The News From Spain Part 6

No, of Greenwich, Connecticut. They would laugh together. But I read the play, after I met him. No one reads that play, but I did.

What did you think?

I don't remember anything about it. Just the t.i.tle page. I kept flipping back and just looking at that one word on the t.i.tle page.

No, too sappy. Too confidential. It wouldn't shock her to know that he's mooning over a man (he guesses it wouldn't even surprise her). But he knows that even this kind of talk would be too much, the same way he knew, growing up, sneaking silently out of the house at night, which parts of which floorboards to avoid. She'd be warm and interested. She'd ask questions. Then she'd have to ask more questions, next week, next month. If it went well, she'd have to rejoice. If it ended, she'd have to commiserate. She'd have to be a friend, or do that sprightly false boss-taking-an-interest-in-the-worker business. It would upset their balance, which cannot be explained, but which works.

Maybe he's wrong. Maybe her boredom, which is spectacular, fiendish, at its worst right now-in later years it'll get better; she'll write, teach, travel, regain some actual, rather than just faked, equilibrium-could be helped a little if he were a little less careful with her.

But on the way home what they talk about is the haddock stew. That seductive, engrossing stew! The recipe calls for tomatoes and cream, so, they speculate, it will taste both astringent and sweet. They can start working on it together, if they hurry. He starts running then. The wheelchair rollicks. She screams a little. He will have left by the time it's ready-Fraulein Sacher-Masoch (actually a Scotswoman from Oban, very kind, but with a perpetually terrified expression) is on tonight-but they'll save him some for lunch tomorrow.

3.

She's right about the letters. Another comes the next morning, a short, fanciful description of the first day at sea ("captain is pirate, reformed"), and then another each day after that. Funny little made-up stories about people in the company.

This one drank whole bottle of champagne and fell off railing and we had to catch her by the toes as she went over.

That one has mouse in cabin and tried to make friends, but turns out mouse speaks only French and that one never learned it.

They're all postmarked New York, New York. She wonders who is mailing them. Which person did he hand them to and explain what he wanted done with them? She's glad not to know.

The physical therapist comes. The other aides-de-carca.s.s. The maid. A childhood friend. Another friend, a former dancer who became a photographer. Friends who teach, friends whose injuries kept them from the tour, a friend who just had a baby and is trying to get back in shape. The old costume designer, who comes for tea every Friday afternoon, beautifully dressed and made up, bringing brioches. The doctor. The super (the kitchen drain is clogged). Her mother. They are all suspects, except for the childhood friend, who's in for just a week, from Paris. She watches them all, wondering which one is her partner in humiliation.

The only person she shows the letters to is Malcolm. He doesn't say much. She argues with him, trying to make him say that they're horrible. She nags him, she's never spoken to him like this about anything. "Are you being diplomatic, is that it? Or do you really not see?"

"I see that they bother you."

"They're grotesque. They're false."

"Would you like me to just take them when they come, and put them away, before I bring you the mail?"

"G.o.d. Don't you humor me."

The days go on. She hates this quarreling with him. The more she picks at him the quieter he gets. Silence is one thing when it's s.p.a.cious, peaceful; but this is something else. She's terrified, she thinks she's marred things between them. She is sure he's gone from liking and admiring her to working for a paycheck. She has to shut up, return to her old reticence. She could, she thinks, if the letters would stop coming.

One day she's railing at him during a procedure for which they both generally stay silent. The letters are insulting, they're condescending, they're a child's toy. They're an indignity.

"Oh, so now you want dignity?" Malcolm asks. They both look down at what he is doing to her body at that moment; and then, instantly, they both start laughing, the kind of helpless laughter that starts up again every time it seems to be dying down.

4.

At home-at Tim's-in the evenings, Malcolm listens to music, reads, and does his exercises, push-ups, sit-ups, dumbbells, and some ballet stretches and warm-ups. He smokes. He eats cereal for dinner. He's waiting.

And then one day he comes home from work, opens the mailbox in the vestibule, and finds a postcard. A picture of the Eiffel Tower.

Got here yesterday. Good food and weather. The schedule is tough. Long wierd days, but no real time to see anything. It's good, though. But I miss New York. T He carries it upstairs and reads it over and over. Such a relief to have it. How could he have imagined that Tim wouldn't write?

But so little in it. So flat and impersonal. The Eiffel Tower? A sly little joke, or just unoriginal? And "weird" spelled wrong. Tim isn't dumb-how can he sound so dumb?

