Chapter 29

Focus Man began planning the trip to Spain several months before they left.

Claire had suggested Southern Spain almost casually. They had been talking about taking a longer vacation, something more ambitious than a week away, and she mentioned that she had always wanted to see the Mediterranean coast. Focus Man agreed that two weeks sounded about right.

That was approximately where Claire's planning ended.

Focus Man's was just beginning.

Within several days he had acquired guidebooks, maps, and enough information about Andalusia to suggest that they might be relocating there permanently. He studied the coastline, compared hotels, calculated driving distances, and discovered that two weeks was simultaneously a generous vacation and nowhere near enough time to see everything worth seeing.

Claire watched the process with familiarity.

One evening she found him at the table with a map spread in front of him and several pieces of paper arranged beside it.

"What's that?"

"The trip."

"I thought the trip was to Spain."

"It is."

She looked at the papers.

"That appears to be considerably more specific than Spain."

Focus Man had worked out a preliminary route.

They would fly into Málaga, rent a car, spend several days along the Mediterranean, drive inland for a few places he thought they shouldn't miss, and make a day trip to Gibraltar. He had marked restaurants recommended by the guidebooks and several that weren't. He knew where parking might be difficult. He had even begun calculating which days certain museums and attractions were closed.

Claire picked up one of the pages.

"You have breakfast on here."

"Only the hotel breakfasts."

"What if I'm not hungry at eight?"

"We can adjust."

She put the page down.

"Good. I was worried."

Focus Man understood that she was teasing him.

He also made a note to verify the hotel's breakfast hours.

They traveled in the off-season, when Southern Spain belonged less to visitors and more to the people who actually lived there. The weather was mild along the coast, the beaches largely empty, and the narrow streets of the older towns were free of the crowds that appeared in the photographs in their guidebook.

From the beginning, driving themselves proved to be the right decision.

It also tested certain aspects of their relationship that no guidebook had thought important enough to mention.

Focus Man drove. Claire navigated.

This arrangement worked well whenever the road signs agreed with the map.

Spanish road signs occasionally had other ideas.

"You need to turn," Claire said.

"Where?"

"There."

"There are three roads there."

"The middle one."

"That's not a road."

"It has cars on it."

"So does the sidewalk."

"Turn."

He turned.

For several minutes they drove along a narrow street between whitewashed buildings, passing parked cars with only inches to spare on either side.

Focus Man looked at Claire.

"Are you sure this is right?"

"No."

"That's reassuring."

"But we're going south."

"How do you know?"

"The sun."

Focus Man considered explaining the limitations of using the sun for urban navigation.

He decided against it.

Eventually they emerged onto the road they had been trying to find.

Claire folded the map.

"See?"

Focus Man had no satisfactory response to that.

Their days developed their own rhythm.

They walked through old neighborhoods where laundry hung from balconies and shopkeepers stood in doorways talking to people they seemed to have known all their lives. They sat at outdoor tables drinking coffee while the morning passed around them. They wandered into shops without needing anything and occasionally came out carrying something anyway.

Claire enjoyed shopping considerably more than Focus Man enjoyed watching Claire shop, although he discovered that Spain had solved this problem by placing cafés near many of the places where shopping occurred.

At some point he learned that "I'll just be a few minutes" did not constitute a reliable unit of time.

He adapted.

Lunch happened later than they were accustomed to. Dinner happened much later.

The first few nights Focus Man had difficulty with the idea that a restaurant might not begin filling until an hour when he normally would have been considering whether it was too late for another cup of coffee.

Claire adjusted immediately.

"I could get used to this," she said one evening as they walked toward dinner sometime after nine.

"You said you were hungry at seven."

"I was."

"That was two hours ago."

"I'm still hungry."

"That's not an improvement."

But once they were seated, neither was in a hurry.

Dinner in Spain seemed less concerned with accomplishing dinner than Focus Man was accustomed to. Courses arrived when they arrived. Wine appeared. Conversations continued. People lingered at neighboring tables long after their plates had been cleared.

Nobody seemed to be waiting for the evening to move on to whatever came next.

At first Focus Man noticed this.

After a few days he stopped.

One afternoon they toured a bullring.

Neither knew much about bullfighting beyond the obvious, and neither left intending to become an enthusiast. But standing inside the empty arena was different from seeing one in photographs. Their guide explained the traditions and rituals, the entrances, the roles of the participants, the history embedded in a spectacle that belonged to a culture older and more complicated than either of them could understand during a vacation.

They walked out into the sunlight afterward.

"What did you think?" Claire asked.

Focus Man considered the question.

"I'm glad we saw it."

"That's what I thought."

Neither needed to decide anything more about it.

There were churches and plazas, markets and streets whose names Focus Man could pronounce only well enough to receive corrections from people who were trying to help him. They ate things they could not always identify and discovered that this was usually better than knowing in advance.

And there was the Mediterranean.

They encountered it repeatedly as they traveled—the water appearing at the end of a street or beyond a row of buildings, sometimes brilliant blue beneath the sun and sometimes gray beneath a changing sky. They walked beaches almost empty except for local residents and an occasional dog. They sat on walls above the shoreline with nowhere they needed to be.

These moments were not on the itinerary.

Focus Man's itinerary began suffering fairly early in the trip.

At first the deviations were minor.

A lunch lasted longer than expected.

