Solitaria

by Genni Gunn

  Later, after the kiss and the pronouncement, David steals outside, but the bird is gone. Cleared away, no doubt, by the diligent hotel staff. He would rather believe the bird regained its senses and flew away. In the window, a postcard backdrop of sky, water, and trees. How easy to mistake reflection, he thinks, catching sight of himself as a stranger, a forty-six-year-old man in a tuxedo, hair dark and wavy. A slender man with bleached green eyes and a cynical disposition women find attractive. A man who goes to weddings, dinner parties, lectures, and movies on his own; who is not afraid of solitude.

  “See anyone interesting?” The bride emerges from the side door, her puffy white dress clouded around her.

  David smiles, startled. “Not even looking.” Annie is always trying to match him up with someone, as if he were a shoe. She doesn’t understand that David is perfectly happy. As happy as anyone can be with a series of e-romances and a lover who lives thousands of miles away.

  “You plan to spend the rest of your life on your own?” Annie says, her tone all sympathy and pity.

  “I have Bernette,” David says, “we’re good,” though it sounds fake even to him. Bernette is his long-distance girlfriend, a serious young woman who teaches in the Women’s Studies Department of a small private university southeast of Chicago. A couple of months ago, on a lark, he googled “Long-Distance Relationships,” and came up with an advice site in which he read that the most important aspect of long-distance relationships is “to have a solid time in the future for when the long distance part of the relationship will end, no matter the time length. Without it, the relationship can begin to mold into something that is always distant — even with great communication. With it, each person can see the point at which the distance will end, and work harder to keep emotions readily available.” He and Bernette have never discussed this solid time. Their relationship is built on a series of small impermanent futures — we’ll go on holiday; I’ll come to visit — carrots dangled at the end of a long stick.

  Annie clamps her small hand on his forearm. “You hardly see each other. What are you getting out of it?”

  “My freedom.” David smiles through clenched teeth.

  Annie stiffens and pulls back her hand. She thinks he’s dismissing her marriage, and maybe he is. “Freedom’s highly overrated,” she says. “You’re kidding yourself.”

  “That’s your version,” David says.

  Annie shrugs and goes back inside. David watches her disappear behind the window mirage, thinking, Romance is a shatterproof window. The phrase applies equally to his e-romances, where the screen is a buffer zone between real emotions, and to Bernette, whose distance forms a thick murky glass.

  You plan to spend the rest of your life on your own?

  It’s not a plan, like a three-week holiday — charter a small plane to Everest, chatter-teeth up to base camp, click a few photos, then into that five-star hotel. This is his life and this is how it’s going so far. Instead of cultivating a mate (like some exotic orchid from a jungle, or an arctic rhododendron that blooms for a few hours one day a year), he has concentrated on words.

  In the evenings, when according to Annie, he should be on spring-loaded dance-floors, sashaying with wonder-women, he is bent over endless piles of English essays he marks night after night, essays written by nineteen-year-olds whose arrogance and ignorance are staggering.

  It’s not a plan, it’s the absence of one.

  He’s in his hotel room by ten o’clock, minutes after bride and groom hop off their cake and drive away in their tin-can car. They’re at Harrison Hot Springs, 70 miles east of Vancouver. Off with the tuxedo, on with the bathing trunks, and down he goes to the outdoor hot pools. The air is crisp, though it’s early July. Up here, the narrow lake forms a wind tunnel between mountains. Once the sun sets, except for a couple of weeks in August, the temperature plummets.

  He swims the length of the pool twice, then perches on one of the ledges moulded to resemble natural rock, and looks up. Directly across, the hotel’s tower: a succession of glass patio doors, like a multi-screen TV, as if one story were not enough. Short Cuts. Many of the drapes are open, either because the room’s occupants have forgotten that despite the mountain in front of them, there are pools below from which people can view their every move, or because they don’t care about privacy any more than exhibitionists who install cameras in their homes and project their dull, generic lives onto the Internet.

