The Rain in Spain (2 page)

But she wasn’t ready to talk to him. Not yet. Hadn’t figured out any of the answers to the questions that had haunted her all day, through the mosaic-tiled archways and the extravagant, blooming gardens, next to the damp, still reflecting ponds of the underground water reserves, even the most functional of areas designed for beauty and symmetry to the eye.

There had been a carefully-balanced opposition in her own thoughts.

Magda with Javi means unhappiness.

Magda without Javi means . . .

She tucked her knees tighter under the table’s edge and rested her elbows on the white painted round, pressing her forearms together in front of her chest. Her thumbs lined up in front of her mouth like she was about to play at the children’s hand game.
Here is the church, and here is the steeple. Open the doors . . . and see all the people!
Not that they’d taken anything so traditional as the church route. Her side of the church would have echoed with empty pews, although surely her parents would have shown up? Two taciturn farmers to balance the scales against what she imagined as Javi’s large, happy family, even though she hadn’t met them yet. Her travel schedule made planning a trip to visit them a challenge, but she sometimes wondered if her husband didn’t know how to explain his strange wife to his more traditional family.

Her own informal wedding announcement to her parents—an envelope of photographs of her and Javi at the government office where they’d married in India, and a note in which she’d briefly described the ceremony—had elicited a Hallmark card of congratulations and a thousand-dollar check she’d never cashed.

“How’s the service up here?” Javi’s voice was low, rough. He put his hands in his pockets and shifted his weight from one side to the other.

She’d wanted to come up to this rooftop bar and look at the city the first night they’d arrived in Sevilla, but Javi had made reservations at a Chinese restaurant that was the latest culinary obsession of the Sevillanos and he was so excited at the coup that she didn’t have the heart to insist. They’d passed smoky, open-front cafes with legs of cured ham hanging from the ceiling over the bar and she’d wished for tapas, hunks of
queso manchego
, and bowls of briny
Mazanillas aceitunas
, but had eaten lotus root and crispy duck.

It had been, of course, delicious, though she chafed at his insistence on planning every meal. Every moment.

“Slow.” It was a question you could ask your new wife—twelve months had passed in a handful of breaths, it seemed. Or a total stranger. She wasn’t ready to be a wife again today. Would he understand what she wanted if she hinted? “But there are plenty of open tables.” She let her eyes wander over the dozen tables scattered across the rooftop between the waist-high walls. And waited.

His forearms flexed, fisting bulging in his pockets. She’d asked him about it once, noticing him tucking his thumb inside his fists and squeezing over and over again. It wasn’t tied to anger, she thought. Nerves perhaps.

He hadn’t understood winter in Chicago when he’d gone there to college from Arizona, he’d said. The largest blood vessel in a hand was in the thumb and if you hugged it with your four fingers it worked as a hand warmer. He’d made it through four months of winter that way, before learning the trick of asking about a pair of black leather gloves at any Lost and Found. There was always a pair.

So, thumbs tucked inside fists, even here in Sevilla where the brutal heat and the heavy salt in every dish had made her fingers a little puffy, the silver band on her ring finger digging in to her flesh until she couldn’t tug it off anymore.

That she’d even tried felt like a curse.

Javier walked to the table two over from hers, hips rolling in that way that made awareness pulse in her belly. That shouted
this man knows how to dance, how to move, how to fuck.

She wished she didn’t know it was true. It was hard to think clearly around him.

The clatter of the chair’s metal feet dragging across the painted rooftop rang loudly in her silence. He turned the chair to face La Giralda, too. She had to look to her right to see him looking at her, eyes like a laser on her face. She waited for him to start in with the questions, the demands to know what she’d done, why she’d thrown his carefully planned itinerary out of whack.

She smiled the polite smile of a stranger, a tourist traveling alone who might welcome conversation with someone from home, as long as it didn’t get too personal. “Hot day today.”

The weather. He raised an eyebrow.

That’s
what you give me to work with?

