The News from Spain (17 page)

“Impressive, aren’t I? But let me tell you something: I know that there is such a thing, but I have absolutely no idea what it is.”

“It’s like a two-headed lute.”

“And
hautbois d’amour
. That was the other terrific name I remember. ‘High wood of love.’ But again: could not tell you the first thing about it if my life depended on it.”

Liza, looking into Alice’s red-cheeked, animated face, felt suddenly lacerated, such an unexpected rawness that she forgot to breathe. “Well, it’s an oboe,” she said finally. “
Hautbois:
oboe. You can see where the word comes from—”

“An oboe,” Alice said. “How interesting.” Then, “How … disappointing. It sounds like it should be something more than an oboe. Something more
courtly
.”

“The oboe d’amour is tuned a third lower than a regular oboe,” Liza went on automatically. “But otherwise it’s pretty similar. My cousin David plays both.”

They walked a few more steps, then Liza said, “I’m in love with him.” She felt relieved an instant before she said it—before she even quite knew she would say it.

Alice stopped and turned to face her. They stood looking at each other for a moment. Then Alice said, “Oh, my dear,” and put her arms around Liza and held her—loosely, because the baby was between them, but for a long time.

Alice was not the first person Liza had told this to. She had talked to a psychologist when she first came to California halfway through her sophomore year of college. That was right after David, who was two years older, had, suddenly and without telling Liza of his plans, gotten married. Their affair had all taken place in the summers, when his family came and opened their house outside the town where Liza’s family lived
in Vermont. Liza had fallen in love with him at thirteen and slept with him since the summer when she was fifteen. She was shattered. She had driven to his college to talk to him; he’d permitted her to question him, horribly, in the vestibule of his apartment building, because his wife was upstairs. Liza, knowing that she was desperate and that the questions were useless, tried anyway to ask him about his marriage—Why hadn’t he at least let her know in advance?—but he, white-faced, had not only refused to talk about it but acted as if he didn’t understand why she was so upset. It was as if he had amnesia, Liza had said later to the shrink in California, or as if he was implying that I’d made the whole thing up.

The shrink had talked to her about incest, how it was always a complicated violation of some sort. “But I wanted to!” Liza had said. “Even then,” the doctor gently insisted.

And the other person Liza had talked to, her friend Amanda (who’d been her roommate at UCLA), had called David “that prick” or “that exploitative asshole cousin of yours”—which gratified the part of Liza that was angry and hurt, but left the part of her that still loved David feeling lonely and wrong.

No one had ever known—Liza herself had not known—that what she wanted was for someone to hold her and say, “Oh, my dear.”

She bathed in it, was infinitely soothed; and yet, in some way she couldn’t understand, she was also saddened.

(Years later, when Liza was divorced from Charlie and long since over David, and she thought of this conversation, she would still wonder about that sadness. Some of it had been for herself, certainly. But some, she had come to feel—and hoped she’d felt back then—had had to do with Alice. Wanting to say “Oh, my dear” back to Alice, and feeling too young and shy to say it.)

•    •    •

It was when they got back from the beach that Charlie asked Alice about her name. “I thought it was Alice Carlisle, but all these letters are addressed to Alice Montgomery.”

“Yes, that was my maiden name, and my stage name. I went back to it after Denis died. And I never even bothered taking my third husband’s name, which turned out to be smart, because that was another short marriage.” In fact, it had lasted just over a year: the English choral conductor she’d mentioned to Liza on the beach.

“I’m glad we straightened that out,” Charlie said. “That would have been pretty bad, to get your name wrong.”

“Well, but not the end of the world,” Alice said.

They were getting ready to leave, gathering the baby’s things, which had somehow spread themselves over the room: a rattle on the floor, a box of wipes and a changing pad on the kitchen counter, a cloth book about animals sticking up between the cushions of the couch. Charlie was fretting because he’d made a pile of things to take to be photocopied, but they were running late; they needed to drive to Vermont tonight; Liza’s family was expecting them.

On the beach, Alice had heard about the Vermont plan: it was going to be a weekend-long family reunion, and it would be the first time Liza had seen David since that night in the vestibule of his apartment building. “So I have a baby, and he has three-year-old twins,” she had told Alice. “We’ll both be well insulated. But I’m scared.”

“That you’ll feel it, or that you won’t feel it?”

“Both. It would be terrible either way. But I think I’ll feel it.”

“I think so too,” Alice had said. She had asked Liza about her marriage to Charlie, and Liza had said she thought it was good.
“I really do. We do love each other. And Veronica—we’re both crazy about her, and Charlie’s a great father. But also: it’s me trying to play by the book.”

“Which can almost work sometimes,” Alice had said.

Now, gently, she told Charlie not to worry: she would photocopy the stuff he wanted over the next day or so, and mail it to him.

“Are you sure?” he asked, and she wanted to hug him too, as she had Liza.

She walked them out to their car and watched them stow Veronica in the car seat, and then she did hug them both, and they thanked her for everything and she said, “Oh, please.” Then they said they would stay in touch and she waved them off, imagining the Christmas cards.

It was getting dark, the sudden darkness that falls over the Atlantic in winter: a somber shutting down, the ocean withdrawing and becoming invisible. She went back upstairs and ran herself a bath. Undressing near the bathroom window, she saw a low shape running lightly through the garden: a fox.