But missing New York: that's all I need to hear.

Unless he means it literally.

And oh G.o.d-the handwriting alone is almost unbearably beautiful.

He props the card against a candlestick on the table in the living room. Looks at it all evening. From far away, pretending to forget that it's there, walking past it and then turning his eyes to catch sudden sight of it again. From up close, holding it in both hands, staring at the bright photograph, the word "PARIS" printed in red at the bottom, as if one might otherwise mistake this for some other Eiffel Tower. Turning it over, again pretending not to have seen it before, pretending he's reading Tim's message for the first time. Relishing the repeated mix of thrill and disappointment-what is it about the disappointment that makes the whole thing somehow lovelier?

When he goes to bed he leaves the card in the living room, leaning against the candlestick. He doesn't need to sleep next to it-he's not that desperate. And this way he can come upon it freshly in the morning.

Over the next few days, he looks at the card so much that he feels like it's fraying. It isn't, really. It's a tough, shiny little piece of manufacturing.

But along with everything else it does to him, it proves that the company has arrived and been on dry land long enough to allow a card to be purchased, written, mailed, and delivered.

A telegram did come for her. "Arrived safely. Paris beautiful of course. Next Turin. Miss you."

But still every day, hating to do it, he brings her mail into the den along with the coffee, and nearly every day, still, there's a letter postmarked from New York. Little fictions about Paris and Turin and Rome.

But she's different, now, about them. "Oh, Malcolm," she says. "It's just getting ridiculous. The poor man."

Anyway, she has a project. A reporter called one day, asking if she would agree to an interview. "A major piece, with photographs. The story of your life."

No, thank you, she said. She gets these calls from time to time, and always says no. She hung up the phone. "Someone should write the story of your life," she told the cat. "Now, that would make sensational reading."

"It would," Malcolm said.

"It would scandalize polite society," she went on. "Look at you. You'd have a tale or two to tell, wouldn't you? You'd set the literary world on its ear, if we were to catalog your adventures."

The idea amused both her and Malcolm. All that day, whenever the cat slept (which was most of the time), they described to each other his dreams. When he washed himself, they said, "Big night ahead." When he walked to the kitchen: "Pre-theater snack." By the time Malcolm left, they had devised a tragic love affair for the cat, and when the cat slept the next day, they said, "See? He's taken to his bed."

She starts writing down some of this silliness-little scenarios about the cat, his ambitions and regrets, his amours, puns-on sc.r.a.ps of paper. Malcolm buys her a small notebook to keep next to the bed, so she can fool around with the cat's story when she has trouble sleeping. "You're egging me on," she says.

"Yeah."

Her friend the photographer visits one afternoon. They're all together in the living room, drinking lemonade, when the cat starts suddenly and gallops away down the hall. She shakes her head. "Oh, the press, the press. Is there no escaping the glare of publicity?"

That leads-as she realizes later she hoped it would-to her telling the photographer about the cat biography, and the photographer saying, "But it needs pictures." And it goes even further: the photographer has a friend in publishing. "Why don't I talk to him? Seriously, what do you think? Would you like me to?"

"Oh, I don't know." Of course she would like it; what's the matter with her? Look how frightened she's become, afraid to admit even to herself that she wants something. "Yes, that would be wonderful," she says.

Two days later, she and the photographer have lunch with the publisher in The Oak Room at The Plaza. Getting there is a big production: Malcolm lifting her into the taxicab, where the photographer steadies her while Malcolm collapses the wheelchair and loads it into the trunk; the two of them wedged on either side of her, holding her upright while the driver maneuvers his cab with that terrified reverence that never fails to amuse her; waiting in the cab as Malcolm carries the wheelchair into the hotel; enduring the conspicuous melodrama of being carried in after it.

"I hope you'll have lunch with us," she said to him earlier. She had thought carefully about how to phrase this. There's no right way. Posing it as a question-Would you like to join us?-would have seemed like mere politeness, something said in the hope of being met with refusal. But the other way, the way she said it, has a kind of white-lady or at least n.o.blesse-oblige condescension to it, which she hoped Malcolm would forgive as awkwardness. She would really like him to be at the lunch, but not if being there would make him uncomfortable. So when he did refuse, gently-he said he'd get a hot dog and walk in the park for an hour-she didn't press it.

