The News from Spain (25 page)

It’s all right, she can let him go. But she can really love him, now, only if he does go.

This is her failure, not his. There’s a hardness about her. She has always known, but hoped it might change. It did change for a while when she met him, but now it’s back again and without the hope: if he couldn’t change it, nothing ever will. This is a sad piece of knowledge, she finds once she gets through the initial pain of losing him, but not dire. She did love him, and still does. And what she really loves, anyway, is work.

Two women who both love the same man: it’s hard not to take sides. The journalist never knew there was a contest. If she had, I think she might have felt compassion for the famous woman,
tenderness, even though the journalist was so tough, and even though she never spent much time thinking about whether her acquisition of a man might be leaving some other woman bereft. I don’t think she would have acted any differently—she wanted the doctor very badly—but she would have admired the famous woman’s fortitude and pragmatism, and the sheer gutsiness of loving so deeply and improbably. Or maybe not. Maybe the journalist did know how the famous woman felt, and was sorry, but not that sorry. You pays your money and you takes your chances. Or maybe she knew and thought it pathetic and ridiculous, an old lady’s ravenous longing for a handsome young man. Excuse me, your desire is showing—the way you might tell someone that her slip is showing, to save her from humiliation.

It’s all speculation. These people are dead—if they were ever real people to begin with. I’m hedging, describing them without giving them names. You can figure out who I mean, but you’d be making a mistake if you were to confuse these characters with those personages. People leave clues but keep many more things secret. I’m trying to find my way inside, insinuating myself through the hairline cracks, starting with something real and ending up with fiction.
A love story—your own or anyone else’s—is interior, hidden. It can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention. It’s guesswork.

Having said that, before I circle back to my own bewildering history with A, I’ll tell you one more thing, and this really did happen. Two years after she and the doctor parted, the journalist spent some time in Italy. She heard that the famous woman was staying nearby. Things had been cooler between them since the affair with the doctor; the journalist missed the old warmth and approbation. She hoped to patch things up, and
drove over one day to say hello. What she didn’t know was that he would be there; he was traveling with the famous woman as her doctor. The sight of him shook the journalist. He was still the same, and he still looked at her the same way. Well, of course not the same, but it was enough for the two of them to go off to spend the night together. The famous woman didn’t like it; they would have seen that, if they’d been looking in her direction. Maybe it’s as well that they didn’t look.

So what was my story with A? “Uneventful,” I want to say. “Nothing happened.” Certainly there was no geographic sweep to it—no Ireland, no Mexico, no journeys along the Adriatic coast. Not even a brief business trip. I imagined it sometimes, how a trip like that might go. I’d reined myself in, after those first incontinent declarations. I didn’t dream of a foreign city or a romantic hotel, or even, any longer, of us in bed together. Just an overnight stay away, in a place of irreproachable tameness. Cleveland, say. The Hilton. Separate rooms. Sitting up together late at night, in one of the hotel’s public spaces—a dark bar off the lobby. We would talk. Nothing else would happen—but it would have been a talk that acknowledged and illuminated and calmed everything. Away from our lives, on a high bluff overlooking the entire low-lying plain of the landscape, we would have been completely frank and open with each other.

But the nature of our work was that we never got away. We didn’t ever go anywhere. We sat in A’s office, going over what had been done and what still had to be done in the coming week or month or year. We reviewed, we planned. The great sweep of our story wasn’t geography, it was time. We sat there for years.

Then one Saturday afternoon I was in a lingerie store downtown.
I tried on different things, looking at myself in the fitting room mirror, trying to imagine which combination my husband would like best. When I carried the pieces—embroidered, scant, expensive—over to the sales desk, I saw the identical garments already lying on the counter. I turned to smile at the man who was buying them. It was A.

I had met his wife a few times over the years—she was a little older than he, a big, forthright, scrubbed-looking retired family lawyer who now did volunteer work for assorted nonprofits. The things A was buying would not have fit her.

