Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage

"YOU'LL GET LOST," she told him. "The same way you do in Brookline or the South End. It's your style, you think it's cute. But look outside! It's pouring cats and dogs." she told him. "The same way you do in Brookline or the South End. It's your style, you think it's cute. But look outside! It's pouring cats and dogs."

He ignored the cliche. She thought in cliches, but that wasn't the worst of sins. "How can I get lost?" he replied. "I can see the cathedral from here." They were staying in the Hotel Alhambra Palace, overlooking Granada, Brad Quigley and his longtime companion, Leonora Katz, experimenting to see if a vacation together might nudge their long relationship into marriage or a break-up. She was in her fifties; he was sixty; they worked in different firms within the limpid backwater of Boston finance and had known each other, at first merely collegially, for fifteen years. Her position and income were equal to his; her professional accomplishment shielded them both, to an extent, from the overhanging question of any legalized connection. There was almost no reason why they couldn't go on as they were, with separate apartments, incomes, and friends. And yet... a small, brisk brunette, she was growing, he could see, brittle, her gestures jerkier, her temper quicker to flare, her judgments snappier and yet p.r.o.ne to sudden reversals and self-doubts. Since exercise cla.s.ses and conditioning gyms had become the fashion, Leonora looked too thin-deprived. Her fine-boned beauty conformed to the low-maintenance style of Cambridge and Beacon Hill. She did not deign to dye the gray from her hair, which was left long and pulled into a tight roll at the back, and the squint lines in her face were deepening, exaggerating an increasingly frequent expression, that of a slightly deaf person who blames you for not speaking louder.

"My mother would want me to go," he said. "Mi madre. She would want me to see the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella. She loved them so." She would want me to see the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella. She loved them so."

"Don't I know it," Leonora said, though the two women had never met. The only other time Brad had been to Spain, twenty years ago, had been with his mother, an unpublished writer who was doing research for a romantic novel concerning the two legendary monarchs and their only surviving child, the love-crossed Joanna the Mad.

It had been a strange trip, beginning with a humiliating, to Brad, embarra.s.sment when the busy clerk at the Madrid hotel, slipping in English, had called his mother "your wife." The clerk had quickly, sizing them up, corrected it with a self-critical chuckle to "your mother," but for Brad a confusion between his mother and his wife held an abysmal plausibility. Not that his mother looked the part, she was gray-haired and stout; but he was forty, and freshly divorced, and what wife, really, would he ever know as well as he knew her? Even as a fetus he had been attuned to her moods and inner workings; she loomed to him less as another person than as an overarching weather. To dilute their relationship he had proposed that they invite along his fifteen-year-old daughter, Belinda, who had taken the divorce the hardest.

Something fraught and sad about the whole expedition had kept him awake in his hotel room every night, he remembered. His task had been to drive his companions each day out from Madrid to one of the towns-Segovia, Avila, Valladolid, Toledo-where his mother had found a clue, a hint of treasure, in the writings of Prescott and Washington Irving and John Foster Kirk, whose histories had enchanted her in college. Though she could read some Spanish, she was shy of speaking it, and it fell to Brad to negotiate their tourism: "Por favor, senor, donde esta el convento?" "Por favor, senor, donde esta el convento?" His mother would gaze at some tombs within the convent, and take a few notes. Once, she reached out and touched the marble foot, worn glossy by other touches, on a funerary sculpture of a long-deceased n.o.blewoman. "What a dear little pointed shoe," she said. His mother would gaze at some tombs within the convent, and take a few notes. Once, she reached out and touched the marble foot, worn glossy by other touches, on a funerary sculpture of a long-deceased n.o.blewoman. "What a dear little pointed shoe," she said.

Yet he could not believe she was finding what she wanted, the key to crack open that opaque, late-medieval world and get it to spill its colorful mysteries into reach of her pen. The cities surrounding the traces of history were noisy with traffic and ringed with the stark sheds of burgeoning industrial development; post-Franco Spain was hastening to cast off its romantic isolation and the picturesque backwardness that had attracted centuries of infatuated travellers. Belinda, helplessly adolescent, still bearing some baby fat, endured hours in the back of the little rented Fiat and politely tried to interest herself in the stultifying relics, from the Escorial to the castle and aqueduct in Segovia, that her grandmother had come so arduously far to see. All the girl asked, as reward for her patience during this week's ordeal, was to visit the disco of the Madrid hotel, and this her guardians granted on the last night. While her insomniac father at last slept soundly in his room, she returned around midnight, rosy and giddy and full of strange tales, for her grandmother's ears, of Spanish boys-how they danced, how they somehow communicated with her, how happy they seemed to see her.

