While our husbands were in meetings, we’d gone to visit the Black Madonna. We took a train away from the beaches and into some foothills, then a cable car over the steep rocky slope up to the monastery. It had the feel of pilgrimage, though we were only a few miles outside Barcelona. Dawn was forty, devout, and coming off her third failed cycle of IVF. I was five years her junior and agnostic in the way of the highly edu-cated—who knew what we couldn’t perceive with our limited senses and our near-primitive brains? My father had died a year prior with rosary beads wrapping his knuckles after abjuring faith most of his life. His worrying fingers flecked black paint on his pajamas and most of the beads were worn to cheap white plastic when I unwound them a few minutes after his last breath. I still had them with me, jumbled at the bottom of my purse.
“I don’t know how the other wives can fly to another country and not even see it,” Dawn said. She picked up a votive candle and deposited a few euros in an unattended box.
We didn’t know each other well, but met annually at the company’s global retreat, always held along the Mediterranean. The other spouses had stayed back at the conference hotel, which was built on a long spit that jutted into the sea.
We joined the line of pilgrims extending down the right side of the basilica.
“I can understand wanting to sit by the pool,” I said, fanning myself with a Spanish-English leaflet. In early September, it was ninety degrees.
“Please,” Dawn said. “They’ve got the air cranked down to sixty.They’re bingeing free room service and masturbating to those Spanish guys we met last night.”
Two backpackers stood in front of us, speaking Dutch or maybe Swedish. One wore a pixie cut and the other had one long plait. They looked exhausted and gave off a strong smell.
“Did you ever do that?” Dawn asked me. “Run around backpacking?”