The News from Spain

by Joan Wickersham

On the beach, Alice had heard about the Vermont plan: it was going to be a weekend-long family reunion, and it would be the first time Liza had seen David since that night in the vestibule of his apartment building. “So I have a baby, and he has three-year-old twins,” she had told Alice. “We’ll both be well insulated. But I’m scared.”

  “That you’ll feel it, or that you won’t feel it?”

  “Both. It would be terrible either way. But I think I’ll feel it.”

  “I think so too,” Alice had said. She had asked Liza about her marriage to Charlie, and Liza had said she thought it was good. “I really do. We do love each other. And Veronica—we’re both crazy about her, and Charlie’s a great father. But also: it’s me trying to play by the book.”

  “Which can almost work sometimes,” Alice had said.

  Now, gently, she told Charlie not to worry: she would photocopy the stuff he wanted over the next day or so, and mail it to him.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, and she wanted to hug him too, as she had Liza.

  She walked them out to their car and watched them stow Veronica in the car seat, and then she did hug them both, and they thanked her for everything and she said, “Oh, please.” Then they said they would stay in touch and she waved them off, imagining the Christmas cards.

  It was getting dark, the sudden darkness that falls over the Atlantic in winter: a somber shutting down, the ocean withdrawing and becoming invisible. She went back upstairs and ran herself a bath. Undressing near the bathroom window, she saw a low shape running lightly through the garden: a fox.

  She lay in the hot water wishing for gin. Not that she’d ever actually take the drink, after all these years—you make the phone call, you go to a meeting, the whole boring yet weirdly effective catechism—but just remembering that old feeling of the first few sips, that first inkling that you were going to begin to relax and feel warm. It would be pleasant, that was all she was thinking.

  Her body rippled under the water, loose and white. Good-bye, Marilyn and Sophia (God, those photographs from earlier!). Hello, Pillsbury Doughboy.

  But it was okay. This was what people looked like at her age. Denis, if he were here, would be old too.

  She got out of the bath and dried herself and got dressed, in a pair of black silk pants and a beige cashmere tunic that had once belonged to Marjorie. Marjorie had invited her for dinner tonight, and she found she was looking forward to it, although she also knew she would have been just fine alone.

  She walked through the house and found Arch by himself in the library off the entry hall. Marjorie was home, he said, but not down yet. “What can I get you, Alice? Gibson? Sidecar? Sazerac sling?”

  “Ha, ha,” Alice said gamely. She assumed this gameness automatically, having learned over the years that it was the only way to deal with Arch. “A little cranberry juice and soda, thanks.”

  He handed it to her and went back to his wing chair. “So Marge tells me you’ve had the press in today. You granted them an audience, your public? The paparazzi too?”

  “No, just a very nice young writer and his wife. He’s working on a biography of Denis and the others.”

  “And we can expect a movie?” Arch went on. “We should be holding our breath for a major motion picture?”

  “Well, Arch, one of these days you just might be surprised,” Alice said, still in that plucky chirp she used with him.

  In fact, Charlie had told her he was working on a movie treatment as well as his book, and was planning to show it around to people in Hollywood.

  Alice, watching Arch sip his whiskey and soda, thought suddenly that if there ever was a movie, there’d be a scene set in El Morocco, and an actress would sit on an actor’s knee and laugh and then he’d kiss her. There would be a lot of takes; at the end of the day the actress would go home thinking how tired she was of laughing and being kissed.

  Arch seemed suddenly aware that she was watching his glass. His eyes narrowed. “So, how’s your higher power today, Alice?”

  “Just fine, Arch,” she said evenly.

  So: after all there were things about her life that she’d never told anyone. Here, right now, were two things she knew that no one else did. The way Arch talked to her, and the fact that, like almost everything else, it never seemed to get to her.