Separating from Leonora made Brad nervous; they had been constantly together for six days. He had been struck these days by a feminine querulousness that their peaceful intermittent evenings together in Boston did not reveal. So long the manager of her own life and of other people's millions, she distrusted his management of their trip. In Seville, he kept leading her, she felt, astray-his map-reading took them up narrow medieval streets abuzz with motor scooters and speeding taxis. She was afraid of falling into the traffic, or having her bag s.n.a.t.c.hed by a pa.s.sing pair of Gypsies on a Vespa. She forbade Brad to give money to beggars, lest he attract a band of feather-fingered pickpockets. She was convinced that all taxi drivers were cheating them, even if their meters were turned on and audibly ticking. Her demands taxed his poor Spanish beyond its means: "Ask him what those extra charges are for. Tell him he's going the long way around." She found scarcely endurable the cacophony of competing tour guides in the Alhambra, and in Cordoba complained, five centuries late, that the Spanish had cra.s.sly built a cathedral in the middle of the marvellous mosque, with its serene forest of marble pillars. She had acquired the notion that one should not drink the faucet water in this country; sin hielo sin hielo had become one of his phrases, not always comprehended, and for her sake he was always sidling into dark, private-seeming bars and buying a plastic bottle of had become one of his phrases, not always comprehended, and for her sake he was always sidling into dark, private-seeming bars and buying a plastic bottle of agua minerale. agua minerale.

So it was with a relieved sense of private adventure that he set out, beneath his umbrella, on the puddled little lane that led to the town from the hotel. It twisted down through hairpin turns; the cathedral quickly sank from sight behind tall shuttered housefronts and, as she had predicted, he became lost. The tiny lettering on his map required fishing his reading gla.s.ses from the pocket of his reversible parka; the map became wet and he kept drifting downward, hoping for a clarifying park or monument. At last he emerged into a broad boulevard roaring with commuter traffic. Only a few pedestrians hurried past, under umbrellas. Even when inspected through reading gla.s.ses, the map offered no clue to where he was on it. Granada was more of a metropolis than the song suggested. A swarthy beggar, perhaps a Gypsy pick-pocket sitting out thin rainy-day pickings, jeered at him from the doorway of a closed bank. Brad was too proud, and too mournfully pleased with his drenched and solitary condition on this errand of obscure filial piety, to ask for guidance. His instinct was to walk uphill, back toward the hotel, itself lost from sight, where Leonora forlornly waited. For her sake he at last went to a news kiosk and asked the woman in charge, "Por favor, senora, donde esta la catedral?" "Por favor, senora, donde esta la catedral?" She gestured brusquely and gave the impatient answer, She gestured brusquely and gave the impatient answer, "Derecho," "Derecho," which meant either to the right or straight ahead. He damply plodded on, missing the loving goad of his mistress's tongue. which meant either to the right or straight ahead. He damply plodded on, missing the loving goad of his mistress's tongue.

The cathedral, its blank side blending into secular facades, almost slipped by him. He entered by a small door that opened near the altar. There were many more visitors inside than he had expected on this foul day, including several busloads of j.a.panese in transparent plastic raincoats. The rec.u.mbent effigies of the Catholic Sovereigns were easy to find, though hard to examine, lying high above the floor of the nave on pompous marble sarcophagi. Brad joined a line of j.a.panese who seemed to know the ropes and found himself stepping down into a crypt beneath the sarcophagi. There, in a small vaulted s.p.a.ce, behind bars, an arm's length away, five plain, black, toylike lead coffins held the remains of King Ferdinand; Queen Isabella; their unbalanced daughter, Joanna; Joanna's unfaithful husband, Philip the Handsome of Burgundy-he died at twenty-eight, and his widow kept the embalmed body in her bedroom for years-and, in the smallest hexagonal lead box of all, the dust of a child, a child left out of guidebook history, which did record that Joanna's madness had not impaired her fertility: two emperors and four queens could claim her as mother, and her insanity flickered down through generations of Hapsburgs.

Whatever, Brad wondered, had made his own mother think that she could encompa.s.s in a work of her imagination these pious, benighted, casually cruel monarchs? She would speak of Juana la Loca as of a lovable eccentric cousin, and of Ferdinand as of the masterful husband she herself had never had. Now she herself was in a box, cherrywood underground instead of lead in a low-ceilinged crypt, but her body reverting to its skeleton all the same. Her body in Spain had been overweight, and dressed in wintry American clothes, so that as Brad remembered her she sweated, pink-faced at the long lunches with him and Belinda on the hot sidewalks by the provincial plazas while they waited for the convents and churches to reopen, her bifocals misting as she consulted her guidebooks and notebooks. Yet, brave soul, she never complained of discomfort, or that she had come all this expensive way and was not finding what she wanted. Now her spirit, not as mad as Cousin Juana's but certainly fanciful, had brought him again to Spain, dragging with him poor nervous, brittle Leonora, who didn't trust even the faucet water. He must be nicer to Leonora, he resolved, emerging into the rain and climbing back to the hotel, and then never repeat this misadventure. He would break off the relationship as soon as they were back in Boston. The clouds overhead were breaking up, exposing exclamatory fragments of blue: an El Greco sky.

