healthy woman should spend her days doing something more fulfilling than shaking off a hangover. I started to look more kindly on the prospect of reining ourselves in: we’d be like those spermatophytes that wait for night to fall and then spread open stupendous, fleshy petals, as big as ships, and we’d pollinate the most trivial of tasks with gentle excitement. But I was in no hurry.
“I want to meet people. Everyone you can introduce me to.”
While I was enjoying life as a newlywed, Helen had been busy cooking up fresh ambitions. She’d convinced herself there were select circles of artists, wealthy, interesting, and glamorous people, or some such nonsense. She had only to learn to wield me like a key and she’d be able to access those secret spaces, and fulfill the fantasy that she’d been put on this earth to enchant the eyes and ears of the most refined society—whose specifics she’d never paused to consider. She nagged me stubbornly, with the sulky face I’d already learned to recognize as the sign she wasn’t going to let it go. We had so much without leaving the circle of our marriage—why kill ourselves to leave the house? Why, when we would only be exposing all the precious things that germinate in intimacy to the corrosive atmosphere of gossip? It’s one of the blind spots you two share, both the women I’ve loved. After all, didn’t you take home the best guy at the party? Didn’t we have fun together? Didn’t your orgasms come without complications beyond the ones we imposed by ludic agreement? Wasn’t the apartment you decorated comfortable? Didn’t we live in the city of your choice?
And so we began to visit places whose names are pronounced with an eye roll. In Barcelona they weren’t as into time travel as in Madrid. Here, the draw was the exoticism of the place itself: hotel terraces, ships, museums that opened their doors at night, towers, greenhouses. I had to get back in touch with people I’d cut off four years before because of the slime that oozed from them: phony cousins, Dad’s business colleagues, classmates from ESADE, occasional hook-ups, confidants…They didn’t receive me coldly—no sooner did we show our faces than a curtain of congratulations came down between us and them. I was the guy who’d been left out of the good life: some said because of misguided ambition, while others mentioned one hell of a family mess. Now that I was returning on the arm of an American stunner, why would they close their doors on me? They had no qualms—the eroticism of return and the anguish of the first-born’s departure were fodder for mass-market dramas, and we fancied ourselves sophisticates, we flattered ourselves that our minds were open and cosmopolitan, that we weren’t really Spanish. Plus, they thought Helen was funny.
Helen went mad with excitement. She compared my friends favorably to the rich people she saw on TV in the United States, whose weddings and divorces and parties and jewels she followed in magazines. She knew the details of every liaison conducted by people whose only purpose in life was consuming (you couldn’t call what they did “drinking”) cold martinis on boats. She knew who slept with whom, who sat beside whom at every dinner and at every race, who slipped from the spotlight, who fell into disgrace. If she hadn’t spent so much time too drunk to hold a pen, she could have written a gossip column.
At home, while she tried to stuff herself into stockings that would have been tight on a little girl, or in the taxi, where she would keep smoothing her hair, I tried to fill her in on backstories. I tried to prepare her, but she was too excited to absorb the raw truth of what I had to tell her, and I’ve never had the patience to make news digestible: this was no longer my scene, we were out of place, they would never accept someone like her. So I chose to arrive late, once the conversations were under way, and cross the room avoiding the bored
“I want to meet people. Everyone you can introduce me to.”
While I was enjoying life as a newlywed, Helen had been busy cooking up fresh ambitions. She’d convinced herself there were select circles of artists, wealthy, interesting, and glamorous people, or some such nonsense. She had only to learn to wield me like a key and she’d be able to access those secret spaces, and fulfill the fantasy that she’d been put on this earth to enchant the eyes and ears of the most refined society—whose specifics she’d never paused to consider. She nagged me stubbornly, with the sulky face I’d already learned to recognize as the sign she wasn’t going to let it go. We had so much without leaving the circle of our marriage—why kill ourselves to leave the house? Why, when we would only be exposing all the precious things that germinate in intimacy to the corrosive atmosphere of gossip? It’s one of the blind spots you two share, both the women I’ve loved. After all, didn’t you take home the best guy at the party? Didn’t we have fun together? Didn’t your orgasms come without complications beyond the ones we imposed by ludic agreement? Wasn’t the apartment you decorated comfortable? Didn’t we live in the city of your choice?
And so we began to visit places whose names are pronounced with an eye roll. In Barcelona they weren’t as into time travel as in Madrid. Here, the draw was the exoticism of the place itself: hotel terraces, ships, museums that opened their doors at night, towers, greenhouses. I had to get back in touch with people I’d cut off four years before because of the slime that oozed from them: phony cousins, Dad’s business colleagues, classmates from ESADE, occasional hook-ups, confidants…They didn’t receive me coldly—no sooner did we show our faces than a curtain of congratulations came down between us and them. I was the guy who’d been left out of the good life: some said because of misguided ambition, while others mentioned one hell of a family mess. Now that I was returning on the arm of an American stunner, why would they close their doors on me? They had no qualms—the eroticism of return and the anguish of the first-born’s departure were fodder for mass-market dramas, and we fancied ourselves sophisticates, we flattered ourselves that our minds were open and cosmopolitan, that we weren’t really Spanish. Plus, they thought Helen was funny.
Helen went mad with excitement. She compared my friends favorably to the rich people she saw on TV in the United States, whose weddings and divorces and parties and jewels she followed in magazines. She knew the details of every liaison conducted by people whose only purpose in life was consuming (you couldn’t call what they did “drinking”) cold martinis on boats. She knew who slept with whom, who sat beside whom at every dinner and at every race, who slipped from the spotlight, who fell into disgrace. If she hadn’t spent so much time too drunk to hold a pen, she could have written a gossip column.
At home, while she tried to stuff herself into stockings that would have been tight on a little girl, or in the taxi, where she would keep smoothing her hair, I tried to fill her in on backstories. I tried to prepare her, but she was too excited to absorb the raw truth of what I had to tell her, and I’ve never had the patience to make news digestible: this was no longer my scene, we were out of place, they would never accept someone like her. So I chose to arrive late, once the conversations were under way, and cross the room avoiding the bored
Similar Books
