Emerald City (16 page)

Slowly she moved forward, letting the water cover her by degrees. Then a wave reared in front of her, and Ellen dove into it. There was a hard, salty blow to her head, and she was beyond the breaking surf.

Several minutes later she saw her mother on the beach. Ellen called to her and waved her arms, expecting to be ordered ashore immediately. Instead, her mother moved closer to the water, keeping her eyes on Ellen. She stepped into the waves with great care, as if fearful of sharp things hidden in the sand. Soon the rim of her dress floated around her waist. Standing that way, she looked like a girl, and Ellen was struck by the thought that her mother had once been her own age. She saw this now in the fine pale bones of her face, the wet hair sticking to her head.

“Swim,” Ellen called to her.

Her mother hesitated, then pushed off. She swam in the smooth, even crawl she used for laps in a pool. The waves jostled her, upsetting the neat strokes.

When she finally reached Ellen, her eyebrows were raised in a look of prolonged amazement. Her head seemed small in its slick coating of hair. “We’ve lost our minds,” she said with a high, nervous laugh.

Ellen was aware of not thinking about her father, and this gave her a tenuous sense of freedom. Her mother treaded water, looking up at the sky. Suddenly she turned to Ellen and grasped her hand underwater. Ellen felt her mother grow perfectly still. After a moment she let go of Ellen’s hand and began swimming back. Ellen followed.

A wave washed them in, and Ellen found herself sprawled beside her mother on the sand. Her father was nowhere in sight. Her mother’s frail limbs showed through her wet dress. Ellen looked down at her own Mexican shirt and saw that its bright pinks and greens had drained away. A sudden despair overwhelmed her. She buried her feet in the sand and grasped a damp, gritty handful in each fist. She had an urge to put some in her mouth and suck the coarse grains.

“What’s going to happen?” she asked, ashamed of the tremor in her voice.

Her mother was kneeling, shivering a little. She put an arm around Ellen’s shoulders. “We’re going back to the house to dry off,” she said. “That’s what.”

She pulled her daughter to her feet, surprising Ellen with the strength of her arms. Ellen leaned against her mother, allowing herself to be led through the sand. The sun had dropped below the horizon.

“And then we’re getting out of this,” her mother said.

I’ve been an off-season traveler since my divorce, and this winter I’m in Spain. A man is following me. On the train from Madrid he was a copper salesman with an eager mustache and samples of his product: copper wires, copper disks, copper beaten into thin, pliable sheets. I took everything he gave me and stuffed it into my purse. In Cordoba he was a restaurant owner who fed me plate after plate of sizzling beef while I watched the rain slide from the awning of his restaurant. I ate until my face began to throb. Sweat gathered on my upper lip.

“The senorita is very hungry,” the man said, filling my glass with red wine. “The senorita has been underfed.”

I nodded, too full to struggle with my college Spanish.

The truth is, I’ll take anything I’m given.

In Toledo, where I have just been, the man was tall and gaunt as an ascetic. He wore a white turtleneck and was feeding squares of marzipan to children in the central square. It was nearly midnight. The air blurred with fog that rose from the surrounding river. The bare trees were strung with small white lights.

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.