BILLY AND LEILA are playing tennis down below and not far away. I sit at my table, drinking yet another cup of espresso, stirring in the little cubes of sugar with my little espresso spoon. The outdoor restaurant of our resort hotel is deserted. I am the only customer. It is still early morning. A little after nine. The sky above me is cloudless and blue, but because I’m in Spain I do my best to think of it as being Iberian blue.
The coffee I’m drinking couldn’t be better or stronger. There are four choices: single espresso, single espresso but double in strength, double espresso, and a double-double espresso, that is, double in size and strength. I’ve had a couple of each already and am now drinking my third double-double of the day.
I light a Spanish cigarette. I brought along many cartons of my own cigarettes on the trip, but I smoked all of them a long time ago. I am now smoking a Spanish brand called Fortuna. I use locally made wooden matches to light them.
A handyman is hosing down the tiles of the terrace restaurant where I sit. The hotel is called Sotogrande, but Billy, in a moment of inspiration, has dubbed it Notsogrande. Which is what Leila has called the place ever since.
The handyman drags his hose past me, turning the nozzle away from my table. We nod to each other and then he moves on to spray the stairway leading down to the next level. Sotogrande is all levels. The dining room has three levels. The outdoor restaurant where I’m sitting overlooks the swimming pool. The swimming pool overlooks the tennis courts where Leila and Billy are playing tennis now.
They always play in the early morning or late afternoon. Leila is allergic to the sun. Even moderate exposure to direct sunlight can cause her to break out with the cold sores she dreads. So concerned was she about getting cold sores in a foreign country (the technical name for this affliction is herpes labialis) that before we left on our trip to Spain she persuaded her Venice dermatologist to overprescribe the quantity of Zovirex she would take along with her. Just in case. It is the only treatment for these fever blisters of hers. She has half a dozen little tubes of the ointment in her makeup bag in our room. Enough Zovirex for a whole ward of cold-sore patients.
She never played tennis before I introduced her to Billy, but thanks to him she has developed a passion for the game. This passion began almost as soon as they met in LA. When we left for Spain, they took their tennis racquets, stowing them in the overhead bins. Since I was a smoker and they were not, I sat behind them on the plane and observed, to my delight, how wonderfully they got along. Although Leila was still young, she seemed a lot younger in Billy’s presence.
We flew to Madrid out of Boston.
From Madrid we drove east to Guadalajara and then south to Toledo. And then father south, on to Granada. Wherever we stayed along the way, I made sure ahead of time that there would be a tennis court where the two of them could play.
Sotogrande has three tennis courts. It is a sprawling resort hotel situated, as its brochures proclaim, “on the magnificent Costa del Sol” of southern Spain. The Rock of Gibraltar is not far away. Across the Straits of Gibraltar is Morocco. There is a ferry service to Tangiers.
Despite the tennis courts, both Leila and Billy grew bored with Sotogrande and the area around it. Bored with the narrow and not-so-clean beaches of Estepona. Bored with the boutiques of Marbella. Bored with the hotel dining room and bored with dining in the nearby restaurants specializing in fish dishes. But bored primarily, I think, by the break in the rhythm of travel, of moving on every few days to another place.
The fault was mine. It wasn’t so much that I loved Sotogrande and felt like staying there as that I felt even less like packing up and moving on.
While I waited to regain my enthusiasm for travel, I rented Billy and Leila a car of their own. This way, with Billy driving, the two of them could take day trips or overnight trips to wherever it was they wanted to go without feeling guilty that they were leaving me stranded and carless in Notsogrande.
Today, after tennis, the two of them went to Ronda. I always took it upon myself to make the reservations for these little overnight trips of theirs. The manager at Sotogrande knew the best hotels everywhere. In Ronda, he assured me, Queen Victoria was the place to stay. I booked them two rooms there for the night.
I finish my espresso and order another double-double. My waiter brings it, along with a clean ashtray.
I stir in the little cubes of sugar with my little espresso spoon and watch the lemon rind twirl like some ancient vessel in a black whirlpool.
I light another Fortuna.
I take a sip of espresso.
I look up at the sky. It’s one of those things you can’t help doing if you’re a tourist. Looking up at the sky as if something momentous is riding on the kind of day it will be. As if I were nothing less than Agamemnon.
The sky is still blue, but a regatta of clouds is sailing northward across it. The clouds are scattered but in a loose confederation, suggesting a common goal. Because I’m in Spain, they bring to mind the doomed ships of the Spanish Armada, sailing toward England once again.
