The News from Spain
Driving to the interview, the biographer got lost. His wife, in the passenger seat, squinted at the piece of paper on which he’d scribbled the directions the day before. “Turn left at the Mobil station. Did you do that already?”
“Liza,” he said, “do you see any Mobil stations out here?”
They were driving through a neighborhood of enormous houses set behind enormous fences.
“I’m just trying to—”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
It was February, but there was no snow on the ground. Maybe it didn’t snow much here, out by the ocean. They wouldn’t have known. They’d flown in the day before from L.A., which is where he—his name was Charlie—had lived all his life. Liza was from the Northeast, but inland: a small college town in Vermont.
They were on their way to see a woman named Alice Carlisle (at least that’s what Charlie thought her name was; later she would correct him), who had been married to the race-car driver Denis Carlisle in the early 1960s. There had been a group of four drivers—The Four, the press had called them—who were always lumped together, written about together. They’d trained together, partied together, raced together. They’d had looks, brains, nerve, and an almost unearthly casual glamour: it was hard to believe, looking at the photographs, that there had ever been any real people who looked like this, much less the coincidence of four of them together in the same sport at the same time. Charlie, who was working on a group biography, had already interviewed the two who were still alive. One lived not far from him, in Orange County; and the other, who’d been hit by a car about ten years ago and lost part of his leg—how weird, to survive all those race tracks intact and then get slammed returning a video to Blockbuster—was now in an assisted-living place near Las Vegas.
Charlie had found Alice thanks to something that at first seemed terrible: a magazine article by another writer about Giles McClintock, one of The Four. The article was called “The Countess and the Race-Car Driver.” Liza had seen the title on the magazine cover at the supermarket, and looked inside to see who the race-car driver was. Charlie would not have needed to look; he was aware that Giles had had an affair with an earl’s wife that had gone on for a year or two and ended shortly after the death of the earl in mysterious circumstances. He had asked Giles about it, dutifully but queasily, in the residents’ lounge at the assisted-living place in Nevada; Giles had said, “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe all you guys are still asking about that. For the millionth time: no fucking comment.” Which had made Charlie drop the subject, and which should, he said to Liza after she brought the magazine home, have been a tip-off that another writer was working on The Four.
Charlie had skimmed the article saying, “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Liza had tried to be comforting—“He might not be working on a book, and even if he is, it’ll be different from your book”—and kept him company while he drank almost an entire bottle of pinot noir.
She was twenty-four, eight years younger than Charlie. The difference in their ages was starting to seem smaller to her than it had at first, when she’d been a student in his intro-to-journalism course and she had liked him for taking himself—and her—seriously.
Charlie had ended up getting in touch with the other writer; he couldn’t stand waiting, not knowing, while that other book might be ticking somewhere like a bomb. But the other book was not about The Four—it was about scandals. In the course of the conversation, the writer had given Charlie some leads he’d gathered while researching the countess story. Among them was Alice’s phone number.
So here they were, in a white rental car that had Iowa plates, though they’d picked it up at the airport in Boston this morning after spending the night at a hotel near the runways. Liza had left the curtains open and lain on her side in the enormous bed late, awake (still on California time), while Charlie slept next to her. On her other side, nestled loosely in the curve of Liza’s body, the baby had sat up, solemnly shredding Kleenex. “Another airplane,” Liza had whispered to her, every time one took off or landed.
Liza glanced back now at the baby, asleep in her car seat, her head slumped on her shoulder. “She’s going to be hungry when she wakes up.”
“So then you’ll feed her,” Charlie said. Then, “Sorry, Liza, I just can’t seem to find my way back to the main road—”
“I know.” What she knew was that he hadn’t really wanted to bring her and the baby along on this interview. He was worrying that they would make him look unprofessional, encumbered. Liza hadn’t planned on it either. In fact, she had imagined spending the day in Boston, silently, in the aquarium, pushing the stroller up the ramp that spiraled around the big central tank, showing the baby the penguins and the sea lion show. But when Charlie had mentioned to Alice on the phone yesterday that he was traveling with his wife and daughter, Alice had said to bring them along, she would give them all lunch. Liza, changing a diaper on the desk in their hotel room, heard his side of the phone call, his hearty “yes”; and then she’d seen the look of dismay, anger almost, that lingered on his face when he’d hung up the phone, because “yes” had been the only answer he’d been able to come up with.
