Page 43 of Slanting Towards the Sea
FORTY
And I always seem to be one paper short as I’m trying to stack up the documentation to start my own sole proprietorship.
In order to get the government support for self-employment, I first need to be unemployed.
So I quit my job at the stationery shop, and after my month’s notice is out, I go to various offices to regulate my status.
The Public Health Insurance Office, the Employment Services Office, the Tax Government.
There are forms for everything coded with indecipherable names, a strict itinerary to follow—and always that one paper missing.
Once I’m unemployed, I take the class with Employment Services, which is a requirement for applying for aid. And there, we’re told we need to draft a viable business plan. I don’t know the first thing about drafting business plans, viable or not, so I enlist Vlaho’s help.
We meet on the terrace of the coffee shop near the bank during his break and order our macchiatos.
He has a certain way of adding sugar to his cup, a ritual I’ve always loved observing.
He pours in half a packet, and twirls the spoon around, but then he doesn’t lick the spoon like I do but runs its edge along the rim of the cup.
It makes one last drop form and slide into the cup, and then he puts the spoon on the saucer.
He sees me looking, and I startle, like I’m caught witnessing something deeply intimate, something I shouldn’t be taking stock of anymore. “Glad to see some things are still the same,” I blurt.
Vlaho doesn’t smile back or concur, he only takes a sip of his coffee and gazes toward the park that lies between buildings, where some kids are at play.
Two, a girl and a boy, hold balloons in their hands, but the girl’s gets snatched away by the warm summer breeze.
It rises until it pops in the branches of a tree overhead. The girl starts howling in dismay.
“Yeah, at least some things never change,” Vlaho says.
There’s an emphasis in his tone I can’t decipher.
He isn’t his usual self, and when I think this, I realize it’s been a while since the energy he radiates shifted.
Even the day I came over for pancakes, he had a somberness about him.
I have an urge to ask him what he means by what he said, to ask him if all is well, if his parents are fine, if work is fine, if he and Marina are fine, but I can’t make myself pry. It isn’t my place to ask. Not anymore.
The truth is, I wasn’t fine for almost a decade after we divorced, and it wasn’t his job to patch me up either. This was the deal we’d had to accept in order to remain friends. A boundary we’ve both had to respect no matter how hard it was to maintain at times.
A bit of a vacuum forms in my chest, pulling at the rest of me as I bring my cup to my lips.
I loved—still love—this man so much. I had once promised to stay with him through sickness and health, to grow old together, to stay with him until death did us part.
I had a fantasy, some would say morbid, reading about all those old couples, married forever, who die on the same day, one of natural causes, the other of heartbreak.
I imagined that would be us in the far future, two wrinkled silver-haired prunes, surrounded by a flock of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and when one of us died, the other one would soon follow.
I hadn’t been able to imagine subsisting in this world without him next to me.
In a way, what took me by surprise the most after we’d divorced was that I survived.
For a long time, I’d resented my body for this blatant treason.
But here we are, sitting together yet apart, and his face is closed where it used to be open, and I’m not allowed—or I don’t allow myself—to ask why.
Nine years ago, I filed for divorce, renouncing him legally.
But in all those years, I realize as I’m watching that little girl hiccup her sadness, I hadn’t renounced him emotionally.
He was still the one, the only one, the one I would die loving.
But now there is Asier, and even though Asier can never be Vlaho, in the marrow of my bones I know it means something has to change.
I need to give Vlaho up on the inside too.
A private, invisible loss, but a loss no less real.
So I stave off those thoughts and get the papers out of my laptop bag.
He pores over them as I lay out the plan that’s more a list of wishes than anything else.
Short courses on best olive-growing practices for busy professionals who grow olives as a hobby.
Olive oil tasting and food pairings. I add two letters of reference for teaching classes and running workshops, one from Marina’s friend and one from the owner of the oil mill where I usually take the harvest for milling.
Vlaho annotates some of the pages, explains how to make a spreadsheet to show the potential revenue versus the potential expenses.
He fills in some of the expected expenditures, taxes, social security, and all the other things that my mind doesn’t like to dwell on.
He gives me some pointers on how to frame my “comparative advantages” and target audience by highlighting my occupation and training.
Once we’re done and I put the papers away, he says, “You might have something here.” He looks surprised by what he just said.
His approval gives me a boost of much needed confidence. “My expectations are low,” I say. “But if I manage to match what I made at the stationery shop by doing what I love, I’ll consider it a success. Not a bar set high, really.”
“Yeah, I talked to Damir the other day.” Damir being his high school best friend.
The last I heard about him was that he was specializing in endocrinology.
“He’s moving to Germany because he can’t afford rent anymore.
He decided to call it quits when he learned his cousin the plumber earns five times as much as he does, all by working in the gray economy.
The guy’s officially unemployed, but drives the most expensive BMW to collect his unemployment aid each month while hiding his triple-figure business from the Tax Government. ”
I should be repulsed, but stories like these don’t shock me anymore.
The last census revealed Croatia has lost over 10 percent of the population in the last decade, and it’s only the young and educated who are leaving.
Brain drain, they call it. My gut twinges.
If it’s only the brains getting drained, does that mean that mine got caught in the strainer?
We watch the children on the playground, the sound of raucous cheer ominous now.
Like that balloon, the higher they aspire to go, the sooner they’ll burst. In moments like this, I’m almost grateful I don’t have children.
Perhaps evolution threw me out of the game for a reason.
Maybe I don’t have it in me to withstand the type of pain that being a parent requires, the kind I can sense in Vlaho.
“We should’ve just packed up and left for Tarifa back when we had a chance,” he says, and his words put me on edge.
Another hard rule that formed after the divorce is that we never, ever talk about the times we were together.
We can mention people we both know or reference situations we both witnessed, but we never talk about us as a couple.
“Tarifa was a bad idea, even then.” I keep my tone playful, but I’m struck by the image of him, sitting across from me in that bar all those years ago, the way he got up and held me by my arms, the fierce warmth of his love nourishing me, infusing me with gratitude for him, for the life that I foolishly thought awaited us.
“Can you imagine me at forty, selling seashells?”
He meets my gaze, and I know he too is thinking about that long-ago moment. The way we made love that night, so fervently, with abandon, with so much tender hope for the future.
The sounds around us dissipate, he feels impossibly close. His eyes flick between my eyes and my lips, once. Twice. “Yeah, I guess not,” he says, and looks toward the playground, toward those children again.