The News from Spain (23 page)

It was an early spring evening, the river rough and choppy, the rowers pulling hard on their oars. Runners came toward me and went past. Next to the path the road was clogged with headlights, cars barely moving.

Or maybe he was making a point of exaggerating, throwing
out something so absurd that I couldn’t possibly make the mistake of taking it seriously. “A foreign city,” he’d said—maybe he was being sarcastic. We can’t exactly go to the moon together, someone might say, without harboring, or expecting to trigger, any fantasies of craters and dust and extreme cold and zero gravity.

I went home, where my husband was happy to see me. I don’t actually remember any details of this particular evening with him, but he was always happy to see me. He would have asked about my day, and I would have told him about parts of it. He would have told me about his day. I must have cooked something and we ate it, maybe by candlelight. He cleaned up the kitchen.

I took a long bath that night. I lay in the hot scented water and thought, A loves me. A told me he loves me. I thought about the foreign city, chose it rather than the moon. But the moon kept pushing its way back in. I knew what A had meant, but I didn’t, quite. It wouldn’t hold still; a little more clarity would have fixed it securely in place. God, you women, the butler said, coming into the room where he should not have been, looking down at my naked body with contempt. I got out of the bath shivering and wrapped myself in a towel. A loves me, I tried to think; but each time I thought it, the elation and surprise of it were a little less, the uncertainty a little greater.

At work the next day, A smiled at me. He smiled all through the next week. Warm smiles: the same kind he’d always given me. But something was withheld too. “Thank you,” he said, where in the past he would have said, “Thanks—you’re terrific. But since when is that news?” I began writing scripts for him. What he would have said if I had not made my declaration. The lovely words I might have heard if I hadn’t craved even lovelier ones.

But my scripts went further. They were wistful, but also peeved: the words that ought to be said by a man who has told a woman he’d like to run off with her to a foreign city. I knew why he wasn’t saying them—our marriages, our working together, that clear bright line that we both saw and would not have crossed—but I wanted him to somehow give me the words without saying them, the way spies and fugitives in movies mouth words to each other silently because they know the room is bugged.

A story, or an essay, can become close, airless. You cannot stay shut up in your own head anymore; you need a break, some fresh air. Let’s go outside. We’ll take a walk, down a New York City side street. It’s 1944. Women in high heels are out walking small shivering dogs. Uniformed maids push old men in wheelchairs. Garbage day: the cans are out. The slow trucks, with garbage men jumping off, hauling, emptying, trotting, whistling, and jumping on again, block the street, but there isn’t a lot of traffic. When you drive to where you want to go, you can park. Not a lot of garbage either; the last fifteen years have been about saving, not discarding.

The doctor parks and hurries from his car. The patient’s condition is not serious—although he would not say that for sure until after he has examined her—but she is one of several patients he is going to see this morning. He is always busy, he always hurries; but he has never had a patient who would not have said of him, “He is so careful—he sees everything.”

He rings the bell and waits on the stoop, holding his black bag. Someone inside the house pulls open the door: the most famous woman in the world. What is she doing there? It’s like a dream: I got on the ferry and the pilot was Joan of Arc, and
then Winston Churchill came along and punched my ticket. But he pulls himself together instantly, takes off his hat and transfers it quickly to his left hand, the one holding the bag, so that he can take her proffered right hand with his own. “Come in,” she says. “I’m glad you’re here.”

He follows her up the stairs. Already he has observed some things about her. Some extra weight in the torso. Slight osteoporosis. She is very tall, erect, yet droopy. But tremendous energy and intelligence: she is recognizably the person he has read about. She looks like her pictures—he almost wants to laugh at how familiar she looks, and sounds, that quavering patrician fluty voice he’s heard so often on the radio. But she is different, too, like a painting that you have seen reproduced many times in books but have never stood before until now: the colors brighter and clearer than you had imagined, the depths more withdrawn, the canvas huge, a whole audacious wall’s worth, when you had expected something tamer.

