The News from Spain Read online

  Then came Barnaby. Susanne hugged him and smelled cigarettes and toothpaste. “How are you?” she said into his ear.

  “Heavily medicated,” he said into hers.

  • • •

  After a while people stopped arriving, and Barnaby asked Barbara to excuse him for a moment. “Sure! Sure!” she said brightly; this party seemed to be exciting her and making her even stiffer than usual. There were two bathrooms on the ground floor, but Barnaby went upstairs, down the hall past Barbara’s room to the big bathroom that looked out over the bay, which had shimmered earlier but was growing dark blue and rough now as the evening came on. He locked the door—an old-fashioned hook that dropped into a metal loop screwed into the door frame, just the way the bathroom doors had locked in his parents’ house in Brigantine—and opened the window, sat down on the floor, and lit a Marlboro Light. Even if they figured out later that someone had been smoking in here—a smell in the towels, in the curtains—they wouldn’t know who it had been. He hoped no one out on the lawn happened to look up to see puffs of smoke emanating from the window: A new pope has been chosen, he thought.

  When he’d finished his cigarette, he flushed the butt down the toilet and put some toothpaste on his index finger and rubbed it around inside his mouth. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw that his expression wasn’t that different from Barbara’s: hectic and wooden. He smiled, then tried to smile again more naturally and ran his tongue over his teeth to get rid of what was left of the toothpaste, which was pale green.

  On his way back down the hall he heard women’s voices coming from the bedroom of one of Barbara’s sisters. “… and I said, ‘Why don’t you wait awhile, you don’t have to get married right away, maybe you should live together first,’ but she didn’t want to hear it.”

  “Do you think he’s gay?”

  He kept moving, and ducked into the next bedroom, which was Barbara’s. He’d had a feeling they all wondered about that—maybe even Barbara did. But it was awful to hear them actually talking about it. He was breathing heavily, shaking with—what? Rage? Shame? He never looked at men, and the idea of actually sleeping with one disgusted him. But so did the idea of sleeping with a woman. Not just Barbara, any woman. This had not been true when he was younger: he’d had some perfectly nice sex with nice women who, after a while, would want to marry him, which ended the relationships—not because he’d pushed these women away or fled them but because they got sad and discouraged after a while and left. He’d probably had a low sex drive to begin with, and now that he was older he seemed to have lost the ability to desire, the way people could lose the ability to diet or sing or write poetry. But how long had he felt this way? Since his parents had died, or since before then? His last, lukewarm, love affair had been seven years ago, and his parents had both died in the space of the last three. A diagnosis of grief seemed, Barnaby thought—and was aware of the irony of remembering, just then, his mother’s passion for anagrams—at once too pat and not apt.

  John got them drinks. They milled around. Susanne talked to people she knew from Plum Point, and people she knew from college, where she and Barnaby had met and become friends. She got into a conversation with a woman who turned out to be the owner of her family’s old house, and who thought Susanne would want to know about all the changes she’d made. At one point during this, she glanced around and saw John talking to a white-haired man in a seersucker jacket—the party was full of white-haired men in seersucker jackets—and he looked back at her. They’d always had this sort of radar in a crowd; they each knew where the other was, and could telegraph something that wasn’t a greeting but more like a checking-in: Still there?

  Still here.

  It had all its old sweet power, she found; it was undiminished—but it was accompanied, too, by something else: a sadness, maybe a wariness. A kind of gingerly self-congratulation: You see? We can still do this.

  Hands came down on her shoulders from behind. She turned to see Barnaby. “You look beautiful,” he said. She thanked him. He said, rapid and overanimated, “No, really. I’ve been standing over there thinking about who would paint you, and I decided Bronzino.”

  She smiled, and he said, “No, see, that wrecks it,” and she wanted to say to him, Oh, Barnaby, calm down, what is it? But the very tightness with which he was wound, the thing that was making her worry about him, made it impossible to get anywhere near him. It was the party, she thought, and she said to him, “Do your cheeks hurt from smiling?”