  Soon, couples arrive — wedding guests giggling and chasing each other around like children finally emerging from their adulthoods. They squeal, laugh, jazz into each other. They splash, race, kiss underwater, as if they were the newly-weds. When one couple starts kissing passionately on the ledge two feet from him, David gets out of the water and patters up to his room.

  He’s brought a set of English essays to mark. “Get a life,” Joe and Annie would say if they knew. He sits up in bed, opens the first one and begins reading, “True wisdom comes only after you have learned to fear God.” He slams the essay back into its pile, and dumps the pile onto the rug. The last thing he needs right now is faulty logic. He flicks off the light, slides open the glass doors, and parts the curtains. Flakes of conversation, trickles of laughter waft into the room, disembodied. He moves back to the bed, where he can see out but not be seen. In front of him, the dark, imposing mountain face.

  At 2:14 a.m., he is awakened by the rhythmic banging of a headboard against the wall behind his head. He opens his eyes, turns over, listening. A couple making love, their voices amplified in the dense silence. “Come on,” the man is saying, over and over, as if trying to coax the woman somewhere. She responds in hyper moans that sound both forced and theatrical. He turns on the light, sits up. Picks up the receiver and dials Bernette’s number.

  “Hello?” Her voice is sleepy. High-pitched, childlike.

  They live in different times, he thinks. She’s always hours ahead of him, her future, his past. Divisions and codes. What was he planning to say? Phone sex. Now, her vulnerable voice silences him.

  “Hello?” she says again. This time her voice is more awake, almost alarmed.

  He hangs up slowly and carefully. Turns out the light and lies in bed thinking about Bernette. Two marvellous years of nothing. They hardly know each other. Three times this past year, they’ve met in a city mid-way between their homes and fucked for a weekend. Weak. Weak. End.

  The college is a quadrant of concrete and glass in prime downtown space, too hot in spring, summer, and fall, too cold in winter. At the centre of each building, a circular open space — glass-domed, six storeys high. A simulated tropical outdoors, with its fig trees and yuccas and palms strategically placed beside cedar benches, as if to say you’re in California, in a mall, an airport. Listen to your heels on the marble tiles. You are privileged. You are our clients.

  David takes the stairs to the fifth floor, where the English instructors’ offices are located. Every few months, everything they are and do is assigned a new buzz phrase. This month, they are curriculum providers and what they do instead of teaching is called facilitating the delivery of materials. Like longshoremen directing cranes. Poetry over there, CanLit to the left, essays to the right, adjectives and misplaced modifiers straight ahead. They use the chalkboard and overhead projectors to facilitate the facilitating.

  In their own minds, the instructors are educators — all of them have spent on average nine to eleven years at university specializing in a subject they now try to teach to these clients — these eighteen-year-olds, straight out of high school, gelled and spiked and tinted, pierced and braided, in platform shoes and flared pants, fringed suede jackets and knee-high boots, who stomp around insisting their knowledge is equal to their instructors’, insisting it is their constitutional right to get passing grades because they’ve paid the money, and the client is always right.

  David and another instructor share an office large enough for two desks and two bookcases. On the wall beside his desk, David has taped an innoc
uous screen-print of the Beatles, bought at a student art sale, something that cannot be construed as being in any way offensive to anyone. Years ago, when he first started working here, he’d hung a print of The Marchesa Casati by Augustus John in its place, having been captivated by the painting since he first saw it at the Art Gallery of Ontario. A couple of years later, after one of the college’s numerous forums on What Constitutes Sexual Harassment?, David wondered if a female student could stare at the mysterious Marchesa and read sexual invitation. He took the print home, and kept his office door propped open at all times during office hours.

