The News from Spain (14 page)

But hearing the hot water thundering into the tub, seeing the steam rise, she is suddenly filled with longing. She wonders how Malcolm will manage it, while knowing that he will. He’s sitting on the edge of the tub, with his hand under the running water, as if testing the temperature, and his body twisted away from her. She can’t see his face. After a while he stands up. She watches as he takes off his shirt and steps out of his trousers. He leaves on his briefs. She looks at his body, which is tall and very beautiful, as beautiful as the body of any dancer. He is neither looking at her nor looking away.

He is very calm, not worrying about any of this even though it is so far outside anything he has ever done. He knows it will be all right. When the tub is full he turns off the water and then goes to her and leans down to unwrap the sheet. He carries her to the tub and steps in. He lowers himself, still holding her crosswise, and then turns her so that she’s lying on her back on top of him, her body resting along the length of his. He has his arm across her chest, supporting her; his hand is just beneath her right breast, which looks very white around the nipple’s pink bloom. He has never looked at her body in this way—it’s the thing he takes care of, and anyway, he wouldn’t—but lying here beneath her, he feels himself getting hard. It doesn’t matter, she can’t feel it so it won’t scare her; and it doesn’t scare him. They rest together in the hot green water.

•    •    •

There’s the warmth of the water—acutely lovely where it envelops her upper body; but also, surprisingly, something she can feel in her legs, without having any other sensation there. There’s the weightlessness. There is the warm, prickly, solid support of Malcolm’s body against her upper back and shoulders. There’s his brown arm lying across her whiteness, his hand near her breast: the assurance and gentleness of it. There’s his chin resting lightly on the top of her head. There’s the sight of their bodies in the shimmering water, her own nakedness stretched out so lightly along his. She has not felt like this in a long time; and some of it is new to her, tonight.

After a while she asks him if he’d like to hear a story.

“Yes,” he says.

“This is one my husband tells. I think it’s my favorite,” she says; and it seems normal and relaxed, too, that she should speak of her husband.

Once
, she begins,
there was a fisherman who lived by the River Volkov. There were many pretty girls in his town, but none so beautiful as his lovely little river. At night the fisherman sat on the bank and played his mandolin and sang love songs to the river
.

One night, when he’d had too much to drink, he fell asleep for a little while, and when he woke in the moonlight he saw a great blue-green head rising out of the river: the Tsar of the Waters. The tsar said, “My daughters and I have enjoyed your singing. Will you promise to come and visit us someday?”

“I promise,” said the fisherman
.

“I would like to give you a present,” said the tsar. “When I am gone, cast your net into the river.”

The tsar’s head sank beneath the surface, and the fisherman threw in his net and felt it grow heavy. He pulled it out and there was a chest, and when he opened it he saw that the chest was full of jewels
.

He sold some jewels and became rich, but still in the evenings he would sit on the bank and sing his love songs, and sometimes he would throw a bracelet or necklace into the river, because it was so beautiful
.

Then he went traveling. He was on a ship, and suddenly, in the middle of the ocean, the ship stopped and would not move. “It’s the Tsar of the Waters,” the sailors said. “There must be someone on this ship he wants.” So they all drew straws, and the fisherman got the short straw and remembered his promise. “That’s right, the Tsar of the Waters does want me,” he said, and he jumped over the side of the ship; and right away the ship began to move again
.

The fisherman sank down, down, to the bottom of the ocean, until he came to the door of the tsar’s palace. “What took you so long?” the tsar asked him. “I got tired of waiting, so finally I had to send for you.”

They ate and drank, and then the tsar said, “I would like you to marry one of my daughters.” And he brought his daughters before the fisherman, and each was lovelier than the one before; but still, the fisherman thought that none was as pretty as his little river. But then the youngest daughter came, and the fisherman cried out: “This girl is as beautiful as my River Volkov.”

And the tsar said, “That’s funny, her name is Volkov.”

The fisherman saw that she was wearing a necklace and bracelet, and they were some of the jewels he had thrown into the river
.

And so they were married, and they went to her room together and were very happy. Before they slept, she said, “Will you always sit beside me at night and sing to me?”

And he said, “I promise.”

And they fell asleep. In the night, his foot touched the foot of his bride, and it was so cold he woke up. The moon was shining, and he saw that he was lying on the ground, and one of his bare feet had slipped into the cold River Volkov, and he knew that he was still poor
.

When she finishes, they lie there quietly for a moment.
Then Malcolm lifts his leg so that his foot touches one of hers. She can’t feel it, but she sees it. She smiles and turns in his arms and she kisses him, not lingeringly but not briefly either. His hand moves, and for a moment her breast is resting in his palm. Then she turns her head away from him and closes her eyes, and he puts his hand back where it was, and they lie without moving until the water starts to cool.

Getting out is not as elegant as getting in. He’s afraid of her wet body slipping out of his wet hands, so he drains the tub and they both get very cold waiting for it to empty, and then he has to squirm out from beneath her without letting her heels and buttocks bang down on the hard porcelain. His soggy briefs sag ridiculously as he drips all over the bathroom floor getting towels, and he wraps her up and puts her back on the hallway floor while he dries himself and grabs some spare clothing he keeps on the top shelf of the linen closet (but no underwear—the need for dry underwear at work has never arisen before). By the time he has remade her bed and come back to collect her, she is shivering on the floor.

And even once she is back in bed again, with Malcolm sitting in the tweed armchair beside her, it takes a long time for her to get warm.

