I TOOK A long, aimless stroll around Sotogrande and then returned to my room.
Leila had left a mess behind. Her things were all over the floor. Never exactly neat to begin with, she was getting messier and messier the longer we stayed in Spain. The ratio of things that got scattered around the room to the things that she packed in her suitcase was about five to one.
I didn’t mind picking up after her. It was exactly the kind of mindless activity I enjoyed doing.
I put her tennis dress into the dirty laundry hamper.
There were several skirts and blouses she had considered taking to Ronda but at the last minute had decided to leave behind. I hung the skirts on skirt hangers in her closet and folded and put away the blouses in the dresser where she kept them.
I picked up the crumpled wet towels from the floor, which she had used after her shower, and hung them on the towel racks to dry. There were blood red stains on the white towels.
Sotogrande was a very expensive hotel, luxurious in many respects, but the red tiles in our room were not glazed properly and bled into anything wet that was left on the floor.
I thought about the two of them, on their road to Ronda. The words had a nice alliterative sound. The two of them on their road to Ronda.
When I finally told them, how would I explain having waited so long to tell them?
The logistics of telling the truth were getting ever more complex and the right time to tell it harder and harder to define.
The room looked better now. Everything in need of folding or putting away was folded and put away. I even found Leila’s sunglasses, which she couldn’t find and had to leave without. I put them on top of her dresser, next to a small wooden bowl full of Spanish coins.
They always called me when they got to where they were going. I checked my watch. I knew where and how far away Ronda was. They should be getting there soon. I lay down on the bed and began waiting for my phone call from Ronda.
I’m not a man who believes in premonitions or forebodings. So when I lay on the bed and after a while began to worry that Leila and Billy might have had a car accident, it was not the presentiment of a disaster of any kind, it was simply the worry of a worry-prone mind. All those who stay behind while the ones they love leave on a journey know what it’s like to wait for a confirmation of safe arrival, and the worries that are loosened when that confirmation becomes overdue.
In my case, the potential for some disaster on the road was enhanced by years spent rewriting other people’s screenplays. In those rewrites, I had more or less perfected the use of certain hackneyed devices, the primary one being the setup and the payoff. By focusing on a seemingly innocuous object or event, I imbued it with consequence as a way of picking up the tension in a sagging story line.
I now found myself falling prey to that same device.
Leila’s sunglasses.
She hated driving in a car without them. The glare of the sun in sunny Spain exhausted her and made her irritable if she didn’t wear her
And today she had left without them. Billy was wearing his when they drove off.
I could easily imagine Leila reaching over and trying to snatch away Billy’s sunglasses from his face. Playfully, of course. And Billy, just as playfully, resisting. And the car, while their playful tussle continued, going its own way.
It was of no help at all to remind myself, while I waited for that phone call from Ronda, that my disaster scenario was too contrived and far too improbable to ever occur in real life.
It was this very improbability that was worrying me. Because anything was possible.