Any Day Now

by Denise Roig

  I flew out the next day, arrived in London, just making my connecting Ryanair flight to Trieste. Trieste was Paul’s idea. We’d missed this city on our first Italian jaunt, but Paul said I couldn’t afford to this time. “You can’t really understand Europe without seeing Trieste,” he wrote. “Jan Morris, another writer with a change of sexual heart, not to mention body, calls it ‘The Trieste Effect.’ Listen to what she says: ‘I feel this opaque seaport of my vision, so full of sweet melancholy, illustrates not just my adolescent emotions of the past, but my lifelong preoccupations too…. It is as though I have been taken, for a brief sententious glimpse, out of time to nowhere.’ Can that old girl write, or what? And, darling, while you’re there, do have the Illy espresso at Cremcaffè. And have one for me, too.”

  But even in his last e-mail Paul had remained vague about how I was to get from Trieste to Venice. “You might just have to wing this part. Remember how good we were at winging it? Our whole life was winging it. Can’t wait to see you. Any day now.”

  We’d agreed I would call when I got to Venice, however I got to Venice. But I called from Trieste, having missed the last bus to Venice for the day. Now I would have to stay over, hotel still to be found.

  “Glad you called.” Paul answered after many rings, sounding exhausted.

  “Remind me how we did this,” I said. “My feet hurt, I’ve got a killer buzz from one cup of coffee and I don’t think my body can survive a lumpy pensione bed.”

  I thought he’d laugh. “Paul?”

  “Right here,” he said.

  “Is everything OK?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Well, actually, there’s been a change of plans.”

  “You don’t want me to come,” I said, realizing in that moment how mad an idea this had been. And what did I have to prove to him at this point anyway? That I loved him no matter what?

  He started laughing. “You might kill me.” This made him laugh harder. Was he already on something — marijuana, heroin, laughing gas — for the pain? Eventually he was able to convey the information that there was not one single hotel room in Venice for that week and probably not for the entire rest of the summer, and that the only place he’d been able to find even one affordable room — “I mean less than $400 a night” — was in Lido di Jesolo. Just saying the name made him laugh so much he began to wheeze. I was so relieved he didn’t want me to go home, that he wasn’t on his way back to New York where he planned to return for the end-end, that I started laughing, too.

  “You won’t be laughing for long, amore mio. Call me when you get there.”

  I wasn’t laughing the next afternoon after humping my suitcase up to the third and steaming floor of Hotel Paradiso, then turning around and bumping back to the first floor because the large, blond concierge, who spoke a little Italian, but mostly Russian, had given me the wrong room key. I was spraying sweat when I finally pushed the door in. Paul had to have planned this. The little coincidence with the name, the fact that the room looked identical to every pensione room we’d shared thirty-five years before (when we could afford a room): beds like hammocks, décor by Goodwill and a single spigot in the all-tile bathroom serving as shower and room hose-down. I stripped and stood underneath, trying to cool off.

  Outside on Via Andrea Bafile, the promenade, I realized this wasn’t Italy at all. “It’s fucking Venice Beach,” I said to Paul via cellphone.

  “Isn’t it tacky?” said Paul.

  “It’s non-stop hotels and all these scorched Hungarians and Germans are tromping up and down dripping ice cream everywhere.” I couldn’t believe how annoyed, how ripped off I felt.

  “Just like old times,” he said.

  “It’s not like it was. This isn’t Italy.”

  “But it is, darling,” he said. “Don’t you remember?” And he told me where to catch the boat.

  He neglected to tell me, though, that the boat ran only once a day between Jesolo and Venice. “Leaves at 9:30 every morning, returns at 5:00,” the tourist agent down the boardwalk told me. For an additional seven Euros, a tour bus would pick me up near, but not at, my hotel and take me to the dock. “But the boat’s already left for today and it means I won’t ever be able to stay in Venice for dinner,” I said.

  “We have fine ristoranti in Jesolo, signora,” said the man.