Early that morning Alice had taken the dogs for a walk on the beach. This was part of her job, but Marjorie had come with her. Marjorie often delegated something to Alice and then did it along with her, partly because she never quite trusted anyone else to do a task, however minor, as competently as she would have done it herself, and partly because they liked each other. (Which didn’t mean that there weren’t things—quite a lot of things—that annoyed each of them about the other.)
They walked fast, the dogs running ahead and then coming back to circle them, while the cold winter sunrise went on over the ocean. They talked, about a party Marjorie and Arch had been to the night before, about wanting to lose weight, about a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe they had both been reading. Marjorie had almost finished it; Alice said, “Well, I’m still in her early thwarted lonely years, but it’s hard for me to feel the anguish since I know how it all turns out.”
“Yes, we do know that, don’t we?” Marjorie said, laughing. “We do know how it all turns out.” She often laughed too hard about some little shared observation, Alice had noticed, as if the sharing were a strange, rare thing that, once arrived at, had to be lingered over, a truce, before Marjorie wandered back into her own lonely, exacting, impatient span of territory.
“Would you be able to stop by the library today?” Marjorie asked. “They called yesterday to tell me my books are in, the Edith Wharton I ordered from the main branch, and the new Anne Tyler.”
“Oh, Edith Wharton, I love Edith Wharton,” Alice said. (She had noticed that she tended to gush whenever she was preparing to disappoint or cross Marjorie.) “But actually, today might not be the best day for that. Unless they’re open late?”
Marjorie was annoyed, as Alice had known she would be. She liked to request things in a voice of extreme graciousness, and if she found she couldn’t get what she wanted (which did not happen very often), part of her annoyance came from having her graciousness exposed as a mere mannerism.
“Thursday is the late night,” she told Alice. “You know they close at three all winter. It really is a little inconvenient for me not to have those books today, and I’m not planning to be anywhere near the library or I’d pick them up myself. Are you sure you couldn’t manage to find the time?”
Here was where Alice’s job was confusing. She was given a studio apartment and a salary—not as big as it would have been without the apartment, but generous nonetheless—and in exchange she walked the dogs, took the cars to be washed, and when Marjorie and Arch were away (they traveled a lot), collected mail, watered plants, and let piano tuners and upholsterers into and out of the house. Alice was supposed to jump when Marjorie said “jump”—but it was confusing because they were sort of friends, and because Marjorie didn’t think she ever said “ju
mp.”
On the whole, though, Alice felt she owed them a lot more than they owed her. Certainly they needed someone like her, a trustworthy errand runner and occasional caretaker. But they could manage without her—they would simply find someone else. Whereas she, without them, would be broke and alone.
She had met them eight years earlier, one night at a country club. They belonged to it; Alice was there as the guest of an old friend, a widow, whose husband had once directed Alice in a play in London. It was close to Christmas, and the club had been particularly festive—there had been an oyster bar, and a martini fountain, and an air, Alice thought, of tired, concocted opulence, as if the club had done this sort of thing so many times that it was sick of itself, going through the motions. Still, she enjoyed the whole thing—oysters, candlelight, the smell of balsam, men in black tie. She’d been flirting lightly with a quite attractive man when she’d noticed a tall woman in a dark red tunic with a million pleats coming toward them. Oh, Alice had thought, the wife. But then the three of them had ended up having a giddy, nutty conversation—afterward she couldn’t remember the content (probably there hadn’t been much), just the champagne-like fizz of it. They’d asked Alice and her friend to join them at dinner. Then they had invited Alice to the next few parties they’d thrown—they lived in one of the greatest of the great houses along the water—and then Alice and Marjorie had lunch together a few times.
