Divorce Is in the Air: A Novel (8 page)

I must have done something right for Helen to start building her new life project around our satisfied bodies. She never objected when I wanted to see her, sometimes with less than an hour’s notice and on the other side of Madrid. My business was getting going, meetings were multiplying, but Helen would take the metro, buses, or taxis (that I would pay for) and she’d wait for me with a patent-leather handbag and her arms pressed close to her sides. I allowed myself the pleasure of letting her enter the rooms before me, of watching the surprise on her face as she calculated the square footage while she undid the swan of folded towels. She loved the lace curtains and bathtubs, the TVs and remote controls that she always grabbed first. One of the good things about that period was that I still hadn’t learned the vast set of expressions Helen’s features could make. It was exciting not to know what face awaited me at the end of a kiss, or after she turned over, half asleep, or when, with one move in that game of bodies that settled us as a couple, her nose would come to rest a few centimeters from my eyes. She liked to order more food and drink than we could consume, and if I had to rush off, I’d let her stay draped over the unbound swan-skins, surrounded by the scent of bodies and the steam from the shower, dunking the succulent thighs of something like chicken into chemical sauces. We went back to the hotel from our first night, and we even visited the place that charged by the hour, though I regretted bringing her there. She was so lovely in the white shirt we’d bought at the market, the stockings with claret-colored thread that she wore to add a risqué touch. Girls in love can also be blank pages to paint upon.

It’s hard for me to visualize Helen without adding filters that belong to the future of that couple who used to seek each other out under the welcoming Madrid skies. I’m learning to adjust the viewfinder so it only lets in enough light to show the Helen that fits this part of the story. And so I discover again, among clumps of insignificant phrases and lovebird idiocies, that she was living in a poorly ventilated dump with three other students (Peter, Mark, and the amazing Ali), that they had revoked her scholarship, that she was supposed to go back to Montana in one month but she didn’t have the strength to write to her parents and tell them, or to buy a ticket (and I never did figure out how she managed to stay afloat in Madrid without any money). Ultimately, if for a few weeks she’d nursed the dream of a reckless life in a Spanish paradise of tapas and bullfights, it was time to start bidding it farewell. So for her, our first night must have been like the lucid hangover of her dream state: here was a guy to sink her teeth into, a southern specimen, not too dark-skinned, who appreciated the touch of her splendid body, which was the only thing Helen had to offer. We were two naked and confused kids (because things weren’t actually going so swimmingly for me, either: bonds, shares, letters of credit, benefits, preferred stocks, property, contracts, and loans…all orbiting the flame that was gradually cooking my family) who found themselves at the end of their teenage boredom marked by plans gone awry, discovering that the greed they have for each other can occupy their minds for hours on end. That together, they can compress their worries into something that fits inside a fist.

So when Helen showed up at my apartment in a green wool dress, wearing rain boots and dragging a suitcase with tags from suspicious airports, I thought about throwing her out—enough was enough. The impulse flashed into my mind the same way you realize you’ve cut your fingertip with a knife before you even see the wound or the blood. Helen stood stock-still with her feet together and her stomach sucked in, wheedling, with that lower lip of hers too thick to be taken for a sign of intelligence. She was quiet, she swallowed, she was solicitous. She told me that something beautiful depended on me, and I discovered I would have been a magnanimous god: I sent her out for bread and ham and half a liter of wine. I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I understood fully, I knew perfectly well what that “you can stay here” really meant, but when I tried to make out the implications for my future, my sight grew dim. My gray matter has never been good at calculating the medium term, and for me the word “future” meant next Wednesday.

It wasn’t hard to force the little lock and open her suitcase, though it was slightly harder to convince her it had already been broken. In one week I’d seen three-quarters of her wardrobe: there was the suit skirt, the striped T-shirts, the jacket that was too big for her, the red blouse with shoulder pads, the tube miniskirt, the patent-leather mini, and some kind of polka-dotted garment. The panties and stockings and bras (which we’ll get to later) that she’d packed were proof she had no intention of leaving. My father had informed me of that female peculiarity while smoking a rancid cigar on the sofa, so it must have been a Sunday and I must have been anxious to escape. It was the kind of transfer of manly information that leaves both parties fairly disconcerted—it was hardly his intellectual legacy. It’s ridiculous how those half-heard ideas end up permeating our beings. But it was a good piece of advice: after I found your cruel note, the thing that convinced me you were serious this time was the fact that you’d taken the portion of the underwear that you wore. You only left behind a single green stocking, balled up where I found it later, at the back of the drawer where you couldn’t reach.

