The News from Spain (10 page)

Many years later you heard he was back in Kentucky, working as a high school teacher. You wondered about that too.

THE END

You went to Madrid with your husband. You were in your forties. You stood in line with him at the Prado, and for the first time in years you remembered the Sturms. You told your husband. “What a terrible story,” he said. He was holding your hand.

While you waited you looked around at the people standing in line with you. Parents with children, nuns, old men, a group of students shoving one another and laughing, all wearing the same blue cap. You saw beautiful women and smitten men. You thought about how lovers, or any two who fascinate each other, choose in rapture and ignorance.

The line moved and you and your husband moved with it, slowly, toward the old building, where the people who’d waited longest were disappearing, being swallowed into its shadowy mouth.

The News from Spain

1

This is why she can’t sleep. Asleep, dreaming, she’s moving. She runs down a street, comically, with no sound, chasing a car that has no driver. It’s in Paris, she thinks—or doesn’t think, she knows: in dreams you just know. Her feet barely touch the ground, just tap it every now and then, to launch her, floating, into the air. As a child, at the lake in the summer, she used to propel herself through chest-high water this way, leaping softly from pointed toe to pointed toe, great soft arching leaps anchored by the briefest contact with the sandy lake bottom.

What would she do, in this dream, if she caught up with the car? That’s not the point. The car is there to lead her through the streets, a benevolent conductor.
This way
, it says.
Now this way
. Her legs, her feet, her toes, follow it without thinking, easily, an ease she doesn’t register in the dream.

But it’s the ease that pierces her when she wakes up. The
unnoticed, taken-for-granted ease, of muscles doing what she has told them—unaware of telling them—to do. Waking, her eyes are slitted, hot, leaking; her face is wet. The feeling of loss, of having something dangled and then taken away, is terrible. So is the self-pity, and the sense of danger. She spent a long time feeling sorry for herself, before she finally shoved all that aside. Even the smallest taste of that, now, the most delicate exploratory lick, feels dangerous, repulsive. Whatever you do, don’t go back there again.

In the early days, she used to think: Just give me five more minutes of movement. Not even dancing—just running, walking. Or not even that. I’d settle for a voluntary shift, a decision and then the tiniest action, to move a leg an inch, to shake a wrinkle out of a trouser leg. Just let me do that once more, and then I won’t ask for anything else. It was like a bereavement—she’d felt this way after the death of her grandmother. Just let me see her one more time, and that will be enough. You imagined that a brief restoration, granted with full knowledge of the overall permanence of the loss, would be sweet: the scratch that would make the itch stop itching. But no, she saw, each time she woke from one of these vivid, utterly convincing dreams. The itch just itched more.

So she can’t sleep. There are pills, big, red, slippery. They deliver something that is not really sleep—it’s grimmer, more bureaucratic, doled out reliably regardless of individual circumstances. It’s mere unconsciousness, an ellipsis in time. But it’s dreamless. Every few nights, frantic and grumpy with fatigue, she asks her husband for a pill. “I need to be clonked on the head with the sledgehammer,” she says, and he smiles kindly at her and goes into the bathroom. He sits with her while they wait for the pill to work. She thinks he would feel it ungallant not to, though on the nights when she doesn’t take a pill she
is alone in this room, struggling to sleep and struggling not to sleep. His bed is in the small room opposite the kitchen at the end of the hall. Decades ago, before their apartment was divided from several others that would have made up its original, generous sprawl, it had been a maid’s room. She and her husband have always called it “the den”—the earnestly rugged American idiom a delight to him.

(Biographers, early in the next century, forty years from now, will write about this little room, speculating on whether he was already sleeping there before she got sick, suggesting that the marriage was already in trouble, that they were on the brink of separating, that he stayed on after her illness out of a sense of duty and guilt—but he and she will both be dead by the time these rumors become public. She, herself, would not have been able to answer this question, except to remark that nothing was as clear-cut as that, either in their marriage or in any marriage, or in anything, for that matter. Sometimes before she got sick he’d slept in the den, saying he’d been working late and hadn’t wanted to disturb her. Sometimes he’d slept there with no comment. Sometimes he’d slept in the bedroom with her. Sometimes
she’d
slept in the den, either for the hell of it or because his snoring had awakened her in the night and she’d pulled the quilt from the foot of their bed and wandered down the hall—wandered! Such a vague, careless word, but still an active verb, an action that required volition and neurons and muscles to work together busily and efficiently, even while you were prodigally unaware of them—to sleep, in happy, self-righteous silence, alone.)

Now her husband sits in the orange tweed armchair beside her bed while they wait for tonight’s pill to embrace her and pull her down. The water glass, half empty, is on the bedside table. The lamps are turned off. The pillows are in their right
places, behind her neck and shoulders. “It’s like leaving on a trip,” she tells him. “When you’re on the boat and the luggage is all there too, and the guests have gone ashore. The responsibilities are all done—you just have to relax and wait for the boat to pull away from the pier.”

“And drink champagne,” her husband says.

“That’s right, you have to drink champagne.”

“So you do still have responsibilities.”

She smiles. “Poor you.”

Speaking of boats—and maybe this is why she did—he is sailing tomorrow, on the
France
, taking the company on a six-week tour. She misses touring, misses Europe, misses going alone with him to museums and odd corners of cities and small, cheerful restaurants for late-night suppers. That private, small, lighted world you could find for yourselves in the midst of traveling. She misses, too, being in groups with him: being one of many in company class, or rehearsal, or at a large, crazy party given by some rich admirer in the lantern-lit garden of a villa—Fiesole, Neuilly—seeing him at a distance, his calm formality, knowing that she was the one who would be alone with him, behind a locked door, at the end of the night. Knowing it but never quite believing it was true. Running down a street, jumping with him into a taxi. “The getaway car,” he would say.