The News from Spain

Driving to the interview, the biographer got lost. His wife, in the passenger seat, squinted at the piece of paper on which he’d scribbled the directions the day before. “Turn left at the Mobil station. Did you do that already?”

“Liza,” he said, “do you see any Mobil stations out here?”

They were driving through a neighborhood of enormous houses set behind enormous fences.

“I’m just trying to—”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

It was February, but there was no snow on the ground. Maybe it didn’t snow much here, out by the ocean. They wouldn’t have known. They’d flown in the day before from L.A., which is where he—his name was Charlie—had lived all his life. Liza was from the Northeast, but inland: a small college town in Vermont.

They were on their way to see a woman named Alice Carlisle (at least that’s what Charlie thought her name was; later
she would correct him), who had been married to the race-car driver Denis Carlisle in the early 1960s. There had been a group of four drivers—The Four, the press had called them—who were always lumped together, written about together. They’d trained together, partied together, raced together. They’d had looks, brains, nerve, and an almost unearthly casual glamour: it was hard to believe, looking at the photographs, that there had ever been any real people who looked like this, much less the coincidence of four of them together in the same sport at the same time. Charlie, who was working on a group biography, had already interviewed the two who were still alive. One lived not far from him, in Orange County; and the other, who’d been hit by a car about ten years ago and lost part of his leg—how weird, to survive all those race tracks intact and then get slammed returning a video to Blockbuster—was now in an assisted-living place near Las Vegas.

Charlie had found Alice thanks to something that at first seemed terrible: a magazine article by another writer about Giles McClintock, one of The Four. The article was called “The Countess and the Race-Car Driver.” Liza had seen the title on the magazine cover at the supermarket, and looked inside to see who the race-car driver was. Charlie would not have needed to look; he was aware that Giles had had an affair with an earl’s wife that had gone on for a year or two and ended shortly after the death of the earl in mysterious circumstances. He had asked Giles about it, dutifully but queasily, in the residents’ lounge at the assisted-living place in Nevada; Giles had said, “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe all you guys are still asking about that. For the millionth time: no fucking comment.” Which had made Charlie drop the subject, and which should, he said to Liza after she brought the magazine home, have been a tip-off that another writer was working on The Four.

Charlie had skimmed the article saying, “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

Liza had tried to be comforting—“He might not be working on a book, and even if he is, it’ll be different from your book”—and kept him company while he drank almost an entire bottle of pinot noir.

She was twenty-four, eight years younger than Charlie. The difference in their ages was starting to seem smaller to her than it had at first, when she’d been a student in his intro-to-journalism course and she had liked him for taking himself—and her—seriously.

Charlie had ended up getting in touch with the other writer; he couldn’t stand waiting, not knowing, while that other book might be ticking somewhere like a bomb. But the other book was not about The Four—it was about scandals. In the course of the conversation, the writer had given Charlie some leads he’d gathered while researching the countess story. Among them was Alice’s phone number.

So here they were, in a white rental car that had Iowa plates, though they’d picked it up at the airport in Boston this morning after spending the night at a hotel near the runways. Liza had left the curtains open and lain on her side in the enormous bed late, awake (still on California time), while Charlie slept next to her. On her other side, nestled loosely in the curve of Liza’s body, the baby had sat up, solemnly shredding Kleenex. “Another airplane,” Liza had whispered to her, every time one took off or landed.

Liza glanced back now at the baby, asleep in her car seat, her head slumped on her shoulder. “She’s going to be hungry when she wakes up.”

“So then you’ll feed her,” Charlie said. Then, “Sorry, Liza, I just can’t seem to find my way back to the main road—”

“I know.” What she knew was that he hadn’t really wanted
to bring her and the baby along on this interview. He was worrying that they would make him look unprofessional, encumbered. Liza hadn’t planned on it either. In fact, she had imagined spending the day in Boston, silently, in the aquarium, pushing the stroller up the ramp that spiraled around the big central tank, showing the baby the penguins and the sea lion show. But when Charlie had mentioned to Alice on the phone yesterday that he was traveling with his wife and daughter, Alice had said to bring them along, she would give them all lunch. Liza, changing a diaper on the desk in their hotel room, heard his side of the phone call, his hearty “yes”; and then she’d seen the look of dismay, anger almost, that lingered on his face when he’d hung up the phone, because “yes” had been the only answer he’d been able to come up with.

Early that morning Alice had taken the dogs for a walk on the beach. This was part of her job, but Marjorie had come with her. Marjorie often delegated something to Alice and then did it along with her, partly because she never quite trusted anyone else to do a task, however minor, as competently as she would have done it herself, and partly because they liked each other. (Which didn’t mean that there weren’t things—quite a lot of things—that annoyed each of them about the other.)

They walked fast, the dogs running ahead and then coming back to circle them, while the cold winter sunrise went on over the ocean. They talked, about a party Marjorie and Arch had been to the night before, about wanting to lose weight, about a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe they had both been reading. Marjorie had almost finished it; Alice said, “Well, I’m still in her early thwarted lonely years, but it’s hard for me to feel the anguish since I know how it all turns out.”

“Yes, we do know that, don’t we?” Marjorie said, laughing. “We do know how it all turns out.” She often laughed too hard about some little shared observation, Alice had noticed, as if the sharing were a strange, rare thing that, once arrived at, had to be lingered over, a truce, before Marjorie wandered back into her own lonely, exacting, impatient span of territory.