Meet Me in Madrid Read online

  Meet Me in Madrid

  Verity Lowell

  Orange gleams athwart a crimson soul

  Lambent flames; purple passion lurks

  In your dusk eyes.

  Red mouth; flower soft,

  Your soul leaps up—and flashes

  Star-like, white, flame-hot.

  Curving arms, encircling a world of love,

  You! Stirring the depths of passionate desire!

  —“You! Inez!” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 1921

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author Bio

  Excerpt from The Life Revamp by Kris Ripper

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Madrid, Charlotte pondered. There had to be someone she could call on short notice in Madrid.

  She was sitting alone waiting on the bill in the rather stuffy restaurant belonging to her rather stuffy hotel near the Academia de Bellas Artes. Again, the middle-aged man at the bar turned around to look at her with an alarming lack of subtlety. And again she busied herself with her phone, hoping to give the impression she was waiting for someone.

  It was just after 10:30, a perfectly typical time to finish dinner in a city that sleeps even less than New York. She’d had an excellent three-course meal including a lobster bisque, cardoons with salt cod, and four kinds of mushrooms a la plancha, plus a generously poured glass—make that two—of tasty Rioja. She was well-fed and tired, but given the time change, a little restless, too.

  The best thing about Charlotte’s job at the museum was the travel. The worst thing about Charlotte’s job at the museum was the travel. It was as if someone gave you a Porsche 911 Turbo with all the bells and whistles (and horses) and said it was yours as long as you never did more than drive it under the speed limit to the local grocery store and back—without stopping anywhere along the way. And as long as you left right now and came back ASAP.

  That’s what a courier trip feels like.

  Most people don’t think about how priceless works of art get from one museum to another for a blockbuster show. Which was why her job chaperoning American paintings and sculptures to the Prado or the Louvre or the National Gallery in London sounded so glamourous when she explained it: she was the one personally responsible for making sure the Mary Cassatt or John Singleton Copley loaned by her institution arrived at its destination without a scratch.

  So, yes, her job description required travel, usually business class, to great museum cities around the world. And yes, “all” she had to do was ride along, drop it off, and show up for work the next day. And yes, she liked to think of her role as a cross between Secret Service agent and sexy librarian. But in reality the trips abroad were usually just plain head-buzzing, eyes feel like they’re bleeding, weak-kneed, exhausting.

  Across the Atlantic and back in three days, door-to-door, and she would be once again drinking coffee in her cubicle in New Haven.

  The upside? Once in a while, maybe every third trip or so, something went delightfully sideways. Mishaps usually boiled down to logistics. Bad weather, schedule mix-up, house registrar out sick, striking preparators. These were the flies in the ointment she pinned her hopes on. Unexpected delays translated into extended stays, and that, in a city as vibrant and sophisticated as the Spanish capital, was just what she wanted.

  Thank God for saints.

  James, Charlotte’s museum colleague in operations, was a dapper, some would say needlessly fussy, fellow who had handled travel at the museum for two decades. It wasn’t at all like him to miss an official foreign holiday. But somehow in the process of carefully piecing together Charlotte’s hour-by-hour itinerary, even perspicacious James hadn’t factored in the Immaculate Conception.

  Nor could he have planned on the arctic squall that unexpectedly descended on the city the very day of the Marian festival in the first week of December.

  Someone or something had conspired to keep her in Madrid just a little longer.

  But what to do with the unforeseen gift of free time?

  She’d go out, obviously. But that was easier said than done well in a city she’d only visited once. The most annoying thing about these junkets was that she actually knew (or knew of) some attractive and intelligent people in many of the places she was sent to. If only she’d been given the time to see them.

  In anticipation of her first-ever courier trip last year, Charlotte had written well in advance to one of her dissertation advisors at Yale, who was visiting at Oxford. Sadly, their planned pub crawl in King’s Cross never happened. As she’d sat backstage at the V&A counting the elapsing minutes, a forklift’s transmission gave out and the crate containing the rare, full-length Eakins portrait in her care couldn’t be opened and inspected until several hours after her predicted quitting time.

  This had been Charlotte’s initial schooling in the futility of trying to add pleasure to a business trip.

  But now that the wine had started to ease away the day’s stresses, a local contact hovered just beyond the tip of her mind. Madrid or the Prado or the Thyssen or the city’s other important museum, the Reina Sofía, had come up in a quasi-recent post in one of her personal feeds. Or was it someone she followed? Or had it been a tweet?

  Charlotte oscillated between platforms, scrolling and searching until she found what she was looking for. Adrianna Coates. The name alone filled her with a delightful little charge in what James would jokingly call her “nether regions.” And it had been a minute.

