The News From Spain Part 8

Marjorie frowned; this was not the kind of thing you said to her. Too personal, too confessional. Alice would have liked her just to nod, but Marjorie said briskly, "Well, I'm sure it will be fine. You remember plenty, I'm sure. And certainly, you're doing him a favor just to spend the time with him. He should be grateful for that. I certainly hope he thanks you. I certainly hope he knows to be grateful."

By the time they reached the kitchen door, Marjorie had grown even more indignant about the writer's antic.i.p.ated ingrat.i.tude. It was her way, Alice thought, of offering solidarity: she didn't quite understand what she had been asked to give, but she knew she'd been asked to give something, and this at least felt like impa.s.sioned reciprocation. Marjorie interrupted herself, bending with a towel to dry one dog and tossing a towel for Alice to use on the other one, to ask if Alice needed anything to round out lunch. "I have some crab cakes in the freezer, I think; and there's a lot of that chicken left from the party the other night ... No? Some soup?"

Alice said thanks, it was very nice of Marjorie (it was), but she was all set.

Charlie and Liza were almost an hour late, and were cowed by the sight of the house. "Oh, my G.o.d," Charlie said.

"It's like Gatsby," Liza said.

"I don't even know where to pull up. Which door, do you think?"

Alice, though, seemed to have been watching for them; she flew out to the car and was saying, "Welcome! Welcome!" before they'd even had a chance to climb out, looking somewhat dazedly around them. She had tousled hair, cut quite short, which was either dyed blond or else had turned the kind of white that is closer to yellow. Very blue narrow eyes, behind gold-rimmed gla.s.ses. A soft, drooping, nearly unwrinkled face. Red sweater, loose jeans. Her voice was a little hoa.r.s.e. She had a wonderful smile.

"And who is this?" she was saying, bending to look into the backseat while Liza unclipped the straps of the car seat.

"This is Veronica," Liza said.

"Veronica!" Alice said to the baby, as Liza drew her out of the car. She'd woken up about fifteen minutes ago and, surprisingly, had not yet cried to be fed. "Your name is Veronica? Such a big name for such a little person." Alice was holding out her arms, glancing at Liza: "Will she let me?"

"Let's see," Liza said, handing over the baby.

"Veronica," Alice said softly, looking into the baby's face. "I think you may be the first Veronica I've ever met. What do you think? Have you encountered many other Veronicas?" Veronica looked back at Alice with her usual mild gravity. Alice laughed. "Ah. She's considering the question."

Still carrying Veronica, she led Liza and Charlie to a door at the far end of the house where it angled and joined with a row of large, old-fashioned garage doors, and then up a narrow stairway to another door. "Here we are!"

It was a big, cream-colored room, with a row of windows at the back. A worn couch and chairs on a balding Persian rug. A couple of low white bookcases. A galley kitchen against one wall; a single bed, covered with a tan comforter, on the other.

Liza went to the windows and saw hedges wrapped in burlap, long beds covered with hay, brown-yellow gra.s.s, more garden beyond, big cold gray sky, and, from the last window, a small slice of dark gray ocean. Charlie saw that he was going to have to find a tactful way to ask Alice about her position in this household; clearly she was not, as he had imagined when they first drove up, the wife of a billionaire. Although: Was her current situation really relevant to his project? Was he going to introduce himself, and today, into the book? I finally found Alice in a one-room garage apartment attached to a fabulously grand house? Or was he just going to write straight history-In 1958 (or whenever it was) Denis Carlisle met a young woman named Alice at (wherever they had met)-objectively planting Alice in the part of her past that mattered to the book and leaving her there?

Alice made coffee, and Charlie pulled out his notebook (he hated to use a tape recorder: not the process of using it but the dullness of the transcript afterward. He felt that sending tapes out to be transcribed was like sending a suit out to be cleaned and having it run over by a steam roller instead-it came back so flattened that it was unrecognizable. For him, reading transcripts of his own interviews was the opposite of verification; a transcript made him doubt what he knew he'd heard).

