Cynthia Robinson's Blog, page 6

I Want to Live in A-me-RI-ca! (Bad, Bad Love Prepares to Cross the Pond)

There was a honeymoon to Argentina, over Christmas. Winter in Europe, flip-flop and cut-offs season  in the southern hemisphere. Obvious choice. Was it fun, you ask? And my answer: I have absolutely no idea, because I wasn’t invited (Husband #1 and his fraught-bordering-on-unhealthy relationship with his homeland is a topic that could occupy us for several posts straight, and we’ll get to it, I promise, but for the moment just stick a pin in it and let me repeat: I was not invited).

So I stayed in Granada. And had some fun of my own, if you can call it that. To wit, a surprise visit from Bad Love Incarnate—surely someone must have called someone but I have a memory, clear as day (though they say those are no more trustworthy than any others), of him just showing up at my door, out of the proverbial clear blue, late one mid-December afternoon, with flowers. Last having spoken to me when I’d called him some months earlier, at Husband #1’s behest, from a payphone (because there was no telephone in Painting Professor’s house… the world was different then) in the main square of Sotillo de la Adrada, to break up with him.

It was like some inner compass had pointed him straight to me. She’s leaving, she’s getting away. Never mind that you spent most of the last year pushing her away with all your might. Going to ridiculous lengths to alienate her in every possible way, some of them pretty damn original. She is leaving, she is getting away, do something! And so there he stood, on my doorstep, doing something with a fistful of wild flowers that looked as though he’d picked them from the side of the road somewhere, though that was impossible in December, even in southern Spain. Maybe they were just the worse for the drive, with him.

I thought they were beautiful.

What is it with men and desire and women they no longer have? I think most of the regular readers of this blog of Bad, Bad Love are women, but if there’s a dude out there tuning in, please dish: the ladies would love to know.

I felt guilty about inviting him in (I shouldn’t have, but explaining the reasons for that would take over the post; you can likely guess the most important of them, and as with many things to do with Husband #1, we’ll get to it later… it’s good). But I did let him in, of course I did, because I wanted to see what would happen.

What happened was kind of boring. Husband #1 may have been in Argentina, but his presence was all over my little studio apartment: an easel, brushes in cans. Turpentine, rags. A canvas in progress—yet another Fauvist rendering of Argentinian social life among the underemployed Under-Thirties (warning signs all around, 360 degrees, and yet I saw not…). Mate, mate cups and a mate straw (of which I was not sick, not quite yet; give it a few posts). It took Bad Love Incarnate all of about five minutes and half of the pre-rolled joint he’d stuck in his shirt pocket to get out of me that I had done the deed. Married the bastard (his words, not—yet—mine).

And that, my friends, changed the entire tenor of the evening: we drank like we’d never drunk before, he’d brought some blow and we did that too. We hit every club in Granada and then some (his ratty truck facilitated transportation, though he definitely should not have been driving). We danced like maniacs (grindhumpbumpworse), arrived back at my place with dawn already thinking about putting on a show over in the east, and then he wouldn’t touch me.

He (who was, as you will perhaps remember, still married, albeit estranged, with two continents and two seas separating him from co-dependent Her…) didn’t have sex, he told me, with married women.

Instead, he cried. And he threw up, multiple times. He only made it to the toilet once. I cleaned, thoroughly. Have I mentioned, here on this Bad, Bad Love blog, that I am a neat freak? Oh yeah. Big time. (This has bothered more than one man who has shared my bed, and is, I offer to you as a theory, one of the principal reasons I cannot share a dwelling with another human, male or female. And, yes, I clean up, obsessively, after my bunnies. You could probably eat dinner off the floor of their cage and not ingest a single microbe. As I said, I cannot help it).

The next morning, which was actually the same morning, I don’t think I slept more than two hours, and none of that straight, he asked for the kind of aspirin you dissolve in water (that’s a Spanish thing, and my landlady had it), but he didn’t want coffee. Not from me.

He left before eight.

Again, if there are men out there, please, please explain. It’s been a long, long time but the question still burns: W. T. F.???

I was up, I couldn’t sleep, so I spent the bleary day organizing (and reorganizing, and organizing again) the few possessions remaining in the studio—my own, along with those of Husband #1—for the great trek to AmeRIca. I then spent a strangely melancholy, elegiac Christmas season, a ‘newlywed’ (though I did not conceive of myself as such), essentially marking time until Husband #1 returned to Granada. We would then pack up what was left of our belongings and head to Madrid for our pre-immigration screening interview at the U.S. embassy, and then a flight. Across the ocean. As a couple. A married one. This will come back to haunt us, trust me.

Gratitude, and the lack of it, are other things that will haunt us. Over and over and over, until Yours Truly finally gets the message. Just before Husband #1 left for his solo honeymoon in Argentina, we’d shipped the majority of our possessions, by boat, to the boyfriend of a friend of mine in Manhattan, who happened to have a storage facility rented for some other purpose and there was some room there. (But, you ask, dear reader, weren’t you supposed to be headed to D.C., for your mega-prestigious fellowship at the National Gallery? Yes. Very astute observation. Yes, I was. This, too, shall come back to haunt us: for the moment I will just state that it was Husband #1’s lifelong dream, he’d confided in me more than once, starry-eyed, to live in Manhattan as a Great Artist; I could at least help him out with the Manhattan part).

My landlady and her husband were a lot more helpful with their car and our many boxes and ferrying us to and from the oficina de correos in Granada than they were strictly obligated to be. I thanked them profusely; Husband #1 joined in, but almost as an afterthought. Which I found mortifying. Later, back at the studio, we had our first mini-fight about that. I thought he should have offered to take them out to dinner, or at the very least stood them a beer, because the large majority of the boxes were his. It was with some amazement that, as we fought (the fight, like all the early ones, was truncated by sex, so I didn’t have a very extended session of meditation), I realized that such a gesture, the necessity of it, the fittingness of it, had never even crossed his mind.

You’re wondering: did he chip in on the rent? No, no he did not.

As I look back from a certain distance over the time I spent with him, it is clear to me that he had bought so completely into the myth of the artistic genius (thank you, Romanticism, thank you 19th century), was so utterly convinced of his own rightful membership in the brotherhood of creative nonpareils, that he truly believed the world owed him everything it chose to give him. And a whole lot more. So why say thank you?

It later also became clear to me that his honeymoon in Argentina was, for him, a sort of victory lap, prior to setting off for Nueva York, and what he had absolutely no doubt would be instant artistic greatness (no, as far as I know, he was not in the habit of ingesting hallucinogens… didn’t need ‘em!). The myth of male artistic genius doesn’t have a lot of room for smart women as traveling companions. That is one possible reason I wasn’t invited. There were others.

Instead, as I said, I celebrated the season in Granada with then-friends who welcomed me into their homes like family, for nochebuena and navidad and nochevieja. I never rang a doorbell without a contribution: the requisite bottles of cava and tinto reserva or turrón, wrapped in festive paper. But I never felt quite… inside. It wasn’t a language thing, I’m completely fluent. It was something else. Where families are concerned, I’m always slightly on the outside. On the margins. I feel that way now, and I felt that way then—no fault of my hosts, something in me is broken in that department. I felt that way as a child, despite my wonderful mother. I’ve given up trying to fix it. I’ve learned to love solitude, and to make the most of it (by writing, for example, and gardening. and cleaning… all obsessively. I’m a mess).

I left Granada (in that incarnation—I have been back, in others, many times since), if memory serves, on the day after Reyes (i.e., Epiphany, 6 January, so I left on the 7th). I never saw those friends again–I have a habit of doing that, too. Losing people along the way. Not through bad intentions, it’s just a thing I do. I was on my way to Madrid, in a bus, to meet Husband #1. At the airport. He’d called, asked me to come, bring the stuff, there wasn’t that much, a bus ticket down and back for him was a waste of money (his), so of course I said yes.

And of course he did not say thank you.

I’m writing this from a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. I always feel like a ghost when I come back to this city. Tomorrow I’m headed upriver, by myself, as I always am, to Millbrook, to a little literary festival, with my Birdies. It looks really pretty. It’s supposed to rain all day.

I did bring an umbrella.

BTW, sorry for the repeat photo… I did make a new one, but something’s up with the picture upload function that my website peeps have to get sorted out. Hopefully by next week… I used the new one on Instagram, tho’! Go check it out… it involves a corset and a passport, if that serves as incentive.

Catch you next week, in Madrid.

The post I Want to Live in A-me-RI-ca! (Bad, Bad Love Prepares to Cross the Pond) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Wedding Bells! Bad, Bad Love Style…

When I got married for the first time I was drunk, wearing black leather pants. When my mother got married for the only time, she was about twenty-four hours the right side of an appendectomy. But you’d never know it from the wedding pictures, where she looks sweet and pretty and poised, her teeth white and lips red, fine clavicles framed in satin by a sweetheart neckline.

