The News from Spain (6 page)

But Harriet makes it explicit. “Either way, she’s not crazy to want it; and either way, it isn’t happening.”

A man has been coming into Rebecca’s bookstore every couple of weeks. He buys a lot—no specific category, he just seems generally ravenous: novels, poetry, history. He is short, probably in his late fifties, with silver-rimmed glasses and a large shaggy graying head and a big square jaw that reminds Rebecca of a lion. He grins at Rebecca when he pays. They don’t talk. Their not talking, which might at first have been shyness or reserve, has begun to feel deliberate, erotic. His name, on the credit slips, is Benjamin Ehrman.

Already Rebecca can tell the story two different ways. One ends with them getting married. The other ends with her looking back over a cratered battlefield of a love affair and wondering: What were you
thinking
?

Harriet calls late one morning, practically in tears.

“What is it?” Rebecca asks.

“I’m still in bed. They haven’t—when I woke up I said I
needed the bedpan. And the aide told me it was too much trouble, I should just … go, and they’d come clean me up. So I did, but that was a couple of hours ago—”

Rebecca looks at the clock hanging on the wall of the bookstore. It’s eleven-thirty. “I’ll call you right back.” She hangs up, and then calls the nursing home and asks to speak to Harriet’s caseworker. She describes what Harriet has just told her, and ends by saying, “That is not okay.”

“No, it’s not,” the caseworker agrees smoothly. “You’re right. But sometimes they can make it sound worse than it really is; there may be a little more to the story. Let me go look into it.”

Rebecca’s hands are shaking. “I don’t think my mother is confused about what’s going on.” She keeps picturing the caseworker in her Halloween costume: her eye patch, her blackened tooth, her little plastic dagger. And she says again, “This is not okay.”

She hangs up and calls Harriet back. “The social worker is sending someone to help you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Mom.
I’m
sorry.” They stay on the phone until Harriet has to hang up because, she says, “Here everybody is, all of a sudden.”

Benjamin Ehrman comes in and buys the
Oresteia
and the complete Ecco Press set of Chekhov stories. Is he taking some sort of middle-aged Great Books course? Is he courting her, trying (successfully) to slay her with his taste?

He pays. He smiles. He doesn’t say anything, not even thank you. At the point when any other customer would have said “thank you,” he smiles at her again.

Oh, Rebecca, you tired, confused woman. You are so ripe for this kind of thing.

She goes down to visit Harriet at Christmas. (She and Peter have never spent the holiday together; she always goes to Harriet, and he is either with his kids or off skiing in Utah. This year, the separation bothers her. Not in itself—she hates skiing—but the fact that there is no expectation that they will make a plan together. How could there not be, after all this time? On the other hand, doesn’t the ease with which they go their separate ways—the pleasantness of it—confirm that she is free?)

She brings Harriet a beef tenderloin she has cooked, and she reheats au gratin potatoes and green beans in the kitchen microwave. The gray people in their straggly hallway flotilla watch, or don’t watch, as she walks by holding dishes aloft. One woman looks at her and raises a forefinger, like someone timidly hailing a cab. “Excuse me,” the woman says, “but is this Washington Square?”

“No, it isn’t,” Rebecca says.

“Do you know how to get there from here?”

Rebecca shakes her head, and the woman smiles and shrugs.

Harriet says of the dinner, “You can’t imagine what a treat this is.”

“Yes I can,” Rebecca says. “That’s why I brought it.”

Ralph’s children have taken him out for dinner—they all live nearby—but later that evening he comes to see Harriet. Rebecca likes him: he is blunt and loyal, and quick, like Harriet.

Rebecca sits, trying to straighten out a piece of knitting (a red scarf, Harriet’s Christmas present to her, which, Harriet
says, “should have been done ages ago but I keep screwing it up—you know I’m not domestic”), while Ralph and Harriet play anagrams on a table rolled up against Harriet’s wheelchair. They take turns flipping over a new letter and seeing if they can steal a word the other person has already made.

Rebecca, ripping out rows of Harriet’s impatient thwarted knitting, is nearly in tears, watching them: the speed, the sureness with which they play. Ralph steals “risked” from Harriet, adds his own “T,” and makes “skirted.” Harriet steals “donuts” and makes “astound.”

