The News from Spain

by Joan Wickersham

  I stood up to go. “I’m glad you told me,” I said, which wasn’t quite true but felt nearly true in that moment: a beneficent compassion for him, for me, for his wife and for the younger—I knew she must be younger—woman.

  “Thank you,” A said.

  I wanted to lay my palm lightly for a moment against the side of his face, but A and I had never touched each other since we’d shaken hands the first time we’d met.

  That night my husband and I went to a concert; an old friend, a violinist, was playing in Telemann’s Paris Quartets. The music was formal, orderly. I was flying apart. For the purpose of narrative unity, it occurs to me to return to the servant metaphor—to invoke again those evil retainers, to add new members to the staff, who were by now holding me captive, doing whatever they wanted. Rage: a stable boy, unwashed, wild, brutal, very strong, barely capable of speech. Shame: the housekeeper, a tight-lipped woman dressed in black with sparse greasy scraped-back hair, who hissed excited filth at me and watched—to guard against impropriety, she said—while the butler stripped me naked and beat me. But while it might be structurally correct to resurrect the metaphor, it’s tonally off. Too neat, too distant. Making something safe, when its unsafeness was the most essential thing about it.

  The next day I called in sick, and the day after that too. I was trying to protect myself, but also to protect A from the force of what I was feeling. On Friday I pulled myself together and went in, but he was out that day, having a colonoscopy. Good, I thought. I hoped he would be all right, that they wouldn’t find anything; but I also hoped that the prep had been miserable.

  I saw A on Monday and we moved on, back into our usual work. But then he asked after my grandson, and I said coldly, “He’s fine.”

  A said, “Tell me what he’s like now.”

  And I snapped, “Whom would I be telling?”

  Oh, lady. Hide yourself. You are dangerous, crazy, outsized, and out of control. It isn’t this man’s fault that you fell in love with him. You imagined that he loved you too, when he was just being gallant. It’s not his job to help you get over it. You always knew that his first allegiance was to another person—what difference does it make to discover that the other person wasn’t who you thought it was? It still is not, and never would have been, you. And anyway, your first allegiance isn’t, and never has been, to him.

  You want, you want, you want. You don’t even know what it is you want.

  He was hurt. I could see it, and also saw that he regretted hurting me. But he wasn’t angry, and he didn’t point out that I had no right to feel injured, no reason to trust him less. We tiptoed around for a while, a couple of months. There was a sadness between us, I thought, a wary fragile solicitude. Finally—he was being very kind, and even though I was mostly behaving well, I did snap at him now and then—I said one afternoon in his office, “Just give me a little room.” He nodded. He knew what I meant. But I needed in that moment to be unguarded with him, to be utterly clear. “Getting over unrequited love is harder than I thought it would be.”

  A said, “What makes you think it’s unrequited?”

  Another friend told me, years after it happened, that at one point she had met someone and fallen deeply, quickly, passionately in love. The man did too, but he broke it off almost immediately because he felt guilty about his wife. My friend understood; she felt guilty about her husband. She did write to the man several more times, even though he had told her not to. She couldn’t help herself. Each time he wrote back, kindly but tersely: We can’t. Then one morning, a year or so later, she was reading the paper. The obituary section. She went for a long walk, a lot of long walks. There was no one to tell.

  You meet someone, you fall in love, you marry. You meet someone, you fall in love, it turns into a disaster. You meet someone, you fall in love, but one of you is married, or both are: you have or don’t have an affair. You meet someone, you fall in love, but you are never quite sure if your feelings are returned. You meet someone, you fall in love but you are able to keep your feelings mostly hidden; occasionally they cough, or break a dinner plate, or burn down the kitchen (accidentally? On purpose?), but mostly they stay out of sight when other people are around. At night they have the run of the house. It’s a creepy, even sinister, ménage. An outsider who happened to glimpse it might be horrified—might ask you in a whisper if you needed to be rescued: Wouldn’t you like to call in the authorities? But no, you’re fine. It’s your own lunatic household; you know how everything works. You’ve all been together for so long that the servants have acquired a battered credibility. They’ve endeared themselves without ever having become likable. You respect one another’s endurance.

  A and I still work together. There’s nothing new to report. Things happen: half declarations, cautious withdrawals, sudden flare-ups, gradual repairs. It reminds me of that old late-night comedy bit, repeated every Saturday night: The news from Spain this week is that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

  When things didn’t work out between the doctor and the journalist, he accepted the job as director of the polio hospital on the Hudson. Sometime in the 1950s my grandmother went to work there as a physical therapist, and she fell in love with him.

