Emerald City

by Jennifer Egan

  I sat on a bench and waited. When the children had gone, the man came and sat beside me. He had a wretched face, gaunt and beaten and sad. “You are alone?” he said in Spanish.

  “Is there any more candy?” I asked.

  He handed me a piece wrapped in translucent colored plastic. It was the softest marzipan, the kind Toledo is famous for. I ate with tiny bites to make it last, letting each piece melt between my tongue and teeth. I knew what was coming, but did not look forward to it.

  The man’s eyes never left me: the frank, sad eyes that clowns have. When I finished he stood and reached for my hand. I followed him out of the square and down a tiny side street.

  His house was near the cathedral. It was stately, decayed, owned by his family for centuries. An El Greco hung in the entry, a portrait of some dead relation. I thought at first it was him.

  “Toledo was El Greco’s home, do you know?”

  I shook my head, although of course I did.

  “Ay!” he cried. “Toledo is famous for this. Here is where you must go tomorrow …”

  I settled back in a velvet chair and let him teach. I like advice, even when I don’t need it.

  “Why come to Spain for this season?” he asked. “Even the Spaniards want to escape.”

  “The museums aren’t crowded,” I joked.

  “You are lonely. I can see in your face.”

  “I’m waiting for something to happen.”

  He leaned forward, gazing at the red velvet folds surrounding his four-poster bed. A carved procession of fat knights on horseback marched down and around each post toward the satin sheets. “Is there a difference?” he asked.

  One cool, skeletal hand reached for my knee.

  Early the next day I took the train to Granada.

  Spain in wintertime is dangerous and beautiful and empty. I wander alone through the embroidered stone of the Alhambra, columns and honeycomb, a weave of colored tiles that makes me dizzy. A man sells peanuts baked in sugar, gravelly and sweet. I buy a bag. I sit on a bench and close my eyes and let the winter sun pour across my face.

  I’m thirty-two years old. In my thirty-two years I’ve gone to college, married, and had a daughter whose hair is pale and soft as the grain of fresh-cut wood. Her name is Penny, and she chooses to live with her father.

  I met my husband on a beach in Mexico, where I’d gone with some girls from my sorority right after college. I can see myself exactly as I was: a tall, knock-kneed girl gathering abalone shells in the skirt of her dress.

  “Have you been to the tide pools yet?” my future husband asked me.

  He was older than any boys I’d known in college. I followed him over a low rocky promontory that reached into the breaking waves. The rocks were sharp, and we moved slowly. I kept my eyes on the spectacle at my feet: shallow pools filled with sea urchins and small crabs, bright anemones that flung open their soft tentacles at each burst of seawater. There were endless, glistening shards of abalone.

  “I can’t believe this!” I cried.

  I dropped to my knees and began scooping up the treasures. My future husband stood above me, smiling down. Then he knelt on a rock and helped me pry an urchin from its hiding place. Soon he was venturing farther into the surf, taken with the adventure of it.

  “Look at this!” he shouted, waving an orange starfish. “This one just about killed me.”

  I loaded up his pockets, soaking his khaki pants. My sundress was a wide basket for dripping sea creatures. Walking back, feeling the warm, wet breeze on my bare legs, I knew he was watching me. At each rough part, he gripped my shoulders. I began teetering on purpose. He was thirty-five, I almost twenty-one, when we married.

  As I descend the path from the Alhambra, two boys leap at me from among the trees. They are tall and skinny, with sharp, beardless chins. One of them holds a switchblade. “Give us everything,” he says.

  I hand him my wallet.

  “All of it,” the other hisses.

  “There’s nothing else.”

  The knife flashes. The boy cuts the strap of my purse and begins opening its zippered pockets. I picture my toothbrush, a powder puff, the bits of copper the man on the train gave me. They are precious, meaningless things, and I want them back.

  “There’s nothing valuable in there,” I tell him.

  In a single flicker of movement, the empty-handed boy snatches the gold chain from my neck. It’s real gold, a gift from my husband. The boy pulls hard, leaving a thin burn along my skin. They run away, skidding on the dry leaves. I watch my purse weave among the tree trunks and out of sight.