  “It’s crazy,” I told Paul when I called him back. “I’m here for less than a week and I’m going to see more of this circus than I am of Venice. And I still haven’t seen you.”

  “Not much to look at anymore,” he said. “Remember how I worried about my weight? Well, I’m real svelte now.”

  “I don’t care what you look like,” I said and felt my throat, against my will, tighten.

  But as the boat charged the waves the next morning, as we came within sight of the city where we’d been so impossibly young, I felt equal to whatever might be required of me. The Venetian light streamed over the water. It was forgiving light, mirage light. It would wash over Paul and me and reflect our best, once-upon selves. Whatever was supposed to happen would happen. We would have no regrets. We would live — though he would soon die — in that light. I could already hear myself describing our meeting to friends back home. It must have taken courage, they would say. But what closure.

  I waited at the quay as Paul had instructed, but he didn’t appear. I tried him at the number I had, but got only his answering machine: Bon giorno, bonjour, howdy — a greeting for everyone. I waited for an hour and then drifted with the crowds toward Piazza San Marco, still turning every few minutes to check for him. I became part of the pilgrimage trudging up and over countless bridges under the Venetian sun.

  And then we were spilling into the vast space of the Piazza and people were snapping photos and stopping at kiosks and running to stand in lines. We flung our hungry selves into the physical reach of the place. So high, so wide. It was no longer a photo in an album, a bruise in my memory. For so long I’d held this place like a shrine to pain. And now I was back, standing in its dazzling light, spinning in its beauty.

  I tried Paul again. This time, no message, just ringing. I ordered a sandwich and iced tea from one of the overpriced cafés in the Piazza, wandered from palace to basilica to palace, bought a black lace fan for too many Euros from one of the souvenir carts. I perspired and fanned, called half a dozen more times, and then at 4:30, still looking around, still thinking he would appear, went up and down over the bridges back to the quay, back to the boat, back to Jesolo.

  Paul didn’t answer his phone until after 9:00 that night. By then, I’d gone swimming in the Adriatic, their proximity to the beach the only thing the Jesolo hotels were good for. The sea had turned silvery pink from the setting sun, but I couldn’t stay in the water long: the mosquitoes were like vultures. I’d had ice cream and vegetarian pizza and had watched the human show on the boardwalk.

  “Did I misunderstand?” I asked when he picked up. “Did I get the time wrong? Were you out there all day looking for me?”

  “No,” said Paul. “No, that wasn’t it.”

  “Were you too ill?”

  “It was a bad day,” said Paul. “All around.”

  “But why didn’t you just call and tell me? You’ve got my cell.”

  “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “I didn’t come all this way for…” I stopped myself.

  “For me to play coy?” he asked.

  “Do you need help?” I said. “Because I’m here. I’m trapped in this stupid resort, but I am only a boat ride away. I can help.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Same place.” He wanted to know about the hotel, about the turistas, about what I’d eaten for supper.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “When I see you.”

  “No, now,” he said.

  So I told him about the sundae I’d had with three kinds of gelati — coconut and mandarin and grapefruit, all layered with whipped cream and kiwi sauce. “Kiwi sauce,” he said. “I’ve never had kiw
i sauce.” I told him about the three Hungarian women sitting at the table next to me in the pizzeria. “Euro-fashionistas,” I said. “None of them was under seventy, bronzed like those old Man Tan ads, billboards for melanoma, and dressed to the teeth.”

  “I love it,” he said. “But how’d you know they were Hungarian? You don’t understand Hungarian.”

  “I asked them,” I said. “We had a nice little sign-language exchange about the mosquitoes.”

  “I’m glad you’re making friends,” Paul said.

  I waited for nearly an hour again at the quay the next morning, called and got his message — a new message only in Italian — then took off, faster than the morning before. I walked into and through the Piazza. It was Friday and the crowds were thicker, the air heavier. Now I was pissed. What kind of manipulative passive-aggressive shit was he pulling now? Was this piece of Venetian choreography meant to make me yet more tolerant? Was he giving me one last, tough little lesson before he went?