But now again, in the lobby, as he settles her in the wheelchair, she has the impulse to ask him to stay. She scrambles to think of some therapeutic pretext that might make it easier for him to say yes, but there really isn't one; and the photographer's hands are already reaching out to grasp the handles of the chair, and then the chair is moving across the lush, dizzying carpet, the vast chaotic s.p.a.ce, the unfamiliar clamor, so she ends up not saying anything.

Only during lunch, as they're eating their salads, does it register with her that beneath his overcoat he was wearing a suit. She's never seen him in a suit before. He might have put it on just to carry her into this posh lobby, but maybe he was hoping that she would repeat the invitation. She wishes she had. The cat idea is his, too; or at least he is its great champion, and hers. She misses him.

The publisher is a plump, red-faced man who loves the idea. "What a lark! What a lark!" he keeps saying, and she wants to say, What do you mean, a lark? Get off it, you're not even English; but she sees that he is nervous-the wheelchair, or whom she's married to, or her old fame, or her perhaps famously rumored reclusiveness, or some combination of these things, or maybe he is just a nervous guy. After lunch he offers her a cigarette (she looks to see if they're Larks, but no, they're Pall Malls), and the three of them sit and smoke and talk business. And then they're out in the lobby again, shaking hands; and Malcolm is there, with his soft rea.s.suring smile; and she's going home in a big Checker taxi, with the promise of a book contract, but even with the excitement she has a momentary pang, remembering how in these cabs she used to love the precarious feeling of riding in the little fold-down jump seat.

5.

She asks Malcolm, hesitantly, if he'd be willing to change his hours-to work some nights instead of, or in addition to, the days he's working now. She's having even more than the usual trouble sleeping, and it would make her feel better to have him in sometimes at night, easier than with some of the other aides. "The writing keeps me busy during the day now," she says, "so Miss Soap Opera or the Fraulein, they're fine, I can sort of tune them out. But at night, right now-"

"Sure." Malcolm nods.

He is touched that she would ask him, and happy about the extra money. Since that brief confusing jolt from Tim-Feel free to stay here while I'm away-he's been worrying about money, looking at apartment listings in the cla.s.sifieds, calculating whether he could afford to rent a place of his own, if it came to that. He is soberly aware of the fragility of his qualifications to do reliable, well-paying, interesting work. When things got so fraught with her, a few weeks back, over those letters-of course he could see what was wrong with them, of course he could-he was frozen with fear that saying the wrong thing (sympathizing too little, or sympathizing too much and implicitly criticizing her husband) might cost him his job. If he did lose it, would he be lucky enough to get another one that he loved? And would she ever forgive him, would he see her again? Sometimes, he imagines telling her by way of apology, I am so worried about putting a foot wrong that I'm afraid to put a foot anywhere.

So now, after they've cooked and had dinner and watched television or listened to music and gotten her into her nightgown, Malcolm sits in the orange tweed armchair next to her bed and they talk. "I figured out who he's in love with," she tells him one night.

"What?" he asks, startled. It's late, after midnight. It's been a rough evening. She's had some pain, which he tried to rub away; and then there was an unscheduled clean-up that required more than a sponge bath, so he had to put her in the contraption (something an aide had rigged up for her in the early days: a beach chair set on a rubber mat in the bathtub, where she sat gripping the rickety metal armrests while you sprayed her with a hose). She is exhausted, and not sleepy, and trying not to take a pill.

"Our boy," she says; and Malcolm relaxes. Oh. The cat. "I know who his femme fatale is."

"Who?"

"Well, it's the Infant's little cat, of course."

He doesn't know what to say.

She goes on. "You've never seen her, have you? Devastating. So innocent and so sleek. b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt in her mouth. It's no wonder that when he saw her, the thought of every other feline just left his head."

He lets her keep spinning the story. How they met, how they fell in love, how they parted.

But you haven't seen her either, he wants to say. How does she even know the Infant has a cat? Her husband must have mentioned it. Or maybe that was all she and the Infant had found to talk about, those times when the Infant came to dinner. He could weep for this new ingenious, doomed invention, for the frantic, gallant gaiety of it.

She says she's written to her husband about the whole thing-the book, the photographer, the contract. She's gotten a telegram back, congratulating her. Now she's written again to tell him this newest idea, about the Infant's cat. "He'll like that," she tells Malcolm.

There's a silence. "Those letters finally stopped coming," she says.

And he, after a moment, takes a quiet, small risk. "I'm glad."