They sat on the couch and began with the basics: Where were you born? What did your parents do? How many brothers and sisters? Alice answered with an air of eager cooperation that Charlie hadn't seen in any of the other people he'd interviewed. Some had been grumpy and impatient (Giles), some straightforwardly factual, or wistful, or thoughtful and almost dreamy, finding that the interview process took them back to things they hadn't thought about in years. But he'd never seen anybody lay herself bare as-as cheerfully, he would later say to Liza.

(But that would come later, in the car, driving to Vermont, that debriefing with Liza. Checking in with her-You were there, what did you think?-which would feel satisfying to Charlie in some ways, and not in others. You were right there, Liza-why are you acting as though you weren't?) Right now, jotting down preliminary facts about Alice, he was faintly annoyed that Liza was there, and a little embarra.s.sed at being his professional (serious, earnest, slightly full of s.h.i.t) self in front of her. She sat nursing Veronica in one of the chairs, her knees practically touching the arm of the couch where he and Alice sat. He was listening to Alice, nodding, writing things down-but he kept seeing Liza there, without actually quite looking at her, and he kept thinking, Could you at least go over and sit on the bed? (But Alice had, quite deliberately, placed her in the chair, saying it was the most comfortable place to sit.) Liza knew how he was feeling, and was trying not to let it faze her. If there had been another room to go into, she would have gone into it, but there wasn't. She was feeling peaceful-relatively peaceful, anyway-sitting there in the sun, with the baby's hand gently kneading the skin just above her breast. Veronica, fresh from her nap, drank but looked around curiously, aware of being in a new place. She had fine dark curls that weren't even quite curls yet, more like half curls; they always seemed optimistic to Liza, and, combined with Veronica's grave demeanor, they could make her want to cry.

Alice was saying that her parents had not approved of her going to New York at the age of nineteen to become an actress, but they had kissed her and given her money and put her on the train, "with all the love in the world," she said. "They didn't understand, so they couldn't quite give me their blessing; but they trusted me and wanted me to be happy, and I was."

She'd gotten married a few months later, she said, to a very young actor. "Because we wanted so much to go to bed together. We'd both been taught, you see, that one didn't have s.e.x outside marriage, and we both believed it. And what's really funny is that we both believed everyone else believed it too." She laughed. "So: the belief didn't last long, and neither did the marriage."

Then she'd had a few years of being what she called "a sort of hot young actress."

She got up and pulled an alb.u.m from the bookshelf and sat with it open on her lap. There she was in an eighteenth-century French farce, with a laced bodice and a curly white wig; there in some modern drama smoldering in a dark c.o.c.ktail dress and smoking; there looking plaintive ("Sonya in Uncle Vanya," she said); there in some sort of showgirl costume, with fishnet stockings and a bunch of bananas on her head.

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 G.o.d, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 demita.s.se 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 G.o.d, "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-Honore, 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 sh.o.r.eline 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."

"Impressive, aren't I? But let me tell you something: I know that there is such a thing, but I have absolutely no idea what it is."

"It's like a two-headed lute."

"And hautbois d'amour. That was the other terrific name I remember. 'High wood of love.' But again: could not tell you the first thing about it if my life depended on it."

Liza, looking into Alice's red-cheeked, animated face, felt suddenly lacerated, such an unexpected rawness that she forgot to breathe. "Well, it's an oboe," she said finally. "Hautbois: oboe. You can see where the word comes from-"

"An oboe," Alice said. "How interesting." Then, "How ... disappointing. It sounds like it should be something more than an oboe. Something more courtly."

"The oboe d'amour is tuned a third lower than a regular oboe," Liza went on automatically. "But otherwise it's pretty similar. My cousin David plays both."

They walked a few more steps, then Liza said, "I'm in love with him." She felt relieved an instant before she said it-before she even quite knew she would say it.

Alice stopped and turned to face her. They stood looking at each other for a moment. Then Alice said, "Oh, my dear," and put her arms around Liza and held her-loosely, because the baby was between them, but for a long time.