  As I plod back, I am filled with a dismal triumph. I feel relief, the relief of being one step closer to something inevitable. The pleasure of ceasing to resist, of giving up.

  I wander through Granada’s crowded streets. My bag is still at the hotel, but I don’t go back yet. The air smells of sugar-baked loaves the vendors are selling from carts. It’s nine-thirty, nearly dinnertime. Children run and call, scrambling down narrow lanes toward the central square. I follow. In the middle of the square a man sells colorful balloon-animals attached to long sticks. The children who surround him draw back at my approach.

  “I’ve been robbed,” I tell the man.

  His face is creased and bare, like cloth that has been folded a long time and then laid flat. He packs his balloons in a leather case. Children whisper to each other with thin, silver voices. Lamps hang from the trees, and I follow the man through their patches of light. I feel myself begin to smile, trusting and alert, following a man I have followed all my life.

  When my husband told me he was leaving, we were sitting in our den. I looked around at the polished shelves, the TV and VCR, piles of The New Yorker and Business Week. The accumulation of ten years of marriage, mostly his.

  “I’ve made the arrangements,” he told me. “I’ll rent an apartment.”

  I ran my eyes along his encyclopedias, photos he’d taken of whitewashed churches in Greece, a crusty turquoise horse from some ancient dynasty. “All this is yours,” I said.

  “We can settle that when the time comes …”

  “You stay here,” I told him. “I’ll go.”

  This took him by surprise. “Do you want that?”

  A terrible feeling had taken hold of me. I searched the room for things of my own and found nothing but things my husband had given me: a kimono pinned to the wall, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, a set of Greek worry beads.

  “What have I got to lose?” I said.

  He sighed. “Don’t be a martyr.”

  I grabbed the bottle of wine we were sharing and threw it against a wall. There was a sumptuous crash and red wine splashed across an Indian rug he’d bought in Arizona. My husband leaned back in his seat and gazed up at me. “You’re a child,” he said.

  Now, when I think of his new wife making eggs for my daughter in what used to be my kitchen, I feel a pleasant ache. The grim satisfaction of a clean sweep.

  It takes three days to straighten things out: passport, traveler’s checks, hours at the police station waiting my turn to explain the simple crime. All of this annoys me. When a thing is gone it’s gone, is what I think. Soon there will be nothing left, and in a sense I look forward to this, although it frightens me.

  I spend these days of waiting in cafés, writing postcards to Penny. At home she will attach them to the refrigerator using fruitshaped magnets. She does this carefully, plotting my journey in perfect sequence. When I return she will narrate it like a story.

  When Penny lived with me, I brought her something every day: Magic Markers, hair ribbons, candy. I tortured myself, convinced she needed more, that nothing I bought or said or did could satisfy her.

  “There’s a hole in our lives, is that what you’re thinking?” I demanded last winter as we sat alone in the vast dining room of a beach resort, the sound of rain mingling with the breaking surf. We were the only guests at the hotel.

  Penny surveyed the white tablecloth. “Where
’s a hole?” she said.

  “You’re thinking none of this is right, aren’t you? That it’s all just slightly off?”

  She gazed at me with her wide brown eyes, trying to see what answer I wanted. “I don’t know,” she said timidly.

  “I don’t blame you for feeling like that,” I said, rising from my chair and pacing before the window. “I feel it, too.”

  Penny stopped eating and stared into her bowl, where pale cereal floated.

  “Now I’ve made you sad,” I cried, dancing around her. “There, sit up straight and forget what I said. Eat.”

  Miserably, she held the spoon in her fist. She glanced at my abandoned plate of eggs. “You eat, too,” she said.

  We sat in silence. Her lip began to quiver.

  I loomed over her. “What?” I said. “Say what you’re thinking!”

  “I miss Daddy.”

  They were the words I most dreaded, yet I felt relief. I sank back in my chair and lifted her into my lap. Through the web of her ribs I felt her heart beating rapidly. Two pigtails sat pertly on her head. I kissed the white arc of her part and breathed its sweet, oatmeal scent.

