Any Day Now

by Denise Roig

  I could actually see the vapour now. It was here in front of my eyes, hazing everything slightly. Everything looked — I searched for the right word and could find only beautiful.

  “There!” Mauro called as we pulled again into a wider canal with more gondolas. He was pointing to a bridge up ahead. I vaguely remembered this bridge. Paul had been fascinated by it, but I couldn’t remember why.

  “The Bridge of Sighs,” Mauro said as we pulled closer. Swarms of people were climbing and descending. It was an elegant curve of a bridge, but not, to my eye, any more special than the other 179. The building on our left, Mauro said, had once been a prison. As they crossed the bridge from the rest of the city to the rest of their lives, incoming prisoners would sigh. “You understand?” he said. “You understand the name now? Molto triste.”

  “Thank you,” I said when he pulled me up onto the dock ten minutes later.

  “Worth the money?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  When I reached Paul by cell that evening, he wanted to know all about the gondola ride. “I still haven’t gotten on one,” he said. “I just scoot around on the vaporetti. Now that I sort of live here, it feels silly somehow taking a gondola.”

  “I’m leaving the day after tomorrow,” I said.

  “I know,” Paul said.

  “Do you plan on seeing me? Did you ever plan on seeing me or had you been thinking more in terms of cell-to-cell contact?”

  “Of course I did.” He sounded wounded.

  “Do you have any idea how painful this is for me?”

  “Painful?” he asked and he sounded so surprised, I said, “I’m going now,” and hung up.

  I paced around the boardwalk, not seeing a thing. I thought we’d worked through this stuff years ago: my rejection, his guilt. The seventies were made for working things through. We talked, we analysed, we talked. And we had mostly hung in. I was there for his grand amour with David (no accident, the name) and for David’s death. He was there through the crash-and-burn of my long marriage. I knew this man, his eccentricities and vanities, his generosity and loyalty. We’d drifted together and apart for years, but the drift somehow always carried us back.

  The street had just closed to cars the way it apparently did every evening. I turned off my cellphone and walked back to Hotel Paradiso. Two of the three Hungarians were taking a coffee and cigarette at one of the outdoor tables. They waved at me, an old friend already, and motioned grandly to an empty chair.

  “Your other friend?” I asked.

  “Oh, mens,” one said and they smiled hugely at me. I nodded as if I was in on it. Both women were dressed like they were attending an elegant beach party — long silky sheaths with silver sandals. They glowed with jewelry.

  Hungarian? I asked. She met a Hungarian man here?

  Yes, yes, they said. “Rich mens,” they said and again there were lots of nods and smiles.

  “Mens?” one asked and pointed at me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh,” both said, looking disappointed.

  “You? Men?” I asked, pointing at them.

  “No, no,” they laughed.

  Paul called as soon as I turned my phone back on, somewhere around 10:00 as I sat in front of the window in my room. I’d turned off all the lights, rolled up the shutter and taken off my clothes, too tired for the blast of the shower and the mop-up after.

  “I just want to know one thing,” he said. “Why’d you stick around all those years if it was so bloody painful?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’re the fucking therapist and you don’t know?”

  “I don’t have one answer for one little thing,” I shot back. And then because I heard the absolute truth of that, I added, more softly, “Not one.”

  “There’s been something in this for you all along,” said Paul. I could hear someone speaking Italian in the background. Was it the radio or a live person? “I would even go so far as to say that your entire career has been built on that early pain, bafflement, whatever you want to call it. You’ve been trying to figure out the human psyche ever since Florence 1969, trying to crack it and protect yourself from it.”

  “But it hurt so much,” I said. “It messed me up for years.”

  “How long am I going to have to explain this to you, dear heart? Life is mess and complication. Nothing but. There’s only little spaces for happy-go-lucky, for grace. And besides, why stick with the old pain when there’s so much new pain available?”

  “Don’t go philosophical on me,” I said.

