Page 28 of Slanting Towards the Sea

TWENTY-FIVE

WHAT I’VE COME TO think of as the era of Marina started at the Italian-language course I took one September, a smidge under two years after Vlaho and I had divorced.

Marina was the only other woman my age in the class, so we naturally gravitated toward one another.

She was a sailing and scuba-diving instructor, and much of her clientele was Italian.

She wanted to become fluent because few Italian tourists spoke English, and even fewer spoke Croatian.

I wanted to learn because I was immersed in olive oil production research, and Italian was its official language.

I didn’t really need to learn it, but it gave me something to do in that lonely time after the divorce.

Our teacher, ?ime, was a dry little man with a wiry mustache who raised his hands like a conductor when he talked, a sight that was difficult to watch with a straight face.

“Ancoraaaa,” he’d draw out at the end of each class. “Che ore sono?”

“Mezzogiorno,” the class would say in unison.

“Tempo di salutarsi!” he’d say.

“E ora di bere un caffè,” Marina would whisper with an eye roll. It had become a ritual of ours. We’d stroll around the town after class, then have coffee in one of the sun-bathed piazzas.

What I liked about Marina was that she was the only woman our age not obsessing over men.

Living in a town that’s oriented toward raising children will do that to women.

Whenever I met a single woman in her thirties, she was spiraling in a panicked need to pair off.

To avoid becoming a spinster, an old maid—the kind of woman society took pleasure in deriding the most.

Marina never talked about men or wanting a relationship.

I never even saw her check a guy out. For a while, I thought she might be gay, but she showed no interest in women either, so there was that.

What she did talk about, and profusely, was sailing and the sea.

The sun-streaked depths and the fish, and this suited me just fine.

I countered her blue with my olive-green.

I had told her that I was divorced. It was the only time we mentioned relationships and marriage.

When she asked me why, I said it just didn’t work out, and didn’t offer more.

She said, “That’s why I’ll never get married.

” Her parents had divorced when Marina was thirteen, but her sister, Irena, was nine and she ended up developing both an eating disorder and depression in her early teens, which Marina attributed to the divorce.

Irena lived with a much older lover somewhere in Sweden now, accepting a very small and contained life, as though she could take the world only in miniature dosages.

Which meant their mother was pressuring Marina to have children, as Marina was the only one of the two siblings who seemed capable of it.

“I will never get married,” Marina said to me that day.

“But if I did, I would never divorce. It’s the worst thing you can do to your kids. ”

“Luckily, we didn’t have children,” I said, marveling at the levity I managed while saying it. And that was the only time we ever touched on that topic.

After one class in December, we exited the building, the tower bells all across the town greeting us with their brassy noon song. “Let’s have some coffee and fritule.” Marina linked her arm through mine.

December in Zadar meant one thing: Advent.

Small wooden cottages sprung up along the Five Wells Square as they did every year at Christmastime, offering mulled wine spiced with clove and cinnamon, sausages with mustard on bread, and fritule—a deep-fried yeasty dough covered in powdered sugar.

It was hard to score a table this time of day.

We circled the square three times until one cleared.

“My shift starts at two, I can’t stay long,” I said.

“Well, if you can kill half an hour of my time, I’ll be much obliged,” she said. “Winter is destroying me. I hate waiting for the season to start.”

“You’re missing the point,” I taunted her. “Everyone who works in tourism milks the season for three months and then takes the rest of the year off. Minimum input, maximum output, baby.” I snapped my fingers three times, the way our Italian teacher sometimes did.

Marina huffed. “I guess I missed the memo.”

“Ivona, hej.” The familiar voice came from behind me. Even in the few syllables of his hello, his southern accent tinged his words, and the bright color of it streamed into my veins.

We hadn’t been seeing much of each other since the divorce.

For all the hurt and pain leading up to it, the divorce itself had been a fairly dispassionate, bureaucratic process.

