The News from Spain

by Joan Wickersham

  T

  He sits at the living room table, holding the letter, not needing to reread it, looking at the familiar, loved room. Faded old rugs, the long curved sofa with a button-dimpled back, the old honey-colored chest of drawers that had belonged to Tim’s great-grandmother, the hi-fi cabinet with its shelves of records, the glass-fronted bookcase filled with Tim’s photographs and Malcolm’s books, the blue mat in the corner with the dumbbells lying around. Slowly he allows himself to feel happy. It seems to him a beautiful letter, filled with the things the postcards lacked—well, maybe not filled with them, but unmistakably implying them. He has never been to Europe—never traveled at all, except for his move to New York. (He does wonder, nervously, about their traveling together. How are these things viewed in Europe? But Tim wouldn’t have asked him if it couldn’t be made to work; people check into hotels all the time, friends, rich men with Negro servants, maybe no one thinks anything of it. Tim has traveled a lot; he’ll know how to do it.)

  And the money for the plane ticket. He allows himself to enjoy that too. And it has nothing to do with the money, he tells himself, scrupulously (and not entirely accurately). It’s the feeling of being planned for, sent for.

  There is nothing to be disappointed about.

  He is fixing his lunch, laying slices of bologna on bread, when it occurs to him that he’ll have to ask for leave from work, and that this might be difficult. Not because she would refuse, but because it feels like the wrong time to go away. She is so unhappy now, beneath all the busy, vivid, energetic wit of the cat book. (“Guess what, Malcolm, I’ve figured out his family tree. He can trace his ancestry all the way back to … Catullus!” and then, the next night, “I’ve dropped the Catullus idea—I figured out something better.”) And whenever she gets going, with sly, apparently detached amusement, on the subject of the Infant’s cat, he wants to tell her to stop working so hard. He is glad to see her occupied, but it seems to him that there’s a panicky, confected feeling to the project, that in fact it has the same quality she objected to, and was so hurt by, in that elaborate letter scheme of her husband’s. It’s as if, to guard against being humored in the future, she’s decided to get in there first and humor herself.

  Later, he walks to work in the snappy, deep blue late-winter afternoon, trying to figure out how he might bring up the subject of Europe. He’s just gotten his key into the lock when the door is pulled open by Miss Soap Opera. Her face is somber and thrilled. “Something’s happened.”

  “What?” he asks coolly. Her fervors automatically make him austere.

  “I don’t know what,” she pants. “She made me put her back in the bed; she didn’t want any lunch.”

  “Maybe she’s sick. Did you call the doctor?”

  “She wouldn’t let me. Just wanted to be left alone, she said. I’m really worried. Would you like me to stay?”

  “No, thanks, I’ll be fine,” he says, wondering as he has wondered before if this woman ever does or says anything that is not in character. He waits until she’s actually out of the apartment—she is capable of lurking around, full of sympathy and meaning—before he goes and knocks gently at the bedroom door.

  “Malcolm?”

  The bedside light is on, and there are books scattered on either side of her. She looks fine. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, you mean …” She rolls her eyes at the doorway.

  So does he. “Yeah.”

  “She drove me absolutely bananas today. I just wanted to scream. She’s just this big, damp, hovering, clucking—I don’t know what—giant chicken. Giant hen. I don’t want to be under her wing—ugh, who could breathe under there?”

  He smiles. “But did something happen?”

  She shakes her head. He waits, but she doesn’t say anything.

  He asks what she’d like for dinner. “I was thinking I might make us an omelet.”

  “You go ahead. I’m really not hungry.”

  He should try to get her to eat, especially if she didn’t have lunch. Then he thinks: Wait a minute, she’s a grown woman; if she lived alone she wouldn’t have anybody pestering her to eat. “Would you like your door open or closed?” he asks instead.

  “Open,” she tells him. She likes the feeling that he is nearby, likes hearing the clink of dishes in the kitchen.

  She lies there, staring at the ceiling. She left her husband’s letter in the den after reading it this morning, but she remembers parts of it—they keep jabbing her. It’s a real letter, the first one he’s actually mailed from this trip, postmarked from Segovia two days after the tour ended in Barcelona.

  “Your news from New York is wonderful. Here is ours from Spain,” it said. He passed her request to the Infant—“but now must call Infanta, because in Spain. She will be happy to lend cat for unhappy love affair.”

  She imagines him and the Infant walking the bleached streets of Segovia, or sitting over a bottle of wine in a whitewashed restaurant, laughing and spurring each other into wilder, frothier notions about the cat’s passions. She knows how it feels to walk down a street late at night, stumbling into each other, giddy with laughter.

  “Also has idea that maybe you will put in pictures of dancers dancing with cats—thinks would be very funny, and willing to pose.”

  It went on, exuberant, bubbling over with joy about her book, full of suggestions—with his syntax and his excitement, she couldn’t tell which ideas were his and which the Infant’s. She sees that he is radiant with relief that now there will be a place where the three of them can all exist together. She wishes she’d never dreamed up this book. Or thought it necessary to prove her own sophisticated magnanimity by inviting the Infant inside. She feels as if she’s asked someone into her house who has tracked mud on all the floors and then broken every stick of furniture in the place. It’s an accident, the guest didn’t mean to do it, but there’s the dirt and there are the splinters.