  He said, “God, I wish I could sit with you at dinner.”

  “But you can’t.”

  “I’m at the dignitaries’ table.”

  “That’s because you’re a dignitary.”

  “A foreign dignitary.”

  “Really?”

  “Visiting from another planet.”

  “Oh. Well, then: welcome.”

  People were beginning to move down the lawn toward the big striped tent, that glowed in the deep-blue evening with candles and lantern light. Susanne saw Barbara walking toward them, holding her skirt up off the ground with one hand, picking her way carefully across the grass in high-heeled sandals.

  “Listen,” Barnaby said to Susanne, his eyes on Barbara, “let’s have an assignation later.”

  “What?” Susanne said, not mistaking his joking tone for anything else, but still startled.

  “We’re both staying in that same shithole place. I’m in room two-twelve. Come knock on my door around midnight, okay?”

  Then Barbara was with them, smiling, tucking her hands around one of Barnaby’s arms. “Hey, you two,” she said.

  They started to walk down toward the tent.

  “It’s a beautiful party,” Susanne said after a minute; the silence had begun to feel like it needed to be broken.

  “I’m so glad!” Barbara said.

  “Are you cold?” Barnaby asked, looking down at her. “Would you like me to get you a sweater, or a wrap or something, before we sit down?”

  “Thank you,” Barbara said. “There’s a wrap on the chair in my bedroom. Light green,” she added, as he headed off.

  She turned then, and put both her hands around Susanne’s arm as she had around Barnaby’s. They walked very slowly down the lawn, in a way that was part saunter, part march. They didn’t say anything. Susanne kept expecting someone to come and break in on them with cheery party talk, one of the guests sweeping past them on the way to the tent, but no one did. They just kept moving, separate and quiet. She crossed her other arm over her chest and put her hand on top of one of Barbara’s, which was still clutching her. Susanne rubbed the back of Barbara’s hand in small circles.

  “Remember Vikram?” Barbara said suddenly.

  “Vikram?” Susanne remembered an angry-looking, sullen, handsome man around whom, for several years, Barbara had built dinner parties. He’d been a political scientist from Oxford, here on one of those fellowships that seemed to go on for a surprisingly long time before ending with what seemed like surprising suddenness. Susanne had found him pompous and difficult to talk to. She also thought he’d been a creep to Barbara, neither returning nor clearly refusing her love, sitting at her table, eating her meals—such elaborate food, prepared so nervously and determinedly to delight him—and being rude to Barbara and only slightly less rude to her friends. Barnaby, Susanne remembered, had always been the extra man at the dinner party, the one invited in case he might happen to hit it off with whatever single woman friend Barbara had invited that evening. He had talked lightly and easily, frowned slightly when Vikram stung Barbara, drawn out the single women without in the least leading them on, praised the food, helped Barbara clear the table. “What about Barnaby?” Susanne had said to Barbara at one point, after Vikram had gone back to England and married someone to whom, it turned out, he’d been engaged for years. “Barnaby? No.” Barbara had actually shuddered. “I feel like he’s hanging around on the ground with his mouth open, waiting for me to finally drop off the tree.”


  “Of course I remember Vikram,” Susanne said now.

  Barbara held Susanne’s arm tighter, nestling into her side. “Nobody liked him, did they.”

  “It just seemed like he wasn’t very nice to you.”

  “He wasn’t, really. But—oh, you know.” They kept slowly walking on the lawn. Barbara laughed a little. “I guess he was just the one that got away.”

  “Well,” Susanne said, automatically soothing, still rubbing Barbara’s hand, “maybe we all have someone like that.”

  They had almost reached the tent. Barbara drew away and stared at Susanne. “What are you talking about? You married the one who should have been the one that got away.”

  • • •

  If they had happened to look up at the bathroom window, they would have seen that another new pope had been chosen.

