The News from Spain (11 page)

You could make a ballet about paralysis—her husband did once, years ago, long before she got sick, when she was still almost a child. She danced, ran all over the stage, was stricken, and then sat in a wheelchair. It was a small piece, done for charity, performed once. Years before he knew her, or even came to New York, Malcolm happened to read the review of that ballet, sitting in the periodicals room of the newly integrated but still
nerve-racking public library in the Kentucky town where he grew up. He used to go there on Saturdays to read
The New York Times
—the news but mostly the arts section, the movie and dance reviews—while the two librarians passed by to see how he was doing, the one who ostentatiously smiled to show he was welcome and the one who didn’t. He remembers that review, for some reason; it talked about the beauty of her arms and what she did with her upper body as she sat in the wheelchair. Someone—well, Tim, who is in the company—has told Malcolm her husband can’t bear to remember that he put her in that piece.

Once she is settled, Malcolm hands her the fine silver knife she uses to slit open the envelopes, positions the wastebasket next to her chair, and goes into the kitchen to get the coffee, which he and she both like to drink all through the morning, very strong, with cream. He carries it in to her on a tray, cup and saucer and a blue-and-white Danish coffeepot, delicate and easy to lift but large so that she’ll be well supplied and won’t have to call for more. Unlike the physical things he does for her body, which are not unmentionable but which go unmentioned—they happen in some different world that contains only facts, necessities, mechanics—this gracefully civilized bit of service evokes her soft, pleasant “Thank you,” and one of those radiant smiles.

Then—he is stripping the sheets from the bed, she has gone back to the mail—she says, “Oh, God.” She is looking at an envelope. From where Malcolm is standing, a few feet away, he recognizes her husband’s scrawly black handwriting.

“What?”

“Wait,” she says. She slices open the envelope, scans the letter and laughs, a small, sour, exasperated sigh of a laugh. She holds the white sheet of stationery out to Malcolm.

Dear Sweetheart—

I am in a taxicab going down to the dock, or I am on the dock, or already on the boat as you read this. Crowded, noisy, loud horns, people say good-bye and they love each other. Even though none of this has happened yet, it will, and I will miss you. Be good and careful and eat well, not too much though, and I will come home to you soon
.

Love—

Malcolm nods, looks at her, and waits. It seems, to him, like a nice letter; but what matters is how it seems to her.

“What do you think?” she asks, in an overly bright, impatient, baiting voice. She’s smiling.
Tell me
, she invites.
Tell me, and I’ll tell you you’re wrong
.

He shakes his head.

She laughs and ducks her head, a graceful little bow, acknowledging his prudence. “Well,” she says, “it’s what you do with a child. You write the stack of letters before you go away, and you give them to a family friend to mail. One a day, or every other day; some prearranged schedule. That way, the child thinks you are thinking of her, and you can go off and be out of reach without worrying that she’s feeling neglected.”

Wouldn’t that be a good thing? he wonders. The notion that someone might take so much trouble to console and please a child is new to him. Best, maybe, to be adored with passion, as a lover; but if you couldn’t have that, then wasn’t the next best thing to be a child beloved enough to inspire such elaborate contrivance?

“You’re quick,” is what he says. “Right, he must have mailed it several days ago.”

“I’m crazy, is what you mean. To be already convinced that
this is only the first of these letters, that there will be more. As they say in mystery novels.” He must look baffled (he is), because she adds, “In Agatha Christie, whenever a threatening note arrives, someone says, ‘This is only the first.’ ”

“This is a threatening note?”

“Malcolm, don’t be stupid.” Her voice is gentle. He sees that she is close to tears. Well, of course she is. Her husband is in love with someone else.

“Malcolm,” she says, “you’re not the one mailing them, are you? He didn’t give them to you?”

“No,” he says, startled, truthful.

“Oh, good. That really would be more than I could stand.” She reaches for his hand and, without looking at him, leans her cheek very briefly against his wrist.

There’s been a long string of these girls. She was one of them. She had predecessors—some wives, some not—and she’s had successors.

