The News from Spain (16 page)

Liza put Veronica, who had finished eating, down on the floor and leaned over to look at the pictures. She saw that Alice had been very beautiful: a kind of frank, at-ease, lush beauty
that was at once erotic and friendly. Even as Sonya, where they must have tried to deglamorize her, she shone. Liza reached her hand toward the Chekhov photo, and Alice said, “Well, that was a mistake. Not for me to do it—it was fascinating—but for them to cast me. I was the hot name for a little while, so they were casting me in everything, and I was lucky to get all that attention. But the truth was, I just wasn’t that good an actress.”

Charlie was writing some things down, Liza saw, but not as much as she would have liked him to. He was humoring Alice a little bit—maybe not quite humoring her, nothing quite so condescending, but he was letting her talk about things he didn’t need to know about so that she’d be relaxed by the time they got to the important stuff. Liza was disappointed in him, and a bit miffed on Alice’s behalf: this
was
good stuff.

But Alice seemed to notice at the same time how few notes Charlie was taking, and she laughed. “Oh, my God, here I am going on and on, and we haven’t even started talking about Denis. Fire away.”

Denis. Liza saw Charlie jump a little, hearing the name—the name in the books, in the newspaper clippings, in the obsessive history-of-car-racing websites, the name on the timeline chart of The Four that Charlie had inked out on poster board on the living room floor a couple of years ago and which had hung on the wall over his desk ever since, the name that Charlie pronounced so seriously as a history name, a biography name—tossed carelessly into the conversation. She knew why the name, spoken casually by Alice who had been his wife, had this kind of effect on Charlie. Denis Carlisle had been killed at the age of twenty-six, in a race outside Barcelona. His car had skidded off the road and flipped into a tree, and his helmet had shattered.

It was the kind of death that both was and was not supposed to happen—shocking, tragic, pointless—but wasn’t that part of what racing was for? Or any dangerous sport. Death was always the thing that could happen; it needed to happen sometimes, or the risk would not be real.

Yes: Denis
, Liza wanted to say to Charlie.
Not some mythic figure. Her husband. Just listen
.

Alice had gotten up again, and was kneeling on the bed, taking down some framed black-and-white photographs from a group that hung on the wall. She came back and handed them to Charlie. One was a close-up of a man’s face: tanned, handsome, squinting into the sun, windblown light hair, intelligence, humor, grace—a set of blessings that couldn’t help but seem doomed; it was impossible to look and not romanticize him, even for Liza, who badly wanted not to, she just wanted to let him be a regular guy caught on film in an ordinary moment.

The other two photographs went together. A group of men around a table in a nightclub. Sitting on the knee of the most beautiful of the men was a woman in a dress that was tight in the bodice and then extravagant in the skirt, billowing over the man’s legs and trailing onto the floor. The other people at the table were smiling, but the man and woman were roaring, their heads thrown back, their eyes closed and mouths wide open, their beautiful throats exposed. The next photograph had been taken a moment later: they’d stopped laughing and were leaning toward each other, looking at each other. The look right before you kiss the one person whose existence strikes you as both necessary and miraculous.

Liza, who knew something of this feeling, who had struggled with it for years (sometimes it was better, sometimes almost unbearable—this was something separate, it had nothing
to do with Charlie or with her marriage, though she knew she had married Charlie partly as an attempt to solve the problem), took the photograph from Charlie and looked at it for a while.

“That was at El Morocco,” Alice said, “the winter we got married.”

“I have to ask this,” Charlie said, “even though I know it’s an incredibly dumb question, but: Do you remember what was so funny?”

The biographer was fine, Alice thought. A mail-order biographer.
Send me one biographer
, you wrote on the form, and this was what you’d get. A perfectly nice, serious, competent young man.

But the wife was more interesting. So young! (But maybe not that young—older than she’d been when she’d married Fred, and Denis, too, for that matter. It was just that they looked younger nowadays.
We looked so old, with the hair and the clothes and the heels and the makeup. But that’s what we wanted, to look old. Sophisticated. The desirable word, the high compliment
.) She admired Liza’s long, straight black hair, her calm face. It was unusual, Alice thought, this combination of self-containment and warmth. Liza didn’t say much: How was it, then, that Alice felt so certain of her goodwill?

They were taking a break from the interview; the two of them were getting the lunch, while Charlie fleshed out his notes and kept an eye on Veronica, who sat on the floor playing with some empty Tupperware containers Alice had put down in front of her.

“I hoped I was pregnant,” Alice said, “right after Denis died, but it was probably good that I wasn’t.”

Liza, at the stove stirring the soup, looked at her.

“Well, because I wasn’t really a responsible person for a number of years after that. A lot of years. I was drinking quite a bit. And flying here and there for acting jobs, trying to have a career. And living in one city, then another.” Alice smiled. “I was a mess.”

It was strange, she thought, getting down a platter for the cold meats and cheeses, that she could narrate all this, her life, and not feel any of it.