  “Take a look at this,” his office mate Julia says, and hands him a booklet, Teaching Excellence, subtitled, Teaching With Hospitality. The first line reads: “Fortunately, hospitality is practiced more than it is preached. A cardinal academic virtue, hospitality is essential in the classroom…”

  David imagines himself in a tuxedo, moving elegantly around the classroom offering trays of adverbs, racks of gerunds, mixed-metaphor salads, free-verse entrees, garlands of sonnets, double-dactyl desserts, and terza rima cappuccinos. He shakes his head. “I don’t know about you,” he says, “but I will not be hosting guests, or offering accommodation or entertainment. I have not invited these students to dinner. They are not my friends.”

  Julia laughs. “Where in our job description does it say ‘host’?”

  David rolls his eyes.

  “Let’s draft a memo to the union,” Julia says, bold-writing in air.

  “Let’s launch a support group for instructors who don’t want to become hosts,” David says.

  “Let’s get our inhospitable butts kicked out of here,” she says.

  David and Julia are kindred souls, both sick to death of new-age methodology, terminology, and euphemisms, of students who arrive at university inflated with twelve years of hospitality and feel-good learning, students with no critical thinking skills. Now and then, he and Julia have a drink after work. Once Julia invited him to dinner, but he declined, afraid to alter their friendship.

  “I feel really burned out,” David tells her. “I don’t know how much longer I can tolerate this bullshit.”

  She nods. “I know what you mean.”

  They both smile sympathetically, then Julia looks away.

  He swivels to face the window and stares at the grey backdrop against which rise skyscrapers whose flat glass surfaces reflect the swirling clouds. He has a small, unobstructed view of the harbour, though today even the water appears murky. Cinereal, he thinks, conjuring a sediment of ash. He likes Latinate words, because they are inextricably linked to his childhood, to the Italian language he learned before he went to kindergarten. Rain drizzles as it has for the past four days, and he imagines in the street below the monotonous spray of tires on pavement.

  His cell rings. He glances at the caller ID. His mother, Clarissa.

  “They’ve found my brother Vito,” she says. “Murdered. In Italy. And all these years, we never knew.” She is distraught and crying.

  “Slow down, Mom. I thought Uncle Vito was in Argentina.”

  “Well, obviously, he’s not.”

  Slowly, he gets the details. His aunt, Piera, the only one who claims to have received regular letters from her brother Vito, has locked herself in her bedroom, and refuses to speak to anyone, including her sister-in-law Teresa, who lives one storey below her.

  “She says she’ll talk to you and only you,” Clarissa says, a tightness in her tone.

  When his mother speaks of her sister Piera, it’s always with slightly pursed lips, with a permanent tone of disapproval. It’s more than bias, David thinks, it’s something historical. “But that’s ridiculous,” he says. “Why would she choose me, when she hasn’t seen me in years? What do I know about her life?”

  “I think that’s the point,” Clarissa says. “She says we’re all biased against her. She adores you and thinks you’ll be impartial.” She pauses.

  David hesitates for a moment. Although he hasn’t seen his aunt in many years, he knows her adoration flourishes through the mask of distance, his flaws invisible. “I’m not finished the term,” he says, uneasily. “Besides, I promised Bernette a holiday together before the new term begins.”

  “This is a family emergency,” Clarissa says. “And Bernette’s lived without you long enough that another couple of weeks won’t matter, believe me.” She pauses. “We’re all going home for the funeral service. Please. I need you to come with me.”

  After he hangs up, Julia glances at him. “Everything ok?”

  He nods.

  She shrugs and returns to her reading.

  He opens his email and searches for Bernette’s last message, dated three days ago and buried among thirty others. It outlines flights and destinations, hotels and car rentals, prices and dates. Bernette wants them to sign up for a three-week eco-tour in a Third World country. She has included numerous links to various organizations and causes. David sighs. The eco-tour itself sounds interesting. The prospect of three weeks with Bernette, however, fills him with anxiety. In the nineteen months they’ve been in this relationship, they have spent only one week together, during the academic convention where they first met. Since then, they’ve had regular email, phone sex, and the odd weekend. Relation ship, he thinks, as if they were on a journey without destination, stuck in a high-priced condo on the Residensea, aimlessly navigating the waters of the globe. Their romance is largely based in text, and words uttered across phone lines and cell towers. I love you, they sign off. I miss you. David is no stranger to e-love. Long-distance romance equals desire fuelled by frustration. Intimate knowledge often burns the fire out. Solid time.