Sitting here, sorting the bills (her husband used to insist on doing them until she finally told him it was ridiculous, she was sitting around twiddling her thumbs so much that her entire brain felt twiddly, and just give her please the goddamn bills), anticipating lunch, she’s thinking about them, this string of women, and trying to remember how she thought about it all when she was the new one. Not even yet the new one—but the upcoming one, the future one, the one beginning to be singled out. None of it had happened yet, but she could tell that the light was shining on her, flickering sometimes but getting stronger as she got closer to it. All she had to do was walk toward it; and it shone, invitingly, approving of the way she walked.

She was young and dumb, she thinks now. Ruthless. No,
young. Trusting the grown-ups, and he was the leader of the grown-ups. She had not seen anyone acting upset—his wife continued to be as kind as ever—and, not seeing any hurt, it had incredibly not occurred to her that she was part of something hurtful. Everyone seemed to feel
Oh, yes, of course;
so she felt it too.

If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else, an older dancer said to her—such a nonchalant blend of malice and reassurance, though at the time she’d missed the malice and had not needed to be reassured.

Oh, well, if it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else
, she has thought in the years since then, telegraphing her thoughts in the general direction of some new ballerina who was bumbling, pale and blank and fluttery, toward that same bright light.

“Oh, well.” It’s artifice, a performance, whether said of love or illness, before an audience or just to oneself. No one really thinks “Oh, well,” but repeated often enough, rehearsed, it can become admirable, almost believable.

This time, though, she can’t say it. She’s tried. She’s sent tokens—flowers, joke gifts, once a very old Russian cross—on opening nights. She’s hosted at dinner a couple of times, evenings that were awkward, painful, not because of her husband’s bewitchment but because of the new one’s shyness, which is so extreme that it’s a kind of encapsulation. She’s coined a name for her—he’s always liked young dancers, babies, but this one is even younger: “How goes it with the Infant?” she’s asked her husband sometimes, with a kind of hearty, almost bawdy cheer that made her shudder. “Infant does very well,” he would answer. Look, they can speak of it! They can share a joke!

Only lately, he hasn’t spoken or joked about it. “How’s the Infant?” “Fine,” he says, vaguely, as if he isn’t quite sure which
infant she’s referring to. In the beginning he talked a lot about what the Infant could do—how high, how fast, how bravely. “No fear—none. She’s like cat.” He’s compared other dancers to other things—“She’s like knife, clean, bam!” “She’s like smoke.” “She’s like happy little dog—jumps until you pat on the head”—but of the Infant, now, he’s gotten quieter. It isn’t the silence of having moved on; it’s a different silence, of having moved deeper. He is not making new ballets for anyone else, and he’s casting the Infant in all the old dances, wanting to see what they’ll look like on her. The old dancers are miffed and alarmed and helpless; the young ones cry and try to get thinner. She hears all this, shut up in the apartment. People bring in the gossip along with the books and the flowers. She shrugs. She sees herself shrugging, in the mirror that leans against one of the living room walls, a mirror she uses for physical therapy and otherwise pretty much ignores.

“Oh, dear,” said one visitor, who’d been fretting about losing her old parts and was suddenly aware of having been thoughtless. “But I guess there are worse things in life.”

“Yes,” she said, and laughed, “like frozen spinach. Have you ever tasted it? Somehow I never had, but I got curious last week. Oh, just frighteningly awful.” She glanced again at the mirror and saw the two of them laughing, the old chic troubled dancer and herself merrily chortling in her wheelchair, and she felt sick.

Sometimes she looks at Malcolm, and he kicks people out. “She’s tired,” he says; or he refers to some fictitious imminent appointment. It’s like being a Tudor monarch, irrational and absolute: all she has to do is lift a querulous eyebrow, and he dispatches the offender. (Except Tudor monarchs didn’t have eyebrows: too fair, or maybe they’d plucked them. She’d gone on a reading binge—all the wives. Which sounds pointed—though
at least her husband has never resorted to decapitation—but wasn’t, because it was only one of many binges. Russian and French history; Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant; Beverley Nichols and then a slew of gardening histories; Lafcadio Hearn; Denton Welch; murder mysteries; Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil; and a lot more, books brought over from the public library or ordered from London or Paris, many cookbooks, volumes of diaries and letters. All the reading she never did when she was young and just danced: a spotty curriculum entirely based on her own happy, avid whims.)