  The News from Spain

  Voi che sapete che cosa è amor …

  (You who know what love is …)

  CHERUBINO TO ROSINA,

  Le Nozze di Figaro, MOZART AND DA PONTE

  Voi sapete quel che fa.

  (You know what he always does.)

  LEPORELLO TO ELVIRA,

  Don Giovanni, MOZART AND DA PONTE

  1

  Years later, long after what most people thought of as the real action was over, Rosina and Elvira met and became friends. They had exiled themselves from their old lives. Rosina was divorced, and Elvira hadn’t seen Johnny in years. They met in a cooking class, which both had signed up for distractedly, thinking it might be good for them.

  One week it was raining on the night the class met. The windows steamed up, the room smelled delicious, and no one could tell what was happening outside. Rain slapped blindly on the glass. By the time they all loaded the dishwashers, wiped the counters, and went outside just after ten, the storm had strengthened. Rosina and Elvira stepped out of the building together. The wind was blowing the rain in stinging sideways gusts, and the dark trees in the square were tossing their limbs and creaking.

  “Come home with me,” Rosina said.

  Elvira was startled. Over the weeks they had smiled at each other, chopped together, talked a little bit in the ladies’ room. It was one of those incipient friendships that might or might not develop: the thing that made it possible—a recognition of and respect for the other’s reserve—was the same thing that would probably prevent it from happening.

  “I’ll be all right,” Elvira told Rosina as they stood on the doorstep. Driving out to the country, she meant. She said it automatically, but looking at the wildly rocking trees, she wasn’t sure it was true. She was surprised and touched that Rosina had remembered, from some polite little conversation weeks ago, that she didn’t live in town.

  “Come on,” Rosina said, already beginning to run.

  Even the drive across the city was frightening—sheets of rain on the windshield; floods in the streets; the old plane trees along the river shuddering and luminous, with paler patches where branches were shearing off; the river rocking and spitting in its banks. “You were right,” Elvira said at the end of it. “I couldn’t have driven home in this.”

  Rosina lived in a tall old row house, the kind that had generally long since been divided into apartments. But this one hadn’t been. It was calmly intact, and of a scale that made Elvira suddenly shy. There were plain, pale modern sofas, and dark carved chests, and old rugs; there were paintings that Elvira would have liked to stop and gape at; there was a Vuillard oil in the library, where a fire was already laid, waiting for Rosina to touch it with a match.

  They sat there, having showered, wearing Rosina’s nightgowns and robes, drinking cognac, with a plate of oranges and chocolate. What is all this? Elvira wanted to ask. She was dazzled, and a little disappointed in herself for being dazzled. She was habitually austere. She lived simply, because she chose to—her income as a painter was erratic, and she wanted to keep as much time as possible free for painting. She’d been around money before, had rich friends, hung around with rich people who bought her paintings. But this, Rosina’s house, wasn’t just money—it was something else, something unfathomable.

  Rosina was asking her about her work—what kind of painting did she do?—and Elvira was giving tight little answers, as if she were on a job interview.

  “I’m sorry,” Rosina said. “I’m prying. I know a lot of artists don’t like talking about their work.”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” Elvira said. Then they were both silent. She felt she was letting Rosina down, being a dull,
graceless guest.

  Finally Elvira asked about the pictures in the house—she was dying to, they were screaming at her, and it seemed pretentiously nonchalant to ignore them. They walked around and looked at everything, barefoot, carrying their drinks. Elvira, who hated it when people talked in museums, didn’t say anything, just smiled at Rosina from time to time, and once laughed out loud, standing in front of a Goya that was hanging in the dining room, a toothy, inane-faced portrait of a woman with many jewels in her hair. Rosina laughed too. “You always wonder how he got away with it,” she said.

  When they sat down again in front of the fire, it was different. They were peaceful, the awkwardness was gone. The late hour, the storm still slashing away outside and beating on the old window glass, the pictures, the brandy, the deep quiet of the house.

