The News from Spain (3 page)

“Of course I remember Vikram,” Susanne said now.

Barbara held Susanne’s arm tighter, nestling into her side. “Nobody liked him, did they.”

“It just seemed like he wasn’t very nice to you.”

“He wasn’t, really. But—oh, you know.” They kept slowly walking on the lawn. Barbara laughed a little. “I guess he was just the one that got away.”

“Well,” Susanne said, automatically soothing, still rubbing Barbara’s hand, “maybe we all have someone like that.”

They had almost reached the tent. Barbara drew away and stared at Susanne. “What are you talking about? You married the one who
should
have been the one that got away.”

•    •    •

If they had happened to look up at the bathroom window, they would have seen that another new pope had been chosen.

Bad behavior. He knew this. He was forty-seven. He was an executive vice president in charge of corporate communications for a mid-size financial services company.

He rubbed his mouth with toothpaste again, went down to dinner, put the wrap gently around Barbara’s shoulders, and then sat down and took hold of her hand under the tablecloth. The look she gave him—benevolent, relieved—made him want to cry.

At dinner Susanne talked to the man sitting on her left—a conversation that never lifted off from the factual where-were-you-born stuff, made harder by the fact that both of them were trying so earnestly to get it off the ground. “And your wife?” Susanne asked. “Is she from Michigan also?”

Waiters came and took away the soup plates and put down plates of rare beef and two tiny roasted potatoes.

The woman on Susanne’s right turned out to be a college friend of Barbara’s. The conversation began pleasantly, but then suddenly the woman, who’d had quite a lot of wine, said, “So why is she marrying him, do you think?” She smiled at Susanne—she had straight black hair and delicate, deep eye sockets, a weary, cold sort of beauty. “I’ll tell you my theory,” she went on. “She has these two sisters with their marriages and children and their establishments—not just households,
establishments
. And she’s watched it all for years, and now she’s tired.”

Susanne nodded and looked across the table at John. He was talking to the man next to him, but he saw her look and got up and came around the table and crouched by her chair. She touched his shoulder lightly and stood up, and he followed her out of the tent. The orchestra was playing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Soon people would start dancing.

“This is an awful party,” she said.

“Do you want to leave?”

“We can’t. Not yet.”

Along one side of the Hardings’ lawn, where it sloped down to the bay, there was a tall yew hedge. Susanne headed for the spot where she thought the opening would be, groped, found it, and walked through. As kids they had called this “the Maze.” It wasn’t really, because there was only one possible route through it, but it had felt the way they imagined a maze would: a narrow angled passage whose green walls were too high to see over and too dense to see through. As she and John walked through it she told him about what the drunk woman had said at dinner, and about her conversation with Barbara. For some reason she didn’t mention what she and Barnaby had talked about.

“You don’t
do
that!” she said, going back to the drunk woman. “You just don’t. You don’t
say
things like that to a stranger at a party.” (She was a little drunk herself.)

“No,” John said, “but you’re also upset because you think she’s right.” (His own slight intoxication often showed up this way, a concise, clear-eyed gravity.)

They ended up kissing each other, for a long time, standing between the high yew walls.
Oh God
, he kept saying,
oh God
.
Susanne felt split: kissing him, watching herself kissing him.
God
, he said against her collarbone.

She didn’t want to walk any farther; the Maze eventually opened onto another flat patch of lawn, from which you could see her family’s house, and she didn’t want to see it. They went back to the party for a while and had champagne and dessert—a kind of round chocolate thing with ice cream inside, which looked like a small cannonball and seemed intended to be emphatically not wedding cake and thus to remind people that this party, despite all its eager nuptial trappings, was part of the build-up, not yet the real thing. The drunk woman had disappeared, so John sat next to Susanne and she gave him most of her cannonball. They watched Barbara and Barnaby dancing, correct graceful dancing-school steps executed while smiling into each other’s faces in the way that had also been encouraged, though rarely adhered to, in dancing school. Then, when other people got up to dance, Susanne and John walked back to the motel and got into one of the beds.

For the first time in all those months, she took him in her mouth. She heard him crying; and then realized he wasn’t crying. Then he tried to reciprocate, and she said, sharply, “No!” and they both froze, she because she was wondering, again, what exactly had gone on in that bed in Chicago, and he because he knew what had gone on—and now, suddenly, feeling him tense, so did she. There was a long, still, dangerous moment, but she pulled his mouth to hers, and got her hips against his, and things went on with a roughness that was only partly fueled by rage and sorrow.

Barnaby and Barbara, too, ended up kissing in the Maze. She led him there, after the party had petered out (which it had by
eleven—he’d known it would be an early night). She held his hand, she turned her face up to his, and he kissed her, even paying dutiful attention to the places where her skin stopped and the bodice of her strapless dress began. Her flesh quivered; she sighed; he felt sorry for her and angry at himself.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too.”

Was it immoral for them to say these things, to marry each other? So much was missing—not just from his side, he knew, but from hers, too, from the way she felt about him.

But they both wanted to get married. They were both tired of not being married. After twenty years of intersecting social life, in some ways they barely knew each other. He’d thought for a long time, somewhat seriously but mainly idly, that from a distance she looked right. This thought had become more urgent in the last year or so, and lately she’d begun to think the same thing about him. They were standing out in the moonlight now and his mouth was prowling around her cleavage, but they were still at almost the same distance.

In bleaker moments he had thought: She could probably, at this point, marry anybody. The problem was that he was somebody—she was marrying a blank, but the blankness was something that, in the close and daily proximity of marriage, he would be unable to keep up.

