Via Dolorosa(12)

“Isn’t it terrible?” Emma said, no doubt seeing her moment to interject. She was sitting forward in her chair and she suddenly looked very young—too young, Nick thought—and nothing at all like a wife.

“It is terrible,” Isabella said, “but it is beautiful, too. I guess I will just have to keep myself busy here in the hotel until the storm passes.”

“Well,” Nick said, “maybe you’ll find something inside the hotel to photograph.”

Isabella smiled again. She was very pretty. “There are always interesting things to photograph,” she told him. “There is never a shortage of such interesting things.”

“Well, I hear the storm should pass soon enough,” Nick said.

“That is good,” Isabella said. “Muy bueno.”

“Isabella lives in Greenwich Village,” Emma said suddenly, turning and looking at her husband. “Isn’t it a small world? I was telling her how we’d looked for a place in the city before you left for Iraq, but that we couldn’t afford anything.” To Isabella, she said, “Anyway, they shipped him off sooner than we’d hoped. Not that, you know, not that we hoped he would be shipped off. But I guess some things, they’re inevitable. Anyway, it was all very sudden. He wanted a place in the city, a little studio in the city where he could paint, but, well, it was all very sudden.”

“We didn’t look very hard, really,” Nick stated. “We could have probably found a place.”

“But we went on a great trip before Nick was shipped overseas. We spent a week in the city, stayed at the Edison in Times Square, and it was spectacular. I’d never been to New York and Nick had been only once, when he was very young, so it was like we were learning about the city together. It was much bigger than I’d expected, too, but I was confident I could live there, even when Nick was away. I’d promised him that I’d get into a routine and work him into it once he came back.”

“It just didn’t work out,” he said. “We didn’t have enough time before I had to leave.”

“It was very sudden,” Emma said again. It was a point she seemed intent on making.

“But you’re not from New York originally,” Nick said.

“No, no,” said Isabella. “Madrid, Spain. I came here as a child, though, and traveled with my father. My mother, she died when I was very young, and my father and I did much traveling together.”

“Do you go back often?” he said. “To Spain?”

“I have been back only once.”

“To see your father?”

“Sadly, no. He is dead now.”

“Oh,” he said, and could not think of anything else to say.

“So you find New York City to be a good place to paint?” Isabella asked, and she was watching Nick now like someone suddenly curious, fondling him with her eyes. “Personally, I find it very inspirational.”

“I suppose,” he said. In truth, he had not been inspired by anything in the city after returning from overseas and, really, he no longer entertained any desire to live in the city, or to move anywhere outside the small Pennsylvania town where he and Emma occupied the narrow, drafty, two-bedroom townhouse left to him by his father. He found, rather quickly and with some vexation, that he felt incapable of any amount of inspiration, regardless of location, since his return from Iraq.

“I find Boston to be that way, too,” Isabella said. “I love shooting in Boston.”

“Oh, we’ve been meaning to go to Boston, too,” Emma said, now quite visibly excited that she had, at least in the bowels of her own privileged superstitions, unwittingly found herself in the center of some inexplicable choreography of fate. “I have relatives there and Nick and I were planning to go visit some day. We wanted to go in the winter when it wouldn’t be so crowded in the city.”

“It is cold,” Isabella said.

“But not so crowded,” said Emma.

“So, Nicholas, you were in Iraq,” Isabella said.

“Yes.”

“How long were you there?”

“Just under a year. Eleven months.”

“Did you see any real fighting?”

Something in him found the question insulting. “Some,” he said. And it occurred to him that perhaps it wasn’t the question he’d found insulting but, rather, the way Isabella Rosales had intended it. There was something about her nature that provoked him, although he could not tell for certain if it was deliberate or not.

“I would love to shoot out in Iraq.” Then, smiling, Isabella Rosales added, “Photos, I mean. Not guns.”

“Don’t worry. There are enough guns out there already,” Nick assured her.

“I would take pictures of the children,” she said. “I would take pictures of their bodies being piled into the back of pickup trucks. I would take pictures of their raw skin and the blood and how their heads turn funny on their necks when they are lifted from the streets.”

Nick did not say anything. Emma, too, was silent; she could only stare at Isabella and could not find a single word to say.

“Well,” Nick said, feeling his eyebrows rise.

“Do you have any pictures from when you were there? I would love to see them if you have them.”