She lay in the hot water wishing for gin. Not that she’d ever actually take the drink, after all these years—you make the phone call, you go to a meeting, the whole boring yet weirdly effective catechism—but just remembering that old feeling of the first few sips, that first inkling that you were going to begin to relax and feel warm. It would be pleasant, that was all she was thinking.

Her body rippled under the water, loose and white. Good-bye, Marilyn and Sophia (God, those photographs from earlier!). Hello, Pillsbury Doughboy.

But it was okay. This was what people looked like at her age. Denis, if he were here, would be old too.

She got out of the bath and dried herself and got dressed, in a pair of black silk pants and a beige cashmere tunic that had once belonged to Marjorie. Marjorie had invited her for dinner tonight, and she found she was looking forward to it, although she also knew she would have been just fine alone.

She walked through the house and found Arch by himself in the library off the entry hall. Marjorie was home, he said, but not down yet. “What can I get you, Alice? Gibson? Sidecar? Sazerac sling?”

“Ha, ha,” Alice said gamely. She assumed this gameness automatically, having learned over the years that it was the only way to deal with Arch. “A little cranberry juice and soda, thanks.”

He handed it to her and went back to his wing chair. “So Marge tells me you’ve had the press in today. You granted them an audience, your public? The paparazzi too?”

“No, just a very nice young writer and his wife. He’s working on a biography of Denis and the others.”

“And we can expect a movie?” Arch went on. “We should be holding our breath for a major motion picture?”

“Well, Arch, one of these days you just might be surprised,” Alice said, still in that plucky chirp she used with him.

In fact, Charlie had told her he was working on a movie treatment as well as his book, and was planning to show it around to people in Hollywood.

Alice, watching Arch sip his whiskey and soda, thought suddenly that if there ever was a movie, there’d be a scene set in El Morocco, and an actress would sit on an actor’s knee and laugh and then he’d kiss her. There would be a lot of takes; at the end of the day the actress would go home thinking how tired she was of laughing and being kissed.

Arch seemed suddenly aware that she was watching his glass. His eyes narrowed. “So, how’s your higher power today, Alice?”

“Just fine, Arch,” she said evenly.

So: after all there were things about her life that she’d never told anyone. Here, right now, were two things she knew that no one else did. The way Arch talked to her, and the fact that, like almost everything else, it never seemed to get to her.

The News from Spain

Voi che sapete che cosa è amor …

(You who know what love is …)

C
HERUBINO TO
R
OSINA
,
Le Nozze di Figaro
, M
OZART AND
D
A
P
ONTE

Voi sapete quel che fa
.

(You know what he always does.)

L
EPORELLO TO
E
LVIRA
,
Don Giovanni
, M
OZART AND
D
A
P
ONTE

1

Years later, long after what most people thought of as the real action was over, Rosina and Elvira met and became friends. They had exiled themselves from their old lives. Rosina was divorced, and Elvira hadn’t seen Johnny in years. They met in a cooking class, which both had signed up for distractedly, thinking it might be good for them.

One week it was raining on the night the class met. The windows steamed up, the room smelled delicious, and no one could tell what was happening outside. Rain slapped blindly on the glass. By the time they all loaded the dishwashers, wiped the counters, and went outside just after ten, the storm had strengthened. Rosina and Elvira stepped out of the building together. The wind was blowing the rain in stinging sideways gusts, and the dark trees in the square were tossing their limbs and creaking.

“Come home with me,” Rosina said.

Elvira was startled. Over the weeks they had smiled at each other, chopped together, talked a little bit in the ladies’ room. It was one of those incipient friendships that might or might not develop: the thing that made it possible—a recognition of and respect for the other’s reserve—was the same thing that would probably prevent it from happening.

“I’ll be all right,” Elvira told Rosina as they stood on the doorstep. Driving out to the country, she meant. She said it automatically, but looking at the wildly rocking trees, she wasn’t sure it was true. She was surprised and touched that Rosina had remembered, from some polite little conversation weeks ago, that she didn’t live in town.

“Come on,” Rosina said, already beginning to run.

Even the drive across the city was frightening—sheets of rain on the windshield; floods in the streets; the old plane trees along the river shuddering and luminous, with paler patches where branches were shearing off; the river rocking and spitting in its banks. “You were right,” Elvira said at the end of it. “I couldn’t have driven home in this.”

Rosina lived in a tall old row house, the kind that had generally long since been divided into apartments. But this one
hadn’t been. It was calmly intact, and of a scale that made Elvira suddenly shy. There were plain, pale modern sofas, and dark carved chests, and old rugs; there were paintings that Elvira would have liked to stop and gape at; there was a Vuillard oil in the library, where a fire was already laid, waiting for Rosina to touch it with a match.

They sat there, having showered, wearing Rosina’s nightgowns and robes, drinking cognac, with a plate of oranges and chocolate.
What is all this?
Elvira wanted to ask. She was dazzled, and a little disappointed in herself for being dazzled. She was habitually austere. She lived simply, because she chose to—her income as a painter was erratic, and she wanted to keep as much time as possible free for painting. She’d been around money before, had rich friends, hung around with rich people who bought her paintings. But this, Rosina’s house, wasn’t just money—it was something else, something unfathomable.