In Madrid, which they had saved for the second week, she seemed to relax; it looked to her like a grander Boston, with a bigger Public Garden and more centrally located art museums. Her taut dark looks and severe hairdo led several pedestrians to address her in Spanish, mistaking her for a native; she liked this, blushing as she protested, "No, no, gracias-soy americana." "No, no, gracias-soy americana." More quickly than he, she learned her way around. In the Prado she found for him a little Goya, an odd painting of a dog, which he had remembered from his previous trip, on view in a kind of bas.e.m.e.nt. It was not to be found among the Goya portraits of the royal court on the first floor. Girlishly proud of her Spanish managerial skills, Leonora led him up, through the tourist throngs, to the third floor, where the savage paintings of Goya's depressive last phase had been sequestered, like a mad person in the attic. He had remembered a complete dog, perhaps thinking of one by Francis Bacon. In reality the painting was t.i.tled More quickly than he, she learned her way around. In the Prado she found for him a little Goya, an odd painting of a dog, which he had remembered from his previous trip, on view in a kind of bas.e.m.e.nt. It was not to be found among the Goya portraits of the royal court on the first floor. Girlishly proud of her Spanish managerial skills, Leonora led him up, through the tourist throngs, to the third floor, where the savage paintings of Goya's depressive last phase had been sequestered, like a mad person in the attic. He had remembered a complete dog, perhaps thinking of one by Francis Bacon. In reality the painting was t.i.tled Perro semihundido Perro semihundido-Half-Sunken Dog-and showed only a Thurberesque dog profile and a lot of yellow blank s.p.a.ce. Brad wondered why he had treasured this memory for two decades. "I couldn't let you not find your little dog," Leonora said, he thought a bit possessively. "You've always talked about it."

"I have?" He felt as if he had never been in Madrid before. He could not spot the hotel where he and his mother and daughter had stayed, on a wide straight street where he had been politely, wordlessly given a ticket for making a U-turn. Only the grounds of the imperial palace-cropped cypresses seen from a bal.u.s.trade-rang a faint bell; the mismatched trio twenty years ago had walked there the first groggy afternoon. Resting his arms on the bal.u.s.trade, he had distinctly told himself, I'm in Spain. I'm in Spain. An exotic formality and gloom had seemed to arise from the gardens, with their boxy patterns of privet and truncated inky-green cypresses. Entry was forbidden, as Brad remembered it. The King was still youthful and revered, and Spain was clinging to his image as a safeguard against a return of civil chaos. Now the King was a beefy, good-natured s.e.xagenarian, the Prime Minister was a Socialist, euros had replaced pesetas as the coin of the realm, and the palace gardens were open to the public. Brad descended with Leonora into the once-forbidden grounds; they seemed innocuous, chilly, and empty, just another piece of tourist Europe, as impersonally accepting of them as the hotel clerks who took their unmated pa.s.sports and handed them back without a flicker of Counter-Reformation puritanism. Spain had rejoined the pagan, Mediterranean world. An exotic formality and gloom had seemed to arise from the gardens, with their boxy patterns of privet and truncated inky-green cypresses. Entry was forbidden, as Brad remembered it. The King was still youthful and revered, and Spain was clinging to his image as a safeguard against a return of civil chaos. Now the King was a beefy, good-natured s.e.xagenarian, the Prime Minister was a Socialist, euros had replaced pesetas as the coin of the realm, and the palace gardens were open to the public. Brad descended with Leonora into the once-forbidden grounds; they seemed innocuous, chilly, and empty, just another piece of tourist Europe, as impersonally accepting of them as the hotel clerks who took their unmated pa.s.sports and handed them back without a flicker of Counter-Reformation puritanism. Spain had rejoined the pagan, Mediterranean world.

Leonora had become more kittenish than she was in Boston. "Wasn't that clever of me," she insisted as they left the Prado, "to find your little dog for you?"

"Perro," said Brad, relishing the trilled double "r." "Yes, it was very clever, dear." said Brad, relishing the trilled double "r." "Yes, it was very clever, dear."