  I don’t know much about it: my mother mentioned it once, years ago, and I wasn’t paying attention. I do know that the doctor was married, to his second wife—a happy marriage, unlike his first one.

  Watching him moving toward this second marriage must have been hard for the famous woman. It wasn’t like the affair with the journalist, when she could wish for it to end because she could see how bad it was for him. This time the doctor was happy, and deeply loved. The famous woman embraced it for him—the courtship, the girl. Not perfectly: she grumbled and was cool sometimes (the new wife, to whom it would never have occurred that this renowned figure might have feelings other than those of devoted, even maternal, friendship, was baffled by the occasional chill), but overall the famous woman accepted with grace. When they got engaged she withdrew for a little while, but then reappeared and held the wedding in her living room. Every year after that she gave a cocktail party for the doctor and his wife, on their anniversary. After my mother died, I found an invitation to one of these evenings tucked inside a biography of the famous woman, which must have once belonged to my grandmother.

  “She loved him for years,” my mother said about my grandmother. I don’t think anything ever happened. I remember my grandmother as strong, solitary, independent: a stoic with a wry sense of humor. It was hard to imagine her abject, pining.

  Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe the doctor returned her feelings. Maybe he didn’t return her feelings and she was philosophical about it. I like to think of her going to work every day and concentrating with him on doing as much as could be done for those patients, noticing small increments of progress, knowing not to expect too much.

  Acknowledgments

  Warm thanks to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, where the book was written.

  And to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

  And to Gordon Lish and George Andreou.

  And to Jay.

  About the Author

  Joan Wickersham was born in New York City. She is the author of two previous books, most recently The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her op-ed column appears regularly in The Boston Globe; she has published essays and reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune; and she has contributed on-air essays to National Public Radio. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two sons.

  Visit Joan Wickersham: www.joanwickersham.com

  Friend: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Joan-Wickersham/415735861811826

  For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com

  The
News from Spain

  by Joan Wickersham

  Reading Group Guide

  ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE

  The questions, discussion topics, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of The News from Spain and of Wickersham’s near magical ability to capture the mystery and complexity of love.

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  In seven beguiling stories Joan Wickersham explores the passion and vulnerability, cruelty and tenderness of love in all its forms. The News from Spain presents a fascinating array of characters, settings, and perspectives: a long-married couple struggles with the repercussions of the husband’s infidelity; a woman caring for her dying mother reconsiders their bond—and her own romantic relationships; a young girl discovers that the search for connections and affection can lead to selfish and reckless acts; a paralyzed dancer weighs the cost of her dependence on her adored, unfaithful husband; and a widow and a young mother develop a surprisingly deep sense of trust and understanding during a brief afternoon conversation. In two clever and engaging stories Wickersham travels back in history. In one, she weaves vignettes about Mozart and his librettist into the story of two close friends and their love affairs; in the other, she imagines a love triangle among a journalist, a doctor, and the wife of a president.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. The book opens with a succinct yet palpable description of the motel Susanne and John are staying in: “The rooms smelled of disinfectant and of bodies.… Outside, the wind was dazzling and salty” (this page). How does this establish an emotional backdrop to the narrative that follows? Which physical details in the descriptions of the wedding party (this page) and the meeting between Susanne and Barnaby (this page) offer insights into the psychological state of the characters?

  2. Compare Barbara and Barnaby’s reasons for getting married (this page) to Susanne’s reflections on her marriage (this page). Do their points of view represent the real choices open to them or are they based on compromise and rationalization? Why are Barnaby and Susanne reluctant to share their thoughts with each other? Are there limits to the trust enjoyed between friends? If so, why?

  3. Harriet and Rebecca know that between them “love has always had to be proved. It is there; and it gets proved, over and over” (this page). In what ways does Harriet’s illness become a testing ground for both of them? Is it surprising or unusual that “they were having, in the middle of all this dire stuff, a good time together” (this page)? Why does their intimacy deteriorate during the periods Harriet when enjoys relatively good health?

  4. How do the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship affect Rebecca’s approach to the men in her life and influence the course of her affairs with Peter and with Ben?

  5. The third story in the book, told in the second person, presents the point of view of an unnamed young girl; it is also the only story divided into distinct sections. What effect do these techniques have on the reader’s impressions of the protagonist, the events described, and the other characters?