My father’s smile, on the other hand, looks more like a grimace, knuckles white as he grips my mother’s elbow. He told the story dozens of times at family gatherings. How he’d been terrified she’d collapse right then and there, in front of the altar, before the “I do’s” and the exchange of rings. That when she came to she’d suddenly realize the grave error she’d been about to commit—this was the part where everyone laughed and refilled glasses of iced-tea, my family didn’t drink—and run as far and fast in the other direction as she could. More laughter. I seriously wondered why she hadn’t. Which wouldn’t have meant I wouldn’t have been born, I’m adopted. Which probably explains more than I could ever imagine about me… have at it, dear reader, have at it.

People said I resembled my father, physically, which was entirely a coincidence, though we were evenly matched in stubbornness and cussedness in addition to our flaming red hair. As a very young child, I adored him, and it was mutual. As I approached adolescence, however, we clashed. And clashed, and clashed some more. Our mutual admiration society devolved into a permanent squaring off of sworn enemies.

And it was, I submit, in an attempt–maybe even a conscious one–to offend him—he came to mind more than once as the inexorable steps were being taken—that I married Husband #1, and that I married him in the way I did.

My mother was gone by then, we all missed her terribly. My family was no longer family, we’d come unglued. The best way to avoid setting the table for another, similar banquet of generational heartbreak a few decades down the line, I reasoned, was to live a life as different from, as diametrically opposed to, my mother’s as humanly possible. And at that, I was, and am, very, very good. And my father, at various junctures along the way (though we became closer and more reconciled, or at least better at keeping quiet on topics guaranteed to produce an explosion, during the final years of his life), was gratifyingly incensed. My first wedding stands out as a shining example.

Enter Husband #1, last seen chasing sublimity and water nymphs in the magical woods in the province of Ávila.

We plotted our troth in Gibraltar–which, officially, belongs to Great Britain–because at that time you couldn’t get married in Spain if you hadn’t lived in the location where you planned to tie the knot for a certain period of time… I think two years, but don’t quote me on that. It’s been a while. At any rate, Husband #1 and I missed the mark by a mile.

Certain circumstances precipitated this momentous step. I was on Fulbright scholarship in Spain, writing about ornament and poetry and its metaphorical encounters in medieval Islamic palaces (yes, they give people money to do that, though with the current government, I think it’s entirely possible the intelligentsia will be rounded up into the biggest library they can find and then gassed, the place torched for good measure, so if some week I don’t show up on the Bad, Bad Love blog, you know where to start looking…). That scholarship was soon to finish and I was to begin yet another one, for dissertation completion, which required residency at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. By this time, Husband #1 had installed himself in my studio in Granada (see how neatly he did that? None of us even realized it was happening…), and when he learned that I was soon headed back to the lands of my birth, he determined to come with me.

I had never lived with anyone before, quasi-conjugally, and it was working out okay thus far, two months in, lots of nights out and drinking and sex (which, let me repeat, was never all that—Husband #1 seemed to be of the opinion that the size of the implement he brought to the party excused him from doing pretty much anything else in the way of preparations: you’re allowed to wonder at my willingness to go along…). So I said okay.

Just like I said okay a couple of days later when Husband #1, mixing paint and sucking at a mate straw (I was still okay with mate at that point, not sick of it yet, though that would come, that would come…), casually broached the subject of marriage.

The reason, I think, looking back, that I put up zero resistance to the Marriage Plot was that getting married figured nowhere on my list of Top Ten Things to Achieve In Life. I truly had not given it any thought. So I took him at his word (silly girl): this was purely a question of paperwork, of papeleos and trámites. A means to an end. No. Big. Deal.

I’d be doing him a huge, huge favor (he liked all the Spanish equivalents of the word “huge”). Marriage was the only way, he said, for him to have a ‘normal’ life en los Estados Unidos. Even have a bank account (though what he planned to put into that account was, at that point, a matter of cloudy surmise). And! He knew, somehow, about Gibraltar. No residence requirement necessary.

How, and why, did he know about Gibraltar?

Good question. Which occurred to me only much, much, much later. But definitely a good question.

The one I asked, at the time, however, was “Bus or train?”

Bus.

Can I just say that Gibraltar is one of the weirdest places on the planet (and if you are remembering that Bad Love Incarnate’s father was born in Gibraltar then you have one hell of a memory… and we have not seen the last of Bad Love Incarnate, not quite yet…)? One of the thickest Andalucian accents I have _ever_ heard, even Husband #1 had some trouble at times. Bleak rocky coastline, you can sort of see Morocco right from the beach from certain spots and on certain clear days, or you can convince yourself you can. Imagine the Arab conquerors disembarking on the shore in 711 A.D. and getting right on about the business of conquest.

Sort of like with Husband #1, the natives put up very little resistance.

In Gibraltar all of the buildings look English, like they’ve been plucked by a big giant hand from the side of some gently rolling green hill in the Lake District and plunked down between the rocks. There are even picket fences.

And shops and shops and shops of cheap electronics.

And cheap alcohol. Which we purchased in quantity. Amazing quantities, in fact, for such a short stay.

We only had to spend one night—got the license in order within an hour of arrival, set the wedding for the following day at ten. Bus back to Granada at two. We parked our stuff in the cheapest B&B in town—the Andalus-speaking, English-looking landlady (everyone reminded me of Bad Love Incarnate’s parents, which, looking back, was likely a pretty bad sign) kind of squinted at us, maybe in disgust, when we told her what we were there to do—and went out to party.

We met two transvestites at the fourth or the fifth club we hit, and they agreed, amid many cocktails and much hilarity, to be our witnesses. So that no one would miss the 10 a.m. altar-time (actually no altar, we did it por lo civil), we spent the night at the house they shared some way out of town—though they were not a couple, they were very clear about that. The drag queens went right to bed, each to her separate room, and left us in the living room with a bottle of Drambuie and two shot glasses. After having stupidly unprotected sex (that’s the sauce béchamel for this post…), we passed out on the couch listening to waves crash on rocks, which I was pretty sure we were both so drunk we were imagining, together. Upon waking to mimosas, however—the drag queens, in addition to being lovely and very funny and witty and smart and cultured and all the things drag queens are in movies, though this was no movie, were wonderful hostesses: they actually had the ingredients for mimosas just sitting around the house—we saw that the waves were real. The house was perched on a little cliff, hanging right out over the water. I was proud of myself for not feeling seasick.

I don’t have pictures of that wedding, or of the brunch afterward (more mimosas…), so I have to, as the Spanish expression goes, “hacer memoria.” Dig around in my memory.

I know that the drag queens, after whispered consultation in the kitchen, decided to leave the drag at home. Our witnesses were, as far as anyone else could tell, perfectly respectable ones, cool in stylish jeans and impeccably pressed shirts (lavender and pink). I know that I wore black leather pants—the same ones I’d partied in the night before; women under 35 can do that and still look hot—and a black, see-thru-y pirate blouse. I know I wore black platform ankle boots, my waist-length hair over one shoulder in a defiantly messy braid, and absolutely enormous gold hoop earrings. I know that I was drunk on mimosas when I said “I do”, en español, and that I was smoking while I said it. I do not require photographic evidence to assert, in full confidence, that Husband #1 was not gripping my elbow, or any other part of me, as he, in turn, pronounced those words (possibly a sign). I don’t know if he smiled, or, if he did, what that smile looked like, because this was pre-cell-phone, and way pre-iPhone, and people didn’t just walk the streets with cameras at the ready. Taking wedding photos would have required thought and planning and care, three ingredients that definitely did not go into the preparations for our Gibraltar nuptials.

In subsequent months, however, I did occasionally regret the lack of photographic evidence of my anti-wedding, because it would have made my father positively blow a gasket. Which, in my book and at that time, would have been an excellent thing.

This Sunday is Mother’s Day, and like pretty much everyone else, my mother is on my mind right about now. As I have lamented before on this blog of Bad, Bad Love, I much regret the fact that she and I were never able to know one another as adult women. Not that we’d have agreed on everything, but I suspect we’d have agreed on a lot. I don’t think she’d have been horrified by my first wedding. Puzzled, maybe, by all the black, but I believe she’d have done her best to enter into the spirit of things. She’d have abstained—as far as I know, alcohol never passed her lips, she didn’t need it, she was always full of joy and had few regrets—but she wouldn’t have condemned what the rest of us got up to. She’d have been up bright and early the next morning with tomato juice and hot buttered biscuits at the ready—every bit as much the hostess-with-the-mostess as the drag queens—and then some coffee (yes, hers was percolated, but percolated can also be good) for when stomachs were settled enough to take it. Then she’d have settled herself into her chair at the kitchen table and said, “Well, now, tell me all about it.”

And she’d have genuinely wanted to know.

