The News from Spain

by Joan Wickersham

  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 that we can make it right, reconcile the irreconcilable. We are like game-show contestants who don’t know when to stop. We could go home right now with the money and the washing machine, but we want the car so we keep going and we get the answer wrong, or choose the wrong door, or spin the wheel too hard, and then we have to go home with nothing.

  Back now to the doctor. His TB is gone, he’s healthy again. It’s 1950. He is vacationing in Cuernavaca with his wife and daughter. What excuse does he give them, how does he manage to slip away to call on a journalist late one night? The journalist, who is waiting for the doctor in her house, doesn’t care how he manages it, as long as he comes to her.

  They met at a party earlier that evening. They knew of each other’s existence, through the famous woman who is his patient and her friend (and idol, except that the journalist isn’t much of an idolizer. Say rather that the famous woman is someone she admires very much and whose good opinion she values). “I’ve heard so much about you,” they said, and laughed at the dopiness of that. They talked all evening; the other guests paled. “Come walk with me,” she said. His face was close to hers; he took the lit cigarette from between her fingers and stepped on it before she’d had a chance to smoke it. Now there’s a soft scratching at her door. She hasn’t turned the lights on, she’s been waiting for him in the dark. It’s a bright, hot, starry night. He kisses her, he murmurs to her, he fills her, she can’t get him close enough. He—but wait. You know how this goes.

  She knows how it goes, too, only for her it has never gone that way. The men pound away with their peculiar urgency, their eyes shut tight, their whole selves shut tight, and she’s shut tight too—isn’t this supposed to be open? Is she doing it wrong, or does everyone lie when they describe it? And all the stuff leading up to it—the smooth wooing that always sounds like a line (she sees right through it, it’s the men themselves who seem to believe it; when she has, occasionally, interrupted to tell them, in extremely plain language, what she understands them to be driving at, they look shocked and hurt, except for the good ones who have laughed and taken her straight off to bed), the passionate declarations, the cajoling, the bullying, the appeals to her sense of responsibility (men and their needs), the appeals to her sense of guilt (she made them want her and now she owes them, they bought her drinks and dinners in a war zone where there wasn’t a whole lot to drink or eat and now she owes them). She is perfectly capable of saying no, and has, plenty of times, charmingly, or politely, or accompanied by a slap or a slug, whatever it takes; but a lot of the time she’s said yes. She’s been curious, or lonely, or she loved them, or she felt sorry for them—sorry because she liked them as men and hated to see them putting themselves through all the hoops. Stop, she always wanted to say, as her hands moved to unbutton her blouse, not necessary. It’s no big deal. And it wasn’t. She thought it probably wasn’t that big a deal to the men either, at least not overall. They wanted it until they got it; then they forgot about it until they wanted it again. But it was supposed to matter, and it didn’t, which made her uneasy when she thought about it so she didn’t think about it.

  Now, in bed with this man, she wants to shout. It’s what he’s doing to her—things no one else has done, except for a few who, she always thought, were trying to prove how unselfish or worldly they were; they asked afterward if it had been good and she said yes and had to restrain herself from congratulating them, which was what they really seemed to want—but more it’s that she suddenly, finally, for the first time, gets it. She takes his face in her hands and looks up at him, astonished. “I know,” he says. And he does know: she believes he knows everything.

  He leaves, he has to. First just for a few hours, to go and do whatever it is he has to do in that other part of his life, the vacation with the pretty daughter and the depressed, depressing wife; he slips back to see her, though, again and again in the next few days. Then he has to get on a plane to New York. Come back, come back, come back. She’s sore, hoarse, shaken, hungry: Could anyone possibly keep this up? Come back, she says, and he’s laughing, and crying too, kissing her mouth and her hair; but she’s thinking also that maybe it’s good that he’s leaving. She needs a break, to write, to think out what this is.

  What is it, what is it? She writes pages, a letter to him. She walks away from it but then picks it up again an hour or two later and writes more. She puts the pages in a drawer. She can’t send it. It’s too long, too much, it would capsize him. She’s been a writer for twenty years, she knows her own voice—but this is a voice she is hearing for the first time. She has never been able to quite believe in anything until she has seen it for herself and found the language to describe it. Poverty and starvation in America, war in Spain. And now, out of nowhere, love. It shocks her and dazzles her, this new voice; she gazes at it and topples over into the pool of it and drowns.

  When he comes back for a weekend, two weeks later, it’s the same. The days, the nights. No family this time: he is hers, uninterrupted. They eat, they swim, they keep going to bed. She’s a terrible cook. They laugh about this. He feeds her an orange, section by section.

  What would it be like to live this way? he keeps saying.

  Like this, she says. It would be just like this.

  My God, imagine.

  We don’t have to imagine. We’re here. You’ll come live with me, you’ll—

  Work?

  Why not?

  My patients, my practice—

  There are sick people here, too, you know.

  Well, then, that’s settled, he says, reaching for her again. I’ll just move here. That was easy.

  See?