Alice was not the first person Liza had told this to. She had talked to a psychologist when she first came to California halfway through her soph.o.m.ore year of college. That was right after David, who was two years older, had, suddenly and without telling Liza of his plans, gotten married. Their affair had all taken place in the summers, when his family came and opened their house outside the town where Liza's family lived in Vermont. Liza had fallen in love with him at thirteen and slept with him since the summer when she was fifteen. She was shattered. She had driven to his college to talk to him; he'd permitted her to question him, horribly, in the vestibule of his apartment building, because his wife was upstairs. Liza, knowing that she was desperate and that the questions were useless, tried anyway to ask him about his marriage-Why hadn't he at least let her know in advance?-but he, white-faced, had not only refused to talk about it but acted as if he didn't understand why she was so upset. It was as if he had amnesia, Liza had said later to the shrink in California, or as if he was implying that I'd made the whole thing up.

The shrink had talked to her about incest, how it was always a complicated violation of some sort. "But I wanted to!" Liza had said. "Even then," the doctor gently insisted.

And the other person Liza had talked to, her friend Amanda (who'd been her roommate at UCLA), had called David "that p.r.i.c.k" or "that exploitative a.s.shole cousin of yours"-which gratified the part of Liza that was angry and hurt, but left the part of her that still loved David feeling lonely and wrong.

No one had ever known-Liza herself had not known-that what she wanted was for someone to hold her and say, "Oh, my dear."

She bathed in it, was infinitely soothed; and yet, in some way she couldn't understand, she was also saddened.

(Years later, when Liza was divorced from Charlie and long since over David, and she thought of this conversation, she would still wonder about that sadness. Some of it had been for herself, certainly. But some, she had come to feel-and hoped she'd felt back then-had had to do with Alice. Wanting to say "Oh, my dear" back to Alice, and feeling too young and shy to say it.) * * *

It was when they got back from the beach that Charlie asked Alice about her name. "I thought it was Alice Carlisle, but all these letters are addressed to Alice Montgomery."

"Yes, that was my maiden name, and my stage name. I went back to it after Denis died. And I never even bothered taking my third husband's name, which turned out to be smart, because that was another short marriage." In fact, it had lasted just over a year: the English choral conductor she'd mentioned to Liza on the beach.

"I'm glad we straightened that out," Charlie said. "That would have been pretty bad, to get your name wrong."

"Well, but not the end of the world," Alice said.

They were getting ready to leave, gathering the baby's things, which had somehow spread themselves over the room: a rattle on the floor, a box of wipes and a changing pad on the kitchen counter, a cloth book about animals sticking up between the cushions of the couch. Charlie was fretting because he'd made a pile of things to take to be photocopied, but they were running late; they needed to drive to Vermont tonight; Liza's family was expecting them.

On the beach, Alice had heard about the Vermont plan: it was going to be a weekend-long family reunion, and it would be the first time Liza had seen David since that night in the vestibule of his apartment building. "So I have a baby, and he has three-year-old twins," she had told Alice. "We'll both be well insulated. But I'm scared."

"That you'll feel it, or that you won't feel it?"

"Both. It would be terrible either way. But I think I'll feel it."

"I think so too," Alice had said. She had asked Liza about her marriage to Charlie, and Liza had said she thought it was good. "I really do. We do love each other. And Veronica-we're both crazy about her, and Charlie's a great father. But also: it's me trying to play by the book."

"Which can almost work sometimes," Alice had said.

Now, gently, she told Charlie not to worry: she would photocopy the stuff he wanted over the next day or so, and mail it to him.

"Are you sure?" he asked, and she wanted to hug him too, as she had Liza.

She walked them out to their car and watched them stow Veronica in the car seat, and then she did hug them both, and they thanked her for everything and she said, "Oh, please." Then they said they would stay in touch and she waved them off, imagining the Christmas cards.

It was getting dark, the sudden darkness that falls over the Atlantic in winter: a somber shutting down, the ocean withdrawing and becoming invisible. She went back upstairs and ran herself a bath. Undressing near the bathroom window, she saw a low shape running lightly through the garden: a fox.

She lay in the hot water wishing for gin. Not that she'd ever actually take the drink, after all these years-you make the phone call, you go to a meeting, the whole boring yet weirdly effective catechism-but just remembering that old feeling of the first few sips, that first inkling that you were going to begin to relax and feel warm. It would be pleasant, that was all she was thinking.