The News from Spain (2 page)

He tried to think of people whom he’d be glad to see, and thought of Susanne. Barbara had said she and John would be staying at The Sands of Time too. He picked up the phone and dialed “0” and asked to be connected to her room, trying to prepare some conversational opener that would include the phrase “overflow guest.” But John answered the phone. Barnaby always felt formal with John—he liked him fine but never knew quite what to say to him. John told him that Susanne had gone out for a walk. Barnaby said, “Well, please give her the message that I called, and I’ll see you guys at the party.”

“We’re looking forward to it!” John said, with what struck Barnaby as a slightly weird heartiness, but a lot of things were striking him as weird lately.

He switched the channel and found a horse race—an hour-long show, he learned by pressing “info” again, which meant forty-five minutes of blabbing and horses walking around, and then three minutes of race, and then some wrap-up.

He hit the “mute” button and left the show on, reading the names of the horses as they came up occasionally on the bottom of the screen.
Red Dynamite. Bold Captain. Out of This World
. Boring names. He remembered suddenly that at the age of nine or ten he’d been addicted to the racing column in
The New Yorker
—not because he’d cared about racing but because he’d loved the names of the horses. It had been the year of Majestic Prince, and his favorite had been the horse that kept coming in second. It had had the best name—which he couldn’t now remember. He frowned and closed his eyes; it had been so important to him that year, so indelible, he could see the slim typeface, remember the columnist’s byline (Audax Minor, another great name—he had asked his mother once, “Why didn’t you name me Audax?” and she, with her habitual kindness, had explained to him the concept of a pen name)—but why couldn’t he think of the name of the horse? His parents would have been able to tell him. By that point he’d been the only child left at home, and he and his parents had had long dining room lunches on Saturdays and Sundays. He remembered that room so clearly: the pale gray walls, the sunlight coming in bright and excited through the old diamond-paned windows. Barnaby had brought notebooks to the table in which he’d written lists of racehorse names he’d made up since the previous weekend. “I like that one,” his father would say gravely, and then he’d listen to the next. “But maybe not that one.”

“No, it sounds a little cheap,” his mother would add. “Not like a Thoroughbred. More like the name of a door-to-door encyclopedia company.”

“Yes, well, you had a different childhood from the rest of us,” his sister Diana, who was closest to him in age but still eight years older than he, had said after their mother had died last year and he’d started crying one afternoon when they were all there clearing out the house. “I think by that point they were atoning. You were like their—it’s like when corrupt noblemen used to give money to the church in their old age, because they suddenly realized they were going to die.”

“You’re right, Diana, that’s exactly what it was like,” Barnaby had managed to tell her coldly. The conversation had enraged him then, and it enraged and desolated him to think of it now. It had been the beginning, for him, of a particular kind of loneliness: the kind that comes from remembering something wonderful, knowing that you’re remembering accurately but forgetting some of it, and knowing that there’s no one left who can corroborate or complete the story.

Susanne and John had to wait at the little guardhouse while the guard looked up their names on the Hardings’ guest list. The guardhouse had always been there, in the middle of the narrow strip of road that marked the beginning of Plum Point, and the guards who manned it—old men, retired policemen—had always known her, always glanced up and waved as she’d walked or driven past. She didn’t recognize this one, and there was no reason why he should have known her, but it bugged her. She felt like saying something loudly to John for the guard to overhear, something that would demonstrate an insider’s knowledge of the place (“Did you notice the Swains have put a new wing on their house?”), but she kept silent. The guard found their names and nodded.

“What’s this like for you?” John asked, as they walked up the road, toward the Hardings’.

“It’s fine,” she said. (And thought:
If you know me so well, if you care so much, then how could you, why did you
, which seemed to be the destination—rhetorical, exhausting—of a lot of her thinking lately.)

Ahead of them was the party, the sloping green lawns stretching out from the Hardings’ big white house in all directions, clusters of dressed-up people. Susanne and John walked
slowly up the driveway, which peeled away from the main road just before the curve that led to Susanne’s old house and which also kept it invisible from here. She was rounding that curve in her mind, the whole time she was walking away from it up the Hardings’ driveway, remembering the tall holly hedges that stopped suddenly, so that suddenly you saw the house, the rambling angles of it mirroring the curves of the road, its front side low and dull because all the excitement was at the back: the long stone veranda, the lawn, the flowerbeds, the flagpole, the wild roses, all that green, all that color, the flag snapping in the wind, the rope slapping against the flagpole, the pale bright blinding light of the harbor.

Oh, house.

They came up to Mr. and Mrs. Harding, standing on the grass below the front porch (“What’s her name again?” John murmured, just before they got there. “Mrs.,” Susanne said. “When we’re sixty and they’re ninety, it’ll still be Mr. and Mrs.”), who peered at them and kissed them and said to Susanne, “So wonderful to see you back here,” and asked after her father. Then came Barbara, in a cream-colored strapless dress. She kissed Susanne; and Susanne, rattled by the dress, which seemed both too bridal and too young, said, “This is just so great!” “We have you to thank,” Barbara said, laughing, and Susanne said, “Really?” And Barbara said, “Remember? We met at your dinner party. You tried to fix us up.” “But it didn’t work,” Susanne said. “Sure it did—it just took twenty years,” Barbara said, laughing.

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.”