“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.