From Madrid he and Leonora took a day trip to Toledo, by train. Their mood, near their vacation's end, had turned light-hearted. She did not furiously object when, in the station, he gave a few coins to a Gypsy with a dirty-faced infant sleeping in her arms. He had been to Toledo once before, but by car, with his-not wife-madre and his and his hija. hija. They had had a flat tire on the way, and his doping out enough instructions to replace it with the spare had been one of his few Spanish triumphs. The flat tire was all he remembered of that excursion except for an old ochre bridge, with studded wooden doors, that they had walked across in sunshine, with Toledo ma.s.sed behind them on a steep, congested hill. They had had a flat tire on the way, and his doping out enough instructions to replace it with the spare had been one of his few Spanish triumphs. The flat tire was all he remembered of that excursion except for an old ochre bridge, with studded wooden doors, that they had walked across in sunshine, with Toledo ma.s.sed behind them on a steep, congested hill.

Today, too, was sunny. The train climbed through vineyards and freshly green fields for an hour and then stopped outside the city, on the other side of the river. He and Leonora followed a set of twittery English women, who seemed to know the ropes, to a red bus that quickly filled; a large group of others from the train crossed the street and trooped away on a diagonal road. Watching them disappear, Brad envied them their secret-a sort of short cut, with no bus fare. The bus, stymied by some torn-up streets, dropped them off at a spot Brad could not locate on the map; he became as lost as in Granada in the rain, while Leonora lost patience at his side. She needed a bottle of water, and was fearful of being robbed in the narrow, twisting streets. "Amazing," he admitted, "how these Spaniards hide their cathedrals."

"But this is the biggest Gothic cathedral in Spain!" She was almost wailing. "You're the only man in the world who could totally not find it!"

When they did come upon it, and prowled amid its five huge aisles, he could not find in himself any memory of having been here before. Surely he and his mother, now as dead as Queen Isabella, and his younger daughter, now married and the mother of three, had marvelled together at the exquisite choir stalls, the towering altarpiece, the elaborately robed carved Madonna dating from the old Visigothic church, and, most memorable of all, the Baroque hole, a piece of sky lined with Heavenly figures, incongruously broken into the Gothic vaulting behind the altar in the eighteenth century. It was as if they had been blind. They would have been weary after their escapade with the tire, and his mother would have had her checklist of sights to feed her fiction. Where had they parked? It was hard to imagine his overweight, overheated mother laboring up and down the streets and stairs that he and Leonora dutifully traversed, from the old Jewish Quarter in the west of the city to the Museo de Santa Cruz in the east. As they wearily leaned on a bal.u.s.trade, he saw his bridge, glowing golden in the late-afternoon light.

The train back to Madrid left in an hour, at six. "I bet," Brad told Leonora, "if we crossed that bridge, and walked to the left, we'd come to the railroad station."

"What makes you think that?"

"I think this map shows it."

"You think. Why are there no people on the bridge? It goes nowhere."

"They wouldn't let a bridge stand that went nowhere. Remember all those people who didn't get on the bus but crossed the street and walked away diagonally? They must have been walking to this bridge. Here it is, on the map. It's called the Puente de Alcantara."

"How do we get down to it?"

It was a reasonable question, so Brad thought she was going to be reasonable. They were standing at a considerable height above the river; several busy thoroughfares intervened. "I don't know," he confessed. "Maybe into that parking lot. I think I see some steps down."

Leonora wanted to please him, but her long years of being single had hardened a habit of self-preservation. "You think, think," she said. "You don't know. know."

"I know that bridge. We were all on it together."

"That was ages ago; you're not even sure of that, I can tell from your voice. Look across the river: there's no road on that side. Brad, I have news for you. I'm taking the bus. I know where it leaves from. If you want to try your precious bridge, I'll meet you at the station. Give me my return ticket."

"Oh, s.h.i.t, never mind," he told her. "We'll go back and take the stuffy, expensive bus together. But it could have been a lyrical experience." At heart he was relieved that he didn't have to plod down in search of the entry to the bridge, and that by defying him she had put some s.p.a.ce between them; they were in danger of becoming inseparable.

Back at the bus stop-a triangular square bustling with young Europeans stripped to their shorts and backpacks-Brad widened the distance by regressively yielding to his desire to buy, at one of the portable stands surprisingly prevalent in the somber old city, the Spanish equivalent of a Good Humor bar-chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick. "Don't," Leonora begged. "The bus will come."

"No, it won't," he said. There was a type-vanilla inside a frosty brown skin b.u.mpy with small bits of nuts-that he especially craved. He rarely saw them for sale in downtown Boston, where men in business suits don't generally patronize Good Humor wagons. "Want a bite?" he offered, poking the treat at his companion, with her gray-streaked hair and censorious frown.