  Bad behavior. He knew this. He was forty-seven. He was an executive vice president in charge of corporate communications for a mid-size financial services company.

  He rubbed his mouth with toothpaste again, went down to dinner, put the wrap gently around Barbara’s shoulders, and then sat down and took hold of her hand under the tablecloth. The look she gave him—benevolent, relieved—made him want to cry.

  At dinner Susanne talked to the man sitting on her left—a conversation that never lifted off from the factual where-were-you-born stuff, made harder by the fact that both of them were trying so earnestly to get it off the ground. “And your wife?” Susanne asked. “Is she from Michigan also?”

  Waiters came and took away the soup plates and put down plates of rare beef and two tiny roasted potatoes.

  The woman on Susanne’s right turned out to be a college friend of Barbara’s. The conversation began pleasantly, but then suddenly the woman, who’d had quite a lot of wine, said, “So why is she marrying him, do you think?” She smiled at Susanne—she had straight black hair and delicate, deep eye sockets, a weary, cold sort of beauty. “I’ll tell you my theory,” she went on. “She has these two sisters with their marriages and children and their establishments—not just households, establishments. And she’s watched it all for years, and now she’s tired.”

  Susanne nodded and looked across the table at John. He was talking to the man next to him, but he saw her look and got up and came around the table and crouched by her chair. She touched his shoulder lightly and stood up, and he followed her out of the tent. The orchestra was playing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Soon people would start dancing.

  “This is an awful party,” she said.

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “We can’t. Not yet.”

  Along one side of the Hardings’ lawn, where it sloped down to the bay, there was a tall yew hedge. Susanne headed for the spot where she thought the opening would be, groped, found it, and walked through. As kids they had called this “the Maze.” It wasn’t really, because there was only one possible route through it, but it had felt the way they imagined a maze would: a narrow angled passage whose green walls were too high to see over and too dense to see through. As she and John walked through it she told him about what the drunk woman had said at dinner, and about her conversation with Barbara. For some reason she didn’t mention what she and Barnaby had talked about.

  “You don’t do that!” she said, going back to the drunk woman. “You just don’t. You don’t say things like that to a stranger at a party.” (She was a little drunk herself.)

  “No,” John said, “but you’re also upset because you think she’s right.” (His own slight intoxication often showed up this way, a concise, clear-eyed gravity.)

  They ended up kissing each other, for a long time, standing between the high yew walls. Oh God, he kept saying, oh God. Susanne felt split: kissing him, watching herself kissing him. God, he said against her collarbone.

  She didn’t want to walk any farther; the Maze eventually opened onto another flat patch of lawn, from which you could see her family’s house, and she didn’t want to see it. They went back to the party for a while and had champagne and dessert—a kind of round chocolate thing with ice cream inside, which looked like a small cannonball and seemed intended to be emphatically not wedding cake and thus to remind people that this party, despite all its eager nuptial trappings, was part of the build-up, not yet the real thing. The drunk woman had disappeared, so John sat next to Susanne and she gave him most of her cannonball. They watched Barbara and Barnaby dancing, correct graceful dancing-school steps executed while smiling into each other’s faces in the way that had also been encouraged, though rarely adhered to, in dancing school. Then, when other people got up to dance, Susanne and John walked back to the motel and got into one of the beds.

  For the first time in all those months, she took him in her mouth. She heard him crying; and then realized he wasn’t crying. Then he tried to reciprocate, and she said, sharply, “No!” and they both froze, she because she was wondering, again, what exactly had gone on in that bed in Chicago, and he because he knew what had gone on—and now, suddenly, feeling him tense, so did she. There was a long, still, dangerous moment, but she pulled his mouth to hers, and got her hips against his, and things went on with a roughness that was only partly fueled by rage and sorrow.

  Barnaby and Barbara, too, ended up kissing in the Maze. She led him there, after the party had petered out (which it had by eleven—he’d known it would be an early night). She held his hand, she turned her face up to his, and he kissed her, even paying dutiful attention to the places where her skin stopped and the bodice of her strapless dress began. Her flesh quivered; she sighed; he felt sorry for her and angry at himself.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too.”