Another card has come from Tim, from Rome. A picture of the Colosseum. More noncommittal tourist-talk, about the Vatican and the Spanish Steps, and looking forward to getting back to New York.

Malcolm goes through it all again: the initial exalted flaring leap of happiness, the irritation, the a.n.a.lysis, the unease, the longing. He props this card against the other candlestick and sets it next to the Paris one; but then when he walks by and sees them both he says aloud, "f.u.c.k you."

6.

Two days later, Malcolm goes down in the morning to check his mail and there's an aerogram. Upstairs, in Tim's apartment, he slits it open carefully so as not to tear the message inside. The thin blue paper is shaking, crackling in his hands. He knows even before he reads it that a sealed message will be different from words written openly on a postcard.

Listen. The tour is wrapping up. Two more nights in Madrid, then Barcelona for three nights, and then back to Paris. What about coming over to meet me? We can have a couple of Paris days (I'll show you the Eiffle Tower) and then figure out where to go from there. I have three weeks off and we could have fun. I'll wire money for a plane ticket. I'll be in Paris again by the time you get this, so send a telegram to the hotel there and let me know. But I hope you'll say yes.

T.

He sits at the living room table, holding the letter, not needing to reread it, looking at the familiar, loved room. Faded old rugs, the long curved sofa with a b.u.t.ton-dimpled back, the old honey-colored chest of drawers that had belonged to Tim's great-grandmother, the hi-fi cabinet with its shelves of records, the gla.s.s-fronted bookcase filled with Tim's photographs and Malcolm's books, the blue mat in the corner with the dumbbells lying around. Slowly he allows himself to feel happy. It seems to him a beautiful letter, filled with the things the postcards lacked-well, maybe not filled with them, but unmistakably implying them. He has never been to Europe-never traveled at all, except for his move to New York. (He does wonder, nervously, about their traveling together. How are these things viewed in Europe? But Tim wouldn't have asked him if it couldn't be made to work; people check into hotels all the time, friends, rich men with Negro servants, maybe no one thinks anything of it. Tim has traveled a lot; he'll know how to do it.) And the money for the plane ticket. He allows himself to enjoy that too. And it has nothing to do with the money, he tells himself, scrupulously (and not entirely accurately). It's the feeling of being planned for, sent for.

There is nothing to be disappointed about.

He is fixing his lunch, laying slices of bologna on bread, when it occurs to him that he'll have to ask for leave from work, and that this might be difficult. Not because she would refuse, but because it feels like the wrong time to go away. She is so unhappy now, beneath all the busy, vivid, energetic wit of the cat book. ("Guess what, Malcolm, I've figured out his family tree. He can trace his ancestry all the way back to ... Catullus!" and then, the next night, "I've dropped the Catullus idea-I figured out something better.") And whenever she gets going, with sly, apparently detached amus.e.m.e.nt, on the subject of the Infant's cat, he wants to tell her to stop working so hard. He is glad to see her occupied, but it seems to him that there's a panicky, confected feeling to the project, that in fact it has the same quality she objected to, and was so hurt by, in that elaborate letter scheme of her husband's. It's as if, to guard against being humored in the future, she's decided to get in there first and humor herself.

Later, he walks to work in the snappy, deep blue late-winter afternoon, trying to figure out how he might bring up the subject of Europe. He's just gotten his key into the lock when the door is pulled open by Miss Soap Opera. Her face is somber and thrilled. "Something's happened."

"What?" he asks coolly. Her fervors automatically make him austere.

"I don't know what," she pants. "She made me put her back in the bed; she didn't want any lunch."

"Maybe she's sick. Did you call the doctor?"

"She wouldn't let me. Just wanted to be left alone, she said. I'm really worried. Would you like me to stay?"

"No, thanks, I'll be fine," he says, wondering as he has wondered before if this woman ever does or says anything that is not in character. He waits until she's actually out of the apartment-she is capable of lurking around, full of sympathy and meaning-before he goes and knocks gently at the bedroom door.

"Malcolm?"

The bedside light is on, and there are books scattered on either side of her. She looks fine. "Are you okay?"

"Oh, you mean ..." She rolls her eyes at the doorway.

So does he. "Yeah."

"She drove me absolutely bananas today. I just wanted to scream. She's just this big, damp, hovering, clucking-I don't know what-giant chicken. Giant hen. I don't want to be under her wing-ugh, who could breathe under there?"

He smiles. "But did something happen?"