She has learned, with this sort of perilous reminiscence, how to turn it off, like a faucet. Stop it the minute you notice it’s beginning to drip. Close the pipes.

“Did you eat?” she asks.

“Not yet. I will.” He sounds tired.

“Malcolm made macaroni.”

“Ah. Try to say it three times fast,” he says instantly, always that quick exhilaration at being able to make a joke that is
American, to play with Americanisms as nimbly as a cat batting a ball of yarn.

They talk more, about the itinerary, about who is scheduled to come in to help her when. An unnecessary conversation—everything is efficiently arranged, as always; she is never left alone for too long; and in an extreme emergency she’d be capable of dragging herself to the telephone—but, thinking that he is reassuring her, it makes him feel better to have it. “I know,” she says. And: “Yes, that’s right.”

She’s beginning to get sleepy now—just a hint of it, the first promise of more to come. It’s slow, luxurious. He hears it in her voice; and she hears the relief in his.

“So would you like a story?”

“Yes,” she says.

He leans back in his chair, lifts his chin, and taps his lips with his fingertips, thinking. The stories he tells her are old Russian ones, tales so embedded in his childhood he can’t remember learning them—from his mother? A teacher? An old book in the Maryinsky schoolroom? They are like songs; he tells them the same way each time, almost in the same words but not quite: he still hears them in Russian, and translates as he speaks. Witches, forests, horsemen, fools. Beautiful maidens. Talking wolves and roosters. Brave tsarinas. Clever devils whose human victims prove, wryly, to be even cleverer. Soldiers whose mettle is tested through nights full of shrieking demons. Cities turned to stone.

“One night,” he begins now, “there was a soldier who had too much to drink …”

“Oh, this one. We had this one last week.”

“No, this is different soldier. All soldiers are drunk.” He thinks for a moment. “That is why only few die in duels.” He
stands up, staggering and reeling. Paces away from her, whirls to face the foot of her bed, points an unsteady finger in her direction, and jerks his arm, miming a pistol shot that even she—drugged, in near darkness—can tell would have missed wildly.

“Who will I find to be this silly with me when you’re away?” she murmurs, before she can stop herself.

He sits again and takes hold of her hand for a moment, very lightly, before letting go and folding his arms across his chest. “One night there was a soldier who had too much to drink.”

She nods. He begins to tell her about the soldier, words she will not remember the next morning. Sleep comes, an abrupt and opaque curtain dropping.

In the morning, there’s the leave-taking. A lot of bustle, which she hates. Just go. But she keeps her face placid, good-humored; she sits tucked in her wheelchair by the living room windows, where the sun turns the leaves of the plants pale and bright and translucent. He has the passport, the handkerchiefs. His luggage is ready. The parquet creaks under his hurrying feet. He will send her telegrams and letters. “Yes, yes,” she says, grinning at him.

“And you two will be all right?” he says, meaning her and the cat.

“We’re planning to get into trouble, preferably involving the police, as soon as you leave.”

Finally he bends to embrace her, and she lifts her arms to him.
They kiss—familiar, fond, nothing more, except she thinks there is a kind of careful brightness between them, an
implicit understanding that to regret, or even acknowledge any awareness of, their mutual unerotic kindness would be pointless and unwise. Malcolm has tactfully and unnecessarily left the room. “Bye, cutie,” she says against her husband’s rough warm neck.

She would never have used a word like that—a condescending endearment, or indeed any endearment—before she got sick.

2

Malcolm knows when not to talk. He knows when she’s tired, when bright conversation would evoke from her an automatic, well-mannered, equal, even superior brightness that would ultimately make her even more tired. He knows when solicitude would annoy or sadden her, would hit her as infantilizing. He knows when there is nothing to say. She has never told him that his ability to be silent is one of the things she likes about him, but he knows it is. She can be scorching about some of the other aides-de-carcass (her term): Miss Soap Opera, Fräulein Sacher-Masoch, The Blinding Blond, Chatty Ballet Man (who was fired after saying “Ah, the ballet, the ballet”). The nicknames were sharp but not mean; mostly she liked these people, she was even grateful to them, but she needed to blow off steam. “You know what I call you behind your back?” she asked Malcolm once.

“What?” He wasn’t alarmed by her question, though it had never occurred to him to wonder about this.

“Malcolm,” she said. Then she said: “What’s hardest is to be at such close quarters, always. I miss being alone. You make
me feel like I’m alone.” She smiled at him. She had a radiant, exciting smile, sophisticated, he thought, mysterious, but also wildly free and childlike—there were more things going on in her face when she smiled than in any other face he’d ever seen—and he had to look away from her in that moment to keep from smothering her with some soulful compliment; he was in danger of turning into Chatty Ballet Man.

This morning, once her husband has left, Malcolm sees that she wants to be quiet but busy. She wheels her chair into the den to sort through the mail. Malcolm follows. He leans down to put one arm around her shoulders and the other beneath her knees, lifts her briefly out of the chair and onto the narrow, unmade bed, steadies her while he fits a hard cushion into the seat of the wheelchair, then tucks his arm under her knees again and swings her back into the chair. He puts another cushion under her feet. Now she is raised to the right height for working at the desk. She is silent and relaxed, very still, as he accomplishes this operation.

He would never say aloud (the ghost of Chatty Ballet Man again) that it’s like partnering, but he has thought it, that kind of mute, aloof acceptance of the boy’s support. But it can be messy, awkward, not like partnering at all, her disciplined, carefully placed arms belonging to an entirely different creature from the dangling legs—a greyhound ending in a scarecrow, he has thought. Or: a mermaid stranded on land.