We felt better after that night. The work was performed again, and its greatness was gradually admitted.
One more brief addition, before I end. A story went around that someone had asked Mozart how he intended to refute his detractors.
“I will refute them with new works,” he said.
It was a confident, valiant thing for him to say, everyone thought. I thought so too, when I invented the story; and I still believe it today.
9
When Elvira dies, in her early sixties of a heart attack, she will leave her house and her money to her brothers, and all the contents of her studio to Rosina.
It will be almost a year before Rosina can make herself go out there, and then only because one of the brothers calls to say the family is trying to get the place ready to sell. She knows by now that grief is mostly endurance, understanding over and over that the person you loved is not coming back. The drive itself smites her: the dull, flat landscape around the highway, the orchards, the two falling-down farmhouses with trees growing in the middle of them, the village—passing these things that used to mean she was getting closer to Elvira, all the landmarks, not remembered for so long but now seen again and remembered perfectly.
She cries in the car, and dreads driving up to the house itself; but by the time she arrives she is calmer. No one is there. It’s a strange, sultry afternoon in August: the sky a molten pewter, and the light is white, fierce, burning. The silence, too, is immense. She walks through the high grass—nothing tragic here, it was that way when Elvira was alive; she never cared about cutting it—to the barn and opens the padlock with the key that came in the mail from Elvira’s lawyer.
She knows the inside of Elvira’s house by heart. The smoke-blackened wall above the living room fireplace, the kitchen with its sagging cupboard doors, the toppling piles of frayed towels in the linen closet, and the fresh smell of the sheets on the small bed in the guest room and on Elvira’s wide bed, where they sometimes spent nights talking in the darkness until they both fell asleep. Rosina was never sure what that meant to Elvira, whose feelings for her might have had a romantic piece. If it was true, she was pretty sure there hadn’t been any suffering involved, though she also knew that believing this was easier than admitting the possibility of anything different.
Yet with all the time she spent in the house, she’s been in the studio only once, early in the friendship. When she flips on the lights that August afternoon, she will see a vast, whitewashed, raftered space, crammed with stuff, neither neat nor messy, just occupied-looking. This will choke her again, sting her eyes. It looks just like what it is: a workroom someone walked out of one afternoon, expecting to be back the next morning. Magazines lying open, pens uncapped, a mug with a tea bag trailing out of it, an address book, a crumpled tissue. There is a painting on the easel, and next to it a table jumbled with paints. Crusted brushes in a crusted glass. The canvas is a small one, about seven inches square: a woman’s face. A direct gaze, hair pulled back but with pieces coming loose around the face, a funny asymmetrical half smile, lips slightly parted. Impossible to tell her age: Elvira hadn’t painted her skin yet. Rosina will be surprised to find this picture. She had thought, from the way Elvira had told her the story of that disastrous show, that she’d stopped doing these paintings of women.
But what she finds next surprises her even more. Dozens of these small portraits, hundreds of them, stacked in the plywood shelving that fills the old horse stalls. The big paintings of buildings are here, but most of what’s here are these women, painted steadily and in utter privacy, apparently for years.
So now there will be years of trying to get these pictures shown. Arranging to have them photographed. Cataloging them. Creating a binder. Writing a description of the show. Naming it: in the end Rosina decides on “1172 Women,” which, astonishingly, is how many there are, and she feels strongly that they all need to be seen together, at least to begin with. What was wrong with Elvira’s earlier show, she decides—aside from the fact that the critic was an asshole—was that there weren’t enough pictures shown. The paintings are individually lovely; but it’s the quantity that is crazily beautiful, the dogged, obsessive, insatiable, repetitive power of face after face after face.
Nobody wants it. Nobody has room for it. Finally there’s a happy, or happy enough, ending. A woman Rosina sits next to at an opera fund-raising lunch mentions that she has a friend who directs a museum at a college in Texas. Rosina mentions the pictures, the woman offers an introduction to her friend, and eventually the paintings travel (Rosina charters the plane), are shown, are reviewed and praised. Then they travel back, and Rosina puts them into storage. She will keep trying to find them a permanent home.
But before any of that happens, Elvira’s house will be sold and the studio emptied. There are a few boxes piled against one wall: books, old sketchbooks, Christmas ornaments. And one box—just a regular brown cardboard box like the others, but this one taped shut—with a piece of paper taped on top of it. A note:
Rosina—This is the box I was talking about that night at the Cristinos’ dinner party. E.
Rosina will take this box home with her (the rest go into storage for now), and will consider for some weeks what to do with it. She will think of opening it. She will think of keeping it and never opening it. She will not remember Elvira’s exact words, but she knows it was something about how the box needed to take its chances, that it needed to go to someone who would do something unforeseen with it. She will remember Elvira talking about happiness, about the times of her life when she was most happy.
Rosina will take a piece of paper and think about what to write on it. Voi che sapete. Voi sapete.
Then she’ll decide the hell with it, and she will send the box, with no note, off to what seemed to be the latest in the long string of addresses Elvira had written down for Johnny.
The News from Spain
Some of this is fiction, and some isn’t.