"I certainly do not. Eat it fast-you're not allowed to eat on buses. What a baby!" And Leonora softly shrieked, with a panic deserving a graver emergency, when the bus pulled up in the next minute. In the squeeze at the door, he held the half-finished popsicle behind his back, so the driver wouldn't see. Leonora was horrified, as they took seats in the rear, that he was still gnawing at the stick, with its fast-melting burden. She elaborated: "You're a disgusting, selfish baby."

He waited to reply until he could say, "There. All gone. Nothing spilled. You may apologize whenever you want." To be more annoying still, he asked her, "What do I do with the stick? Could you put it in your purse? Please? Please? Pretty please?" Pretty please?"

The bus, avoiding the torn-up streets on its way out, crossed the river on a smooth highway bridge and pulled up across from the station within ten minutes. Enjoying his new, b.u.mptious role of hostile bad boy, Brad said to Leonora, "O.K., smartie. We're here forty minutes early; I hope you're happy."

"I'm not un unhappy," she said. Her anxious fury had abruptly given way to a softer, more experimental mood. Rather than cross the street to the station, she pointed at a vending machine on their side, a few steps away. "Maybe you can get me a bottle of water." The insertion of the euro and the responsive thump of the cold bottle was a transaction satisfying to them both; after two weeks in this country, they were learning the ropes. "Let's walk down a little," Leonora said, "to where you think you saw those people going to this bridge you say was so great."

"I didn't say it was great, it was just something I remembered. One of the terrifyingly few things."

The street turned an oblique corner and became, on the side nearer the river, bucolic and scarcely trafficked. Beyond a low stone wall the riverbank held tall gra.s.s dotted with poppies and white, daisylike flowers of a medieval simplicity. The walk was short, scarcely a city block long, to the end of the old bridge, with its fortified gates, its ochre arches. The road they had just travelled had been invisible, slightly sunken, semihundido, semihundido, from the other side. "So-I was right," he said. But, looking across the river, Brad saw that Leonora had been right about access from the parking lot; he couldn't see any stairs. The approach would have been long and diagonal, on weary feet. "O.K., thanks," he said. "Let's go catch the train." from the other side. "So-I was right," he said. But, looking across the river, Brad saw that Leonora had been right about access from the parking lot; he couldn't see any stairs. The approach would have been long and diagonal, on weary feet. "O.K., thanks," he said. "Let's go catch the train."

"No, I want you to walk on the bridge. There's time. How silly I was, Brad, not to trust you-it was so close. close. I'm embarra.s.sed to have been so stubborn. So un-simpatico." The bridge had been unpopulated when they had viewed it before, but now whole families, from small children to patriarchal, black-clad men with canes, were strolling and dawdling between its waist-high walls. Leonora insisted on pulling her little camera from her purse and photographing Brad posed at the far end, with its elaborate tower and gate. The ancient tall wooden doors, cracked and darkened, still bore the studs, heraldic metal florets in rigorous rows, that had been nailed into his memory. Here they had once stood, in the same warm dust, his mother and daughter and he, his perspiring mother saying something to make the moment amusing, or writing something in her notebook, but exactly what was long lost, and her novel had never been published. I'm embarra.s.sed to have been so stubborn. So un-simpatico." The bridge had been unpopulated when they had viewed it before, but now whole families, from small children to patriarchal, black-clad men with canes, were strolling and dawdling between its waist-high walls. Leonora insisted on pulling her little camera from her purse and photographing Brad posed at the far end, with its elaborate tower and gate. The ancient tall wooden doors, cracked and darkened, still bore the studs, heraldic metal florets in rigorous rows, that had been nailed into his memory. Here they had once stood, in the same warm dust, his mother and daughter and he, his perspiring mother saying something to make the moment amusing, or writing something in her notebook, but exactly what was long lost, and her novel had never been published.

Leonora put her camera away and stood closer to Brad, in the heat the old stones radiated, than necessary-a European, rather than an American, conversational distance. "Now, wasn't I nice," she flirted, "to find you your dear mother's bridge, after you were so mean?"

She had given him a bridge. "Oh yes, very," he said. "You were very nice. I won't be mean ever again." Her pale pointed face in its hopeful uncertainty, its shy determination to be winning, had shed years; it had drawn so close he smelled the shrimp paella they had shared for lunch, and the liquid dark of her Spanish eyes swallowed him with its plea.