  In a book they would have told each other their stories then. They would have been stranded together for a night, high above their ordinary lives: travelers at an inn, fleeing a city in which there was plague; or refugees from a shipwreck crowded into a lifeboat; or survivors of a war holed up in a villa. The threat of death would have hovered, recently and narrowly escaped, possibly still imminent. They would have told their stories without fear, with a reckless noble end-of-the-world candor.

  But there was no plague, no shipwreck. The storm was dramatic but not deadly; it was just a late-winter rainstorm. Elvira and Rosina were both guarded, discreet, even secretive people; that wasn’t going to change. They told each other a little bit that night; they made forays. Rosina talked about her grown son—she had moved to this city to be near him and his wife and their two small daughters; Elvira was here because she’d lucked into a small house in the country, with a barn she could use as a studio. But something bigger happened too, an alliance, an unspoken agreement that this would be a patient and safe friendship. They would come to know each other slowly, over time.

  2

  It would have been nice, impressive, to write: The countess left Aguas Frescas, taking nothing. But on second thought, why? Who over the age of twenty would be impressed by such shortsighted renunciation? The lawyers had worked out a decent settlement. And Rosina had wanted a number of things. A few of the smaller paintings, her pearls (though none of the other jewelry), money. She sent word to her husband through the housekeeper that she would like to take some furniture from obscure corners of the house, nothing much, nothing that would leave any room looking plundered. Not even anything from her bedroom—those sad pieces of furniture, paced between, stared at, cried on, collapsed on: they were part of what she was leaving.

  Her husband sent word back that she should take whatever she wanted. He was being fair, reasonable, as he almost always was, except when he wanted something that fairness and reason couldn’t easily obtain. Even then, he could cloak his unreasonableness by pointing out hers. “Look what you’re doing to yourself,” he would say, when she had wept and stormed at him after learning of some new infidelity.

  I can stand this, she had thought at first. Well, not at first. At first there had been nothing to stand. They were happy. They ran the estate, which included a large and very successful vineyard; they went riding and fishing together; they spent time in the city and went to parties and concerts, bought clothes and books; they were ecstatic and abandoned in bed together. “No,” she would murmur, “no, don’t,” and that was part of the game, for him to overcome her.

  For the first few years they would travel abroad together in connection with the wine business. Then he started saying that one of them should stay home and oversee, as he put it, “domestic operations.” These trips were boring, anyway, he said. You stay here, and we’ll go someplace in the spring. Paris, or New York. So he stopped taking her with him. From the rumors she began hearing of his travels, she surmised a wife would have been an encumbrance. She surmised. Listen to the coolness of that, the hard-won worldliness. When she first learned of his infidelities, she was shattered. But eventually she came to feel that as long as his dalliances were conducted while he was away, they had nothing to do with her. She even felt a dim sense of gratitude at his discretion, seeing it as a mark of his respect and tenderness for her (and seeing at the same time the self-abasement inherent in such gratitude).

  I can stand this, she thought.

  But then he fell for someone at home, one of the maids. Her personal maid, as it happened. Or maybe it didn’t just happen. Maybe that was part of the attraction: trying to do it right under her nose, seeing just how close to her nose he could get.

  So now the chase was happening right in front of her, scampering buffoonishly through her own bedroom as if she, herself, were not there at all. The maid wasn’t interested, thank God. She was loyal to Rosina, and told her everything. The count wanted to sleep with her. He wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything, that’s what he’d said.

  He must believe it too, Rosina thought. From the maid’s account, it sounded as though he was becoming almost a bully about it, which was against his character, or at least against the character he generally presented to the world. That character, the man he wished and professed and most of the time managed to be—admirable, considerate, courtly—must be like a too-tight shirt that had finally ripped at the seams. Now he’d pulled it off and left it lying on the floor, for someone else to pick up.

  He was growing careless. He was grabbing at the maid in passageways, trying to pull her into corners. Starting out in a whisper, then raising his voice when she resisted. He bargained, threatened, pleaded. His eyes filled with tears. He bellowed. Everyone knew. He must have realized that Rosina knew too.

