The Pleasing Hour

by Lily King

  There were two pairs of feet but only one voice: Marc’s, gentle and continuous. Lola shut off the light and cracked the door open. They passed by. They were not touching. It was eerie to peer out at them unnoticed as they moved through the slit of the open door. “Here we are. Here we are at the room,” Marc said, before the wail of the cats behind us drowned him out.

  Marc insisted on going to the synagogues first and repeated his insistence several times before the clustered hill of Toledo even came into view through the windows of the minivan we’d rented, though no one had expressed the slightest resistance to the plan. Still, at the end of lunch in a large plaza called Zocodover, where, according to Marc’s book, Castilian Spanish was spoken for the first time, he announced it again with even more defensive determination. When we rose obediently, he seemed perplexed by how quickly words could become action. He was unprepared.

  “Where do we go?” he asked me, holding the map out to one side so I could look on.

  Nicole rolled her eyes and sat back down. She hadn’t said more than ten words all day.

  I stepped up beside him and took a corner of the page. The sun was directly above, hot in my hair, bright on the paper. It spread across my shoulders, along my arms, down my spine. Marc’s face drew closer to mine as we squinted at the map. I suggested a route and he looked up, all business. It would never occur to him, I was sure, to think about kissing me.

  They were not easy to find, the synagogues, despite the brand-new map and the signs marked SINAGOGA posted along the street. The city wanted to give the impression that these temples were as important to its history as the cathedral and cloisters, but in truth the arrows were misplaced or they led you down an alley of eleven unmarked doors.

  I hung back and waited at the end of the first block for the rest of the family, until Nicole waved me along, saying that Marc would walk us around in circles if I didn’t help him. And so I quickly caught up with him, and as the others lagged farther and farther behind, swayed by black and gold damask in window cases on one side of the street and by bright blue and yellow pottery on the sidewalks of the other, it became easy to imagine that Marc and I were traveling alone together in Toledo. I could feel his love of travel. I could feel it as he peered over a wall down to the bright green river that encircled the city, poked his head into a shop that sold only suits of armor, gaped as an entire high school band from Ohio in matching windbreakers filed past, each with a triple scoop of ice cream in their cones. He spoke only to navigate; otherwise he simply gave me wide eyes and small grins and an occasional nudge in case I was missing something in another direction. He was happy, happier than I’d ever seen him, which made me happy too, except when I thought of how his mood would irk Nicole.

  It did. She made one brisk lap through the single room of the synagogue, paid not one shred of attention to Marc’s descriptions of Jewish worship and its brutal eradication, and left. I stayed. I didn’t understand everything he said, but most of it. Since the Inquisition the building had changed hands several times. In the middle of the sixteenth century it had been a hostel for fallen women.

  The room was unlit, bare of objects, even of seats. Until my eyes adjusted, it seemed like a hoax, to pay five hundred pesetas each to stand in a dark empty space. Then slowly I began to make out the walls. They were bare white except for a thin strip along the top—psalms, Marc said—that seemed not carved but scripted in gold with a large quill, the ends of each unrecognizable letter tapering off to a perfect point. In this room there were not the shrines, the gold flake, the frescoes, the pipe organs, the velvet cushions, the floor plaques, the vaulted ceilings, or the mottled colored shafts of light from the high windows of the cathedral we’d seen in Cuenca that morning, which made the synagogue’s beauty and tragedy all the more pronounced.

  Nicole had left already, and the others were edging toward the door. There was no reason, then, I couldn’t drift a little closer to Marc.

  He stood in an alcove, studying the carved underside of the arch above. “The shape of this arch is what they call Mudejar style,” he said, without turning. “Round arches are Moorish, but these were done by Moors laboring for their Christian rulers.”

  The whole length of his neck was visible, the muscles taut, the Adam’s apple sharp as a stone. “But,” I said, focusing on the arch, “this was built for the Jews.”

  “It was. One of King Pedro the First’s ministers was Jewish, and he had it built.” He went on about how that king was murdered by his nobles for giving too much power to the Jews, how Jews were massacred again and again in this city, well before the slaughter of the Inquisition.