Except for near infinite patience for rescued bunnies, I’m about as umotherly as they come—I must have been outside smoking, quite possibly drunk, when they were handing those genes out. Maybe that’s a reaction, too, to the way I was brought up. My mother was pretty much perfect as mothers go, and I’m kind of a perfectionist: I could never have measured up, so I preferred to excel in other areas. Like Bad, Bad Love, at which—as I hope, dear reader, I have thoroughly convinced you by now—I am a consummate expert.

And pissing my father off. I was really, really good at that, too.

Okay, time to take the bunnies out to the garden for a while. Catch you next week… from the Big Apple!

Literally and figuratively. With Husband #1 in tow… woohoo.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream, à la Bad, Bad Love (avec de la sauce béchamel)

There was a waterfall. Our waterfall. I was sure—naked, sun-dappled, still high from the after-lunch smoke-up, the two or three cognacs (damn, I could hold my liquor in those days)—that we were the only two living beings who’d ever seen it.

Me, Husband #1 (though he was not that yet, not quite yet), wild nature and a few controlled substances. July, in the mountains around the sweet little town of Ávila, in the still-sweeter and still smaller town of Sotillo de la Adrada, we lived our idyll.

We lived, for about two weeks (I think…), with Husband #1’s painting professor, in a low, snug little house—pitched roof, timbers and stucco, oddly Alpine—perched on the side of a craggy mountain. It looked impermanent somehow, like a mountain goat stopping to rest on its way up or down, like the next time you looked, it might just be gone.

Like that, like magic. Like the incremental part of hallucinatory fairly land that it was—those two weeks in themselves one long hallucination, one long, great dream. Unreal even as you stared straight at it. I’d wonder later, lost in the bleak wilderness of a married life into which I had somehow stumbled–though there were clear steps along the way: they are traceable, and I will trace each and every one of them for you, dear reader, all in good time, right here on this intimate little blog of Bad, Bad Love. I would wonder if I’d ever actually seen that house. Really lived those two weeks. Wonder, as I glanced across the table of our miniscule West Village apartment at this unknown being who, last time I checked, had been Husband #1, if any part of our very own Midsummer Night’s Dream had ever happened at all.

Our mornings started late—the first smell of coffee crept beneath the doorway into our airy room around ten. Breakfast around the crumb-strewn table, with whoever happened to be around, and up. Painting Professor, Painting Professor’s paramour du jour (they varied, but they were all the same, willowy and blond, Norwegian or Danish or Dutch, occasionally German; we were never sure where he got them, because he didn’t go to Madrid very often; maybe they were nymphs, wandered in through the always unlocked door, and fell asleep in his bed). Painter friends from down the way, someone who had picked up pastries or a baguette at the bakery in town. Some homemade jam from the market. Butter. An endless supply of café con leche—there was a battered old blue bowl on the counter, where people tossed in whatever pocket change happened to be weighing them down.

Then we all worked. I, brushing crumbs from the table with my hand, set up my Arabic dictionaries and translated. Woodlands through the window became the perfumed gardens of 9th-century Baghdad, populated by devastatingly lovely (and therefore deadly) androgynous cup-bearers, who, if you turned your back for a second, might just become ban trees or fields of laughing daisies. Husband #1 and Professor painted, in the front-room studio, light streaming in through the open windows. Their backs to one another. Easels facing off as though preparing for a duel. Professor liked dark and tortured, a figure occasionally seeming ready to emerge from the roiling cloudscapes before disappearing back into the billows. Husband #1 was more decidedly figurative. Café scenes, backyard asados (all of his paintings were set in his native Argentina, which was as big a red flag as ever was waved before a myopic matador, and of course I didn’t see it, whether I’d popped my contact lenses in or not). Friends, many of whom were women, all realistic but with the perspective ever so slightly off, the colors electric, jarring, fauvish, with heavy black outlines pushing back against the three dimensions of painterly space. Friends whom Husband #1 missed. And would miss ever more… but that’s another post for another day.

Painting Professor and Husband #1 consumed endless streams of mate, out of carved wooden cups and through the classic silver straws (another thing I’d grow to hate, eventually, though during our midsummer interlude I reveled in the newness). They argued, threw an occasional paintbrush across the room. Hugged, knocked off early for the sacred pre-prandial cerveza, while I dressed in the bedroom.

Then we’d all drive down the hill in Painting Professor’s Jeep, leaving our little mountain-goat house perched behind (maybe it would be there when we got back, maybe it wouldn’t), to the restaurant where we, along with the rest of the intellectuals of Sotillo de La Adrada, almost all of whom were Argentinians in self-imposed exile, had lunch.

I think the restaurant was named Gredos, but I wouldn’t swear to that. It’s been a while. Our lunches, though, were a daily event; a back room reserved, always, for us.

Actually, lunch doesn’t even begin to cover it. Aperitivos and tapas, patatas bravas and pulpo al gallego, sardinas, escabeche. Olives and bread and manchego cheese. Gazpacho. Fish courses, meat courses. Flan and fruit. Bottle after bottle of red wine (I remember putting money into a fondo en común, but no way enough money to account for our part of the daily Bacchanal).

Then coffee after coffee, and brandy, or orujo (¡invita la casa!). Heady discussion and debates, art and politics and books and social justice, and missing Argentina (Argentinians always, always miss Argentina, worse when there’s a bunch of them together), for hours and hours and hours. Our ‘lunches’ usually broke up around five or so, when Husband #1 and I would wander off to our waterfall to have sex on the mossy ground, or against a tree (the rough bark against my skin, moss is so soft), and try to sober up for the evening’s activities.

Which meant convening at the sprawling home of a jolly, Frans-Halsian Drinker of a man named Federico, some distance out of town. Federico was a journalist who’d narrowly escaped the death-prisons of the proceso militar (his wife had not; she’d suffered an unspeakable fate similar to the ends met by people known and loved by every person around that groaning lunch table, every person who later showed up at Federico’s for drinks and tapas. I was unable to take in the ramifications of such collective trauma at the time, but I’ve had plenty of time to think about it over the last twenty-five years or so, and we’ll hear more about it in future posts).

But for now, let’s stay with the good times, at Federico’s. He was semi-in love with me, which I enjoyed, because he was brilliant and he praised my Spanish (and Husband #1’s taste in women). He was sexy in a too-big, over-ripe, bearded way that some men manage to manage, despite features that might objectively be qualified as physical defects. The kind of sexy that lasts, like a good wine, into late middle age and even beyond. He was an unabashed hedonist. He spoke flawless French, and he enjoyed speaking it with me. I was never sure where he got the money he seemed to throw around so freely. Probably not from the op-ed pieces he wrote for journals back home in Buenos Aires.

Federico had a pool, in which he encouraged me to skinny dip, or at least to swim in my underwear (I frequently obliged), and a rambling garden covered over with grape arbors he’d let run wild. He had extra bedrooms, where Husband #1 and I slept more than once.

He was an astonishingly good cook. He taught me the vital importance of béchamel, and he taught me how to make it. Now that I think of it, if I’d had a lick of sense, I’d have moved into that beautiful rambling house with Federico (as he invited me—jokingly, but behind every joke likes a little, tiny truth—dozens of times to do). I’d probably still be there.

Instead, drunk on nymph-and-satyr love beside our own private waterfall, I listened to Husband #1. I let him move with me back to Granada, and eventually to Manhattan.

Because cohabitation in tiny apartments on, like, no money would without a doubt be exactly like our midsummer idyll. Just as good, in every way. Right?

Umm, right.

But we’ll get to that next week (or the next – I think my mother might be trying to come back for the next post, we’ll see). For now, I’ll wave good-bye to you from my seat at the raucous lunch table at Gredos, from within a cloud of smoke (because of course we all smoked, a lot), raising my glass of post-prandial brandy in your direction, as I return Federico’s sly wink.

He really was an extraordinary man. Much more so than Husband #1.

Catch you next week…

The post A Midsummer Night’s Dream, à la Bad, Bad Love (avec de la sauce béchamel) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Take Some Good With the Bad: Interlude with Flowers. And My Mother.

I know I promised you bad, bad love in Ávila, and you will get it. I promise. In next week’s post, cross my heart and hope to die. But this weekend I’m putting in my garden, which means flowers. Flowers remind me of my mother—my mother lived to put in her garden every spring. So while I’m outside, with my hands in the dirt, the tender little plants nestling into the brand new holes I’ve dug for them, it’s impossible for me not to think of my mother. And therefore impossible for me to post about Bad, Bad Love—I don’t think my mother even recognized its existence. She was convinced my father had hung the moon, and the sun while he was at it. Most of my bad, bad loving came about after she was gone–she died when I was twenty-five, of metastatic melanoma.

I never knew my mother as one adult woman trying to relate to and understand another. If I had, it is entirely possible that my reading of her relationship with my father would have been a much more nuanced one. As it is, I remember her as the peacemaker—my relationship with my former-Marine, authority loving, conservative and deeply religious father was a troubled one. My brother’s relationship with the same man sometimes became openly violent, and even when not openly so, the violence simmered under the surface like a cottonmouth floating shallow in murky water, ready to strike. The violence often burst forth at the dinner table, or the supper table, as we called it. It’s probably a surprise to no one that I suffered, as an adolescent, from a variety of eating disorders.