  I wanted to walk fast, in a huff, but the crowds slowed me down. I was on Villa delle Procuratie, according to the sign on the wall, a shaded, narrow walkway packed with expensive shops, everything for the procuring. Gusts of air conditioning reached me on the melting street, pulled me inside. I went into one shop, then another — bought a string of multi-coloured Venetian glass beads for my daughter, then bought another next door, a shorter string, in case she didn’t like the first one, then bought another in a shop further down for myself, different than the first two because at seventeen Marisa was in an intense period of individuating. Last year Paul had said, “It must be difficult for her. You concentrate so hard on the people you love.”

  When I found myself fingering a fourth necklace — in case Marisa didn’t like either of the other two, or in case she preferred the one I’d bought for myself — I put it down and went back outside. It was so hot now that it made being a tourist feel like punishment. There was no place to go home to. I was a half-day and a boat ride from even a shower. I called Paul again and this time got a message made for me.

  “Leticia, if you get this, all I can say is that I am really sorry. I can only imagine what you must be thinking. Your usual patience evaporetto, and oh, darling, you have been immensely patient with me in spite of what I have probably done and said over the years. I forget now exactly what I’ve said. Everything feels like just yesterday and a hundred years ago. OK, here’s the thing. I can’t go out today and I can’t have anybody in. I know you could stand the sight of me — pale, cadaverous, retching every now and then — but see, I couldn’t stand the sight of you looking at the sight of me. I think Harold had the same problem, though, of course, Ellen Schwamm was with him up to the end. Go figure that one out. Hey, did you hear they’re trying to clean up our old guy in Florence, the David? And it’s stirring up the usual Italian opera. Some experts say the only way not to destroy the marble is to use soft cloths and erasers. So there’s some woman restorer going at him with mud masks and mineral spirits. Poor guy. One thing they know now: cheap marble. Michelangelo’s stone wouldn’t be used to build a sink today. Say hey, darling. I know this is beyond the beyond. But let’s hope for better tomorrow. Have some kiwi sauce for me. Say hi to the Hungarians. And do take a gondola ride…worth every outrageous Euro. It’s an ‘A’ ride, the one we never took. Love you, truly do.”

  We hadn’t been able to afford a gondola ride thirty-five summers ago, though Paul kept saying we could. We’d had a windfall in Florence that he was intent on spending as quickly as possible. He wanted to stay in a good hotel, eat out every meal. But I put my foot down about the gondola. To be squired through a few canals by a gigolo-type in boater hat and tight black pants for a small fortune? Paul had suggested it every day. I said no every day.

  We’d begun to disagree about other things, too, about the architecture and whether cats were better pets than dogs, and the real reasons we were vegetarians. He thought my politics were too mild and I thought he should stop smoking weed because when he did he wolfed down whole loaves of bread and blocks of cheese, then got a migraine later. These had been little differences when we were making love three times a day, but since Florence, Paul’s desire had turned polite. “Do you want to?” he asked in our tent at night. We’d found a campground called Camping Paradiso right outside Venice, convinced now that every city, every village in the whole Italian boot had a campground with this name. “Do you want to?”

  So what now? I wasn’t in the mood on this second solo day to do museums or palaces. I went into another street of shops looking for more gifts, found some lovely glass vases in one, and was loading them up on the counter, mentally ticking off the names of friends, when my hands began to shake and I had to put them all back on the shelf under the careful eye of the signora. I went back out into the street. I would walk. I would find comfort in the bridges and alleys, the piazzas, the water.

  One night, in that earlier summer, after a day of barely speaking, we’d walked until our feet were numb. By midnight, the tourists had all gone back to their hotels, the kids to their hostels. We fed some cats a bit of cheese, ducked into a tiny church, miraculously still open, where Paul had sat for a long time with his eyes closed. We were so tired from our summer. It was unimaginable by then that we’d left L.A. with the idea of going to Israel to work the land like pioneers. Europe had gotten in the way. And money. We’d been so desperate for money in Florence that Paul had offered himself to two men, cousins. They’d talked art; they’d had sex. “They let me do only the things I wanted to,” Paul told me after.