Her AA sponsor was fond of saying, “My life is an open book.” Alice, who liked the candor of AA (not all the hokey slogans, though), wondered if that was it. Standing up in front of meetings, talking to various friends over decades, telling things to writers (one showed up to interview her every couple of years, although most of the projects never seemed to get finished): the more you talked about your life, the less real it seemed. Maybe she’d told her story so many times that it had become just that: a story. What do I know about my life that no one else knows? she thought.

If she closed her eyes and tried to conjure up Denis’s face, what she saw was the photographs. The man squinting in the sun, the man sitting in the car, the man laughing back at her from the deck of the boat they’d lived on in Monte Carlo harbor. What had his bare back looked like, his thighs, the palms of his hands? What had his face looked like in bed, what things had he said to her, how had his voice sounded when he said them?

It wasn’t that she didn’t have the information, the adjectives she needed to answer her own questions, up to a point.
Strong. Warm. Tender. Helpless and elated
. It was that the words were all she knew. The words both preserved and eradicated the past; at some point they had replaced it.

Liza held the baby in her lap during lunch, feeding her soup with an old demitasse spoon that Alice had run down to borrow from Marjorie’s silver chest. Charlie kept asking questions and taking notes, not eating much. Alice was liking him better—he certainly knew a lot about Denis. More, in fact, about Denis’s career than she knew herself.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “that was Bavaria, 1961.”

“Was it?” Alice said.

They had covered everything. Now the three of them were waiting, sitting at the table with the afternoon sun making a drama of the dirty lunch dishes, to talk about Denis’s death.

“I know this must be a painful subject,” Charlie began.

“No, it’s all right,” Alice said gently. She felt sorry for him. “Remember, it’s over forty years ago.”

“You weren’t with him there, were you?”

She shook her head. “I’d gone to Paris, to visit friends.”

“And so—well, I guess I’m wondering how you felt, when you got the news from Spain.”

The news from Spain. Oh, dear God, “the news from Spain”! Spoken in that deep ponderous undertaker voice. The unctuous importance of it, as if he were saying: The news from Hiroshima. The news from Dallas.
Lighten up, Charlie
, she felt like telling him.

Her eyes met Liza’s, and she saw that they were united, somehow, against Charlie’s solemn ardor. But she also felt an obligation to protect his dignity.

She made her own voice serious and hushed. “Well, it was terrible,” she said. And it had been. But at the moment she was feeling pretty jaunty. In fact, she was afraid that if her eyes met Liza’s again, she might start laughing.

She went on, though, in the serious voice: She had been
staying with Michael and Sylvia Webster, an American couple she and Denis had met at a party in Cannes and become quite close to. She and Sylvia had been out shopping, and when they came home at teatime Michael, unusually, was there. He was with the diplomatic service; they had a teletype machine in the office. He had already arranged for Alice to fly to Barcelona, though there was no hurry by that point. It always seems like you have to hurry, even when it’s too late. It’s also so strange, Alice said, what you remember from a time like that. No memory whatsoever of the flight, or anything about Barcelona. What I remember was the shaving kit—Sylvia had taken me that day to a beautiful leather-goods store on the rue Saint-Honoré, and I’d bought Denis a shaving kit; and that’s the thing I really remember about the days right after his death: how the thought of that shaving kit could just undo me. They asked me if I wanted to see Denis, she added, and I knew that I definitely did not.

Charlie was scribbling and looking stricken, she saw. Liza’s face, too, was creased and sad.

All this was new to them. It was a terrible story.

“An adventure! Are you ready for an adventure?” Alice said to Veronica, when Liza had put her in the baby carrier and strapped it onto her chest, so that Veronica faced forward. She hung in the harness tilted out and slightly downward, like the figurehead of a ship.

They were walking down to the beach with the dogs; they had left Charlie on Alice’s couch with a box of letters and photographs. “Fair game,” Alice had told him. “Anything you want, really. We can go into town later and make photocopies.”

The dogs were running around like crazy. The baby laughed and screamed at them, pointing, kicking her legs. “They’re pretty silly, aren’t they?” Alice said. She unlatched a gate and they walked along a short boardwalk and then down some steps onto the beach. The strong, cold wind exhilarated Liza, and she laughed. She and Alice both started to run. The ocean was the color of slate, enormous. The waves ran very fast, halfway between the shoreline and the horizon, forming white tops that skidded toward each other and joined. They were the same each time, but they seemed, somehow, impulsive, a series of sudden whims.

After a few minutes Liza and Alice slowed to a walk, breathing hard but, as Alice pointed out, warmer. The baby’s cheeks were flaming; she watched, yearning but not making any sound, as the dogs went on running, away from them.

“So,” Alice said to Liza, “and what do you do?”

“Oh.” The question startled Liza, maybe because she’d spent so much of the day as an observer. “Well, I’m a musician.”

“Really? What kind of music?”

“Early music.”

“How early?” Alice, still panting from the run, sounded eager, and was looking at Liza with real interest.

So Liza talked, about the consort tradition and how it had led into the baroque, which Alice turned out to know something about because she had a friend in London who was a choral conductor. “Purcell,” she said. “He’d be an example of one of those transitional guys, right?”

“Exactly,” Liza said. “What I play are the stringed instruments—lute, dulcimer—”

“Theorbo,” Alice said, surprisingly.

Liza laughed. “Theorbo.”