“Thanks, nothing quite worked,” I managed to say to the saleswoman, and I fled—the store; the sexy little pieces, which were tainted now and were too young for me anyway, really; and most of all A’s face.

It was a three-day weekend. No office until Tuesday. It was like being shredded from the inside. I had lost my parents, and my mother-in-law, whom I loved; had lost friends to cancer and a car accident; had watched friends suffering their own losses. And had watched the news, read the papers, knew what pain there was in the world. Romantic pain, when you’re in your seventh decade and happily married, should not be this brutal, this consuming. That weekend we took our grandson, who was now three, to a goat farm in the country. The goats stepped up a ramp onto a little carousel, three goats at a time, to be milked. Our grandson asked questions, petted the goats, hated the cheese. He wanted to know why goat’s milk tasted different from cow’s milk, and what other kinds of milk there were. I smiled at him and let my husband try to answer the questions: I didn’t know.

A was waiting for me on Tuesday morning, his face grave and wary. We went into his office and he closed the door. We sat in our usual chairs facing each other. His marriage was
rough, he said. His wife had been a drunk for years. She’d been violent with him; she had repeatedly threatened suicide. He did not feel able to leave her. “I’m not going to catalog it all for you,” he said, “or try to justify myself. I just want you to understand a little, what it’s been like.” Twelve years ago—before I knew him—he’d met someone. “It’s a complicated set of loyalties,” he said.

“It must be,” I said. The two women, the two hidden lives. “A, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He smiled at me. “I’m not unhappy.” His shirt was one my husband owned too—a pattern of thin and thick blue stripes. Both my husband and A had worn this shirt for years. I knew what the cloth felt like; I had taken it to the cleaner’s many times. I saw the mistake I had made, thinking that in some small but real way A belonged to me. My love for him was foolish, a kind of vanity, as well as a disservice to him: it had nothing to do with who he was. He had had agonies, and made accommodations, and found love and comfort—that was the real, deep river of his life, flowing along through land I’d never seen.

I stood up to go. “I’m glad you told me,” I said, which wasn’t quite true but felt nearly true in that moment: a beneficent compassion for him, for me, for his wife and for the younger—I knew she must be younger—woman.

“Thank you,” A said.

I wanted to lay my palm lightly for a moment against the side of his face, but A and I had never touched each other since we’d shaken hands the first time we’d met.

That night my husband and I went to a concert; an old friend, a violinist, was playing in Telemann’s
Paris Quartets
. The music was formal, orderly. I was flying apart. For the purpose of narrative unity, it occurs to me to return to the servant
metaphor—to invoke again those evil retainers, to add new members to the staff, who were by now holding me captive, doing whatever they wanted. Rage: a stable boy, unwashed, wild, brutal, very strong, barely capable of speech. Shame: the housekeeper, a tight-lipped woman dressed in black with sparse greasy scraped-back hair, who hissed excited filth at me and watched—to guard against impropriety, she said—while the butler stripped me naked and beat me. But while it might be structurally correct to resurrect the metaphor, it’s tonally off. Too neat, too distant. Making something safe, when its unsafeness was the most essential thing about it.

The next day I called in sick, and the day after that too. I was trying to protect myself, but also to protect A from the force of what I was feeling. On Friday I pulled myself together and went in, but he was out that day, having a colonoscopy. Good, I thought. I hoped he would be all right, that they wouldn’t find anything; but I also hoped that the prep had been miserable.

I saw A on Monday and we moved on, back into our usual work. But then he asked after my grandson, and I said coldly, “He’s fine.”

A said, “Tell me what he’s like now.”

And I snapped, “Whom would I be telling?”

Oh, lady. Hide yourself. You are dangerous, crazy, outsized, and out of control. It isn’t this man’s fault that you fell in love with him. You imagined that he loved you too, when he was just being gallant. It’s not his job to help you get over it. You always knew that his first allegiance was to another person—what difference does it make to discover that the other person wasn’t who you thought it was? It still is not, and never would have been, you. And anyway, your first allegiance isn’t, and never has been, to him.