By then, Vlaho had moved out of our apartment as well, and found a new place closer to the bank.

When we met at the courthouse, he appeared less gaunt, less hollowed out.

He was somber, but calm, reconciled to the situation, and this broke my heart in a whole new way.

We’d had coffee from time to time since.

Not often, because there was always that balance to strike, wanting nothing more than to be around him, and knowing I needed to let go.

“Oh, hey,” I said, a little too eager, as I turned to him.

His face was more angular, starker, than when I’d seen him last, seven months ago. He’d grown a two-day shadow that pricked my face as he kissed me on both cheeks. But he still smelled the same. That scent, always the scent snapping me back to who we’d once been.

He looked over the cheery throng of people around us enjoying mulled wine. “You’re the last person I’d expect to see here.”

“Likewise,” I said. Neither of us liked crowds. That’s why we’d spent our college years holed up in my apartment instead of going to rowdy student parties.

“I’m just passing through. I parked my car under the city wall.” He pointed his thumb behind him, toward Vladimir Nazor park.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I’m on vacation as of today. Going to Cavtat for the holidays. So I thought I’d buy some presents before I go.”

He looked between me and Marina, and I realized I hadn’t introduced them. “Oh yeah, sorry, this is Marina. We take Italian together. Marina, this is my… um… Vlaho.”

“Buongiorno,” Marina said with a mock flourish.

They shook hands with polite disinterest. He turned to me again, took a moment to inspect my face. A thousand questions vacillated between us. Where have you been? What have you been up to? Are you okay? Are you, really? Questions we couldn’t ask, but that burned inside us nonetheless.

Being locked outside his life was the worst kind of punishment, yet so fitting for the crime I had committed against him.

I ached, as I always did when I saw him, to put this whole charade behind us.

To get up from that chair and sink into his embrace, holding tight until he surrendered to me.

To tell him the last two years had been a mistake.

But of course I couldn’t do that. He was bound to move on sometime, and when he did, he’d be happier than I ever could have made him.

If he hasn’t moved on already. The thought struck through me.

“Well then—” he said. “Wish me luck. I have no idea what to buy. I can get away with a nice bottle of wine for my dad, but my mom…” He shrugged.

“Frana loves that peony perfume from L’Occitane,” I reminded him. “The one in the round red bottle.” It stung to be so familiar with his family yet removed from it at the same time.

“Oh, yeah. Right. That’s a good idea.” He loitered for another second, his hands deep in his pockets, looking like he wanted to say more but hadn’t found anything worth saying, and I felt the same way. “Well then…”

I wasn’t ready for him to go. I needed a few more minutes. Why the beard? What was going on at work? Did his father get that gout under control? Was there someone else already?

“Care to join us?” I asked.

“Thanks. I haven’t had coffee today.” His acceptance as quick and eager as my invitation. He glanced at Marina, as if asking for her permission. She slipped her phone inside her backpack. “By all means.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“How do you guys know each other?” she asked.

“We used to be together,” I hurried to say before he managed to beat me to it. I waved my hand in a nonconsequential way, and Vlaho gave me a Is that what it was? look. “We’re just friends now,” I added, and Vlaho’s lips curled into a smile soaked with quiet hurt.

“I see.” Marina seemed mildly amused by the display of awkwardness between us, but she didn’t press us for more. It wasn’t her thing, prying.

“Marina owns a sailboat,” I said.

“Oh, really? That’s amazing,” he said.

“You sail?” Marina asked.

“No, but I’ve always wanted to learn.”

What happened next happened in a flurry.

Marina offered to show him the basics, and at first, he declined.

He didn’t want to be an imposition. But Marina said she had to take the boat out before the season anyway, and that it wouldn’t be a problem if he tagged along.

She’d do that for a friend of mine. I relaxed in my chair, kind of proud that my friend would be instrumental in fulfilling Vlaho’s lifelong dream.

This way, I thought, I was still a part of his life.