  “I’ll take you back,” I said. “We’ll leave today.”

  She was the last to go, the hardest to part with.

  Nights I spend with the man who sells balloon-toys. He lives on the outskirts of town in a tiny high-rise apartment with a balcony he is very proud of. He takes me out there to appreciate the view, which is mostly of TV antennas. We hardly speak. (My Spanish isn’t good.) His room smells of those small green olives that taste so excellent with wine. If he has any, though, he doesn’t share them with me.

  Mornings, he sits on his balcony wrapped in a coat and smokes thin brown cigarettes. I lie in bed, looking up at the ceiling fan and trying to remember my life before I married. I know I must have had one: long, easy days studying the works of Botticelli, sprawled on the college green with my friends. But I glimpse these scenes like pictures, never from inside. It could be another person’s life.

  After smoking for an hour or so, the balloon man climbs back into bed with me. He’s a skinny Spaniard with a sudden, crooked smile. In another life I might have loved this man, even married him. As it is, I lie beneath him and stare up at the fan, its long blades immobile in winter.

  Finally the passport chores are done. I spread my map across a café table, as my husband used to do. I consider my options.

  “Alison?” a man says.

  I can’t place him. He has that elfin sort of face which doesn’t age, pale eyes, and strong square hands.

  “Rutgers,” he says. “Remember?”

  I do, then. He was not a friend exactly, more one of those people I had known about and spoken to occasionally. “John?”

  “Jake.”

  “Weren’t you always selling something? You had a lot of business schemes?”

  “Bravo.” He eases into a chair beside me. I remember now that he ran a business typing students’ papers. Later he sold shares in a card-counting venture in Atlantic City. He had seemed so much a man of the world that just sitting beside him made you feel nostalgic, as though he were already beyond those college years, looking back, and you were one of his memories.

  “So, what have you been doing?” I ask. “How many companies have you chaired?”

  “This and that.” He taps the table’s edge as if testing for hidden compartments. “Nothing earthshaking.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “And you?”

  I take a deep breath, and only then does it strike me what a terrible process I’ve initiated. My life teeters before me like a bad view from an unsteady height. “It’s a long story,” I say, feeling my smile wane. “Not worth it.”

  “Ditto.” He takes off his glasses, which are shaded beige, and rubs the skin between his eyes. The lids are pink at the edges. I have an odd sense that we have just exchanged a confidence.

  “You, ah … waiting for your husband or something?”

  “Right,” I say, pleased by this suggestion. “He’s at the Alhambra. I wasn’t up to the climb today.”

  “I hear you. My wife’s up there, too.”

  “How funny!” I cry, unable to resist. “I wonder if they’ll meet.”

  I feel lighthearted, as if nothing had happened to me yet. I imagine myself standing in a cafeteria line, holding a blue plastic tray. In my mind, it is late spring, and the grass is green and fat.

  “Do you know, I was robbed up there the other day?” I tell Jake. “Two boys got everything. My passport … I had to buy this bag.”

  I hold it up. It’s made of the softest calfskin, that fine leather for which Spain is famous. For two days I have held it in my lap, smelling the sweet new leather each time I breathe. At night I leave it open beside the balloon man’s bed so I can smell it as I go to sleep.

  He feels the seams. “It’s good quality,” he says. “A lot of times they aren’t. Where’d you get it?”

  “Right nearby. I can show you.”

  “But your husband …”

  “Oh, he just left. He’ll be gone awhile.”

  The sunlight in Granada is more pure and strong than any I have felt in Spain this winter. It warms my neck. The soft leather of my new bag rubs pleasantly against my shoulder. I feel the happiness that comes of believing your own lies for a minute. I picture my husband wandering through the halls of the Alhambra, loaded with his guidebooks and maps, describing everything to me at dinner over a bottle of wine.

  “You must have a hundred companies by now,” I say in a voice I don’t quite recognize.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, lots then.”

  “Sure,” he says, shrugging. “A few.”

  “Are some of them in Spain?”

  He glances at the sky. “No. None here.”