At the age of almost sixty, I fell in love with a man who wasn’t my husband. And I loved my husband very much. We were in a long, happy marriage, had raised three children, still wanted each other (we would leave work and meet at home sometimes, at lunch). Enough context—more would begin to sound self-righteous. I fell in love with someone else.
Nothing happened. I was married; he was married. We worked together. I could say that we were lawyers, or doctors who shared a suite of offices, or that we had adjacent chairs in the string section of an orchestra, or that he was a painter and I ran the gallery, or that I was the painter. But any of that would be an invention, and that’s not the kind of fiction I’m interested in. What I will say is that we worked together closely for many years, and the work was something that mattered to both of us. It wasn’t as if I got a crush on my squash partner, and could then prudently decide to play squash less often or find a different person to play with. Each of us had strong reasons to stay there, to keep seeing each other, even after our feelings—mine, anyway; I was never quite sure how he felt—made themselves known.
Such coy, evasive, passive, pseudo-Victorian syntax! “Made themselves known”—as if these feelings had their own lives apart from us, their own dilemmas about how to behave. Should they continue to shuffle around quietly, wearing slippers, in order not to disturb us; or should they stand in the doorway and clear their throats until we had to look up and acknowledge their presence?
My feelings were quiet for a long time. I didn’t even know they were there. There was no instant attraction. For several years I liked this man, admired him, respected him, trusted him. He paid attention to whatever he was doing, and he was kind, but rigorous too. I liked where his tolerances and intolerances fell. I thought his jokes were funny.
Then I realized I had started to look at the floor whenever there was a silence between us; I had trouble looking directly at him. I imagined us cooking together: an excellent omelet. I imagined him kissing me; imagined us in bed. When I went to a concert or a museum, I im
agined running into him, or going there with him, listening to his smart comments—imagining this while in reality I was there with my husband, listening to his smart comments.
Was I alone in feeling as I did? This, always, was the question. If the man, my colleague, had given me any of the usual small signals of seduction—sizzly glances, accidental brushings against—I would have recoiled, and the attraction would have ended right then. But he was correct. Warm, though. Very warm. The way he looked at me, some things he said. I was going away alone on a trip, and he said, not once but twice, “I wish I could go with you.” And there were other things, occasional remarks that lit me up and made me wonder.
My feelings—let’s hold on to this idea of them as shuffling Victorians, let’s make them servants, an entire uniformed household staff—were fresh, raw, perpetually startled. They weren’t sensible. But they behaved themselves for a while. They were frank, earthy even, among themselves; but they were discreet. They kept their mouths shut and their faces neutral. They never did anything to embarrass me or give me away. They had been trained; as long as they stayed in their own part of the house and I paid their wages—a ridiculously small sum, but they didn’t know any better, so I could get away with it—we did well enough together. They were invisible, I wasn’t even required to know their names. I underestimated their docility and overestimated my own power, and, like all fables about arrogance, this one turned menacing.
My feelings started to become unruly. Maybe they read something that stirred them up (a revolutionary pamphlet, handed to them on a street corner as they strolled past on their afternoon out), or maybe they just grumbled a lot and egged one another on, nursing the teapot in the servants’ dining room. They came to me and said, in a tone that was not insolent but not entirely respectful either, that they wanted more.
You will be noticing, about now, that these servants are something of a threat not only to my peace of mind but to this story. Dangerous as prospective household mutineers, they are more dangerous as a metaphor. Here, too, they want to take over. Now that they’ve intruded, it’s tempting to stay with them, this charming, scoundrelly bunch of domestic malcontents, to name them and give them rooms in the attic and possessions and mothers and sweethearts. I could keep writing about them, and allow myself to be distracted—rescued—from the hard thing I meant to write about. So I am ordering them back to the kitchen. They shuffle down the corridor and through the baize door, obedient for now, but there may be trouble later. There’s trouble already. I want them shut away but I heard what they said: they wanted more.
I needed to tell the man how I felt about him. I needed it for a long time—months—without doing anything about it. But then I couldn’t stand not to anymore. I know: bad idea. Naming something makes it real, unignorable, gives it power. (So, too, does refusing to name something. I don’t want to give this man a fictional name—Pete, Edward, and see? He is instantly diminished—so I’ll just call him A. It shrinks him a little, but he’s mostly intact, and it’s better than the self-importantly secretive and clumsy “this man.”) I needed to tell A how I felt. We were sitting together in his office one afternoon, working, with the door shut. I told him that I loved him.
He looked at me.
What had I wanted? Not for him to get up and cross the room and take me in his arms. But to see things in his face. Joy. Love that matched mine. Relief that I’d said it out loud for both of us.
But what I saw in his face was nothing. Blankness—as when you mistakenly think you recognize someone on the street and you smile and wave and the person looks back at you: Huh?
The silence went on. We stared at each other. Finally I said I was sorry.
“No, no, no, no,” he said. His face had unfrozen. There was an expression on it: his forehead was creased; he looked troubled, dismayed. “Please don’t.”
Don’t what—love you? Say it aloud? Apologize? It was too late; I had already done all three. And the excruciating politeness of that “please”! We continued to sit there.