  But on the bus back to Camping Paradiso that night, Paul turned from the window to look at me. “We opened Pandora’s box,” he said.

  “No, you opened it,” I said, feeling immediately sick.

  “You’re right,” he said. He was not going to argue.

  “Do you want to find those two faggots again, Davie and Chuckie, or whatever their names were?”

  “This isn’t about them,” Paul said.

  “The sex was better, is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “I love you,” he said. “But I think I need a man to feel…”

  “Aroused?”

  “No, obviously not.”

  “Powerful?”

  “Complete,” he said. And it was my moment not to argue — though on and off for the rest of that night and the next week, I cried and bullied and raged. Do you know what a fucked-up life you’re going to have? What are your parents going to say? (A lame jab, because at twenty Paul was only too happy to rough up the folks.) I reminded him how much he’d loved and wanted me. But in the end I had to accept a humbling fact: I couldn’t change the way he felt.

  I had a client a few years back whose husband left her for another woman. Of course, I’ve had many clients in the same situation, but this woman’s conviction six months later that she could still change her husband’s mind, not only about her, his rightful and deserving partner, but about the other woman, was so absolute that I couldn’t wedge in the smallest possibility that maybe she was going to have to take his word for it, that at some point, she was going to have to believe him. He no longer wanted to be with her. The woman fired me after a few months, saying I wasn’t on her side. Over the years, I’ve watched the slow coming-to on clients’ faces, the sag in the chest, tears dripping into hands. He doesn’t want me anymore. She doesn’t love me anymore. But, wait, I tell them: There is a freedom that comes with accepting this, though it is a searing freedom.

  I left the shops behind and walked in the way one walks in Venice. One is always lost, one is always gasping. Another alley, another courtyard, another church. I lost my sense of direction almost immediately. I threaded and wound, grateful for the shade in the narrowest streets, for the lack of crowds. And then I was in another small piazza and there was a one-word sign with a few flapping flags around it: Gondola. Mauro was his name, he said, and he helped me onto the shockingly unsteady thin wood boat. He was an older man and his hand was callouse
d and sure; he’d lifted a million hands like this.

  “It’s so shaky!” I cried.

  “It’s water,” he said and flashed his gondolier’s smile. As we drifted free — “No one else coming?” he asked, looking around; he was paid by the person, after all — Mauro pushed his foot against the edge of the nearest building. “I will show you the Venice tourists do not see,” he said. “I show you the real Venice.”

  “How many people do you say that to every summer?” I asked, sure he’d laugh or at least smile.

  “Hundreds, thousands,” he said, not smiling, and propelling us out of our alley and into a wider canal. The sun struck the water and, blinded even with sunglasses, I had to look down. The gondola cushions were black vinyl with fake fur trim. Mauro kicked off again, black slipper against brick. My eyes traveled up — black toreador pants on short, muscled legs to the heavy white cotton of a long-sleeved shirt. There was something medieval in the cut, a costume really.

  “How much is this going to cost?” I’d forgotten to ask.

  “For you, signora, I charge fifty Euros.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “It’s a lot of city, signora,” said Mauro, and began reciting Venice’s vital statistics: 180 bridges, 37 kilometres of canals, 60,000 residents, 405 gondolas all gliding along on water only 6 feet deep. We passed brick so ancient there was no mortar left, just walls of stone balanced by habit. Every now and then I’d turn to watch Mauro’s foot shove off against them as he propelled us in spaces that seemed too narrow for a swimmer. He flicked and pushed the way a goldfish navigates a bowl. What did he see from back there? The backs of sweaty heads, people aiming camcorders and editing images on digital screens? If he looked now he’d see only a woman in her fifties wearing linen capris, hands in her lap.