The News from Spain

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2012 by Joan Wickersham

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Some stories from this work were originally published in slightly different form in the following:
Agni, Glimmer Train
, and
New England Review
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wickersham, Joan.
The news from Spain : seven variations on a love story / Joan Wickersham.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-95889-1
I. Title.
pS3573.I252N49 2012
813’.54—dc23
2012005073

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket photograph by Stacy Renee Morrison
Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

The News from Spain (1)

The News from Spain (2)

The News from Spain (3)

The News from Spain (4)

The News from Spain (5)

The News from Spain (6)

The News from Spain (7)

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

Reading Group Guide

Other Books by This Author

“Everything that happens, happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth.”

—ROBERTO CALASSO,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

The News from Spain

The motel was called The Sands of Time, but it could just as easily have been The Dunes, or The Sea Shell, or The Breakwater, or The Harbor Rest—all of which were the names of other, similar, motels lining the road that led to Plum Point.
The rooms smelled of disinfectant and of bodies. Nothing vulgarly specific, not the smell of sweat or feet: just a tired essence of long, hard, human use. The rooms were clean, but the surfaces felt slightly sticky. Outside, the wind was dazzling and salty.

It was a Saturday. July. The Hardings, whose middle daughter, Barbara, was newly engaged at the age of forty-six, were having a party at their house on the Point, and they had reserved a block of rooms for their overflow guests.

Susanne and John got to the motel just before four. It was the first time they had been away alone together since she had found out, in April, that he’d slept with someone else. It had happened two years before—happened only once, according
to John, at the end of an intense friendship he’d fallen into with the woman who owned the Chicago gallery that was putting on a show of his paintings. There had been e-mails; he had flown out to meet with her several times to work out the details of the show; he had not realized, he told Susanne in April, that this kind of danger could sneak up on you. There’d been liking, maybe a little flirtation although he hadn’t acknowledged this even to himself at the time; certainly there’d been respect on both sides—

“Stop,” Susanne had said.

He did stop, looking sad and troubled and solicitous. He was all those things, Susanne knew. He had done it; doing it had horrified him and he’d never seen the woman again, except at the opening, when Susanne had flown out to Chicago with him. She remembered the gallery owner in a red hand-painted kimono jacket, an attractive mix of animation and steadiness. Susanne, knowing then only that John liked her, had liked her too. She wore the same perfume as Susanne’s best friend at boarding school. “What is it again?” Susanne had asked.

“Chanel Number Nineteen.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s getting harder to find it,” the gallery owner had said, and that had been their whole conversation, because someone had interrupted them.

Susanne had found out about it one night this spring. A wifely moment: she’d bought him a wool shirt last Christmas, it had itched and he’d returned it, and now the store was having a sale and she was looking for the credit slip so she could get him something else. She looked through some things lying on top of John’s dresser and then thought to check his wallet, where he often kept odd receipts. She’d pulled out a folded piece of paper, softened and grayed: something he’d been carrying
around for a while. A printout of an e-mail. She’d read it. She’d gone into the bathroom, where he’d been getting out of the shower. After a while they had turned the shower on again, hoping to muffle things—by then he was sobbing, and she was almost screaming—but their daughter, Ella, had knocked on the door and asked what was wrong. “Nothing!” they’d both answered.

They’d been married for twenty-six years. They had loved each other since high school.

Over the past three months since that night, Ella’s presence in the house had been both protection and hindrance. They’d had to keep themselves in check.

This morning they had dropped her off at a friend’s house, where she would spend the night. Then they had driven north, and then out toward the coast, in silence. Susanne drove. John read a book, and then napped. A familiar drive: they used to do it all the time, when Susanne’s father still had his house on Plum Point. They came to the clam shack where they always used to stop. Susanne drove past it and pulled in at a different place, a few miles down the highway. It turned out the clams weren’t as good. She noticed, and she knew that John noticed. She saw him decide not to say anything and she was annoyed that he hadn’t, because it deprived her of her chance to shrug coldly. She also saw the sadness of all this, the desperately angry smallness of it: the unspoken little spat averted because they both knew he’d lost the right to protest being made to eat at the wrong clam shack.

On the back wall of the motel room there was a sliding glass door. Susanne stood for a few minutes looking out at the harbor. It was almost the view she’d grown up with, but not. You could see the lighthouse from here, the whole fat white cylinder of it, and the ferry dock, the line of cars waiting to get on. From
her family’s house on Plum Point, three-quarters of a mile up the road, you saw the ferry only in progress, laboring into and out of the harbor, and you didn’t see the lighthouse at all, only the pale wedge of its light sweeping the sky. But from Plum Point you saw the Race, invisible from here, the strange patch of water where the tides and currents crossed and went crazy twice a day. As a child the idea of the Race had thrilled and terrified her: the idea that a benign place could turn treacherous at predictable intervals. And with the dining room telescope you could see Sinnewisset, where the ferry went, and beyond it the string of small nameless purple islands.