  And there is her husband, mistaking her desperate good manners for a genuine wish that the guest might visit more often—or even move in.

  And there is she herself, standing in the wreckage thinking that the only thing to do now is to put down white carpeting and set out some even more precious, fragile chairs.

  “Just checking to see if you need anything,” Malcolm says from the doorway.

  “I’m fine,” she says.

  • • •

  Clearly she’s not fine. He goes back into the kitchen and absently puts the other half of the omelet—the one he’d hoped she would say she was hungry for, when he looked in on her just now—into the refrigerator and carries his own plate into the living room.

  He eats, reading The New Yorker but not remembering a word of it; he is just a pair of eyes moving down a page. He is imagining Europe, which he finds he can’t do. Museums, buildings, languages, food—what is all that? It’s an expanse, a vista he can feel the magnitude of without seeing clearly what it will be like; something inside him has gotten larger at the thought that he’s going to go there. All he can actually picture, for some reason, are the Impressionist paintings he’s seen in the Metropolitan of café scenes, the women in bustles and feathered hats, the whiskered men in evening clothes. Where would he be, in those paintings?

  He thinks of Tim. The warm thing that he already feels like he’s flying toward.

  I wish he were smarter. I wish he loved me more.

  Those things are true, but they don’t matter. You don’t want to go to someone because of a list—tall, red-gold hair, a kind of careless princely ease in the world—and there is no list that can stop you from wanting to go.

  The apartment is very quiet.

  The apartment is quiet. What is Malcolm doing out there? She wants him with her and she doesn’t want anyone with her. She wants obliteration. She calls out, “Malcolm.” When he comes, she asks him to bring her some brandy.

  On an empty stomach? she hears him thinking. The other aides (not de-carcass anymore, not now, anyway, she’s so tired of her own peppy
humor) would have said it, the Fräulein (no, her real name was Katie) with a quaver; and Betty, with dramatic relish.

  Malcolm goes out and comes back with the drink.

  He’s poured it generously, not wanting to appear to be rationing her. “Would you like a drink too?” she asks. He hesitates for a moment. This has never come up before. He wants to be sharp, to be able to take care of her; but he doesn’t want to seem prudish. And also: he’d like a drink.

  “Bring it in here,” she says. “Come sit for a while. And Malcolm?” she says, and he looks back at her questioningly.

  “There’s a letter on the desk. Can you go in and read it? And then come back, but please don’t say anything about it.”

  When he returns after a few minutes with his own glass of brandy, she looks at his face and then looks away so she won’t start crying.

  After a while she asks for more, and he brings it. Why should she not get drunk if she wants to?

  She asks him to turn out the light. They stay there together without talking. Finally he sees that she is asleep, and he goes to the living room and sits on the couch and falls asleep also. In his sleep he hears her calling his name over and over; and then he is awake and she is still calling him, screaming his name.

  He runs into the bedroom, flipping on the overhead light so that the room is suddenly, starkly illuminated, the whole scene.

  She is sobbing, he has never seen her cry before. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he says, already pulling the covers off the bed, running to the bathroom to fill a basin with warm water and grab some washcloths. The sound of her crying pierces him like nothing ever has; his hands are shaking as he cleans her; his voice shakes as he tells her again and again that it’s all right.

  “I’m so ashamed,” she manages to say at one point.

  “It’s not your fault, it was the brandy on an empty stomach, it could happen to anyone,” he says, and she cries:

  “No, I don’t mean this,” waving a hand to encompass the mess.

  “All right, all right, all right,” he continues to murmur.

  He leaves her once he’s cleaned her up, to run into the bathroom and set up the contraption so that he can rinse her. But when he wraps her in a clean sheet and carries her in there and she sees it, she starts to cry again. “No, please, no.” She is shivering.

  “All right,” he says again. He carries her out of the bathroom and lays her gently on the floor of the hallway, with a folded towel under her head.

  Lying there, she watches him leaning over the tub, detaching the hose from the tap and then lifting the contraption and folding it. The door half shuts while he replaces it on the hook where it lives, and then the door swings inward, opening again, so that she can see him going over to the tub and turning on the water. A bath—is he going to give her a bath? She hasn’t had one for years. They tried it a few times, in the early days, her husband and an aide; but the tub is surrounded by tiled walls on three sides and there is no way for someone kneeling beside it to keep her neck and shoulders from sliding under without putting her in a stranglehold. After a few attempts that left her with bruises, the idea was abandoned; and as with all these failed experiments, she hasn’t wasted time on regrets.

  But hearing the hot water thundering into the tub, seeing the steam rise, she is suddenly filled with longing. She wonders how Malcolm will manage it, while knowing that he will. He’s sitting on the edge of the tub, with his hand under the running water, as if testing the temperature, and his body twisted away from her. She can’t see his face. After a while he stands up. She watches as he takes off his shirt and steps out of his trousers. He leaves on his briefs. She looks at his body, which is tall and very beautiful, as beautiful as the body of any dancer. He is neither looking at her nor looking away.