I still mattered. It never occurred to me that Marina would turn out to be the woman I had feared since the day I learned my uterus was useless, and in some way, since the very day I’d met him.

Next September, Vlaho called to tell me she was pregnant.

That they were getting married. I knew they had been hanging out since she’d given him sailing lessons the previous spring, but the idea of them being together, sleeping together, shattered me to pieces.

For weeks afterward, I couldn’t straighten my back.

I walked bent around my center as if I’d taken a literal blow.

If there had been any attraction between them the day I’d introduced them, I’d completely missed the clues.

In my na?veté, I thought of love only as a tsunami that pulls you under with brute force—like it had been with Vlaho and me.

But sometimes, love can work more like osmosis, it can imbue you slowly.

Vlaho and Marina must have connected like that, two fluids of different densities: steadily, drop by drop.

It would be a church wedding, he said, not because either of them was religious, but her mother was traditional in that sense, and Marina had given in. Marina hadn’t struck me as much of a people pleaser, but I’d obviously missed some clues there too.

Ours had only been a civil wedding. I wasn’t religious either, but it felt like God’s blessing would make their marriage more real than ours had been, more substantial. The one that mattered. The one kids were born into. That was the blow that was hardest to stomach.

It would be a small ceremony, he said. He sounded congested, like he had been crying. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

I clenched my stomach to prevent the dismay rolling upward.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” I said, but really, I was thinking, You bastard, you bastard, you son of a bitch.

How could you, how could you, how the fuck could you?

The pain was so searing I couldn’t speak.

When I managed them, my words sounded venomous. “I left you, remember?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you did.” That hollowness of voice. That defeat.

We hung up.

It was done. The worst thing imaginable, the one thing I’d dreaded since we parted ways, had happened.

Vlaho had someone else. Someone else was entitled to kiss him, love him.

Make her life with him, share his bed. Decode the endless number of his facial expressions, his tender smiles.

Listen to the sound of his deep melodic voice when he pillow-talked, a voice that carried the scent of tangerines and watermelons and all things beautiful and painful.

Someone who could curl his silky hair around her finger when he lay in her lap.

Someone who could look for his nose and downward-sloping eyes—that look that always read a bit melancholy—on a child that had her cheekbones and lips.

I curled up on the floor in my room, and cursed the day I’d enrolled in Italian, the day I’d met Marina, the day I’d introduced them to each other, the day they’d made love and gotten her pregnant.

Images of him pushing into her tore into me, snapshots of them lying naked on the stern of her boat, becoming one under the light of countless stars.

I wanted to claw my eyes out, but the images were mental, burned into my brain.

The wails within me flared, and I had to let them out or they would rip right through my chest. I started howling. The ugly, loud way, the way animals growl when they’re injured. I held myself on the floor, on my knees, rocking back and forth.

“What the hell is going on here?” Dad, who never came into my room, stormed through the door.

I saw myself through his eyes, a grown woman kneeling, sobbing, and felt ridiculous. I straightened up and wiped my tears and nose with the back of my hand. “Nothing, Dad, sorry. Everything’s fine. I just got a little upset about something, that’s all.”

“Thought someone had ripped your head off,” Dad mumbled and shut the door as he left the room.

I sat on my bed, all those beastly howls still roiling inside me, with nowhere to go.

Once when we were children, my mom said that Sa?a’s tears always broke her heart.

“When Sa?a cries, he never lets out a sound,” she’d said.

“There are only these enormous tears rolling down his cheeks.” What she hadn’t said, but implied, was that because I cried with sound, my sorrow wasn’t as real, wasn’t as heartbreaking as his.

I lay on my bed, the roars frozen inside my chest, and thought of my mom up there in heaven. Big fat tears came and went, rolled and rolled, but there was no one to be heartbroken for me. I was that tree, felled inside the forest, that no one had heard fall. That tree that didn’t make a sound.