She bit her lip just off center and tried not to smile. If he’d sat at her table, she would have tangled her feet with his right then to feel the scruff of his bare hairy ankles against her own. She remembered she was contemplating untangling more than their limbs and the heavy blanket of lethargy settled over her again.

“Your first time in Sevilla?” he asked, still playing along.

“Yes. You?”

He nodded, eyes on the church tower. “Are you . . . enjoying your visit?” Javi, so good at fitting in he could talk to anyone, pretend to be at his ease anywhere, was terrible at this.

“Some of it.” She took pity on him. Or drove the knife in. “I went to the Alcázar today. It’s lovely.”

She sipped her drink, saw Javi wince out of the corner of her eye. They were quiet for a couple of minutes. He was no doubt rearranging the itinerary for the next few days. What had been today’s scheduled activity? Visiting the
Archivo General de Indias
maybe, with the scholarly letter of introduction he had procured that would allow them to see the original journals of Christopher Columbus, not currently on display in an exhibit. She was actually sad to have missed that.

Another visit he’d arranged with her happiness in mind.

God, she was a mess.

The skinny waiter reappeared. He’d run his eyes over her legs every time he’d condescended to check on her, resentment at being forced to leave the air-conditioned bowels of the hotel for the crazy
Americana
on the roof written all over his face. His steps slowed at seeing the two of them, sitting at separate tables.

Shit. It was a small hotel. They’d been very noticeable. The honeymoon couple whose reservation had gotten messed up, landing them in a room with two twin beds instead of the double bed they’d booked. Javi had wanted to switch to the Alfonso XIII immediately, the five-star hotel where people still talked about that time Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had visited.

She hadn’t minded the twin beds by then, so she’d told Javi she didn’t want to leave the
Barrio Santa Cruz,
the old Jewish Quarter, preferring their tiny, authentic hotel to luxury.

The kid in the black pants and pressed white shirt stopped halfway between their two tables, looking from Javi to her and then back at Javi.

Pains in my ass
, she imagined he was thinking.

She held her breath.

Please don’t break this spell
.

“
Dos más de lo que la señora toma, por favor.
” Javi didn’t move an inch from his casual sprawl, but his voice made the kid jump and scurry away for two more of what she was drinking.

The pigeons circled the tower again, swooping with that flock intelligence that let them stretch out in a long line before smoothly bunching up again, each bird always aware of its companions even as it flew an individual path.

“What are you drinking?”

She dragged her finger down the side of the glass, pushing more condensation to puddle on the table. “A
tinto de verano
.”

“Red wine of summer?” Her Spanish accent was decent, but it still took him a moment.

She smiled, feeling fond. It wasn’t his kind of drink. “Sort of like a Beaujolais mixed with Sprite.
Gaseola limon.
” He pursed his lips, trying not to smile, and she knew he was wishing he’d ordered a beer. A
Cruzcampo
like the locals, even though he thought it tasted like shit. “Between the mixer and how rarely that kid makes it up here, I’m pretty sure I can just keep ordering these and still find my feet underneath me when I’m done.”

They shared another smile. Getting used to the slower pace of Spanish restaurant service was hard for Americans, accustomed to constant, hovering staff.

Today she had mostly enjoyed the long, lingering gaps between visits from the waiter, leaving her in sole possession of the rooftop and its view of all the sights they’d come here to see. Everything close enough to identify, but still out of reach.

“How long have you been up here?”

She didn’t actually know. “What time is it?”

“Almost ten.”

She looked away. The last sliver of a fat orange sun was sliding below the horizon, the sky still alight with pinks and golds to her left, but a velvety navy to her right where the heavy storm clouds still threatened. The city in front of her was a Magritte painting, buildings silhouetted against a lighter sky, windows glowing incandescent gold or fluorescent white, sparking against the dark.

“The sun sets so late here. Not like at home.” Her cheeks were warm with the beginnings of a burn, even with the hat. He was waiting. “Since six.”

“By yourself?”

She flinched. He couldn’t think there was someone else? She tensed her shoulders, ready to defend herself, but then saw him. Head down, staring at the table top.