  He is very calm, not worrying about any of this even though it is so far outside anything he has ever done. He knows it will be all right. When the tub is full he turns off the water and then goes to her and leans down to unwrap the sheet. He carries her to the tub and steps in. He lowers himself, still holding her crosswise, and then turns her so that she’s lying on her back on top of him, her body resting along the length of his. He has his arm across her chest, supporting her; his hand is just beneath her right breast, which looks very white around the nipple’s pink bloom. He has never looked at her body in this way—it’s the thing he takes care of, and anyway, he wouldn’t—but lying here beneath her, he feels himself getting hard. It doesn’t matter, she can’t feel it so it won’t scare her; and it doesn’t scare him. They rest together in the hot green water.

  • • •

  There’s the warmth of the water—acutely lovely where it envelops her upper body; but also, surprisingly, something she can feel in her legs, without having any other sensation there. There’s the weightlessness. There is the warm, prickly, solid support of Malcolm’s body against her upper back and shoulders. There’s his brown arm lying across her whiteness, his hand near her breast: the assurance and gentleness of it. There’s his chin resting lightly on the top of her head. There’s the sight of their bodies in the shimmering water, her own nakedness stretched out so lightly along his. She has not felt like this in a long time; and some of it is new to her, tonight.

  After a while she asks him if he’d like to hear a story.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “This is one my husband tells. I think it’s my favorite,” she says; and it seems normal and relaxed, too, that she should speak of her husband.

  Once, she begins, there was a fisherman who lived by the River Volkov. There were many pretty girls in his town, but none so beautiful as his lovely little river. At night the fisherman sat on the bank and played his mandolin and sang love songs to the river.

  One night, when he’d had too much to drink, he fell asleep for a little while, and when he woke in the moonlight he saw a great blue-green head rising out of the river: the Tsar of the Waters. The tsar said, “My daughters and I have enjoyed your singing. Will you promise to come and visit us someday?”

  “I promise,” said the fisherman.

  “I would like to give you a present,” said the tsar. “When I am gone, cast your net into the river.”

  The tsar’s head sank beneath the surface, and the fisherman threw in his net and felt it grow heavy. He pulled it out and there was a chest, and when he opened it he saw that the chest was full of jewels.

  He sold some jewels and became rich, but still in the evenings he would sit on the bank and sing his love songs, and sometimes he would throw a bracelet or necklace into the river, because it was so beautiful.

  Then he went traveling. He was on a ship, and suddenly, in the middle of the ocean, the ship stopped and would not move. “It’s the Tsar of the Waters,” the sailors said. “There must be someone on this ship he wants.” So they all drew straws, and the fisherman got the short straw and remembered his promise. “That’s right, the Tsar of the Waters does want me,” he said, and he jumped over the side of the ship; and right away the ship began to move again.

  The fisherman sank down, down, to the bottom of the ocean, until he came to the door of the tsar’s palace. “What took you so long?” the tsar asked him. “I got tired of waiting, so finally I had to send for you.”

  They ate and drank, and then the tsar said, “I would like you to marry one of my daughters.” And he brought his daughters before the fisherman, and each was lovelier than the one before; but still, the fisherman thought that none was as pretty as his little river. But then the youngest daughter came, and the fisherman cried out: “This girl is as beautiful as my River Volkov.”

  And the tsar said, “That’s funny, her name is Volkov.”

  The fisherman saw that she was wearing a necklace and bracelet, and they were some of the jewels he had thrown into the river.

  And so they were married, and they went to her room together and were very happy. Before they slept, she said, “Will you always sit beside me at night and sing to me?�
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  And he said, “I promise.”

  And they fell asleep. In the night, his foot touched the foot of his bride, and it was so cold he woke up. The moon was shining, and he saw that he was lying on the ground, and one of his bare feet had slipped into the cold River Volkov, and he knew that he was still poor.

  When she finishes, they lie there quietly for a moment. Then Malcolm lifts his leg so that his foot touches one of hers. She can’t feel it, but she sees it. She smiles and turns in his arms and she kisses him, not lingeringly but not briefly either. His hand moves, and for a moment her breast is resting in his palm. Then she turns her head away from him and closes her eyes, and he puts his hand back where it was, and they lie without moving until the water starts to cool.

  Getting out is not as elegant as getting in. He’s afraid of her wet body slipping out of his wet hands, so he drains the tub and they both get very cold waiting for it to empty, and then he has to squirm out from beneath her without letting her heels and buttocks bang down on the hard porcelain. His soggy briefs sag ridiculously as he drips all over the bathroom floor getting towels, and he wraps her up and puts her back on the hallway floor while he dries himself and grabs some spare clothing he keeps on the top shelf of the linen closet (but no underwear—the need for dry underwear at work has never arisen before). By the time he has remade her bed and come back to collect her, she is shivering on the floor.

  And even once she is back in bed again, with Malcolm sitting in the tweed armchair beside her, it takes a long time for her to get warm.