Alice had been working as a bank teller then, which she’d started when she got out of real estate (before that she’d been a decorator, and before that an actress). She was coming up to the age for mandatory retirement, and trying not to think too much about what would come next. Something would turn up, she had to believe. What had turned up was that Marjorie, who drank at these lunches, said emphatically that this was perfect, Alice must come to her and Arch; they needed someone to look after them. A grown-up, said Marjorie, someone with imagination and a life of her own, not some stupid kid who would need to be told all the time what to do. Alice, who didn’t drink at all anymore but got a lot of vicarious, nostalgic pleasure from watching other people do it, was touched by Marjorie, who had up until now merely amused her. “I will come,” she had said, “and I will tell you right now, though I bet you won’t want to hear it, that your grace and tact are just extraordinary.”
So Alice had this perplexing, nuanced job, which had saved her life and which made saying even a rare “No” to Marjorie somewhat complicated and difficult. Alice thought it was a bit like a pinball machine, the “No” a little silver ball that you shot off as strategically as you could, but always with a sense of randomness, and then you stood and watched it ricocheting and bouncing off a series of moods and obligations and generous acts and small stored resentments and moments of gratitude and ingratitude, wondering curiously where it would come out. It might help to send another silver ball after it, to careen around and run into it, perhaps altering its course: an explanation.
“It’s just that I have these young people coming to spend the day,” she told Marjorie. “A writer, in fact. He’s working on something about Denis.”
“Oh, how exciting,” Marjorie said, vexation apparently forgotten. “Now, is this the same one who was here—let’s see, was it two years ago? Three?”
“No, that was a screenwriter,” Alice said.
“And did anything ever happen about that? Do you hear from him?”
“He sent me a couple of Christmas cards, but not this past year. No, I’m sure I would have heard if a movie had actually been made.”
“Yes, we’d probably notice that, wouldn’t we?” Marjorie said, laughing. “We’d notice if we were at the movies and it was the story of Alice. I think we’d notice.”
As they came up from the beach, with the inexhaustible dogs streaking ahead of them down the length of the pergola, webbed with winter-bare rose canes, Alice told Marjorie that she always felt a little peculiar when these writers showed up, because the truth was she didn’t really remember all that much. “I don’t mean that my memory’s going. It’s not about going gaga.”
Marjorie frowned; this was not the kind of thing you said to her. Too personal, too confessional. Alice would have liked her just to nod, but Marjorie said briskly, “Well, I’m sure it will be fine. You remember plenty, I’m sure. And certainly, you’re doing him a favor just to spend the time with him. He should be grateful for that. I certainly hope he thanks you. I certainly hope he knows to be grateful.”
By the time they reached the kitchen door, Marjorie had grown even more indignant about the writer’s anticipated ingratitude. It was her way, Alice thought, of offering solidarity: she didn’t quite understand what she had been asked to give, but she knew she’d been asked to give something, and this at least felt like impassioned reciprocation. Marjorie interrupted herself, bending with a towel to dry one dog and tossing a towel for Alice to use on the other one, to ask if Alice needed anything to round out lunch. “I have some crab cakes in the freezer, I think; and there’s a lot of that chicken left from the party the other night … No? Some soup?”
Alice said thanks, it was very nice of Marjorie (it was), but she was all set.
Charlie and Liza were almost an hour late, and were cowed by the sight of the house. “Oh, my God,” Charlie said.
“It’s like Gatsby,” Liza said.
“I don’t even know where to pull up. Which door, do you think?”
Alice, though, seemed to have been watching for them; she flew out to the car and was saying, “Welcome! Welcome!” before they’d even had a chance to climb out, looking somewhat dazedly around them. She had tousled hair, cut quite short, which was either dyed blond or else had turned the kind of white that is closer to yellow. Very blue narrow eyes, behind gold-rimmed glasses. A soft, drooping, nearly unwrinkled face. Red sweater, loose jeans. Her voice was a little hoarse. She had a wonderful smile.