And I wondered at my mother’s unwavering insistence that her life as a housewife was exactly what she’d always wanted, that she’d never dreamed of anything else, that she would never dream of wishing things other than what they were.

My mother was a talented seamstress. I believed she was a frustrated fashion designer. Which became my truth throughout my adolescence and the early years of young adulthood. She may have felt no such thing. And it’s also possible she wouldn’t allow herself to feel any such thing. She was, at any rate, an offhandedly brilliant designer of clothing (sans patterns) for her beautiful daughter, who had no idea she was beautiful—I spent most of my youth worrying about being ugly, and now when I see photographs of that young woman, I just want to slap her silly.

My clothes were the envy of all the girls of my elementary, junior high and high schools, and the marvel of my entire college dormitory. I had no idea how to even shop for clothing when, during my second year of graduate school, my mother was no longer able to sew.

The most joyful moment of my mother’s horrific final hospital stay involved a dress, covered in flowers. She was thin to the point of transparency, her skin dry like paper. She was bald under colorful bandanas with attached faux bangs that only made things worse but she never wanted my father to see her without them. On the day of the joyful moment, my father was absent. Which I remember, somehow, as key. As something to be desired—his grief swallowed up the room, the hall, the hospital, the universe. In the presence of his grief there was no room for joy.

And my mother always, somehow, found joy.

Everything went according to my plan. I showed up just after her breakfast tray had been delivered—she was no longer touching food—in the dress she’d been making for me when she became too weak to lift the scissors, and so she put them down.

One of her dearest friends, Virginia, wife of the mayor in our small Tennessee town, was also a seamstress, also talented (though not nearly so much as my mother, as she declared over and over again as my mother marveled). Virginia and I, together, had finished the dress. And it brought my mother joy.

My mother called it “the mermaid dress.” It molded itself to every curve of my body like the glimmery, shimmery, scaly skin of that fantastic creature, flaring out into layers and layers of ruffles from knee to ankles, after the fashion of a flamenco costume. Fuchsia, red, butter-yellow, lime green. Turquoise, ruby, tourmaline. My red hair loose down my back like a Titian river. And of course the platforms. My oh my, such smooth skin, my mother said, caressing my back like a lover–she’d left it mostly bare. She touched my waist, my hips, naming the flowers—I don’t remember them all, I wasn’t yet into flowers—and said I looked exactly like life. Smelled like it too.

Still today I marvel at the idea of my sweet, chaste mother coming up with something as unabashedly sensual as that dress, that had no place in any place like a hospital. And she knew that, and it brought her joy.

My mother believed she had good love, the best love. Which was married love, the only kind there was. She, therefore, knew very little of what I got up to when I wasn’t at home. I made sure of that. When she died, I was in Palermo. She’d entered a coma two weeks earlier, and her bedside physician, together with my father and my aunts, convinced me that she no longer knew the hand holding hers was mine. That I should do what she’d been wanting me to do all summer—take my fellowship money and fly to Italy and see those medieval monuments she was so proud of me for studying. She’d never stopped talking to the nurses, the doctors, the radiologists, to anyone who would listen (and pretty much anyone would listen to my mother, she charmed everyone with her sweet innocence), about her brilliant daughter. Whom she asked, every day as that daughter entered the room to take up her bedside seat, just after lunch time, what on earth she was still doing there, wasn’t she leaving for Italy soon?

I received the news of my mother’s death in Italian, not in time to make it home for the funeral (my devastated, distraught father would eventually place a cassette tape into my hand; to this day I have not been able to listen to it). I did my first weeping of bereavement (I’d wept many times previously, of course: diagnosis, new diagnosis, first little stroke, second one) in that other tongue. Which maybe put me outside myself (in addition to beside myself), and maybe explains my behavior the following day, when I was scheduled to take a ferry back to the mainland, to spend a week with a friend and her family near Naples.

I picked up a guy on that boat. A photographer (yes, perceptive and attentive reader, another one). He took my picture, over and over—those shots might be out there, somewhere, from when I was young and beautiful, even with my eyes swollen from weeping. We got drunk on white wine from Sardinia as the sun, that fiery sun, dropped into the water in an unbelievable ball of flame and fuchsia. Then we had sex. All over the boat. For hours. Inside the emergency skiffs, strung up to the sides of the ferry in case of a Titanic sort of incident. In a linen closet left carelessly open—neither of us, probably goes without saying, had access to a cabin. Behind a pile of ropes, right up against the guard rails. My ass got a soaking, rope burn streaked the backs of my thighs. I felt my head sticking out over the edge. Wet wind in my hair. I slid an inch further out, and then another one. I could so, so easily have slipped right through, vanished into the ocean in the middle of the night. Pulled him with me. Vanished us both without a trace.

I cried throughout most of the sex, sometimes I sobbed. My legs twined through his, I told him about my mother and he hugged me and untangled himself from me and brought me more wine (there were moments of extreme tenderness that night, strange as that may sound). By breakfast time, I was all cried out and we were all screwed out and he sat me on his lap so we could take bites from the same pastry at the same time, and drink from the same (innumerable) cup(s) of coffee. He begged me to come with him to Corfu, where his mother lived. I didn’t have a mother any more but I could enjoy his mother for a while. She would cook for us, and not mind us sleeping in the same bed. She would love me. She loved beautiful things. She had a flower garden, glorious now in early August.

I didn’t go, of course. I don’t know quite why. Going would have been reckless, and in those days I was always up for reckless.

My mother loved Aaron Copland. She especially loved Appalachian Spring, which she liked to listen to through the open living room window as she put her garden in, the music floating out through the screen window, from the old slide-top stereo, the aroma of new blooms and fresh dirt finding its way inside too. The title “Appalachian Spring” only came to be attached to that piece of music long after its composition, somewhat haphazardly, in Copland’s mind it had nothing in particular to do with Appalachia. These are facts of which I hope my mother was blissfully ignorant because they would have disappointed her. She said Appalachian Spring reminded her of our family vacations to Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. We used to go every summer; there were violent moments around the dinner table even there, between my father and my brother. I imagine my mother edited those out, replaced them with joy.

And so Appalachian Spring—I’ve been streaming it while writing this post—reminds me of my mother. Who was a deliriously happily married woman. Or maybe a determinedly happily married one. I will never know. I do know that I would never have been able to stand being married to my father—too authoritarian, too set in his ways. I’m pretty sure I would never be able to stand being married to anyone. But when I hear Copland, I imagine other people being happily married, somewhere, being happily able to do that, somehow, and that makes me wistful.

For something I know I do not want. How’s that for effed-up?

Happy weekend, y’all. I’m spending it with flowers. Putting in my garden. With my mother, or with her memory anyway. I’m pretty sure my father would have been appalled at a good 80% of my adult behavior in the realm of Love (Good, Bad, Whatever), but I’m equally certain, though I do not know why, that my mother wouldn’t judge. She’d just listen, have her hands in the fresh dirt, brand new flowers at her feet, and she’d tell me I looked like life. Smelled like it too.

Next week the love will be Bad again. 100%. And that’s a promise. Till then, go plant some flowers.

The post Take Some Good With the Bad: Interlude with Flowers. And My Mother. appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Married, Making Béchamel (avec accent aigu), II: It’s the Nutmeg, Stupid

The nutmeg is key. It is essential. How did Husband #1, who certainly liked to eat Béchamel (I left the accent off last week, pardonnez-moi), not know this? Should’ve put him out of the running. Should’ve been a sign. But Husband #1 once sent me a telegram. A telegram. What romantic (yes, I am one, despite appearances to the contrary) wouldn’t say yes to a man who sent her a telegram?

It is unforgivable, not to know about the nutmeg. Yes, it is unthinkable. But maybe not terribly shocking in Husband #1’s case, as he was an absolutely terrible cook. Speaking of terrible cooks, if you, Dear Reader, will permit me a slight digression, there is a spammer who religiously comments on my posts, every week, in poorly constructed phrases he (I assume it’s a “he”—his screen name has the word ‘Viagra’ in it) probably believes amusing. Last week he bewailed his two (unfortunate) offspring’s refusal to eat his Béchamel, into which he puts mustard. For which crime his offspring should be removed from his custody, immediately. Child Services, if you’re out there… Viagra Spammer (who, curiously, has never tried to sell me any Viagra) likely wonders why his comments fail to appear in the comments section. That would be because all comments must first be approved by the moderator, and that moderator is…Moi.

So. Husband #1. Not only was he a terrible cook, he had such poor culinary aptitude–really zero food sensuality, and that should have set off all sorts of warning bells–that once in Manhattan—we were living in the East Village, on Bleecker Street—when I asked him, as part of a shopping list, to buy cardamom, he came back with cinnamon and swore that there was no difference between them. Actually, he later confessed to not knowing the difference in English: my ease with his language and his comparative unease with mine was an early sore spot for us. His English is better now, or so I hear (fifteen years later, it’d better be). My money, though, would still be on him failing a taste test.

