A Marriage in Four Seasons

by Kathryn Abdul-baki

  Hearing him chuckle, she glanced up. He’d switched channels again, and an old episode of Three’s Company was on, dubbed in Spanish and complete with laugh track.

  “Honey, for God’s sake,” she said. “Let’s go out and find the Alhambra.”

  Fixated on the screen, Richard seemed not to hear her.

  She picked up her guidebook, her annoyance growing, and then went to the bed and lay down beside him, noisily flipping through the book to the pages describing the Alhambra—hoping to keep him from completely zoning out and to get him to refocus on her dissatisfaction with the room. She didn’t want to start their stay in Granada on a sour note by continuing to harp on it, especially since he seemed perfectly fine with the accommodations, but she couldn’t let go of her disenchantment.

  It took a few seconds, but he turned to her and glanced at the page she was perusing, a view of a lavish palace chamber with an ornate stucco ceiling, bordered by a wall of blinding, gold-leafed, Arabic calligraphy.

  “Wow,” he said, looking at the photo.

  Her anger started to melt away as he finally showed some interest in the Alhambra. She inched closer to him, so they could share the page. Then, just as quickly, he turned back to the television.

  She put down the book and climbed on top of him, straddling his lap to obstruct his view. When he tilted his head to see past her, she gave him an impish smile and leaned over to block his view again.

  “Honey,” he protested.

  She got off him and picked up the book, sighing.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, gently, turning to her. He rolled on top of her and pulled aside the towel to cup her breast. He started to kiss her neck, and she put down her book again and ran her hand over his hair, threading her fingers through the thick clump of it above his neck, trying to concentrate on its pleasing smoothness rather than on the ugly window curtain.

  She felt somewhat foolish for making such a fuss about the room, especially since she was mostly to blame for it. When they were preparing for the trip, Richard had delegated hotel arrangements to her while he focused on ways to keep them safe, specifically to keep them from being targeted by thieves or gypsies. As she’d mapped out their route through southern Spain, marking the pretty towns and Moorish castles she wanted to visit, he was busy devising methods to camouflage money pouches and cameras.

  “We just won’t ride the subway, Rich,” she’d said, resenting his priorities and the damper his overzealous attention to safety was putting on her enthusiasm for the trip. “Most thefts I’ve read about happen on the subway.”

  “They can sniff a tourist anywhere,” he’d replied, experimenting with a contraption around his ankle: a bandana secured with Velcro.

  To make things worse, there had been several incidents in Malaga perpetrated by Libyan immigrants two weeks before their scheduled departure. Although Spain had had no mass immigrations from other Middle Eastern countries, such as those that Northern Europe was currently experiencing, she’d sensed that the news report had made Richard even more wary of their upcoming tour. She suspected that, if it were up to him, he would have canceled the trip altogether.

  Richard turned to glance back at the TV where perky Suzanne Somers was chattering in Castilian. Then he returned to Joy and planted little kisses on her breast, continuing upward to bury his face in her neck with more ticklish kisses.

  She struggled to hold onto her determination to change the room, but she couldn’t help dissolving in a fit of helpless giggles. “Stop!”

  “Mi amor,” he said, breathing into her neck again.

  She chuckled. “Are you romancing me in Spanish?”

  “Just trying to impress you.”

  He ran his fingers in little circles around her navel, then bent down to kiss her stomach.

  She tried to enjoy the feel of his hands and lips on her skin, but instead felt herself inadvertently shrinking away. “You know, Rich, I still feel him, feel his little thumps inside me.”

  He kissed her forehead tenderly.

  “It’s been months, but I can’t shake it. Sometimes I wake up at night and can’t catch my breath. It’s scary.”

  He cuddled her closer and kissed her eyelids. “We’ll make another one, sweetheart. Another Stephen.”

  “There’ll never be another Stephen,” she said.

  He sighed. “No, there won’t be another Stephen.” He caressed her cheek. After some moments, his hand ventured out to touch her breast again.

  “Honey, I’m tired,” she mumbled, expecting him to catch her cue that she wasn’t in the mood to make love.

  Her pregnancy seemed like yesterday. Her water breaking unexpectedly, much too early, as she was vacuuming the living room, the labor pains in her back and abdomen ripping through her, Richard rushing home from Manhattan to get to the hospital, and later, the doctor’s frantic rush to save the baby. Then the weeks that followed as the depression set in. Though the wound in her stomach had healed, her belly continued to cry out for its missing contents.

  She knew, however, that her inattentiveness to his overtures was caused by more than just the familiar despair creeping into her. Over the past months, sex for her had mostly become a required chore, like grading papers or folding laundry—a mission solely aimed at conception. Whenever Richard reached for her, she responded as though summoned by the god of some fertility cult, her sights focused squarely on the end result. She suspected he sensed that her heart wasn’t in it for the sake of pleasure, and that she wasn’t entirely with him.

  She’d gone back on birth control for a while after the stillbirth, although there was almost no need at that point since she was rarely in the mood for sex. She certainly hadn’t wanted to get pregnant again and face a possible repetition of that terrible loss.

