Sant Pol de Mar

Sant Pol de Mar Beach, Spain, August 1979

I remember how his eyes held mine and drew me toward the shore, my feet sinking an inch with every step and hot sand squishing like little lava eruptions from between my toes.

I’d had a morning’s swim and had just caught him watching me when a wave caught my back and ushered me forward. Then the wave collapsed behind me and fell back into the sea, like it had been called into existence just to present me to him.

He stood there on the edge of the water and looked at me. I looked back.

He said, “Shouldn’t you be standing on some giant seashell with zephyrs blowing your hair about?”

I looked down at my own body and took a fold of swimsuit fabric between my forefinger and thumb pulled. I looked up at him again and I kinda shrugged and I said, “Excuse me. The way you’re looking at me, I wasn’t sure I still had clothes on.”

This made him smile. He said, “Where are you from?”

I turned and extended my arm over the Mediterranean.

He said, “I mean, before you came waltzing up out of the sea.”

I guess my accent is just Southern enough to give me away, so I came clean. “Mobile, Alabama.”

“Mobile! I’m from just across the Bay. I’m from Spanish Fort.”

I said, “Spanish Fort! That’s way too cool. It really is a small world.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s a broom closet.”

I held out my hand. “I’m Margaret.”

He took my hand. “I’m Arthur.”

Still holding my hand, he lifted me up onto the beach, like he would’ve if I’d been stepping into Cinderella’s coach.

Two women and a dark-haired man, all three of them young, sat nearby on blankets under a big blue beach umbrella with their arms wrapped around their knees. I pointed my eyes toward them and told Arthur, “My friends, Margot and Brittany.”

Arthur said, “Who’s the Spaniard?”

“Antonio. He kindly volunteered to be our guide.”

“Yeah? Which of you is he after, do you think?”

I pressed my lips together and cocked my head and he understood the look. Me, obviously. Then I saw a couple of Spanish beauties lying back and propped on their elbows under another umbrella. They looked at me in a not friendly way. I hoped they weren’t gypsies who knew how to cast magic spells or something. I looked at Arthur and questioned him with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, they want to practice their English.”

I said, “Oh, I’ll bet they do.”

“You don’t think they’re competing for me?”

I said, “I don’t. I think they mean to share you, like a dinner for two.”

            We made a lunch date for that afternoon.

It was four hours later, and a salt-spiced breeze rolled up from the sea and spent itself just at the terrace of our beachside restaurant. Our table gave a grand view of the sea-blue Med, and the sky-blue sky had this palest of a yellow wash, from the sun that looked down on us from somewhere over Africa.

Arthur wore white slacks and a plain blue tucked-in polo and sandals. Thank God he wasn’t in one of those bell-bottomed, ridiculously wide-collared, tutti-frutti-colored clown costumes that men wore in America and Europe back then. Crew cut too. Not that I like crew cuts especially, but they’re okay, I guess.

I wondered if those Spanish floozies were still around. I hoped they were just interesting trinkets that Arthur had picked up to admire for a moment and had then set back on their shelves. I think that’s what they were because I didn’t see them again. I had told Margot and Brittany to take Antonio and get lost for a couple of hours.

           Arthur asked me, “What brings you to Spain?”

“I’m an art history major at Alabama. Last week I toured the Uffizi and the Academia in Florence. This week I saw the Prado in Madrid. Now, I’ve got a couple of days to be lazy before I fly home. So here I am having lunch with you in Sant Pol de Mar. And what do you do, Arthur?”

           “I study architecture, Auburn University. Been bumming through Europe for the last few weeks, took in some churches and castles. But tomorrow morning I catch the train for Madrid and then a plane home.”

           I ordered the sea scallops on mixed greens, and he had this spicy-looking seafood paella. After lunch, I had a glass of wine and he drank a beer and we sat looking over the Mediterranean. I told him things about me, things that would paint the picture I wanted him to see. And he did the same. But I don’t think that’s dishonest. Who and what we want to be may be just as important as who and what we are.

We sat for long minutes saying nothing, not awkward silences, just each of us with a quiet comfort of knowing the other was near.