  He leaves, he comes back. More sun, more oranges, more talk—and it’s serious now—of how they will live. He’ll have a clinic a few days a week. The rest of the time he’ll just be with her. He’ll write—he has always wanted to write. You’d write terrific books, she tells him. She knows: she writes terrific books, and she used to be married to one of the great writers. The doctor is intimidated by the idea of her former husband. Those are big shoes to try to fill, he has said.

  Yeah, she said—well, his shoes and his ego were the biggest things about him.

  It’s kind of nice, having to reassure the doctor about something. The men who boast and swagger always need to be taken care of; but the doctor, who doesn’t show off his muscles, is strong. It’s nice that there are a couple of chinks, some endearing vulnerabilities. I would never hurt you, she tells him silently, even if I have to lie to you. But in fact, she is never tempted to hurt him, and she doesn’t need to lie. She’ll be his for as long as he wants her. She hopes it’s forever, but if it isn’t, she’ll live.

  She writes to her friend, the famous woman. And here is a different voice: halting, but clean and pure. (She imagines herself and the doctor as children—no, young lovers. Juliet and Romeo without poison, without a dagger, going hand in hand to their parents to ask for a blessing. This is nuts and she knows it. She and the doctor are both in their forties.) She waits apprehensively for an answer. She can almost write it herself: You need to remember that he is married, with a child.

  The famous woman writes back swiftly. But not about the doctor’s marriage; the rebuke is about his work. Why would you think of asking him to move to Mexico? He is established here in New York, and very dedicated; his work is important. It’s the woman’s job to mold to the man. You are in Mexico only on a whim. Why should you not be the one to move? You could write anywhere. It would be selfish to ask him to give up what matters to him for the sake of a childish reverie.

  The journalist throws this letter away, to free herself of its frosty cadences.

  The famous woman, in New York, paces her bedroom late at night, wearing a mud-colored chenille bathrobe. He has rendered unto her the things that are hers—but there are things that will never be
hers, no matter how badly she might want them. He has never promised more. It is her job to control her own appetite. She doesn’t daydream about Mexican beaches or mountains. But she has imagined the two of them, each alone (maybe he stays in his marriage, maybe not: he’s alone either way), working hard separately—but connected, always, by a strong current that runs between them, a mutual frequency heard always, and only, by them. He’s a young, healthy man in an unhappy marriage; she accepts (tries to accept) that he will seek companionship, maybe love of a sort, with young women. But not this: this engulfing fevered wasteful stupid enslavement, this utter forsaking of himself to pursue some dream that, she suspects, isn’t even really his dream. If he goes she will lose him. She tells herself—she really believes it—that what’s more terrible is that he will lose himself. But she knows that trying to hold on to him would only be a different way of losing him.

  She remembers the four days in Ireland better than he does—he was so sick there, so helpless. She remembers walking to get food for him, a mile in the fog, the road invisible in front of her and behind her, just the sounds of her footsteps and her breathing. There might have been fields full of sheep, or disused airplanes, or houses: she never knew. There must have been people—the other passengers from the plane, the people she bought the food from—but all she can remember is the fog hiding everything, and the way he looked lying on the bed. She made a private place for him in a corner, hanging blankets to cordon it off. He ate like an obedient child.

  Her room, this bedroom, is big and homely. Things are here not for beauty but for a reason: the lamps to read by, the books for information and ideas, the photographs on the wall for love. A wall of pictures: her children and grandchildren, her friends, her dead husband and father. The doctor’s photo is by itself, on the table next to her bed. Her great feat in this love is to be unashamed.

  He flies down to Mexico again and again. The journalist welcomes him, loves him, starts to know him better. He’s a worrier. He wants to talk it through, over and over. He’s been offered the directorship of a polio hospital just outside New York. It would be such a good post for him, would combine so many of his interests. But she has said she can’t write in New York. He will turn it down, but he needs to think. He will move to Mexico, definitely, but it will take time; things need to be worked out. Enough reassurance from her and maybe he will really do it.

  But she doesn’t want to attain him by assuaging his doubts. She wants this to be free of doubt, clean. She wants it to be the way it was at first, when he came shooting toward her like an arrow. Stop dithering, she tells him sharply; and then has to clean up the mess of having hurt him. But the mess keeps spreading; the more she scrubs, the bigger it gets.

  Now he is taking steps—he opens a Mexican bank account—to prove to her that he is serious. If he were really serious, he wouldn’t have to do all this proving; he would move and let things figure themselves out. She has done it that way, many times in her life: you know where you want to be, Paris, Washington, Madrid, Germany, and you go there, period. He wants her, but not enough.

  It’s all right, she can let him go. But she can really love him, now, only if he does go.

  This is her failure, not his. There’s a hardness about her. She has always known, but hoped it might change. It did change for a while when she met him, but now it’s back again and without the hope: if he couldn’t change it, nothing ever will. This is a sad piece of knowledge, she finds once she gets through the initial pain of losing him, but not dire. She did love him, and still does. And what she really loves, anyway, is work.