Helen came into my Salamanca bachelor pad with the intention of staying (I almost said “staying under my wing”). And not only did I open my home to her, I did something even more insane, just because it seemed the natural thing to do. I asked her to marry me in a civil ceremony. Her parents could meet mine later (neither of us noticed the other’s shudder of horror), and we would formalize our union on a grander scale, as only priests can do.

Granted, in one sense we’d only been fucking. Sure, our sexual fervor had formed canals that irrigated all our worldly activities: I’d be at the cinema or getting dinner, leaving a meeting, taking a short walk to a taxi stand, and my nerves would remind me of the singular pleasure of squeezing her breast, of removing her swimsuit, of kissing the lips of her cunt. It was the kind of relationship where what you want is not a safe distance from which to evaluate your partner with equanimity, but rather to get her into a house with you ASAP where she’s always in reach of your appetite. The kind of relationship that demands you live together or let the lust devour your thoughts down to the root of your brain; think of it like the fire of a biblical marriage—an unstoppable love.

A civil union was as sad back then as it is now, but the event was eroticized by its furtive unexpectedness. I showed up in morning dress, wearing a black tie that, since I’d arrived in Madrid, had led a sorry itinerant life through the offices of accountants, bureaucrats, and lawyers specializing in financial rescue. Though we’d promised to leave our families out of it, I couldn’t resist sporting Dad’s cuff links. Vicente, whose name Helen took pains to pronounce as if it were spelled “Bicente,” came as our witness. We paired him with a chubby Italian woman whom my fiancée presented as her “dearest friend” and whom my wife didn’t take half a morning to condemn to the abyss of traitors (and now that I think about it, I never found out why). The sky was lofty, blue, smooth, promising. The extremities on my left side trembled as Bicente and the other fifteen people we invited to round out the party threw rice at us. Someone blew a horn of German origin that for years afterward I thought was a tradition from Helen’s homeland (the Thrushes had migrated from the Neckar valley to the shuddering depths of America). For the first time ever, we kissed with our tongues tucked under the domes of our palates, and when the cold putty of her lips touched mine, I felt my nerves prickle lasciviously. Suddenly it didn’t seem a bad idea for Catholics to impose premarital chastity. With his eyes closed, the groom could follow his blood from heart to peripheral organs, letting it lick the walls of his veins as he anticipated the nakedness that, once uncovered in dread and excitation, he could savor all night long under the light of a honey-soaked moon.

We ate dinner in a restaurant with tables set out under the shade of two oak trees. We treated ourselves to a banquet of salads and tempting fish with shiny scales, and however I try to recall that scene, I always come back to the same little branch of scorched thyme standing out against the white of the plate. Not as white, though, as the “surprise” cake Bicente had ordered, which was precisely what you’d expect from a mind as simple and optimistic and content and good as that of my dear friend from Madrid: icing, our names, the outline of a heart. In the elevator going upstairs we barely looked at each other, victims of a sudden modesty, and Helen noticed me twirling my wedding ring as if it were too tight. I couldn’t even muster an erection when her stockings came off. The night was so rehearsed it was as if I could hear the audience breathing, and I felt the expectations of the entire species weighing on the back of my neck. As you know, if I ever attract the attention of passers-by it’s only because they’ve caught me in a spontaneous outburst of histronics. I’ve never sought out the spotlight.

“Let’s just keep the party going.”