           Then it was time to go. We left the restaurant and walked along the esplanade until it was time to part. I think the wine and the smell of the sea had gone to my head, ‘cause I said to him, “I want a souvenir, something that’ll be mine alone, something I’ll always remember.”

He said, “Anything.”

I looked around, not that I cared that anyone saw, but I didn’t want to share. I stood on my toes and kissed him.

           When I got back to the condo, I told Margo and Brittany all about Arthur.

“Forget him,” Margot said. She sat on the bed and dug into a toenail with the probe on her clippers.

“Live for today,” Brittany said and sipped her gimlet and hiccupped.

They had a point. I came to Europe for Romance. Well, for my studies, but for Romance too. Romance hadn’t had a face or a name, but if Romance had a name, it would have been Rodrigo or Marcello, not Arthur. I hadn’t traveled halfway around the world to meet a boy from just across the Causeway.

I closed my eyes, trying to see this Arthur person. But the features wouldn’t sharpen. What I could see, was the smile of gentle confidence and the eyes full of knowledge, maybe not knowledge of what I thought, but of something more frightening…what I desired.

           I told Margot and Brittany, “You’re right. I won’t see him again.”

           We didn’t talk about Arthur that evening. We went to a club and danced and flirted with guys. When we got back to our condo, we told stories about boys we knew back home, and we laughed and drank too much Spanish wine.

           The next morning, the crash of waves on the beach woke me. Only the day before, I had let the surf comfort me like a lullaby, while I drifted back for another half-hour’s sleep. Not this morning. This morning, I just lay on my bed and waited for the next wave to hit. And the next. The surf was louder today.

I got up and put on a robe and went to the sliding glass patio door and pushed it open. The sun skidded up off the sand and stung my eyes. I don’t like to squint, scratches crows’ feet into the corners of your eyes, you know, so I put on my sunglasses.

My girlfriends were still in bed. Margot groaned, “Turn off the light!” and Brittany snored.

But they finally got up and it was Brittany’s turn to get breakfast on the table. It was a continental breakfast, like we’d made every day, and we sat down to café con leche, except Brittany liked hot chocolate for breakfast, and we had almond croissants and yogurt and fruit.

We’d had this breakfast all week and we had enjoyed it every day. But this morning I thought, I would do bad things for some biscuit and sausage gravy and a bowl of grits.

           We had our customary pitcher of piña coladas with breakfast, and Margot and Brittany chatted like wind-up dolls about the shopping they were going to do this morning and the Spanish boys they were going to catch-and-release this evening, like they were in some bass tournament back home. How did my two best friends become children overnight?

           They hadn’t, of course. They were the same Margot and Brittany, my best friends.

           Then something’s wrong with me. Boredom?

           No, ennui. It’s good to know another language but not know it well. Then you can find a word to endow with the feelings and moods you want to express but that your new word probably doesn’t really have. For me, ennui meant a little bored and a little melancholy and a little anxious, because one can’t see clearly into tomorrow, or even know what one wants to see. God knows what ennui really means. God and Frenchmen.

I was a young woman of means, educated, and not unattractive, I didn’t think. What was missing? Or was I just the most spoiled brat in the world?

Bored in Mediterranean Spain? What’s wrong with me?

I saw it in a flash. There was nothing wrong with me. But there was something missing. Something that wasn’t missing yesterday.

And I knew what.

I said to Margot and Brittany, “I’m going out.”

Margot said, “You’re not going back after that Arthur guy?” She was alarmed.

Brittany said, “What about ‘live for today’?”

I said, “Today’s almost gone. You want to live for today, you’re almost gone too.”

But I still loved them. I blew them a kiss at the door.

It was almost noon. He was gone, I knew that. He was on the train for Madrid. But I had to tell myself I had tried. I rushed into the lobby of his hotel and looked all around.

And I saw him. In a big comfortable chair reading a Spanish newspaper. He saw me and smiled. He got up and came to me and took my hand and we walked out of the hotel and into the warm sun and the clean salt breeze.

I said, “You don’t look surprised to see me.”

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

I said, “How did you know I’d be back?”

He said, “That kiss you gave me yesterday, it wasn’t a farewell.”