  I watched his hands as they rose and fell. He had wide palms and long lean fingers. He stopped talking and looked around the room. “What people do to each other,” he said quietly. He remained very still. “You can feel them here, can’t you? You can almost hear their voices.”

  I could feel how it would be if he placed those hands on me, if he bent his long neck down. The yearning and the comfort of the dream and his touch came back to me. If I heard any voices at all, it was the voices of the fallen women. I wondered if, once fallen, you kept on falling, again and again, for the rest of your life.

  The rest of the family was waiting across the street, faces cast up to the sun. Nicole gave the appearance of being thoroughly relaxed: her body slanted against a low wall, eyes shut, head back, lips stretched into an accidental smile. Men walking past seemed torn between her and Odile, attracted to Odile’s youth and length and languor but distracted by Nicole’s presence, as if she might be a film star they couldn’t quite place. When Marc reached the other side, transforming them into wife and daughter, the gawking stopped.

  “Now the cathedral, Papa,” Guillaume said, pulling on Marc’s arm with both hands.

  “All right!” he said, trying to hoist Guillaume sideways onto his hip. But Guillaume squealed and kicked and Marc dropped him back on his feet impatiently. Then he took the map from his pocket and held it out for me. It was a straight shot this time. I had no real excuse to walk with Marc, so I stayed beside Lola and watched him from a few feet back. He had bad posture and splayed feet, but I loved the way he moved up the street. His waist was long and narrow; his old blue trousers hung low. When he reached behind to scratch his back, his shirt was lifted briefly and I saw a few pale knobs of his spine. Every now and then he’d call back to us: “Did you see the shape of that man’s shoes?” or “Can you smell the paella coming from that apartment up there?” He crouched down to look through an open basement window and found a man with a light strapped to his forehead inlaying the gold on a black ring with a tiny needle. “Did you know,” he said, when we’d caught up, “that every family in the business has their own damask pattern?”

  The cathedral rose up before us like all cathedrals, gaudy and spired, as if dribbled from a finger like sand. And like all good tourists, we stood before it in its large plaza, absorbing its glistening magnificence against the plush cloudless sky.

  A row of apostles stood on each side of the cavernous entrance, and above its arch sat more people. Despite all their finery, their exquisitely cut robes and scepters and headpieces, they seemed a clumsy design compared to the simple grace of the synagogue.

  “Why is it,” Marc said, to no one in particular, “that Christians believed themselves to be such worthwhile decoration?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” I said.

  Nicole turned in our direction, paused a moment, then suggested, not unpleasantly, “Why don’t the infidels stay outside in the sun?”

  I was sure he agreed to this not to be alone with me but to let Nicole reemerge. She had spoken for the first time in the voice of her old Paris self.

  But when we walked across the plaza to sit on a set of shallow steps littered with knapsacks and orange peels and the people they belonged to in rolled-up shirtsleeves who smelled of coconut lotion or the spinach and garlic bocadillos they’d just eaten, Marc said, his knees rising
nearly to his shoulders, “So, rejected from the house of God,” and then looked at me with the same relentless curiosity he’d had in his eye since we landed in Spain.

  We wound down the mountains of La Mancha south toward Granada, stopping for the night in a small village whose center was split in two by a deep gorge. Three architects had died—one accident and two suicides—before another was able to complete the 200-meter-high bridge that now joined the two sides of town. Marc had chosen this place for the bridge alone, and before dinner we all had to indulge him in an hour’s examination of it from all angles.

  It was spectacular. It rose up in one narrow arch made of a pale stone, which now, with evening falling, had turned a soft lilac. From above, the water flowing through seemed a thin trickle; from below it was a loud rushing river. Houses were embedded along the walls of the long ravine, half hidden by boughs and vines and moss. The bridge was even more striking from below, and the walk down the steep narrow path smelled of new grass and the dinners on the stoves of some of the crouching houses.