But this morning, with the company safely packed onto the boat, there are no worried, exhausting visitors for her to jolly along. There’s the mail, the coffee, the tour of the plants (looking for leaves that might have died since yesterday—there aren’t any—and pinching leaves off the geraniums to get the scent), the cat stretched out in a block of sunlight, asleep and grinning, and a Mozart wind serenade on the record player. There’s the bathroom stuff; and a shampoo, a long, perilous procedure in which Malcolm binds her with white cloths, mummylike, to a board that slants up to the kitchen sink. Then there’s lunch, delicious, a salad with tiny potatoes and thin green beans and olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. And olives. And bread, thickly spread with butter. “Oh, Malcolm, thank you.”

She takes her hair out of rollers and brushes it and looks through a cookbook, thinking about dinner. “Haddock stew?” she says to Malcolm, who is folding laundry. The cat sits up and starts energetically washing a leg. “He heard me. Yes, darling, we’ll slip you something. You won’t starve, I promise.”

Then more bathroom stuff and she takes a nap while Malcolm goes out to the fish store and the wine store and the A&P. Then they go out together, she wearing sunglasses and wrapped in a plaid blanket (“my neurasthenic Baden-Baden
millionaire outfit,” she calls it), and Malcolm pushes her along Riverside Drive, where the wind is cold and the sun breaks the water into tiny blinding smithereens.

She thinks of the boat sliding out of the river this morning. Out of sight of land now. You walk the deck. You rest. You dress for dinner. You have cocktails. You stand by the railing and look at the stars or down at the long foaming triangle of the wake. Nothing appears to be happening, but you’re moving slowly toward Europe, and the whole time you are feeling that deep vibrating hum of the engine, without being aware that you feel it.

Malcolm, too, is looking at the river and thinking of the boat.

Of Tim, who may or may not write.

Who offered to let Malcolm stay in his apartment while he was away—an offer that, Malcolm saw, was meant to be generous, but that was actually chilling, since he’d been “staying” there for over a year and had begun at some point to think of himself as living there. Was Tim trying to tell him he was a freeloader? (But Malcolm does buy all the groceries, and cooks as well, on the nights when he isn’t working—he always has a meal ready when Tim comes home from the theater.) Or to remind him not to overestimate how close they were, not to make assumptions about the future or even about right now? No, he decided, as Tim went on holding him after speaking, with no sign that any big caution had just been delivered. It was meant warmly. Maybe for Tim it was a step forward, even if to Malcolm it felt like a loss, a sudden discovery that something lovely and unspoken had perhaps not been spoken because it wasn’t there.

It would be so good to talk about it, he thinks, looking at
the back of her patterned silk head scarf as he pushes her along the sidewalk. To lay all these messy pieces—hers and his—out on the floor, to turn things this way and that, to speculate. But neither of them would want that conversation. She was too reticent about her marriage, Malcolm didn’t want someone else’s insights about Tim, they were both exquisitely careful of each other’s privacy.

Really, what he would have liked, rather than a solemn dramatic analysis, would have been the freedom to babble about it to someone. To her. She’d be a joy to babble to.

Did you know that Tim isn’t short for Timothy?
he’d like to say.
His name is actually Timon
.

Of Athens?
she’d ask, alert and curious, her mouth curling in that beautiful smile.

No, of Greenwich, Connecticut
. They would laugh together.
But I read the play, after I met him. No one reads that play, but I did
.

What did you think?

I don’t remember anything about it. Just the title page. I kept flipping back and just looking at that one word on the title page
.

No, too sappy. Too confidential. It wouldn’t shock her to know that he’s mooning over a man (he guesses it wouldn’t even surprise her). But he knows that even this kind of talk would be too much, the same way he knew, growing up, sneaking silently out of the house at night, which parts of which floorboards to avoid. She’d be warm and interested. She’d ask questions. Then she’d have to ask more questions, next week, next month. If it went well, she’d have to rejoice. If it ended, she’d have to commiserate. She’d have to be a friend, or do that sprightly false boss-taking-an-interest-in-the-worker business. It would upset their balance, which cannot be explained, but which works.