Otto in Spain

Otto wasn’t at the hospital the day his daughter was born because he was at his wife’s parents house, with his wife. He was in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the white porcelain tub, staring at his white shoes on the white bath-mat on the white tile. His shorts were white, and his shirt. The sun poured into the bathroom through some sort of ridiculously expensive window designed to let sunlight pour in whilst still allowing one to shit in private. Otto had already gotten six or seven calls regarding the whole daughter-birthing thing but he couldn’t very well leave now because this anniversary was some kind of really enormous deal to his wife because her parents had been married like longer than she or he had been alive. Otto was 26. Until last year he had been an extremely successful tennis player and he was kind of famous, especially for an American tennis pro. He supposed that his wife would probably find out about the baby soon enough. It was pretty remarkable, he guessed, that he hadn’t already been photographed with Jennifer, which was the awfully annoying name of the woman who was right now having Otto’s first child as he moped on the edge of his wife’s parent’s porcelain bath. Probably this anniversary was such a big deal to Anita because probably she knew that they would never make it as far as her parents had. Or else maybe she was pregnant, oh God. Otto let his ass sort of slide down into the tub so that he was sitting in it with his head against one wall of the tub and his legs dangling out like a murder victim. Otto had sort of attempted to murder himself before he quit playing tennis professionally. It hadn’t really panned out though. Although in all honesty he had pretty much been pretending that he had succeeded. But now he was going to have a daughter.

Maybe after Anita divorced him he could move to Spain with Jennifer. Otto doubted that he was very famous in Spain. He could raise goats. He would never again wear white shorts. At night he would lay at the top of a hill and observe the stars and he would speak spanish to his neighbors. Otto closed his eyes and imagined himself speaking Spanish to his neighbors. Perhaps Jennifer would not like Spain and she too would leave him. She probably would enjoy neither looking at stars nor conversing in Spanish. Otto hoped that when she left she might run away in the night with a visiting American millionaire and leave Otto to raise their daughter. He thought that under these circumstances he would really pull through. Due to their nighttime stargazing his daughter might become a famous astronomer. Or maybe she would write novels in Spanish and win numerous European awards. Reviewers would note that she was the daughter of former tennis star Otto Ambroch who disappeared shortly after his sudden retirement from tennis. This is exactly how he would like to be remembered: as a brief anecdote in newspaper articles written about his daughter.