When Barbara had called with the news that she and Barnaby were engaged, and that there would be a summer party at Plum Point, Susanne had thought that coming here would be piercingly sad: she had managed never to come back in the six years since her father had sold the house after his third divorce. But then she had found the piece of paper in John’s wallet; and now she looked out at the harbor impassively, the familiar place from the unfamiliar angle, and went to hang up the dress she planned to wear to the party.

John was lying on his back on one of the beds; there were two.

Susanne surprised herself by saying aloud, “Well, so that’ll be an interesting decision.”

He looked at her and saw that she was looking at the beds. She’d spoken in a particular drawl that in the past had often marked the end of a fight between them: ironic, still a little pissed, but with a clearly sexy edge.

He answered, in the same drawn-out, challenging, let’s-play tone: “Yes, it will.”

But hearing him speak that way—his quick assumption of
something shared—made her turn away. She unpacked her things into one of the rickety stale drawers, and when she finished she said, “I’m going out for a walk.”

“You can’t just keep holding on to this,” he said. He’d been sitting on the bed watching her. It occurred to her then that the speed with which he’d assumed a truce, which she had read as arrogance, might have had more to do with relief.

She opened the sliding door and stepped outside.

Barnaby was lying on his back on one of the beds in his room, his hands behind his head. He had folded the bedspread down; it looked so dingy and used; he hated the idea of lying on something that so many other people had lain on before him. He looked up at the ceiling, which was rough and swirly. They must have added sand to the paint. Had they done this as an extension of the beach theme, or was it just a standard motel painting practice because it showed the dirt less? It was such a relief to lie there and wonder about this kind of stuff. This kind of nothing.

He thought of his favorite line from one of his favorite movies—
Holiday
, with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. When the Cary Grant character walked out on Katharine Hepburn’s awful sister, and she crowed in a voice of angry ice: “I’m so relieved I could
sing
with it.” That’s how he felt right now, lying on his back in The Sands of Time motel with the air conditioner hissing and his shoes off and the curtains closed and the phone off the hook and the sandy ceiling and the pictures of big seashells bolted to the walls. He didn’t have to talk to anyone or be anywhere for another hour and a half, and he was so relieved he could have sung with it.

“But those rooms are for overflow guests,” Barbara had said.

“Doesn’t that crack you up, the idea of an overflow guest?” Barnaby had asked. “It’s actually a very odd concept.”

“Mom’s been assuming you’d stay at the house. She’s got a room set aside.”

“It’s bad luck to have the groom staying in the house.”

“That’s just the night before the wedding.”

“I must have read the wrong etiquette book.” For some reason Barbara’s literalness tended to make him goofy. Maybe he would calm down, living with her. Maybe she would learn to be goofy. The idea of a goofy Barbara was so preposterous that he had actually laughed.

“What’s so funny?” she’d asked.

“Nothing. I’m just tired.”

“Besides,” she said, “you’ve stayed in the house before.”

Her face was a mix of coyness and distressed appeal.

He looked away. He’d stayed with her once in her room, lying next to her in her bed. “Are you attracted to me?” she had asked that night.

“Of course I am, you’re very attractive. I’m just tired,” he had said. He had said this on each of the occasional nights when they ended up in bed together. He didn’t know what he would say after they were married.

He picked up the remote control for the TV, which had been resting on his stomach. Saturday afternoon—there was never anything good on Saturday afternoon. Golf. Golf. Weather. Laurel and Hardy—or was that Abbott and Costello? He could never tell the difference, and all four of them gave him a headache. Golf. Bowling.
Fishing
, for God’s sake. He stopped here, for a bored moment, to see what there was to see. Nothing. The guy caught a fish, held it and stretched it out in the shallow water, to show how big it was, Barnaby guessed, though
he didn’t see the point of this, as the fish was actually quite small; and then the fish was let off the hook and it swam away. He pressed the “info” button to see how long the show was—it ran from four to six.
Two hours
. He started to laugh, a choked barking laugh. He wanted to say to someone, “Two hours of
fishing
—can you believe it?” By the time the show was over, he would be standing on the Hardings’ vast lawn in his linen jacket and his gray slacks, smiling next to Barbara, shaking hands and kissing people’s cheeks and saying, “Thank you, thank you, yes,
very
happy, thank you.”