  The last time she’d seen her, Adrianna was wearing her newly issued robin’s-egg blue academic regalia, rising in turn with the other would-be professors to receive her doctoral degree under a crowded tent in one of the grassy quads. Though somewhat older than Charlotte, Adrianna was only four years ahead of her in the doctoral program in art history. They’d actually met when Charlotte was still an undergrad at Yale. Adrianna had been a graduate TA in one of Charlotte’s last big lecture classes. Adrianna had been new to teaching but she was every bit as intimidating as the full professor she was there to assist.

  As PhD students, they’d only had one seminar together—in Adrianna’s final year. Charlotte had put herself together for those beyond-daunting weekly class meetings, dressing as she might for a job interview, if not a first date. With Adrianna to impress up close, she’d read more thoroughly and carefully than for any other class. The paper she wrote that term was the reason she’d received honors. It was published the year she graduated, helped get her a museum job—and was the last original scholarship she really felt good about.

  She
still remembered the first time they’d run into each other socially. It was Charlotte’s third year in the program and she’d gone out to celebrate the end of her first term of teaching—Corot to Manet—with her all-male entourage of grad student queer boys because “real lesbians don’t study the Impressionists,” as they were fond of telling her.

  There were still one or two actual old-school gay bars in New Haven in those days. The most storied, One Fifty-Five Lancaster, a two-roomed garden-level cave with a great patio, was practically across the street from the art history department. Although it had to have been close to eight years ago now—she must have been about twenty-five—Charlotte could summon that night to mind as if it was last week.

  She and the boys were sitting around a big table near the bar when Adrianna came in trailing some extremely hot and considerably younger student type. The two of them, arranged precisely in Charlotte’s sight line, had hardly ordered their dry martinis before they started making out at the bar like prom-goers in the back of a limo. It was dark to begin with, and they were in the back corner. But there was something about the way Adrianna, always so formal and frighteningly whip-smart in the classroom, had allowed the woman’s hands to slip inside her blazer. Something about the way her kiss seemed to deferentially answer to the younger woman’s aggressive advances had stayed with Charlotte; all these years later, she vividly recalled what it felt like to watch them. It was funny and a bit sobering to realize she was now probably about the same age Adrianna had been at the time; she’d have to be in her early forties by now.

  But here were the Instagram photographs Charlotte had been thinking of. Carefully composed, really quite sensual imagery of lipstick-stained espresso cups on marble café tables; of the hems of women’s skirts, their legs tucked underneath; of stray cats regarding each other across the pebbled paths of the public gardens. If Adrianna’s moody snapshots were taken in Madrid, it was not the city Charlotte had yet discovered.

  Cross-referencing them with Adrianna’s FB page, Charlotte determined (she preferred to think of it as good spycraft rather than stalkery behavior) that Adrianna was currently residing in Madrid on a prestigious sabbatical fellowship. According to her latest posts, she was there to document a group of objects housed at a convent near the palace. Made up of paintings, elaborate jewels, and tapestries, the collection had originally belonged to a seventeenth-century nun who spent her life assembling art in a cloister of royal women.

  All very interesting. But did she dare send La Reine des glaces—the ice queen—as they used to call her, an after-dinner message on a snowy night?

  * * *

  Adrianna Coates had had a long day. She’d spent the morning at the National Library ordering up baroque manuscripts and poring over them in a very cold and crowded reading room. She’d then gone to the dismal basement cafeteria for her usual late lunch: a crust of hard, saltless bread, a few pieces of chorizo, and a pincho de tortilla—as Spaniards referred to a narrow slice of cold potato, onion, and egg pie. A demi glass of cheap white wine was her reward.

  After the sun went down, she’d Metro’d to the city center in anticipation of a tiresome but mandatory dinner meeting of her fellow fellows in the loud, smoky bar next door to one of the city’s oldest restaurants.

  She had quickly come to hate these monthly gatherings. Of a group of fifteen, she was, and would continue to be, the only woman of color and, as far as she could tell, the only queer person. It was a true boys’ club. The two other women were a pompous sexagenarian emerita from Columbia who continually asked her where she was “really” from and a mousy blonde from Dartmouth in a constant state of anxiety (understandable, Adrianna granted) over the well-being of her three-year-old twin sons still residing with their overwhelmed father back in New Hampshire.

  It was always a two-stage affair. The Ivy that funded their fellowships was fond of following the fellows’ interminable happy hour “reports” with the same kind of vaguely narcotic, drawn-out, fish and cream-sauced dinner the restaurant had been serving since—and maybe during—the Spanish Civil War. She never got through all the courses but she always left feeling like a snake who had swallowed an ostrich egg.

  The thing dragged on forever and as it did, hands and conversation began to wander from the scholarly to the salacious, none of it tasteful or even funny, with alarming speed.

