Lady of Spain is about love in the 1950s, when the solution to failed marriage was separate bedrooms and teenage sex was a furtive activity; when everybody - old and young - slow danced to romantic ballads played on the accordion. "Lady of Spain, I adore you..."The dancers are Bill and Billy Haynes, father and son, both spinning in the orbit of their Lady of Spain, Mrs. Haynes. Billy describes her: "Have I said that my mother was a beautiful woman? She was. I found this somewhat of an embarrassment, another instance of how my family was not right. Mothers were supposed to be plump and gray, slightly younger versions of grandmothers, but mine was trim and dark, with auburn hair and hazel eyes that flashed brilliantly. Around the house during the summer she wore shorts and high-heeled wedge sandals, usually with a halter top..."Bill is a compulsive philanderer. And Billy is at a sexual crossroads. By the end of their story, Bill has lost his Lady of Spain and Billy has traded her in for the girl who took his eagerly offered virginity. Billy's sexual coming-of-age is complicated by acute and persistent memories: of sales trips taken with his father and the visits they paid to ladies; of his mother's insistence that Billy play his accordion for her "patients" at a Veterans' Hospital party; of muffled quarrels and crying from the bedroom in the family's vacation cabin; of the feel of a satin gown against a boy's body and lipstick on his lips; of the inside of a DeSoto, front seat and back; of nakedness on the floor of a shoe store basement.Lady of Spain, unabashedly confronts the force of male sexuality, its obsessive grip, its complexity, its pain, its joy, and its music. Read Less