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 19^th 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.