  Adrianna waited until the discussion took an especially off-color turn, which it inevitably did, to excuse herself for an unnecessary trip to the powder room. En route, walking the long wood-paneled hall to the back of the building, she felt her phone’s vibration through the sides of the Goyard bag that accompanied her everywhere.

  She didn’t receive many communiqués at this time of the night. Most people stateside would assume she’d be either out for a late dinner or asleep. Adrianna was curious enough about the sender to plop down on a bank of tufted leather benches outside the W/C and have a look. In any case, it wasn’t like she actually had to go.

  Charlotte Hilaire.

  Now that was a blast from the past. What in the world might cute little Charlotte want—contact info for a colleague, perhaps, or a good word for a job?

  How striking she must be as a grown woman, Adrianna mused. With an ease that surprised her, she could conjure up Charlotte as she was when they’d first met, a formidably intelligent, tennis-playing type who’d gone straight through to grad school and couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. A wearer of sundresses. Small-boned and curvy with olive skin grown deeply tan from days at the beach or on the courts. Freckled. A shy but devastating smile.

  Supremely shy. In fact, if memory served, outside of the seminar, they’d barely spoken to each other. The one exception might have been a few ridiculously chaste coffee dates provisionally arranged to discuss “professional development” or suggested revisions for Charlotte’s brilliant, as Adrianna recalled, thesis on the color line and Impressionism in New Orleans.

  Wasn’t she from New Orleans? Some old-guard Creole family?

  Adrianna realized all this reminiscing had played out even before she clicked into her direct messages to see what, if anything, Charlotte Hilaire wanted from her.

  She’d forgotten they were Facebook friends. But there it was.

  Hers was the kind of stilted, charmingly awkward correspondence Adrianna sometimes received from younger, though usually queer, female scholars who hoped she would read their incipient articles or participate in a panel at a conference.

  Dear Dr. Coates, it began. The remainder of the paragraph said in four or five multi-claused sentences what she might have led with: I’m in Madrid on a courier trip with a couple of extra days on my hands due to the storm. Might you have time for a drink?

  Chapter Two

  Adrianna checked the time. It was just past eleven. For Madrid, especially during a holiday week, this was truthfully a little early for a nightcap. But it might be perfect timing for a quiet get-together at her favorite unofficial women’s bar, a little spot near the Plaza de Chueca.

  But what was she thinking? This wasn’t a date. The girl was emphatically straight. In her mind, Charlotte had always been at the center of a gaggle of preening, tight polo-wearing, meticulously shaven gay boys when Adrianna saw her around Yale. She was just the kind of pretty girl their kind loved to gossip and drink with; a fashionable enhancement of their brand.

  Dealer’s choice, though. If Charlotte Hilaire wanted to kill time with a local in Madrid, she’d be wise to do it at a place of Adrianna Coates’s choosing. For her part, she had little interest in traipsing across the city on a stormy night to meet the girl at her uptight hotel near the museum.

  Adrianna paused a moment, then wrote: Dr. Hilaire! Call me Adrianna, please! How nice to hear from you. I’m actually out right now. Can you get a taxi to Chueca in 30 or so?

  No reason to be coy, she thought, pleased with the lack of hesitation that characterized her post-“di
vorce” self. But then it suddenly and unpleasantly dawned on her that Charlotte might be thinking of the old Adrianna. That back in grad school she might even have witnessed Adrianna’s undistinguished exploits during the death throes of her last, very long-term, relationship. A time when she was definitely not herself.

  Even now she felt ashamed of mid-thirtysomething Adrianna. There was an entire embarrassing year she tried not to remember—when the pain of betrayal filled her with a furious desperation she hoped never to experience again. For the whole of her first two terms of assistant teaching she’d been careless and unfaithful—a vengeful response to the humiliating infidelity of Vera, her eventual ex. Never again.

  Single now for the better part of two years, she was neither hungry nor thirsty. Her sex life was like the feeling of fullness that eventually comes with fasting. In the academic realm, near-superhuman productivity had garnered her scholarly acclaim and no small jealousy from her less single-minded peers. And it was all sustained by an occasional one-night stand or porn marathon. She was as untethered as a balloon, free to float through her forties with few responsibilities or attachments besides the life of the mind and the commitment to stay that way.

  Her phone pinged. A restrained five-minute delay suggested Charlotte’s desire not to seem overly eager while being at the same time unwilling to miss their reunion.

  Perfect.

  They would meet at the Chueca bar at midnight. Adrianna was surprised Charlotte hadn’t balked at the appointed time as too late to leave her hotel, as it might have seemed to other Americans. An image of her former classmate nervously accepting a plastic glass of wine at a long-ago campus reading flashed through Adrianna’s mind. Back then those modestly downcast eyes were a source of frustration, coming from an emerging scholar who had every reason to be confident. But perhaps this Charlotte was less restrained and timid. Maybe now she was a woman of the world.

  * * *