  For several weeks she didn’t leave her room. The household was swarming with hazards. Trysts, confrontations, conspiracies, exchanges of gossip. If she had gone out she would have seen things, heard things. She found it easier, though certainly not easy, to stay in her room, staring at the trees in the garden and at her own tired face in the mirror. She was sick of her own dignity, sick of pretending to be calm while the maid told her the latest incident, and sick with missing her husband—in the middle of all this, she missed him. It felt as though something were awry in him, some physical piece that had shaken loose, and if she could just get in there and tighten it up, he would be himself again, recognizable, and he would recognize her again too; he would shake his head and look at her and put his arms around her.

  But she couldn’t get anywhere near him. He addressed her formally, about estate and household business, on the rare occasions when they were alone together. He slept in a different part of the house. On nights when there were no dinner guests, she had a meal brought to her room on a tray, and he ate downstairs, watching soccer on TV.

  Besides, what would she have said? “Please”?

  He would have looked back at her and said blankly, “What?”

  They were at an impasse.

  What broke it, bizarrely, was that he accused her of having a lover. What? What? She would have laughed, if she hadn’t been so tired and heartsick and also afraid of him. He was furious—she’d never seen him so enraged. (He was projecting, the psychiatrist she began seeing several years later would say. He wanted someone else, so he assumed you did too.) The purported lover was a young man, a kid, really, who worked in the house. He did have a crush on Rosina. Once when he came to her room to change a lightbulb, he gave her a poem he’d written: a wistful charting of the symptoms of love. He was so sweet; he could barely look at her. He came back to regrout the tiles around the tub. The railing on her balcony needed attention. “Am I in your way?” Rosina asked. “No, no, stay,” he said. All right, she liked it; it was flattering and comforting to be worshipped a little bit. But that was as far as it went. “He’s a child,” she told her husband, when the startling accusation burst out of him.

  “He’s eighteen. He’s a handyman. You’re a married woman carrying on with the handyman.”

  And you’re a married man who wants to fuck the maid, she could have said.

  Oh, this was s
ordid, humiliating. It went on for weeks. In the end he said, “Rosina, please, I’ve been a complete jerk.” It was his use of her name that melted her; she couldn’t remember the last time he’d said her name. Everything got cleaned up; everyone was bundled off. The handyman joined the army. The maid married her fiancé, who also worked on the estate, and the two of them were given the capital sum they needed to start a beauty salon and day spa in Seville.

  Rosina had her husband back—but she didn’t, not really. They were very careful. They had gone from “I love you” to “You see? I love you.”

  They went on a trip together to India. They came back and tried again to have a baby. He had a thing with one of the gardener’s daughters, and possibly something with the graphic designer who did the labels for the wine. He told Rosina she was overreacting. “None of this means anything.”

  “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I may have to leave.”

  “You shouldn’t,” he said. “But it’s your choice.”

  He was so patient. She, with her grievance, was so wearying. This is crazy, she thought, or else I’m crazy. She really wasn’t sure anymore. He was calm and reasonable, and she was shaking, crying, listless, unable to eat or sleep. That’s when she started seeing the shrink in Seville. He put her on an anti-depressant and told her she was sane.

  3

  Elvira wasn’t even interested in Johnny. He seduced her. He came to Burgos to scout for a movie. She was painting, working as a waitress. “My God,” he said, when he came into the café with a couple of other guys for lunch. “You’re amazing. What a face. Would you like to be in the film I’m making?”

  She’d rolled her eyes at him and asked him what he wanted to eat.

  “Food?” he’d said. “Who could think of food at such a moment?”

  She laughed. She got suddenly that he was performing, making fun of this kind of scene. “I know,” she said, writing on her pad. “You’ll have an order of ambrosia, with nectar of the gods to drink.”