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You'll get lost," she told him. "The same way you did in Seville-you nearly got us killed on those narrow streets. It's your style, you think it's cute. But it's pouring cats and dogs."
He ignored the cliche. "How can I get lost? I can see the cathedral from here." They were staying in the Hotel Alhambra Palace, overlooking Granada, Brad Quigley and his longtime companion, Leonora Kling, experimenting to see if a vacation together might nudge their long relationship into marriage or breakup. She was in her fifties; he was sixty; they worked in different firms within the limpid backwater of Boston finance and had known each other, at first merely collegially, for fifteen years. Her position and income were equal to his; her professional accomplishment shielded them both, to an extent, from the overhanging questions of any prolonged heterosexual connection. There was almost no reason why they couldn't go on as they were, with separate apartments, incomes, and friends. And yet ... a small, brisk brunette, she was growing, he could see, brittle, her gestures jerkier, her temper quicker to flare, her judgments snappier and yet prone to sudden reversals and selfdoubts. Since exercise classes and conditioning gyms had become the fashion, Leonora looked too thin-deprived. Her fine-- boned beauty conformed to the low-maintenance style of Cambridge and Beacon Hill. She did not deign to dye the gray from her hair, left long and pulled taut at the back, and the squint lines in her face were deepening, exaggerating her increasingly frequent expression of a slightly deaf person blaming you for not speaking louder.
"My mother would want me to go," he said. "Mi madre. She would want me to see the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella. She loved them so."
"Don't I know it," Leonora said, though the two women had never met. The only other time Brad had been to Spain, twenty years ago, had been with his mother, an unpublished writer who was doing research for a romantic novel concerning the two monarchs and their only surviving child, the love-crossed Joanna the Mad. It had been a strange trip, beginning with a humiliating, to Brad, embarrassment when the busy clerk at the Madrid hotel, slipping in English, had called his...