  The next day the land flattened out. On either side of the car, young green fields spread from the road to the edges of strange gold and plum hills. It was these hills that captured my attention, again and again, try as I did to avoid the sight. They rose and they fell. They writhed at the corners of my eyes, bare flesh- and bruise-colored curves. They undulated: buttocks, breast, belly, thigh. The hollow of his back. The ridge of my calf. The movement of the car aroused me further. I tried to sleep, to escape my body, but my eyes kept opening back up to the land beyond. I was soaked and swollen. I wanted to touch myself. We had been in the car for hours without a stop. I’d forgotten my French. I nodded to things I didn’t understand. Marc found me in the rearview mirror and said, “You must be tired, Rosie,” and I felt like sobbing at the sound of my name in his mouth. It became painful, and the pain crept into my lower back and down my legs.

  Everyone else had begun to complain to him. Hadn’t he said they’d be there by early afternoon? Why hadn’t they flown? Were they lost? He said it would be beautiful but it was all the same. It was too hot; turn on the AC. It was too cold; open the sunroof. Everyone had to go to the bathroom at once.

  We stopped at a gas station. Before filing off to the toilet with the others, Nicole gave me the task of paying and inquiring how far until Granada. I walked around to the other side of the van, where a woman was standing by the pump. She wore a bright pink visor and faded pink slippers, the backs of which had been crushed down like sandals, and between these her body was hidden entirely by a pale green shift. Unlike so many of the faces I’d seen in Spain, hers had not been shriveled by the sun. Her skin was soft and loose. She greeted me with the silent understanding between native and tourist that acknowledges both the tourist’s money and the native’s control over what they will get for it. “¿Lleno?” she asked, and, without waiting for an answer, filled the tank with their most expensive fuel.

  At a table in the shade at the side of the garage sat a man waiting for her to return to a game of cards. Marc came around the corner then, peering over the man’s shoulder as he passed. I leaned against the van, aware of his gaze but not returning it. Out of the car I felt better—good, even. Sexy. Had I ever felt sexy before? I looked down at my breasts and the edge of my T-shirt where it met the waist of my shorts. It was a woman’s body now. I’d lost the extra weight, but my hips were wider, my breasts still plump. Had my body ever seemed this inviting, this warm and alive?

  He came up beside me. He had on a white shirt, an old dress shirt thin from wear and sharply wrinkled from a day in the car. A corner of the breast pocket had begun to tear. I could feel how soft the cloth would be, how the heat from his chest would rise quickly through it.

  “Double solitaire,” he said.

  “What?”

  He nodded in the direction of the table.

  I’d loved cards once, the long cracking like knuckles of the shuffle, the hope a new hand brought, and the feeling of sitting cross-legged opposite my sister on a Sunday afternoon with a bag of candy or one of the banana-chocolate-marshmallow-fluff concoctions we’d make in the blender. What was it about foreign places that made you remember and yearn for so many things all at once? I looked at Marc for an answer, but his eyes were fixed on the land ahead. I wondered what he ached for and if he too saw bodies in all those hills.

  I remembered my other duty. I turned and asked, “¿Está lejos, Granada?”

  The woman clucked a few times, a sound I’d come to learn meant no.

  The nozzle clicked off. “Tres mil quinientas,” the woman fired out at me.

  I translated the number for Marc, who handed the woman a fifty-thousand note and grinned at me for being so quick. He hadn’t noticed that the figure was on the pump.

  Nicole appeared from around the other side of the garage. She had brushed her hair and retucked her shirt. She walked with a spine of steel but kept her eyes half shut and two hands on her purse as if for balance. As she came closer, I saw how her thumb was rubbing the edge of the purse’s clasp. I could feel Marc realigning his thoughts and his posture at her approach. Gravel grated beneath his shoes. Why was everything so vivid here?

  “I’m in the mood to drive, all of a sudden,” she said.

  “Good, because I’m in the mood to nap,” Marc said. Did he not notice how phony this mood of Nicole’s was? Had he not seen her thumb stroking her purse with such nervous desperation?

  Guillaume wanted to sit in front. Marc came back with Lola and me, while Odile kept her spot stretched out in the rear. Nicole draped her jacket over the back of her seat. Her arms in the sleeveless green shirt, which I remembered from shopping on my second day in Paris, already had a brown gleam to them. She rolled down her window, hung out an elbow, and started the car.

