The Year In Sex

T he bull died. Alice had never really given the matter any thought. At Las Ventas bullring there was pageantry, and horns blared. She was able to recognize a kind of art in the ritual motion, the fancy foot­work, the strutting of courageous men. Then the thin blade stabbed, puncturing a lung, and the bull died. A team of men and horses clattered into the ring and towed it out, bleeding and floppy. Sweepers followed, obliterating the imprint of the body being dragged across the smooth brown sand, i The stone seats at Las Ventas were hard. The sun | was Spanish stern. The matadors, and the picadors on their armored horses, and the lithe young ban-derilleros who danced up to the bull and stabbed it with bright darts were dressed in sparkly suits. The men sitting around Alice and Will in the cheap seats smoked cigars and drank beer from plastic cups. They cheered aesthetic niceties in the arena that Alice did not perceive. Then the bull died. Next to her, aggravated by the smoke, Will said, "What's wrong?" It would have been better for him, and probably for Alice, if Will had been less physically perfect. He was like a Spanish matador, that trim and shapely, only blond. It was taking them far too long the fact that he was not going to make it as an actor. Twenty-seven. A watershed age, or it should be. But Will could not bear the thought of an anonymous life. Spain wasn't their vacation; it was the island they swam to, escaping them­selves. Neither of them had any idea what happened next. Will was no good with money, so it was Alice's job to make sure the little they had lasted. "The bull died." "What did you expect, Alice Alice?" That was how he'd been signaling his irritation with her lately, doubling her name. She told him, "I'm going to dream about this. "Only if you want to." She watched a dignified man carry a signboard to the center of the ring. The sign­board announced the name of the next bull and some of its particulars. It was fixed to a pole, which he placed on the ground, turning a slow circle so that anybody who wanted to could read it. Before she knew it, another unsuspecting angry bull raced into the ring, look­ing for its tormentor. Twenty minutes later it was dead. Afterward, Will wanted to go out to a sherry bar, but Alice persuaded him to eat in their room. They were staying above Donde Manolo, a work­aday eatery with no choice on the menu; you ate what they had on a given day. The room was a monk's closet, but there was a narrow table with rick­ety legs on which she put out bread and olives, a tin of sardines and half a bottle of rioja. Why on earth did she provoke him after he'd agreed to eat in? "You could go to college," she said. "I could work. I'll get a job, any job. We'd get through it." The anger was there. She watched it narrow like a laser in the erav minils of his arro- - o-—/ r —r —- gant eyes, expecting it to burn a hole in her. But he surprised her and let it go. Sitting on the bed, feeling like Mommy, she watched him pick up a towel, make it a cape, become a matador. It was a bravura performance. Having been to one bullfight, he had the moves down. The swagger, the style, the confidence. The room was a ring and Will its cen­ter of gravity. It was fun. The problem was the mirror on the wall over the chest of drawers. He played to it as though nothing else mattered, least of all Alice. But feeling mature, liking the taste of the wine in the creases under her tongue, she clapped like a real audi­ence. At the same time she could not help dreading the bull. W hich did come into her dream that night, blacker than the Ventas victims. The context was dream-wacky, and she had already lost most of it when she woke up breathing fast and shallow. It was late. Will was snoring like an angel. Out in the street, one horn honked. She got up and looked out the window. Thick shadows were walking on their own, unconnected to bodies. Alice felt old. She was her grand­mother, with her grandmother's eyes, hands, memories. The day she and Will decided to get married it began as a spoof. He wore a Confederate uniform and leaned on a bloody crutch before the justice of the peace. She wore a babushka and seven strings of glass beads around her neck. They were playing parts. Then, with no warning, they became the char­acters they'd affected. I'll leave him. Whispering it in the dead of night didn't count. She picked up Will's towel-cape and made a pass at the animal of her imagination. Just missed getting gored. It was safer to sleep. Her next mistake was telling him what she'd read in the paper the next morning, that Brava Coquense, the Spanish direc­tor, was filming at the Santa Ana Plaza. A thriller of some sort, if she understood the Spanish. Will couldn't stay away. They joined the crowd of spectators behind a I rope line watching the self-important bustle of a movie making itself. Brava Coquense had a silver ponytail and was I steeped in cool. The actors clearly loved 1 him, or pretended they did. They were filming a single scene, a woman with superb long legs pursuing a man in a leather jacket carrying a satchel, both of them twisting through the social hub­bub of walkers and talkers, drinkers and emphatic gesticulators. After the scene was shot, the spectators clapped and Will stomped away in a rage. It was as though he had sneaked up close to the edge of the world where he belonged, only to crash into an invisible field of force. Alice knew better than to chase after him. That night Will did not come back to the room. Sleep­ing alone was a relief. Alice felt the kind of sexual longing she had experienced as a teen­ager, an ache like loneliness incarnate. She brushed the loneliness lightly with a hand and found herself crying softly, thinking of her grandmother. Mama Aija fled Latvian hor­rors she refused to speak of, winding up in Queens mar­ried to an Irish fireman. Once, when Alice was a kid, she had gone into Mama Aija's room and found her standing naked before the full-length mirror, one hand over her groin, the other tracing the outline of her sagging pink breasts in a tender effort of memory that devastated the girl and aroused a fierce protective instinct in her. The old woman smiled at her granddaughter with radiant kindness. Later, Alice understood the sorrow in Mama Aija's blue eyes to ¦ be sacred knowledge, leaping I a generation to make a home in her. The next day Will came back to the room with an iPhone and a bottle of fino. The cost of the phone alarmed Alice. With