But that telegram. A telegram! It arrived one week to the day after Bad Love Incarnate and I had definitively broken up. Actually, we broke up while having sex (probably some of the best sex of my life; what is wrong with me?), really early in the morning, after which he drove me in his rattly truck to the god-forsaken Spanish version of a truck-stop where I caught the bus back to Granada, and refused to stay for breakfast. I, still high on post-coital, post-fight endorphins (they really are similar), didn’t particularly care. I enjoyed the dramatic figure I cut, sidling up to the tiled bar of the cafeteria, in my miniskirt and platform sandals, my waist-length red hair in just-had-sex disorder. I lit up with studied nonchalance as I ordered my tostada con aceite y tomate (toasted bread with olive oil and tomato compote, an Andalucian breakfast staple: by ordering it and sprinkling salt all over it like you never heard of a heart attack, you signal that you know your way around and are not to be fucked with). As the waiter put my cortado doble (lots of espresso, the barest hint of milk) in front of me with one hand, offering me an ashtray with another, his eyes unabashedly took in the sight I was for sore ones. He audibly blessed the mother that bore me (dios bendiga tu madre), and I felt fine. I was fine. The Bad Love Teflon the world grants to the young. It hurts, bad, but when you’re young, you know you’re hot while you hurt. And so the hurt hurts less.

Because you know there will be more chances.

And there were. Enter, once again, Husband #1. We had parted, like actors in too many movies to list, on a station platform, a Roman one, amid the hisses and whistles of trains, arriving and departing, with hugs and te echaré de menos-es. I honestly didn’t think I would ever see him again. And that was fine, it was part of the script. I was sad, and enjoyed being sad, like I was in my own little movie. I even cried a little on the train to the airport—the young are pretty when they cry, I enjoyed the sympathetic glances.

But I underestimated him. He remembered the name of the street in the Albaicín, where I rented my studio—which I had told him because I liked it, calle del Agua, “Water Street,” because of an old medieval cistern, still there today. And I had told him my landlady’s name, Ana, in the context of describing our evenings sipping jerez on her balcony, me high from smoking up first with my downstairs neighbors, translating into Spanish the fruits of my daily labors, Arabic love poetry from the eleventh century that would melt a stone.

He might not be able to tell cinnamon from cardamom, and I might eventually come to hate him for that, but Husband #1 could find a woman when he wanted to. The way he went about it was actually pretty genius. Rather than an address, he attached to his telegram a sort of description. Of me, of my street. Of my landlady, of her house. And they let him get away with it. The Granada telegraph people found me. Likely because, unlike today, with the Albaicín converted into a sort of Disneyland version of a suq in Fez, literally crawling with teterías and touristas, in the early 1990s a redheaded guiri measuring almost two full meters in height, and with near-perfect Spanish to boot, would be easily findable. More than one bricklayer, like the waiter at the roadside cafetería, had blessed my mother for what she’d given to the world; another had opined, as I walked past him, to or from the market, that I was a monumento (this was way before #metoo; as long as they looked and didn’t touch, I kind of didn’t mind). And I partied a lot, I was out every night. All this to say, they knew me around those parts.

So I got my telegram. Quiero verte, he said. I want to see you. Necesito verte—I need to. He was having another show, this time in the cultural center of a town of which I had never heard. Sotillo de la Adrada, in the Province of Ávila. Where Santa Teresa was from. Yes, that one, Bernini sculpted her with her head thrown back in ecstasy, throat bared to the very pointy point of the mean little angel’s poisonous arrow. Husband #1 was living in a room in his former painting professor’s house (like Husband #1, said painting professor was Argentinian; they get around, and they find each other). The bed was big. Would I come and see him.

I would.

Sotillo means ‘little grove.’ Sounds idyllic. And it was, incredibly. Hallucinatory, really. Sotillo de la Adrada (in order to get there, you needed to take a crazy-romantic number of buses, and I wore platforms on them all) was where Husband #1 and I became an official Thing.

Sotillo de la Adrada was also where I witnessed, for the first time, an Argentinian man making Béchamel. It is where I learned about the nutmeg. And, looking back, it is probably significant that I did not learn that fact from Husband #1. And that he witnessed the same incident of food preparation that I did, and retained nothing. Hindsight and all that.

Speaking of sauce, I need to feed myself, and feed the bunnies. So I will knock off here… and wish you some Bad, Bad Love of your own. Preferably some upon which you can look back and ponder. Hope you’re not living it right now.

See you next Friday, in Sotillo de la Adrada. It’s really beautiful there, I’ll show you around.

 

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Married, Making Bechamel, I

I’m not prejudiced against marriage. I’m not even prejudiced against married people, some of my best friends are married. Marriage, however, is definitely not for me. I’ve tried it twice, and I don’t care if the third time is the charm, because I am Not. Going. There. Again. It took me to a bad, bad place and I have no desire to return.

I think what I hated most about marriage was what marriage did to me. This could be one long-ass post, which none of my three readers will have the patience to read to the end, or it could be several. I am opting for several, hence the Roman numeral after ‘Bechamel.’

Which, by the way, I hate. As a child I was mildly allergic to milk, which was all good with me because I couldn’t stand the stuff. Still can’t. The mere thought of ingesting a glass of milk makes me queasy. Bechamel, of course, as you are probably thinking, is mostly milk. The parts of it that are not butter and white flour, anyway, both of which were, at the time of my first marriage, anathema to the just-barely-under-control anorexic in me, and I got really effing good at making Bechamel. Like I say, I particularly did not care for what marriage did to me.

My first husband was Argentinian. I met him in an airport. In Madrid’s Barajas Airport, to be exact, when I was thirty. So I’d already held out for a good long while on the marriage thing. I was living in Granada , working on my dissertation and having a very-very Bad Love time with Bad Love Incarnate (remember him?). One particular week in July, I was showing him I had a life by leaving his ass parked in the Andalusian countryside (doubt he cared, if he even noticed) and going on my way, to Rome, to spend a week with a German friend who was finishing up her dissertation research.

Just as an aside, there are probably too many dissertations in the world. And I was absolutely not looking for a husband.

As we were waiting to board the flight, an Italian grandpa type picked me out of the crowd. Not hard to do: I am 5’10” without shoes and I was, as always in those days, wearing heels. Though my skirt, like my flaming red locks, was long and flowing, from the waist up I was provocatively dressed, and given his short stature, his eyes rested, once he had approached me, almost exactly at breast level. He was staring down my push-up bra without even trying. And #metoo was still a long way off.

So Italian Grandpa began to sing, a MamaMia sort of thing, something about la primavera and la cosa piu bella. Italian Grandpa sang loudly, we started to draw amused glances, and Yours Truly wanted to vanish into the floor.

Husband #1 to the rescue. Out of the waiting, staring crowd he came, my own personal savior, knight on a white horse, to beat back singing Grandpa. And proceed to take his place.

Before I knew what had hit me, he’d sweet talked the stewardess into playing seat roulette so that his would be next to mine (obviously this was long before 9-11). He spent the plane ride showing me photographs of his paintings—yes, he was a painter, the first of two; I am a slow learner. He was on his way to Rome to set up a one-man (emphasis on Man) show at the Argentinian cultural center. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say his eyes bugged out when I told him I was an art historian, and upon hearing the name of the august Ivy-league institution that would eventually grant me my degree, they threatened to pop.

Aha. You’re seeing the writing on the wall, already, now, before we even get to the Bechamel (who knew Argentinian cooking used Bechamel…). I’m seeing it too, now. In hindsight. Which, as they say, is 20-20.

Let me emphasize: this guy was So. Not. My. Type. Once we got to Rome (a gorgeous, gorgeous city in which I defy any one of the three of you not to fall for a persistent suitor who is even moderately attractive, and he was more than moderately, although I should repeat, absolutely Not. My. Type.) the hunt was on. And he wore me down.

Looking back, I am amazed. There were no cell phones. There were no smart phones. There was no texting. There was a high-ceilinged rented room in a gently and beautifully dilapidated house just off the Piazza Navona (how I found the room remains a mystery to me, there was no Air B&B, there was no Internet, were we possibly better off without it?). The room was rented to me by a gently and beautifully dilapidated Italian woman with a baby grand piano in her living room. She was divorced, maybe more than once. She wore her vaguely tragic past like a second-hand designer coat, hanging carelessly off one shoulder. She was cultured in that general European way that so few Americans seem able to manage, and she had a telephone in her kitchen, that worked. Sometimes.

Of course, of course, of course he charmed the landlady.