  Not until some four months later, the pain of the loss numbed somewhat, had she begun to feel the stirrings of optimism and her drive to try again. At first her desire was like a faucet she could turn on at a whim. All it took was feeling Richard strong and reassuring beside her in bed to kindle her mood. He had been supportive and loving throughout the ordeal, and she wanted to give him a child as much as she wanted one for herself.

  Even when it didn’t happen immediately, she wasn’t concerned, suspecting that her body was simply weaning itself of the vestiges of the previous pregnancy. She was thirty-five, and he was five years older, not spring chickens but surely still in their prime.

  A few months later, however, she began to grow discouraged, wondering whether something inside her had changed as a result of the stillbirth. Although tests showed they were both healthy, that her tubes were in good shape and his sperm count sufficient to produce healthy children, she couldn’t help obsessing about the “congenital weakness of the fetus,” the medical reason given to them for the stillbirth. At times, she’d even begun to wonder whether she and Richard were somehow incompatible on a genetic level.

  Richard had now moved slightly away from her and resumed watching TV.

  “I’m sorry,” Joy said, reaching out and stroking his hair again, wanting to shake off her ambivalence.

  “It’s okay,” he replied absently, as though lost in his own thoughts.

  She could feel herself pulling away even now, constructing walls between them. Perhaps it was due to her latent fears of a future loss, she rationalized, although part of her knew better. She was beginning to have the gnawing sense that Richard was not, after all, her true soul mate.

  For some reason she couldn’t understand, since the loss of the baby, she’d been retreating into her fantasy world more than usual. Especially when they made love. It was rarely Richard she was focused on in those intimate moments, but rather on some other acquaintance or colleague she found attractive or sensed was attracted to her. In the past, she would simply have accepted the regard of these men as a compliment, and she certainly had never responded to any innuendos sent her way. But recently, the images of these men bombarded her thoughts during sex, and it was getting harder t
o banish them. Although she obviously didn’t blame Richard for her erotic daydreams of other men, she suspected they had something to do with his change during these past months.

  The grief that had threatened to destroy her had also engulfed him, affecting him in ways she couldn’t have foreseen. He’d obviously bottled up his feelings about Stephen; instead of crying and withdrawing as she had done, he seemed to conceal his sadness by creating ever steeper career goals and burying himself under overwhelming workloads. He would voluntarily take on difficult clients for his boss and consent to work-related travel more often than usual. At times he was distant, and at others he would lose his temper over trivial things. Some days he seemed to have morphed into a complete stranger.

  Now, as they lay in bed miles from home, Joy reminded herself that both his behavior and hers were temporary, that a new baby would reestablish her feelings for him and for their marriage. It was, after all, the solid aim of family-building Richard had projected from the start that had attracted her—that and his robust awareness of what he wanted from life.

  Back when they’d met, she’d been smitten by his innate pragmatic grasp of things. She’d been on the rebound from a previous relationship, yearning for some grounding, and he had been gallant, handsome, and sensible. He was a banker. Despite her years studying and working in Manhattan, she had never dated a banker and found his knowledge of the complex world of finance intriguing, the way he could summarize the current state of inflation or the reasons for fluctuating interest rates. He could analyze specific economic data or investments he’d just heard about as though he’d been studying them for years, and he had even mapped out a plan for his own financial security for the next decade. Drawing her away from her own, often exhausting, literary and philosophical excursions as a college English teacher, his solid attitudes were refreshing and sexy to her, all bravado and fortitude. It had certainly felt like great chemistry between them. Two years later, they had married.

  Now as she watched him while still stroking his hair, she wondered whether opposites really do attract. Once again, she wanted to push aside the heartbreaking thought that perhaps the stillbirth had been some sort of sign—perhaps they weren’t meant to be parents together, and this was nature’s way of pointing it out.

  Richard’s lips against her ear now startled her. His warm feet affectionately rubbed her cool ones.

  “Rich . . .” she started to object.

  He nuzzled her face, his arms encircling her.

  Touched by his efforts to be uplifting, she found herself returning to her previous hopes that a baby would change everything. She turned to him and lightly kissed his lips.

  “Rich, do you think we’ll be parents? Someday?”

  “Honey, of course we’ll be parents.”

  “I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “Don’t keep thinking about it,” he said softly. “Like the doctor said, it’ll just happen. Like it did before.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Not that part. It’ll be different next time.”

  His confidence was meant to bolster her, but she felt he was denying the legitimacy of her fears.

  She turned slightly away from him. “I feel so alone.”

  He kissed her shoulder. “You’re not alone. I’m here.”

  “It just feels so lonely, not carrying the baby, not having him growing inside me. My body seems useless now.”

  He shook his head. “It’s normal, honey. You were pregnant and now you’re not. But nothing else has changed.”

  She felt that was a callous thing to say. Of course, he couldn’t understand what it meant to be pregnant and suddenly not to be, to feel your body couldn’t fulfill its purpose, its promise. She used to try to tell him how wonderful it was to feel the baby’s kicks, and he’d smile as she put his hand to her stomach to feel the butterfly-light thumps. But he wasn’t as fixated on them as she. He was able to shift his attention to other things almost immediately.

  “You weren’t as connected as I was,” she said.