She leads him to his patient’s bedroom. The patient, a woman he has treated for several years, thanks him for coming. Already he is holding her wrist, looking at her eyes and skin tone. She introduces the famous woman (the doctor nods, his fingers palpating beneath the jaw), an old friend, apparently, who has come to nurse her.

“Well, you needed someone,” the famous woman says, walking over to the window. “And there are so few civilian nurses these days.” She holds the cord of the blinds. “More light? More privacy?”

“Light, please.” The doctor continues to examine the patient. The famous woman adjusts the slats and watches him. He is deft, thorough. His hands, which she would have expected to be steady—he looks like a man with steady hands—are trembling slightly. Nerves? Some kind of illness, a palsy? No, she
decides, continuing to watch him. He shakes because he is concentrating so hard. He has a fine, serious face. She knows doctors, her husband’s many doctors—some who have promised too much and been proven slowly wrong; some whose pessimism is like a fortress, without a door or even a window, so that she, though not usually prone to hysteria, has felt like a madwoman running up and down beside the thick stone walls looking for a way out or a way in, a way to get somewhere other than where she is, standing with the eminent somber doctor who keeps shaking his big, hopeless head. This one, the young man listening now with a stethoscope to her friend’s difficult breathing, is quick and sensitive.

She watches him pack up his bag. “So now you have some work to do, but nothing to worry about,” he says. He leaves medicine and instructions, and then follows her back down the stairs; his tread behind her is light, almost noiseless. “Would you stay for some tea?” she asks him.

For the first time she sees his smile. Oh. Not just a good doctor, a good man. “I would like to, very much. But I have several more patients to see this morning, and I’m afraid I’m already late.”

“I understand,” she says, moving briskly to the door—of course, he’s very busy, she mustn’t keep him. She holds out her hand; he takes it and bows over it. She watches him clap his hat on as he hurries down the steps to the sidewalk, before she closes the door and goes to the kitchen to make tea for her friend.

The doctor, walking back to his car, wonders if it was a mistake to refuse the tea. How gauche, to say no to her! It must not happen very often. Well, that fellow certainly is full of himself, she must have thought as she closed the door. But he knows, somehow, that she would not have thought badly of
him, that she understood about the patients and the lateness. The pressing schedule does matter, but it also, now, seems foolish. Would another half hour have made that much difference? He gets into his car and drives away, regretting the lost chance to sit and talk with her.

A year later, after her husband’s death, the famous woman telephones him. She has moved from Washington to New York and does not have a doctor here: Would he be willing to take her on as a patient? He would be happy and extremely honored, he says, improvising a gracious little speech, to which she replies, with what might be either self-effacement or tartness—or both—“Don’t worry, I won’t take up much of your time. I’m very healthy.”

She proves herself right on both counts: he never sees her. Eventually she comes to him for shots before an overseas trip. He suggests a complete physical; it has been a while since she’s had one. Not necessary, she says. He understands, then, what it is to oppose her, the stubborn force of her. She cannot be pushed. But, he thinks, she has an open mind: she listens, she can sometimes be convinced. He explains that a doctor needs a baseline, in order to stay alert to any deviation. “I know how strong you are, and it’s in both our interests to help you stay that way. But for me to do my job I need information.” He smiles at her. “Think of it as a fact-finding mission.”

“Fine.” She begins unbuttoning her dress.

He has wondered if perhaps she is especially modest, or even ashamed of her body, which might account for the reluctance to be examined. But it turns out that no, in fact she is entirely at ease and unself-conscious. The cloth gown falls from her shoulders and she ignores it, sitting bare-breasted on the examining table, chatting away, falling silent only when he leans in and listens, after asking her to breathe deeply. He is the one
who is self-conscious, or rather conscious of her, of the body. Of all bodies, suddenly, no one is immune: their sagging and slumping, their softening, their improbable fortitude and inevitable weakness, their gallant, long, doomed struggle against failure. He is not a sentimentalist, but the sound of her heart, pumping resolutely and privately beneath the white mottled skin of her chest, nearly brings him to tears.
Healthy female, age sixty-two
, he begins noting on a chart in his imagination; he has collected himself, and gently tells her she can get dressed. She’s in great shape.