If you think about it, the fact that Husband #1, the friend (also Argentinian) with whom he was staying, near the Colosseum, my friend, and I, had come to constitute, by the third day of my stay, an inseparable foursome (for hanging out, you gutter-minded person, for hanging out), is a true tribute to Husband #1’s resourcefulness. A handsome guy (even a So. Not. Your. Type. one) pursuing you across one of the world’s most gorgeous cities, into parties in villas (how did we get into parties in villas?), and eventually, of course, into bed (but the sex was not great, and it never became great, which is another of the little mysteries tied up into this bigger-ball-of-yarn mystery: how the effing hell did he get me to marry him?). Your guy back home in Granada (or, rather, not in Granada: therein lies the problem) treats you like shit.

So, of course, you fall for it. You ditch your own nebulous plans for research—which were never all that concrete anyway; you were mostly coming so you could rub your absence in Bad Love Incarnate’s face—in order to trudge across the city, in your heels, in search of every art gallery in bella Roma, handing out invitations to Husband #1’s opening. He likes you to do the talking because your Italian is better than his, despite his Italian-born parents (the fact that you have an ease with languages that he does not will eventually become a very large thorn in the side of your relationship but you do not know that yet).

Look at you, independent woman of the world! You’ve just become this guy’s handmaiden. His sidekick. His help-meet. Oh so very Old-Testament-y, despite your platforms and your miniskirt. And he pulled that off without you even noticing.

You may be on your way to a PhD, honey, but who’s the smart one here? He’s working his way right up to that Bechamel.

Which we will soon get to, I promise, dear and faithful readers of this Bad Love Blog. We will, we will. Incidentally, I am seriously happy with this week’s picture (yes, those are my shoes, and no they are not knock-off), and I might well re-purpose it for further posts on this topic. Consistency of brand all that. Saving of time. And I like it. So you may well see them again next week…

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Bad, Bad Love in the Afterlife: Chapter 2 of #novelinprogress…

She had died in this room. In that bed.

Nigel kissing her eyelids, gently licking her tears. The remembered sensation—she had wept while she died—a sudden, sharp echo passing through her.

The echo stirred the pain around. Far worse than physical pain, which had a point of origin, could be assuaged. Or at least corralled: the pain is here, not there. But this pain lived in all of her, its intensity constant and unvaried. Her broken heart had become her entire self.

How could he?

She was too close to the bed, she didn’t want to see it poke through her hand or her skirt. The intense urge to move away hurled her toward the window, where her shoulder, instead of cracking the glass, passed through it, a thin black smudge visible on the other side.

Below, the square. Early morning pedestrians. All walked alone, faces in their phones against a screen of naked branches and fog.

Madeleine had timed the email to Charlotte, containing the link to a pre-paid, round-trip ticket, for three hours after she’d ingested the liquid. Maybe a bit brutal. But a week in London, with generous per diems, was a decent deal. The business to be taken care of wasn’t all that complicated, Charlotte would have had plenty of time to herself.

Charlotte had taken a new-age-y turn over the past several years, she’d have brought crystals and white candles and maybe even pentagrams.

Fat lot of good they’d done.

Parts of her down there, crunched beneath the sole of a shoe. Her ashes, clinging to frost-bitten plants, to the desolate tables and chairs of the little Italian coffee stand, where she and Nigel sometimes had breakfast when it was warm.

Madeleine turned her back on the window.

The room was a mess, including the bed—goose-feather pillows misshapen as though they’d been pummeled, linen sheets wadded into a sweaty-looking ball. Even the duvet was rumpled; the velvet and brocade throw pillows looked slept on.

Or fucked on.

Men’s dress shirts were strewn across the settee, draped from the gilded curlicues that framed the floor-length mirror. Along the wall beside the closet marched a ragged row of shoes and boots.

As she reverberated with hopeless longing, something happened to the shoes.

Surfacing through a pair of Armani loafers, their toes polished like mirrors, the sober brown of Nigel’s chukka boots. Calfskin, always Loakes. Slightly worn at the heel, he’d have had to buy new ones next year.

On the bedside table appeared the bottles, the tiny ones, for their last stay in this room, dark blue glass, no labels. One each. The vertigo swept back in as the bottles vanished, made worse by the fact that, when she glanced into the mirror, a blank room stared back at her.

Had her presence stirred the room’s memory of things it had once held? As though in answer to her question, the shirts on the settee darkened, a cloud passing beneath them: her black silk nightgown. Usually her lingerie repertoire was more adventurous; stockings (Nigel preferred garter belts to thigh-high stay-ups), corsets (the real kind, with actual stays, in which she could barely breathe, no wonder women had ditched the goddamned things) but, not knowing who might discover them, she’d opted for floor-length, black, expensive.

But wasn’t she wearing that nightgown?

No, she was wearing a dress, black, a mid-calf thing with fitted bodice, jet buttons, froths of lace at the throat and cuffs. She’d gone through a Goth phase in her mid-thirties, at the tail end of the life stage when one could still follow the students’ fads and not look ridiculous. She hadn’t worn it in years.

Charlotte. Madeleine had told her she could choose the dress, in the directional email. Charlotte choosing this dress was the highest of all possible Charlotte honors, she’d have kept it for herself if she could have buttoned it up. And she’d gotten it right with the boots, through which the grain of the hardwood floor winked in a disturbing way.

Palimpsest. That was the word she’d been reaching for, to describe the surfacing ghosts of her things, of Nigel’s. A favorite of Madeleine’s, but one Nigel had labeled “the most pretentious word in the entire English language.”

Had Nigel found her pretentious?

His folded trousers and shirt materialized—with a clarity that made her sway—through the hotel bathrobe carelessly tossed across the desk chair. The clothes he’d worn on their last day, their last night. He hadn’t wanted to die in pajamas, so he’d climbed, naked, between the sheets, his body warm around hers. Knowing, all the while, what he was about to do.

The clothes vanished. As though Nigel himself had appeared, only to inform her he was leaving again. She was alone, both in the silent room and in the empty cavern of herself.

A phantom-limb tenderness that swelled into an ocean, she was swimming in it. Madeleine tensed for its ebb, for the pain that would follow.

But instead of pain, a thorny little sprout of doubt. Nigel had said, as they’d signed the pact, that he’d never be able to live in a world that did not also contain her.

How, in any dimension or universe, did that square with him dumping her? It made no sense, and things that made no sense were generally not as they appeared. Vital facts were missing, which, when adduced, explained the inexplicable.

From the doubtful sprout sprang a tiny, fragile bud of hope.

Maybe the stag had not been trying to tell her that Nigel was gone, lost to her forever. She had jumped to that conclusion. But perhaps the stag’s message was other. Something less obvious. Medieval exegesis was nothing if not polyvalent. Contradictory, even, with its four possible levels of interpretation—literal, typological, tropological, anagogical—for the Bible and for everything else. Anagogical was Nigel’s favorite; the stag as mystical bridegroom, like in the Song of Songs. She’d let her emotions run away with her—understandably, under the circumstances—rather than thinking the problem through.

If she herself had landed in the hotel, the logical supposition was that Nigel had done so as well. The problem was the unknown quantity of time elapsed between their deaths and the present moment, whenever that was.

Compounded by the fact that Nigel was distracted by the least little thing, which would have him off down the street, only to lose track of whatever it was as soon as something else caught his eye, reaching the corner with no idea why he was heading in that particular direction and not the opposite one.

By Nigel’s own account, his morning walks consisted primarily of wandering along the Thames, or staring up into the trees in a square somewhere. If he got lost, he just wandered some more.

Why should he be any different now? There must be a million ways to lose one’s bearings in this dimension.

And there was no shortage of places in the hotel for Nigel to lose himself. The bar, for starters, with its gloomy old portraits, whose identities Nigel pondered. Or the founder’s library, jumbled with oddities, where Nigel liked to thumb through dusty books with obscure titles and fading jackets. The warren of meeting rooms that occupied the basement, or the 234 guest rooms, each with its own quirky architectural details—he’d stared for a quarter of an hour once at a fireplace bordered in stucco vines, trying to work out the artful symmetry of the twining arabesque pattern.

Nigel was anything but methodical, but she was organized, meticulous. Thorough. She’d scour the entire hotel, room by room, for the next century if need be. She’d have to risk Nigel returning to the suite and not finding her here. Because how did you leave a message for a ghost?

Okay, so she’d come back often and check. Problem solved, or as well as it could be.

Or. How stupid she’d been. He could also be in Newcastle. Because maybe the deal was that you wound up where your ashes did (the British always chose cremation, there wasn’t space for more cemeteries). Alice—

What if she found him only to learn the worst? That he wasn’t here, with her, because he didn’t want to be? The floor seemed to waver and roll beneath her transparent feet.

Well. Just like with her diagnosis, she’d want the truth. Without obfuscation. Not four months, Jag had said when she’d pressed him. More like three. And that was knowledge: it had allowed her to choose between her dwindling options, all awful, but at least she’d had the power to choose. She’d want to know, she’d always want to know. And so she would.