“You do?” she asked.

John had fallen asleep, sprawled on his back on top of the sheets. He was snoring. Susanne got out of bed and looked at him. She looked at her watch: it was ten minutes past twelve. She pulled on some clothes, the jeans and T-shirt she’d worn earlier that afternoon. She found the room key where John had dropped
it on the dresser and let herself out, closing the door quietly behind her. She had started to climb the wooden staircase that led to the second floor of the motel when she saw that Barnaby was coming down toward her.

“Hey, Susanne,” he said. He seemed startled to see her.

She said, “Did you forget our assignation?”

“Our assignation?” he said blankly. Then he said, “Wait a minute, that didn’t sound very gallant, did it.”

“Barnaby,” she said, “it’s a joke.”

He came down the rest of the stairs and took hold of her forearm. “Let’s have our assignation on the beach.”

They passed out of the margin of light around the motel. The moon was up and the beach was pale and bleached; it was easy to see where they were walking. Barnaby still had on his clothes from the party, but Susanne shivered and he gave her his jacket. It was loose, and warm from him. He put his arm around her, and they walked a little way down the beach. Then they sat down on the cold sand, and Barnaby said, “Excuse me,” and held his jacket away from Suzanne’s chest and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the inside breast pocket.

“Want one?” he asked. She shook her head, and he lit one for himself while she cupped her hands loosely around his to protect the match from the wind. (They both, simultaneously, had a sudden memory of how, at Barbara’s dinner parties, when Susanne had still smoked and Barnaby had smoked openly, the two of them used to go out on the doorstep together and stand beneath the small porch hood, struggling to light up in the rain, in blizzards, that small, innocent, exciting touch of their hands.) It took him a few matches, but finally he drew in his breath and blew out smoke.

He said, “All right, if you won’t smoke, then what about—”
and then Susanne felt his hand fumbling near her hip and he pulled something out of that pocket, something heavy that she’d noticed dragging on the jacket when she’d put it on. A silver flask. She laughed.

“What?”

“Just that you’re so well equipped.”

“I know. Did I think I’d find myself unexpectedly fox hunting?” He unscrewed the lid. “Actually, with Barbara’s family, there could be fox hunting, couldn’t there.”

Susanne drank some brandy, loving the deep stabbing burn of it, and passed the flask back to Barnaby.

“So,” she said.

“So.”

They sat looking out at the luminous sky, and at the harbor silvered by moonlight.

That was when they would have talked, if they had talked. Barnaby might have told her that he knew his engagement looked shaky from the outside, but that he was counting on Barbara’s discretion and rectitude to make the marriage work. He might have said that he believed that after a point Barbara would stop wanting and stop asking, that she’d decide the marriage was what it was and would consider it a point of honor to uphold it. That he didn’t know anyone else with whom he thought he could build a marriage on honor, and that it was the only thing he thought he might possibly build a marriage on. That he was afraid of being alone if he didn’t marry her, and if he did. That he missed his parents; that no one knew how much; that he knew that even he didn’t quite comprehend how much.

And Susanne might have told him about John. (She hadn’t told anyone, except for her mother, and that had been an
accident, something that had burst out of her mouth one day when her mother was going on, as she so often did, about how wonderful John was and how Susanne should appreciate how lucky she was to be in that marriage.) She might have told him that she was tired of being angry at John, that it was fading a little but that she didn’t think it would ever stop. That she wondered if it would always go on this way or would eventually change: this paradox that any moment of happiness between them became a new, incendiary part of the grievance. That the times, like this evening, when it was good again made his having fucked someone else seem even more pointless.

They sat on the beach not talking. In a way they didn’t trust each other. It had nothing to do with thinking the other person wouldn’t understand—he knew that she would have, and she knew the same of him. It was thinking that the other person’s understanding wouldn’t really make any difference. Maybe they were right, maybe it wouldn’t have. There was something comfortable, and symmetrical, about sitting there together thinking they knew how deep their trust in each other—or in anyone—could go, and where the limits were going to be.

After a while Barnaby picked up a big shell, a whelk. “When I was growing up we had a house on the Jersey shore.” He smiled; Susanne saw his tired face relax in the moonlight. “And my father would hand me a shell and say, ‘Want to listen to the news from Spain?’ Because we were roughly across the Atlantic from Gibraltar. I used to love that, thinking that if we went out in a boat the next place we’d hit would be Spain.”

Susanne took the shell from him and held it to her ear. An urgent tumbling whispering roar. A sound unheard for years, but old, instantly familiar. A sound from childhood: you
thought that if you could only listen hard enough you’d be able to decipher what you heard.

Barnaby had found another shell for himself, she saw.

And then for a long time—longer than they would have expected, though neither of them said this aloud—they sat and listened to the news from Spain.

The News from Spain

The news from Spain is terrible. A bomb under a park bench in a small town near Madrid. Fifteen people have been killed and dozens injured. Harriet tells the aide, who crosses herself; the nurse, who says, “It makes you want to stay home and never leave the house—but that would just be giving in to terrorism”; and her daughter Rebecca, who says, “Why do you spend all day watching that stuff?”

Rebecca is tired. Harriet has been sick on and off for years, more than a decade. Rebecca has just driven four hours from Boston to get to the Connecticut nursing home where Harriet now lives. She is taking two days off from the small bookstore she owns, paying her part-time assistant extra to cover for her. She’s brought a shopping bag full of things Harriet likes: rice pudding with raisins, shortbread, fresh figs, and a box of
lamejuns
from a Middle Eastern bakery. She has walked into the room and Harriet has barely looked away from the TV to say hello.