  “I wasn’t carrying him,” he said softly.

  “I mean, you were more aloof. Like you couldn’t get into the pregnancy.”

  “Honey, that’s not true. I enjoyed every minute of it.”

  “I felt you weren’t as interested—”

  He interrupted. “Joy, don’t do this. That’s not true and not fair. I wanted that baby. But . . .” he stopped and took a breath, “we can’t keep torturing ourselves like this. It didn’t happen this time.”

  His face contorted slightly, and he ran his fingers through his hair. “There’ll be a next time,” he said, as though trying to convince himself.

  She sighed. He was right. She shouldn’t be tormenting them both like this. He felt as much anguish at their loss as she. He just handled it differently.

  Maybe he was right about the baby too, that there would be a next time. She wanted to believe that. But even if she conceived and successfully carried a baby to term, what she really wondered was whether they could ever finally knit together their bond as lovers and partners and go back to how they’d been before.

  Wasn’t that the real reason she’d chosen to come here, chosen Granada, this jewel of Andalusia, to reignite love? She hugged him.

  As if encouraged by her awakening energy, Richard lifted her hair and lightly bit her neck as he fumbled with the zipper of her jeans.

  This time she yielded to his coaxing, snuggling closer to him, her fingers tracing the bulge of his arm muscles as he guided her hand gently to his waist, then downward, as if to verify his desire.

  She pushed her hips into his, now eager to make love and to escape into her fantasies, guilty fantasies of other men, admittedly, but providing a pleasing buoyancy that fueled her. As if on cue, her dream of getting pregnant took hold, and she found herself embarking on her mission again, riding the narcotic, danger-ridden strains of a guitar coming from somewhere outside the window.

  She stretched puma-like, fingers and toes reaching in opposite directions. Things really were different here. Even their love-making left her unexpectedly light and happy and more focused on Richard. She placed her palm on her stomach. Maybe this time some baby magic would work its spell.

  Three’s Company mercifully over, she got dressed, retrieved the guidebook from the floor, and lightly tossed it to Richard on the bed.

  “Can you please get us to the Alhambra?” she asked.

  Picking up her old copy of Tales of the Alhambra, she tried to make herself comfortable enough on the stiff sofa to settle into Washington Irving’s world for a bit.

  Since first reading of the “light, elegant, and voluptuous character” of the Moorish wonder that Irving had lived in for several months in 1829 and so eloquently described, the Alhambra had indelibly etched itself into her consciousness. When her doctor advised that she and Richard take a trip to get their minds off their devastating loss, she’d immediately thought of southern Spain, of Granada. Despite the unsettling accounts of thefts and political unrest that Richard worried about, she’d doggedly pushed on with their itinerary, convinced that Granada would be the place that might cheer her up. Judging by the quality of their lovemaking just now, she’d been right.

  Although she knew that her view of the place was overly influenced by Irving’s romantic writings, for a long time now she had believed that such a place existed, and she trusted Irving not to mislead her.

  “He started writing this while actually living here,” she mused aloud. She looked up, but Richard was now tuned to a Spanish soap opera.

  She groaned and dove back into Irving’s reflections on the medieval Moorish era of Al-Andalus. The enterprising American writer and diplomat had been fascinated by the historical narrative of the Moorish empire and had documented the legions of myths of the Alhambra as well as added his own colorful anecdotes of his stay in the dilapidated Moorish palace.

  When she looked up again, Richard was dozing.

  “Great w
ay to start off, Rich,” she said, putting down her book. “Rich?” She went to the bed and, despite being miffed, crawled over to lie beside him.

  She used to love to watch him doze when they were first married, the way he could catnap, his face placid as the Sphinx, his head sunk deep into the pillow so that it bunched up on either side to insulate him from noise. Gazing at his profile now, tracing the line of his straight nose and full lips, then moving down the long form of his body under the bedspread and back up to his smooth, brown hair, she tried to resurrect those past warm feelings instead of dwelling on her irritation at his not leaping up to sightsee or to help her change their room. She jiggled the bed a bit to coax him awake, but it was no use. He was beginning to snore.

  “Damn it, Rich,” she muttered.

  She knew he would have preferred that their first trip to Europe together be to Italy, to Tuscany, but he’d wanted to indulge her Spanish fantasy. This would be her trip, he’d told her. The “new beginning” trip. The new baby trip. Although she appreciated that, this journey wasn’t starting off right.

  The doctor had encouraged them to take time off from their daily stresses. She was free between the spring and summer semesters of teaching English at Hunter College, and Richard had extra weeks of leave from the bank. Yet, despite all their preparations, Richard was showing a mystifying inability to open himself up to the adventure. His energy and inquisitiveness seemed to have mysteriously evaporated the minute they got to Spain, leaving him wary and stolid.

  She found his reticence puzzling, especially since he and his younger brother had spent two years overseas when their father was a diplomat stationed in Athens. His parents were divorced by then, his mother having moved to California with her new husband, leaving the boys with their father. Richard and his brother had traveled around Europe during their school holidays, and Richard had talked fondly of the Scandinavian fjords, the Italian towns, and the Greek islands they’d visited.