She still felt a little dizzy. But the cold had subsided, and the despair was gone. In its place, a sense of purpose. A goal. A quest—how very medieval. Like the bride in the Song of Songs, she’d fly over valleys and mountains, towers and fortresses, never flagging, never tiring. In search of her beloved.

Because it was the bride who searched, while the stag wandered the hills, nibbling on leaves and tender green shoots, appearing and disappearing at will.

The bride had to do the work (didn’t she always?). That was the message of the window.

The post Bad, Bad Love in the Afterlife: Chapter 2 of #novelinprogress… appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love: Hurts Worse When It Dumps You

“I know where they keep their porn.” Bad Love Incarnate—the unconventionally handsome Brit with the gap-toothed smile and a camera slung around his neck, the one from the Alhambra—said that. In the foyer of a house we were somehow standing in, at the top of a winding mountainside road that might have been a private driveway, between Vélez-Málaga and the coast. We’d seen the sea from where we’d left the car. Not that far away, boats on it, salt smell in the air, lights from the too many hotel chains hugging the beach throwing their reflections across it like so many drunkenly skipping stones.

Drunk. We were drunk. Before reaching the foyer, we must have hit ten dive bars slung out across a sloppy radius of scrubby, mountainous countryside within driving distance from the property Bad Love Incarnate managed for his parents (and with his parents, as in, he for all intents and purposes lived with them; he was in his early forties). All the bars had blow dealers in the back, and Bad Love Incarnate–somewhat miraculously, given his absolutely terrible Spanish–knew them all.

We rode in his old truck with the windows down—the air pleasantly cool, I don’t remember the season, all of them except winter feel sort of alike. When I needed to pass out (only for a while, I’d always wake up after fifteen minutes or thirty, or whenever we reached the next destination, ready for another drink), I did. Sprawled across his lap, my hair reaching across his thighs almost to the floor, we both liked that, I probably liked it the most, his fingers lazy in my hair.

Secret: I never let myself completely black out, I wanted to savor the feeling of his hands in my hair. For later, for the probably long time until I’d feel them there again.

I gloried in every bad thing we did that night, I’d waited so long for it. This was my date night. I’d been a good girl.

Though I’d cheated on Bad Love Incarnate, that very week, my way of acting out against the waiting… A couple of months later, when we were on our way to burning out, I would tell him about it and not really get the reaction I was gunning for: he wanted details. While we were doing the very thing I was telling him about having done with someone else.

Anyway. This was my night. I’d earned it (I know there is at least one mental health professional who follows this Bad Love Blog fairly closely… interpret that last sentence with as much therapist-license as you choose).

The relationship, if you can call it that, was not what I’d pictured, during the weeks after that fateful encounter in the Alhambra (nothing looked like what it was that night, not even the Alhambra). I actually let Bad Love Incarnate talk me into ditching my perfectly great life in Madrid, where I had hip flight-attendant friends who partied like nobody’s business and got us into absolutely every club, even the ones with velvet ropes in front of them, and onto free flights all over the place pretty much every weekend, of course this was well before 9-11. I loved Madrid. Where I was actually (sometimes) getting work done on my thesis, which was, incidentally, also about people who drank and partied too much, albeit in the 11th century. I actually let this dude talk me into moving to Granada (not—and this should have been a red flag—into the second guest house on his parents’ property, but rather to a city not that far away but far enough to mean that efforts had to be made). Where I knew no one (though I soon remedied that). Where I would be close to him.

Ha.

I did that move right. Found an amazing studio in a rehabilitated sixteenth-century carmen in the Albaicín. Right across the Carrera del Darro from the Alhambra, self-same World Heritage Site where I’d had the misfortune (though I didn’t know that yet) to encounter Bad Love Incarnate for the very first time. I quickly made friends with my forty-ish landlady, who invited me every afternoon—after I’d spent an hour or so getting high with my hash-dealer neighbors on our patio, staring at the goldfish in our very own pond—up to her terrace for sherry. We drank and shot the shit (my Spanish getting more Andaluz by the hour) and contemplated the Alhambra. She’d ask me to show her the snippets of medieval Arabic love poetry I’d translated that day (the hash-dealing neighbors were forbidden to appear at my door before 5 p.m., so chances were I’d gotten at least some work done before knocking off to get fucked up). And I would retranslate my Arabic-English translations into Spanish for her, spontaneously, feeling all inspired by the Alhambra—it’s pretty spectacular when the lights come on at night—and by the secret certainty of what I thought I’d found there. Once she said my translations, or the verses, or the combination, were so terribly beautiful she could barely stand to listen, and she cried.

Bad Love Incarnate wasn’t much interested in my translations. In fact, I don’t think he ever read a single one.

Another thing I did in my sixteenth-century carmen studio apartment was wait for Bad Love Incarnate to call. This was long before anyone carried cell phones around, or even had them, or had even thought of them. People still used pay phones, and even telegrams (I’ll tell you about one of those in a couple of weeks). For him to call, easy-peasy. Mum and Dad had a perfectly good phone in the kitchen of the house into which they had turned La Escuela. Which Bad Love Incarnate rarely used. At least not to reach me, which he could have done on my landlady’s phone at any time, had he been so inclined—she had instructions to wake me or find me or roust me however she had to, from wherever she had to, if she so much as suspected she heard his voice on the other end of her perennially crackly line.

Par contre, for me to call—which I would do with Pavlovian regularity at our appointed times, usually really early in the morning, which he knew I hated, but I would get up and do it for him anyway—I had to walk down a steep incline along twisty, zigzagging streets lined with sleeping white stucco houses to a payphone, for which I previously had to have scrounged together enough coins for a long conversation (on the few occasions he actually came to the phone, we often ended up talking for an hour, maybe two, always on my dime, as it were, or peseta—he was a good talker in the early morning, when you could catch him. Sounded like he’d done a lot of early morning coke, and maybe he had). Usually his dad would answer. Usually he was “out.” And I would spend my coins chatting to his dad. At the time it never really occurred to me, or maybe I blocked those thoughts out, but now it does: what did the parents think? Oh, and after he’d failed to manifest and the dad and I had chatted through all my change, I had to walk back up the steep incline. My pockets lighter. No more coins.

I think Bad Love Incarnate did use that phone at least occasionally, to reach his cocaine-codependent wife. He liked to talk to me about her. Between, that is, the long, long silences. We’re talking weeks. When he didn’t talk to me at all.

And then, one day, like the blazing sun after a rainy month in Galicia, “Come over this weekend.”

No need to tell me twice. Always with the stomach-churning knowledge that he might cancel at the last minute (precedent was well established), I packed my suitcase, feeling safe only once the bus was actually pulling out of the station. No cell phones. He couldn’t call me on the bus to cancel.

Why he didn’t want to see me more often was a mystery I couldn’t solve–not drunk, not high, not sober. As soon as he laid eyes me I could see him calculating—where he could take me, private or at least semi- so. To take me. And I was down with that.

Just as I was with being in that foyer. He’d used a key, hadn’t he? I hadn’t seen that part, but he must have. Of course he knew the people, he knew where they kept their porn.

And their liquor, and their blow.

There were satin sheets on their bed. We didn’t change them when we were done.

We drove back to La Escuela with the sky lightening toward the east. Windows down, my hair spread across his lap.

La Escuela was at the top of a twisty, winding road, too. It had a gravel driveway. Before we went to our (separate) beds to sleep, with the sun just slipping above the horizon, we had a long good-bye, me flat on my back in the gravel driveway. The sky was especially beautiful, I was looking straight up at it. Feeling it meet my eyes like a hard kiss. Feeling the little stones beneath me. Grinding into my back. Each one with its sharp little edges. Making me bleed.

“Was it just that we wanted to keep on—talking how we did and digging into ourselves…–to wonder how not to do it: live: not to live: not to live long enough to lose each other and so to die in the old way, happy?

We were happy. Was that so hard to stand?

Was can’t last what made it bearable or can?”

–Noy Holland, BIRD: A Novel

Maybe Bad Love Incarnate, perennially high as he was, was the smart one of the pair. He knew ecstasy was best doled out in small doses (once it’s gone, it’s gone). And he knew it was best served either very hot or very cold, mixed liberally with pain.

When he was gone, when we were done, when it was over–… But no, I think we’ve had enough Bad, Bad Love for Good (Bad) Friday, that’s enough suffering for this week. I’ll come back and tell you the last chapter later. Promise.

Oh, and today’s pic? One of my favorite streets in Granada. Where Bad Love Incarnate only came to see me twice. Once when he helped me move, and once months after we’d broken up. When I was on the point of moving back to the states with Hubby #1 (to whom we’ll get, I promise, he was Really, Really Bad Love, I found him in an airport).

That time he cried.