Delicate Wives

VERONICA H HORST was stung by a bee, and it should have produced no more than a minute of annoyance and pain, but she, in the apparent bloom of health at the age of twenty-nine, turned out to be susceptible to anaphylactic shock, and nearly died. Fortunately, her husband, Gregor, was with her, and threw her fainting body, with its dropping blood pressure, into their car and sped careening through the heart of town to the hospital, where she was saved. When Les Merrill heard about the event, from his wife, Lisa, who was breathlessly fresh from a session of gossip and women's tennis, he was stung by jealousy: he and Veronica had had an affair the previous summer, and by the rights of love he should have been the one to be with her and to save her heroically. Gregor even had the presence of mind, afterwards, to go around to the local police and explain why he had been speeding and careening through stop signs. "It seems incredible," Lisa innocently told her husband, "that here she's nearly thirty and apparently has never been stung before, so n.o.body knew she would react this way. As a child I was always getting stung, weren't you?" was stung by a bee, and it should have produced no more than a minute of annoyance and pain, but she, in the apparent bloom of health at the age of twenty-nine, turned out to be susceptible to anaphylactic shock, and nearly died. Fortunately, her husband, Gregor, was with her, and threw her fainting body, with its dropping blood pressure, into their car and sped careening through the heart of town to the hospital, where she was saved. When Les Merrill heard about the event, from his wife, Lisa, who was breathlessly fresh from a session of gossip and women's tennis, he was stung by jealousy: he and Veronica had had an affair the previous summer, and by the rights of love he should have been the one to be with her and to save her heroically. Gregor even had the presence of mind, afterwards, to go around to the local police and explain why he had been speeding and careening through stop signs. "It seems incredible," Lisa innocently told her husband, "that here she's nearly thirty and apparently has never been stung before, so n.o.body knew she would react this way. As a child I was always getting stung, weren't you?"

"I think Veronica," he said, "had a city upbringing."

"Still," Lisa said, hesitant in the face of his ready a.s.sertion, "that's no guarantee. There are parks."

Les, picturing Veronica in her house, in her bed, where an elongated pink-tinged pallor, like that in a Modigliani or a Fragonard, had been revealed to him, said, "She's a pretty indoor kind of person."

Lisa was not. Tennis, golf, hiking, and skiing kept her freckled the year round. Even her delft-blue irises were dotted, if you looked, with tan specks of melanin. She insisted, "Well, she nearly died," as if Les had been wandering from the point. His mind had been exploring the abysmal possibility of Veronica's beauty and high spirits being removed from the world by a chemical mischance. In her moment of need, had her care pa.s.sed to her lover the previous summer, he might have proved less effective than Gregor, who was small and dark and spoke English if not with an accent with a studied precision, as if locking the sense of his words into a compact metal case. She found him repellent, Veronica had confessed-his fussiness, his dictatorial streak, the cold a.s.sertiveness in his touch-but Les, by breaking off their affair at the end of the summer, had possibly saved her life. In Gregor's shoes he might have panicked, doubted what was happening, and fatally failed to act. As it was, he saw gallingly, the incident would be rolled into the Horst family annals, as a pivotal and eternally ramifying moment-the time Mommy (and, as she would become, Grammy) was stung by a bee, and funny foreign-born Grampa resourcefully saved her life. Les was so jealous that he nearly bent over as if with a stomach cramp. Had he, sweet dreamy Les, been there, instead of scowling, practical-minded Gregor, her emergency would have acquired and forever retained a different poetry, more flattering to her, more congruent with a doomed summer love. For what was more majestically intimate even than s.e.x but death? He imagined her motionless profile, gray with collapsed blood pressure, cradled in his arms.

Veronica had a favorite summer dress, with a ballerina neckline and three-quarter-length sleeves, of orange, orange distributed with a tie-dyed unevenness. It was not a color most women would wear, but it brought out the reckless gleam in her long straight hair and the green of her eyes. Remembering their affair, Les seemed to squint through a wash of this color, though it was no longer summer but September when they parted, the gra.s.s in the fields going to seed and the air noisy with cicadas. Veronica's eyes watered, her lower lip trembled as she listened to him explaining that he just couldn't face leaving Lisa and the kids, who were still almost babies, and they should break their relationship off while it was still secret, before things got messy, and all their lives lay scattered and ruined. Through her tears Veronica appraised him and determined that indeed he did not love her enough to rescue her from Gregor. He was not free enough, was how he preferred to phrase it. They wept together-his tears made a gleam on the skin of her shoulder within the wide oval of her neckline-and agreed that no one but them would ever know.

And yet, through the fall and winter and into the next summer, he felt cheated by this secrecy; their affair had been something wonderful he wanted known. He tried to rekindle her attention. She ignored his longing looks and rebuked his confused attempts to single her out in a crowd. Her green eyes glared, under the frown of her long reddish eyebrows. "Les dear," she said to him once when he cornered her late at a party, "did you ever hear the expression 's.h.i.t or get off the pot'?"