I take another sip of coffee, but the old caffeine kick just won’t kick in anymore.
Obviously it’s not the coffee. It’s me. Something new is wrong with me. Not terribly wrong. Nothing to be alarmed about. But something is definitely wrong.
It’s as if my old drunk disease has spawned its own, completely opposite counterdisease. Alcohol can no longer get me drunk. And now caffeine can no longer wake me up. Not fully, at least.
I first became aware of the symptoms of my caffeine disease in Madrid. We stayed there five days, and for the first couple of days I thought it was simply a case of jet lag. The symptoms were very similar to those I’d had before during my first couple of days in Paris or London. My assumption was that on the third day I would feel like myself again.
But it didn’t work out that way. The jet lag itself went away, but a residue of some other lag remained.
I wasn’t dysfunctional. I could and did function normally, despite this new disease. When we left Madrid, I did more than my share of driving. I carried on lively and meaningful conversations with Billy and Leila. I joked. I made sweeping generalizations about Spain and its people. I ate well. I slept well. I made love to Leila and was very animated in my lovemaking.
So it wasn’t that I either felt or looked dazed or drugged or narcoleptic. It was just that I wasn’t open for business. Any business.
I was so good at keeping my symptoms to myself that neither Leila nor Billy seemed to notice that I had anything the matter with me. I saw no point in telling them. The two of them were having such a wonderful time.
Besides, what exactly could I tell them?
That caffeine no longer had the kick it once had?
That when I woke up in the morning, I wasn’t really awake?
That I wasn’t open for business?
What made it even harder to bring up my new malady was that they both had noticed a change in me. But far from perceiving it as a problem that I was having, they happily concluded that I was finally beginning to unwind, to let go.
“I have never seen you look so happy, Dad,” Billy told me.
It wasn’t simply a matter of not wanting to disappoint him and hurt his feelings that made me go along with such remarks. It was also the possibility that, for all I knew, Billy was right. A very real possibility existed that what I considered to be symptoms of some new disease were in fact due not to a disease but simply to a case of happiness.
Maybe I was not sick. Maybe I was happy.
Even a partial list of my blessings would warrant happiness.
My former theoretical daydreams about the kind of relationship I wanted to have with Billy were now an actual, almost daily, occurrence. We had nice, long, easy chats. Just the two of us. We talked about life and literature and Leila. I gave him a hug almost every night when he went off to bed in his room, which was right across from ours.
“Good night, son.”
“Good night, Dad.”
Very often, I kissed him on the cheek at these times. And sometimes, because we were in Spain, I kissed him on the cheek three times, the way the locals did. More than once, he kissed me back. And for a boy his age to do that to his father was no small thing.
He knew that I loved him.
I could tell that he loved me.
Both of us loved Leila, each in his own way, and she loved both of us.
For the first time in my life I felt like a member of a loving family and sometimes even the head of it.
There was every reason to assume that this little family unit of ours would prosper and last a lifetime and that the bonds of love between us would only deepen with the passing years.
I light another Fortuna. I take another sip of espresso. I check out the sky again.
I consider giving happiness a whirl.
But the problem, given this exotic new disease I’ve contracted, is that to do anything I first have to decide to do it, go through the business of deciding, and then, having decided, go through the business of holding on to the decision I’ve made. And even when the end result of all that deciding (and all that holding on) is happiness itself, the work required to achieve it has become a little too much for me.
Too something.
How to explain?
Being happy, deciding to be happy, is one thing. Staying happy is something else entirely.
Everything, it seems to me, is suddenly a conscious choice, requiring conscious decisions. To be happy. Not to be happy. To be miserable. Not to be miserable. To feel guilty because I haven’t yet told Leila and Billy that they are mother and son. Not to feel guilty about it, because the right time to tell them has not yet come and a thing like that should only be done at the right time.
Once we return to America, I think to myself, this whole thing will pass. This inability ever to fully awake during the day. This sense that nothing is involuntary. This strange sense that even when I am asleep at night, I am conscious of what I am doing.
A tall chain-link fence surrounds the tennis court. Outside the fence is a little wooden bench where I sit and smoke my Fortunas and watch them play.
It’s almost ten thirty now, but because the tennis courts are situated on the lowest of the many levels of Sotogrande, the shadows cast by those other levels help to keep the courts in shade until well after eleven o’clock. There’s some sun now, on Billy’s side of the net, but that’s all.
They don’t mind my sitting here and watching them play.
If they did, I wouldn’t do it.
But they don’t.