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The Ones that Wore My Clothes

So yes, him. The one who liked to wear my underwear—one of you dear readers wanted to hear more. Actually, there was more than one. Three of ‘em, by my count, that liked to dig around in my closet and play dress-up. There was the ethereal, sylph-y grad student in Classics who spent most of his time playing D&D—I found him on an archaeological dig somewhere in the Mediterranean. We hooked up on the sly all over the dig site—what is it about shovels and trowels and dusty work boots?  He was terrible to me, in the end, and I hankered after him all the harder for it. He liked a vampire-sleeved, full-skirted black velvet number I wore pretty much whenever it was clean in those days, with a sweetheart neckline and a fitted waist. He looked hot. He took it off and we had great sex. A lot.

I don’t know what happened to him in the end. I do not believe it inaccurate to imagine him conventionally married somewhere along the Northeast Corridor (my money would be on Boston), father to beautiful Aryan offspring. Teaching Latin in a respectable boys’ school because he never finished the doctorate because D&D. I would bet a large amount of my juicy 2017 tax return that he does not wear his wife’s dresses. Quite probably because he does not find them interesting enough to bother.

And there was the guy in my intensive Arabic program, also blond and ethereal, son of a fundamentalist of some sort (it’s always the minister’s son…) from upper Michigan. Having his very own ruhr springer halfway around the world in Cairo. He was more gamine than handsome, in the red dress we scrounged up somewhere, at his request, for a Halloween bash we were throwing (I did some of the hardest partying of my life among the ex-pat community in Cairo). He took choosing eye shadow as serious as a heart attack. He even shaved his legs. I dressed as Eve for that party—there was a florist’s shop on the ground floor of our building, it was easy to bargain for a day’s leftovers, which were the basis of my costume. And a cut-up spring green bed sheet so there’d be something to pin the flowers to, and not much else. Monsieur Gamine and I never got together, some bad things happened to me that year and I went to some dark places, where wholesome preacher’s chillun couldn’t easily follow. Closet drag queens or not. Last I heard he, too, was conventionally married, a father, etc., etc. As noted above, this is the effect I tend to have.

But the one we’ve gathered to hear about, I believe, is the tanned and unconventionally handsome Brit with the camera slung around his neck (he was a filmmaker/3rd-tier actor/L.A. factotum taking a break from his habits and his co-dependent marriage—yes, if you’re keeping track, another married one—as a handyman around his parents’ property in Southern Spain). Smiling his bright white, gap-toothed smile as he trailed 29-year-old me through the Alhambra until I put down my champagne glass and talked to him. He ruined a black lace teddy. Stretched its poor seams to their ripping point, and once he was out of it, it did not regain its shape.

I actually didn’t mind that much about the teddy, I’d gotten it on sale at El Corte Inglés in Granada; I could raid my graduate student stipend again the next month. He didn’t look especially good in it, his face was too masculine, with a big beaky nose. Truth to tell, the teddy was incongruous on either of us in that rustic cabin, against the backdrop of rural Andalucía that peered in through the naked windows, in a place where dusty work boots (those again) were the default footwear of all persuasions and genders. But he seemed to enjoy it, and, as I say, I didn’t mind it. So we made a fire, put a blanket on the floor, and got very drunk and very high. It’s quite likely we did a couple of lines as well, he had a very big problem with white powders that he was trying unsuccessfully to remedy in the wilds of Andalucía, where he probably hadn’t imagined he’d have such an easy time finding dealers.

It is possible that I was more open than some might be to the idea of my beloveds in my clothes because of the stuff I was studying—I was, at that time, literally swimming in medieval Arabic love lyrics sung by lovesick (male) poets to effeminate, or at the very least androgynous, male beloveds:

I lay awake, insomniac, during the night through which you slept,

            The night is careless of that which I suffer—your gaze knows it.

Inside the litter* adorned is a face that keeps hidden its secrets…

            Lo, when he decrees a halt, beauty sends forth its own legal decree,

Leading them astray from the path of moderation…

–Abu Bakr `Ubada ibn Ma’ al-Sama’ (the latter part of which translates, more or less, as “Son of Water from the Sky”; translation mine)

*Litters! Those again. I defined them in last week’s post. NB: as made clear in these lines, they were not just for the ladies.

I spent hours and hours with these pretty boys and my Arabic dictionaries, translating them. We got up close and personal. So of course I liked them. As I did the troubadours, which were also part of my project, who reveled in effeminate style—Glam Rockers of the twelfth century, they sported trailing locks and sleeves and had the ladies swooning.

No, I had no problem with the ripped teddy, or with crazy drunken nights when we did crazy drunken things. What I had a problem with were the bad, bad love parts—did I mention he’s remarried now, conventionally? Like I said, I tend to have that effect.

The bad, bad love parts were really, really bad. I think I will save those for next week. And we will eventually get back to Kurt-not-Kurt, I promise. All this is taking us right straight back there.

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The Path to Kurt-not-Kurt Leadeth Us Through the Alhambra, II

So. The unconventionally handsome tanned guy with gap-toothed smile, British accent, and a camera slung around his neck? The one following twenty-nine-year-old me around a nocturnal Alhambra ablaze with oil lamps and candles (and champagne)? Turned out he liked to wear my underwear.

Ladies, he was Bad Love Incarnate. In or out of my lingerie, in any sense you would like to take that phrase, I have spent years musing over metaphor so I’m game for whatever you’ve got.

Also turned out that the charming elderly couple to whom Bad Love Incarnate introduced me when we returned inside to the bar (from gazing out over Granada from the ramparts of the Alhambra, the city ablaze, ourselves ablaze, everything ablaze and so we were thirsty) were… his parents.

With whom he lived. In a converted schoolhouse in a tiny Andalusian town—no sea view, up in the mountains—named Vélez-Málaga (if you know where that is, then you really know Spain). They had dubbed the house, imaginatively, La Escuela. There were two guest houses. Bad Love Incarnate had set up housekeeping (sort of) in one.

I decided the other one was for me.

Now that I have you hooked, all three of you dear, dear, dear readers, ‘ere long I needs must leave you, because I have a dinner date. With the ex-husband. One of them, anyway.

No, no, no, no Bad, Bad Love with him. There will be none of that, believe me, I just need to get him to sign the tax return: he’s my ex in the eyes of everything but the law. He continues to mooch health insurance off me, or more properly said, off my employer, all perfectly legal because we’re still married on paper… I just need to look good enough to get him to sign on the dotted line (*I* get the $$ because *I* earned it in the first place), which means I actually have to brush my hair for the first time today. So I gotta go.

But next week, I promise, promise, promise, a nice long entry about Bad Love Incarnate, alcohol and drugs, and Bad Love Incarnate’s father. Who was born in Gibraltar, who spoke Spanish like a native of Andalusia—Bad Love Incarnate was worse than useless in that language; however messed up we were, my Spanish was always, always, always pretty much perfect so I talked for both of us. And who (the dad, id est) was a British spy in North Africa during WWII.

And we have to tell about Bad Love Incarnate in order to get us to Husband #1 (tonight’s activity involves #2), who will, in turn, I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, get us back to Kurt-not-Kurt, which is, I know, all you care about, the only reason you ever stop by this little inter-place. I know. Don’t worry, I don’t take it personally.

But before I go upstairs to brush my hair, or at least attempt to untangle it, I will leave you to ponder why we like love to hurt so much. Why we—the human race—have always liked love to hurt so much…

All the way back to the fourteenth century, they liked love to hurt so much. Witness this love lyric penned by one who knew the nocturnal Alhambra well, in all its fourteenth-century glory, being a favorite among the Sultan’s guests… he’d probably enjoyed the very same glittery view Bad Love Incarnate and I contemplated on that fateful night. And he was probably just as drunk as we were—the idea that medieval Muslims did not drink is a very, very mistaken one. Anyhoo…

The blooms of beauty in the garden

Were ripped asunder by their howdahs,* as they took them for their sleeves;

She bewitches; she can, if she wishes, on the day of defamation,

Throw a lance that will make shudder [as it hits its mark].

For her, man’s reason is booty,

That of those who died honorably from love’s swiftness.

Whenever she wills our drunkenness,

She gives us a draught of bad omens, instead of wine…

Among that which love had left to me is a flash of lightning—

They imagined it glimmering from between the teeth of a smile,

And the breath of a breeze, coming from the armor…

From the caravan, where they die of thirst…

–court poet Abū Ishāq Ibn al-Hajj, Granada (maybe even the actual Alhambra), 14th c.

**NB: A howdah is one of those litter things, like a little carriage with silken curtains balanced on the backs of camels. Inside, the dark-eyed beauty who’s just eaten the poet’s heart for dinner, and now is off ‘cross the cruel sands of the Arabian desert to the next way-station, buh-BYE.

That there poem was translated from the Arabic—the medieval Arabic, no less—just for y’all (okay, also for an academic publication, with footnotes that I took out because people don’t like footnotes on blogs, but it was cut and pasted ‘specially and uniquely for your delectation), by your friend the Redneck Scheherazade. Who has to go brush her hair, like, right now. And maybe her teeth too.

Catch you next Friday. Till then, love lots and love badly. If you can’t do lots, then at least do badly.

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