The News From Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story by Joan Wickersham

Author:Joan Wickersham [Wickersham, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Short stories, Literary, Romance, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780307958884
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2012-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

“Open,” she tells him. She likes the feeling that he is nearby, likes hearing the clink of dishes in the kitchen.

She lies there, staring at the ceiling. She left her husband’s letter in the den after reading it this morning, but she remembers parts of it—they keep jabbing her. It’s a real letter, the first one he’s actually mailed from this trip, postmarked from Segovia two days after the tour ended in Barcelona.

“Your news from New York is wonderful. Here is ours from Spain,” it said. He passed her request to the Infant—“but now must call Infanta, because in Spain. She will be happy to lend cat for unhappy love affair.”

She imagines him and the Infant walking the bleached streets of Segovia, or sitting over a bottle of wine in a whitewashed restaurant, laughing and spurring each other into wilder, frothier notions about the cat’s passions. She knows how it feels to walk down a street late at night, stumbling into each other, giddy with laughter.

“Also has idea that maybe you will put in pictures of dancers dancing with cats—thinks would be very funny, and willing to pose.”

It went on, exuberant, bubbling over with joy about her book, full of suggestions—with his syntax and his excitement, she couldn’t tell which ideas were his and which the Infant’s. She sees that he is radiant with relief that now there will be a place where the three of them can all exist together. She wishes she’d never dreamed up this book. Or thought it necessary to prove her own sophisticated magnanimity by inviting the Infant inside. She feels as if she’s asked someone into her house who has tracked mud on all the floors and then broken every stick of furniture in the place. It’s an accident, the guest didn’t mean to do it, but there’s the dirt and there are the splinters.

And there is her husband, mistaking her desperate good manners for a genuine wish that the guest might visit more often—or even move in.

And there is she herself, standing in the wreckage thinking that the only thing to do now is to put down white carpeting and set out some even more precious, fragile chairs.

“Just checking to see if you need anything,” Malcolm says from the doorway.

“I’m fine,” she says.

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