Leila’s white outfit seems whiter than Billy’s because of the whiteness of her skin and because Billy’s oversized tennis shirt (it’s enormous) is soaked with sweat. The dampness darkens its appearance.
Leila is bone-dry. It’s a problem she has. She gets hotter and hotter and, depending upon the level of exertion, redder and redder, but she can’t sweat.
Her face is covered with red blotches, as if somebody has slapped her around. The same red marks appear on her face after prolonged lovemaking. I think of that now while I watch her play. She makes the same little noises, little grunts and yelps, while chasing a ball as she does when she’s nearing her orgasm. I think of that too while I watch her play. The similarities.
“A-a-a!” Leila screams and chases a lob from Billy.
She kills me, the way she plays. She’s all heart and no skill. Her game hasn’t improved a bit, but her passion for the game has intensified.
She’s running after the ball now, which has sailed high over her head, and it’s over her head that she carries her tennis racquet now, while pursuing the ball, like some screaming lepidopterist chasing a butterfly.
The tennis game, such as it is, goes on.
Nobody, as far as I can tell, is keeping score. They’re just playing, pretending to abide by the rules when it suits them, and abandoning them when it doesn’t.
This absence of structure makes me a little uneasy in my role as the observer, but that’s my problem, not theirs. I’m a stickler for law and order in sports. For standards. For tradition. For structure. The game they’re playing is anarchy. There, just now, Leila’s return is out by two or three feet, but Billy doesn’t call it. Played this way, tennis looks no better than life itself.
It’s not a big deal. It just makes me a little uneasy to see the game played this way.
Leila, her face still a little blotchy, is undressing in our room. Slipping out of her tennis things.
She is completely naked now. Hers is one of those pre-aerobic bodies. No definition, nor discernible muscle tone anywhere. Everything is soft and round, just as her breasts are soft and round. Her stomach is not hard and flat but softly rounded like the rest of her. What makes her body so erotic is the sense that it is completely connected to the rest of her, so that when she smiles, her whole body smiles.
The proximity of her nakedness is provocative in theory, but I’m not open for the business to follow.
Grabbing a dry towel, she heads for the shower. Her bare feet slap on the red-tiled floor. She vanishes. The shower comes on. The acoustics of our room in Sotogrande amplify the sound, turning it into the sound of a large fountain.
The thought of telling her about Billy always comes up when there’s something else that’s coming up. Their trip to Ronda.
The trip to Spain was my idea, because I was going to tell her about Billy right before we left. My whole motive for the trip was to have something waiting in the wings that would absorb the telling of the truth and allow us, after the truth was told, to move on from there.
I have a terrible problem with truth. I can’t imagine what will follow the telling of it. I see everything stopping and the spoken truth, like some avalanche, blocking all roads forward and back.
I should have told them right away. I should have done it when I introduced them to one another, although the word “introduced” is really not the right word under the circumstances.
I meant to do it, but the logistics of the telling got in the way.
I couldn’t decide how to do it. Should I first tell one and then the other? And if so, should I first tell Leila and then Billy, or the other way around? Or bite the bullet and tell both of them at the same time?
It had to be done right. There had to be the perfect moment and the perfect way in which to do it.
Leila starts singing in the shower, not so much singing as vocalizing some Andalusian melody we heard on the radio the other day.
Billy’s room is right across the corridor from ours and is shaped, to all intents and purposes, like ours. Same components, different configuration.
He has already showered and is beginning to pack when I enter his room without knocking.
His hair is still wet. Long and black and shiny. His chest is bare, he hasn’t put on a shirt yet. Long baggy shorts are all he’s wearing.
His torso is at once flat as a surfboard and full of little valleys and hollows, all those little unfilled-in places where youth resides. I could easily imagine birds drinking water from the two hollows under his collarbones.
His shoulders are a joke. I have never seen shoulders so skinny and yet so wide. His arms as long as the sleeves of a straitjacket. He packs his duffel bag without moving his feet at all. He simply reaches out for things around the room with those long arms of his and zap, the thing is in his hand and then in the duffel bag in one motion.
As tall as he is, he seems even taller now, because he is standing above me. I’m sprawled out on the couch in the sunken living room level and he’s up there in the bedroom level by himself.
Leila is with us in spirit. There are three of us here, as there always are when I’m with either one of them. The other is always present in spirit. This physical absence but spiritual presence of the other allows me to relax and enjoy the illusion that it’s just the two of us, whichever one of the two I’m with at the time.
“You’re not going to fall asleep down there, are you?” Billy calls to me.
I yawn, playing along with the part that he thinks suits me.