By yourself?
was completed with
instead of with me.

“Yes. Just thinking.” She couldn’t get her head straight around him. It was too hard to think past the wanting him.

“About what?”

About the influence of the Moors on Spanish architecture.

About the difference between Iberian and Serrano ham.

“About whether or not my husband made a bad choice when he married me.”

Sharp inhale. His head jerked up. “
Magdalena—
”

She shook her head.
Don’t.
She couldn’t have this conversation with him as herself, always lost in the spell of this man. Maybe she couldn’t have it at all. She’d never wanted so hard in her life, the way she wanted him. All her crushes and earlier loves were faded by him, old photos with washed-out colors, disappearing before her eyes.

The waiter returned with their drinks—tall skinny glasses with four swallows of wine and sparkling lemon soda over ice—and left the scrap of paper that was the bill on Javi’s table. He would tip too much. They both did, knowing it exposed them as tourists but unable to stop.

No one spoke. The waiter left.

“I came from Barcelona. Have you been?” she asked. It was harsh, slamming the gate like that. Javi’s shoulders bunched up under the untucked white button down, his hands wrapping around his glass, fingers overlapping to the third knuckle, fingertips white. He wanted to push, she knew.

She held her breath.

The last of the sun slipped below the horizon. The pigeons had flown away to roost for the night, safely pressed breast to breast in the eaves of the cathedral perhaps.

“Yes.”

Her exhale was audibly shaky. “Did you like it?”

“People have a strange idea of what belongs in a museum there.”

He’d been perplexed and almost insulted by the living room that looked like Mae West in the Dali Museum two days before. His engineer’s brain understood paintings in frames or statues on pedestals, but balked at the idea of a sofa as a pair of lips and framed pictures of cloudy skies for eyes. She’d watched the families passing through, parents kneeling down next to small children to point and direct their stares, and had loved it.

“But did you like it?”

“I am glad to have seen it.”

Right there.

That was it.

Her breath hiccupped in her chest, catching right under her breastbone with a sharp pain. “You can check it off your list.”

“Yes.” His eyebrows lowered as he spoke slowly. He knew something about his lists bothered her, but didn’t understand what it was. And that was what would break them, she feared. She couldn’t help wondering what list had had her name on it.

The wind picked up. At last. Hot air fluttered the hem of her skirt against the back of her knees, a butterfly touch. She lifted her face and let it flow over her cheeks instead of tears.

“You like lists.”

He hesitated, staring at her. She wondered if everything felt like a trap to him. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

“But you can miss
so much
, looking ahead to the next item on your list.”

“It’s just a list.”

But it wasn’t. It was everything. Because she wasn’t the last item on that list. She knew that. And being with her, the wanderer, home for one week and then gone for two, made so much of what she knew he wanted impossible.

A fat wet drop splashed against the back of her hand. The warm water beaded up and ran down her wrist. She looked up. Clouds blotted out the stars everywhere except a slice of the sky to the west.

“I think it’s—”

Deluge.

The rain fell like a hot, wet hammer, soaking them to the skin in moments, pushing her full glass of
tinto de verrano
to the brim. She yelped and sprinted for the tiny awning over the door to the interior. A second behind her, Javi also crowded under the scant protection, shirt molded to his broad trapezius muscles and plastered over his chest. Dark strands dripped in front of his eyes until he slicked his hair back with one hand, grinning as she laughed and held her dress away from her chest with one hand, wiping rain out of her eyes with the other.

“The rain in Spain—” she began.

“Falls mainly wherever
we
are,” Javi finished for her with a twist of a smile.

Misquoting
My Fair Lady
had become a running joke on their trip.

Their legs were still getting soaked, the rain falling so hard it bounced off the rooftop and splashed them up to their knees. Gusts of wind shifted the faint silver curtain of rain off the vertical. Her chest heaved with the deep breaths of an adrenalin rush. They’d both abandoned their drinks in their race to shelter. She had her straw bag, contents mostly dry, but—