  6. The narrative of the third story captures the awkwardness and excitement of becoming a teenager—of finding a place within a school’s social structure, discovering the opposite sex, flourishing under a special teacher’s care, and observing often puzzling adult behavior. In what ways do each of the mini-chapters in this story set the stage for scandalous revelation and the girl’s reaction to it (this page)? Why is the summation (“The Rest of the Story” and “The End”) related from an adult point of view?

  7. What part do memories and dreams play in the dancer’s attempts to reconcile herself to her physical helplessness? When her husband leaves for the tour, “They kiss—familiar, fond, nothing more, except she thinks there is a 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” (this page). Is this the best (or only) way for these characters to deal with their situation, or would they benefit from more openness and honesty?

  8. What do the details about Malcolm’s private life add to the central portrait of the dancer’s troubled marriage? Are there similarities between the two relationships? Between the dancer and Malcolm, the choreographer and Tim? What do the scene in the bathtub and the story the dancer tells Malcolm illustrate about the power of illusion and fantasy in our lives?

  9. Do the sketches of Charlie and Liza (this page) and Alice (this page) establish a sense of how their meeting will unfold? Does the interview belie or conform to your expectations? What particular moments or comments transform the dynamics of the encounter and why?

  10. What inspires Liza to confess her secret to Alice? What qualities, experiences, or beliefs unite Liza and Alice despite the differences in their ages and situations? Why do people often tell a relative stranger something they have hidden from those closest to them?

  11. Discuss the parallels between the lives and loves of Elvira and Rosina and their namesakes in the Mozart and Da Ponte operas. (If you are not familiar with Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, brief summaries are readily available online). How do the playful yet pointed echoes of the classic operas (and the legendary adventures of Don Juan) set a tone and enrich the atmosphere of the contemporary stories? What do they convey about the universal complications, pain, and pleasures of love?

  12. Da Ponte writes “But I have learned that memory is inconstant, which is perhaps its greatest danger and yet also its greatest virtue” (this page). What light does this cast on Elvira’s attachment to Johnny and its effect on her life and her work? To what extent is the friendship between Elvira and Rosina built on the sharing and preserving of their personal and perhaps faulty versions of the past?

  13. A happily married woman unsettled by a sudden rush of love for a colleague sums up her emotional turmoil with both wit and poignancy: “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” (this page). Why is this metaphor so effective? What does it say about the battle between emotions and reason, between heart and head?

  14. The final story begins with a simple pronouncement: “Some of this is fiction, and some isn’t” (this page). To what extent does the appeal of the story about the doctor, the journalist, and the president’s wife stem from the combination of fact and fiction? Why does Wickersham leave the “famous woman” unnamed although her identity is quite clear? What draws the woman to the doctor and him to her? In what ways do her public and her private identities overlap, and how do they differ? What effect does this have on the way she conducts herself with the doctor? Why does the discovery of the journalist’s affair with the doctor affect her so deeply (this page)? Does the narrator present each character in an objective way or does her own situation color her opinions and speculations about them?

  15. Linking her two stories, the narrator of the last story says, “I am writing about women, about love and humiliation. Men do it to us, but mostly we do it to ourselves. We love the wrong people; we love at the wrong time. We think we can make it right, reconcile the irreconcilable” (this page). Which other stories feature women who struggle to explain, justify, or simply make the best of difficult relationships? Are there male characters who find themselves in similar situations?

  16. Infidelity and betrayal play a central role in The News from Spain. Many of the characters are involved in or are considering an affair; friendships and family relationships are also betrayed, either intentionally or as a consequence of carelessness or self-interest. Discuss the various forms of unfaithfulness and deception depicted in these stories and what they reveal about the unpredictable, often uncontrollable passions that underlie acts of transgression.

  17. “A love story—your own or anyone else’s—is interior, hidden. It can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention. It’s gu
esswork” (this page). How does this insight shape and inform The News from Spain?

  18. What is the significance of the subtitle “Seven Variations on a Love Story”? Do you see these stories as parts of a whole or as separate entities? In what ways do the stories amplify one another? Does the arrangement create a unifying thread and forward momentum?

  SUGGESTED READING

  Charles Baxter, Gryphon; Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her; Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry; Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness; Antonya Nelson, Some Fun; Ann Packer, Swim Back to Me; Tobias Wolff, Our Story Begins

  ALSO BY JOAN WICKERSHAM

  The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order

  The Paper Anniversary