And so, rather than nursing my wounded masculinity or relieving my troubles by banging my head against the wardrobe mirror, we caught a taxi to Chueca and hopped from bar to bar drinking gin and tonics, enchanted with our existence. The fabulous couple, the most sociable newlyweds the city had ever seen, rejecting propositions from men, from women, married couples, you name it—even urban centaurs: females from the waist up, males between their legs. And we went back to the bed in that apartment that didn’t feel like ours, but to which we had the key, no small thing. And, half undressed, my ring rolling off into the corner where it took us five days to find it, we undertook the first married variation of the exhilarating, vigorous yoking of love. I won’t go into detail, but I felt pretty good about having married a woman who expressed herself freely, who faced problems head-on without complicated grievances. A woman you could surprise with an embrace from behind and she wouldn’t make you feel like a savage. A woman with whom I didn’t have to temper my occasional fits with doses of timidity just to acclimate to the social temperature in the room. Here was a woman who knew how to laugh out loud, who knew how to shout, a woman who wouldn’t give in, who knew how to fight so we’d be purified inside: she was an innocent beast.

I was supposed to return the keys to the apartment a week later, but I’d decided to arrange things so we could stay in Madrid. Bicente would help, and so would all those friendly citizens who snack in the streets and always invite you to join them. I knew only too well what awaited me in Barcelona, and I’d gotten married before I could even tell Helen, much less figure out how to handle it. Plus, Helen was no good for Barcelona. She wasn’t like you or the rest of those Eixample show ponies—with your insipid air of contrition and tight buttocks, all of you convinced you’re standing at the top of the podium, from where you can turn in disdain to survey the rest of the world in all its backwardness (oh, that expanse of provincial villages). That night I dozed off convinced that Helen would bow to my superior wisdom, content to let herself be dragged through the steps of a manly dance. I fell asleep satisfied, a man ready to enjoy a marriage underpinned by reason.

But she was against it. She told me she couldn’t stand the smell of garlic in Madrid, the stench of fried food, all the short, squat guys with their African looks, the hours of raw sun without shade that burned the streets and the buildings: a string of words smeared with American bullshit. Helen had been in Madrid two or three months (I didn’t pay attention to the tally) and she still saw us through a lens of WASPy contempt (though I’d love to hear what a real WASP would have to say about her hips or that Teutonic jaw of hers). No matter where she was in the city she could hear a bull in agony, its saw-like shriek; she saw blood dripping down the walls (that was a good one), she couldn’t stand the women’s saggy backsides, the shadow of hair on their arms, the thunderous streets, the pink ties, the unpunctuality, so much vulgarity, the toothpicks. The toothpicks!

“I want to live in Barcelona.”

As if we were still on rational ground, I wondered what she thought she’d find in Barcelona: the same smells, similar light, craftier people, posers, exclusive circuits and cliques, spoiled fake blondes, suburban tracksuits, bumpkins from Alicante wearing thick-rimmed glasses, gossip, people who get choked up at the sight of grown adults holding hands and dancing in a circle; two flags, two languages, laughable politics, plastic bars, and that nightlife like a filthy, evil vacuum cleaner that sucks a guy in and teaches him to be his very worst.

“I can’t live so far from the ocean.”

I would have taken it better if she’d invoked Montjuïc, if she’d talked to me about Gaudí, about the Olympic Games, or Mariscal’s zoo full of moronic animals. But she disarmed me, that sea dog from Montana—a region celebrated for its open seas and marine vistas. There’s something so alluring in the most irreducible parts of other people’s absurdity; I’m left paralyzed and trembling in fascination. And what ocean was she planning to enjoy in Barcelona? That stretch of watered-down oil lapping at a shore of make-believe sand? I didn’t say anything, but I was on to her. Most people who long to live by the sea really just want to move to a city with a port, and there you have a good explanation. Helen wanted to spend her afternoons at customs, captivated by the heavy coming and going of ships, entertaining ideas of departure: a whole world before her, at whose center she imagined herself happy (
that
word).

As I lustily stirred the tomato sauce to keep it from sticking to the only crappy pot I had, I decided that if there was one place we were not going to live, it was Barcelona. I would have rather set up shop in Bilbao, or in a Sevilla boardinghouse, or in some tiny village that Helen would find “cute.” If she wanted to see the breakwaters and the grime in Barcelona, we could always visit. Of course, it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to have my arm twisted. I had half a dozen airtight reasons, and as soon as Helen stopped screeching and throwing clothes in suitcases, I would impose them on her until she was subdued by common sense.