“And who is this?” she was saying, bending to look into the backseat while Liza unclipped the straps of the car seat.
“This is Veronica,” Liza said.
“Veronica!” Alice said to the baby, as Liza drew her out of the car. She’d woken up about fifteen minutes ago and, surprisingly, had not yet cried to be fed. “Your name is Veronica? Such a big name for such a little person.” Alice was holding out her arms, glancing at Liza: “Will she let me?”
“Let’s see,” Liza said, handing over the baby.
“Veronica,” Alice said softly, looking into the baby’s face. “I think you may be the first Veronica I’ve ever met. What do you think? Have you encountered many other Veronicas?” Veronica looked back at Alice with her usual mild gravity. Alice laughed. “Ah. She’s considering the question.”
Still carrying Veronica, she led Liza and Charlie to a door at the far end of the house where it angled and joined with a row of large, old-fashioned garage doors, and then up a narrow stairway to another door. “Here we are!”
It was a big, cream-colored room, with a row of windows at the back. A worn couch and chairs on a balding Persian rug. A couple of low white bookcases. A galley kitchen against one wall; a single bed, covered with a tan comforter, on the other.
Liza went to the windows and saw hedges wrapped in burlap, long beds covered with hay, brown-yellow grass, more garden beyond, big cold gray sky, and, from the last window, a small slice of dark gray ocean. Charlie saw that he was going to have to find a tactful way to ask Alice about her position in this household; clearly she was not, as he had imagined when they first drove up, the wife of a billionaire. Although: Was her current situation really relevant to his project? Was he going to introduce himself, and today, into the book? I finally found Alice in a one-room garage apartment attached to a fabulously grand house? Or was he just going to write straight history—In 1958 (or whenever it was) Denis Carlisle met a young woman named Alice at (wherever they had met)—objectively planting Alice in the part of her past that mattered to the book and leaving her there?
Alice made coffee, and
Charlie pulled out his notebook (he hated to use a tape recorder: not the process of using it but the dullness of the transcript afterward. He felt that sending tapes out to be transcribed was like sending a suit out to be cleaned and having it run over by a steam roller instead—it came back so flattened that it was unrecognizable. For him, reading transcripts of his own interviews was the opposite of verification; a transcript made him doubt what he knew he’d heard).
They sat on the couch and began with the basics: Where were you born? What did your parents do? How many brothers and sisters? Alice answered with an air of eager cooperation that Charlie hadn’t seen in any of the other people he’d interviewed. Some had been grumpy and impatient (Giles), some straightforwardly factual, or wistful, or thoughtful and almost dreamy, finding that the interview process took them back to things they hadn’t thought about in years. But he’d never seen anybody lay herself bare as—as cheerfully, he would later say to Liza.
(But that would come later, in the car, driving to Vermont, that debriefing with Liza. Checking in with her—You were there, what did you think?—which would feel satisfying to Charlie in some ways, and not in others. You were right there, Liza—why are you acting as though you weren’t?)
Right now, jotting down preliminary facts about Alice, he was faintly annoyed that Liza was there, and a little embarrassed at being his professional (serious, earnest, slightly full of shit) self in front of her. She sat nursing Veronica in one of the chairs, her knees practically touching the arm of the couch where he and Alice sat. He was listening to Alice, nodding, writing things down—but he kept seeing Liza there, without actually quite looking at her, and he kept thinking, Could you at least go over and sit on the bed? (But Alice had, quite deliberately, placed her in the chair, saying it was the most comfortable place to sit.)
Liza knew how he was feeling, and was trying not to let it faze her. If there had been another room to go into, she would have gone into it, but there wasn’t. She was feeling peaceful—relatively peaceful, anyway—sitting there in the sun, with the baby’s hand gently kneading the skin just above her breast. Veronica, fresh from her nap, drank but looked around curiously, aware of being in a new place. She had fine dark curls that weren’t even quite curls yet, more like half curls; they always seemed optimistic to Liza, and, combined with Veronica’s grave demeanor, they could make her want to cry.
The News from Spain Page 11