"Well, I have now," he said, shocked and offended. Lisa would never have said such a thing, any more than she would have worn a splashy tie-dyed orange dress.

His concealed affair with Veronica burned within him like an untreated infection, and as the years went by it seemed that Veronica, too, suffered from it; she seemed never to have quite recovered from the bee sting. Weight loss, making her look gaunt and stringy, alternated with periods of puffiness and overweight. There were trips to the local hospital, about which Gregor was adamantly mysterious, and spells when Veronica was hidden within her house, suffering from complaints which her husband, showing up at parties by himself, refused to name. Les, in his inert, romantic way, imagined her, having in a fit of treacherous weakness confessed their affair to Gregor, being held captive by him. Or else regret over losing Les was gnawing at her delicate const.i.tution. Her beauty did not greatly suffer from her frailty, but gained a new dimension from it, a ghostly glow, a poignance. After years of sunbathing-all wives did it back then-Veronica developed phototoxicity, and stayed out of the sun all summer. Her teeth, as her thirties wore on, gave her trouble, and the orthodontic and periodontal specialists she regularly consulted had their offices in the nearby middle-sized city, in a tall building across from the one in which Les worked as an investment adviser.

Once, he glimpsed her from his window as, preoccupied and solemn in a dark, wide-skirted cloth coat, she reported for treatment across the street. After that, he kept looking out his window for her, mourning the decade they had let slip by while married to other people. Lisa's outdoor bounce and freckled good nature had become somewhat butch; her hair, like her mother's, turned gray early. Gregor was rumored to be discontented and having affairs. Les imagined these betrayals as wounds Veronica was enduring, within the silent prison of her marriage. He still saw her at parties, but across the room, and, when he maneuvered close to her, she had little to say. During their affair, they had shared, along with s.e.x, concerns about their children, and memories of their parents and upbringings. This sort of innocent exposure of another, eagerly apprehended life figures among the precious things lovers lose-a flow of confidences that, halted, builds up a pressure.

So when he spotted Veronica leaving the dentists' building, unmistakably her although he was ten stories high and she was bundled against the winter winds, he left his office without bothering with a topcoat and ambushed her on the sidewalk a half-block away.

"Lester! What on earth?" She put her mittened hands on her hips to mime exasperation. Christmas decorations were still in some shop windows, gathering dust, and tinsel rain from trashed evergreens glittered in the gutters.

"Let's have lunch," he begged. "Or is your mouth too full of Novocain?"

"He didn't use Novocain today," she primly told him. "It was just the fitting of a temporary crown."

The detail thrilled him. In the warmth of a booth in his favorite weekday lunch place, he marvelled at her presence across the table. She had reluctantly removed her dark wool overcoat, revealing a crimson cardigan and a necklace of pink costume pearls. "So how have you been these many years?" he asked.

"Why are we doing this?" she asked. "Don't the people in here all know you?"

They had arrived early, but the place was filling up, with noise and little sharp drafts as the door opened and closed. "They do and they don't," he said, "but what the h.e.l.l, what's to be afraid of? You could be a client. You could be an old friend. Which you are, actually. How's your health?"

"Fine," she said, which he knew to be a lie.

But he went on, "And your children? I miss hearing about them-there was the rough-and-tumble one, and the sensitive shy one, who you couldn't stand some days."

"That was ages ago," Veronica said. "I can stand Jane now. She and her brother are both at boarding school."

"Remember how we used to have to work around them? Remember the time you sent Harry off to school even though he had a fever, because you and I had a date set up?"

"I had forgotten that. I'd prefer not to be reminded; it makes me ashamed now. We were foolish and heedless, and you were right to break it off. It's taken a while for me to understand that, but I do."

"Well, I don't. I was crazy to give you up. I exaggerated my own importance. Kids-mine are teen-agers now, too, and away at school, and I look at them and wonder if they ever gave a d.a.m.n."

"Of course they did, Lester." She cast her eyes down, toward the cup of hot tea she had ordered, though he had pressed her to have, like him, an alcoholic drink. "You were right: don't make me say it again."

"Yeah, but now that I'm with you again, it feels desperately wrong."

"If you flirt with me, I'll have to leave." This threat provoked a long chain of thought in Veronica that led to her saying solemnly, "Gregor and I are getting a divorce."

"Oh no!" Les felt as if the air had thickened, pressing like pillows in his face. "Why?"

She shrugged, and grew very still over her cup of tea, like a card player guarding her hand. "He says I can't keep up with him any more."