  We’re near the cathedral. It is very quiet on these backstreets, and their narrowness keeps the sun from touching the pavement. When I find the small corner shop where I bought my leather purse, its gates are down. “Siesta,” I say. “Damn.”

  We stand awkwardly, unsure what to do next. Twice Jake turns to look behind him. “Are you being followed?” I joke.

  “No,” he says. “Why, are you?”

  I adjust my calfskin strap. “Of course not.”

  “You know,” he says. “Seeing you makes me remember my very young self. It’s a funny feeling.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “How completely without fear I was.”

  “Isn’t everyone, at that age?”

  “Me especially. Too much.”

  “Now you scare more easily?”

  He moves away, hands in his pockets. There is no sound but the squeaking of small black birds that circle overhead. They sound like mice, only more plaintive.

  Jake turns to me quickly. “I did a stupid thing,” he says. “I’ve lost a lot of people’s money.” The skin is white around his mouth.

  “How awful.”

  “It is awful.” He breathes as if we had just been running. “I don’t know why I told you that.”

  “It’s all right,” I say, rubbing my damp palms along the sides of my dress. I want to get away from him.

  “Forget I said that.”

  “Fine.”

  He pushes his hands inside his pockets and looks at the sky. It is very blue above us.

  “I’ve ruined families, that’s what I’m saying. These people have nothing left. Can you imagine what that’s like?”

  “For you or for them?”

  “For them,” he says, startled. “Them. Of course.”

  I run my fingers over the soft leather strap of my purse. I love this purse much better than the first.

  “You know what’s worse? I cheated them. Set it up that way. Then it went more wrong than I meant.”

  He is watching the church facade, its broad doors and bulges of plaster. I wonder if I should simply walk away.

  “Look at this,” he says, la
ughing abruptly. “They’re chasing me around the globe, and here I am in a churchyard spilling my guts to a total stranger.”

  “We went to college together.”

  “That’s true.”

  I hold the bag in my arms, hugging the leather to my chest. I watch him pace across the stones.

  “I’m leaving Spain today. Going to Morocco, down into Africa. That’s a secret,” he adds, laughing again. It is a strange, nervous laugh I’m not fond of. He moves close to me. His breath is oddly sweet, and his hands shake. I’m afraid he might faint, and then what will I do with him?

  “You know the worst thing? The worst thing is I can’t do anything. It’s gone. Finito, my whole life.”

  “But you’re so young,” I say, surprising myself. “How on earth can you say that?”

  It’s true. He is a young man, frightened as a boy. He grows embarrassed, and his eyes veer down to the shiny stones at our feet. “Christ,” he says, shaking his head. “Look, I’m sorry to put you through this. Your husband’s probably looking for you …”

  His whole face trembles. He watches me with a look I recognize: the look I’m sure I must have myself when I watch the normal people living happy lives.

  “I don’t have a husband,” I say, holding his gaze. I feel it coming now: a giddy rush of confession, urgent as nausea. “I have nothing in the world.”

  Jake is speechless. He stares at me, his mouth open a little, his head tilted to one side. I feel an uneasy desire to move closer to him.

  “Are you serious?”

  I nod in silence and look away.

  The sound of a motor distracts us. Turning, I see two men in puffy jackets on a Vespa. It hurtles down a side street, heading straight for us. I barely have time to look at Jake before the bike ploughs between us at top speed and someone knocks me onto the pavement. I sit up, stunned, rubbing my hip, and see my new calfskin bag swinging from a motorcyclist’s shoulder. I scream at the top of my lungs, and the sound echoes back across the courtyard. The Vespa rounds a corner and disappears.

  Jake runs after them, his footsteps following the motor into silence. I stand alone beneath the whirl of squeaking birds and wait. After a while I sit on the church steps and stare at the hem of my dress, bright green against the stone. Minutes pass, too many to continue waiting, but I feel no urge to move. Night is hours away. A man comes and opens the gates to the leather shop. Beautiful bags like mine hang in the windows. I wonder, if I explain to him what happened, whether he might give me another one for free.