  We pulled out onto the highway. No one else seemed bothered by the way she pumped the accelerator, changed lanes, or swerved into the shoulder every time she looked in the rear or side mirror. The road crossed a wide river. At any moment, Nicole could pitch us right over the edge.

  Marc fell quickly asleep. I snuck glimpses of him across Lola, feigning sudden interest in the other side of the road, which was identical to my side: the pale fields, the heaving hills. I’d never seen him sleep before. He wore a crushingly sad expression, which cut my arousal with a more gentle urge to cradle such a face in my hands. My sister told me once that there were men who needed to take care of someone and men who needed to be taken care of. Cal, at eighteen, was definitely the first type; Marc, at forty-nine, was the other. Cal would have wanted to marry me, like in a fifties movie. He wanted things to be in order. He would have tied my shoelaces in double knots if I’d let him. If he knew the whole truth, he’d never forgive me for the decisions I’d made.

  In the rearview mirror, Nicole’s face was placid now. She had picked a lane and stayed in it; her foot on the gas was more constant. She had regained control. But was this what she really wanted? She seemed both to need and eventually resent the power she claimed. I cadged another glance at Marc. He was so much less complicated. With him it would be easy to remove the sadness: three kisses with a few reassuring words and it would be gone.

  Rain spattered the glass of the hotel’s breakfast nook the next morning.

  “No es normal,” the proprietor, pointing a scolding finger at the sky, informed the guests one by one as they came downstairs loaded with tripods and fat lenses and room-by-room guidebooks for the trek up the hill to the Alhambra. “Va a pasar. Va a mejorar.”

  I sat with my French family, who carried no gear—only an Instamatic and a pamphlet from the front desk. Dull-eyed and only half curious, they turned to me for translation. The words were nearly all the same in French, I wanted to tell them.

  They were a groggy family in the morning. I observed them from an altered angle today, feeling separate in a different way.

  I’d come down first and had a cortado and a package of dry cakes that was brought to me on a plate by
the owner’s daughter, a small child who hummed to herself as if alone in the room. Among the guests already there—three Spaniards, a German, and a young American couple—I felt entirely French, and when Lola joined me I began speaking greedily, knowing that every word would bloom out of my mouth exactly the way it should. As the others took their seats at the table I’d chosen, they opened their plastic wrapped cakes and complained that they tasted like dust. Meals were serious to them, even this scant breakfast that came with the price of a room. Nicole had me ask for orange juice and toast. My Spanish came out nearly as well as the French. I loved the whole different feel of it on my tongue. The little girl gave me a quick adult nod, both an acknowledgment of the request and a commendation of my unexpected proficiency, and darted off. It was not difficult to ask for juice or toast—zumo de naranja; pan tostado; it was a handful of sounds delivered in the proper sequence—but it gave me a connection to the place, the room, the humming child, the wet red flowers on the bush pressed up against the window, that the others were deprived of. In Paris, they were the connected ones. They knew the streets and the styles and the faces of the famous; they knew the songs and the subjunctive and the name of every bridge. They were the standard I was always straining and failing to achieve. But here they were still simply French and I was a chameleon. Today I was not separate from them; they were separate from me, from me and everything else.

  As if they too knew this, on the way up to the palace in the rain, they hovered close to me: Marc with his map, the kids with their questions, Nicole pointing out anything written in English. At first the Alhambra was unimpressive: a long line to walk on dirt paths from one tower to another. We climbed to the top of the tallest and saw the city below, flat and dismal, as if wounded by the rain. In the first of an endless series of small packed buildings, I was moved through the rooms not by my own volition but by the unyielding currents of other people, people who smelled of wet hair and wet shoes and murmured different languages in the same tones. There was beauty—walls, columns, and arches dripping with relentless ornamentation—but more vivid was the swish of Marc’s windbreaker behind me. I fought the impulse to stop short like a naughty child to feel him bump up against me. Nicole moved more swiftly than the rest of us. I liked it that for rooms at a time people might have thought, as Marc spoke quietly into my ear and Lola tugged at my sleeve, that this was my family.