You want, you want, you want. You don’t even know what it is you want.

He was hurt. I could see it, and also saw that he regretted hurting me. But he wasn’t angry, and he didn’t point out that I had no right to feel injured, no reason to trust him less. We tiptoed around for a while, a couple of months. There was a sadness between us, I thought, a wary fragile solicitude. Finally—he was being very kind, and even though I was mostly behaving well, I did snap at him now and then—I said one afternoon in his office, “Just give me a little room.” He nodded. He knew what I meant. But I needed in that moment to be unguarded with him, to be utterly clear. “Getting over unrequited love is harder than I thought it would be.”

A said, “What makes you think it’s unrequited?”

Another friend told me, years after it happened, that at one point she had met someone and fallen deeply, quickly, passionately in love. The man did too, but he broke it off almost immediately because he felt guilty about his wife. My friend understood; she felt guilty about her husband. She did write to the man several more times, even though he had told her not to. She couldn’t help herself. Each time he wrote back, kindly but tersely:
We can’t
. Then one morning, a year or so later, she was reading the paper. The obituary section. She went for a long walk, a lot of long walks. There was no one to tell.

You meet someone, you fall in love, you marry. You meet someone, you fall in love, it turns into a disaster. You meet someone, you fall in love, but one of you is married, or both are: you have or don’t have an affair. You meet someone, you fall in
love, but you are never quite sure if your feelings are returned. You meet someone, you fall in love but you are able to keep your feelings mostly hidden; occasionally they cough, or break a dinner plate, or burn down the kitchen (accidentally? On purpose?), but mostly they stay out of sight when other people are around. At night they have the run of the house. It’s a creepy, even sinister, ménage. An outsider who happened to glimpse it might be horrified—might ask you in a whisper if you needed to be rescued: Wouldn’t you like to call in the authorities? But no, you’re fine. It’s your own lunatic household; you know how everything works. You’ve all been together for so long that the servants have acquired a battered credibility. They’ve endeared themselves without ever having become likable. You respect one another’s endurance.

A and I still work together. There’s nothing new to report. Things happen: half declarations, cautious withdrawals, sudden flare-ups, gradual repairs. It reminds me of that old late-night comedy bit, repeated every Saturday night: The news from Spain this week is that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

When things didn’t work out between the doctor and the journalist, he accepted the job as director of the polio hospital on the Hudson. Sometime in the 1950s my grandmother went to work there as a physical therapist, and she fell in love with him.

I don’t know much about it: my mother mentioned it once, years ago, and I wasn’t paying attention. I do know that the doctor was married, to his second wife—a happy marriage, unlike his first one.

Watching him moving toward this second marriage must have been hard for the famous woman. It wasn’t like the affair with the journalist, when she could wish for it to end because she could see how bad it was for him. This time the doctor was happy, and deeply loved. The famous woman embraced it for him—the courtship, the girl. Not perfectly: she grumbled and was cool sometimes (the new wife, to whom it would never have occurred that this renowned figure might have feelings other than those of devoted, even maternal, friendship, was baffled by the occasional chill), but overall the famous woman accepted with grace. When they got engaged she withdrew for a little while, but then reappeared and held the wedding in her living room. Every year after that she gave a cocktail party for the doctor and his wife, on their anniversary. After my mother died, I found an invitation to one of these evenings tucked inside a biography of the famous woman, which must have once belonged to my grandmother.

“She loved him for years,” my mother said about my grandmother. I don’t think anything ever happened. I remember my grandmother as strong, solitary, independent: a stoic with a wry sense of humor. It was hard to imagine her abject, pining.

Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe the doctor returned her feelings. Maybe he didn’t return her feelings and she was philosophical about it. I like to think of her going to work every day and concentrating with him on doing as much as could be done for those patients, noticing small increments of progress, knowing not to expect too much.

Acknowledgments

Warm thanks to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, where the book was written.