One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of January, Rebecca goes to the movies by herself. She stands in line—a long one—not thinking of much. The smell of popcorn, and how sickening it is. The fact that the hole in the right-hand pocket of her orange wool coat has now become big enough that she ought to start carrying her loose change in the left one. Ahead of her in line a man is waving, beckoning, smiling. Benjamin Ehrman. She turns around to see if he means someone behind her; he grins, and points at her, and beckons again. So she goes to him.

“What movie are you seeing?” he asks, and she tells him, and he says, “Me too.”

She says, “So, you do know how to talk after all”; she feels like a jerk as soon as it’s out of her mouth.

But, “I know,” he says. “One of us was going to have to break that silence.” That sounds meaningful, erotic, again; he defuses it by adding, “It was getting to be like those staring contests you have when you’re a kid.”

So they go in together, sit together, are deferential about the armrest, are aware of exactly where each other’s hands are
in the darkness. The movie is a “little” one that has received doting reviews. The audience is enraptured with it, laughing, sighing. Rebecca hates it. She looks over at him and he looks back and rolls his eyes at her. They don’t know each other well enough to agree to walk out—they don’t know each other at all, so walking out would mean going their separate ways. They stay, sitting there through the whole thing, grimacing at each other, sinking down in their seats, their shoulders growing conspiratorially closer as their silent agreement that the thing just stinks grows more and more intense. At the end they throw themselves out into the street, laughing. They go for coffee but order wine instead.

A list of what shocks Rebecca, over the next weeks and months:

Bed. That something she’s done a lot of and enjoyed in the past could feel so fiercely new.

Underwear. He likes it, so he buys it for her and she starts buying it for herself. Tarty, expensive stuff. And nothing in her objects—not the feminist part, not the shy part, not the part that is aware of weighing fifteen pounds more than she did in college.

Her hair. It’s long, it nearly reaches her waist; she’s always worn it up, or in a braid. He wants it down. She sits on the bed between his thighs with her back to him, and he brushes her hair, crooning to her. And she loves it—she, who has always disliked having anyone touch her hair since childhood, when Harriet used to yank a brush through it and say impatiently, when Rebecca flinched, “You have such a tender
scalp
.”

Pet names for each other. We won’t even put them in here, because the ones they make up are so incredibly silly.

Italian chocolate eggs with toys inside. He hands her one
after dinner on one of the first nights he cooks for her. She thinks, Oh, how nice, a chocolate egg. When she unwraps it and breaks off a piece, she discovers a small plastic capsule inside; when she opens that, she finds six plastic pieces; when she puts the pieces together, they make a tiny pterodactyl holding a jackhammer. Oh, he says, the pterodactyl road crew ones are the best.

Jealousy. He is separated but not divorced. Rebecca sees the wife around Cambridge, a narrow pretty greyhound of a woman, with a face that is at once anxious and arrogant. She looks rich. She is rich, because Ben is rich. Five years ago he sold his dot-com company and made the kind of money that can scatter people all over an expensive city in big houses: one for himself, one for his parents, one for a son and daughter-in-law, and then another one for himself when he moved out of the first one and left his wife alone there. That had happened a year before Rebecca met him. Rebecca hates seeing this woman—Dorinda. After a sighting she always has a sense of belated, alert panic, the kind you feel when you narrowly miss having a traffic accident. She sees Dorinda in the supermarket, and Dorinda’s eyes hold hers for an instant and then sweep coldly away. Is this just one person registering the presence of another, unknown, one? Or is it the snubbing of a rival? She asks Ben if Dorinda knows about her. Ben says he’s mentioned to Dorinda that he’s seeing someone but that they’ve never discussed whom. Implying that they do still discuss some things. What things? What do they talk about? How often? How married are they? There is also another, much earlier, wife: Carol, the mother of Ben’s three grown children. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard. Rebecca doesn’t know what she looks like and is not bothered by her as she is by Dorinda, though it does worry her
some that there are two of them, two of Ben’s former loves cast adrift in the world. Does it mean she will one day be a third? Is he a serial discarder? No, she tells herself: he is fifty-seven, he’s had a life. Rebecca is forty-five, and has a past of her own. Her quantity is equal to Ben’s: two. Steve, who had grown less and less interested in sex, and eventually told her that it would be okay with him if she wanted to go out and have an affair; and then Peter.