  Was it immoral for them to say these things, to marry each other? So much was missing—not just from his side, he knew, but from hers, too, from the way she felt about him.

  But they both wanted to get married. They were both tired of not being married. After twenty years of intersecting social life, in some ways they barely knew each other. He’d thought for a long time, somewhat seriously but mainly idly, that from a distance she looked right. This thought had become more urgent in the last year or so, and lately she’d begun to think the same thing about him. They were standing out in the moonlight now and his mouth was prowling around her cleavage, but they were still at almost the same distance.

  In bleaker moments he had thought: She could probably, at this point, marry anybody. The problem was that he was somebody—she was marrying a blank, but the blankness was something that, in the close and daily proximity of marriage, he would be unable to keep up.

  “You do?” she asked.

  John had fallen asleep, sprawled on his back on top of the sheets. He was snoring. Susanne got out of bed and looked at him. She looked at her watch: it was ten minutes past twelve. She pulled on some clothes, the jeans and T-shirt she’d worn earlier that afternoon. She found the room key where John had dropped it on the dresser and let herself out, closing the door quietly behind her. She had started to climb the wooden staircase that led to the second floor of the motel when she saw that Barnaby was coming down toward her.

  “Hey, Susanne,” he said. He seemed startled to see her.

  She said, “Did you forget our assignation?”

  “Our assignation?” he said blankly. Then he said, “Wait a minute, that didn’t sound very gallant, did it.”

  “Barnaby,” she said, “it’s a joke.”

  He came down the rest of the stairs and took hold of her forearm. “Let’s have our assignation on the beach.”

  They passed out of the margin of light around the motel. The moon was up and the beach was pale and bleached; it was easy to see where they were walking. Barnaby still had on his clothes from the party, but Susanne shivered and he gave her his jacket. It was loose, and warm from him. He put his arm around her, and they walked a little way down the beach. Then they sat down on the cold sand, and Barnaby said, “Excuse me,” and held his jacket away
from Suzanne’s chest and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the inside breast pocket.

  “Want one?” he asked. She shook her head, and he lit one for himself while she cupped her hands loosely around his to protect the match from the wind. (They both, simultaneously, had a sudden memory of how, at Barbara’s dinner parties, when Susanne had still smoked and Barnaby had smoked openly, the two of them used to go out on the doorstep together and stand beneath the small porch hood, struggling to light up in the rain, in blizzards, that small, innocent, exciting touch of their hands.) It took him a few matches, but finally he drew in his breath and blew out smoke.

  He said, “All right, if you won’t smoke, then what about—” and then Susanne felt his hand fumbling near her hip and he pulled something out of that pocket, something heavy that she’d noticed dragging on the jacket when she’d put it on. A silver flask. She laughed.

  “What?”

  “Just that you’re so well equipped.”

  “I know. Did I think I’d find myself unexpectedly fox hunting?” He unscrewed the lid. “Actually, with Barbara’s family, there could be fox hunting, couldn’t there.”

  Susanne drank some brandy, loving the deep stabbing burn of it, and passed the flask back to Barnaby.

  “So,” she said.

  “So.”

  They sat looking out at the luminous sky, and at the harbor silvered by moonlight.

  That was when they would have talked, if they had talked. Barnaby might have told her that he knew his engagement looked shaky from the outside, but that he was counting on Barbara’s discretion and rectitude to make the marriage work. He might have said that he believed that after a point Barbara would stop wanting and stop asking, that she’d decide the marriage was what it was and would consider it a point of honor to uphold it. That he didn’t know anyone else with whom he thought he could build a marriage on honor, and that it was the only thing he thought he might possibly build a marriage on. That he was afraid of being alone if he didn’t marry her, and if he did. That he missed his parents; that no one knew how much; that he knew that even he didn’t quite comprehend how much.