“I just might,” I reply. “If I can’t wake up, I might as well go to sleep.”
“Go right ahead then.” He smiles and continues packing.
Silence falls between us, but it is an easy silence. Like roommates in college. He’s off on a date. I’m staying home.
“I’ve never seen you like this, Dad.”
“Like what?”
“Like that. You look like Buddha under that tree, whatever that tree is called, where he lay down and went to sleep.”
“I envy Buddhists,” I tell him. “It must be so nice to have a religion founded by an overweight man for once. The thing about Buddha …”
I banter on. Billy pretends to listen, laughing an occasional busy little laugh just to inform me that he’s paying attention.
My banter about Buddha runs out of steam. I light a cigarette.
He puts on a loose polo shirt and instantly takes it off and puts on another one. I’ve seen him do this at least half a dozen times with the same shirt. He bought it in Madrid and feels obligated to wear it, but as soon as he puts it on, he rips it right off again.
“What’s in Ronda?” I ask him.
“It’s not so much what’s in Ronda as what’s not in Ronda. And what’s not in Ronda is this place. This Notsogrande.”
He pauses. He looks down at me. There is a change in his voice when he speaks again and inquires, “Do you want to come with us, Dad?”
Back in my room again. Leila is cool and showered and almost ready to go. The red blotches are faded from her cheeks. She is wearing a long white sun dress, with bare shoulders and arms.
Still barefoot, slipping into her sandals, as I look at her.
The straps on the sandals are thin (she bought the sandals in Marbella) and the holes in the straps are small. She is having a bit of difficulty notching the notches.
She crosses her legs and moves her foot this way and that, as if enjoying the way her feet look inside those dainty sandals.
Seeing her completely dressed is even more provocative and erotic than the sight of her naked flesh was earlier. She looks gift-wrapped.
Out in the parking lot of Sotogrande, the three of us do what we always do when they go off on a little trip of their own. I escort them to their rented car and dispense unwanted advice like Polonius. Although Billy has three credit cars accepted worldwide, whose billing address is that of my new accountant, Jerry, I make a point of stuffing a wad of pesetas into the pocket of his baggy shorts.
“Oh, Dad,” he complains.
“Just in case. You never know.”
Leila is wearing her big blue hat, the same hat she wore when I first saw her getting out of that taxi in Venice.
There is no protocol as such on these occasions, but when I position myself to take my leave of them, I always kiss Leila goodbye first. I do so this time. It feels so cool in the shade of her big blue hat. I find her lips and kiss them. Like drinking water from a stream.
“Saul,” she asks, “are you sure you don’t want to come with us?”
I shake my head.
“C’mon, Dad,” Billy does his bit. “Go grab a suitcase. We’ll wait.”
They insist.
I decline again.
Finally I win.
We always do this and, although I know I’m not coming, I enjoy being coaxed.
It’s Billy’s turn now to be kissed. He bends his legs to lower his cheek to my lips. His arms are so long, I feel willowy in his embrace. I kiss his cheek and he kisses mine. Memories of his childhood flood my mind.
Their bags are in the trunk. Leila is sitting in the car already. And now Billy, like a tall tripod collapsing, shrinks himself into the driver’s seat where, as if by magic, his long limbs telescope out again.
His window is rolled down and I put my hand on top of the door frame. I bend over and stick my head inside the car as I speak.
“Do you have a road map?” I ask.
He does.
“Call me when you get to Ronda so I know you made it safely?”
He says he will.
“Promise?”
He promises.
“Drive carefully,” I tell him. “No speeding.”
“Oh, Dad,” he moans. “Are you kidding? With Leila next to me? If I go over forty, she opens the car door and starts dragging her foot on the road.”
He puts on his sunglasses. He starts the car. They can’t leave until I take my hand away from the door. I keep it there a beat too long and then let them go.
I wave.
They wave.
I see Leila punching Billy on the shoulder in playful retaliation for something. They’re having fun already.
Everyone I love, everything of any meaning to me at the moment, is inside that rented car that is pulling out of the parking lot. And yet, the only true response I feel as I watch them depart is one of relief.
A relief of some kind.
It’s as if having people who mean so much to me were a burden. Like a pressure, like a tumor on the brain, which I now feel receding as the distance between us grows.
How to explain?
When they’re around me, either one of them, or both, I’m so conscious of them, so conscious of the need to appreciate, and rightly so, the newfound meaning in my life. But appreciating, counting one’s blessings, is hard work. A constant squinting of the psyche to keep it all in focus. A point is reached when you want a sabbatical from meaning.