  He composes a warm email, telling her about his uncle Vito, and how he must accompany his mother to Italy and doesn’t know when he’ll return. Family business. Perhaps they could try for the eco-tour during the Christmas holidays? Or next spring, before the rainy season?

  He rereads the email, trying to imagine it from her perspective. I love you. I miss you. He clicks on the Send button.

  “Do you want to have a drink later?” Julia asks when he stands up.

  “I wish,” he says. “I may have to go to Italy.”

  “Italy?” she says, smiling widely. “Poor you.”

  “I’m serious. It’s a family emergency.”

  “Oh, David, I’m sorry —”

  “It’s not like that,” he says, and explains about his uncle.

  “You should definitely go,” Julia says when he’s done. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take your classes. There are only a couple to go.”

  “Would you? You’re an angel,” he says. “I won’t expect you to mark anything. I’ll take care of them when I come back.”

  He’s in his thirty-second-floor bachelor suite in Vancouver’s West End barely an hour, when the phone rings. “You must be kidding,” Bernette says.

  He laughs. “I wish. I couldn’t make up something like this.” A pause. “I’m sorry.” He imagines her standing in front of a window in an apartment he’s never seen, a thin thirty-eight-year-old woman, with brown cropped hair.

  “I’ve been so looking forward to seeing you,” Bernette says, her voice soft. She sighs, and he hears the disappointment in that breath. Dis - appointment, he thinks, how appropriate.

  “I have too. Look, I promise, as soon as I’m done in Italy, I’ll fly out and we’ll spend some time together.”

  “You’ve been saying that all summer,” she says, a little edge to her voice.

  “You know how busy I’ve been.” He takes a deep breath. “We’ve been over all this already. Please try to understand.”

  “Are you seeing someone else?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “How could you even ask?”

  “All right,” she says, “if it’s so ridiculous, why don’t I come with you to Italy? Then you can do your family thing and we’ll be together.”

  Now it’s his turn to sigh. “It’s much more complicated th
an that,” he says. “I haven’t seen the family for years, and we’re dealing with a tragedy here. I just don’t think it’s a good idea —”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she says.

  “It’s family business,” he says. “It’s not as if we could travel around together. I’ll be in a house the whole time. Besides, we’ll be speaking Italian. You’d be bored.”

  “You don’t consider me part of your family.”

  He has no response for that, because she’s right. Why do these uncomplicated e-romances always turn into torturous scenes of accusations from which he can’t really defend himself?

  “Can you excuse me a moment?” he says. “My other line is ringing.” He clicks the hold button, without waiting for her reply, and lets out a long sigh.

  When he returns to the line, she has hung up.

  Three days later, David and his mother Clarissa land at Fiumicino Airport just before noon, exhausted by the nine-hour flight from Vancouver to Heathrow, the three-hour wait, and the two-hour flight to Rome. They stand by the luggage carousel, dully watching bags slide down the ramp, bags that appear uniformly black, bags that belong to everyone but them. Soon, Clarissa gathers a crowd of admirers, begging for autographs. She is a diva, a soprano who has sung in every opera house in the world, with every tenor of renown. She is revered here in Italy. “Piacere,” she says, signing tickets and itineraries, until their bags are loaded into a taxi, and soon they are on a train, heading to Belisolano, to her mother’s hometown.

  “Do you miss it all?” David asks her when they’re settled in their seats. Clarissa retired five years ago, and now gives private voice lessons to protégés, and does the odd TV appearance and recital. “The fans, the glory?” David spent his childhood with nannies backstage, in hotel rooms, while they travelled the globe. Then came boarding school, and later university. By then, Clarissa was so well-buffered by handlers, the only fans and glory he saw were on TV.