never had, but I got curious last week. Oh, just frighteningly awful.” She glanced again at the mirror and saw the two of them laughing, the old chic troubled dancer and herself merrily chortling in her wheelchair, and she felt sick.

  Sometimes she looks at Malcolm, and he kicks people out. “She’s tired,” he says; or he refers to some fictitious imminent appointment. It’s like being a Tudor monarch, irrational and absolute: all she has to do is lift a querulous eyebrow, and he dispatches the offender. (Except Tudor monarchs didn’t have eyebrows: too fair, or maybe they’d plucked them. She’d gone on a reading binge—all the wives. Which sounds pointed—though at least her husband has never resorted to decapitation—but wasn’t, because it was only one of many binges. Russian and French history; Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant; Beverley Nichols and then a slew of gardening histories; Lafcadio Hearn; Denton Welch; murder mysteries; Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil; and a lot more, books brought over from the public library or ordered from London or Paris, many cookbooks, volumes of diaries and letters. All the reading she never did when she was young and just danced: a spotty curriculum entirely based on her own happy, avid whims.)

  But this morning, with the company safely packed onto the boat, there are no worried, exhausting visitors for her to jolly along. There’s the mail, the coffee, the tour of the plants (looking for leaves that might have died since yesterday—there aren’t any�
�and pinching leaves off the geraniums to get the scent), the cat stretched out in a block of sunlight, asleep and grinning, and a Mozart wind serenade on the record player. There’s the bathroom stuff; and a shampoo, a long, perilous procedure in which Malcolm binds her with white cloths, mummylike, to a board that slants up to the kitchen sink. Then there’s lunch, delicious, a salad with tiny potatoes and thin green beans and olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. And olives. And bread, thickly spread with butter. “Oh, Malcolm, thank you.”

  She takes her hair out of rollers and brushes it and looks through a cookbook, thinking about dinner. “Haddock stew?” she says to Malcolm, who is folding laundry. The cat sits up and starts energetically washing a leg. “He heard me. Yes, darling, we’ll slip you something. You won’t starve, I promise.”

  Then more bathroom stuff and she takes a nap while Malcolm goes out to the fish store and the wine store and the A&P. Then they go out together, she wearing sunglasses and wrapped in a plaid blanket (“my neurasthenic Baden-Baden millionaire outfit,” she calls it), and Malcolm pushes her along Riverside Drive, where the wind is cold and the sun breaks the water into tiny blinding smithereens.

  She thinks of the boat sliding out of the river this morning. Out of sight of land now. You walk the deck. You rest. You dress for dinner. You have cocktails. You stand by the railing and look at the stars or down at the long foaming triangle of the wake. Nothing appears to be happening, but you’re moving slowly toward Europe, and the whole time you are feeling that deep vibrating hum of the engine, without being aware that you feel it.

  Malcolm, too, is looking at the river and thinking of the boat.