She has of course by now broken up with Peter, who, she thinks, barely seemed to notice. In fact, it’s Rebecca who has failed to notice. She is so far gone, so deeply drunk on love, that she doesn’t notice how surprised and hurt he is; how aware he has been, over the years, of his own caution and reticence; how miserably, suddenly, certain he is that their long civilized mildness was fatal and largely his fault; how far from mild he is feeling now. He’s angry at her but angrier at himself.

“We could still see each other sometimes,” she said vaguely, cravenly, at the end. (She was thinking that it had been so friendly all along, maybe it could just keep being friendly.) “I’ll miss you.”

“No. Don’t call me. Don’t call me again unless you mean it,” Peter said; and then he amended it to: “Don’t call me.”

It was very clear and clean, Rebecca thought at the time. They had met for a cup of coffee in Harvard Square, and they were done and she was walking home within fifteen minutes. She was relieved that there hadn’t been a scene, but also not surprised. She did feel sad: she
would
miss him. She passed the store that sold the chocolate eggs, and went in and bought one to hide somewhere—Ben’s slipper, the piano bench. They’ve taken to stashing them all over his house for each other to find.

What does Harriet make of all this? Nothing. Rebecca hasn’t
told her. She doesn’t know what Harriet would say, but she knows she doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to hear anything from anybody.

She wants to be utterly alone with Ben: she wants to drink him, eat him, climb inside him, run away with him. She’s never felt this way about anyone.

What she has always thought, watching friends of hers disappear into similar love affairs in the past, is “Uh-oh.”

But who is ever able to apply to her own current love affair a word like “similar”?

She gets calls from the nursing home. “I’m just calling to report that your mother fell this morning. She slid down out of her wheelchair. She wasn’t hurt.”

“We’re calling to let you know that your mother is in the emergency room. She has a pretty high fever, and the doctor was worried she might be dehydrated.”

She calls Harriet. “Mom?”

Harriet says she’s okay, or she’s tired, or she’s mad that they didn’t take action sooner, or she knows they’re short-staffed and that it’s not their fault, or that they’re a bunch of stupid uncaring assholes who just want her money. Rebecca murmurs and soothes, gets indignant, calls the nursing home to complain, suggests to Harriet yet again that they hire a private aide to keep a closer eye on her (which Harriet has always refused to do, because as it is the nursing home is gobbling up her money and once it’s gone she’ll have to go on Medicaid and have a roommate, the idea of which she finds abhorrent).

Rebecca is so competent by now whenever there’s a crisis. She always has been—but it’s different now, more automatic,
because she has Ben. When something happens with Harriet, she does what needs to be done, but it feels more like Honor Thy Mother than it does like running into a burning building to save someone you love who is trapped inside.

“And you’re sure you don’t want me to look for a place near Boston?” Rebecca asks.

No, Harriet always says, because of Ralph.

She talks to Cath occasionally, and Cath says, from the safe distance of Denver: “It’s time for her to live closer to one of us.”

(Rebecca is tempted sometimes to say:
Okay, Cath, I’ve arranged to have Mom med-flighted out to you
.)

Harriet gets a urinary tract infection, another leg infection, bronchitis.

She has been sick now for so long, this has all been going on forever. Rebecca wishes it would all just stop—but the only thing that will stop it is Harriet’s death, and she doesn’t want that.

She asks Harriet one afternoon—it’s when Harriet is in the hospital with bronchitis, and Rebecca has driven down to Connecticut to spend the afternoon with her (just the afternoon: she wants to be back in Cambridge again by bedtime)—“Aren’t you tired of all this?”

“Yes,” Harriet says. “But I don’t want it to be over, because I want to know the end of the story.”

“What story?” Rebecca asks.

“All the stories,” Harriet says.

“You’re so sad,” Ben says, rubbing the backs of his fingers against her cheek when she gets home from the bookstore one evening.