styl­ized defiance he opened the bottle and poured her a glass. "And the service plan?" she asked him. "I told them you'd come back tomor­row and work that out." "We can't afford it." "How am I supposed to get work if nobody can find me, Alice Alice?" Here was the moment toward which they had been maneuvering in their complicit ignorance. She tasted the sherry. It was very nice. Quietly she told him, "No one is trying to find you, Will. They don't want you." He came as close as he ever would to hitting her. The flat of his hand grazed her face. But he (continued on page 122) THE BULL YOU SEE, THE BULL YOU DON'T Continued from page 74 had an actor's iron control over his body, and she understood the blow was psychic, or symbolic, or some other messed-up thing, and it was up to her to decide the extent of the damage that was done. To impress the depth of his hurt feelings on her he swept dramatically from the room, leaving the phone and the bottle behind, slamming the door after him. She passed another lonely night, acutely conscious of Mama Aija before the mirror, a precious leg­acy of self-knowledge she hoped one day to be able herself to pass on. The following day was interesting because it was totally up to Alice what she did. There was no sign of Will, nor did she expect him. The offending phone lay on the table. She drank a tiny glass of fino before she went out looking for breakfast and later spent a seduc­tive hour in a bookstore absorbed in picture books of bulls and the matadors who lived to kill them. Maybe it was a little surprising that Will didn't come back that night either. And maybe calling what she felt relief made things too tidy in her heart. But she did. There was room and time and a need for tidiness. An old-fashioned clock hulked in one corner of the room on clunky feet, an artifact of fash­ionable days. Normally she didn't notice the dock's insistent tick, but that night it raced her to the edge of a cliff she had not anticipated. Two more solo days, the hours and their minutes sharp enough to draw blood. She had the sensation of standing in a ring. The sand was brown. It mattered how she stood her ground. She slept late the following day and woke knowing that some ultimate thing was going to happen. Of course she had known all along where to find Will. With the Dutch woman. Katja was studying the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, writing some sort of thesis on evil. She had an exquisite small body and an understated command of the space around her. Katja was in charge of her neighborhood, wherever she moved, but was not too proud to notice a man as beautiful as Will. Alice took her time, not wishing to be or to appear hurried. The little plaza was hard to find. You had to know what you were looking for. You walked down a narrow street where the buildings on either side were so close the sun did not penetrate until suddenly you stumbled into a triangular space of cobbled stones with a fountain of blackened bronze and numerous city birds chirping in the waxy leaves of a tree that would never be big. The plaza was bright in early afternoon, and they did not notice Alice on the periph­ery, half in shadow. Somewhere Will had come up with a cape. A real one, red as heart's blood and sheeny. Also a sword, the sort of estoque the matadors used to make the kill. He was fighting the bull, which was invisible, and doing it with style. At the foun­tain in a folding chair, Katja with her perfect perky tits watched with admiration, clapping now and then. Four of her Dutch friends sat there with her. They shared a bottle of wine and an appreciation for the grace and skill with which this blond American played out the Spanish ritual. Didn't they see, Alice wondered, that he was an actor? It was fascinating, watching Will's mas­tery of the cape, which he held low and close to draw the bull in, courting danger and threatening murder at the same time. Alice felt vicarious pride, not a pride of ownership but of the eye. At that moment, in the sun-spackled plaza on the stones of Madrid, Will was complete, content and without flaw. He took her breath away. She knew what was coming. The bull was lacerated, it was aggravated. After it was weakened still more, chasing a continually disappearing enemy, the torero chose his moment. Will stood watching the animal breathe, its invisible chest heaving, blood dripping on the cobbles. He raised the esloque and stepped forward, ready to stab. But when he got to the place he imagined the bull's defenseless shoulders to be, there was Alice. Her presence broke the spell; she couldn't help it. She would not soon forget his indignation. "What are you doing here?" He held the sword poised to strike, at the lethal angle he had seen them affect at Las Ventas. For an instant, Alice thought he would bring the thin blade down on her head, but that was an indulgence on both their parts. She was not exactly aware of what she was doing until it was done, but that seemed to be how important things hap­pened to her. She reached for the sword, and Will let it drop into her hand without resist­ing. He surrendered the cape when she tugged on it. She folded the cape over her forearm, and clutched the sword in her other hand. She turned around and marched away. Katja and her friends sat there stunned. This was not the ending they'd been build­ing up to. Will, because he was Will, had not memorized his lines. At the edge of the plaza Alice whispered three times, I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee. Three times made it proper, made it right. Made it happen. That night she went to an ATM and took out half the cash in their account. Down­stairs at Donde Manolo, the Ecuadoran cook gave her an envelope and a free torti­lla. She ate the tortilla slowly in their room, nibbling since it was her last meal in Spain. She put the money in the envelope and left it on the table. She placed the phone on top of the envelope. She thought about smash­ing it. That would save Will money, and he wouldn't have the strength to do it himself. But it was up to him to smash the phone or not. She slowly drank a glass of fino. Not until the shadows had reclaimed the streets did she leave the room. Her pack was surprisingly light, and she felt buoyant. She was not 100 percent sure, yet, where she was going. In a while she would feel bad for Will. Not yet, though. She slung her pack over her back and walked. There was the bull you saw, she understood as she went, and also the bull you didn't.