“I’m sorry,” I said again; and he said again—although this time at least he omitted the courtesy—“Don’t.”
Somehow I got out of there. I had work to do, he had work to do. My daughter was expecting her first baby and I was taking her shopping, to some store out by the malls. She was much bigger than she’d been when I’d seen her last. Her hem was uneven: high in the front and drooping in the back. She was wearing low, old shoes. I wanted to hug her, for that hem and those shoes. We looked at the crib she’d seen before and thought she liked, and then we walked up and down several other rows of cribs. “I hate them all,” she said. She looked at me and she was starting to cry. “Why do they make this stuff so ugly?”
I put my arm around her.
“Will I still be the same?” she asked. “Do things ever go back to how they were?”
“No,” I said.
I bought her all the stuff—the crib, the changing table, the stroller. We had tea. I heard everything she said. Things felt clearer and more vivid than they usually did, as if I’d been purged somehow by my humiliating afternoon with A. I wasn’t thinking about it or remembering it, but it was there, hurting in the distance. Once, in high school, I sprained my ankle during a dance in the first act of Guys and Dolls. It hurt, but the pain also waited for me: it agreed to let me get through the rest of the show before it said, “Now.”
This pain, the pain about A, hit me, unsurprisingly, later that night, when I was in bed next to my husband. I had been lying there with a book, my eyes moving over the lines of type, not reading. I was aware suddenly of my husband’s stillness, and aware also that he’d been still for a while. I looked over and saw that he’d fallen asleep. His book was on his chest; it had shut itself around his hand. He was still wearing his glasses. I got out of bed and went around to his side, took the book and the glasses, turned out the light. I touched him lightly on the shoulder, and without waking he slid down in the bed so that he was lying flat.
I stood looking down at his sleeping face. He would not have told another woman “I love you.” If he knew I had said it to A, he would have been terribly hurt. He wouldn’t have understood it. But he would have forgiven me. He would have trusted me not to—not to what? Not to sleep with A? There was no question of sleeping with A—I knew that, and my husband would have known that. My husband would have trusted me not to go any further than I had, not to do anything worse than confess my feelings to A. He would have trusted me not to sit there with A exchanging longing looks, and having brave trembling conversations about love and desire and frustration and honor, and sighing together, “If only …” Having romantic feelings was one thing; conducting a romance, even an unconsummated one, was another. The line was there. I saw it and would not have crossed it. Good. Right. Got it.
Yet I had crossed a line when I told A I loved him. And I wanted those things that lay across the line—those trashy shameful taboo things: sighs, confessions, endearments, eloquently articulated longings. Or rather I wanted agreement from A that these things could have happened. I did not need to play them out, or even to soulfully renounce them—I just needed him to say, “Yes. You’re right. There’s something here, and I see it too.” I had thought I’d needed it, anyway. Now I thought I’d be happy if we could just forget I’d ever opened my mouth.
I went downstairs and got out the bottle of cognac and poured myself a glass. (All the thick wadding of years of heedless domesticity: my husband’s cognac; the cut-glass tumbler part of a set my children and I found one long-ago summer at a Rhode Island flea market where we also bought my son a box of lead Napoleonic soldiers; my slippers a gift from my mother-in-law.) I sat in the dark living room with my legs tucked under me.
I can’t describe how I felt then, except to say that I needed to make myself very drunk. My feelings were rioting, they’d become an angry mob, they’d pulled out all the knives and come pounding through the house looking for me.
I do remember thinking, with
that clarity you can sometimes feel when getting drunk, that when A said “Please don’t”—oh, God, the memory of his creased white face!—what he meant was don’t talk about it. Don’t make it explicit, you’ll kill it. Whether or not he had loved me before—and it seemed to me, now, that he had, quietly and steadily, in exactly the way I would have wanted him to—he certainly wouldn’t from now on. By speaking, I had turned myself into a problem.
And I remember wondering—and drinking more, this was when I tipped over into oblivion—what A was doing right then: sleeping with his arms wrapped around his sleeping wife; awake and working, not thinking of me; awake and sitting in his own dark living room, drinking cognac and thinking, Shit. How do I handle her?
Humiliation. Humiliation was the big one, the butler, the majordomo. He was a bully, with cold eyes. The others were afraid of him. He ran the house.
• • •
Years ago, a friend told me she’d had an affair. She fell in love with a man who kept breaking up with her because he felt guilty about his wife. My friend would have understood that, she said—she felt guilty about her husband—but the unbearable thing was that the man could make himself break it off only by deciding my friend was a terrible person. He railed against her, blamed her, disavowed every loving thing he’d ever said to her. She was devastated. Then, months later, he would start it up again—the flirting, the heat, the desperate pursuit, the secret conversations and meetings.
After this happened a few times, she told him she wanted to end it for good, but that she wanted it to happen kindly. She wanted them to sit down together, remember the good things, and say good-bye. She thought that with this mature acknowledgment, she could let him go. Without it, she felt stuck, helpless; she was perpetually being pulled toward him or pushed away. Please, please could he just give her the calm and loving good-bye.
The News from Spain Page 16