"Really? What a selfish, narcissistic creep! Remember how you used to complain about his touch?"

She repeated the almost imperceptible shrug. "He's a typical man. More honest than most."

Les wondered, was this a dig at him? In their game of reopened possibilities, he didn't want to overplay his own hand. Rather than say nothing, he said, "Now that winter's here, you don't seem as pale as in summer. How are you doing with sunlight?"

"Since you ask, it makes me ache. I have lupus, they tell me. A mild form, whatever that means." Her grimace he took to be sarcastic.

"Well," Les said, "that's nice it's mild. You still look great to me." The waitress came back, and they hastily ordered, and pa.s.sed the rest of the lunch uncomfortably, running out of the small talk, the innocent sharing, that for so long he had felt deprived of. The small talk had come, however, in bed, in the languid aftermath of erotic fulfillment. Veronica was less apt now, Les sensed, to be languid; she carried her wide-hipped, rangy body warily, as if it might detonate. There was something incandescent about her, like a filament forced full of current. Before the waitress could offer them dessert, she reached for her coat and told Les, "Now don't tell Lisa any of this. Some of it's still secret."

He protested, "I never tell her anything."

But he did tell her, eventually, that perhaps the time had come for them to divorce. His reacquaintance with Veronica-the present-day, more fragile and needy Veronica-filled him night and day with her image. In her pallor she had become the entryway to a kind of hospital radiance, a blur of healing, of old wounds repaired. Breaking off their affair had never sat right with him; now he would take care of her for the rest of her life. He saw himself bringing her broth in bed, driving her to tense appointments, becoming almost a doctor himself. The affair was not exactly resumed; their contacts were confined to her dental appointments, since risking anything more might imperil her legal status as a wronged wife. In these lunches and stray c.o.c.ktails she more and more came to resemble the mistress he remembered: carefree in manner, lively and light-voiced in her conversation, with an edge that somehow cut through to his real self-the heroic, debonair self his dull and dutiful life concealed.

"But why?" Lisa asked, of the divorce he had threatened her with.

He could not confess Veronica's revival in his life, for that would entail confession of the earlier liaison. "Oh," he said, "I think we've pretty much done our work as a couple. I can't keep up with you, frankly. All your sports. You've become self-sufficient, maybe you always were. Think about it. Please. I'm not saying we should start with the lawyers tomorrow."

She was not fooled. Her blue eyes, their gold freckles magnified by small sh.e.l.ls of tears, stared. "Does this have anything to do with Veronica and Gregor splitting up?"

"No, of course not, how could it? But they are showing how to do it-sensibly, with mutual respect and affection."

"I don't know about affection. People say it's shocking of him to leave her, when she's so sickly."

"Is she sickly?" He had thought that the bee sting had opened only his eyes to the extent of her vulnerability, her lovely old-fashioned faintingness.

"Oh, I think so," Lisa said, "though she puts up a good show. Veronica always did."

"See, that's it, show. That's how you think. That's what we've become, a show. All our married life, we've been a show."

"I never felt that. I must say, Les, this is all news to me. I'll need time."

"Of course, dear." There was no hurry; the Horsts were hitting snags, about money. The radiant portal would keep.

And Lisa, that good sport, did seem to adjust, day by day, as the house filled up with the musty feeling of impending abandonment. The children, peeking in on vacations from school, smelled the difference and took refuge in skiing trips to Utah or rock-climbing expeditions to Vermont. Lisa, on the contrary, seemed to become less and less active. Returning from work, Les would find her at home, listless, and when he asked about her day, she would reply, "I don't know where the time went. I didn't do anything, even housework. I have no energy."

One drizzly weekend in early spring, instead of going off to her usual Sunday-morning foursome in the indoor tennis facility, she cancelled and called Les into their bedroom. He had been sleeping in the guest room, which the children had noticed. "Don't worry, I'm not seducing you," Lisa said, lowering her nightie to expose her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and lying back on the bed with not desire but a kind of laughing fear in her face. "Feel here."

Her fingers led his to the underside of her left breast. Instinctively, he pulled his hand back, and she blushed at this rejection and said, "Come on. I can't ask a child to do it, or a friend. You're all I've got. Tell me if you feel anything."

Years of faithful exercise and wearing a jogging bra had kept her body tone firm. Her nipples, the color of watered wine, were erect with their unceremonious exposure to air. "Not just under the skin," she coached him. "Down deeper. Inside."

He didn't know what he felt, in that dark knit of vein and gland. "A lump," she prompted further. "I felt it in the shower ten days ago and kept hoping it was my imagination."

"I... I don't know. There's a... an inconsistency, but it might be just a naturally dense place."