A shop Claire wanted to visit opened later than the guidebook claimed.

They stopped at an overlook because the coast was too beautiful to drive past.

One morning they simply slept late.

Focus Man looked at his watch when he woke.

Claire was still beside him.

"We're behind schedule."

Her eyes remained closed.

"We're on vacation."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

"They are this morning."

She went back to sleep.

Focus Man lay there for another minute.

Then he did too.

By the middle of the trip the itinerary had acquired handwritten changes, crossed-out destinations, and arrows pointing toward alternatives. One page had a coffee stain across a carefully planned afternoon.

Focus Man kept it anyway.

Gibraltar had been on the schedule from the beginning.

They drove south along the coast until the Rock began appearing in the distance, an enormous mass rising above everything around it. Even Focus Man, who had studied photographs and maps before the trip, was surprised by its physical presence.

They parked and spent the day exploring.

The famous Barbary macaques were impossible to miss.

Focus Man had read the warnings.

Do not feed them.

Do not touch them.

Do not carry food where they can see it.

He took these instructions seriously.

Claire apparently found his seriousness entertaining.

"They're monkeys."

"They're macaques."

"They look like monkeys."

"They're still macaques."

One sat on a wall watching them.

Focus Man watched it back.

"Don't antagonize it," Claire said.

"I'm not antagonizing it."

"You're staring at it."

"It's staring at me."

"Maybe it thinks you're a macaque."

Focus Man walked away.

Claire followed, laughing.

There were other encounters that day, including one involving people they met near Gibraltar that Claire and Focus Man would remember for reasons having little to do with the Rock itself. Years later, the stories they told about vacations were often like that. The famous places established where they had been. The unexpected people supplied the stories.

They drove back toward their hotel tired and hungry.

For once, Focus Man didn't consult the itinerary.

"Where are we eating?" Claire asked.

"I don't know."

She turned toward him.

"You don't know?"

"No."

"Are you feeling all right?"

"We'll find something."

Claire smiled and looked back out the window.

They did.

It was a small restaurant they would never have found in a guidebook. Focus Man could not later remember its name. He remembered the tables, the noise of conversation, the food, and Claire sitting across from him long after the hour when they would normally have finished dinner at home.

It became one of his favorite evenings of the trip.

Near the end of their two weeks, they spent an afternoon with nothing particular planned.

This was partly because they had seen most of what they had hoped to see and partly because Focus Man's itinerary had finally surrendered.

They walked along the Mediterranean.

The season had left the beach nearly empty. A few people were scattered along the promenade. Farther out, boats moved slowly across the water. The sun was beginning its descent, though there were still several hours before dark.

Claire took off her shoes and carried them.

Focus Man kept his on.

"You're going to get sand in them," she said.

"I know."

"Then take them off."

"I'm fine."

They continued walking.

After a while they sat on a low wall facing the sea.

There was nothing they needed to discuss.

They had been together nearly every hour for almost two weeks. They had driven hundreds of miles, eaten dozens of meals, gotten lost, found their way again, visited places Focus Man had carefully selected and others they had stumbled across by accident.

It had been a good vacation.

A very good one.

Claire sat beside him looking toward the water.

Focus Man watched a boat far offshore.

Minutes passed.

Once, years earlier, they might have filled that time with conversation. There had been so much to discover then. Every story led to another story. Every question opened another part of the person sitting beside them.

Now they knew most of the stories.

Or thought they did.

Focus Man glanced at Claire.

She seemed content.

He was content too.

That was what made the thought difficult to place.

Nothing was wrong.

He didn't even know why the silence had attracted his attention.

Perhaps this was simply what happened after people had been together long enough. Silence stopped needing to be filled. There was comfort in sitting beside someone without having to entertain them, explain yourself to them, or reassure them that you were still there.

He looked back toward the Mediterranean.

The water changed color as the sun moved lower.

Claire eventually leaned against him.

"What's on the itinerary?"

Focus Man smiled.

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"We're finished."

She looked at him with exaggerated concern.

"You planned nothing?"

"I thought we might have dinner."

"Where?"

"I don't know."

Claire rested her head against his shoulder again.

"Spain has changed you."

He laughed.

They remained there a while longer.

That evening they found another restaurant without consulting a guidebook. They ate late, as they had learned to do, and walked afterward through streets that were becoming familiar just as it was nearly time to leave them.

The next morning Focus Man packed the maps and guidebooks into his suitcase. He found the itinerary underneath one of them.

He looked through its pages.

They had followed perhaps two-thirds of it.

The rest had been replaced by wrong turns, long lunches, closed shops, unexpected views, conversations, and places they had never intended to find.

He considered throwing it away.

Instead he folded it and put it into the suitcase.

Claire watched from across the room.

"Saving the plan?"

"Of course."

"Why?"

Focus Man thought about it.

"It was a good plan."

Claire smiled.

"It was."

She went back to packing.

Focus Man placed the itinerary beneath his shirts and closed the suitcase.

The trip had not fixed anything.

There had been nothing to fix.

They had laughed. They had gotten lost. They had eaten too much and stayed up too late. They had discovered that Claire could navigate by the sun and that Focus Man could survive an afternoon without knowing precisely what came next.

They had been happy.

And sometimes, sitting beside the Mediterranean with Claire leaning against him, they had been quiet.

Focus Man still didn't know what that meant.

For the moment, he didn't need to.