This time the tartness is unmistakable. “What did I tell you?”

He collapses, a year after that. He has to go to Switzerland, to leave everything: New York, his practice, his little girl. And his wife. The chest X-ray is at once sentence and manumission.

He writes to inform his patients; and the famous woman, that great helper of people in trouble, calls to say she is flying to Geneva, and she has arranged for him to have space on her plane. He thanks her. There are things he wrestles with, but not the fact of illness, a patient’s or his own. A bacillus is a fact. Help is offered; you take it.

The plane judders and buzzes. The sky is black. The silver clouds are enticing: a carpet. You could get out and walk on it. He is cold and hot, wrapped in a blanket. The lights are out, people are sleeping. She sits next to him and they talk. “It’s late, you should sleep,” they murmur to each other sometimes, after a silence, but they don’t sleep. By the time they come down in Newfoundland in the gray morning, they have told each other everything.

The stop is too long—the scheduled refueling, but then an engine problem. In the afternoon they get back on the plane, and now he does sleep. She sits and watches him, his thin face
damp with sweat, bruise-colored shadows under his eyes. When he wakes, he looks confused.

“Almost there,” she whispers.

“Almost where?”

“Shannon.”

It’s the second refueling stop. But something goes wrong here too; they are not called to reboard the plane. Fog, she is told. It’s midnight. Ordinarily, at such a delay, she would take some papers out of her case, or start talking with the workers in the aerodrome. But the doctor is slumped in his chair, shivering. She touches his forehead with the back of her hand and then with her palm. Then she does what she almost never does: makes a fuss. Someone comes with a lantern and leads them down a dark road—a mile, they walk it, freezing—to a cold, empty barracks, rows of bare bunk beds.

They are there together for four days. It’s like a shipwreck.

Afterward they go on to Switzerland—she to the long days of meetings, careful, patient, an old diplomat among other old diplomats, wisely keeping the horse, who wants to gallop, to a walk; and he to the clinic with its terrace full of deck chairs overlooking the mountains. He lies there and writes to her, wearing sunglasses and fingerless gloves; he has plenty of time for letters. She doesn’t have time but she writes to him anyway, late at night in her hotel room.

She loves him. She says it trustingly, the way she bared herself on his examination table. She doesn’t hide, or apologize, or seduce, or provoke. She doesn’t try to dazzle or amaze; she has no particular interest in the sound of her voice. She doesn’t demand anything; in fact she is anxious to assure him that there will be no demands. She is an old woman in love with a younger man, and she is a realist. She’d like to see him and hear from him sometimes. She doesn’t cringe, but she doesn’t
want to take up too much space. She just wants him to allow himself to matter to her, to matter more than anyone else does, or has, or will.

What do you do with such a gift? The doctor slits open her envelopes in the alpine sunlight of his clinic bedroom. Her words might unnerve him, but they don’t. He doesn’t have to check or caution her, because she has been so swift to check and caution herself. There is nothing to explain. Oh, the grace of her, the humility and courage. He is free to speak of love without saying more than he can honestly say.

When she is dead, her daughter will find his letters and burn them in the bedroom fireplace.

Now we have to go inside again, away from the bright bracing Swiss winter air and back into the overheated office where A and I did our work. The room where we sat together—his office—must have been beautiful once, and still had some straggling remnants of architectural dignity. Over the years it had become deeply familiar to me. The high ceiling, with an empty plaster acanthus wreath at its center and a breast-shaped protuberance covering the hole where a chandelier must once have been. The blocked-up fireplace. Two tall windows, A’s books and papers on the wide sills, the parquet warped and stained pale beneath the old silver radiator. His coat on a hanger on the back of the door: a raincoat in the fall; in winter a parka or a dark gray overcoat, depending on where he might be going that day during lunch or after work; then in spring the raincoat again; and now, in early summer, nothing. Just the pale wooden hanger, stenciled with the name of a store too faint for me to read.