Living Together

Travelogue

T R A V E L O G U E Iwasn’t happy at the thought of three of us in one room, but New York hotel rates and Tim’s enforced four-day workweek said that’s how it would have to be. My twenty-year-old daughter and I had roomed together at her high school softball tournaments and on trips to audition universities, but I worried Emily would be uncomfortable having her father at such close quarters. The arrangement was that Emily and I would sleep in the king-sized bed while Tim thrashed about on a cot we had to maneuver around as if it were a large sleeping dog. Tim complained. “Why doesn’t Emily sleep on the cot? She’s the thinnest.” “Dad, that’s disgusting. I’m not going to spend one second in a room where my parents are together between the sheets.” I knew how she felt and wondered why I hadn’t I been able to say that to my parents on a trip we took together when I was Emily’s age. It was the semester break of my junior year at college. As a treat my mother and father took me to an upscale resort in Hawaii, the last place I wanted to be, but I relented when I stepped off of the plane. The air, velvet or cashmere, made me want to stroke it. I remembered my philosophy professor quoting some Greek who said air was the first cause of all things. I became optimistic. The resort had loggias and pillared passageways with glimpses of gardens and the sea. There were primitive totems set around and 6 2 on the walls, subtly colored Hawaiian quilts. I thought I might be happy there until we were shown to our room. It was spacious with louvered doors that slid open to give a view of the ocean. I waited to be taken to my own room, but a cot was rolled in. “Am I staying with you?” Dad said, “Have you any idea what a room at this place costs?” Mother looked hurt, as if I had returned a carefully chosen present . I didn’t see how I could manage both days and nights with them. I was always a secret child. I had been ill when I was young, and months in bed made me feed on my imagination, an imagination that vied with the world in which I had to do my living. When I was too much with people, they challenged what I had concocted. Immediately I thought of ways to be by myself; I’d spend the days on the beach or in a remote part of the gardens. Mother assigned each of us a dresser drawer and place in the closet to hang our clothes. In the bathroom she set out three glasses. Seeing how there would be separations, I felt a little better. We dressed for dinner, which was a formal affair as if the hotel were a cruise ship floating on an imaginary sea. The maître d’ had a British accent. He introduced himself as Alex. He was a young James Mason with the same lock of dark hair falling over his forehead and Mason’s jaded look that suggested he saw much farther ahead than other people did. I guessed Alex was in his late twenties . As he seated us I gave him a complicit smile to let him know that I understood how painful it must be to toady to tourists like my mother and father. The minute he heard an unfamiliar accent from a taxi driver, a 6 3 waiter, or, for that matter, a fellow guest at a party, Dad wanted to know where the person came from. He wasn’t hostile to foreigners. He wasn’t prying. It was a geography lesson, but it embarrassed Mother and me. “You sound like you come from England,” he said to the maître d’. “What part?” “I’m from London.” I was thrilled. It was as if the authors I loved: Woolf, Forester, and Graham Greene had suddenly materialized right there before me. I wondered how I could let him know I was familiar with his world. Dad wasn’t finished with his quiz. “What brings you all the way to Hawaii?” “I’m hoping to learn something about the food industry.” It was hard to...