  “Listen, even infuriating Harold got a bit insightful at the end,” Paul said. “Hey, here’s a Brodkey quote for you…” I heard him going through papers… “‘It is not easy to accept your own unsuitability for life. But if I do not accept it, I will throw my life away in resistance.’ Deep, huh?” His voice was getting weak. “Pending death does that.”

  “Then we should all be a lot wiser,” I said. “Since it is, in fact, pending for all of us.”

  “For you and your ilk, Letty dear, death is still just an idea. Tomorrow,” he said. “For real.”

  In the middle of the night — it must have been the middle of the night because the roar of the street was muted — Paul called back. “What do I know about Venice?” he asked before I’d even said pronto. “I mean, what? What can I say that hasn’t been said? One hundred and eighty bridges and four hundred gondolas? It’s a city built on sticks, goddamn sticks.” And he began to cry. I’d heard him cry like this once a long time ago. The light in the tent had been an underwater shade of green.

  I listened to him cry. “Thank you,” he finally said. “Anyone else would have rushed in with a pickaxe or a Band-Aid and I don’t want either.”

  “I thought I was the one who had to go through the heavy shit this week. See, even now you won’t let me have the stage,” I said. The temperature had finally dropped. Something like a breeze was coming through the window.

  “I will,” he said. “Any day now.”

  “Do you remember the last time you cried like that with me?” I asked, a dangerous question if he didn’t.

  “Baggy old tent,” said Paul. His voice was nearly gone now.

  “It’s actually four hundred and five gondolas,” I said. “Mauro, the gondolier, said so.”

  “See?” Paul said. “What do I know? Domani.”

  But the next morning as I waited in the heat for the bus to the boat to the city, I called just in case. He’d made another message for me. “Did you know I have a friend who says that I’ve been here — I mean here on the planet, not here in Venice — so many times before, and that I’ve burned through so much karma in this lifetime alone, that I’ll be coming back as light next time around? How about that? I will wrap my beams around you, Leticia. I will fold you in my rays. I will shine down on you.” He’d pulled the phone away to cough. “Don’t look for me today. I won’t be there. I thought I could, but I can’t. All systems are going. Call it goddamn ego and caprice. Cowardice even. But, hey, something good comes of everything, right? I got a blast of your truth, which I suppose I still needed. And I got to have you near again, at least as near as I could. And you, you got…kiwi sauce. Mosquitoes. Gondolas.” Now his voice broke. “And my gratitude. That, Letty love, is rarer than love, though you have that, too, in case you were deluded enough to ever doubt it. But here’s to delusions, too! Arrivederci, sweetheart. I’ll be back. Any day now.”

  I didn’t get on the boat, couldn’t, but walked back to the hotel. I cried all the way, not caring who saw. A few cars slowed, a whole busload of people stared out their tinted windows. The street was already mad with tourists, people with third-degree sunburns and sweat circles under the arms of their tank tops. These people had all missed the boat, too, missed their one chance to spend the day in Venice. Instead they were here in a little world made just for them.

  Though it was only 10:00, I bought a coffee gelato and stood on the sidewalk eating
it and crying some more. I’d never cried and eaten ice cream at the same time. It was an experience. I looked at people. Even as they shoved pizza into their faces, even as they bought yet more postcards, they seemed relaxed. These people didn’t mind that they weren’t in Piazza San Marco. They could buy the same fans, hats and T-shirts right here in Jesolo, the same gelati. The view was a little different, the light a little less magic, but if they really wanted to, they could do the palace tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that.

  About the Author

  Denise Roig is the author of A Quiet Night and a Perfect End, a short-story collection that found critical favour when it came out in 1995 and again in 2000 when it was translated in French as Le Vrai Secret du bonheur (Editions de la Pleine Lune.) CBC Radio’s “Between the Covers” broadcast selections from A Quiet Night and a Perfect End in the fall of 2003. Denise lives in Montreal where she teaches journalism at Concordia University and is working on her next book, Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School.