  Two women who both love the same man: it’s hard not to take sides. The journalist never knew there was a contest. If she had, I think she might have felt compassion for the famous woman, tenderness, even though the journalist was so tough, and even though she never spent much time thinking about whether her acquisition of a man might be leaving some other woman bereft. I don’t think she would have acted any differently—she wanted the doctor very badly—but she would have admired the famous woman’s fortitude and pragmatism, and the sheer gutsiness of loving so deeply and improbably. Or maybe not. Maybe the journalist did know how the famous woman felt, and was sorry, but not that sorry. You pays your money and you takes your chances. Or maybe she knew and thought it pathetic and ridiculous, an old lady’s ravenous longing for a handsome young man. Excuse me, your desire is showing—the way you might tell someone that her slip is showing, to save her from humiliation.

  It’s all speculation. These people are dead—if they were ever real people to begin with. I’m hedging, describing them without giving them names. You can figure out who I mean, but you’d be making a mistake if you were to confuse these characters with those personages. People leave clues but keep many more things secret. I’m trying to find my way inside, insinuating myself through the hairline cracks, starting with something real and ending up with fiction. 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 guesswork.

  Having said that, before I circle back to my own bewildering history with A, I’ll tell you one more thing, and this really did happen. Two years after she and the doctor parted, the journalist spent some time in Italy. She heard that the famous woman was staying nearby. Things had been cooler between them since the affair with the doctor; the journalist missed the old warmth and approbation. She hoped to patch things up, and drove over one day to say hello. What she didn’t know was that he would be there; he was traveling with the famous woman as her doctor. The sight of him shook the journalist. He was still the same, and he still looked at her the same way. Well, of course not the same, but it was enough for the two of them to go off to spend the night together. The famous woman didn’t like it; they would have seen that, if they’d been looking in her direction. Maybe it’s as well that they didn’t look.

  So what was my story with A? “Uneventful,” I want to say. “Nothing happened.” Certainly there was no geographic sweep to it—no Ireland, no Mexico, no journeys along the Adriatic coast. Not even a brief business trip. I imagined it sometimes, how a trip like that might go. I’d reined myself in, after those first incontinent declarations. I didn’t dream of a foreign city or a romantic hotel, or even, any longer, of us in bed together. Just an overnight stay away, in a place of irreproachable tameness. Cleveland, say. The Hilton. Separate rooms. Sitting up together late at night, in one of the hotel’s public spaces—a dark bar off the lobby. We would talk. Nothing else would happen—but it would have been a talk that acknowledged and illuminated and calmed everything. Away from our lives, on a high bluff overlooking the entire low-lying plain of the landscape, we would have been completely frank and open with each other.

  But the nature of our work was that we never got away. We didn’t ever go anywhere. We sat in A’s office, going over what had been done and what still had to be done in the coming week or month or year. We reviewed, we planned. The great sweep of our story wasn’t geography, it was time. We sat there for years.

  Then one Saturday afternoon I was in a lingerie store downtown. I tried on different things, looking at myself in the fitting room mirror, trying to imagine which combination my husband would like best. When I carried the pieces—embroidered, scant, expensive—over to the sales desk, I saw the identical garments already lying on the counter. I turned to smile at the man who was buying them. It was A.

  I had met his wife a few times over the years—she was a little older than he, a big, forthright, scrubbed-looking retired family lawyer who now did volunteer work for assorted nonprofits. The things A was buying would not have fit her.

  “Thanks, nothing quite worked,” I managed to say to the saleswoman, and I fled—the store; the sexy little pieces, which were tainted now and were too young for me anyway, really; and most of all A’s face.

  It was a three-day weekend. No office until Tuesday. It was like being shredded from the inside. I had lost
my parents, and my mother-in-law, whom I loved; had lost friends to cancer and a car accident; had watched friends suffering their own losses. And had watched the news, read the papers, knew what pain there was in the world. Romantic pain, when you’re in your seventh decade and happily married, should not be this brutal, this consuming. That weekend we took our grandson, who was now three, to a goat farm in the country. The goats stepped up a ramp onto a little carousel, three goats at a time, to be milked. Our grandson asked questions, petted the goats, hated the cheese. He wanted to know why goat’s milk tasted different from cow’s milk, and what other kinds of milk there were. I smiled at him and let my husband try to answer the questions: I didn’t know.

  A was waiting for me on Tuesday morning, his face grave and wary. We went into his office and he closed the door. We sat in our usual chairs facing each other. His marriage was rough, he said. His wife had been a drunk for years. She’d been violent with him; she had repeatedly threatened suicide. He did not feel able to leave her. “I’m not going to catalog it all for you,” he said, “or try to justify myself. I just want you to understand a little, what it’s been like.” Twelve years ago—before I knew him—he’d met someone. “It’s a complicated set of loyalties,” he said.

  “It must be,” I said. The two women, the two hidden lives. “A, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” He smiled at me. “I’m not unhappy.” His shirt was one my husband owned too—a pattern of thin and thick blue stripes. Both my husband and A had worn this shirt for years. I knew what the cloth felt like; I had taken it to the cleaner’s many times. I saw the mistake I had made, thinking that in some small but real way A belonged to me. My love for him was foolish, a kind of vanity, as well as a disservice to him: it had nothing to do with who he was. He had had agonies, and made accommodations, and found love and comfort—that was the real, deep river of his life, flowing along through land I’d never seen.